Grace did not press the panic button, but her fingers curled around the medallion as if it were a crucifix, a conduit for prayer. ‘Let it be quick.’
Hours passed by with no drag of time, more like a flight of minutes only. Night fell, and she was sitting in the dark when she heard a hand try the knob on the front door. Now came the metallic sound of a key in the lock – Phoebe’s key.
Backlit by street lamps, her daughter was silhouetted in the open doorway, growing larger, moving closer. But Grace’s last thought was not of impending death. No, she was picturing the tin box in Mallory’s hands. Odd to be thinking of that. And now she would never know what was—
Mallory walked down the dimly lit corridor of wooden frames and chicken-wire walls to stop by the Nadlers’ storage cage. As she unlocked the door, things began to stir inside, a scramble of bugs and vermin. A mouse ran across the bare mattress on the boy’s bed, still running when it cleared the edge, its paws madly pedaling on the air.
The detective turned on a floor lamp.
In one hand, she held the remains of Ernest Nadler. It had taken a long time to find him, hunting through forged documents and the crematoriums of three states. Dr Kemper, the hospital administrator, had paid from his own pocket to have the boy’s body – the evidence – reduced to ashes, but no payment for an urn – only a nasty tin box with a child inside.
Mallory, in turn, had destroyed Dr Kemper.
With only this box in her hand and the threat of a public trial for conspiracy in the murder of a little boy, he had elected to go quietly to jail on a lesser charge. As for his partner in evidence tampering, the pathologist, Dr Woods, was dead of a drunk’s failed liver.
Big fish, little fish – all accounted for – almost done.
Just tidying up.
And toward that end, Phoebe’s journal – with her mother’s fingerprints on the binding, the proof of fair warning – was placed in the drawer of a nightstand. There it kept company with a murdered boy’s diary and the brief note his parents had left behind. Absent any mention of living heirs in the Nadlers’ will, and given the slow plodding way of city bureaucracy, many years might go by before anyone visited here again, and then no probate clerk would ever figure out what the detective had done.
In the squad-room mythology of Mallory the Machine, she had no shred of sentiment, neither empathy nor sympathy, and the young woman showed no emotion as she sat down amid the detritus of a small family’s life, her cold eyes passing over their belongings to focus on an orphan sock.
Mallory laid the box of ashes on the mattress. And now that she had put him to bed, she switched off the light. ‘Good night, Ernie.’
A child had made a stand, he had suffered and died. And then, though long gone, the little boy had snagged his unsentimental paladin with a kindred lament scrawled in a diary: I’m lost.