And he never would.
At the subtle rise of road ahead, he could swear that he saw bright streaks of forked lightning under the wheels; the silver car had left the ground, flying, hydroplaning on the water.
The silver Beetle was out of sight when the trooper’s c ar stopped well short of the Ohio state line-beaten. There would be no official report on his patrol car being humiliated by, of all things, a V o lkswagen, for this would be akin to reporting alien spacecraft. And so, without a single speeding ticket, the small convertible would run Route 80 through the neighboring state of Indiana and across another border into Illinois. The driver’s destination was the Chicago intersection of Adams Street and Michigan Avenue -the eye of the storm.
Behind his back,
Riker heard the snap of the doctor’s latex gloves. The examination of Savannah Sirus was done.
The detective asked, oh so casually, as if there were not a great deal riding on the answer, “So, Doc, what do I put down for the time of death?”
“Your absolute faith in rectal thermometers is really quite touching,” said Dr. Slope. “I don’t s u ppose a helpful neighbor heard the shot while he was looking at his wristwatch?”
The detective looked over one shoulder and smiled at the older man to say,
No such luck.
The neighbors had heard gunfire from this apartment on other occasions, and, good New Yorkers all, they had become selectively deaf to what Mallory was doing in here.
“Well, then,” said Slope, “just put down today’s d ate for now. Rigor mortis is always a crapshoot, and I’ve got too many variables to call a time of death with body temperature. An open window on a cold night-dried sweat stains on her blouse. For all I know, the woman had a raging fever when she died.” He circled the couch to stand before the detective. “So what’ve
you
got?”
Riker upended Savannah Sirus’s purse and spilled her possessions across the glass coffee table. There were two clusters of house keys. He recognized a silver fob on the set that would open the door to this apartment. “Looks like the lady was Mallory’s houseguest.” Another item from the purse was an airplane ticket from Chicago to New York. “I don’t t hink we’ll be calling out a crime-scene unit for this one.” He was testing the waters here, for the medical examiner had not yet made a pronouncement of suicide.
Dr. Slope turned to face his minions waiting in the hallway beyond the open door. He gave them a curt nod. The two men wheeled a gurney through the front door and set to work on bagging the victim’s remains. When they had cleared the room, taking the late Savannah Sirus with them, the doctor sank down on the couch beside Riker. “You think your partner knows what happened here tonight?”
Rather than lie, the detective said, “Well, you tell me.” One wave of his right hand included the leftovers of a take-out dinner, an empty wineglass and a saucer full of cigarette butts. “Point taken?”
The medical examiner nodded. He was well acquainted with Mallory’s freakish neatness. The young homicide detective would never tolerate anything out of place in her apartment. She was the sort who compulsively straightened picture frames in other people’s houses. Ergo, the mess had been made after her departure. Dr. Slope stared at the open window. “Riker? You think our victim originally planned to jump, then changed her mind and shot herself?”
“No.” But he understood the other man’s reasoning. This was the only open window on a cold spring night-and the screen had been raised. “The woman knew Mallory reasonably well. She’s been staying here awhile.” He held up the plane ticket. “Got here three weeks ago.” He neglected to mention that the ticket was round-trip; Mallory’s houseguest had no thoughts of dying in New York City -not on the day she arrived. “Savannah Sirus didn’t know much about guns and ammo. Now this is the way I see it. She thought the bullet might pass through her body and mess up a wall. Well, Mallory wouldn’t like that, would she?”
The doctor was shaking his head in accord with this.
Riker continued. “So the lady opened that window and pulled up the screen. That’s where she was standing when she shot herself. And it looks like she’s been planning this for a while.” He pointed to the gun on the floor. “You didn’t t hink that was Mallory’s, did you?”
“No,” said Dr. Slope. “I suppose not.”
The weapon on the carpet was a lightweight twenty-two, a lady’s g u n. Kathy Mallory was no lady; she carried a cannon, a Smith & Wesson.357 with a bigger kick and better stopping, maiming, killing power.
