The girl’s head lolled to one side as she closed her eyes. ‘I give them all the same line – “It’s cold, mister. Do you know how I can get out of the cold, and maybe get something to eat?” Sometimes they just give me money. One of them tried to flag down a cop car, and I had to run for it. Palanski screws up sometimes. But you’d be surprised how many men want to take me out of the cold.’
‘Then Palanski shows up at the John’s door the next day, right? He shows them a mug shot and the date of birth. How old are you?’
‘Thirteen.’
‘And the Johns pay up, and they pay well.’
He wouldn’t even need to solicit the bribe. This was New York City, and they all knew the drill. The wallets had flown from their pockets, the money had spilled into Palanski’s outstretched hand, and he had tipped his hat and smiled on his way out the door.
‘Where are you taking me?’ The girl’s eyes were open now and looking out the windows on a landscape that was not Manhattan any more.
‘Someplace safe. A friend of mine arranged for you to spend a few days in the country. A few days is all I’m gonna need.’
‘I can’t go three days without a – ’
‘I know.’ Mallory reached inside her jacket and pulled out the three bags of white powder she had retrieved from the waters of Bethesda. She showed them to the girl and put them back in her pocket.
By the time the car pulled into the circular drive, she knew the girl’s name was Fay, and Fay could never go home. If she did, her mother the drunk would beat her to death. Or perhaps the mother’s new boyfriend might get first dibs on the girl’s young body. Mallory pulled up in front of the large and graceful old building with a white Georgian facade. Edward Slope’s car was parked near the freestanding wooden sign.
‘Mayfair Research Facility? What kind of a place is this?’
Mallory kept silent until she and the girl were in the lobby which might have passed for the ground floor of a fashionable hotel. When the girl saw the first white-coated attendant, she tried to bolt. She pulled at Mallory’s hand, which would not release her. Now the attendant had Fay by both arms and was forcing her down the hall and away as she screamed out to Mallory. ‘You said you wouldn’t turn me in! You promised, you promised!’
She broke free of the attendant and ran to Mallory. ‘We had a deal. You promised.’ She was crying now, the garish make-up washing down her face like yesterday’s Halloween mask. She was stripped to childhood again. She wrapped her arms around Mallory’s waist as the attendant tried to pull her away.
Dr Edward Slope was glaring at Mallory. ‘I told you to prepare her for this. You never listen to me – or anyone else.’
He sat down on his heels and gently turned the face of the child toward his own. ‘You think it’s going to hurt. It won’t. I want you to go with this man. You’re already feeling sick, aren’t you? Yes, I can see that. He’s going to give you something to take the pain away. It’ll never hurt you again. You have my word on that.’
She loosened her grip on Mallory, but the look of betrayal remained. A deal had been broken. Nothing would change that, and they both knew it.
When she was gone down the hall with the attendant, Slope turned to Mallory. ‘There’s a limit to my influence here, but I pulled every string I could. I just hope you know what you’re doing. An underage Jane Doe is illegal as hell, so I’m passing her off as a relative incognito. She’s in the program, but only for the three days of detox. What then?’
‘I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I just need her off the street for a couple of days. Oh, and I need a Polaroid of the kid. Can you manage that for me?’
‘Yes, of course. But what happens to the child when the three days are up?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve got enough problems right now.’
‘Kathy, sometimes I think you’re growing into a real human being, and then you exasperate me this way. You got her this far, that’s good. But after the detox – what then? You can’t just dump off a little girl like she was a sack of potatoes.’
‘Doris does all the cooking in your house – that’s her job, right?’
‘What?’
Mallory’s hands went to her hips. Her words had a cautioning edge. ‘If you’d ever tried to prepare a meal, you’d know what an art form it really is, making every dish come out at the same time.’ Her voice was on the rise now, and angry. ‘Well, I’m cooking! I’ve got six dishes going at six different speeds, and they all have to be done at exactly the same time or the whole thing falls apart on me.’ One long fingernail jabbed at his chest. ‘You go do your own damn job! Get off my back!’
And the cook with a gun walked through the lobby and out the front door.
Today Mallory had only one message for each of her suspects. She blocked out the bulletin board they would access on their screens and tapped in the code to call up the dummy board. It displayed only one sentence repeated over and over again: I HAVE A WITNESS. And that was no lie if cats counted.
Though the hallway was generous in width, Pansy Heart pressed her body to the wall as her husband walked by. His face was red, his eyes hard, and he walked heavy on his feet, sending one fist to the wall a scant few inches from where she stood. In the room he had left, the computer screen was blank once more. What had been the message this time?
A door slammed at the other end of the hall. She jumped as though she had trod on a live wire. She gripped the edge of the hall table, feeling empty and airy inside, believing that she might fly upward without this solid anchor of oak. Her heart was knocking on the wall of her chest.
It was natural to be thinking of her mother-in-law on that last day of the old woman’s life, in that moment when the organs were shutting down one by one. There had been an inner knowledge of impending death in the ancient eyes. Only minutes before, terror had lived in that deeply lined face. Then the lines had smoothed out, and in the eyes was, not peace, but triumph. And then her mother-in-law had died – escaped.
Angel Kipling paced up and down the carpet before her husband Harry. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t know what this is about.’ She held up the printout from the computer. A single sentence repeated one hundred times across the sheet. ‘A witness to what? What have you done?’ Her voice was in the whining mode and threatened to climb into a scream.
Harry Kipling was buttoning his shirt in front of the mirror. Now he sought out her reflection behind his own. ‘It’s not addressed to me, is it?’
Angel’s lip was curling as he turned around to face her in the flesh. She placed her hands on her wide hips, and her robe fell open to display the ponderous breasts sagging against the thick body. His eyes dropped to the opening in the robe, and he quickly turned away from her. She winced as though she had been slapped.
As he left the full-length mirror to examine his tie rack, Angel stood alone in the glass, staring at her reflection. She had not yet put on the armature of make-up, and her hair was wild with snarls.
She closed the robe quickly and addressed her husband in a smaller voice this time. ‘It’s not another bank card scam, is it, Harry? You’re not having trouble living on your allowance money, are you?’
It had cost her a fortune to clean up after his last foray into creative banking, that or face the scandal and the stockholders. And she had never believed the stolen money was gone, spent. Was he amassing capital for a getaway? No, he would never leave her. He would never stray far from the source of unlimited wealth.
He ignored her and continued the business of tying his tie, an odd and useless preoccupation for a man who had no occupation, no business to conduct. And now she forgot that she was ugliest in the morning, most vulnerable without her magic make-up.