The Chalk Girl

TWELVE

Phoebe and I are always the first ones into the dining hall. When the doors open, we run like crazy so we can grab chairs at the end of a corner table, a safe place with two walls at our backs. We call it the Fox Hole. Everyone else calls it the Losers’ Table. Even losers new to the school know to come here. They see kids in glasses or braces, the lumpy, shapeless ones and the pencil-shaped uncool, and every loser says to himself – These are my people.

Toby Wilder walks in. Phoebe’s eyes shine. And there are other girls with shiny eyes, here and there, all around the room. He definitely has power over women – but he doesn’t care. Toby sits down to lunch in his Fortress of Silence. Everyone wants to hang with this kid, but no one bothers him. Phoebe and I watch him from the Fox Hole. We all know our places.

—Ernest Nadler

The private office of the man who ran Crime Scene Unit was a cluttered repository of weird dead things in glass jars and catalogues of arcane knowledge. Riker and Mallory had been kept waiting – and wondering how much trouble they were in – and how were they going to dig their way out?

Heller lumbered into his office and glared at each detective in turn. Sizing their necks for nooses? No hellos were offered. He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a photograph of two holes in tree bark. ‘This is what we started out with. Screw holes in trees . . . after we read about the trees in the newspaper.’

Apparently all was not forgiven. Riker turned his head toward the sound of squeaky wheels. The new hire, CSI John Pollard, entered the room, pushing a hand truck that fit Coco’s loose description of a delivery man’s dolly. The long struts of the handle extended up from a square of metal between two wheels. A large cardboard carton sat on this low platform, held in place by buckled straps.

‘That box holds a simulation of the murder kit,’ said Heller. ‘My guy’s the same weight as the heaviest victim. John, sit on the box.’ The CSI perched tailor-fashion on top of the carton, and his boss secured him to the dolly with straps. ‘Now you got a rolling weight of just under two hundred pounds.’

Riker eyed the hand truck with its load of box and man. ‘Could a woman move that thing?’

‘One way to find out.’ Heller turned to Mallory. ‘Give it a shot.’ And then he walked out the door, unconcerned that this might give her a hernia.

She tipped back the hand truck and wheeled the carton with the ride-along CSI out of the office and down the hall. If this caused her any strain, Riker saw no sign of it. They entered a room of bare walls and a clean, steel table. This was a thinking-man’s lab with no visual distractions – and no noise. Heller could gut detectives in here all day long, and no one would hear the screams.

John Pollard, freed from his bindings, began to unload the carton, and Riker shook his head – no, no, no! – as a jumble of equipment accumulated on the long table: a bag of screws, a cordless drill, a metal plate, a socket wrench, a pulley – and a winch? Attached to the winch cable was a heavy-duty hook used for towing cars and trailers. Two battery leads extended from its back end, and now – Christ Almighty – a car battery was set on the table. ‘What’s with all this crap? Our perp used a rope to hang the sacks. We gave it to you. We even saved you the knots.’

CSI Pollard leaned down to retrieve a bagged coil from the carton. ‘This is one of the ropes from the crime scenes. But the Hunger Artist used a winch cable to lift those bodies into the trees.’

Heller laid a photograph on the table. It was a close-up shot of a branch. ‘You see those marks? Those are imprints from a chain used to hang this.’ He picked up an open-sided pulley. ‘Your perp threaded one of these with a winch cable.’

John Pollard rested one hand on the winch. ‘This model can pull a rolling weight of five thousand pounds – cars, boats. It wasn’t designed to lift anything, but we tested this one in the park.’ He touched the two red battery leads. ‘These hook up to any twelve-volt.’ He nodded to the car battery at the other end of the table. ‘I’m guessing the Hunger Artist would pick the lightest brand. That one weighs thirty-five pounds.’

Mallory folded her arms, clearly not buying any of this. ‘There’s no good reason why a perp would make this so complicated.’

‘I don’t care about why,’ said Heller. ‘We’re telling you how he did it.’ He bent down to the carton, pulled out a six-inch length of branch in a clear plastic bag. ‘Here’s the damn tree, Mallory. Look at it. Chain-link impressions – just what you’d expect from holding dead weight. No sign of burn or drag. The rope only held the sack in place. It didn’t pull anything over this branch. A pulley and a winch lifted the body straight up. That’s the only scenario the evidence can support.’

