Carol O’Connell - Crime School

‘Perhaps he had control issues.’ Charles suspected that this was why Mallory had joined NYPD, but he could not complete this twinning image of her and the scarecrow. ‘It’s an interesting choice, isn’t it? His emotional problems must have been very tightly contained while he was a police officer. The deterioration probably started after he moved to New York.’

He looked up to see Lars Geldorf standing just inside the door. Some tenant must have buzzed him into the building. Charles was unprepared for the change in him. The old man had aged another decade in a day.

Ignoring the unwelcome visitor, Mallory looked down at her keyboard. The retired detective walked a few steps into the room, then seemed at the point of falling down. Charles picked up a chair and rushed toward him, but the man waved him away and remained standing.

Lars Geldorf s eyes were fixed on Mallory. ‘I heard about that poor woman – Stella Small. You think the copycat hangings are my fault, don’t you? If I’d done my job right twenty years ago – ’ His shoulders sagged, and he braced himself with one hand pressed flat on the cork wall, then turned his defeated eyes to Charles. ‘I think I will take that chair.’ He sat down and waited out Mallory’s silence. It was clear that the old man would not leave without a word from her.

She continued her typing, occasionally looking his way, annoyed that he was still here. Her eyes trained on the keyboard, she said, ‘I can’t discuss details of an active case. You know that.’

‘Yes,’ said Geldorf. ‘I know.’

She could have killed the old man with only a few words, but she kept silent, and Charles saw this as the potential for kindness. Growing up in Special Crimes, she would have seen many of these old men coming and going, haunting police stations as confused ghosts, unable to come to terms with the end of things.

Mallory was done with Geldorf now, and he could make no mistake about that. The conversation was over, and yet he continued his vigil. After a time, his presence began to wear on her. She pushed her chair back from the workstation and swiveled round to face him. ‘So you want me to tell you what you got wrong? Is that it?’

Yes, that was what he had come for. He had to know.

She strolled to the cork wall and what remained of the old murder case, then ripped down a sheet of paper. ‘This is your report on the hanging rope and the duct tape. It’s real short. ‘Common items. Untraceable.’ Wrong. The rope belonged to the building handyman. I got that information from the landlady’s granddaughter.’

‘The handyman was out of town when – ’

‘On a family emergency. I know. That’s why he left his toolbox in the hall. The landlady promised to take care of it for him. But before she could drag it back to her apartment, the killer found it and stole the rope and the tape. If you’d talked to the handyman, you might’ve gotten a print from the toolbox.’

Geldorf had no comeback for this, but he would not look away from her.

She ripped two more sheets of paper from the wall. ‘And then there’s the locked door. Locked when the landlady called the police. Open when the first cop showed up on the scene.’

‘I caught that,’ said Geldorf. The light was back in his eyes, and he rose to a stand as he defended himself. ‘That door was never locked. It was stuck. The landlady was old, pushing eighty. Tiny woman, no muscle. It was a hot night in August – and muggy. Wood swells in the damp and the heat. The door was stuck, not locked. And she admitted that when I – ’

‘Admitted what? That she was old? That you confused her? She never recanted her statement, and you didn’t make any notes on that conversation. And what about Natalie’s son? You never talked to him.’

‘What the hell for? What good would it do to torture a little boy. He’d just lost his mother. When you’ve been on the job a little longer – ’

‘Natalie came to you for help, and you just strung her along, you and your buddies. After she died, you built your case around the easiest target, an innocent man.’

‘I was right about the ex-husband!’

‘No, you botched that too.’ She paused a moment, waiting for him to challenge her, but he said nothing. ‘And twenty years later, here we are, cleaning up the mess.’

Geldorf shrank down to his chair. His gaze lowered to the floor at her feet. She had won. He was finished.

Mallory hunkered down beside his chair and looked up at his face. If she had been a cat, Charles might have seen this pose as a prelude to a lunge, but he hoped for something better from her. For a moment, he believed that she planned to soften her words with some comfort for a vulnerable old man.

How foolish was that?

‘Listen to me.’ She gripped Geldorf s arm to shake him from his stupor of pity. He stared at her red nails, startled, as if she had just extended claws.

Mallory’s half smile said, I’m done playing with you. ‘Here’s the best part, old man. This killer might be a cop. So go home and lock yourself in. If the police come knocking, don’t open that door. It might be one of your mistakes coming back on you. Scary, huh?’

Arthur Wang finished telling the forensic expert about his conversation with Winetrob. He had intended it as a humorous story to break the tension in the nightwatchman’s basement office.

‘Sorry, Arty. Winetrob was right.’ Heller pointed to the red smears on the cement floor. ‘That’s not the watchman’s blood. I called the hospital to check for broken skin on the victim. When they removed Stella’s shoes, they found cuts on her soles and glass fragments in the wounds. I got a partial footprint off one of the shards – real small, a woman’s print. This is her blood.’

One of Heller’s technicians nodded, saying, ‘And Winetrob was right about the watchman not showing up for work tonight. The security camera has a record of everybody who uses the employee entrance. He’s not on the film.’

‘But the watchman isn’t on vacation,’ said Wang. ‘I checked.’ ‘Then maybe Winetrob’s right about the heart attack, too.’ Detective Wang produced a long piece of stiff paper sealed in an evidence bag. ‘So who’s been using the old man’s employee card? Somebody punched in on the time clock last night.’

Heller turned to his assistant. ‘Maybe the watchman’s still here. Call out the cadaver dogs. We’ll do another sweep of the store.’

Mallory ended her call with the Wisconsin detective, then turned to Charles. ‘The scarecrow was planning murder when he left Nebraska. There’s nothing wrong with the police computers. The damn clerk didn’t want to tell me she couldn’t find the records. The file was deleted from the computer. The hardcopy is missing too – prints, photos, everything.’

‘Did the police talk to the relatives?’

Mallory nodded, then turned back to her computer monitor.

‘They had to wait for a warrant, then they tossed the cousins’ house. The only New York address they found was Susan Qualen’s. Her cousins haven’t heard from Junior in three years. They had a falling-out. They finally told him his mother’s killer got away with murder. A bit late. When he came to New York, his Aunt Susan added her own poison.’ Mallory’s fingers flew across the keys, entering new parameters to narrow her search. Her eyes were riveted to the screen. ‘Where are you hiding?’

‘Maybe he doesn’t live in New York,’ said Charles. ‘It’s only a few minutes to New Jersey on the subway.’

She shook her head. ‘He’s living in the city. Deluthe saw him at Kennedy Harper’s crime scene thirty minutes after we found the body. Either he works for NYPD, or he was picking up local radio calls on a police scanner. He’s here.’