Carol O'Connell - Mallory's Oracle

"It was this boy who brought out my true gift. I had the sense of him close by, I could feel him. That night I took off my blindfold and looked hard at the boy. I foresaw his death. He was unkempt, he hung his head, hiding something. "You must tell the police what you have done," I told him. I thought if he confessed, he might be spared. The boy ran out. Later, a missing little girl was found in a shallow grave in the lot behind his shack. Later still, the boy was found hanged in his jail cell."

"Was there any warning about the boy's death? Automatic writing? Anything like that?"

"No, that came later, much later."

"And it's happened again? Recently? What did Martin see written on the walls?"

She wouldn't meet his eyes. Her gnarled hands worked in her lap as she examined a lace doily with keen interest. "I didn't want him to see it. You know how sensitive Martin is. I was trying to clean it off when he walked into the kitchen. I hadn't even heard the front door open."

He could only imagine what patience it must have taken for her to build a relationship with Martin.

"The writing, what did it say?"

"It said, "Blood on the walls and in the halls, rivers and oceans of blood"."

The thrift-store clerk was working alone. His co-workers were having an affair on the lunch hour, and he was being a good sport. Pity they weren't here now, because John and Peter would never believe this. He hardly believed it himself. The learning-disabled shoplifter had covertly deposited a load of silverware in the box for utensils.

She was moving quickly to the door with her empty towel, and then, as though she had just remembered something, she spun around on her heel and returned to the box. She picked up a knife and polished it with her towel, and then another, and another. Now she was lifting the box and setting it on the floor. She sat down beside it and spilled all the utensils out on the threadbare carpet. A middle-aged woman with iron-gray hair and the attitude of an amateur social worker was standing over the girl, speaking to her in soft words that did not carry across the room. The girl in the dirty and torn red dress only stared at the knife in front of her eyes, blind and deaf to everything else, concentrating on her work, polishing each piece of silverware. No, he realized now, it was not each piece. The girl seemed to favor the knives. She began to hum to herself as she polished them with her dirty towel.

The iron-gray woman walked up to his counter, and together, in tense but companionable silence, they watched the girl working away at each blade, polishing and polishing.

The woman turned to him with fire alarms in her eyes and in her voice. "Shouldn't you call someone?"

"No reason. She's not violent."

"Seriously, you don't think that's crazy?"

"This is New York City, lady. Crazy isn't good enough.

If she wants a room in Bellevue Hospital, she's gotta kill somebody to get it."

Charles set the photograph back on the mantelpiece. In the time it took to cross the small room, he had come to a few alarming conclusions about these photographs, and now he turned his mind back to the main event.

Redwing had strong powers, by Edith's estimation, and she was also dangerous, reeking of Santeria, that mix of Catholic rites and voodoo, sympathetic magic and animal sacrifice. Now he multiplied the dangers to Mallory.

"Actually, Martin saw the second writ," Edith was saying on the periphery of his hearing. "Herbert saw the first one. Well, the first prediction in years, and I don't remember making it. The words that Herbert saw were "Death is close by time and space"."

"Have you spoken to Herbert recently?"

"Not for a few days, no. He was quite concerned about poor Martin."

"Poor Martin?"

"Well, Martin is a bit touched, isn't he." It was not a question. She made the spinning motion of finger to temple to indicate that Martin's mind might have stripped a few gears. And he found that odd, because Martin was not the least bit insane. Henrietta, a practising psychiatrist had never used that word. Sensitive, she called him, and fragile, but not insane.

Martin had designed a life to complement his art. True, he had organized his private world within extraordinary parameters. Like Henry Cathery, he had opted for simplicity, even striking the noise of color from his surroundings, keeping to the hush of white, the better to listen. Martin would be sensitive to every nuance against the pure white background of his life.

Charles suspected Henrietta kept a protective watch on Martin for a reason other than impending breakdown. Might Henrietta be watching over Martin in the way a miner kept one eye to the canary's cage suspended from the rafters at the lower levels of the earth? When the fragile canary gasped and fluttered and struck its weak wings against the bars of its cage, the miner would know the air had gone foul, and Henrietta would know that Edith was active again.

Edith's gifts did not extend to following the rush of an intellect that worked in microseconds. And as he picked her brains for the critical details, she mistook it all for polite conversation. Leaving his sandwich and tea untouched, he bid her goodbye and took his hurried leave.

Mallory cut the ignition and her lights while the car was still in motion. She pulled silently to the curb. "This is the building Redwing calls home this week." Leaning across Riker, she looked out the passenger-side window. "Keep an eye on the television screen in that first-floor apartment." Riker stared into the lighted rectangle of the tenement building and the interior poverty which made a burglar gate on the window a bad investment. An old black-and-white television set was sitting on a card table. The wall behind it was a mosaic of cracks and peeling paint. A battered-to-stuffings easy chair sat to one side of the television, and all that showed above the chair's back was a balding head and tufts of dingy white hair.

Mallory was lifting her laptop computer out of its case. "Tell me when the TV's picture breaks up."

Riker noted that Mallory had added a few new toys to her car. The antenna on the front fender was not made for ordinary radio reception. And he now recognized the black phone-set in her left hand as telephone-company equipment. "No you don't, kid. You're not doing a phone tap without a warrant."

"No, I'm not. I won't hear one human voice. I'm going to pull an electronic scramble out of the air and reassemble it on my computer. Cite me the federal code for that one." Riker turned back to the apartment window, the better to avoid witnessing. "So what happens when the TV's picture breaks up?"

"The old man sitting in front of the set will get up and start banging on it."

Riker nudged her arm. The set's screen was gone to zigzags and lost vertical hold. The old man got up from his easy chair and began pounding on the set. There was no anger in the pounder's face, but Riker thought the old man might be crying.

The screen on Mallory's laptop came to life.

"We're in. The wiring in this building is the pits. Redwing doesn't know her computer busts up the old man's reception, and the old man doesn't know what a computer is. Look at the set."

Riker turned back to the window. The television set's reception had returned to normal. The old man walked back to his chair.

"There," said Mallory. "Now you got me on unlicensed TV repair."

How many times had she done this trick?

"I want you to promise me you won't come back here again. You can't just go into surveillance work without training." How could he explain to Mallory that she could never do covert surveillance, even with the training, because she had glorious blonde hair and a face that tended to linger in memory, for years or a lifetime. "You never put in the time wet-nursing sources – pimps and junkies, thieves and dealers, prostitutes – all the eyes and ears you need on the street just to get through a day on the job. A beat cop has more to work with than you do."