Mallory's Oracle

CHAPTER 7

They advanced across the flat stones, quick jerking shapes of light and dark, and some were spotted with brown and gray, uniform only in their forward motion, and one of them was insane.

Feet of red, and red rings around the bright mad eyes, he was otherwise coal-black until he passed into a dapple of sun, and iridescent flecks of green shimmered in the light. The feathers of his head were not smoothed back and rounded. Spiky they were, and dirty, as though a great fear had put them that way, and the fear had lasted such a long time, a season or more, and the dirt of no bathing or rain had pomaded them into stick-out fright, though the bird was long past fear now and all the way crazy. No fear of the human foot. A pedestrian waded through the flock, which parted for her in a wave, all but the crazy one, and it was kicked, startling the pedestrian more than the bird.

The woman shrieked and stiff-walked down Seventh Avenue. The insane pigeon followed after her, listing to one side with some damage from the kick, until he forgot his purpose.

Margot Siddon did not know how many hours she had gone without sleep. She followed the man down St Lukes Place heading towards Seventh Avenue under a slow-brightening sky. Streetlamps still glowed and cast her shadow slipping down into the underground. Fluorescent lights washed her face to white as she passed through the turnstile. The station was deserted at this hour, but for the two of them. To be sure of this, she walked the length of the platform, checking behind each thick post.

By all the laws that governed the universe and New York City, there should be a cop here at this moment when she least wanted to see one. Apparently, even this ancient rule had crumbled in the general breakdown of law and order. They were alone.

She walked toward him, only wanting to see his eyes one more time.

He turned when she touched his sleeve. As he shook off her dirty hand, the last sound he heard was the click. He was a good New Yorker, he knew what that sound must be, and he was given part of a second, that much time to be afraid, before she slipped eight inches of steel into his ribs. By his eyes, he was surprised to be falling, dying, with no time left to ask why.

Edith Candle woke in the ghosty gray hours before sunrise. Her bare feet touched to the carpet as she pulled a woollen robe around her shoulders and plotted out the day's schedule between her bed and the bathroom. She was drawing her bath water and had not yet looked into the kitchen. On the far wall of that room, just above the sink, a childish scrawl spread in a thick line of lipstick: THE PALADIN WILL DIE.

He approached the park with a small anxiety. More than thirty years had passed since he had last been here. To him it would always be a place of menace. All memories fashioned at the level of a child's eye were unreliable in scale, but Gramercy Park was otherwise unchanged. And so perfect was the memory of his sixth birthday party, Charles Butler winced.

Edith had invited all the children in the square to that party, all the children who'd had nothing to do with him on previous visits. And he made no new friends that afternoon, but had once or twice been the cause of uproarious laughter which made him want to sink into the earth, to be anywhere but there.

While Cousin Max had loomed over the children, making objects go up in flames and birds go up in flight, six-year-old Charles had shrunk as much as possible, scrunching down in his chair, aiming for invisibility. For the magic show's grand finale, Max had given Charles his fondest wish. First, he made the boy the center of attention, and then, mercifully, Max made him disappear, something which Charles's large nose had hitherto made impossible in any company of children.

After the show was over, Charles had reappeared against his will. The children with smaller noses and more modest brains had surrounded him and demanded to know how the trick was done. But he was honor-bound not to betray Max's secrets. In slow steps, and of one mind, the children were closing the ranks of small menacing bodies while Edith and Max were packing up the magic act and trundling boxes and bags through the gates, across the street and back into the house. He was alone in the circle of faces all filled with hate, small eyes bright with anger.

The first punch to his stomach put him into shock, so startling it was to be hurt for no reason he could understand. He covered his stomach to protect it from the next blow, and he was kicked from behind. An open hand shot out to slap his face, and he thwarted it with his raised arms. The same hand came back to him again as a fist in the side.

And now he understood them.

He dropped his hands to his sides and smiled at them, stretching his mouth to its widest, its looniest. They stood back half a step, still of one mind, and that mind was confused. What was this, asked their eyes which were one pair. In their base understanding of anger and fear, this smiling was against the rules. The tentative shot of a fist hit the back of Charles's head, but there was no real force to it. Their energy was draining off for lack of anything to feed it. There were no more blows before Edith entered the children's circle, put one hand on his shoulder and disappeared him back into the house.

During subsequent stays with Edith and Max, he had remained on the sidewalk side of the bars, where he stood now, looking in.

He opened the gate with Mallory's key and found himself a bench in a nice broad patch of October sun.

The boy at the gate must be Henry Cathery. Kathleen had supplied a more detailed description than Charles needed. The small traveler's chess set would have been sufficient to identify the boy. She hadn't needed to add the part about the visitor from another solar system. Charles, fellow alien, had a painful idea of what this boy's life must be like among the earth people.

He brought out his own traveler's set in the minutes while Cathery was settling into his own patch of sun. Charles's ancient wooden board was inlaid with squares of mahogany and cedar. The chess pieces were made of ivory and jade. The carving had surely driven the craftsman blind with the incredible detailing of each miniature. At the bases of the figures were the pegs to correspond with holes in the board.

From a distance of park benches, he noticed that Cathery was now sliding his own chess pieces across a metal board on magnets. Cathery's concentration made him impervious to the discomfort of being stared at. The boy was alone in his own universe, and Charles, a universe away, was not likely to catch his eye in anything approaching a natural encounter.

There was nothing in childhood which had prepared him for any pleasant encounter with a stranger. He had missed that stage of socialization which other people found so natural. He was not at all given to spontaneous conversation. Ah, but then, they were countrymen of sorts, this fellow Martian and he. He folded his set and walked slowly across that chasm which separates strangers and their very personal territory of park benches.

When he was standing over Cathery and blocking his sun, he said, "I see you favor magnets over pegs."

Cathery nodded, never taking his eyes from the board. If Charles had spoken from a burning bush, it would not have impressed Cathery sufficiently to break his concentration. Charles unfolded his own set and held it out between the boy and the metal board. Cathery looked at it and began the slow smile of a child within grabbing distance of candy.

Well that was better.

"I've seen one like that before," said Cathery, not looking up, eyes fixed on the board and its figurines. "It's a museum piece, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Where could I get one?"

"You couldn't. There are only three of them, and two are in museums."

"You want to sell it? I don't care what it costs."

"No, I don't think so. Care for a game?"

Cathery never answered him but put his own set to one side and looked up with the apprehension of one unaccustomed to this little social dance, unfamiliar with the steps. In that moment, Charles understood him with an insider's knowledge. This brilliant young chess master had all the socialization skills of a very small child. Charles smiled and sat down, placing the peg board on the bench between them. He held up the white to Cathery. The boy nodded. Their conversation had begun, though more than twenty minutes would pass before any more words were exchanged.

