Still smiling, the commander of Special Crimes Unit stepped into the hall and locked the door behind him.
The squad room was quiet and dim. All but one of the overhead fluorescents had been killed, and only a few independent lamps were left on, though all the desks were empty. The only bright light was focused on Mallory and the rookie detective. Ronald Deluthe wore a bloody T-shirt. His jeans and baseball cap, ripped from the wall of the incident room, were free of stains.
Riker stood by the window and watched the crowded sidewalk below. He saw Charles Butler’s head above the crowd of normal-size human beings and that other species, the reporters.
Mallory was still instructing her star performer. ‘Keep your face down.’
Well, that should be easy enough. Riker doubted that the boy would have the strength to lift his head. ‘We should send you back to the hospital, kid.’
‘He wants to do this,’ said Mallory, speaking for Deluthe. ‘So he stays.’’
Riker was about to make another comment but let it slide for Deluthe’s sake. In the aftermath of killing the scarecrow, this was almost therapy, though that was not Mallory’s motive. She only wanted an authentically battered doppelganger.
‘One problem,’ said Riker. ‘Even if they don’t see his face, they’ll recognize the hair. You can see that bleach job through solid walls.’
‘I know.’ Mallory resolved the problem with a mascara wand. After a few deft strokes, the fringe of hair beneath the bandages was turned to brown. ‘Deluthe, you’ve got everybody’s attention now.’ She leaned down to his eye level. ‘So no more bleaching.’ And that was a direct order. ‘You’re not invisible anymore.’
Riker was startled. Empathy was not his partner’s forte. She should have been the last one to work out the puzzle of Deluthe’s bright yellow hair.
‘I don’t want to see any emotion at all,’ she said. ‘We’re clear on that?’
‘Yes,’ said Deluthe.
Mallory dabbed at his bleeding lip with a tissue, perhaps perceiving fresh blood as a sign of overacting. ‘When Janos brings you back to the squad room, I’ll ask a few questions. Don’t speak. Just nod.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘A lot hangs on that nod.’Jack Coffey crossed the squad room to join them. ‘We got nothin’ else, kid. No physical evidence.’
They could not even justify an arrest warrant. And since there was no need to mention that Deluthe had dispatched their only eyewitness with a baseball bat, the lieutenant led him down the hall in silence.
‘So you got your perp.’ Geldorf s voice came from the stairwell door, where he stood with Charles Butler. ‘Nice work!’
‘Hey, Lars.’ Riker returned the old man’s broad smile. ‘You know all your lines?’
‘Oh, yeah. Charles briefed me. Don’t worry about – ’
Mallory made a motion to silence Geldorf as the stairwell door opened again, and Alan Parris was escorted into the room by Detective Wang. Riker studied the suspect with the eye of a fellow alcoholic. The ex-cop showed no signs of a recent binge, but fear could sober a man. At least Parris did not reek of booze. His new suit was another sign of fear, disguising him as a respectable taxpayer instead of an unemployed drunk.
‘Mr Parris?’ Mallory pointed to the door on the far side of the room. ‘Could you wait in there? Thanks.’
Geldorf watched the man enter Coffey’s office and take a chair near the glass partition. ‘He’s gonna be way too comfortable in there. You need a closed room, no windows, no air.’ The old man was reborn, and all the annoying cockiness was back as he turned to lecture Mallory. ‘You want complete control over him. You decide when he takes a piss, when he eats – if he eats.’
‘It’s not your call,’ she said, reminding the old man that he was visiting Special Crimes Unit on a provisional passport. ‘Parris thinks he’s here for a friendly little chat.’
‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Janos walking toward them. ‘When he saw Geldorf, he panicked. Now he wants a lawyer. So we gotta kill an hour till – ’
‘The hell we do.’ Riker strode across the room, entered the office and shouted, ‘What’s all this crap about a lawyer!’
Parris’s voice was surly. ‘You plan to crucify me for these hangings, right?’
‘You don’t watch TV? You don’t listen to the radio? We nailed our perp this afternoon, okay? Now I read your statement, and I got some questions on Natalie Homer.’
‘I wasn’t – ’ Parris turned to the door as two more people stepped into the office. Mallory sat down behind Coffey’s desk, then glared at Lars Geldorf, warning him to keep silent and wait for his cue.
‘Parris,’ said Riker. ‘You were saying?’
‘I wasn’t the one who took Natalie’s complaints. I was a uniform, not a dick.’
‘But you knew her.’ Geldorf stood behind Parris’s chair and placed one gnarly hand on the man’s shoulder. ‘You saw her every day on patrol.’
Parris shook off the man’s hand. ‘She never even looked my way.’
‘That bothered you, didn’t it?’ Geldorf leaned down to Parris’s ear. ‘She was so pretty. And here you got this gun, all this power, but she don’t even know you’re alive.’
‘Back off,’ said Mallory. Now everyone in the room, including Alan Parris, was united by a common enemy – Lars Geldorf.
The old man pretended to ignore her and reached into his breast pocket. He pulled out a Polaroid of Natalie Homer, a close-up of a dead woman with mutilated hair and flesh. ‘Not so pretty now, is she? Not so high and mighty anymore.’
Mallory leaned over and snatched the photograph. ‘I said that’s enough’ Some of her anger was genuine. She disapproved of ad-lib remarks and unauthorized props.
‘I want a lawyer,’ said Parris.
‘I don’t blame you,’ said Riker. ‘This is bullshit. But you haven’t been charged with a crime.’ He turned on Geldorf. ‘Not one more word.’ This small gesture had endeared him to the smiling Alan Parris.
‘Mr Parris – Alan,’’ said Mallory. ‘You were a cop. You know how hard this job can be. So what can you tell me about her? Anything that might – ’
‘Nothing. Every time she came into the station, there was a crowd of dicks around her. They talked to her for hours. For all the good that did her.’
‘You felt sorry for her.’ Riker nodded his understanding, his commiseration. They were brothers now.
‘Damn straight. She deserved better.’
‘Tell me about the extra patrols in that neighborhood,’ said Mallory. ‘You checked in on her, right? Maybe you stopped by her place to – ’
‘Why should I? The detectives never asked me to.’ Parris turned to Geldorf. ‘You bastards liked her well enough, but you never believed her.’ He turned back to Mallory. ‘They only saw Natalie when she was really scared. I guess they figured that was just normal for her.’
‘But you knew better,’ said Riker. ‘You saw her every day. You knew what she was going through.’ She was always Natalie to Alan Parris, a first-name acquaintance and not a woman who had never given him the time of day.
Jack Coffey had left the door to the lock-up room wide. And now Lieutenant Loman watched the back of a prisoner being marched down the hall. Mallory was right. No one else could have been as convincing as this young cop in bloodstains, chains on his wrists, chains on his ankles, faltering steps and now a stumble. Janos’s massive arms reached out to catch Deluthe before he could fall.
‘The leg irons are overkill,’ said Harvey Loman.
Coffey stared at the sweat shining on the back of Deluthe’s neck. The mascara hair treatment was running in a brown streak that mingled with the T-shirt’s bloodstains. Then he realized that the game was not over when Loman went on to say, ‘I can’t see that pathetic bastard outrunning Janos.’