However, Riker knew that this gun on the floor did indeed belong to Mallory. She collected all kinds of firearms, none of them registered, and a twenty-two had its uses. But the matter of gun ownership might interfere with the doctor’s finding of suicide.
The detective slouched deep into the leather upholstery as he pondered where his partner was headed tonight. And why had she stopped showing up for work?
Mallory, what did you do with the time-all your crazy days of downtime?
Rising from the black leather couch, Riker forced a yawn, as if he needed to affect a blasé attitude about violent death. In fact, he had been born to it, a true son of New York City. “I’m gonna check out the other rooms.”
He passed by the guestroom and caught a glimpse of rumpled sheets and a blanket used by Savannah Sirus. Farther down the hall, another open door gave him a view of Mallory’s o w n bedding. There was not a single wrinkle in the coverlet, as if no one had ever slept there, and this lent credence to a theory that she never slept at all. Mallory the Machine-that was what other cops called her.
Dr. Slope was walking behind him when Riker entered another room of spotless good order, his partner’s d e n, where no dust mote dared to land. Some people had dogs; Mallory kept computers, and they sat in a neat row of three, their Cyclops eyes facing the door, waiting for her to come home. Even her technical manuals were well trained, each one perched on the precise edge of a bookcase shelf. The back wall was lined with cork, and Riker was puzzled by what, at first glance, had passed for striped wallpaper. He turned his head to catch a look of profound shock in the medical examiner’s e yes.
And that was puzzling, too.
From ceiling molding to baseboards, the cork wall was covered with sheets of paper, each one filled with columns of figures. Riker guessed that these were telephone numbers by the separation spaces for area codes and prefixes. Though reading glasses rested in his breast pocket, he preferred to squint, and now he noticed that six of the numerals were arranged in random combinations, but one floating sequence of four remained the same in every line. So this was what she had been doing with the time since he had seen her last-apart from pumping bullets into her walls, blowing bugs to kingdom come when she could not find a fly swatter. And, given a dead body in the front room, he suspected her of worse behavior. Thankfully, in some saner moment, she had patched the holes in the plaster.
Dr. Slope’s eyes widened as he took in the thousands of numbers on the cork wall. Most had red lines drawn though them, all perfectly straight in machine precision. He moved closer to the wall, the better to see with his bifocals. “Oh, my God. She
drew
these lines with a pen.”
And those hand-drawn lines could only indicate telephone numbers that had not panned out for Mallory. The detective gripped the medical examiner’s arm and turned the man around to face him. “You’ve seen this before.” Riker’s t o ne slipped into interrogation mode, close to accusation when he said, “You know what this is all about. Talk to me.”
The doctor nodded, taking no offense. “I saw something like this a long time ago-on the Markowitzes’ old phone bills. As I recall, it was that first month after Kathy came to live with them. So she was eleven years old.”
Yeah, sure she was.
Louis Markowitz, a late great cop, and his wife, Helen, had raised the girl as their own, but never would Kathy Mallory talk to them about her origins. She would not even give up her right age. At first, she had insisted on being twelve, and Lou had bargained her down by one year, though she might have been a ten-year-old or a child as young as nine.
The medical examiner stood at the center of the room, wiping the lenses of his bifocals with a handkerchief. “Lou showed me his phone bills, line after line of long-distance calls. Kathy made all of them.” The doctor stepped closer to the wall, nodding now. “Yes, it’s the same. You see, when she was a child, she was prone to nightmares. Lou thought the bad dreams might’ve triggered those calls. Sometimes he’d come downstairs late at night and catch her with the telephone. She made hundreds of these calls that first month. This wall reminds me of the Markowitzes’ phone bill. In every long-distance telephone number, four of the numerals were always the same, and the others just seemed random. She wouldn’t t e ll Lou anything helpful, but he worked out a good theory. He knew there was someone out there, some connection to her early life, but she could only remember part of a telephone number.”
“So Lou called the numbers on his phone bill.”