A glance at the magnet set allowed him to predict Cathery's opening, a classic game from a championship match.

Yes, that was it. Three moves later, it was apparent that Cathery was extending the chess problem to the new game. Charles called up the playing field from a page in a chess book and moved accordingly. And accordingly, Cathery's every move was predictable. If he continued to play with all the original moves, Cathery might catch on. The boy probably had no eidetic memory – that was rare – but he would certainly have committed these particular moves to what memory storage he had.

While Cathery's eyes were fastened to the board, Charles ran through the possibilities of more obscure games to match the opening. It was dishonest in a way, he supposed – Mallory had her influences on him – but if he didn't provide a master game, he might not be able to hold Cathery for long in a conversation about the weather.

"I've never seen you here before," said the boy, tossing a bishop into harm's way in a mad rush for a new queen. "You just moved in?"

"No, I don't live here." Charles spared the bishop and plotted to take down the would-be queen. "My cousin used to live in that house." He nodded to the other side of the park. "I expect it's been divided up into apartments now. It was a wonderful old place. I used to play in this park when I was a child. It hasn't changed. Peaceful, isn't it?"

Cathery nodded. "I'll never leave here."

Charles believed him. Now that Cathery was grown and beyond the torture of children, he would find this place a perfect environment for a solitary chess-player. No street people, no panhandlers to interrupt his game, to break his concentration with acts of supplication or acts of insanity. Henry Cathery would thrive on simplicity. There was nothing about his person to say he went to any trouble about his clothing or his hair. The spotty beard was an obvious growth of neglect. The boy would always opt for extreme simplicity, less distraction from the game.

"Henry!"

But just now, a distraction in the form of a thin young woman was calling to Cathery from the gate. Her hair was matted and her long, dark red dress was torn. An over-large vest of faded brocade was her only cover against the chill October morning. He found it interesting that she called Cathery by his given name.

Charles waited for Cathery to move his piece and lift his eyes. He nodded towards the girl at the gate. Cathery looked at her and, never changing his expression, said, "Ignore her. She'll go away in a while. Your move."

"Isn't she a friend of yours?"

"No."

Such a friendship did seem unlikely. Henry Cathery had grown up with money in a protected environment. While this one at the gate had the look of the homeless, a young woman with nowhere to be.

"I have no friends," said Cathery.

And Charles believed that too. Again, less distraction.

"And no family?"

"Not now."

Less distraction.

The young woman paced back and forth in front of the gate. Panic was jerking and twitching in every muscle of her body. Then, suddenly, she stopped her walking to and fro. She held tightly to the bars and pressed her face to the iron. Relaxing with a gradual sag and a slant of her body, her hands dropped away from the bars. The spasmodic agitation was gone now. She slowly moved off down the sidewalk and carried herself away from the park with a poignant grace. Charles stared after her until she was out of sight. He felt an unaccountable sadness.

Cathery looked up at him with only a shading of impatience. Charles brought down Cathery's would-be queen, and that set the boy back a bit. In the time the old master's stroke had bought him, Charles turned to stare at the little buildings at the east end of the park.

"So that's where the first murder happened. I should think that would be a more interesting problem than a chess game."

Cathery had put out one fleshy hand to castle his king. The hand hovered, concentration broken, as his eyes turned to the shed.

"I don't see the problem," he said.

"A daylight murder with all these witnesses? I call that interesting."

"Nothing to it," said Cathery. "He laid her down quick, cut her throat to shut her up, and then he cut her some more. The shrubs could hide that much. She was old. She couldn't have put up much of a fight."

"How do you know her throat was cut?"

"Everyone knows her throat was cut. Ten people must have come out to look at the body before the cops showed up."

"Did you see the body?"

"Sure."

"Did you notice anything else besides the cut throat?"

"No. She was partly covered by a garbage bag. No one touched her before the police came. They only wanted to look at a dead body."

There was no pain in the recollection of his grandmother's brutal killing. It was a sterile subject and an annoying distraction.

"But those benches face the building. Not much between the benches and the spot where she died. And no one noticed a stranger in the park that day."

"Then it wasn't a stranger," Cathery shrugged. "Easier."

"No. Think it through. You're too accustomed to dealing with the flat of a board. See the face at that window?" He pointed up to a second-floor apartment window set in red brick.

Cathery squinted up. A head of white hair was bobbing behind the window glass.

"Now, look over there," said Charles.

Another face, this one much younger, looked down on them from the other side of the street.

"The police love people like that. There's at least one professional watcher in every neighborhood. How many windows in this square? Someone had to be watching, but no one came forward. Perhaps the witnesses didn't know what they were witnessing. Is that possible? That doorman faces the murder site. Maybe he was inside when it happened. But what are the odds that no one was looking at the spot at any given minute of the day? The shrubs would cover a prone body. But how do you do a violent bloody murder like that one with no real cover? And what fool would take that risk?"

"It would be the ultimate high, wouldn't it?"

"Pardon?"

"You saw that girl at the gate. When she was in high school, she used to steal things from stores. What she stole was stuff she couldn't use half the time. She said it was a rush. It was exciting."

When their game was ended in a stalemate, Charles quit the park and closed the gate behind him. He looked back to see Cathery staring up at the watcher with the white head. The watcher withdrew from the window – quickly.

Mallory had her old man's brains. Jack Coffey would admit that much. All the damn interview notes NYPD had collected in the past three months, reams and reams of notes, and no one had made the seance connection.

He looked at her sitting quietly on the other side of his desk and wished he had her back on duty again. Until this morning, he hadn't realized how much he'd missed her in the past two months. There was a time, not so long ago, when he had kept track of her off-duty hours, and felt the lack of her in the way he dragged himself to work on the days when she would not be there, driving him nuts with sarcasm and just a trace of perfume. Two months was a long time to be missing her perfume.

Coffey looked up to see Charles Butler filling the doorway of his office. Butler moved across the room and folded his long self into the chair next to Mallory. While he was apologizing for being late, the man was suddenly caught short by the changes in the office. He was staring at the denuded walls which no one, cop or civilian, had seen in Markowitz's lifetime.

"You haven't missed much," said Mallory to Charles.

Coffey wondered what he was missing here. Butler shows up thirty minutes late, and Mallory, the punctuality freak, lets it go by? Where was the venom, the sarcasm, the glare of "Come hither, I want to hurt you"? He faced Charles Butler who had recovered from the mild shock of the redecorating.

"So, Charles. Wouldn't you think one of those old women would've come forward?"

"Oh, the seance ladies? I suppose it's possible they each assumed someone else would call. That's common group behavior."

"No," said Mallory. "They were playing Russian roulette."

