Jack Coffey turned around to face his detective. „I know you’ll never let go of that badge, Mallory. You’re better at this than your old man when he was in his prime.“ He quit the room, closing the door softly, just to let her know, that, though she had cut him at the knees, there were no hard feelings.
And now that she had beaten Coffey, she glanced at the window on the interrogation room. One down and one to go.
She looked over her handiwork, this barefoot woman wired to a machine, every muscle tensing, bracing. They stared at one another. Nedda was blind to Mallory, but well aware that she was being watched from the other side of the mirror. The woman was waiting so patiently for the game to begin. She raised her head, as if to ask the young detective – When?
Kathy Mallory left the observation room, locking the door behind her, not out of deference to Jack Coffey’s wishes, but for the sake of privacy alone. She entered the brightly lit interview room, and Nedda Winter looked up with no reproach for what was about to happen to her.
Mallory knelt down on bended knee and lifted Nedda’s right foot in her hand, noting its fragile, paper-thin skin and the raised blue veins that came with age and a hard life. She gently slipped one shoe back on the woman’s foot and carefully tied the laces, not too loose, not too tight. When she had done the second shoe, she raised her face to Nedda’s. „The night you killed Willy Roy Boyd – you didn’t find that ice pick on the bar – in the dark. You had it under your pillow, didn’t you?“
Nedda nodded between wariness and surprise.
Mallory removed the metal clips and unfastened the tubes that bound the woman’s breast. „You never feel safe anymore, do you?“
„No. Not for a long time.“
„Not since you left the last hospital.“ Mallory walked back to the table and pulled out an ordinary wooden chair that had no wires. „Sit here.“ Fumbling with her list of rules for a life, she added the word „Please.“ When Nedda had joined her at the table, the detective said, „Suppose we just talk.“
And Nedda did.
She began with the morning of the massacre, counting up the dead. „All those bodies. When I got to the top of the house and saw the nanny on the floor, I couldn’t go into that nursery. I didn’t want to see Sally’s body. I couldn’t find Cleo and Lionel, but I’d only searched the rooms upstairs.“
Returning to the staircase, she had stopped awhile by her stepmother’s corpse. „She was a silly, flighty woman, but I loved her so much. She was the only mother I ever knew. Then I sat down on the steps beside my father’s body.“
James Winter had entered the house as she was pulling the ice pick from her father’s chest. „Uncle James bundled me into the car, and we drove to a dingy little building in Greenwich Village. He left me there for days and days. Said he had to go back for the ice pick because my fingerprints were on it. When I saw him again, he told me it was no good. The police got to the house before he did, and they had the ice pick. He said they’d found the bodies of all the children, Cleo and Lionel too. And the baby was dead. They were hunting for me, he said. He cut off my hair and dyed it with shoe black. I stayed in that room for a long time. I don’t know how many days. I lost count. An old woman brought my food. Clothes, too – I think they were hers. She was very kind to me.“
„She’s the one who taught you to read the tarot cards,“ said Mallory.
„How did you know that?“
„I know almost everything. Just a few more loose ends. Go on.“
„One night, the street outside my window was full of police. I thought they’d come for me. The old woman came upstairs. She said we had to clean the place right away, and then I’d have to leave. If the police found any trace of me, she’d go to jail. We worked all night into morning, washing down the walls, the floor, the furniture. While she was downstairs, getting a suitcase for me, the police came and took her away. Later that day, Uncle James came back. We waited for dark, and then we drove up to Maine. He said he had a summer cabin there. When we crossed the state line, he stole a car from a restaurant parking lot and left his own car in its place. I remember a road into the woods. After that, all I have are missing pieces of memory – like Uncle James turning off the headlights. I thought that was queer. The road was so narrow, and the woods were pitch dark. We were driving blind. The last thing I recall was the car’s inside light coming on. I don’t remember the crash. When I woke up, I was in the dark, and the car was rocking. I was in so much pain. I turned on the headlights. They pointed straight up at the sky, and below me there was nothing but black space. I screamed.“
„A cop named Walter McReedy rescued you.“
„Yes. Later, he told me that the driver had drowned in the quarry pool.“
„You never told McReedy who the driver was?“
„I thought Uncle James was dead. Walter said the body would float up eventually, but it never did. And he never mentioned finding my uncle’s abandoned car in the restaurant parking lot. I could never ask him about it. I told him I couldn’t remember anything.“
„And that’s how you knew your uncle meant to kill you that night.“
„Yes. Uncle James must have jumped from the car just before it went over the edge. That’s why the inside light came on. And the police never found his car because he ‘d used it to drive back to New York. So I knew he’d tried to kill me. And he was still alive.“
„You couldn’t tell Walter McReedy the truth.“
„No, and I couldn’t go home again. I didn’t know that there was anyone alive to come back to. And the police had my fingerprints on the ice pick.“
„This pick.“ Mallory reached into her knapsack and pulled out a plastic bag containing the murder weapon. „There were only two fingerprints on the handle. That’s how the police ruled you out as a suspect. Thumb and index finger, the prints you left when you pulled the pick out of your father’s body. There’s no other scenario for the way they appeared on the weapon. Otherwise the pick was clean. So the lead detective figured the killer had the presence of mind to wipe that pick after using it to murder nine people – so why leave two clear prints behind on a murder weapon? The fingerprints cleared you. Those cops only wanted to find you and bring you home.“
Nedda bowed her head. „If I had known that Cleo and Lionel were still alive, I would’ve told Walter McReedy everything. But I believed Uncle James when he told me that their bodies were found in the kitchen. I never got to that room.“
Mallory leaned toward her, one hand resting on her arm. „You spent two years with the McReedy family.“
„Off and on – between surgeries. Most of the time was spent in the hospital.“
„The McReedys never talked about the Winter House Massacre? That was national news.“
Nedda almost smiled. „Once, there was life before television. You can’t imagine that, can you? But we had radio on a clear night, one station from Bangor that played gospel music.“
„You were famous.“
„But I wasn’t the Lindbergh baby – just the debris of a crime that happened somewhere else. The local paper was a two-page weekly newsletter. And the biggest news in that small town was the story of the McReedy brothers rescuing me and risking their lives to do it. Now you see why my uncle took me there to die.“
Mallory nodded. „And all that time you spent with the McReedy family, you were waiting for James Winter to come back and kill you.“