“Yes, all of them. And he found an odd pattern. Every call was made at some obscene hour of the night-so even the men were inclined to remember them. You see, when a man answered, she hung up the phone. But if a woman answered, she’d always say, ‘It’s Kathy, I’m lost.’ ”
“That must’ve driven the women
nuts
.”
“Yes, it touched their soft spots and their panic buttons.” The doctor turned his face to a high-rise window on the dark city. “According to Lou, all of the women begged Kathy to tell them who she was-and where could they
find
her? But the child would just hang up on them. Lou figured that Kathy never got the response she wanted. Those women didn’t know who she was. So then she’d dial the next combination of numbers… trying to make a connection to someone who would recognize her.”
“A woman.” Riker fished through his pockets and pulled out a piece of paper given to him by the first officer on the scene. This note listed sketchy vitals of victim identification, including a home telephone for the late Savannah Sirus. One sequence of four numbers matched the ones repeated on the cork wall. “I guess the kid finally made her connection.”
Eight hundred miles away,
another corpse had been found.
Hours after the windows of shops and offices had gone dark, an umbrella was snatched up by a gust of wet wind. Tearing and twirling, it scraped across the broad steps of the Chicago Art Institute. The only watchers were two great cats, standing lions made of bronze and blind to this broken trophy from the battle against horizontal rain. Their green patinas were altered by strikes of lightning and red flashes from the spinning lights of police vehicles. Cars and vans converged upon the construction site at the other side of Michigan Avenue.
Two homicide detectives were soaked through and through. They surrendered, throwing up their hands and then jamming them into coat pockets. Grim and helpless, they watched the heavy rain come down on their forensic evidence and carry it away. There it went, the body fluids, stray hairs and fibers, all flowing off down the gutter. The corpse, washed clean, could tell them nothing beyond the cause of death-extreme cruelty. There had never been a crime scene quite like this one in the history of Chicago, Illinois, nothing as shocking, nothing as sad.
The religious detective made the sign of the cross. The other one closed his eyes.
The dead man at their feet was pointing the way down Adams Street, also known as Route 66, a road of many names. Steinbeck had called it a road of flight.
The rainstorm had abated,
but the owner of the gas station had no plans to do any legal business at this late hour. Locked behind the wide door of his garage was one happy crew of gambling men in the grand slam of Chicago crap games, high rollers only, beer flowing, dice clicking and folding money slapping the cement floor.
Big
night.
A fortune was in play amid clouds of cigar smoke when the silver V o lkswagen’s d river, a young woman in need of gas, had come softly rapping at the door. Then she had banged on the heavy metal with both fists and kicked it a few times, calling way too much attention to the activities inside.
Stop
the music!
And now he stood beside her under the bright lights of his gas pumps- and the crap game was forgotten.
“Is that what I think it is?” The man gazed lovingly upon her engine. “Oh, yeah.” He looked up at her with a wide grin. “Girl, what have you done? A Porsche engine in a V o lkswagen Beetle?”
And
how
had she done it?
Even if he had been cold sober, this problem would have given him a headache. It
might
have been possible to modify an old model with the engine in the rear, but this was a new Beetle with front-wheel drive, built for an engine under the
hood.
No kind of engine could work in the damned
trunk
. Yet there it was.
He had to take three paces back to see how this magic trick was worked. The silhouette of the car was slightly off, elongated, but otherwise a perfect job. The girl had fabricated a VW Beetle onto the frame of the 911 Twin Turbo Porsche. Before he stopped to wonder why she had done such a thing, he had already moved onto the problem of the convertible’s roof: that tall hump of a ragtop might cut into the speed, but not by much. Now how would this counterfeit body affect the Porsche’s performance in cornering?
“Hey, girl? If you take a curve too fast, you’ll roll this car. You know that, right?”
Advice and gasoline were all that he could offer her. The tall blonde preferred to work alone. By frosty glare and body language, she had taught him to keep his greasy hands off her immaculate engine.
“You got some time?” he asked. “I could put on a roll bar.”