Coflfey nodded, but he wasn't buying it. It didn't fit the image formed by the elderly women in his own life, and a little old lady was a little old lady. No, something else had frightened those women, scared them off the police, and he intended to find out what it was.

"I'm arranging police protection for all of them." The better to interrogate them without lawyers intervening.

"Turning into a real horse-race, isn't it?" said Charles. "How often do you get such a plethora of suspects?"

"Well," said Coffey, smiling, "we usually begin with the entire population of Manhattan and then whittle it down. Right now, I got Redwing."

"What about Henry Cathery?"

"We checked him out."

"I'm just curious. If he fitted the FBI profile so well, why didn't you concentrate on him?"

"I like money motives," said Mallory.

"So do I," said Coffey. "Every single one of those old women was loaded with blue-chip stocks. But then, so is Henry Cathery. He's worth a hell of a lot more than the dead grandmother."

"But you're dealing with a serial killer. Surely there's a mental disorder to consider, a pathology to the crimes."

"Hey," said Coffey. "If FBI headquarters were in New York, they'd have an entirely different set of profiles. New York City is another country."

"Coffey's right," said Mallory. "Now take cannibals, for example. Our last cannibal wasn't really hard-core."

"Yeah," said Coffey. "He was nothing at all like the Minnesota cannibal. The death was accidental. He just didn't know what to do with the body."

"Disposing of the head is always going to be a snag," said Mallory. "When we found a half-eaten head, the FBI sent us down the garden path with their psych profile."

"They never once suggested looking for a bank teller who was once a Boy Scout," said Coffey. "And as far as we knew, his parents were never cruel to him, and he had the standard complement of chromosomes."

With the attitude of only wanting to beat the dead horse one more time, Charles tried again. "But pure profit motive? No one would profit from all four killings. You think a sane murderer would kill four women if he only wanted one of them dead? Would a jury believe it?"

"A jury of New Yorkers?" said Coffey. "Oh, sure."

Mallory nodded in agreement.

"But don't you think the four-week cycles fit nicely with the pathology of a lunatic?" He looked from Coffey to Mallory. "No? But if you only considered the element of madness, it would still be an open field. I understand that Margot Siddon's alibi for the death of her cousin is a theater full of people who can't agree on the right year, much less the hour. No alibi for the Gaynor or Cathery murders. Her alibi for Pearl Whitman's death is Cathery, and he's none too committal. He's got his own alibi problems since Miss Whitman died. The medium we don't know about yet, but that's reaching. And Gaynor – "

"Gaynor? Charles, even if Gaynor didn't have Mallory for an alibi, I'm sure he could account for his time. His students make great alibis; they live on schedules; they're always watching clocks. We've got to check out his appointments for the office hours, but I don't think we're going to find gaps in his day."

"Didn't Henry Cathery also have a witness to account for his time? Pearl Whitman? How reliable was she?"

"So? What's the connection? You're not suggesting that Mallory is unreliable?" No, he could see that Charles wasn't about to suggest anything like that. Mallory was already tensing. Coffey could feel it across the desk without even looking at her.

"No, of course not," said Charles who probably loved his life as much as the next man, "but Gaynor was saved by a time constraint. No one would have an alibi for any of the murders if the women didn't die where they were found. Then it could be any of them."

"Nice try," said Coffey with no sarcasm. He really did like Charles. "But we have a lock on the crime sites. A forensic pathologist estimates the quantity of blood loss based on the victim's height and weight and the type of wound – if it's a quick kill, there's less blood loss. Then a forensic technician accounts for the blood at the crime site. The areas where the blood pools under the flesh line up with the position of the body. The first thrust gets a major artery. There's an awful lot of blood. No particles found on any of the bodies that were foreign to the site. Not even microscopic evidence to suggest they'd fallen elsewhere. So Gaynor's out of the woods."

"I'm not ruling Gaynor out," said Mallory. "Not him, not any of them."

"You're kidding," Coffey said. "What do you know that I don't?" Even as he asked the question he knew he was being suckered. She was playing with him.

"And what have you got, Coffey? Any little thing you want to share with me?" Her eyes were guns. They made him nervous, and he looked everywhere for something else to be looking at. When his eyes settled on Charles Butler, the man was smiling, and there was just a hint of sympathy.

"Fair enough," he said. Though he would not characterize any dealing with her as fair. She'd been born to the advantages of a quicker mind and a paralyzing beauty that had done something terrible and wonderful to him the first time they had met. Only Mallory could not see what a stand-out she was. That was the sad way of damaged kids. They grew up with distorted mirrors.

"We might have a new angle," he said, "now that Redwing links up to the victims. You'll like this one, Mallory, it's a money scam. When we started the surveillance on the square, we matched her description up with a rap sheet. We've got her under the aliases of Cassandra, Mai Fong and – "

"And Mary Grayling." Mallory was examining her nails. "And she's changed her base of operations. Your man has been watching an empty apartment all morning."

Coffey slumped back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling for a moment. If he killed her now, everyone would know.

He lowered his gaze to stare at her, always a mistake, and he got lost for a second in her pretty eyes. In the early days of working with Mallory, she'd given him stomach flutters each time he saw her. It took him years to realize that she was all stone – no heart and nothing but contempt for a man who could be reduced to a puddle of jelly at her feet. Not that he cared. Jelly had no self-respect.

"What else have you been holding out, Mallory? Any more bombs you'd like to drop on me?"

"Play nice," she said. "You give, I give."

"You give me everything you got, and right now, or I bust you for obstruction."

Well, that certainly made her yawn.

"Mallory, I've already got you cold for working a case off the books, violating conditions of leave, interfering with police business – "

"It's my business," she said, giving each word equal weight. There was no emotion to her when she was angry, only a narrowing of the eyes to warn the poor bastard in her sights. "He was my old man, not yours."

"This case is NYPD property. I can put you on suspension, and take the badge and the gun."

"Oh damn. I left them in my other jacket."

"You hold out on me, and I swear I'm gonna nail your bleeding hide to the wall. You can't win with me, Mallory," he lied.

When jelly met stone, the outcome could not be good for jelly. He knew it and she knew it.

"You think Coffey has a line on how the first murder was pulled off?" Mallory stood at the window which faced the street – the dirty, daylight life of Soho: the trash whipping in the wind on the sidewalk below, the ragged people who had no better clothes, and the ragged people who were making fashion statements. The sash was raised to emit the aroma of refuse from another garbage-collectors' strike which piled up on the sidewalk one flight below.

"Could be." Charles poured out a glass of sherry for her and watched her down it in one healthy swig. A good grade of sipping sherry was pretty much wasted on her. He sighed. "If we have to work with the parameters given, Jack Coffey has no more idea how the thing was done than you do. If the parameters are wrong – who knows?"

