‘Good practice for a hanging,’ said Mallory.
‘It does explain a lot, doesn’t it? Twisting on the end of a rope, but no panic. And she nearly escaped.’
Mallory thought of the day this woman had walked into a police station with a bloody note staked to her neck. The hanging scenario worked well with that kind of poise. But now she had two victims who were accomplished at playing dead while their hearts were beating a million times a minute. What were the odds against that? She turned to the medical examiner and smiled.
You wouldn’t hold out on me, would you?
The doctor would never volunteer what he could not swear to in court and back up with evidence, but if he thought this was the end of the autopsy, he was dead wrong. She glanced back at the dissected woman on the other side of the room. There was cutting and there was cutting. ‘So I’ve got a perp who can’t tell the living from the dead. That’s it? That’s all you can tell me? The hangman’s just another screw-up who can’t find a pulse?’
Dr Slope hesitated for a moment. He had always fancied himself a great poker player, born with a face of stone that gave up nothing in his hand. Yet Louis Markowitz had beaten him in every bluff, and everything that cop knew about poker and Slope he had passed along to his foster child. Even if she could not read the doctor’s face, she knew what he was thinking: she was an ungrateful brat, and he was going to put her in her place.
The man’s voice was testy, but still in the lecture mode. ‘You assume he believed his victim was dead. Well, J don’t. After he strung her up, she was getting oxygen, but not enough to keep her conscious for long. So I know the killer left the scene immediately. Otherwise, there wouldn’t have been time enough or strength enough for Kennedy’s aerial ballet. He didn’t stay to watch her die.’
Just like Sparrow – a pattern.
A few minutes with this medical examiner was worth ten hours with any psychiatrist, for most witch doctors were light years removed from the carnage of murder. She turned her back on Slope and crossed the room to the steel table and the body of Kennedy Harper all sewn up with crude stitches – a Frankenstein scar. Mallory was striving for the sound of boredom when she asked, ‘What else can you tell me? Anything useful?’
The doctor’s poker discipline was shot to hell. His face was now an easy read, waffling between surprise and indignation. He marched up to the table and confronted her across the body, firing off another contradiction. ‘I’d say your man’s not the violent type. That may seem a bit odd – ’
‘Odd?’
‘All right, Kathy – it’s insane. But he didn’t go off on either of the women. He didn’t beat them or – ’
‘He cut off their damn hair.’
‘But no cuts to the flesh, no fractures from a fist. And the other one, Sparrow – she didn’t have a single defensive bruise. I’ve seen every unspeakable act a man can commit on a woman’s body.’ The doctor looked down at the corpse laid out on the table, the woman he so admired. ‘But I don’t see that kind of violence here – no loss of control, no rage.’
This did not square with a note staked to the neck of a living woman, and she was about to tell him that when he held up one hand to forestall any more arguments.
‘I’m out of my depth,’ he said. ‘This man didn’t care if the women lived or died. He’s a walking paradox – a serial killer who’s not all that interested in killing.’
The murder of Kennedy Harper had taken over an entire wall of the Special Crimes incident room. Mallory posted the autopsy pictures next to Heller’s crime-scene diagrams. Sparrow also had a wall to herself. The throwaway whore had become a priority case.
Rows of metal folding chairs were filling up with detectives. Four men gathered around the audio equipment and listened to the Cashtip recording of the killer’s voice, playing again and again, unwilling to believe that it did not offer more. The volume was turned up each time they heard the ambient sound.
Pssst.
One man timed it by the second hand on his watch. Mallory used a natural clock, a quirk of the brain that told her this sound occurred every twenty seconds. It reminded her of Helen Markowitz’s spray starch on ironing day.
She walked to the hangman’s wall and stared at a photograph of the back of a man’s head. The image, crowned with a baseball cap and encircled with dead flies, was as worthless as the lame description of T-shirt and jeans played out in the clothing pinned to the cork.
Pssst.
Janos stood beside her. ‘So what do you think of our scarecrow?’
‘Is that what we’re calling him now?’
‘Yeah.’ He turned to look around the room. ‘Hey, what happened to your partner?’
‘He’ll be back.’ She had kept track of all the passing minutes since Riker had slipped out of the room. After the ambush in front of Peg Baily’s bar, he would not miss an opportunity for a drink today. Each up-close encounter with his ex-wife was a prelude to a binge. Her internal timepiece had moved well past his three-minute walk to a nearby watering hole.
Pssst.
Riker would down his bourbon in no time. Mallory allowed extra minutes for his return trip. He would not walk back here with the same urgent speed. She factored in another minute so he could trade insults with the desk sergeant before climbing the stairs and ambling down the hall to the incident room.
Mallory turned her face to the door, and her partner appeared.
Pssst.
She saw nothing amiss. Riker prided himself on never stumbling in the daylight hours. There were no new spills on his suit, nothing more recent than his interview with Daisy, and that splash of bourbon had dried long ago. He sat on the chair next to hers and peeled the wrapper from a roll of mints. ‘Did I miss anything?’
‘No. We’re still waiting to hear from Tech Support.’
Pssst.
The detectives around the tape player walked away from the machine, allowing the recording to play out at full volume, and still the suspect’s voice was subdued.
‘ – a woman has been murdered in the East Village – ’
It was an empty monotone, lacking the bravado of a man on a quest for fame, and one more motive died.
‘ – name is Kennedy Harper – ’
The mechanical tone almost qualified as a speech impediment, or that was the excuse offered by technicians at One Police Plaza. They had not yet fixed the suspect’s home state.
‘ – you can find the body at – ’
This man, so adept at theatrical staging, was so bland in his recital of bare facts – a death, a name, an address.
Pssst.
Mallory was fleshing out the portrait of a killer whose emotions were dead, not the type for a thrill kill. He was a tidy man, well organized. A man with a plan? She stared at the scarecrow on the back wall. What the hell do you want?
‘We got it!’ Janos hovered in front of a computer monitor and read the pertinent details as he scrolled down the screen, ‘The scarecrow is from the Midwest. They’re still trying to nail down the state. The techs say he wasn’t calling from a cell phone or a pay-phone. And the ambient sound might be from an early-model humidifier or an automatic plant mister.’
Jack Coffey entered the room and shut off the tape player. ‘Listen up!’ All conversation stopped and every pair of eyes turned his way. ‘Riker’s witness, Miss Emelda, is worth her weight in gold. Our perp was the old lady’s man in the tree – the guy with a Polaroid camera.’
He held up two plastic bags, each containing a small box with a Polaroid logo. ‘These film cartons were left at both crime scenes, and they weren’t left by accident.’ He held one higher than the other. ‘And the box we found today has a twenty-year-old expiration date.’ He tossed the bags on the table. ‘Kennedy Harper died six days ago – that’s official. Six days and twenty years ago, another hanging victim was found.’