Carol O'Connell - Mallory's Oracle

"And get her badge and her gun," Blakely had warned him. "You don't want her out there armed and working solo."

Commissioner Beale had mentioned the badge and gun, but she apparently had not heard him. Her eyes had gone all soft and distant. He reminded himself that she had buried her foster-father only a few hours ago. She was so pretty, so vulnerable. He didn't bring up the business of badge and gun a second time. Everything was going so well. Why spoil it? This, after all, was one of his most trusted officers.

Wasn't she?

"Is this a rent-control apartment, Sergeant? Do you mind my asking the rent?"

"No rent. I own it. Markowitz made the down payment for me when I moved out of Brooklyn. He wanted me to live in a doorman building with good security."

And Markowitz had probably helped with the mortgage payments and the maintenance fees. The man had certainly been on the force long enough to accumulate a nice little savings account. No, no reason to get the badge and the gun. Markowitz was as clean a cop as NYPD ever had, and this young woman had been raised by him in the best tradition of New York's Finest. Well, good enough.

Later in the day, when he would explain to Chief of Detectives Harry Blakely that he had left Mallory armed and dangerous, Blakely would roll his eyes but say nothing.

Lieut. Jack Coffey closed the door behind him and slowly sank down in the overstuffed chair in Markowitz's office. A small bald spot on the back of his head was reflected in the window behind him. The glass ran the length of the upper portion of one wall with only the interruption of the door. The window looked out on the bustle of officers and clerks in the Special Crimes Section.

The two adjacent walls were pure Markowitz, camouflaged to blend with the mess of paperwork on his desk. Floor-to-ceiling cork panels held notes on matchbook covers, duty rosters on computer printouts, surveillance and arrest reports, memos, the paperwork collage of a command position in a growing department. The decor of clutter was very like Markowitz. The entire room had been an inside-out, flattened-out model of the man's mind. He had been a lover of detail, a collector of images, a squirreler of bits and jots of data.

However, it was the back wall that held Coffey's attention. It was stark-naked. Before the funeral, it had been covered with cork and papered over with photos, handwritten notes, news clippings, copies of statements and everything else pertaining to the Gramercy Park murders that would take a pin, the thousand details of the priority case.

He could pull most of the same information off a computer disk, and all the physical evidence was under lock, available at a call, but it would not be quite the same. The back wall had been the last available repository of Markowitz's brain. It was weird to see even one clear foot of space in the paper storm of this office, and now he was looking at a whole damn wall. He'd been raped.

He turned to his sergeant who was looking down at his own scruffy shoes.

"How did she get it out, Riker?"

"So you think it was Mallory?"

"Cut the crap."

Riker said he never saw her take down the cork, and he hadn't. But he never mentioned that he had walked behind her through the department, past twelve occupied desks at the top of a shift, down the corridor packed with uniforms, and past the garage security guard, as she carried a long, thick roll of cork under one arm and a desk blotter under the other, with a calendar wadded in her purse and God knows what else. It was a big purse. But she had not been able to manage all that and the Xerox machine, too. Riker had carried that out for her so she wouldn't have to make two trips.

Mallory had only stolen one wall out of three. Lieutenant Coffey should be thankful she had left him the desk and chair. That was the way Riker saw it.

Mallory walked into the room which Commissioner Beale had not seen. Her den had once housed only a PC and the bare furnishings of one desk, one chair, and one bookcase with computer manuals and disks of countless raids on other computers. It was spartan and clean. Even the glass of the wide window was spotless, invisible to the human eye which found no streak or pock to stop its depth of field before it crashed into the traffic of the street running along the course of the Hudson River.

She sat down, tailor-fashion, in the center of the floor and began to unroll the remarkable mind of Louis Markowitz. It was important to leave the cork intact, as the order of pinning one thing over another had been part of the man's thinking process.

The FBI profile was among the paperwork on the first layer. It described the killer as between twenty and thirty-five years old, abandoned by his father before the age of thirteen, and raised by a woman, a mother or a grandparent. But pinned over this were inventories of the first two victims' stock portfolios. Markowitz had always favored money motives. In the pinning and covering, he had rejected the profile of a sick mind. It was only the top layer he wanted to see each day from his desk across the room. And in time, the pieces of it had come together for him. It was all here.

She had done the background checks for him after the second murder. The print-out on her favorite suspect had pride of place on the cork. Jonathan Gaynor didn't strictly fit the FBI profile, but he did fit the money motive as sole beneficiary of his aunt's estate. Estelle Gaynor's heir was thirty-seven. And he must be smart, thank you Rabbi, because he had almost as many initials after his name as Charles Butler did. Gaynor might have been smart enough to make his aunt the second kill and not the first.

Henry Cathery, the heir to the first kill, was represented on the cork with her raids on a bank computer. Markowitz had probably lost interest in this one when she told him the Cathery boy had more money than the victim.

It took her two hours to Xerox each scrap of paper, cut it to size and replace the copy in its exact position on the unrolled cork. The copy camera, a recent theft from the police lab, sat on the floor behind her. She lined up each glossy print of the two crime scenes with the flat board and shot them with slide film. Three-dimensional objects also went under the copy camera: matchbooks with his scribbles, a green plastic bag which was not crime-scene evidence, and a cellophane bag of beads that were evidence from the cache of a million tiny white beads found at the site of the first murder in Gramercy Square Park. These were Anne Cathery's beads.

The forensic tech with the least seniority, had complained bitterly that the task of accounting for every damn bead had fallen to him. It had taken six hours of picking through the grass and the dirt of the park to collect every single one. It had been a day's work to track down an identical necklace and more hours to match the number of found beads to the unbroken strand. All because Markowitz loved these little details.

The doorbell chimed.

One of the neighbors? The doorman would have announced an outsider on the house telephone. On the day she had moved into this building, Louis Markowitz had put the fear of God into the doorman, that and a hundred-dollar bill. And then, he had gone home alone to Brooklyn, to a dark-windowed house where he had once been a part of the little family of three: himself, the wife, and the thief.

The bell chimed again as she was crossing the front room.

Her purse lay on the table by the door, and in it was the gun lying over the folder of her badge. It was early yet. She hadn't had time to leave any tracks, to make any noise. But when she opened the door, she had the gun in her right hand and hidden behind her back.

It was Riker who rilled out the door frame, a shaggy bear in a bad suit. By the look of his graying muzzle, he hadn't shaved since Markowitz had died. A slob's idea of tribute, she supposed. Riker was looking down toward the hand he couldn't see. He raised his wrinkles in a smile and said, "You wouldn't hurt me, would you, Kathy?"