Carol O’Connell - Crime School

And the scarecrow was still waiting for his story.

‘You found one of the stalker notes,’ said Mallory. ‘You found it on the floor the night she died.’ She had guessed right. He was nodding. ‘And you had a lot of time to read it – two days and two nights. Flies in your hair, roaches crawling in your clothes. The stove burner was on. The heat was suffocating.’

His gun was getting heavier, and his aim was drifting again. The old woman was his accidental target. He was tired in every part of his body and tired of his very life. Yet Mallory held his attention. ‘You were in the bathroom when he came to kill your mother.’

The pigeon lady was oblivious to the weapon, but her birds were restless, sensing tension in the air as a threatening storm. Their wings batted against the wire doors of the cage, and a shower of downy white feathers drifted from the coop in an eerie August snowfall.

Mallory walked toward him, slow stepping. ‘You heard something.’ She circled around him, drawing his body and his gun away from the old woman. ‘You opened the bathroom door – just a crack. The man was bending over your mother.’ Now she was positive that he had not seen his mother strangled to death. The six-year-old child had believed that his mother was still alive while he watched a man mutilate her and hang her. If a fireman and a doctor could not tell the living from the dead, what chance did a little boy have?

The pigeon lady was on the move again. Mallory kept track of her in peripheral vision. The old woman crossed the roof, walking into the line of fire to pick up a heavy bag of birdseed.

Mallory backed off softly, slowly.

Easy now.

A hand tremor made his gun shake. He was sliding into profound shock and aiming from the hip.

‘You watched him hang her – without a sound, no screams. She never – ’

His head was shaking in denial.

Impossible. Mallory knew she could not be wrong about this part. Yes, she was right. She had simply not pushed this idea far enough. ‘ You never made a sound. You -just – watched.’’

The man’s head tilted to one side, as though some supporting string had been cut. His face contorted into a soundless scream, and the blood-clotted eye cried red tears. He was bleeding inside and out.

The birds were screaming, wings in a racket, beating the wire of the coop, frantic to get away.

‘You watched that bastard kill your mother! You let him do it to her!’ Of course he did – only six years old, traumatized and paralyzed, and now she played to the guilt of the innocent child. ‘You never called for help. You never even tried to stop him.’

The doors of the pigeon coop flew open and dozens of birds escaped before the wide eyes of their keeper. In tight formation, they flew across the roof in a roar of wings and cries, diving close to the scarecrow, then veering upward. His eyes were wild, following the flight of birds into the sun.

‘You couldn’t reach her up there on the rope.’ Mallory could see him as a small, shivering boy, crying to his mother, no clue that she was dead. ‘How could you leave her – if she was still alive?’

He dropped his gun and never noticed its loss. On the next roof, the pigeon lady stared at the sky, arms fluttering in her own attempt at flight.

‘After two days – the bugs and the heat – you couldn’t take any more. You left your mother all alone in the dark. You knew what the insects were doing to her when you closed that door and walked away.’

His bad leg buckled, and he folded to the ground like a piece of collapsible lawn furniture. And there he made a stand of sorts, on his knees, as though his legs had been cut to stumps. Mallory stepped closer to kick his gun, sending it flying to the far side of the roof.

He was helpless. Both eyes were open now and looking in on some interior hell. She knelt down before him, facing him in the position of prayer. He raised his head a bare inch. Later, she would remember his eyes with an imagined film of dust, as though he had already been dead for some time – for years and years. It would have been a kindness to put a bullet in his skull – an act of mercy.

Resurrection time.

In the absence of kindness and mercy, she planned to rebuild him as her only witness to the murder of Natalie Homer. ‘I know it was a cop who killed your mother. And you’re going to help me nail that bastard. It’s revenge you want, and I can get that for you.’

No, that was not what he wanted, never what he wanted. Mallory could see her error now, a very bad mistake.

Natalie’s son was waiting for his bullet, staring at the revolver with a great hunger. He had foreseen this moment long ago as a little boy in the heat of August, waiting so patiently to be punished. And he had laid this out so clearly in the mad restaging of a crime that he believed was his alone. Three hangings, one endless shriek, Catch me! Kill me! He had even warned his victims and sent them into the arms of the police as his messengers, extensions of a scream.

Mallory could see all the way to the bottom of his madness, the rest of the damage done to a small child. ‘You thought your father sent you away – because he blamed you.’

No response. The scarecrow was shutting down what remained of his mind. Mallory tried to touch him, and he shrank back, a reflex that she understood too well. Her hand froze, suspended in the forbidden act of reaching out. She was always clutching air – touching no one. Yet she tried again, gently grazing his battered face with the tips of her fingers.

A shadow blocked the sun. She heard the sick sound of the bat cracking his skull, breaking it open. There was time to catch him in her arms, and they fell together.

Ronald Deluthe stood over them, listing to one side. The baseball bat dangled from his right hand as he sank to the ground, where he sat bolt upright, legs splayed out, his eyes slowly closing.

The scarecrow’s weight was on top of Mallory. His blood was on her face and in her hair. As she lay beneath the corpse, only her eyes were moving, slowly turning to Ronald Deluthe. She watched as his upper body pitched forward and his head hit the dusty tarpaper between his spread legs.

Mallory had lost her weapon. Her gun hand absently stroked the scarecrow’s hair, then came away with bits of red bone and flesh. But how could this be? She had yet to tell him how his mother had really died – that there was nothing he could have done to save her.

Charles Butler’s Mercedes pulled up in front of the apartment building and double-parked alongside a row of police units and their spinning red lights. An ambulance was at the curb, where two men in hospital whites stood beside an empty gurney.

Riker was the first one out of the car, yelling, ‘What happened? Where’s the wounded cop?’

‘It’s my fault!’ An unnerved civilian rushed up to him, arms waving, as if this might help to gather his thoughts. ‘I’m sorry. I thought he was unconscious. I just took my eyes off the poor man for a minute. My wife was feeling a bit queasy, and I thought she was going to faint. You see, she saw the body in the closet. And when I looked back – well, the man was gone.’

Riker barreled through the shed door, gun drawn, eyes going everywhere. He saw the little redheaded man rolling in wet sheets and moaning. On the neighboring roof, a confused old woman was staring up at the sky where her lost birds had gone.

He found Deluthe beside the shed, slumped over and holding a baseball bat in a one-handed death grip. Mallory lay a few feet away – underneath a corpse.

More sirens were coming, and she listened to them, as if from a great distance of miles and miles. The scarecrow’s flesh was deceptively warm, and so was his blood. It dripped from the broken skull to soak her and stain her.