"You mean if he lied, if he held out on me. Count on it. You're crushed by the unmovable crime sites, aren't you?"

"Well, no. There are other possibilities. Do you know what was going on in that park every hour of the day? Might there have been a distraction?"

"The homicide detectives did interviews with all the residents who were in the park that day. Nothing stands out in the reports."

"My cousin Max could distract an entire audience with one hand. The magician's buzz word is misdirection, sending the eye elsewhere while you work the trick. The misdirection could have been a small thing, something common, a noise or an argument."

"I'll check it out. What else have you got?"

"Did the park murder have to be planned? Couldn't it have been a crime of opportunity? A fluke of timing? Something simple?"

"No. Too methodical. The weapon was a common kitchen knife. It was brought to the park. So what did you think of Henry Cathery? Could he have pulled off something like that?"

He forgot himself and downed his sherry.

"I think he's brilliant, if that's what you're asking. I don't know that he'd go to any trouble for money."

"Neither do I. Suppose he had a reason to hate his grandmother?"

"Such as?"

She handed him a folder with a recent batch of printouts. One was a psychiatrist's recommendation for short-term commitment in a sanitarium. Henry Cathery must have been twelve years old by the date.

He read the sheets at the speed of a normal human being. Although he could easily have devoured content and sense in a fraction of the time, he hesitated in front of Mallory. He was always trying to pass as a native of normal. Henry Cathery, however, had not tried hard enough, or not cared enough, and that was his only mistake.

The case psychiatrist's name was familiar. He stared at the wall and projected the page of a psychiatric journal dealing with papers on gifted children.

This reading from blank walls was one of the traits which had unsettled and alienated his cleaning woman. Once, Mrs Ortega had hovered in his peripheral vision, watching his eyes moving rapidly back and forth, scanning lines of a text which only he could see. She had jumped up on a kitchen chair and tried to prize his mouth open, having only the best intentions of pulling his tongue clear of his air passage, in the belief that he was having a fit. Humiliation had taught him to be more careful in his public behaviors. But Mallory had long ago uncovered this gift. She would understand and not try to force his mouth open.

According to the critical article recreated on the wall, Dr Glencome was a famous popularist. He'd written several books on the socialization stages of children, forgetting ever to mention that each child was a special case, an individual. Apparently, he had diagnosed the gifted and reclusive young Henry Cathery as socially unbalanced, and committed the child.

The records detailed each passing month of the boy's imprisonment in the private hospital. Henry had gradually become more introverted, spirit all but killed and threatening the body. He had been wasting away on forced feedings until Glencome had no choice but to let Henry go free or see him wither and die, thus killing the ungifted doctor's reputation for being so very good with children. After the incarceration, the child chess master had entered no more matches.

Charles closed the folder. Mallory was getting more ruthless in her computer raids. This invasion of a child's life was too intrusive. But he could not forget what he had read. So the old woman had inherited the boy when his mother died. First Henry had grief to deal with. Then this gifted child had to contend with a grandparent's perception of normal, coupled with the authoritative opinion of an ass with a PhD.

"This isn't a valid diagnosis. It doesn't mean Henry Cathery was mentally unbalanced, that he'd be dangerous to himself or others."

"I think I guessed that," she said. "But the old lady and the shrink couldn't leave him alone, right? Suppose he held a grudge all these years? Suppose he snapped? So first he kills his grandmother, and then he learns to like it and he can't stop."

He was trying to imagine what it had been like for the Cathery boy, to be locked away from his chessboard, forced into a different mold, thwarted like a Bonsai tree.

"I thought you liked money motives," he said. "Hated mental disorders."

"I'm trying to be open-minded. Here, look at this."

He took a sheaf of papers from her hand. Telephone-company records of calls between Anne Cathery and the private clinic which the boy had escaped from nine years ago.

"Maybe she was going to commit him before he hit his twenty-first birthday and came into his trust fund. His birthday was two weeks after his grandmother's death. Interesting, huh?"

"You're not going to give these records to Coffey, are you? This is so brutal. I can't see him standing up to Coffey, not in the face of this, a history he had every right to believe was private."

"No. I'm not turning the files over to Coffey."

"Good." He was looking at her with new hope. She might eventually become altogether civilized.

"What's Coffey ever done for me?"

The buzzer went off in a short burst, the minimum intrusion, and Charles opened his door to the ever polite Dr Ramsharan. It must be urgent. She had not changed into the soft, worn blue jeans. She stood on his threshold dressed for the office in a crisp white shirt and a linen suit of pale blue. When he stood back to allow her to enter the room, Mallory had disappeared.

"Herbert again?"

She smiled and nodded as she walked into the front room of Charles's apartment. She sat down in the chair closest to the door.

I'm sorry to bother you with this. I suppose I could've gone to Edith. She's known Martin and Herbert for such a long time. But she's getting on in years. I'm sure you don't want her exposed to this nonsense, and neither do I."

"Wise," said Charles. "How can I help you?"

"Herbert definitely has a gun. It makes quite a bulge under his jacket. Did I tell you he's taken to dressing in an army fatigue jacket? Scary, isn't it?"

"Did you have any better luck with Martin?"

"You know how chatty Martin is."

"Hmm. I'm not sure anymore which one of them set the other one off. Maybe Martin got the vest when he saw the writing on Edith's wall. And it could have been just the sight of Martin's vest that set Herbert off. That's all it would take."

"I haven't been able to find out who mentioned my gun to him. Some of the tenants are out of town. I've had that gun such a long time, I thought Herbert knew. He makes it his business to know everything that goes on in this building. Once, I caught him going through the trash."

"That seems a bit paranoid, doesn't it?"

"No. He's just a garden-variety control-freak. He's something very common in any community of humans. There's one of Herbert in every crowd. And all of us have some weak point, some fracture. Herbert's fracture is widening. I need to know why."

She sank back in the upholstery and looked up to the ceiling. With added focus, she seemed to be staring through the plaster and into Edith Candle's apartment on the third floor. Her next words were predictable. "I wish I knew what was written on the wall in Edith's apartment."

"Maybe we should talk to Edith."

"Not a good idea. She was the house mother for all the years she owned the building. Old habits die hard. She'd want to take care of it herself. I don't even want her in the same room with Herbert. I told you, he's ripe for an explosion. You can trust me to know my explosives."

Charles tilted his head to one side as he listened to what Henrietta was not saying. She was not saying it might be dangerous to bring Edith into the problem; she was tap-dancing all around it. Dance was not her forte. She was not saying that Edith was the source of the problem. She knew the relationship of family, and danced wide of it, and danced badly. It spoke well of Henrietta that she was no good at subterfuge. She didn't have the face to hide a bold-face lie, and neither did she have the dishonest agility to lie by omission.

