Mallory's side of the board had more financial data on the top layer, including the US Attorney's probe of Edith Candle and Mallory's probe of Edith's computer. Financial statements dominated both sides of the wall with the money motive. Father and daughter were holding to the same portrait of a killer: sane but evil.
At horrific speed, he read Mallory's neatly typed and incredibly detailed surveillance notes. The medical examiner's reports he took no time with, ripping them from both sides. He accidentally knocked loose the pin which held a plastic bag to Markowitz's section. It drifted to the floor to cover the pile of rejects. The beads from Anne Cathery's necklace were also sent to floor.
Now, with all the extraneous clutter gone, he knew why and how, but not who. Pearl Whitman tantalized him, as she must have done to Markowitz before him. But it was Samantha Siddon who finally gave up the killer's name.
Riker was the first thing Mallory saw when she opened her eyes. In her estimation, he was not a pretty sight. She thought his eyes were redder if that was possible.
His gray, unshaven face collapsed into a smile of relief.
"Hi, kid. How're you doin'?"
"Mallory to you. I feel like I've got a hangover."
"You know, this reminds me of the time you had appendicitis. You were just a little squirt."
"Riker, what's – "
"I went down to the hospital to sweat out your operation with Lou and Helen. Lou said I'd missed the best part. When the emergency-room nurse pressed down on your appendix, you kicked her in the gut, he said. I laughed till I cried."
"What's going on, Riker?"
"You remember anything about last night?"
"Redwing." She sat up quickly, too quickly. "Oh Christ, my head hurts. You got her?"
"We got her for assault and five or ten other counts. Coffey adds on a new one every time something occurs to him. The last thing I saw on his list was "No dog tags". He's on a damn mission."
"Where's the boy?" She pulled off the bandage which covered the needle dripping fluid into her arm.
"He's in Juvenile Hall. Don't mess with that needle or I'll call the nurse. You won't like that. She's bigger than you and meaner."
"I have to get out of here." She pulled out the needle and rubbed the hole in her arm. "Where's my stuff?"
"Not so fast, kid. You don't go anywhere, you got that? Don't give me any grief, Kathy."
"Mallory."
"This is personal, kid, not business. But I can make it business. You stay put, or I book you."
"What charge?"
"A stolen Xerox machine."
"Okay, you win."
"Naw. That was too easy, kid. You forget who you're talking to."
"I only want to go home."
"You stay here for the duration."
"I'll stay home for the duration. I'll go nuts if I have to stay here. At least at home I've got my computer."
"And Lou's bulletin board."
"That too."
"You're too weak to go anywhere."
She threw back the covers and swung her bare feet over the edge of the high hospital bed. She landed on the floor, sitting unceremoniously on her backside with a new pain to contend with.
"I told you so," said Riker.
Three women had chimed the warning bells, but they had charitably overestimated him. Bells or no bells, the village idiot was always the last to know his house was on fire.
There had been a warning of sorts toward the end of his mother's life. "You must never break Edith's seclusion, Charles. Remember that." And then his mother was gone. And later, when her remains were going to the ground, he was handed a telegram at the graveside, a message of condolence and an invitation to tea. His mother had said nothing about invitations to tea.
Then Mallory had tried to warn him, and how he had thanked her for that. Henrietta had not even tried, wise woman, but tripped the alarm in trying to work around him. One day, if he was to survive this life, to pick up on all the warning bells, he must get a woman of his own, and maybe a white cane and a seeing-eye dog as well.
Raindrops pocked the windows of the cab. Forked lightning lit up the streets and lifted the gloom of overcast for an instant before menacing the earth with a clap of thunder. The cabby was driving through the rain with laudable caution and no speed at all, not realizing that the house was on fire.
"Look here," Charles said to the driver I'll pay you ten dollars for every red light you go through."
"Oh, you crazy Americans," said the driver, whose name was made up entirely of consonants.
Charles pushed a twenty-dollar bill through the slot in the bulletproof glass.
"I love this country," said the cabby.
She sat across the kitchen table from Riker while the coffee-maker gurgled between them. Her head throbbed, and it crossed her mind that the doctors had packed her brain case with cotton batting.
"Why didn't Charles come back to the hospital with my stuff and my keys?"
"Maybe he did," said Riker. "You didn't hang around very long."
Mallory shook her head. Charles had already been here, so the doorman said, and left in a hurry. She got up from the table.
"Where are you going, kid?"
"Well, not out the front door." Even the Shadow could not pass through solid oak.
After the doorman had let them in with a master key, they had reached a mistrustful stand-off when Riker locked the front door deadbolt from the inside and pocketed the spare key from the ring in the kitchen. Next, he had gone to the bedroom window's burglar guard leading out to the fire escape. He had found the key to the padlock and secured that exit, too.
Now she had drunk as much coffee as she could stand, and Riker had matched her cup for cup. Her mind had cleared only a little, and he was showing no signs of the lost night's sleep. If anything, he was jazzed with caffeine, and for the first time, capable of thinking rings around her, anticipating every ploy.
Maybe.
When he was safely lost in the sports section of the morning paper, she walked into her den and pulled the door shut behind her. She dragged a chair from its position at the computer to the center of the room and sat before the board, scanning the whole of the cork wall as one unit, one mind at work. Despite the mess of papers at the baseboard, she was slow to focus, to realize there had been an intrusion here, another mind at work on the board.
Charles.
He had torn off layers of paper and rearranged the photos and printouts. Samantha Siddon had come to prominence in a centered and solitary position. Anne Cathery, Estelle Gaynor and Pearl Whitman were grouped together and off to the side, lined up in the order of their deaths. The financial data came next in Charles's own hierarchy of paper-shuffling.
She was staring at the small white beads, Anne Cathery's, torn from her neck on the day of the murder in Gramercy Park. They lay scattered all over the pile of papers and the plastic bag. The ground had been soaked in blood, strewn with beads. In the slide show inside her head, the Cathery murder scene was blending with Markowitz's. She could see herself lining up the blood pools of Markowitz's face. "Line 'em up flat with the floor," Dr Slope had told her then.
She walked to the baseboard and knelt down by the pile of Charles's rejects and the plastic bag. Something was missing. What had Charles taken away with him? Her drugged brain would not move quickly enough. She turned to the faster brain of her computer and called up the files to match the missing sequence numbers. And now she could see all that Charles had seen.
There was writing on the wall, and there was writing on the wall.
Charles hammered on the door.
No response.
He tried the knob. The door was unlocked. He entered slowly. The front room was curtain-drawn dark. Down the hall, a rectangle of light reflected off one wall opposite the door to the library. When he rounded the wall and stood in the open doorway, he faced a dark shape in an armchair pulled out to the center of the room and back-lit by the bright light of a table lamp.