Carol O’Connell - The Man Who Lied To Women

Riker had never seen Heller work so fast, anything to appease Mallory. And when he was done, he couldn’t get out of her way fast enough.

‘I’m going up to talk to the old lady and the kid,’ said Riker.

‘Right.’

She was on to the computer now. He was dead to her, as were the technicians who worked around her.

As Riker was closing the door behind him, Heller was working on the nightstand and bitching about the perp being a good-housekeeping fanatic, forgetting that only four feet away from him sat just such a fanatic, and she was armed.

‘Don’t bag that,’ said Mallory to Heller as he was trying to ease the card file off the small table next to the computer. ‘I need it. It’s a client list – all the people she did research for.’

‘You got your own tweezers in that kit?’ Heller asked, looking down into her case of tools.

She looked up at Heller. Did he think she didn’t know how to handle evidence? No. He was just doing his job. Markowitz had always coddled and petted Heller, even when he was giving the man fits, checking out details within details. And she needed this man.

‘Don’t worry about it, Heller. If his prints were on it, he wouldn’t have left it behind.’ She moved her chair to one side of the screen. ‘Here, look at this.’

Heller bent down to look at the lighted computer screen of white letters on a blue field. It was a list of names. He looked back to the exposed first card in the spindle.

‘You see? All the information on the first entry matches that card. You’re looking at an electronic copy of the card file. Someone logged on to this computer at least six hours after Bosch was killed. Whoever cleaned the apartment cleaned up the computer too. He deleted this file. I brought it back with a utility program. If I get lucky, that card file won’t be an exact match to the computer file.’

‘You think the guy might have removed his own card?’

‘I’d bet even money on it. Why would he delete the list if he wasn’t on it?’

Heller was nodding as he accepted a plastic evidence bag from a technician. He scribbled his initials on the label and turned back to face her.

‘We’re done here, Mallory. I can’t tell you much. The guy was tall. He’s got a long reach up that wall.’

‘How do you know he wasn’t standing on a chair?’

‘You can follow the track of the sponge along the wall. No stop and start motion to move a chair. He was walking along the length of the wall. I’d guess his height at six-one to six-three. And he’s a thorough bastard. We’re taking the rugs and the mattress into the lab. If there was any blood, we’ll find it. We pulled a few prints off the shoes and the belts. The prints probably belong to the victim.’

He looked up to the marks high on the wall. ‘Nobody that tall could have such small finger pads.’

Heller seemed to be casting for words.

‘Anything else?’

You wouldn’t hold out on me, would, you, Heller?

‘The guy’s weird,’ he said at last.

Heller leaned down and pulled out a drawer from the nightstand near the bed. It was empty; the contents had been bagged. He turned the drawer upside down and held it out to her. The pine scented cleaning solvent was still strong on the wood.

‘He cleaned all the exterior surfaces of the drawers,’ said Heller. ‘Now that’s weird. And it’s not like there was a blood bath here. There wasn’t. I’d get flecks, at least, with the light and the spray. But nothing. The guy’s just weird.’

‘You mean I’m looking for a psych profile based on a cleaning job?’

‘Could be. I saw something like this ten years back. Maybe your old man told you about it. The crime scene was already as clean as this one. They caught the bastard when he came back to the site to clean it again. There was a detective in the apartment when the perp showed up with rubber gloves, a bucket and a mop. They should all be so easy. That’s all I got.’

And, thank you, Heller, prompted the ghost of Markowitz who sat in an overstuffed armchair inside her brain.

‘Thanks, Heller.’

She smiled again and made a show of taking the tweezers out of her tool kit and carefully pulling back each card on the spindle, matching it to the files on her screen.

Heller and his men were gone when she was into the h’s. Missing was the card on Betty Hyde. According to the retrieved computer file, Hyde was a gossip columnist with a large syndication. Mallory didn’t need the file to know that the woman also did television spots on an evening news program. Her residence was the Coventry Arms, an upscale Upper West Side condominium.

Gold.

The address was a six-minute walk from the site in the park where the body was dumped.

A quick perusal of the electronic calendar told her that Betty Hyde used Amanda Bosch’s fact-checking services on an irregular basis. The notes on parties indicated something more social in the relationship.

Mallory recalled the face of Betty Hyde from the gossip columnist’s regular five-minute news segments. Hyde was vicious in her reporting of private lives. The woman would make a better victim than a suspect. When Mallory was done with the list, only the columnist’s card was missing from the hard copy. The address had to tie in.

Next, she went into a set of hidden subfiles. The security would be chimp-simple to crack, but why would Bosch need that kind of lock-out on a home computer? Was there someone else spending time in this apartment? It would hardly be Betty Hyde, whose tastes were radically different, judging by the address of a multimillion-dollar condo.

The computer was asking for a password. Mallory flipped through her software array with the eye of a burglar viewing her selection of prybars and glass cutters. She selected a disk and started up the program to bang down the door with a crashing cascade of every variable on a password. It was BOOK which unlocked the door, and now a novel came tumbling out.

Well, that fit nicely with the books on writers’ markets and the style guides which lined the bookshelves, and which were not part of a researcher’s trade.

‘No, you’re absolutely right, Mrs Farrow,’ said Riker. ‘She shouldn’t have talked to you that way. But you see, she lost her father recently, and she just hasn’t been the same since.’

Actually, there was no difference at all in Mallory.

‘Oh, that poor child,’ said Mrs Farrow.

Mallory was never a child.

Riker sat back in a well-padded chair upholstered in roses, and there were roses on the wallpaper and in the pattern of the rug. Roses even trimmed his coffee cup. He smiled at the old woman who lived in the apartment over Amanda Bosch’s.

‘I understand you’ve been having problems with your Social Security checks.’

‘Yes. Jimmy steals them and cashes them. I thought that was why you arrested him. His mother usually makes it up to me, but this month she was a little short. I’m not pressing charges. I never do. Amanda came up with groceries and helped me out with my medication. I told Jimmy if he didn’t pay Amanda back, I would put him in jail. Not that I would, you understand. So what does he give her? A secondhand sports coat with a cigarette burn on the sleeve.’

‘Do you know where Jimmy was on that morning?’

‘My grandson was right here in this apartment. His father dragged him over here to apologize to me at six in the morning. My son works nights, you see. Gets off at five. Well, when his wife finally told him about the check, he went crazy, my son did. And Mrs Cramer – she’s my neighbor down the hall. Oh, she’s such a sweet woman. Every morning since my last heart attack, Mrs Cramer comes by to check on me before she goes to work at the hospital. Well, she was here when Jimmy and his father came by. You can ask her – she’ll tell you the same. Then, we all went to mass together and sat down to breakfast at my son’s house. My son drove me home at noon.’