He was surprised. He had always believed he knew Edith Candle so well.

"All right," he said. "I won't mention anything to Edith."

The tension about her mouth relaxed into an easy smile. Henrietta was her straightforward self again, done with dancing.

When he had closed the door on Henrietta, he turned to face Mallory, who was inches away from him. He'd never heard her coming up behind him. He wished he could put a bell on her neck.

Margot covered her eyes with one hand as she smashed the window leading into her bedroom. She cut her hand on the glass and never noticed. She slipped to the floor and into a deep sleep, not minding bare wood and the cold draft from the broken window. As she rolled in her sleep, the knife with the dried blood on it slipped from her pocket and thudded onto the floor. She slept on without dreams.

Riker picked up the old woman at her Gramercy Park apartment. More detectives had been sent to pick up the other three seance ladies, per Coffey's orders to keep them separated. Damn waste of time. The woman was silent on the ride in. Her round face was a mask of white powder. Her eyebrows had been drawn with a shaking hand. She had not asked to see a lawyer, but neither had she asked why he was dragging her into the police station. That was interesting enough to make a note at the next stop light. He jotted down the word scared.

When they arrived at the station he ordered a uniformed officer to round the women up from the separate corners, offices and cubby holes of the unit and put them all in the interview room together.

"Coffey won't like that," said the uniformed officer who had started shaving only the year before.

"Yeah, he will," said Riker. I'll take the heat if he doesn't."

He stood behind the one-way glass and watched the women file in and settle into a more comfortable silence. Minutes dragged by before the stiffness passed off and the elderly women began to talk easily amongst themselves. The conversation did not break off when an officer brought in a tray of covered styrofoam cups and a box of doughnuts from the deli across the street. Riker smiled and moseyed down the hall to Markowitz's office where Jack Coffey was waiting for him.

"You got all the old ladies from the seance?"

"Yeah."

"Put the Penworth woman in the interview room. I'll talk with her first."

"She's in there now."

He followed Coffey to the large room at the end of the hall and counted to three as the lieutenant looked in the window of one of the doors.

"All of them together," said a very testy Coffey on the third count. "I told you I wanted to see them separately." Jack Coffey looked through the glass of the interview room at four old women seated around the long table, chatting amongst themselves, excited, laughing.

"They're more talkative when they're all together," said Riker. "Make it more like a gossip session and you'll get more out of them."

"Riker, when I tell you – "

"Hold it, Lieutenant. You're gonna say that was Markowitz's style, right? Okay, so it's not the old man's command anymore and you're no Markowitz. Okay. But when we picked up the old ladies, one by one, they were like clams in the car. When they met up here, it all changed. They've been chattering about murder nonstop for the past twenty minutes."

"All right, Riker. We do it Markowitz's way." He looked back to the window. "Who's who?"

Riker had been primed for a fight, and now he felt somewhat let down because Coffey wasn't really such a bastard. He read off the names to match up with the woman who nodded constantly, the moon-faced woman, the one with the little head and the gigantic chest, and the skinny one with the high cheekbones who had a smart mouth and was his favorite.

They walked into the interview room and a wash of gossip running full spigot.

"Anne's death was the most spectacular," said the nodding woman whose slight palsy happily agreed with her sentiments in the rankings of recent bloody murders in the neighborhood.

Coffey took his place at the head of the table, and Riker took the next chair, notebook in hand. They politely waited for a lull in the conversation, and Coffey introduced himself.

A round face beamed on Coffey and one pudgy white hand rested on his arm. "You know, Lieutenant, for a while, we thought it was one of us."

"Oh, yes," said the lady of the high cheekbones. "That was rather early on, of course. Pearl hadn't died yet."

"You mean you regularly discussed this possibility?"

Riker smiled down at his notebook. Coffey was having a hard time with that.

"That's practically all we talked about between seances. You thought we were discussing needlepoint?" asked the woman described in Riker's notebook as "small head, big jugs".

"By the time Pearl died, we'd settled on other possibilities," said the nodding woman.

"Such as?" Coffey prompted.

"The Cathery boy."

Riker flipped back through the pages of his notebook. "Miss Whitman was Henry Cathery's alibi. She said she was with the kid in the park between 1:30 and 4:30 on the afternoon of June 30th. They played chess for three hours. Does that sound right?"

"Yes. Pearl was quite a player when she was young. She gave it up when she turned sixty. She had more tournaments on her resume than Henry did."

"As I recall," said the lady of the white-powder moon-face, "Henry went to some trouble to remind Pearl of the hours. Pearl had been a bit confused, but she finally decided that must have been the right time."

"Cathery had to remind her?"

"Their games were haphazard. He took his chess set to the park every day, but sometimes it was in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon. If Pearl was there at the same time, she'd give him a game."

"She told us she was positive about the time," said Coffey.

"I doubt that," said the thin woman. "You know how it is. No, you wouldn't, would you? When you start to get up there in years, every time you forget your keys – well, it must be senility. That's why it was so easy to convince Pearl that she was with Henry during those particular hours."

"Since Pearl's murder," said the nodding woman, "I see Henry in the park both morning and afternoon. Maybe he always went twice a day. I'm not sure. One gets so used to seeing him there."

"Right," said the moon. "His game with Pearl could just as easily have been in the morning."

"We didn't all agree on Henry, of course," said the woman with the tiny head. "I thought the lot of them, all the heirs, hired a service to do it. Maybe they got a package rate."

"Well, of course they'd get a package rate," said the nodding woman with more enthusiasm than palsy. "This is New York. Who pays retail?"

"And do you favor the conspiracy theory too, ma'am," asked Riker of the thin woman with the cheekbones which made him think she had been hot when she was young.

"Do you think all the heirs are in on it?"

"No, dear. The smart money is on Margot Siddon."

"Margot has been so strange these past few years," said the thoughtful moon. "Or so Samantha used to say."

"Oh please," said the woman of the tiny head with a heave of her ample chest and a diva's sigh. "Compared to whom? You don't think of Henry as the all-American boy, do you?"

The nodding woman's head began to wobble, attempting to contradict her affirmative nod with a negative shake of the head.

The moon beamed on Coffey again. "Henry was really very little trouble to Anne. You know she took him in when his parents died."

"She took Henry and a tidy allowance as guardian and executor," said Riker's favorite. "Henry, incidentally, is worth ten times what Anne had."

"So does Margot Siddon have an alibi, Lieutenant?" The little round face leaned forward, eyes bright.

"I don't see it as a woman's crime, ma'am," said Coffey.

She seemed affronted by this and cocked her head towards the others, who smiled with pleasant endurance and tolerance, and the thin woman's shrug said, "Men."

