„And there’s one old case still on the books, mass murder,“ said Mallory. „How would you like to wrap nine unsolved homicides this week?“
Oh, Jesus freaking Christ.
Jack Coffey could not find the words to toss these two out of his office. The partners politely waited for him to find his voice again. He did. He slammed his fist down on the desk. „No, this is not happening! Riker, tell me she’s not talking about Stick Man.“
Mallory answered for Riker. „Special Crimes Unit would get all the credit, and we need good press right now. The timing is perfect.“ She tacked on the reminder, „It’s budget-cutting season.“
Ordinarily, these would be the magic words, but not today. Jack Coffey, feeling slightly giddy, covered his face with both hands, worrying that tics or twitches might betray his image of a man in control of this meeting.
Mallory, of all people, should never have bought into this fantasy of a superannuated psycho from the last century. She was more jaded, better rooted in reality. Any cop could imagine the horror show of her childhood on the streets of New York, dodging kiddy pimps and pedophiles, ending every day in the exhaustion of a child’s poverty, then chasing down some place where she could be safe for a few hours, where she might close her eyes to sleep. Still feral in many ways, she was suspicious of everyone she met and everything she was told. Her belief in a ghost story intrigued him more than Riker’s.
A fair detective in his own right, Coffey had worked through the puzzle in the very next minute. These two were holding something back, a bombshell. There was no other explanation. „Riker, do you have any idea how old Stick Man would be today?“
„Well, yeah.“ The man’s tone indicated that this might be a silly question since he was the expert on all things related to ice-pick homicides.
„All right, let me see if I understand this.“ The lieutenant uncovered his tired eyes to look at Riker. „You’re planning to reopen the Winter House Massacre. Have I got that right?“
The man only shrugged to say, Yeah, that’s about right. And his partner was busy inspecting her running shoes for smudges.
Jack Coffey shook his head. „Riker, you’ve got two minutes of my time. Give me the rest or get out.“
„Okay. The old lady you talked to this morning? That was Red Winter.“
„Of course it was.“ Jack Coffey wore that special smile reserved for dealing with lunatics. „I should have guessed.“ His smile never wavered, though his teeth were locked together and grinding. „So… when you asked Red Winter where she ‘d been for the past sixty years – “
„Fifty-eight years,“ said Mallory. „She was twelve when she disappeared. She’s seventy now.“
„Shut up,“ said Coffey. He only had eyes for his senior detective.
„Well, sure,“ said Riker. „We asked where she’d been, but she just yawned and went upstairs to bed. Left us to lock up the house.“
With one angry sweep of his hand, Coffey wiped his desk of papers and sent them flying to the floor. He was on the verge of the explosion his squad had been waiting on, betting on. And now he realized that he was still smiling – actually grinning – not a good sign, not a healthy sign.
Mallory bent low to pick up the scattered papers around her chair. „We got the medical examiner to lose the ID on Willy Roy Boyd for a week.“ She was already assuming that he would believe the most ludicrous story ever told within these walls. „We have to keep a low profile,“ she said, collecting the sheets and stacking them neatly on the edge of the desk, then bending down for others. „The reporters can’t get near this story.“ She settled back into her chair to concentrate on aligning all the edges of every sheet. „It might be better if the rest of the squad didn’t – “
„I won’t tell a soul,“ said Jack Coffey. And he would not – no more than he would run naked through the streets, scattering rosebuds along the way. He continued to smile, feeling oddly calm. He just needed a little time was all, that and a bottomless bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Most of all, he needed to make these two detectives disappear. So much depended on that: his sanity, his stomach lining and what was left of his hair. Though the blinds were closed, he could sense the troops massing out there, pressing up against the glass, tensing, waiting for him to crack wide open.
Any minute now.
„You got seventy-two hours,“ said Coffey. „I don’t expect to see your faces for three days. Got that?“
He very much wanted to lay his head down on the desk and bang it a few times, but his detectives were still seated in their chairs, perhaps not fully comprehending that they had gotten away with this.
„Leave,“ he said, „now!“ And leave they did.
They left the door open, unfortunately, and he heard a snatch of their conversation.
Riker asked his partner, „Where to now?“
„We ‘re going to mess up a lawyer,“ she said.
„That’s my girl.“
Money was changing hands in the squad room, but the lieutenant no longer cared who had won or lost this round. He knew Mallory was going after the lawyer who had won a bail hearing, against all odds, for a cockroach who had murdered three women. The high school student, Boyd’s youngest victim, had been closer to a child. Jack Coffey had been the one to break the news to her parents, to show them the morgue photograph of their daughter’s face, a shot framed to expose the features least bruised and broken. The mother had touched the photo, caressing it with her ringers, then rubbing the glossy surface, as if desperately trying to break through that artificial dimension to get to her only child.
Both parents had cried.
The morale of the squad had gone down when that serial killer had walked out free on bail, spitting on the sidewalk and spitting on the law. The timing had been a gift from hell, the very hour of the schoolgirl’s burial. And so the lieutenant gave no thought to blowback from Mallory’s upcoming confrontation. Finally, he understood why she needed jurisdiction on the dead body of Willy Roy Boyd.
She wanted payback.
Coffey wondered if Mallory would go after the defense attorney’s testicles. There were some things in life that were worth his rank and pension; neutering a lawyer was high on the list.
He picked through the cards on his Rolodex until he found the number for the parents of Boyd’s last victim. He would call them first and tell them that the man who had destroyed their lives was dead – stabbed to death by an elderly woman. They might find some just irony in that.
No – they would cry.
Nedda Winter pulled back the sheer white drape of the front window for a better view of the old Rolls-Royce. Once it had been her father’s car, and now it belonged to her brother. A dozen suitcases were disgorged from the car’s trunk. Tall Lionel, sixty-nine on his last birthday, handled the bags with surprising ease, though he did this service grudgingly, for most or all of the luggage would belong to his sister Cleo Winter-Smyth. Bitty’s description of the summer house in the Hamptons filled its closets and drawers with her mother’s clothing. And Cleo’s room upstairs was packed with more designer dresses like the one that she wore now.
So why this spectacle of suitcases? What was the point of two houses if one could not travel lightly from one to the other?
Without taking her eyes from the window, Nedda spoke to the small woman behind her. „They’re here, Bitty.“ She glanced back at her niece, who was still holding the Bible. „Go up to your room if you like. I’ll deal with them.“
This arrangement was very agreeable to her niece, who stole up the staircase with exaggerated stealth, perhaps on the off chance that Cleo and Lionel could hear escaping footsteps through the solid walls of the house.