With the attitude of only wanting to beat the dead horse one more time, Charles tried again. "But pure profit motive? No one would profit from all four killings. You think a sane murderer would kill four women if he only wanted one of them dead? Would a jury believe it?"
"A jury of New Yorkers?" said Coffey. "Oh, sure."
Mallory nodded in agreement.
"But don't you think the four-week cycles fit nicely with the pathology of a lunatic?" He looked from Coffey to Mallory. "No? But if you only considered the element of madness, it would still be an open field. I understand that Margot Siddon's alibi for the death of her cousin is a theater full of people who can't agree on the right year, much less the hour. No alibi for the Gaynor or Cathery murders. Her alibi for Pearl Whitman's death is Cathery, and he's none too committal. He's got his own alibi problems since Miss Whitman died. The medium we don't know about yet, but that's reaching. And Gaynor – "
"Gaynor? Charles, even if Gaynor didn't have Mallory for an alibi, I'm sure he could account for his time. His students make great alibis; they live on schedules; they're always watching clocks. We've got to check out his appointments for the office hours, but I don't think we're going to find gaps in his day."
"Didn't Henry Cathery also have a witness to account for his time? Pearl Whitman? How reliable was she?"
"So? What's the connection? You're not suggesting that Mallory is unreliable?" No, he could see that Charles wasn't about to suggest anything like that. Mallory was already tensing. Coffey could feel it across the desk without even looking at her.
"No, of course not," said Charles who probably loved his life as much as the next man, "but Gaynor was saved by a time constraint. No one would have an alibi for any of the murders if the women didn't die where they were found. Then it could be any of them."
"Nice try," said Coffey with no sarcasm. He really did like Charles. "But we have a lock on the crime sites. A forensic pathologist estimates the quantity of blood loss based on the victim's height and weight and the type of wound – if it's a quick kill, there's less blood loss. Then a forensic technician accounts for the blood at the crime site. The areas where the blood pools under the flesh line up with the position of the body. The first thrust gets a major artery. There's an awful lot of blood. No particles found on any of the bodies that were foreign to the site. Not even microscopic evidence to suggest they'd fallen elsewhere. So Gaynor's out of the woods."
"I'm not ruling Gaynor out," said Mallory. "Not him, not any of them."
"You're kidding," Coffey said. "What do you know that I don't?" Even as he asked the question he knew he was being suckered. She was playing with him.
"And what have you got, Coffey? Any little thing you want to share with me?" Her eyes were guns. They made him nervous, and he looked everywhere for something else to be looking at. When his eyes settled on Charles Butler, the man was smiling, and there was just a hint of sympathy.
"Fair enough," he said. Though he would not characterize any dealing with her as fair. She'd been born to the advantages of a quicker mind and a paralyzing beauty that had done something terrible and wonderful to him the first time they had met. Only Mallory could not see what a stand-out she was. That was the sad way of damaged kids. They grew up with distorted mirrors.
"We might have a new angle," he said, "now that Redwing links up to the victims. You'll like this one, Mallory, it's a money scam. When we started the surveillance on the square, we matched her description up with a rap sheet. We've got her under the aliases of Cassandra, Mai Fong and – "
"And Mary Grayling." Mallory was examining her nails. "And she's changed her base of operations. Your man has been watching an empty apartment all morning."
Coffey slumped back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling for a moment. If he killed her now, everyone would know.
He lowered his gaze to stare at her, always a mistake, and he got lost for a second in her pretty eyes. In the early days of working with Mallory, she'd given him stomach flutters each time he saw her. It took him years to realize that she was all stone – no heart and nothing but contempt for a man who could be reduced to a puddle of jelly at her feet. Not that he cared. Jelly had no self-respect.
"What else have you been holding out, Mallory? Any more bombs you'd like to drop on me?"
"Play nice," she said. "You give, I give."
"You give me everything you got, and right now, or I bust you for obstruction."
Well, that certainly made her yawn.
"Mallory, I've already got you cold for working a case off the books, violating conditions of leave, interfering with police business – "
"It's my business," she said, giving each word equal weight. There was no emotion to her when she was angry, only a narrowing of the eyes to warn the poor bastard in her sights. "He was my old man, not yours."
"This case is NYPD property. I can put you on suspension, and take the badge and the gun."
"Oh damn. I left them in my other jacket."
"You hold out on me, and I swear I'm gonna nail your bleeding hide to the wall. You can't win with me, Mallory," he lied.
When jelly met stone, the outcome could not be good for jelly. He knew it and she knew it.
"You think Coffey has a line on how the first murder was pulled off?" Mallory stood at the window which faced the street – the dirty, daylight life of Soho: the trash whipping in the wind on the sidewalk below, the ragged people who had no better clothes, and the ragged people who were making fashion statements. The sash was raised to emit the aroma of refuse from another garbage-collectors' strike which piled up on the sidewalk one flight below.
"Could be." Charles poured out a glass of sherry for her and watched her down it in one healthy swig. A good grade of sipping sherry was pretty much wasted on her. He sighed. "If we have to work with the parameters given, Jack Coffey has no more idea how the thing was done than you do. If the parameters are wrong – who knows?"
"You mean if he lied, if he held out on me. Count on it. You're crushed by the unmovable crime sites, aren't you?"
"Well, no. There are other possibilities. Do you know what was going on in that park every hour of the day? Might there have been a distraction?"
"The homicide detectives did interviews with all the residents who were in the park that day. Nothing stands out in the reports."
"My cousin Max could distract an entire audience with one hand. The magician's buzz word is misdirection, sending the eye elsewhere while you work the trick. The misdirection could have been a small thing, something common, a noise or an argument."
"I'll check it out. What else have you got?"
"Did the park murder have to be planned? Couldn't it have been a crime of opportunity? A fluke of timing? Something simple?"
"No. Too methodical. The weapon was a common kitchen knife. It was brought to the park. So what did you think of Henry Cathery? Could he have pulled off something like that?"
He forgot himself and downed his sherry.
"I think he's brilliant, if that's what you're asking. I don't know that he'd go to any trouble for money."
"Neither do I. Suppose he had a reason to hate his grandmother?"
"Such as?"
She handed him a folder with a recent batch of printouts. One was a psychiatrist's recommendation for short-term commitment in a sanitarium. Henry Cathery must have been twelve years old by the date.
He read the sheets at the speed of a normal human being. Although he could easily have devoured content and sense in a fraction of the time, he hesitated in front of Mallory. He was always trying to pass as a native of normal. Henry Cathery, however, had not tried hard enough, or not cared enough, and that was his only mistake.