"According to the testimony of Mrs Whitman's doorman."

"Oh my dear, I hope you haven't relied too heavily on the testimony of doormen," said the tiny-headed diva. "Pearl and I had the same doorman. He's drunk four days out of five."

"I have the same doorman as Anne and Samantha," said the moon. "He does the building football pool on Wednesdays. That was the day Anne died, wasn't it?"

"Now, Estelle's doorman is my doorman. He's very new and very young," said the nodding woman. "You know these young people, they think we all look alike."

Coffey shot a glance at Riker who nodded in agreement. The doormen did not make great witness material.

"Did the four victims have anything else in common besides the seances?"

"Samantha and Anne went to school together. Vassar, I think."

"Estelle and Pearl were very close," said the thin woman. "They did stocks together."

"Pardon?"

"They made the same investments with the same brokerage house. They put me onto quite a good thing once."

Riker watched Coffey make the mistake of the patronizing smile. Coffey must think these women were discussing their pin money instead of the hundred-million-dollar increments they moved around the boards at the stock exchange. But Coffey had not yet read Mallory's print-out on their stock portfolios and recent transactions, which companies they held stock in and which they owned outright.

The moon leaned into the conversation. "Didn't Pearl and Estelle go into partnership on a corporation?"

"That was twenty years ago, dear, and they unloaded it the following year. Things in common," mused the nodder. "Estelle and Samantha are from New York 400 families. Social Register, you know. Anne Cathery and Samantha are both DAR. That's Daughters of the American Revolution."

Riker leaned forward, tapping his pencil on the notebook. "Is there any one thing they all had in common?"

"They were old."

"Thank you," said Riker.

"Ladies," said Coffey, in the same tone Riker had heard him use to address a field trip of third-graders, "do you realize that any one of you could be the next victim?"

"Well, it was something of a crapshoot at first," said the nodding woman. "But this time, we're fairly certain that Fabia's next. Show him the letter, Fabia."

The woman turned her small head down and had to lean over a bit to see beyond her large chest and into the purse on her lap. She produced a folded paper in a dramatic flourish. She was almost gleeful as Riker and Coffey read the lines that demanded her money and threatened her life.

Charles flipped through the library microfiche, rolling by the pages of thirty-year-old newspapers. Kathleen had been right. There it was on the cover of a major daily, a photograph of the hysterical widow, clinging to her husband's body.

The reporter for the Times speculated that Max might have survived, but the bus boy had broken the glass of the water tank when he saw Max was in trouble, remaining in the dead float well past the safety margin, one leg still bound to the weight at the bottom of the tank. The broken glass had cut him to shreds, severing every major artery. Onlookers had watched helplessly while he bled to death.

And now he noticed a new detail in the photograph. His own father's face stared out at him from the crowd of nightclub patrons in the background, a small cameo of horror and disbelief.

Charles understood those disbelieving eyes so well. As a child, it had been hard to believe that Max could ever die.

Nine-year-old Charles had been uncertain of Max's final exit from the world when he attended the funeral in the Manhattan cathedral. He had been holding tightly to his parents' hands as he entered that enormous place lit by a thousand candles, filled with a throng of mourners who had come to say goodbye to the master. Cousin Max lay at peace in a white coffin, dead, so the boy had been told. But Charles had held to the hope that this too was an illusion, another exit, but not the final one.

The cathedral ceiling was higher than heaven. The stained-glass windows and the candles had created a brilliant spectacle of unimagined space and beauty. The candles had gone out one by one, and by no human hand. Though windows kept their brilliance, the interior had dimmed to a ghostly twilight as the first magician had appeared in white top hat, and tuxedo with a flowing white satin cape. Out of this cape he had pulled a glowing ball of fire. Charles had seen this done on stage. It was one of Max's best illusions. The ball of fire left the magician's hand and floated over the coffin where Max slept on. A parade of men and women in white satin had come forward to circle the casket, which disappeared a moment later when they broke ranks and returned to their seats.

The casket had reappeared at the cemetery. Max's wand was broken over the open grave.

He remembered looking up to the sky, that perfect cloudless expanse of blue, as a thousand white doves took flight and blocked out the sun. He had heard the thunderous rush of wings rising, and felt their wind on his face and in his hair. When he looked down again, the coffin was gone, and a scattering of white rose petals covered the earth at the bottom of the open grave. The doves soared up and up, climbing to heaven, wings working with a fury, as though they carried a weighty burden with them, up and away. The little boy followed their flight with astonished eyes.

The advantage of a prominent nose was that it missed very little. Her perfume rose up in the elevator with him. Balancing two bags of groceries and a newspaper, he followed it down the hall. At the juncture of the two apartments, he turned away from his residence to open the office door; Mallory sat behind the desk in the front room, facing a bearded man whose gesturing put one waving arm perilously close to a delicate lampshade of glass panels. This could only be the sociologist from Gramercy Park, heir and murder suspect. He fitted Mallory's scarecrow description, but only in the looseness of his limbs and the awkward way they flew around without direction. His face was attractive, small regular features and warm engaging eyes. The beard suited him and saved him from the small nose which bordered on pug and would have made him an ageing boy for ever.

"Charles Butler, Jonathan Gaynor," said Mallory.

"It's a pleasure, Mr Butler."

"Charles, please."

"I love your windows," said Gaynor. "Do you know the period?"

"Thank you. The architecture is circa 1935."

This tall triptych of windows was more aesthetic than the rectangles of his apartment across the hall. Restored woodwork gleamed from the frames which arched near the ceiling. Mallory, behind the desk, was a dark silhouette in the center panel, softly back-lit by the gloaming light of the dinner hour.

Charles settled his grocery bags on the desk. "This room is unique. All the other windows in the building are the same period but not quite the same style."

"It's a remarkably quiet room, said Gaynor. "Doublepane glass in the windows?"

Charles nodded. At times the room was so quiet Mallory swore she could hear pins crashing to the floor, and the "Oh shit!"s of spilled angels.

"You know what these windows remind me of?" Gaynor's hand sent a pencil caddie flying to the carpet. He bent down to pick it up with a lack of self-consciousness which must have come from the habit of sending things accidentally away. "This whole room could be the set for The Maltese Falcon. It's vintage Sam Spade."

Charles sat on the edge of the desk and looked around the room with new eyes. When he had taken over this apartment for his office, he had been working on the theory that a room was a three-dimensional metaphor for a human life, and a basic element of harmony. Once he had the room, he believed his life would take on a new shape, the right shape this time around. Now it was a bit of a shock to realize that his ideal room was the stereotypical setting of murder investigations. But it was.

"I've persuaded Mallory to have dinner with me," said Gaynor. "Care to join us?"

