Riker pulled a photograph from a manila envelope. ‘We found another homicide victim in the Ramble. She was bagged and strung up – just like your brother. But we didn’t get to her in time. She’s dead. We figure there’s gotta be a connection to Humphrey. If you could just take a look at the picture? Tell us if you recognize this woman.’ He laid down the photo of a naked female with a rat-chewed nose and cheeks, tape covering the eyes and mouth, and only bare bones for fingertips. The picture had no ID potential – only shock value.
Phoebe Bledsoe rolled her eyes up to the ceiling. ‘I’ve got no idea who that is.’
‘That’s what you said about your brother in the hospital.’ Riker raised his hands as if to say, But hey, no hard feelings. ‘And then you gave a phony name to the—’
‘My mother told me not to call attention to myself.’
‘Your mother sent you to the hospital?’
‘The picture in the paper wasn’t very good. She couldn’t be sure it was my brother. Humphrey was only sixteen years old the last time we saw him. He had chubby cheeks then – and his hair was red, not black. The man in that bed—’ Her eyes lowered. Her hands clenched.
Jack Coffey could finish that thought for her: Humphrey Bledsoe’s grainy newspaper portrait was black and white. His sunken eyes and cheeks had lost their definition to a bright flashbulb. The better photo on a new driver’s license bore even less resemblance to the coma patient, who was clearly not himself today.
‘I wanna tell my lieutenant that you cooperated,’ said Riker. ‘Then we can make those charges go away.’ Once again, he held out the photograph of the female corpse. ‘I know this body’s in real bad shape, but the woman was around the same age as your brother. He was twenty-eight, right? If you could give us a list of his friends—’
‘I don’t know his friends.’ She looked down at her chewed fingernails and then hid them in her lap beneath the table. ‘I told you – I haven’t seen Humphrey in years.’
Riker reached into the envelope and pulled out a clear plastic bag containing a blond strand of hair with long, dark roots. ‘This might help. Take a look at the dead woman’s hair . . . Miss Bledsoe? Could you please open your eyes?’
Mallory curled her fingers into a fist and banged the table with the force of a hammer.
Phoebe Bledsoe’s eyes were wide open now as she edged her chair back a few inches. Prompted into a more helpful frame of mind, she studied the hair sample. ‘I still don’t know who she is.’
Mallory hit the table again, beating out the rhythm of a drummer – or a shooter – bang, bang, bang, staring all the while at her suspect. Under the table, the Bledsoe woman’s fingers intertwined in a death-grip prayer.
Well, insanity made everybody nervous. It was an interesting moment for the watcher in the darkened room. His detective, the one recently voted the most unstable, was pretending to be unstable.
Riker leaned toward Phoebe Bledsoe. His was the reassuring face of reason. ‘You really need to cooperate. My partner here wants to charge you as an accessory to kidnapping.’
‘I kidnapped Humphrey? That’s crazy!’ The woman paused to steal a glance at Mallory, probably worried that she had offended the insane detective with the slur word crazy.
‘No,’ said Riker, ‘not your brother. I mean that little kid he snatched.’
Her mouth opened to mime the words, Oh, no. The shock was real. She shook her head. ‘I want a lawyer!’
Riker slumped low in his chair. ‘Like I said, Miss Bledsoe, you’re only here for questioning. If we have to charge you with a crime, then you get a lawyer.’ While he packed up his envelope, preparing to leave, the suspect was rising from the table.
Mallory’s hand flashed out to close around the woman’s wrist, and she said, ‘Sit down.’ Her words had no rising or falling notes, no human qualities. ‘You’re not going anywhere.’
‘I think I know what my partner is trying to say here.’ Riker stood up. ‘She wants to spend some quality time with you.’
The frightened woman turned her head to stare at an empty chair on her own side of the table, as if intently listening to someone who was not there. Miss Bledsoe smiled, taking some comfort from her invisible companion. And Lieutenant Coffey had to work on a relative scale of insanity for the occupants of the other room.
Oh, please, not another nut who hears voices.
Schizophrenics were next to useless in court.
Riker sat down at the table. Slowly. No sudden movements. ‘So . . . Phoebe, who’s your friend?’ He casually gestured toward the empty space that commanded all of her attention.
Crazy was a game of musical chairs, for now the woman stared at Riker as if he might be crazy.
A stretch limousine was a common sight at the Driscol School, though not in the summer months of vacation. In the backseat of this one, an attorney cautioned his client. ‘Miss Bledsoe, if anyone shows you another badge, just hand the bastard my card.’ It was the second business card he had given her in the past half hour. Perhaps this young man sensed that Phoebe had already forgotten his name. In another few minutes, she would not recall any distinction to set him apart from the law firm’s other errand boys, all Yalies and Harvard graduates.
The rear door was opened by a chauffeur. She stepped out onto the pavement in front of the school, and the car rolled away. Phoebe looked up at the large building that dated back to an era when stone filigree was in fashion – and gargoyles. Two such monsters sat above the lintel, set to spring on anyone entering by the massive front door. The less grandiose neighbors, all brownstones, were also unchanged since the 1800s. The Landmark Society was rabid in the matter of external renovations, and with only the flaw of fluorescent street lamps replacing gaslight, they had managed to stop time on this Upper West Side street.
The school’s founder had been a man with a penchant for carving his family name in stone all around the town. This mad quest to keep the Driscols in the public eye had been defeated elsewhere by urban planners who had torn his monuments down. But here on the façade of this building, the name remained in letters etched so deep that centuries of wind and rain could not obliterate them.
A narrow space between the Driscol School and the building next door was closed off by a tall wrought-iron gate. Phoebe fished through her purse for the key and unlocked it. On the other side of the iron bars, she made her way down an alley that opened onto a generous back garden. Chairs and tables were set in conversational groupings, and there were small benches here and there for the solitary teacher or student when classes were in session. Lush green ivy covered the rear wall, and flowers of many colors filled the wide wells of ancient trees.
A flagstone path led to a tiny cottage that had been a carriage house in the horse-and-buggy days. An anomaly in a city of skyscrapers, it sat on an adjoining plot of land not entailed to the school. Before the age of soaring real-estate prices, this had been a way station for family members who had depleted their trust funds or fallen into some other disgrace.
It was a hiding place.
Phoebe occupied the cottage with the grudging consent of her mother, the last of the Driscol line. By terms of the family trust fund, Phoebe did not count because she carried her father’s name. She was merely a Bledsoe, declared so on her birth certificate.
A small boy walked beside her on the path. He was fair of hair and spindle-legged. For the entire eleven years of his life, he had been called Ernie. In later years, Phoebe had renamed him Dead Ernest, a pale joke, a poor play on words; being dead earnest had gotten him killed. In this incarnation that walked beside her, the child was much thinner. His T-shirt and jeans were dirty, and there were dead leaves in his hair. He had lost one shoe and a sock – and his life.