Carol O'Connell - Mallory's Oracle

"I suppose a lot of people just don't realize how wrong it is," said Mallory, swilling her wine and speaking in uncharacteristic small-talk tones, "how illegal it is."

"Very few people with the money to invest at any level can claim they don't know that insider trading is wrong, and why it's wrong."

"Including little old ladies?" Mallory smiled, and her eyes narrowed in Charles's direction.

"Oh, particularly little old ladies," said Gaynor. "They control the lion's share of the large-to-medium investor capital."

And Charles knew that all this was for his benefit. Mallory might genuinely like Edith Candle, but Edith had not respected the law, and Mallory was the law. Apparently her code of ethics was a little more complicated than the poker-players realized. Why hadn't he seen that for himself? She could have stolen the earth with her computer skills, but she had relegated her thefts to whatever Markowitz might need to keep the law. Perhaps she did have the unrepentant-till-pigs-fly soul of a thief, but she drew sharp lines, Markowitz's lines. There was more of him to her than Helen.

Charles nodded to Mallory, and in that nod he promised to speak to Edith about her forays into the market and what she could expect to get away with in the future.

After Gaynor said his good-nights and thank-yous and closed the door behind him, after the dishes had been cleared from the table, she made herself at home on the couch, shoes kicked off, feet curling under her. When he set the tray with the coffee and liqueurs on the table before her, he saw the box with the red wrapping paper. And this was his first clue that today was his fortieth birthday.

He sat down beside her and tore the red wrapping paper from his gift. The uncovered cardboard box bore an espresso-maker logo, but when he lifted the lid, he was staring down at an object that would never make a good cup of espresso, not in this world. Not knowing quite what to say, he resorted to the obvious. "A crystal ball?"

"My idea of homage. You're the only man who ever impressed me very much. I find the rest of them boringly predictable."

Charles held the crystal ball up to the light. His nose elongated in a dark patch of curving reflection, and he put it down on the coffee table.

She would never guess how much this pleased him. Every sign of friendship was a reaffirmation that he was not so odd, not a complete freak, not entirely alien. If he could ask for more it would only be that she were less beautiful or that his nose did not precede him by three minutes.

"You like it?"

"Very much. Not a paperweight, I take it?"

"No, it's the real article. Straight out of the department evidence room. But the gypsies may have used it for a paperweight. The whole outfit was into computer fraud."

She was doing the service of pouring coffee and liqueurs, holding a spoon up, did he want sugar? No? "So, what did you think of Gaynor?"

"I suppose I liked him well enough." And it had been obvious that Gaynor liked Mallory quite a bit. "What do you really know about him?"

Her father would have asked that. Louis had remarked that one day he would have to unplug her computer for a few minutes so she could meet and marry a young man while he was young enough to hope for grandchildren. Louis had been confident that it would only take a few minutes. He had seen what she had done to his detectives in less time.

"I've got a print-out this long," she said. "I know his parents are dead. He has a summer-house on Fire Island, he dabbles in stocks, and he's just inherited a few hundred million. But he wasn't starving before the old woman died. He's worth a hundred thousand on his own, all socked away in conservative investments. No arrests, no juvenile record."

So her interest in the man was all professional. So Gaynor dabbled in stocks.

"He didn't by any chance cash in on the Whitman Chemicals merger?"

"No. I thought so at first. The timing was right. Then I backtracked the stock purchases through the computer of a financial house. He made some modest gains that year, but there was no connection. Lucky for him," said Mallory. "Estelle Gaynor got away with it. She's only a footnote in the investigation, but the SEC would've busted her nephew in a minute on sheer proximity. The government would have taken all the profits, fined him and jailed him. But none of his own transactions are linked to anything criminal. It's not like he was ever hard up for money."

"Some people never have enough money. What about the other victims?"

"There's no connection to the Whitman merger beyond Gaynor's aunt. Pearl Whitman was a principal, but she never purchased stock in the merging company. No financial history of insider trading for Samantha Siddon or Anne Cathery, but they both play the market."

"You know, it might be a good idea not to get too close to any of these people until you find out what the connecting link actually was."

"I know. The seance isn't enough. I think something brought them together before the seances began."

"Maybe, maybe not. What do old women do when they meet? They talk about their children. Did you think these women might have shared a secret or a confidence?"

"Like a little lunacy in the family?"

"I hope we're not getting off on the Cathery boy again. He's socially awkward – many gifted people are – but odd behavior doesn't signify mental illness. You can't really see him hacking up an old lady, can you?"

"Oh, sure I can. And if it turns out that Anne Cathery was trying to get the kid locked up so she could get her hands on his money, I'd have to figure she had the knife coming to her. But I'd still bust him."

"All Henry Cathery seems to crave is a little solitude. He only wants to be left alone. You're not planning to torture him, are you?"

Charles stared at the pattern of the carpet.

She touched his arm to call his eyes up to hers. "You liked Henry Cathery, didn't you?"

"I understood him."

"Were the old ladies helpful? Did they give you the new location for Redwing?"

"No," said Riker. "The old ladies don't contact her. She calls them. We have to wait till the next seance and tail her. And don't get any ideas, kid. Coffey's already arranged for the tail."

Riker spent the next hour drinking Mallory's beer and bringing her up to speed on Coffey's progress which, according to Riker, was zip. "Dr Slope thinks we might have a slight variation in the murders. If it's two people, then both of them are right-handed, both used incredible violence in the slashing. But the wounds are not identical. The fourth victim is slightly off, and Slope can't say for sure it's the work of one man. Maybe the guy was just in a freaking hurry this time."

"What about a man and a woman working together?" 'Naw. I'm going along with Coffey on that one. It crossed my mind, but I just don't see a woman doing that kinda job on another woman. Don't get me wrong, kid. Women can shoot and stab with the best of 'em. And they're really thorough. If I see a corpse with a whole clip emptied into it, I gotta figure a woman did that. But I can't see a woman doing these mutilations. You see something like that, it's always a man who has a problem with women."

When Riker had gone, Mallory sat down by the light of the VCR and the slide-projector. She began the nightly horror show of the slides and the dancing Markowitz.

Old man, why didn't you leave something behind, a, few bread-crumbs!

And in her dreams, Louis Markowitz tried to teach her how to dance.

When Margot opened her eyes to the light, she could not tell if it was the gray of evening or morning. What day was it? And she was thinking of food as her stomach gnawed at her like a separate animal with teeth to bite her from the inside. The bloody knife lay inches from her face. She didn't see it for the long minutes she thought about food. She daydreamed of bakery bread. The knife was kicked to one side by blind feet on the way to the door.