‘The Hunger Artist put a lot of thought into this,’ said CSI Pollard. ‘In fact, he over thought everything, every possible problem. In all three trees, the sacks were tied off on a high branch. If this guy hauled the victims up with a rope and used his own body as a counterweight, he couldn’t even climb the—’

‘So that’s where the winch comes in,’ said Riker. A second rope would have neatly solved the problem, but he only wanted to end the windy lecture – before Mallory did.

‘That’s right,’ said Pollard in a tone reserved for rewarding small children and pissing off homicide detectives.

‘No,’ said Mallory. ‘Doing it this way, the perp would be out in the woods all night.’

‘Wrong.’ Smiling and smug, Pollard held up the cordless drill and clipped in the socket wrench. ‘I bolted a winch mount to a tree in ten seconds. Then I connected the battery to the winch, lifted a weighted sack, climbed up and tied it off with the rope.’ Pollard picked up the remote control. ‘I loosened the cable with this. Then I unlocked the chain, and the pulley dropped to the ground. I climbed down in one minute flat – removed the winch’s mount plate – another ten seconds. Start to finish, seven minutes was my best time. It only looks like the Hunger Artist did it the hard way. This is actually the fastest, easiest way.’

Mallory stared at the jumble of tools laid out on the table. ‘You got all this from screw holes in trees? That was the only real evidence, right?’

Heller was way too calm when he turned his face to hers.

And CSI Pollard prattled on. ‘The holes match a standard mount plate.’ He picked up a small plastic bag containing long screws with hexagonal heads. ‘These lag bolts fit the holes. One bolt would’ve worked, but he used two for every tree. Very clean holes, not what you’d find with a manual screwdriver. That’s how I know your guy used a socket wrench attached to a cordless drill.’

Who knew murder could be so tedious? Riker turned to his partner for support with this idea, but Mallory seemed almost too lethargic to pistol-whip John Pollard.

She stared at the two-wheeler dolly. ‘At least that makes sense.’

Riker agreed. The police on patrol would have stopped anyone found in the park after curfew. A footrace through dark woods offered better odds of escape than a car chase, and an abandoned dolly would be harder to trace than a vehicle with a license plate. And it moved silently – no noisy motor. It was actually the safest way to transport an unconscious victim through Central Park.

CSI Pollard removed the empty carton from the dolly’s platform. ‘Check out the tires. This brand matches tread marks from the first crime scene. Rubber inflatables – made to carry a heavy load over unpaved ground.’ And now, with a special smile for the pretty detective, he said, ‘I told you – this guy thought of everything.’ He popped off the balls of his feet – as if that would make him tall enough to appear on Mallory’s radar.

Oh, but now she did notice him. How unfortunate.

Mallory looked over the top of Pollard’s head to see Riker’s worried face, his silent plea – Don’t gut the little guy. They could not afford one more feud with Heller’s people. She nodded, and both detectives turned their backs on John Pollard to follow his boss down the hall to the private office, where another carton had been left on the desk.

‘You can take this with you.’ Heller opened the box to show them reams of paper, enough to make a dozen telephone directories. ‘This is from our database – lists of every product brand to fit the murder kit. You got model numbers for the past ten years, manufacturers, outlets. Some of these places went out of business, so we threw in global liquidators. No index. Sorry. I guess you’ll have to go through it page by page. I figure that’ll take you guys a few thousand hours.’ He smiled, perhaps for the first time in years. ‘Have a nice day, Detectives.’

Mallory and Riker exchanged looks that conveyed the same thoughts: Heller really knew how to hold a grudge – and they were totally screwed.

After dropping off the useless carton at Special Crimes, the detectives traveled north into Midtown, home to the Hunger Artist’s latest victim.

Despite a do-not-disturb sign hanging from the doorknob, the manager of the hotel unlocked the door to Willy Fallon’s room. ‘She’s been with us a little over six weeks. Her previous address was a hotel in Los Angeles.’ There was little more that he could tell the detectives about this guest. The description of a demanding bitch was couched in polite terms of ‘She can be difficult at times.’ And phone records showed no outgoing calls. ‘Not so unusual. Everyone has a cell phone these days.’

Or maybe yesterday’s party girl had no friends.

Mallory opened the door by a crack to see a cell phone lying on the floor next to a small pile of clothing. The manager was dismissed, and the detectives entered a clean and serviceable room, not a palace, but the kind of place where middle-management executives might stay on extended business trips – hardly the accommodations of an heiress to the Fallon Industries fortune. ‘Looks like the family put Willy on a budget.’

‘Well,’ said Riker, ‘the recession hit millionaires, too.’

