Carol O’Connell - Winter House

Yeah, right.

But one glance at Riker told her that he was a believer in road rage. A traffic jam like this one could make killers out of the best-tempered nuns.

„So tell me something.“ Mallory’s words were slow and dead calm, as if she had all damn day for this conversation. „When were you planning to share all these names?“

An old man stood on the cement strip that divided the traffic bound east and west. The elderly pedestrian had no stake in this event, yet he was as outraged as any of the drivers gathering around her car. He shook his fist and mouthed toothless angry words that were lost in the fray. Other men were massing near the windows on all sides. Riker held up his badge, as if that would fix everything.

Mallory slowly turned her head to glare at him, to warn him. He had better start talking and fast. The people surrounding this car were murderously angry, and this was definitely not the time for one of his long-winded stories.

And so Riker told her a story.

Charles Butler sat at his desk, reviewing paperwork on the latest client of Butler and Company. This one was the most brilliant to date – and the most troubled. The teenager had dropped out of college, descended into profound depression, and continued his fall by dropping off the planet. Mallory had found a lead with an illegal perusal-for-profit of police reports on missing persons. She had then tracked the boy down to a hole in the swamp at the edge of the world (her euphemism for a motel in New Jersey).

During the employment evaluation, all the right answers had been provided for every question on the personality profile, and that had been a clue to a problem; no one was so well balanced. However, the first warning had been the boy’s rolled down sleeves on an unseasonably warm day. Mallory had suspected drugs. Charles had believed the sleeves would hide the scars of an attempted suicide.

He looked up from his reading and noticed his copy of The Winter House Massacre lying on the end table by the couch. So Mallory had decided not to read it after all. Wise. What a deadly bore was history in the hands of a bad writer. He turned back to the matter at hand, reading his business partner’s most recent research on their young job candidate.

She had turned up a history of no less than six therapists, thus explaining how the youngster had sailed through all the psychological examinations – practice. Charles read the headings for each of Mallory’s documents; all of them had been raided from hospital computers in the tristate area. She could not have gotten them by any other means. Even at one remove from theft, it would be unethical to read this material. And what would Mallory’s foster father have said of this – theft of confidential patient files?

That’s my kid.

And Louis would have said that with great pride.

Thoughts of this dead man linked up with the image of Nedda Winter skirting her ghosts on the staircase the night of the dinner party. He had never mentioned that to Mallory as an indication of a mind gone awry. If that held true, then he must count himself as a loon and a half.

The brown armchair beside the couch was the most comfortable seat in this office, and yet he never sat there. It was Louis’s chair even now. That good old man had sat in this room on many a night when sleep was impossible because his wife was dead. In a way, all of Louis’s stories of life with the incomparable Helen Markowitz had been ghost stories. Had she not come alive in this room? After a time, Charles had also come to grieve for Helen, though he had never met her. And he still grieved sorely for Louis. He missed that great soul every day.

And Charles could see his old friend, clear as day, seated beside him now, gathering up hound-dog jowls in a dazzling smile. And was there just a touch of pity in the old man’s crinkled brown eyes? Oh, yes. Only Louis could fully appreciate Charles’s predicament with Mallory’s purloined documents.

As the former commander of Special Crimes Unit, Inspector Markowitz had made such good use of his foster child’s skill with computer lock picks.

Charles looked down at the raided information, poisonous fruit from Mallory’s hand. Well, it was definitely in a good cause – life and death – if his suspicions about their client proved true. He read every line of the stolen data and discovered that each of the boy’s psychiatric examinations had followed police custody for a suicide attempt on Halloween. And what were the odds that he might forgo his yearly wrist-slashing?

Well, job placement was out of the question, but now he could make the proper referral for long-term therapy. Mallory may have saved the boy’s life with this information, stolen or not. Charles looked up at the armchair – Louis’s chair. His old friend, the dead man, shrugged, then splayed one hand to say, This is how it begins – the seduction.

Charles found himself nodding in agreement with a man who was not there. Yes, he had actually rationalized a breach of ethics, an unnecessary violation. In truth, Mallory’s theft had only supported his own suspicions. He was actually quite good at his craft, though he applied his skill to analyzing a potential client’s gifts and suitability for employment.

Retiring to the couch, he stretched out to finish his reading in comfort. He was surprised to turn a page and find Mallory’s job proposal for placing the boy in a remote scientific community. There, he would not be a solitary freak, but one of many such freaks, and he would cease his ritual attempts to kill himself every Halloween; this had been Mallory’s argument for selling an unbalanced job candidate.

Oh, of course. Never mind the fee. And here he countered with her own trademark line, „Yeah, right.“

Mallory, the humanitarian, had also secured the client on the profit side of this transaction. The New Mexico think tank was funded with a truly obscene amount of grant money. Best of all – and this was her final salvo – the personnel director had not balked at the disclosure of the boy’s suicidal ideation, and the project would provide long-term therapy.

Thus far, this was the only argument for job placement.

All that remained was the detail of signing off on Mallory’s paperwork.

He slowed his reading to a normal person’s pace, for his partner sometimes deviated from the standard boilerplate contract, and he had learned to go slowly and scrutinize every line before signing anything. True to form, she had named a staggering fee that he would never have had the gall to charge, and her conditions straddled a borderland between ethics and all that the traffic would bear. She had added a penalty clause, doubling their fee if the New Mexico project failed to keep the boy alive through Halloween.

Charles stared at the ceiling, averting his eyes from the laughing dead man.

Reading that final contract clause in the best possible light, Mallory was not actually planning to profit on a death. No, she only wanted to ensure the boy’s ongoing survival. He turned to face his memory of the late Louis Markowitz, who knew her best.

The old man lifted one eyebrow to say, But you ‘re not really sure, are you, Charles?

On a normal day, he would be madly rewriting the terms of Mallory’s contract, but now he simply bowed to the absurd and signed his name on the dotted line.

Done with the business of the day, he turned his attention to the telephone on the other side of the room, willing it to ring. He was looking forward to another conversation with Susan McReedy, the lady from Maine. Mallory had insisted that the woman would call again. The detective’s contracts were a bit dicey, but her instincts were superb. Yes, Ms. McReedy would definitely call back. He could see the woman clearly now, sitting by her own telephone, her hair gone to gray and her life as well, facing the tedium of her retirement years. This very moment, all of Ms. McReedy’s thoughts would be consumed by old acquaintance with a memorable icepick-wielding redhead.