The Chalk Girl

THIRTEEN

I can’t use the school toilets anymore. Humphrey and the girls might be hiding in one of the stalls. But sometimes I have to pee or die, and I do it in the garden out behind the school. Now and then, teachers see me zipping my pants up or down, but they never say a word. And this is proof that they know what’s going on. Not ratting me out for peeing on a wall, that’s how they show support. Piss on them.

—Ernest Nadler

The dissection room was a chilly place of bright lights, stainless steel, and white tiles. The medical instruments were best described as cruel. And the term remains had a different meaning here. Yesterday’s rat-chewed corpse from the Ramble was today’s collection of body parts, organs weighed, tagged and bagged, and tissue samples gone for lab tests. A section of the dead woman’s jaw was also missing, and so was the brain and the sawed-off crown of the head. What remained on the table was a hollowed-out torso with putrefied limbs and a face obscured by a loose arrangement of surgical gauze above the bloody hole where the chin had been.

‘If you want me to check for chloroform, a broad-base scan will take at least five days.’ The chief medical examiner stood beside the table and looked down at the body, the source of the stink in this room.

Detective Riker retreated to the wall of sinks and cabinets; he was not keen on the blood-and-guts side of his trade.

Mallory stood at the foot of the table, clicked on her recorder and said, ‘Jane Doe. Bag number two from the Ramble.’

‘She might be the second one found,’ said Dr Slope, ‘but this woman is the Hunger Artist’s first victim. I drew blood that was still in liquid form. That puts time of death within seven days. She was three, maybe four days dead when she got here. Heller can narrow that for you. He does wonderful things with fly larva.’

Mallory stepped closer to the doctor. ‘I can’t wait around for Heller to hatch flies. I need that little detail now.’

‘Always in a hurry.’ The doctor picked up a clipboard from the small tray table and flipped through handwritten notes. ‘Her ordeal did a lot of damage to the organs. It was a slow death.’ He scanned the lines and flipped more pages, sometimes glancing Mallory’s way to see if she was sufficiently irritated yet. Apparently not. More page flipping followed. ‘As you might have expected – no stomach contents. That might’ve helped.’

He smiled. She glared.

He held up an X-ray. ‘There’s a hairline fracture at the back of the skull.’ Dr Slope waited a beat, and then, before Mallory could remind him that she had already seen that X-ray, he said, ‘Well, you know that didn’t kill her. Off the cuff, I’d say cause of death was dehydration. But then I found something else that was much more interesting.’

Riker rolled his eyes. All he wanted right now was one standout detail that would marry up to a missing-person file. And Slope knew that. The stack of reports from the tristate area posed a huge expenditure of man-hours. But now the detectives would have to listen to a lecture. And this was his partner’s fault. Mallory and the doctor had a game to play. It had gone on for years. It would never end.

‘All right, let’s start over,’ she said. ‘Give us the basics. Age, height, weight—’

‘Mid to late twenties. Height, five feet six. Weight, one hundred ten pounds. Does that help?’

No. That would fit a great many missing women from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, but Mallory never answered obvious questions. ‘What about tattoos?’ she said. ‘Injection sites? Birthmarks? Anything useful?’

‘There’s one truly rare feature.’ Slope’s pause was long and maddening, but Mallory was cool. Somewhat disappointed, the doctor walked to the counter and picked up a specimen bottle. ‘This is it.’

Riker saw something white and wormy floating in liquid. ‘Our vic had an alien baby?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Slope. ‘The woman’s most remarkable feature was in her brain.’

And Mallory did not shoot him.

‘I found this tumor on the pituitary gland. It’s not cancerous, but it would’ve caused other problems. It’s been there for a few years. The symptoms would’ve been obvious to her general practitioner. It’s situated in a tricky location for surgery, but doable. And it’s odd that she never had it removed.’

‘Bad healthcare plan,’ said Riker.

‘I don’t think so, but I’ll get to that later. A tumor in this specific location presents with a variety of symptoms, and not always, but sometimes, a drastic change in personality. I know that was the case with our Jane Doe.’

‘Wait.’ Mallory clicked off her recorder and folded her arms against the doctor. She was not buying this. ‘You diagnosed a change of personality . . . in a dead woman.’

‘You’re skeptical. I can always tell.’ Dr Slope gave her an evil smile as he lifted a strand of the corpse’s hair, half its length brown, half blond. ‘I can date that tumor back to her last salon appointment. My wife is a blonde. I know the cost of hair coloring. There are three different shades for these highlights to make them look natural . . . like your hair, Kathy.’

‘Mallory,’ said the natural blonde, correcting him – again.

‘It cost Jane Doe a lot of money to maintain this process. And she had another expensive habit – cocaine. I found old surgical scars from repairs to the damage in her nasal cavity.’

Riker’s chin dropped to his chest. Scars inside the nose so rarely turned up in the details collected by Missing Persons.

‘So she had money to burn before the tumor showed up,’ said Mallory. ‘So?’

‘Well, two years ago, she not only stopped dyeing her hair – she also stopped brushing her teeth. She has dental caries in the age of fluoride. I had a forensic dentist consult on the damage, and his opinion nicely fits my timetable for the tumor. Also – and this goes back to your question on injection sites – there are none, and no additional scaring in the nasal cavity. The standard tox screen shows no recent drug abuse. So that’s another change in behavior.’

