Carol O’Connell - Killing Critics

“Seriously, you’re still looking for another killer?”

Mallory looked up as a new waitress, just starting her shift, refilled their coffee cups and then left them alone again. “She has the same name tag as the other one. Why are all the waitresses named Sandy? And why does a dive like this have real gold name tags?”

“The owner bought the name tags from a liquidator, who bought them from a bankrupt jeweler. And you’re right, they are real gold. But since they were already engraved, he got a good price.”

He went on to explain that the name tags had been the deluxe business cards of a prostitute named Sandy. The cards were all paid for, cash in advance, but never picked up because Sandy had died of a severe asthma attack. Her nine-year-old daughter waited an hour for the ambulance to come, not believing it would never come. Next, she called the fire department. The firemen were there in three minutes, but Sandy had stopped breathing five minutes before that. “And so, the phone number of Sandy’s answering service was covered with a pin glued to the back of the cards, and all the waitresses are called Sandy.”

“You went to a lot of trouble to find that out.”

“Yes I did.”

“You remind me of Charles. He’s a puzzle freak. He can’t let go of a problem until he’s worked it out. Hard to believe you ever stopped looking for Sabra-or the man who killed your niece. You had to wonder what had happened to your sister. You would have kept at it until you found her.”

“I never said-”

“A morgue attendant tells me you were first in line to view the body of a homeless woman, a jumper from Times Square. Did you think it was Sabra?”

He looked down at the table. Given his limited range of expression, he knew this simple aversion of the eyes must be tantamount to a confession.

“One more thing.” Her voice had a cold edge to it. “The night Aubry died-Sabra was in the gallery with you, wasn’t she?”

He lifted his face, and discovered that his expressions were not so limited after all. Mallory was nodding in agreement, as if he had answered her question aloud. Apparently, pain was something she could read in his face, for her voice was softer when she said good night.

On the bedroom bureau sat a wedding photo in a silver frame. Youthful and smiling, Louis and Helen Markowitz stared out of the frame. Two pairs of young, laughing eyes watched the flames racing toward them, consuming everything in sight, every memory of home and family until, mercifully, the glass of the picture frame was coated with soot and ash, blinding their eyes to the end of memories stored away in precious, irreplaceable things.

Mallory stood by the open door of her apartment, taking in the damage of pulled-out drawers, overturned tables and broken glass from the bulbs of fallen lamps. The doorman followed her into the front room.

“I swear I don’t know how he could’ve got past me, miss.”

“He probably walked in behind a tenant. If they want to get in, they will. There aren’t any safe places in this town.”

She walked into the kitchen to stand amid shards of crockery. The burglar had wiped the shelves clean of dishes and cups. Canned goods lay on the floor alongside the contents of her refrigerator. A canister of sugar was spilled over the contents of the flour canister.

Thorough little bastard.

Her den was less damaged. Since she had moved all her computer equipment to Charles’s building, Mallory had not thought to put this room to any better use than storage. Clothes were spilled out of trunks and onto the carpet, and the few remaining computer manuals had been ripped.

Not just a robbery.

She picked up a winter dress of good wool and found it slashed with a razor cut. In the bedroom the carpet was littered with silk blouses slit the same way. More drawers had been pulled out, and a wide selection of running shoes were strewn all over a jumble of blue jeans and blazers, linen and nylons. The mattress had been gutted and its stuffing coated the room. The feathers from her pillows lay on every surface.

The doorman was fidgeting beside her.

“It’s okay, Frank. I’m fully insured. Now tell me everything that happened. Who told you about the break-in?”

“A tenant. Mrs. Simpson. She comes down and says a cop told her to get me up here. He was waiting for me at the front door.”

“Are you sure he was a cop?”

“Yes, miss. He showed me a badge and his identification. And he gave me this.” The doorman put a white business card in her hand. “He said he’d get back to you for a list of what was missing, and I should tell you that you don’t have to file the report. He said he’d take care of it.”

Now she read the card and recognized the name of Blakely’s gofer. A push for a shove? She went to the bedroom closet and pulled out the side wall. Nothing had been touched, he had missed this cache where her valuables were stored.

“Thanks, Frank. You can go now.”

“I’m sorry, miss.”

She looked at his face grim with worry over his job. Well, she wasn’t about to break in an entirely new doorman. “I don’t think I’ll be mentioning this to the management company, Frank. And I’ll talk to Mrs. Simpson, all right?”

“Thank you, miss.”

It took twenty minutes to determine that nothing had been taken. Simple harassment? No, Blakely had probably sent his gofer out to find something. Did Blakely know about the office in Charles’s building?

The sirens were screaming down the road as the flames shot up to the rafters of the attic, where Helen Markowitz had stored Kathy’s baseball glove and her school uniforms. The family albums of five generations were all burning. The book of photos on the top of the pile was stubborn, only smoldering, then finally catching fire, burning all the pictures of a child’s growing years from ten to seventeen, when she had her full height. Before the siren screamed up to the front door, every trace of young Kathy Mallory had vanished in the smoke.

She unlocked the front door of Charles’s building. He would be asleep now. She took the stairs slowly, gun in hand, listening for sounds that did not belong in this quiet building of sleeping tenants, but she heard nothing out of the ordinary. On the second floor, she walked the hall silently, approaching the office of Mallory and Butler, Ltd. She fit her key in the lock and worked the tumblers quietly, entering with no noise at all.

Nothing in the reception area had been disturbed. She opened the door to Charles’s private office. Nothing was out of place. She found her own office in the same perfect order. She settled down in the chair behind her desk and waited in the dark. If Blakely knew about this place, his gofer would come here next. She might have some time to kill.

She reached out to the desk phone and dialed the priest’s number. And she knew from the weary “hello” that she had awakened him.

Well, tough.

“Father Brenner, what’s the religious penalty for defiling a corpse?”

“You woke me for that ?”

“It was my mother’s corpse. This is under the seal of the confessional, right? You can’t tell?”

“Oh, God. Yes, if you wish. Kathy, is this real?”

“Oh, Father, it’s as real as it ever gets. Let’s say I lost my mind. Maybe it was all that blood, and the way she died. I had to leave her, but I couldn’t leave. But it was too dangerous to stay. I had to go, to run and right now. So I took a little bit of my mother with me-her brain.”

And now she looked down at her fingernails, examining the polish for chips. “So, Father, what’s the penalty for that?”

“How old were you, Kathy?”

“I was almost seven.”