So her interest in the man was all professional. So Gaynor dabbled in stocks.
"He didn't by any chance cash in on the Whitman Chemicals merger?"
"No. I thought so at first. The timing was right. Then I backtracked the stock purchases through the computer of a financial house. He made some modest gains that year, but there was no connection. Lucky for him," said Mallory. "Estelle Gaynor got away with it. She's only a footnote in the investigation, but the SEC would've busted her nephew in a minute on sheer proximity. The government would have taken all the profits, fined him and jailed him. But none of his own transactions are linked to anything criminal. It's not like he was ever hard up for money."
"Some people never have enough money. What about the other victims?"
"There's no connection to the Whitman merger beyond Gaynor's aunt. Pearl Whitman was a principal, but she never purchased stock in the merging company. No financial history of insider trading for Samantha Siddon or Anne Cathery, but they both play the market."
"You know, it might be a good idea not to get too close to any of these people until you find out what the connecting link actually was."
"I know. The seance isn't enough. I think something brought them together before the seances began."
"Maybe, maybe not. What do old women do when they meet? They talk about their children. Did you think these women might have shared a secret or a confidence?"
"Like a little lunacy in the family?"
"I hope we're not getting off on the Cathery boy again. He's socially awkward – many gifted people are – but odd behavior doesn't signify mental illness. You can't really see him hacking up an old lady, can you?"
"Oh, sure I can. And if it turns out that Anne Cathery was trying to get the kid locked up so she could get her hands on his money, I'd have to figure she had the knife coming to her. But I'd still bust him."
"All Henry Cathery seems to crave is a little solitude. He only wants to be left alone. You're not planning to torture him, are you?"
Charles stared at the pattern of the carpet.
She touched his arm to call his eyes up to hers. "You liked Henry Cathery, didn't you?"
"I understood him."
"Were the old ladies helpful? Did they give you the new location for Redwing?"
"No," said Riker. "The old ladies don't contact her. She calls them. We have to wait till the next seance and tail her. And don't get any ideas, kid. Coffey's already arranged for the tail."
Riker spent the next hour drinking Mallory's beer and bringing her up to speed on Coffey's progress which, according to Riker, was zip. "Dr Slope thinks we might have a slight variation in the murders. If it's two people, then both of them are right-handed, both used incredible violence in the slashing. But the wounds are not identical. The fourth victim is slightly off, and Slope can't say for sure it's the work of one man. Maybe the guy was just in a freaking hurry this time."
"What about a man and a woman working together?" 'Naw. I'm going along with Coffey on that one. It crossed my mind, but I just don't see a woman doing that kinda job on another woman. Don't get me wrong, kid. Women can shoot and stab with the best of 'em. And they're really thorough. If I see a corpse with a whole clip emptied into it, I gotta figure a woman did that. But I can't see a woman doing these mutilations. You see something like that, it's always a man who has a problem with women."
When Riker had gone, Mallory sat down by the light of the VCR and the slide-projector. She began the nightly horror show of the slides and the dancing Markowitz.
Old man, why didn't you leave something behind, a, few bread-crumbs!
And in her dreams, Louis Markowitz tried to teach her how to dance.
When Margot opened her eyes to the light, she could not tell if it was the gray of evening or morning. What day was it? And she was thinking of food as her stomach gnawed at her like a separate animal with teeth to bite her from the inside. The bloody knife lay inches from her face. She didn't see it for the long minutes she thought about food. She daydreamed of bakery bread. The knife was kicked to one side by blind feet on the way to the door.
Out on the avenue, she had her choice of discarded paper cups. She selected one and primed it with three pennies and jingled them for the tourists.
An old woman stopped and kept Margot standing in the cold wind as she dipped a thick-veined claw into her large purse and, with maddening slowness, groped around its interior, finally extracting a change purse. Margot shifted from one foot to the other as the old woman worked the clasp with arthritic fingers, at last, wincing out a single dime and chiming it into the paper cup.
Margot stared at the dime which kept company with the three pennies at the bottom of her cup. A scream of outrage exploded from her mouth with force enough to push the old woman back two steps to the brick wall littered with playbills and ads and graffiti. Margot screamed at her, yelling obscenities, shrieking 'Bitch, bitch, bitch' in an angry chant. She followed after the old woman, who had turned and was hurrying away with all the speed of veined and brittle legs. The woman gathered her thin coat closer about her throat, as if it might be protection from the young lunatic who was dancing alongside her, sometimes leaping in the air and screaming vile words which had the effect of physical punches and outright terror.
The old woman tried to run, and her bones failed her, legs falling out from under her. She heard a snap of bone when she hit the hard cement, which hates old bones and breaks them when it can. The old woman never felt the jagged edge of the broken beer bottle until she looked down and saw the blood gushing from the split in her flesh. A small noise came from her dry lips, a crack in the voice, a squeal of fear, more from the sight of her own blood than the pain. The old woman was crawling now, dragging her body along the sidewalk as the lunatic with the dirty matted hair danced around her, ranting on and on. stomping and leaping, frightening the wide-eyed pedestrians who passed her quickly by, pretending not to see, not to hear, not to feel.
The old woman ceased her inching escape. She lay still in the body and quiet. Tears streamed from her eyes as her life leaked out through the jagged red hole in her leg.
CHAPTER 8
With food enough and sleep enough, Margot was focussed once again. In her mind, she replayed the image of the knife disappearing into his ribs in a quick thrust of the blade, she watched again as he slid to the concrete of the subway platform, gasping like an air-drowned fish, blood bubbling up from his mouth. She had stared at his eyes for a very long time. He was the one. There could have been no other eyes like those.
She would have to do something about the knife, all the knives. She wouldn't miss them any. She didn't need them anymore. How many knives did she own? She collected all the knives from the kitchen and bundled them in a towel and carried them out the door as if they had been babies. And they had been, but no more.
Riker was comfortably settled into a chair by the bulletin board in Mallory's den. He drained another beer. An empty coffee cup and a plate with the remains of Mallory's more wholesome breakfast were on the table by her computer. It would not have surprised him if she had pulled her bed into the den so she could sleep with the board as well as eat with it.
"Has Charles ever seen the board?"
She shook her head as she attached the last print-out to the cork. It dangled by a single push pin.