Charles gathered up his grocery bags and moved to the door, looking back over one shoulder to say, "Oh, you're both invited to dinner at my place."

And the parade of three crossed the hallway.

The kitchen in his apartment was his favorite room these days. In the past year, he had grown accustomed to people dropping by at all hours. He welcomed company after all the years he had spent isolated in his room at the think-tank.

The Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields played a Vivaldi mandolin concerto at a background level that facilitated conversation. Jonathan Gaynor made himself useful stirring the sauce for Swedish meatballs. Mallory perched on the counter top, sipping white wine to the left of Charles's chopping block, and he was unreasonably happy.

"It's wonderful," said Gaynor, sipping from the spoon. "Did your mother teach you how to cook?"

"Oh no," said Charles, smiling as he wept over the minced onions. "She only managed to cook one unburnt piece of toast in her entire life."

"Oh, right," said Mallory.

"Really, I was there that day, I remember the moment when it hit the top of the pile on the breakfast table. It was golden brown, the first I'd ever seen that wasn't black. I reached out to grab it, but my father got it first. He handed it back to my mother and said, "This one isn't burnt yet." She never missed a beat. She put it back in the toaster and burned it to a husk."

"All I ever had was boarding-school fare," said Gaynor, holding his empty wineglass to Mallory, who filled it. "Burnt toast would've been the highlight of the meal."

Both men looked at Mallory who had never failed to have a well cooked, nutritionally balanced meal in all the years she lived with Helen and Louis. Just for one flickering moment, Charles believed her competitive streak might tempt her to recall a time when she lived out of garbage cans.

She jammed the cork in the mouth of the winebottle.

"So, Jonathan," said Charles. "You have any theories on the Invisible Man of Gramercy Park?"

"It had to be a lunatic."

"Why?" Done with onions, Charles moved on to tearing small bits of bread into smaller bits.

"I look out on that park every day," said Gaynor. "I promise you, there's no way he could have killed Anne Cathery with a hope of not being seen. Therefore, it had to be a mental incompetent without the forethought to protect himself from detection."

"Good reasoning, but how do you account for the fact that there were no witnesses?"

"A fluke. And it speaks well for my theory. There was one unguarded moment when no one was looking that way."

"And no one noticed a blood-splattered lunatic strolling out of the park," said Mallory dryly.

"He could have covered his clothes with something," said Gaynor.

"Wouldn't that indicate the presence of mind to protect himself from detection?" said Charles.

Gaynor sipped his wine and looked off to that corner of the eye which Charles recognized as the place where he did his own best work.

"In that case," said Gaynor, "I only have to extend my unguarded moment long enough for him to leave the park. He could have been a derelict who followed her through the gate after she unlocked it. And once he was out of the park, who would take any notice of a street person? Who would look long enough or close enough to determine that his clothes were stained with blood?"

In that same corner of the eye, Charles was reconstructing the long red dress worn by the young woman who had hailed Henry Cathery from the park gate. Gaynor might have something there. Blood, wet or dry, was not so detectable as the technicolor paint of motion-picture blood. Had the killer worn something dark or something red? Could it be that simple?

Mallory was not so open-minded.

"I can't believe it," she said.

"Of course you can't," said Gaynor, stirring the sauce dutifully, and misunderstanding her. "No sane person wants to believe that anyone is sick enough to kill a helpless old woman," he went on, continuing with his stirring and his misunderstanding of Mallory, who was not in the least sentimental about helpless old ladies. "But there are probably a lot of people who wish the Invisible Man had come to their house."

"That's cold," said Charles, crumbling raw ground beef into a bowl.

"Yes, it is," said Gaynor. "But true." He looked up to Mallory. "Think about relatives who can't afford nursing homes. Old people are living longer, into their nineties some of them, draining the resources of their children. I don't think that series of murders enraged the public. I think it fed their fantasies. It's no accident the Invisible Man is taking on superhero proportions in the news media."

"You make it sound like the freak's performing a public service," said Mallory.

Charles could see this line of conversation was not sitting well with her. She would have given anything to watch Louis and Helen grow old. She filled her wineglass, dismissing them both with her downcast eyes.

"I know you're a sociologist," said Charles, "but do you have any expertise in sociopaths?"

"Only to the extent that they impact on society. We need them in times of war. If we don't have enough, we manufacture an artificial pathology in their basic training. As long as they're confined to a military life or a combative sport, or even a police force, we can keep them in check. If you put them out in the civilian population, they'll cull the weak, the stragglers and – "

"The elderly," he would have said next, if Mallory had not cut him off.

"How does insider trading impact on society?"

Charles stared at her lovely face, her Irish eyes of Asian inscrutability.

"It's potentially devastating," said Gaynor. "In the worst possible scenario, Wall Street loses the trust of the investors. Who wants to risk their savings in a rigged game? Think of the small investors who suffer the most when they're cheated. Investments fall off across the board, from mutual funds to city bonds and blue-chip stock. Then the market collapses, and we all line up with a bowl at the local soup kitchen. That pack of thieves in the 1980s scandal shook a lot of people's faith. The soup kitchen was a near thing."

"I suppose a lot of people just don't realize how wrong it is," said Mallory, swilling her wine and speaking in uncharacteristic small-talk tones, "how illegal it is."

"Very few people with the money to invest at any level can claim they don't know that insider trading is wrong, and why it's wrong."

"Including little old ladies?" Mallory smiled, and her eyes narrowed in Charles's direction.

"Oh, particularly little old ladies," said Gaynor. "They control the lion's share of the large-to-medium investor capital."

And Charles knew that all this was for his benefit. Mallory might genuinely like Edith Candle, but Edith had not respected the law, and Mallory was the law. Apparently her code of ethics was a little more complicated than the poker-players realized. Why hadn't he seen that for himself? She could have stolen the earth with her computer skills, but she had relegated her thefts to whatever Markowitz might need to keep the law. Perhaps she did have the unrepentant-till-pigs-fly soul of a thief, but she drew sharp lines, Markowitz's lines. There was more of him to her than Helen.

Charles nodded to Mallory, and in that nod he promised to speak to Edith about her forays into the market and what she could expect to get away with in the future.

After Gaynor said his good-nights and thank-yous and closed the door behind him, after the dishes had been cleared from the table, she made herself at home on the couch, shoes kicked off, feet curling under her. When he set the tray with the coffee and liqueurs on the table before her, he saw the box with the red wrapping paper. And this was his first clue that today was his fortieth birthday.

He sat down beside her and tore the red wrapping paper from his gift. The uncovered cardboard box bore an espresso-maker logo, but when he lifted the lid, he was staring down at an object that would never make a good cup of espresso, not in this world. Not knowing quite what to say, he resorted to the obvious. "A crystal ball?"

