Mallory perused the shadow side of the room, where the crack of a door in the floor had certainly gone unnoticed. ‘So the perp doesn’t know I have a witness.’
‘Actually . . . you don’t.’ Charles smiled. ‘I do. Custodial guardianship, remember? That’s why your man in Missing Persons called me. The Chicago police found the grandmother’s body an hour ago. Dead of natural causes. Coco has no other family. But she has me.’
He allowed a moment for the import to settle in. And now, with all the leverage he was ever likely to have, he laid down new rules for dealing with his young ward.
Mallory did not like them. Charles did not care.
The commander of Special Crimes Unit stood behind the pink curtain surrounding the coma patient’s bed. In a face-off with Dr Kemper, the hospital administrator, he held up a newspaper open to the page with the crime victim’s photograph. ‘Somebody sold this picture to a reporter.’
Kemper, a thin weasel of a man, took on an attitude of personal offense, one hand pressed to his breast, when he said, ‘It wasn’t one of my people.’
The lieutenant pointed to the patient. ‘This guy’s wearing a hospital gown in the photo – so we can rule out the ambulance crew. They only saw him naked.’
‘I’ll look into it.’
What Jack Coffey hated most about this man was the smooth way he lied with a smile. The lieutenant turned to a nurse, who stood close to the administrator’s side like a lady-in-waiting. ‘Go out in the hall and tell Officer Wycoff to bring in that woman.’
When she had left on this errand, Jack Coffey only glanced at the prince of pricks who aggravated him so much. ‘I don’t need you anymore. Take a hike.’
The hospital administrator’s smile widened as he made his hasty getaway. On the other side of the pulled-back curtain, Officer Wycoff stood beside the visitor he had found so suspicious. The woman was young, still in her twenties, and tall. No wedding ring. Though she had the unlined face and sexless body of a plump child, the quaint word spinster came to mind, perhaps because her mouse-brown hair was pulled back in a schoolmarm’s bun. And the next word he thought of was wallflower. She wore a simple gray dress, the better to blend into a concrete city and disappear. There was only one standout feature, lush eyelashes that looked fake, but he knew they were real. This woman wore no makeup at all.
She twisted to one side, trying to see around him for a peek at the mystery patient. Coffey stepped aside, and she stared at the man on the bed. Her hand tightened around the shoulder strap of her purse as she shook her head. ‘I don’t know him.’
And did he believe that? Well, no.
She was turning round, ready to leave, and quickly. Coffey nodded to the officer, who caught the woman by one arm and restrained her. Eyes wary, she turned back to face the lieutenant. ‘I have to go.’
Jack Coffey consulted Officer Wycoff’s small notebook. ‘You gave your name as Mary Harper?’ He held it up so she could read the open page. ‘And this is your address?’
‘Yes, I live on the Lower East Side.’
‘No, you don’t. That address puts your apartment in the middle of the East River.’ Coffey reached out and slipped the purse strap off her shoulder. ‘So you made a false statement to the police. And now I get to search this bag for weapons before we take you in.’
A nurse came through the curtain as the purse’s contents were dumped out on the bed. ‘Can you do that somewhere else?’
‘Oh, Coma Boy won’t mind.’ The lieutenant looked down at the items spilled across the white bedsheet. No smokes, but there was a cigarette lighter, and he picked it up. Nothing else gleamed like real gold, and it was heavy – solid, not plated. This elegant bauble would not square with the lady’s ugly walking shoes. In this town, rich women wore ankle-breaker stilettos. There were deep scratches on the gold surface. Maybe this lighter was a souvenir of better days. Or maybe not. And now he discovered another lie.
‘Miss Harper, I believe you told Officer Wycoff you weren’t carrying any identification.’ He picked up a snakeskin wallet. It was beautiful. He held it close to his nose, and it even smelled like money; he wanted to marry it. The lady’s driver’s license was displayed in a clear plastic window, and she was not Mary Harper. What a surprise. ‘My detectives just identified our victim here.’ He waved toward the unconscious patient. ‘Phoebe Bledsoe, meet Humphrey Bledsoe.’
TEN
They only mess with Phoebe when she’s with me, and they don’t hurt her much. Sometimes she gets bounced off a locker in the hall. A little violence in passing. It seems almost accidental.
I don’t think they even see her.
Phoebe doesn’t appreciate her superpower of invisibility.
Maybe that’s because Toby Wilder can’t see her, either. Toby is entirely too cool to know that either one of us exists.
—Ernest Nadler
Lieutenant Coffey sat down on the dark side of the one-way glass for a peepshow view of the lighted interrogation room. In other cop shops, covert watchers made do with bare rooms and maybe a folding chair or two. This one was decked out like a tiny movie theater with raised rows of cushioned seats to accommodate the backsides of visiting VIPs.
The lieutenant was the only watcher in the dark room, and Phoebe Bledsoe was the sole occupant of the lighted one. Above the woman’s head, long fluorescent tubes leached the color out of her face, and her feet tapped the floor while she chewed her lower lip. She chewed her fingernails, too; they were bitten to the quick after an hour of sitting there alone.
The door opened. Two detectives entered the interrogation room and sat down.
Showtime.
While amiable Riker made the introductions, his partner placed her hands flat on the table, the red arrows of ten long fingernails pointing at Miss Bledsoe. And then Mallory leaned in to stare at the woman up close. Such a hungry look. So intense. Some said she could do this for an hour without blinking, but that was only the cophouse mythology of Mallory the Machine.
Jack Coffey smiled. His detectives were running an interesting twist on the old game of good cop and bad cop.
Sane cop. Crazy cop.
The lieutenant had no trouble reading Phoebe Bledsoe’s mind as she stared at Mallory: What fascinating green eyes. Are they real?
The woman quickly looked away. Every New Yorker was taught in the womb to never make eye contact with the lunatic. She turned to the sane detective. ‘Am I under arrest?’
‘No,’ said Riker. ‘We just need some information.’ He scanned a sheet of paper and then flashed her a friendly smile. ‘I see you’re a nurse at the Driscol School. So you’re on summer vacation?’
Miss Bledsoe leaned forward. ‘Lieutenant Coffey said he’d charge me for making a false statement to the police officer. And obstruction – that was another charge.’
‘Don’t worry about that.’ Riker dismissed this idea with a wave of one hand. ‘We’re not here to give you a hard time.’ He turned to his partner. ‘Are we?’
Mallory continued to stare at Phoebe Bledsoe as if the woman might be lunch. She licked her lips.
On the other side of the glass, Jack Coffey’s smile was wry. Nice try. He had no doubts about why his detective was playing crazy cop today; she knew he was watching her, wondering: How crazy are you?