‘Hold it,’ said Riker. ‘Don’t tell me. The sheriff finds out that the wolf never had rabies in the first place. Am I right?’
‘Right you are. He discovers that someone else was bitten by that same wolf and survived. The animal actually had distemper. Looks the same as rabies, lots of frothing at the mouth, but it’s not transmissible to humans. However, the wound wasn’t cleaned properly, so Wichita suffered a massive infection – fevers, hallucinations – but no symptoms of hydrophobia.’
The detective politely raised one eyebrow, though he seemed to have lost interest. After a few moments of silence, Charles said, ‘You’ve had news from the hospital. Your friend – ’
‘Yeah.’ Riker turned his face to the passenger window and its view of the open sky over the water. ‘Her one good kidney is failing.’
And even Jake Swain could not have written an escape for Sparrow. However, pressed by deep concern for a friend, Charles now came up with the next best thing – an emergency epiphany. ‘There was an eyewitness to Natalie Homer’s murder. Does that cheer you up?’ The car came to a standstill in heavy traffic halfway across the bridge. Riker turned around to face him with a look of surprise, successfully distracted from pain.
Charles changed gears as the traffic moved forward again. ‘My theory works nicely with the problem of the locked door.’
The detective turned back to face the passenger window, his way of saying, Oh, that again.
‘Bear with me. Previously, I assumed that someone used a key to open Natalie’s door before the police arrived. But my witness wouldn’t need a key – not if he opened the door from the inside.’
‘And here’s the flaw,’ said Riker. ‘That would mean your witness was in the apartment for two days – watching a woman’s body rot.’
‘Yes. Now back up a bit. The night she died, Natalie was cooking a meal for two. She had no friends, and she was on bad terms with her sister. So the dinner guest was her son.’
‘Interesting,’ said Riker, which was his polite way of saying that it was not at all interesting. ‘So, before Erik Homer goes on his honeymoon, he leaves the kid with his ex-wife? No, Charles. This guy was a control freak. After the divorce, he never let Natalie see that kid, not once. This can’t work.’
‘Why not? Erik Homer was getting married again. He had a new woman to control. And this baby-sitting arrangement would be for his convenience. That’s what makes it work. And no one ever interviewed the boy. We don’t know where Junior was for two days in August or anytime after that.’ Charles could see that Riker was not buying any of this. ‘Only a small child would have stayed in that room with the body. The boy wouldn’t want to leave his mother. Dead or alive, she was his whole world.’
‘Let’s see if I understand this.’ Riker’s voice was strained in an effort to quell the sound of condescension. ‘It was a studio apartment. No place to hide a kid, even a small one. But Junior managed to – ’
‘Riker, all over the world, mothers tell their children to wash up for dinner. It’s a universal thing. The boy was in the bathroom the whole time that man was killing his mother.’
‘It was August,’ said the detective. ‘No air-conditioner in Natalie’s place. Rolling blackouts. The lights were off half the time. The stove burner was left on. More heat when – ’
‘Yes, and after two days, the little boy’s survival instinct overcame trauma, and he left the apartment. This explains the unlocked door. Also, it very neatly explains your contrary reports of the boy’s whereabouts. The father sent him away. Erik Homer didn’t want the killer to find out that his son was a witness.’
Charles and Riker were still at odds when they entered the back office of Butler and Company.
Mallory never acknowledged them. She was deep in conversation with her machines, speaking to them with keyboard commands. They responded with screens of data and papers pouring from the mouths of three printers. She sat with her back to the discordant men and the mess on her cork wall. Her vision was thus narrowed to a sterile field that hummed with perfect harmony.
Charles rounded the computer workstation and saw the cold machine lights reflected in her eyes. He looked down at the thick cable that fed her electronics through a dedicated line of electricity, and he played with the idea of accidentally kicking the plug from its socket and disconnecting her that way.
Riker rapped on the top of the monitor, and when this failed to get her attention, he said, ‘Charles thinks he’s got an eyewitness to the murder of Natalie Homer.’
‘Hmm. Natalie’s son.’ Mallory never lifted her eyes from the glowing screen. ‘He’s the one who unlocked the door to the crime scene. But I don’t know what name Junior’s using these days, so we’ll just stick with the scarecrow.’ She smiled at her computer, as if it had just said something to amuse her. ‘And now we’ve got a game.’
CHAPTER 13
Charles said a silent goodbye to Louis Markowitz. His old friend’s personality was being erased from the cork wall by layers of lopsided pictures and papers.
Mallory walked along the cork wall, ripping down reports and sending tacks flying through the air. Photographs of fat black flies hit the floor where they mingled with enlarged cockroaches and smiling portraits from Natalie Homer’s actress portfolio. Given that Mallory was a pathologically tidy creature, Charles thought this might qualify as a loss of control, a display of temper, though she never raised her voice when she said, ‘So Natalie’s sister got away.’
‘Yeah,’ said Riker. ‘I put the dogs on her. We might get lucky before she ditches the car for a plane or a bus. Maybe Susan’s more afraid of her nephew than us.’
‘She should be,’ said Charles. ‘If Natalie’s son is the scarecrow – ’
‘He is.’ The soft plof of papers and pings of pushpins followed Mallory to the end of the wall, where she tacked up the print bought from William Heart. ‘It all fits.’ She pointed to the open bathroom door in the background of this photograph. ‘Charles is right. The boy was probably in there while his mother was being murdered. Two days later, he was found wandering in the hall with a suitcase and all the symptoms of shock. And that was before the first cop opened the crime scene.’
‘Okay,’ said Riker. ‘Say the scarecrow is Natalie’s kid all grown up and not too shy about cold-blooded murder. If he knew who killed his mother, he’d just off the bastard.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘The boy was hiding, watching through a keyhole or a crack in the door. Maybe he never saw the killer’s face.’
‘Or even the actual murder,’ said Charles. ‘The scarecrow doesn’t imitate his mother’s death by strangulation – only the postmortem hanging.’ And now he noticed the dead quiet in the offices of Butler and Company. ‘So where’s Lars Geldorf?’
‘I had Deluthe take him home. The old man is out of the loop. We’re consolidating all the hangings. From now on, he doesn’t get past the front door.’ She turned her eyes on Charles. ‘You’ve got a problem with that?’
‘Well, he has so much invested in Natalie’s murder.’ And now, judging by the hand gravitating to her hip, Charles realized that the correct response would have been, Oh, hell no. But he rather liked the old man, and so he persisted. ‘Lars could still contribute to the – ’
‘Wrong.’ She turned her back on him. ‘All Geldorf ever had was a stalker pattern and an ex-husband, every cop’s favorite suspect. He spent all his time trying to break Erik Homer’s alibi.’ A more linear personality was taking shape on the cork wall as Mallory finished pinning up a straight line of text and pictures. One red fingernail tapped the statement of Susan Qualen. ‘Natalie’s sister hated her brother-in-law. Every other word on this paper is bastard. But later the same night, she was talking to Erik Homer for hours, and they weren’t discussing funeral arrangements.’