"My idea of homage. You're the only man who ever impressed me very much. I find the rest of them boringly predictable."

Charles held the crystal ball up to the light. His nose elongated in a dark patch of curving reflection, and he put it down on the coffee table.

She would never guess how much this pleased him. Every sign of friendship was a reaffirmation that he was not so odd, not a complete freak, not entirely alien. If he could ask for more it would only be that she were less beautiful or that his nose did not precede him by three minutes.

"You like it?"

"Very much. Not a paperweight, I take it?"

"No, it's the real article. Straight out of the department evidence room. But the gypsies may have used it for a paperweight. The whole outfit was into computer fraud."

She was doing the service of pouring coffee and liqueurs, holding a spoon up, did he want sugar? No? "So, what did you think of Gaynor?"

"I suppose I liked him well enough." And it had been obvious that Gaynor liked Mallory quite a bit. "What do you really know about him?"

Her father would have asked that. Louis had remarked that one day he would have to unplug her computer for a few minutes so she could meet and marry a young man while he was young enough to hope for grandchildren. Louis had been confident that it would only take a few minutes. He had seen what she had done to his detectives in less time.

"I've got a print-out this long," she said. "I know his parents are dead. He has a summer-house on Fire Island, he dabbles in stocks, and he's just inherited a few hundred million. But he wasn't starving before the old woman died. He's worth a hundred thousand on his own, all socked away in conservative investments. No arrests, no juvenile record."

So her interest in the man was all professional. So Gaynor dabbled in stocks.

"He didn't by any chance cash in on the Whitman Chemicals merger?"

"No. I thought so at first. The timing was right. Then I backtracked the stock purchases through the computer of a financial house. He made some modest gains that year, but there was no connection. Lucky for him," said Mallory. "Estelle Gaynor got away with it. She's only a footnote in the investigation, but the SEC would've busted her nephew in a minute on sheer proximity. The government would have taken all the profits, fined him and jailed him. But none of his own transactions are linked to anything criminal. It's not like he was ever hard up for money."

"Some people never have enough money. What about the other victims?"

"There's no connection to the Whitman merger beyond Gaynor's aunt. Pearl Whitman was a principal, but she never purchased stock in the merging company. No financial history of insider trading for Samantha Siddon or Anne Cathery, but they both play the market."

"You know, it might be a good idea not to get too close to any of these people until you find out what the connecting link actually was."

"I know. The seance isn't enough. I think something brought them together before the seances began."

"Maybe, maybe not. What do old women do when they meet? They talk about their children. Did you think these women might have shared a secret or a confidence?"

"Like a little lunacy in the family?"

"I hope we're not getting off on the Cathery boy again. He's socially awkward – many gifted people are – but odd behavior doesn't signify mental illness. You can't really see him hacking up an old lady, can you?"

"Oh, sure I can. And if it turns out that Anne Cathery was trying to get the kid locked up so she could get her hands on his money, I'd have to figure she had the knife coming to her. But I'd still bust him."

"All Henry Cathery seems to crave is a little solitude. He only wants to be left alone. You're not planning to torture him, are you?"

Charles stared at the pattern of the carpet.

She touched his arm to call his eyes up to hers. "You liked Henry Cathery, didn't you?"

"I understood him."

"Were the old ladies helpful? Did they give you the new location for Redwing?"

"No," said Riker. "The old ladies don't contact her. She calls them. We have to wait till the next seance and tail her. And don't get any ideas, kid. Coffey's already arranged for the tail."

Riker spent the next hour drinking Mallory's beer and bringing her up to speed on Coffey's progress which, according to Riker, was zip. "Dr Slope thinks we might have a slight variation in the murders. If it's two people, then both of them are right-handed, both used incredible violence in the slashing. But the wounds are not identical. The fourth victim is slightly off, and Slope can't say for sure it's the work of one man. Maybe the guy was just in a freaking hurry this time."

"What about a man and a woman working together?" 'Naw. I'm going along with Coffey on that one. It crossed my mind, but I just don't see a woman doing that kinda job on another woman. Don't get me wrong, kid. Women can shoot and stab with the best of 'em. And they're really thorough. If I see a corpse with a whole clip emptied into it, I gotta figure a woman did that. But I can't see a woman doing these mutilations. You see something like that, it's always a man who has a problem with women."

When Riker had gone, Mallory sat down by the light of the VCR and the slide-projector. She began the nightly horror show of the slides and the dancing Markowitz.

Old man, why didn't you leave something behind, a, few bread-crumbs!

And in her dreams, Louis Markowitz tried to teach her how to dance.

When Margot opened her eyes to the light, she could not tell if it was the gray of evening or morning. What day was it? And she was thinking of food as her stomach gnawed at her like a separate animal with teeth to bite her from the inside. The bloody knife lay inches from her face. She didn't see it for the long minutes she thought about food. She daydreamed of bakery bread. The knife was kicked to one side by blind feet on the way to the door.

Out on the avenue, she had her choice of discarded paper cups. She selected one and primed it with three pennies and jingled them for the tourists.

An old woman stopped and kept Margot standing in the cold wind as she dipped a thick-veined claw into her large purse and, with maddening slowness, groped around its interior, finally extracting a change purse. Margot shifted from one foot to the other as the old woman worked the clasp with arthritic fingers, at last, wincing out a single dime and chiming it into the paper cup.

Margot stared at the dime which kept company with the three pennies at the bottom of her cup. A scream of outrage exploded from her mouth with force enough to push the old woman back two steps to the brick wall littered with playbills and ads and graffiti. Margot screamed at her, yelling obscenities, shrieking 'Bitch, bitch, bitch' in an angry chant. She followed after the old woman, who had turned and was hurrying away with all the speed of veined and brittle legs. The woman gathered her thin coat closer about her throat, as if it might be protection from the young lunatic who was dancing alongside her, sometimes leaping in the air and screaming vile words which had the effect of physical punches and outright terror.

The old woman tried to run, and her bones failed her, legs falling out from under her. She heard a snap of bone when she hit the hard cement, which hates old bones and breaks them when it can. The old woman never felt the jagged edge of the broken beer bottle until she looked down and saw the blood gushing from the split in her flesh. A small noise came from her dry lips, a crack in the voice, a squeal of fear, more from the sight of her own blood than the pain. The old woman was crawling now, dragging her body along the sidewalk as the lunatic with the dirty matted hair danced around her, ranting on and on. stomping and leaping, frightening the wide-eyed pedestrians who passed her quickly by, pretending not to see, not to hear, not to feel.

The old woman ceased her inching escape. She lay still in the body and quiet. Tears streamed from her eyes as her life leaked out through the jagged red hole in her leg.