Charles waited for Cathery to move his piece and lift his eyes. He nodded towards the girl at the gate. Cathery looked at her and, never changing his expression, said, "Ignore her. She'll go away in a while. Your move."
"Isn't she a friend of yours?"
"No."
Such a friendship did seem unlikely. Henry Cathery had grown up with money in a protected environment. While this one at the gate had the look of the homeless, a young woman with nowhere to be.
"I have no friends," said Cathery.
And Charles believed that too. Again, less distraction.
"And no family?"
"Not now."
Less distraction.
The young woman paced back and forth in front of the gate. Panic was jerking and twitching in every muscle of her body. Then, suddenly, she stopped her walking to and fro. She held tightly to the bars and pressed her face to the iron. Relaxing with a gradual sag and a slant of her body, her hands dropped away from the bars. The spasmodic agitation was gone now. She slowly moved off down the sidewalk and carried herself away from the park with a poignant grace. Charles stared after her until she was out of sight. He felt an unaccountable sadness.
Cathery looked up at him with only a shading of impatience. Charles brought down Cathery's would-be queen, and that set the boy back a bit. In the time the old master's stroke had bought him, Charles turned to stare at the little buildings at the east end of the park.
"So that's where the first murder happened. I should think that would be a more interesting problem than a chess game."
Cathery had put out one fleshy hand to castle his king. The hand hovered, concentration broken, as his eyes turned to the shed.
"I don't see the problem," he said.
"A daylight murder with all these witnesses? I call that interesting."
"Nothing to it," said Cathery. "He laid her down quick, cut her throat to shut her up, and then he cut her some more. The shrubs could hide that much. She was old. She couldn't have put up much of a fight."
"How do you know her throat was cut?"
"Everyone knows her throat was cut. Ten people must have come out to look at the body before the cops showed up."
"Did you see the body?"
"Sure."
"Did you notice anything else besides the cut throat?"
"No. She was partly covered by a garbage bag. No one touched her before the police came. They only wanted to look at a dead body."
There was no pain in the recollection of his grandmother's brutal killing. It was a sterile subject and an annoying distraction.
"But those benches face the building. Not much between the benches and the spot where she died. And no one noticed a stranger in the park that day."
"Then it wasn't a stranger," Cathery shrugged. "Easier."
"No. Think it through. You're too accustomed to dealing with the flat of a board. See the face at that window?" He pointed up to a second-floor apartment window set in red brick.
Cathery squinted up. A head of white hair was bobbing behind the window glass.
"Now, look over there," said Charles.
Another face, this one much younger, looked down on them from the other side of the street.
"The police love people like that. There's at least one professional watcher in every neighborhood. How many windows in this square? Someone had to be watching, but no one came forward. Perhaps the witnesses didn't know what they were witnessing. Is that possible? That doorman faces the murder site. Maybe he was inside when it happened. But what are the odds that no one was looking at the spot at any given minute of the day? The shrubs would cover a prone body. But how do you do a violent bloody murder like that one with no real cover? And what fool would take that risk?"
"It would be the ultimate high, wouldn't it?"
"Pardon?"
"You saw that girl at the gate. When she was in high school, she used to steal things from stores. What she stole was stuff she couldn't use half the time. She said it was a rush. It was exciting."
When their game was ended in a stalemate, Charles quit the park and closed the gate behind him. He looked back to see Cathery staring up at the watcher with the white head. The watcher withdrew from the window – quickly.
Mallory had her old man's brains. Jack Coffey would admit that much. All the damn interview notes NYPD had collected in the past three months, reams and reams of notes, and no one had made the seance connection.
He looked at her sitting quietly on the other side of his desk and wished he had her back on duty again. Until this morning, he hadn't realized how much he'd missed her in the past two months. There was a time, not so long ago, when he had kept track of her off-duty hours, and felt the lack of her in the way he dragged himself to work on the days when she would not be there, driving him nuts with sarcasm and just a trace of perfume. Two months was a long time to be missing her perfume.
Coffey looked up to see Charles Butler filling the doorway of his office. Butler moved across the room and folded his long self into the chair next to Mallory. While he was apologizing for being late, the man was suddenly caught short by the changes in the office. He was staring at the denuded walls which no one, cop or civilian, had seen in Markowitz's lifetime.
"You haven't missed much," said Mallory to Charles.
Coffey wondered what he was missing here. Butler shows up thirty minutes late, and Mallory, the punctuality freak, lets it go by? Where was the venom, the sarcasm, the glare of "Come hither, I want to hurt you"? He faced Charles Butler who had recovered from the mild shock of the redecorating.
"So, Charles. Wouldn't you think one of those old women would've come forward?"
"Oh, the seance ladies? I suppose it's possible they each assumed someone else would call. That's common group behavior."
"No," said Mallory. "They were playing Russian roulette."
Coflfey nodded, but he wasn't buying it. It didn't fit the image formed by the elderly women in his own life, and a little old lady was a little old lady. No, something else had frightened those women, scared them off the police, and he intended to find out what it was.
"I'm arranging police protection for all of them." The better to interrogate them without lawyers intervening.
"Turning into a real horse-race, isn't it?" said Charles. "How often do you get such a plethora of suspects?"
"Well," said Coffey, smiling, "we usually begin with the entire population of Manhattan and then whittle it down. Right now, I got Redwing."
"What about Henry Cathery?"
"We checked him out."
"I'm just curious. If he fitted the FBI profile so well, why didn't you concentrate on him?"
"I like money motives," said Mallory.
"So do I," said Coffey. "Every single one of those old women was loaded with blue-chip stocks. But then, so is Henry Cathery. He's worth a hell of a lot more than the dead grandmother."
"But you're dealing with a serial killer. Surely there's a mental disorder to consider, a pathology to the crimes."
"Hey," said Coffey. "If FBI headquarters were in New York, they'd have an entirely different set of profiles. New York City is another country."
"Coffey's right," said Mallory. "Now take cannibals, for example. Our last cannibal wasn't really hard-core."
"Yeah," said Coffey. "He was nothing at all like the Minnesota cannibal. The death was accidental. He just didn't know what to do with the body."
"Disposing of the head is always going to be a snag," said Mallory. "When we found a half-eaten head, the FBI sent us down the garden path with their psych profile."
"They never once suggested looking for a bank teller who was once a Boy Scout," said Coffey. "And as far as we knew, his parents were never cruel to him, and he had the standard complement of chromosomes."