‘The Fallons are billionaires.’ Mallory checked the bathroom to find towels draped over the side of the tub and an unwrapped bar of soap that agreed with the rumpled sheets on the bed. There had been no maid service since the kidnapping. Next, she opened the door to the closet. The clothes hanging on the rod were very expensive – and very last year. She emptied a purse on the dresser. No vials, joints or pill bottles, but there was a light dusting of white powder at the bottom of the bag. She wet one finger and dragged it across the satin material for a taste. ‘Cheap stuff. Willy’s cocaine is laced with cornflower.’

‘That fits the budget theory.’ Riker stood over the small pile of cast-off clothes and shoes. ‘So this is where the perp dropped her and stripped her. Willy felt safe turning her back on the guy. And then –’ He made a swing motion with one hand. ‘Bam, down she goes. You could kill somebody that way. The other woman, the dead one – she was pretty ripe. Had to be the first victim – the practice run. Maybe the Jane Doe was dead before she went into the sack.’

‘No,’ said Mallory. ‘Slope says our killer didn’t even use enough force to knock that one out – just enough to stun her and knock her off balance. I showed him Humphrey’s hospital X-rays. Same thing. I think our guy just got carried away with Willy Fallon. He hit her too hard. That’s why she can’t remember anything.’

Riker leaned back against the door and stared at wall decorations, cheap reproductions in plastic frames. ‘What’s our girl doing here? I could afford this place.’

Mallory retrieved the cell phone from the pile of clothing on the floor, and she flicked through the list of stored numbers. ‘I’ve got one for her parents. It’s a Connecticut prefix.’

However, Mr and Mrs Fallon were not at home to the police at this time. And concerning any future date, according to the secretary who made all their social appointments, the detective had a better chance of being thrice struck by lightning on a cloudless day. ‘But one can always hope,’ he said. And the line went dead.

Wilhelmina Fallon was pain-free and flying high on medication as she multitasked from her hospital bed, clicking through TV channels and flipping the pages of newspapers until she came to the photograph of a coma patient found naked in Central Park. It took a long time to make a telephone connection to the reporter on that story. Twice she had to suffer insults of ‘Willy who?’ from underlings, a reminder that her party-girl days were old news.

But not anymore.

After identifying the coma patient as Humphrey Bledsoe, Willy placed another call, this one to a TV news station. She was too impatient to wait for tomorrow’s newspaper to restore her to fame.

On the other end of a third phone conversation, a hotel bellman assured her that, yes, he had removed her drugs from the room in advance of the police dropping by. And, yes, the bellman would be happy to take a small cut of her stash in lieu of a cash tip.

Willy had no cash.

The last call was made to her parents, also known as the Bank of Mom and Dad, but Mr and Mrs Fallon were not at home to their daughter. This time the snippy social secretary fobbed off her call on old Birdy, the downstairs maid.

A maid!

Willy had just suffered a kind of demotion. ‘Birdy, tell my parents I want to come home.’ And now she learned from the lowliest employee in the Fallon household that a trip to the family compound would not be advisable at this time. It was almost like a recorded message. Willy imagined the woman reading lines from a list of stock responses to cover every occasion.

‘Birdy, I’m in the hospital. I nearly died. Do they know someone tried to murder me?’

Apparently there was nothing on the maid’s list that might pertain to that question, and the older woman stammered, ‘I – I have to go now, Miss Willy.’

Oh, of course – furniture to dust and floors to mop. This minimum-wage earner was a very busy person – no time for idle gossip with socialites.

Willy wondered if she should teach the old bat a screaming lesson in class etiquette, a shouted stream of four-letter words guaranteed to wither the tender soul at the other end of the line. She clutched the telephone receiver a little tighter, and her voice dropped to a begging whisper. ‘Birdy, please don’t hang up on me.’

Too late. Her connection to home and family was a dial tone.

After the telephone had been ripped from the wall and the pillows had flown across the room, a nurse walked in to find Willy crying and shredding newspapers into tiny pieces. Help was summoned. The words Mommy, Daddy, Mommy, Daddy, followed by a rant of obscenities were taken for a seizure, though the doctor hardly seemed worried or sympathetic as he put a needle into Willy’s arm.

From the other side of the room, she heard the television set call her by name. And the anchorman went on to name Humphrey Bledsoe as another victim of the Hunger Artist. ‘A third victim remains unidentified.’

A third victim?

‘Oh,’ said Willy, ‘I know who that—’

‘Problem solved,’ said the doctor, pulling the needle from her arm. These were the last words she heard as the room began to spin, and her eyes closed on the whirlwind of walls and furniture and newspaper confetti.