Carol O’Connell - Crime School

Predictably, Parris focused on the portrait of his own young self fresh from the Police Academy. He was about to say something when Mallory cut him off, saying, ‘This won’t take long.’ She picked up the photographs and rose from her chair.

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Lieutenant Loman. ‘I remember the little kids in the hall – one of them anyway.’ He was staring at the evidence bags that contained a twenty-year-old film carton and a set of notes written to Natalie Homer. ‘You know why I remember him, Jack? This tiny little boy – he reached inside the door of Natalie’s apartment and picked up an empty film carton. He wanted a damn souvenir of that poor woman’s murder. Cold, huh? I wish I could forget that kid.’

Mallory stood before the injured detective, looking down on his swollen face. When she spoke to Deluthe, her voice was loud enough to carry across the squad room. ‘Take your time. This is what they looked like the year your mother died.’

Deluthe kept his head down and stared at the photographs as she held them up, one by one, angling them away from the glass wall of Jack Coffey’s office. And now she fed Deluthe his cue, the first question, ‘ This one?’

The young cop nodded.

‘Are you sure?’

Deluthe nodded again.

In a departure from the script, Mallory bent down to him and lowered her voice. ‘Don’t talk, don’t move. We’ve got some time to kill before I go back in there. I know you can’t get that dead man out of your mind. You never will. He’s part of you now – and what you did to him.’ She nodded toward the large man beside him. ‘Detective Janos volunteered to look after you for a while.’

Deluthe stared at her with fresh damage in his eyes. ‘You think I’m a nutcase?’

Mallory nodded. ‘We all go crazy.’

‘Crazy is a place,’ said Janos. ‘You go, you come back.’

‘Happens so often, we even have a protocol for it – the suicide watch.’ She held up the photograph again. ‘Now tap this picture and we’re done.’

He stretched out his handcuff chain to do it.

Mallory counted to ten slowly. ‘Nod one more time.’

He did as she asked, then lowered his head, eyes fixed on the floor, a genuine portrait of remorse.

‘Good job.’ She prized realism.

Deluthe slumped over, fists clenched, eyes shut tight. The anesthetic benefit of shock was wearing off. She turned to Janos. ‘Get him back to the hospital.’

Mallory made a show of looking at one photograph on the long walk back to Coffey’s office. Arthur Wang blocked her way, handing her the evidence bags with the notes and the original film carton with the Polaroid logo. ‘The boss is done with these.’

Detective Wang opened the door to the lock-up room and handed Lieutenant Coffey a duplicate set of photographs. Mallory had only given him one line to say: ‘It’s the one on top.’

Jack Coffey stared at the picture for a moment, then laid it down on the table in front of Loman. ‘The scarecrow picked you.’

‘He picked you.’ Mallory pushed Lars Geldorf s photograph across the desk, then turned to Alan Parris, saying, ‘You can go now.’

The ex-cop quickly left the office, and Geldorf sank down in the vacated chair. He clutched the portrait of himself at age fifty-five and shook his head. ‘This is crazy. Crazy.’ There was a flicker of panic in his face when he looked past Mallory, raising his eyes to stare at the tall man standing behind her chair. No need to turn around.

With only the eyes in the back of her head, she pictured Charles’s wonderful tell-all face stricken with surprise – the real thing. No actor could portray shock and betrayal so well as an honest man with her knife in his back.

Welcome to my job.

She watched Lars Geldorf s face and saw the reflected sorrow of Charles Butler, who had finally understood his role tonight. He had been gulled into preparing this old man, his friend, for the close, the kill. And now he joined the list of the wounded as he walked toward the office door, eager to put some distance between himself and his assailant – Mallory.

Ah, but she was not quite done with him yet. ‘Charles?’

He stopped. She knew he would. There was a bruised and battered look about him when he turned to face her. Was he wondering how far ahead she had planned for this moment?

‘I’m sorry. I wanted it to be Parris or Loman,’ said the queen of all liars, and only Lars Geldorf believed her. The door closed on Charles Butler, and the old man’s sole source of comfort was gone.

The room was colder now.

‘I never set eyes on Natalie’s son,’ said Geldorf.

‘That’s probably what kept him alive,’ said Mallory.

The old man turned to Riker. ‘Help me out here. I’m telling you, I never – ’

‘Lars – don’t,’ said Riker, deadpan. ‘It’s over. Why would the kid lie?’

‘My apologies.’ Mallory smiled. ‘I thought you botched this case because you were such a lousy detective. In fact, you were the one who fed me that line.’ She picked up the small square Polaroids of the old crime scene, then dealt them out across the desk like playing cards. ‘I know why Parris isn’t in these shots. He was only in that room for two seconds. And you?’ She stacked the photographs into a neat deck. ‘You’re not in them because you took all the pictures that night.’

‘I could’ve told you that!’ said Geldorf.

She held up the empty film carton. ‘This always bothered me. The scarecrow left one at every hanging. It had nothing to do with Natalie’s murder – only her crime scene. This one’s twenty years old. The boy found it in the hall while you were shooting pictures of his dead mother.’ She dropped the film box on the desk. ‘A little something to remember you by.’

‘And now it makes sense,’ said Riker. ‘The kid’s family always knew a cop killed his mother. We wondered how a six-year-old would recognize a cop in street clothes. We thought that narrowed it down to Parris or Loman – the uniforms.’

‘The scarecrow set us straight,’ said Mallory, lying as easily as she drew breath. ‘When he watched you shoot those pictures of his mother, he knew you were police. And that was his second look at you.’

Geldorf sat back in his chair and grinned. ‘You guys are good, but you can’t scam the master. I invented this little game you’re playing. You got nothiri ’.’ He stood up and buttoned his jacket. ‘Try this on some other sucker.’

‘Not so fast, Lars.’ The man was stunned when Riker put both hands on his shoulders and forced him back into the chair. ‘We haven’t booked you yet. The charge is murder.’

And that charge hung on a pack of lies told by a fly on the wall.

‘All those sausages,’ said Mallory. ‘Too many for one person, remember? Natalie was making dinner for her son. The boy was in the bathroom while you were killing his mother. We always figured the perp was someone she knew.’

‘Her ex-husband!’ Geldorf shouted this in the tone of, Are you blind?

‘No,’ said Riker. ‘He was Natalie’s^irsf stalker. Then he met his new wife and the harassment stopped. You were the one who left the notes under her door. You scared her right back to the stationhouse – back to you. What a joke. You and that beautiful girl. Even twenty years ago, you were twice her age.’

‘You didn’t expect Natalie to be home that night,’ said Mallory. ‘She was always at work when you stopped by with your love letters. She caught you leaving that last one under her door. That’s why the boy didn’t hear any conversation before you killed his mother.

How could you explain a thing like that?’