Carol O’Connell - The Man Who Lied To Women

So what was Mallory doing here?

Despite the crowding to standing room only, Mallory had half a row to herself. The cat sat on her lap and tried to lick her face. She stared down at the animal. With perfect understanding and the desire to go on living, the cat ceased its attempted licking and curled up on the legs of Mallory’s jeans. One ragged ear was drooping, the point of it all but severed.

The bird people cast their eyes nervously over the cat and hugged their carrier cages. The dog people were holding their leashes with a death grip, more than a little put out that Mallory had not disguised the cat as a box. Rules of etiquette were clearly being violated here, and they were not rules that Helen Markowitz could have imparted to Mallory, for theirs had been a house without pets.

Riker watched her for a minute more. She was detached from the cat, but the cat was very attached to her. He could hear the purring four rows away. Now Mallory’s head turned slowly until she was facing him, staring into his eyes.

A world-class spook that kid was. And he blamed Markowitz for that. There had been a limit to the kind of games one could play with a child who was not a child. The games Markowitz devised for her had developed ricochet vision. And he believed she could feel the rise in temperature when one more live body walked into a room.

She nodded to him. He moved past a dog and a parrot, another dog, a lizard and ten empty seats to sit down beside her.

He looked at the cat, who only looked to Mallory. ‘So you think the department’s gonna pay for the vet’s bill?’

‘Damn right. The cat’s a witness.’

‘Hey, this is Riker you’re talkin’ to.‘

‘The cat knows the perp, and the perp knows the cat.’

‘I think you’re pressing your luck, kid.’

Her eyes said, Don’t call me kid .

‘Coffey’s not too thrilled about the condo switch. Might have been good politics if you’d run the idea past him first.’

‘It’s none of his business where I live.’

‘Well, he had an interesting point. Amanda Bosch was your age, your style. Maybe she was a little shorter, but you’re definitely the perp’s type.’

‘I know that.’

Mallory’s face moved in tandem with the cat’s face. Two pairs of slanting eyes stared at him.

It was too early for a drink.

‘What name are you using?’

‘My own name.’

‘Risky, isn’t it? I only say that because your pretty face has been all over the television as a dead woman and a cop. Odds are he’s seen you. If he hasn’t, somebody’s gonna mention it to him.’

‘Good. Just wait till he sees the cat.’

‘You don’t know who he is. You’ll never see him coming.’

‘I’m not dealing with Professor Moriarty here. He’s a man who knows as much about computers as a secretary, maybe less. He’s a liar who got caught out. And he’s the panicky type.’

She leaned down to the canvas bag at the foot of her chair and extracted a manila file holder. ‘This is the list of tenants and their stats.’

He took the file and opened it, letting out a low whistle as he scanned the names of credit card companies, insurance companies and financial institutions. Well, this would explain the redness in her eyes; she’d been up all night breaking into computer banks. And then she’d probably been wading through that mess of paperwork pulled off Amanda Bosch’s computer – maybe five or six hundred pages she had neglected to mention in the apartment inventory.

How did she get the US Army info? It sometimes took him a week or more to pull personnel files.

‘What’s with the military service records?’

‘Physical stats – height and blood groups.’

‘Mallory, we didn’t find anything to type his blood group.’

‘He doesn’t know that. He drove himself nuts cleaning that place. The things he cleaned. He doesn’t sleep nights wondering what we might have found.’

He was looking at a list of units with more than forty-five names crossed off.

‘What are the cross offs?’

‘Most of them won’t meet the height requirement. And I crossed off all the single men and women. And the married man who made a fortune in software – he’d know you can delete a file, but you can’t erase it. He’d know the files could be restored. Cross off the apartments owned by corporations with three-day turnover – my perp was New York based. Then the vacant apartments are crossed off. What I’ve got left loosely fits the profile.’

‘What about this writer, Eric Franz? He’s single, isn’t he?’ He held up her fax of the vehicular accident stats dated to late November. ‘His wife died more than a month ago.’

‘The affair with Bosch started before that. A year or so – isn’t that what Mrs Farrow told you? And Bosch was more than three months gone with the baby before she aborted.’

A hungry looking sheepdog had made three rows of progress towards Mallory and the cat. His owner, an elderly woman, regained the leash and dug her heels into the linoleum to bring the dog to a choking halt.

‘Got any favorites?’

‘Yeah. I put stars by their names. Four of them don’t keep regular hours. That would leave them free for afternoons with Amanda.’

The sheepdog was gaining ground again, slowly dragging his owner behind him. Riker and Mallory exchanged glances.

‘If you shoot the dog, kid, you better kill the owner, too. If you let the old lady live, she’ll sue the city. Commissioner Beale won’t like that.’

Apparently, the cat had never seen a dog before. Nose was sitting docile on Mallory’s lap, only mildly curious about the large frenzied animal which was coming to eat him.

Riker resumed his reading. Mallory had a question mark by the name of Harry Kipling. A penciled note read: Connection to Kipling Electronics?

That name might give Coffey a few bad moments. High profile suspects were the worst. With any luck, Kipling would prove to be a computer freak, and thus beyond the pale. ‘How did you get a blood type on Kipling? There’s no Army record.’

She looked at him for only a moment, and he understood that this was not something he would want to know. And now it began to dawn on him that local hospital records must be a piece of cake after cracking the US Army computers.

‘Oh shit,’ said Riker. He was staring at two more high profile names on the list. One was a recent appointment to the US Supreme Court, and his Senate hearing was in progress. Another name was that of a prominent TV reporter who now had his own talk show every afternoon. These were two of the four bearing stars in the column.

When he looked up again, the crazed sheepdog had left the floor and was hurtling toward the cat. One of Mallory’s long legs was already curling back to kick the beast into the next world.

The door to Charles’s private office was closed on the low voices of moderate conversation. Mallory set the large canvas bag down on the desk in the front room. The cat stepped out of the bag and rubbed up against her arm as she opened the drawer to check the answering machine for messages.

Charles objected to the sight of modern conveniences among the antiques of another century, and so, she worked around him by hiding them out of sight. He was still unaware of the security system she had installed – she was that good at wiring.

She pushed the cat away and pressed the button to hear Coffey’s voice saying, ‘I want to talk to you the minute you get in. The minute! You got that, Mallory?’

Yeah, right.

A woman’s scream pierced the door to Charles’s private office. The cat flew off the desk.

She was through the door and into the next room with her gun drawn as a man’s voice was saying, ‘Justin, don’t!’