‘What a good boy you are,’ said the old guy. ‘Now, about Amanda?’
‘I see Amanda in the hall now and then, that’s all. She and my grandmother were real tight. Talk to the old lady.’
The old woman was waiting for them on the front steps of the building. Jimmy Farrow stood between two uniformed officers on the sidewalk, his head bowed and his hands cuffed behind his back. Riker climbed the steps behind Mallory and watched the old woman looking from Mallory to her grandson, lips slightly parted in disbelief.
‘Police,’ said Mallory, showing the ID card and shield. ‘You’re Mrs Farrow? This is your grandson?’
The old woman nodded, her eyes blinking rapidly.
Riker looked back to the sidewalk. The siren on the squad car had scattered most of the hookers like roaches, but now one came weaving back, too jazzed on crack to be afraid.
‘I want access to Amanda Bosch’s apartment,’ said Mallory.
‘Do you have a warrant?’ the old woman asked, automatically.
That was predictable to Riker. It was a neighborhood where such a phrase came tripping to the tongue, spoken even before that all-time favorite ‘I didn’t do it.’
‘She’s dead,’ said Mallory. ‘You think I need a warrant?’
Nicely worded, kid.
And the denial in the slow shake of the old woman’s head was also predictable. Such a thing could not be, said Mrs Farrow’s eyes. She pulled her thin sweater close about her neck, as though that would protect her from Mallory. She retreated two faltering steps. Mallory’s long reach put a photograph in the old woman’s face.
‘Is that her? Is that Amanda Bosch?’
Ease up, Mallory. We don’t want to kill a taxpayer.
Mrs Farrow stared at the image of the dead woman and crossed herself. Another protection failed her as Mallory put her face in the old woman’s face. ‘Is that her?’
‘Yes, yes. It’s Amanda Bosch.’
Mallory made a note, and Riker knew her meticulous report would read that positive ID was made at 10:56 am. That would make a department record for a corpse without prints.
They followed the old woman up the stairs and down the hail to the apartment at the end of the second landing. Mrs Farrow fumbled with the lock, but finally managed it. When the hand with the key ring came back to the old woman’s side, the keys jingled with the trembling.
Riker entered the apartment behind Mallory. Mrs Farrow hovered on the threshold for a moment and then melted away down the hall.
The first thing he noticed about the apartment was that it was clean. From where he stood, he could see through the sparkling galley kitchen and into the room beyond it. Spotless, smelling of cleansers and powders, all cleaned up for company. Or had the place been cleaned up for blood traces and prints?
The inside doorknob gleamed. He looked down and moved his head to see it from every possible angle. There might be latent prints on it, but he doubted it. Even Mallory was not so neat that she wiped the prints from her own doorknob when she left her apartment. He called through the open door to a uniformed police officer standing out in the hall with Jimmy Farrow.
‘Looks like this might be the original crime scene. Ask the old lady if you can use her phone to call the techs.’
‘Waste of time,’ said Mallory, bending low to approve the polish of a small table. Every surface was gleaming. ‘Very neat. If our guy gets off on a psycho defense, I may hire him to clean my condo.’
Markowitz had raised her right. She touched nothing, hands jammed into the pockets of her jeans as they continued the routine walk-through into the next room.
The back room was tiny, with only space enough for the single bed and the personal computer. She knew better than to touch it, but her hands pulled out of the pockets the moment she saw it. From now on, she would have no interest in anything else. She did not have her father’s mania for small details.
The door to the closet was ajar. Riker’s eyes adjusted to the dim light within until he made out the outline of the old-fashioned wooden cradle on the floor. So Amanda had purchased a cradle for the aborted baby, and then put the cradle away, out of sight, when the child was cut out of her.
He looked away.
He perused the bookshelf and found style guides and reference books: one on how to prepare a manuscript, another on writers’ markets. In this room, too, all the surfaces were cleaned. In the better light of two windows, he could see the scallops of sponge marks high on the wall. Had there been blood on the walls? Had Amanda managed to do some damage to him before he killed her?
‘Well, that tears it,’ he said, turning to Mallory, who was reading the label of a computer disk on the console shelf. ‘This has to be the crime site, and the bastard wiped it clean.’ He spoke on blind faith that she might be listening to him. ‘You know, this may be the end of the road, kid.’
She was pacing back and forth in front of the computer. She could hardly wait to get at it. He knew she was only holding off for a technician to tell her what she already knew – it had been wiped clean. She was ignoring everything else in the apartment.
Not the old man’s style.
Markowitz always had his investigators bring him every damned detail they could fit into a notebook or a plastic bag. She was letting every detail go by.
A uniformed officer appeared in the bedroom doorway. ‘There’s a crew in the area. They can be here in about fifteen minutes to a half hour.’
‘Thanks, Martin,’ said Riker.
If Mallory approved the cleaning job, it was a certainty they would find nothing. She had called it a waste of time, and she had called it right. Twenty minutes later, Heller, the senior man in Forensics, was sharing Mallory’s opinion. He stood in the center of the bedroom, his slow brown eyes wandering over every polished surface, and wincing.
As Heller pulled on his rubber gloves, the nod of his head sent another technician to the kitchen. A third man was already at work in the front room. A ricochet of flashbulb light found its way to the back of the tiny apartment. Heller, brush in hand, turned to the small nightstand by the narrow bed.
‘No. Do the computer first,’ said Mallory. ‘I need it.’
Perhaps another man with Heller’s years in the department might have bridled at a direct order from Mallory, who was younger than Heller’s youngest daughter. He only nodded, taking no offense, and set his kit on the floor by the computer.
A uniformed officer filled the bedroom doorway. ‘Your keystroker brought this over.’ He handed Mallory a leather case. She opened it to display a set of delicate tools and boxes of disks.
She turned to hover over Heller as he worked with the black powder.
‘Don’t get that crap in the keyboard,’ said Mallory. ‘And watch the vent – you don’t want it dropping in the vent.’
Riker had never seen Heller work so fast, anything to appease Mallory. And when he was done, he couldn’t get out of her way fast enough.
‘I’m going up to talk to the old lady and the kid,’ said Riker.
‘Right.’
She was on to the computer now. He was dead to her, as were the technicians who worked around her.
As Riker was closing the door behind him, Heller was working on the nightstand and bitching about the perp being a good-housekeeping fanatic, forgetting that only four feet away from him sat just such a fanatic, and she was armed.
‘Don’t bag that,’ said Mallory to Heller as he was trying to ease the card file off the small table next to the computer. ‘I need it. It’s a client list – all the people she did research for.’
‘You got your own tweezers in that kit?’ Heller asked, looking down into her case of tools.
She looked up at Heller. Did he think she didn’t know how to handle evidence? No. He was just doing his job. Markowitz had always coddled and petted Heller, even when he was giving the man fits, checking out details within details. And she needed this man.