Carol O'Connell - Mallory's Oracle

"Don't call me kid," she had shot back. And it was always Mallory after that. It had cost him something to call her Mallory after all the years she had been Kathy to him, as though he'd never had a hand in raising her.

She watched the slides, lights playing on her face as the images changed quickly. What would the old man make of all this? Well, first he would say she was leaving tracks, big messy ones. Markowitz the dancing fool would never do that.

So how did he get killed?

The slide carousel looped back to the first shot of Markowitz lying in his own blood. She no longer took pride in the fact that she never cried. Dry eyes closed tightly as she switched off the projector and sat alone in the dark.

The new order she had created for him permeated his entire life these days, extending even into the office kitchen. He opened the refrigerator to gleaming metal shelves which Mallory had stocked with ample makings and condiments for every kind of sandwich known to God and Charles Butler.

It was an odd moment to realize how deep his feeling did go, as he was gathering ham and pickles, mustard and mayonnaise. Thieving, amoral, liar that she was, he knew with a terrible finality that he would love Kathleen Mallory till he died. Where was the Cheddar cheese? And it would always be the one-sided affair of a solitary man with a ridiculous face.

His eyes avoided the expanse of yellow wall above the stove as he lit the burner and set the tea kettle over the flame.

He regretted the choice of yellow paint for the kitchen. It had been an impulse decision. Like most people, he had believed yellow to be a cheerful, happy color. Too late, he had realized his mistake and called up an item on the subject of color, mentally projecting a page from an old science journal directly onto the white refrigerator door. The article had agreed with his own feeling. Yellow made people jittery.

But even if the walls had been the calming pink of drunk-tank experiments listed in the following paragraph, it might not have had any effect on his state of mind this late evening.

He slathered mayonnaise on rye bread and wondered what went on in Gramercy Park. Who was she watching, and who might be watching her? Scenarios were growing in his brain like cancers. He laid down three slices of ham and wondered about the gun she carried every day. And then there was Herbert's gun to worry about. And what had Edith to do with this?

He added on a generous slab of yellow cheese.

The tea kettle screamed.

"So we're back on the same pattern with this one," said Riker, slugging down his breakfast beer and spilling a few drops on his shirt. "The Siddon woman looks different from the others, doesn't she? Real peaceful." He held the photograph out to her. She only shrugged as she took it from his hand. Right. What would Kathy Mallory know of peace?

She pinned the bloody likeness of Samantha Siddon to the wall with the other on-site photos. Riker watched her all but melding into the cork, passing through the wall of it as she became absorbed by everything he had brought her.

The exterior wall in the first photograph was splattered with blood, and only patches of Siddon's fawn-colored suit were not soaked through with red. One bloody palm print stained the rough brick a few feet above the head. Mallory put her finger on this photo.

"The victim's print?"

Riker nodded.

She walked back to the other side of die wall where Markowitz's collection had been reprinted from the slides. She stared at the Park photos of the first murder and moved on to the next set. "What about the second kill? Were there any prints on the car?"

Riker leaned back against the board and paused mid-gulp. "Hmm?"

"Estelle Gaynor, the one found in the limo. Were there any bloody prints?"

"You got it all there in Markowitz's report. One thumb and an index finger on the window, hers – no palm prints, not hers anyway. We tracked down all the latent prints. One set belongs to a garage mechanic. Some prints from the old man who owned the car. Nothing else."

He drained the rest of his beer with one swig and moved to the Markowitz side of the wall to stand behind her. She was staring at the detail print of the Cathery killing in the park which showed one bloody print of a full hand on the white trim of the shed.

"You're really reaching for connections, Mallory. If you're looking for a trademark, there weren't any bloody palm prints for the Pearl Whitman site."

"It's wrong somehow," she said, crossing back to her own side of the board to stand before the Siddon prints and the separate shot of the palm's bloodstain.

Riker was hearing echoes of Markowitz who was always listening for the off notes. "Mallory, the woman was fighting for her life." Ah, but wait. He stared at Samantha Siddon's peaceful face. It wouldn't agree with a battle on any scale.

"Slope can't say for sure it's the work of one perp?"

"He's still working on it. Commissioner Beale likes that idea, too. It makes him feel like we know something the newspapers don't know."

"So Beale's giving Coffey a hard time?"

"You know the drill. The press crucifies Beale, Beale waves his little fists and squeaks, and Coffey pretends to be afraid of mice."

She pinned one sheet of the report to the board. "Any deviations this time? Anything odd?"

"Yeah. That one's crooked," he said, pointing to the last paper she had pinned up.

"Get serious."

He was serious. It was odd for her to make any departure from perfectionist neatness. He looked down at the chipped fingernail on her right hand, and he began to hunt the room in earnest for anything else out of place. The television and VCR had been pulled in from another room. The slide-projector was new. But no dust gathered, that was certain. He supposed even a perfectionist could have an off day.

"No deviation from the MO." He shrugged. "Same old, same old. Her purse was gone. No deviations among the local corpse-robbers, either."

She smiled, and that worried him. What was the deal here? Why did she find that so interesting?

"What about the wounds?" she asked. "Consistent?"

"Slope says he can't match wounds if the bastard uses a different knife every time. But the areas and the order of the cuts are the same. He always goes for the throat first."

"What odds does he give for two of them?"

"I tried that one. Slope won't give odds, and he's a betting man."

As Mallory pinned up the last photo, Riker noticed her alignment was off again. Now he stepped back from the board. Markowitz's side of the wall was the usual mess. Kathy's side was neater, but with each addition to the board, less neat. Every time he came into the room, something new had been added, and item by item, her pushpin precision was going down the tubes. The preliminary report hung on the diagonal by one tack. So, what was going on here? The rest of the apartment was immaculate as always. He wondered how much time she spent in this room.

She handed him a photograph of a woman dwarfing a cab driver. "Her name is Redwing. She's running a scam in Gramercy Park. Ever see her before?"

"She's on the park surveillance log, but I don't know her face," said Riker. Redwing was not a new element in the square, but a once-a-week pattern over more than a year. It was the shots of Jonathan Gaynor and Henry Cathery which had his full attention.

"I'm meeting her tomorrow at a seance," said Mallory.

"I want some background on her, but she's not on computer as Redwing. If you tripped over an alias with a rap sheet, you'd tell me, right?… Riker?"

Riker nodded, only half-listening, preoccupied with the surveillance shots. "Kid, we gotta talk about your style, okay? You don't get shots like this unless you're so close the perp can see you, too."