‘Okay,’ said Riker. ‘So far, we’re working off the description of a blonde with brown roots and cavities. Thanks. You got a photo of her face before you messed her up?’ He was hoping for something that might actually help. Right now they had nothing, not even her eye color. The last time the detectives had seen this corpse, strips of duct tape had covered the eyes and mouth.

Dr Slope pointed to the counter. ‘There’s a set of photos in that envelope. But you won’t need them. I’ll have her name by this time tomorrow.’

Riker’s head lolled back, and he stared at the ceiling. Was Mallory drawing her gun on the doctor? Did he care?

‘And that brings us to the plastic surgery,’ said Slope. ‘The woman had a chin implant.’

That would neatly explain a gaping wound where the chin used to be. Any serial numbers on the prosthesis would lead them to the surgeon who did that operation. Riker looked at his watch. A search like that could be done in an hour or less. Why wait till tomorrow?

‘She also had breast augmentation.’ Dr Slope held up a bag with two implants that looked like small white pillows. Riker knew they would be soft to the touch; their perfect shape was the only memorable thing about the first teenage girl he had groped in the backseat of his father’s car. Ah, nostalgia.

The doctor mistook his smile for interest, and the lecture continued. ‘The prosthetics were traced to a European company. Unfortunately, with the time differential, I won’t get a call back until tomorrow morning. Then we use the codes to find the surgeon, and voilà.’

They were going to lose a day in the identification. Well, even with the damage of a rat-chewed face, maybe they could rule out some of the missing-persons reports that had come with pictures. Riker opened the medical examiner’s envelope and stared at the first photograph of the victim’s face. ‘What the hell is this!’ It was not a question but an accusation.

‘Oh, the mole,’ said Dr Slope. ‘Didn’t I mention that?’

Sarcastic bastard.

Forgetting for the moment that autopsy damage made him puke, Riker walked to the head of the table and used his pen to dislodge the gauze from the dead woman’s face, what was left of it. The duct tape was gone, and now he could see the exposed upper lip – and a mole with two incredibly long, thick hairs that resembled cat’s whiskers.

Riker was heading for the door, and Mallory was right behind him, when Slope called out the final punch line. ‘So . . . you think the mole might be helpful?’

Riker stared at the autopsy photographs laid out on his desk, and then he looked up at his partner. ‘With Heller, we had it coming, but what did you do to Slope? I mean recently.’

Unannounced visitors to the squad room interrupted his grousing. Charles Butler came through the stairwell door with Coco, and behind them was Robin Duffy, Mallory’s biggest fan. And so it was difficult to say who was happiest to see her. Coco won for the widest grin as she ran down the aisle of desks, her arms spread wide, and she handily beat the old lawyer in this footrace to hug their favorite detective. Then Duffy’s arms reached out in heavy-duty-embrace mode, and he squeezed her tight. Across the room, two detectives raised their heads to watch the spectacle of people who liked Mallory well enough to risk this.

Charles took Coco’s hand and led her toward the lunchroom, the home of a giant, twelve-tier candy machine. ‘This will be fun,’ he said, jingling the change in his pockets. ‘We’re going to practice your motor skills with coin slots.’ And when the child hung back, reluctant to leave Mallory’s side, he said, ‘Just for a few minutes.’

As they disappeared down the hall, Robin Duffy laid his briefcase on a desk and opened it. ‘Kathy, I need you to sign some paperwork.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I have to catch a plane to Chicago. The executor for the grandmother’s estate wants Coco returned to Illinois.’

‘Sure he does,’ said Riker. ‘Easier to rob the kid if he’s got custody.’

‘Coco isn’t going anywhere,’ said Mallory.

‘That’s what Charles said.’ Robin held up an affidavit with the psychologist’s signature. ‘This says she can’t be relocated until he finds her a permanent home. I’ve got a hearing before a Chicago judge.’ The old man handed her another sheet of paper. ‘I took the liberty of drawing up your statement, Kathy. In effect, it says Coco isn’t going anywhere. Just sign it, give me a copy of the material witness warrant, and I’m off to the airport.’

When the paperwork was done, Charles Butler reappeared with a chocolate-covered child. Mallory knelt down with a tissue to clean the little girl’s face and hands. This was pure reflex; she cleaned everything. Coco gifted the detective with a candy bar and another hug that smeared Mallory’s silk T-shirt, normally a hanging offense. But Coco got clean away with this, and down the stairs she went, hand in hand with Charles, the elf and the giant.

Riker answered his phone on the first ring, saying, ‘Yeah?’ He listened to the desk sergeant for a moment and then said to his partner, ‘The mole man’s downstairs.’

The middle-aged visitor to the SoHo station house had a sweet smile and an odor of homelessness about him, though he was clean-shaven and wearing freshly laundered clothes. For many years, Mr Alpert had managed a soup kitchen to feed the poorest of the poor, and now he smelled like them. A man of faith, he handed Detective Mallory a religious pamphlet, having determined, almost immediately, that she had not yet found the Lord.

He followed her up the stairs to the squad room, saying, ‘I thought I’d have to make the identification at the morgue.’

‘That won’t be necessary,’ said Mallory. Only one missing-person report had mentioned the giveaway detail of a mole with cat’s whiskers.

They passed through the staircase door and into the squad room of tall windows, empty desks and one man standing. ‘Hey, there.’ Detective Riker extended his hand. ‘Thanks for coming in. We’ll have you outta here real soon.’

‘I’d appreciate that,’ said Mr Albert. ‘We’re shorthanded at the mission.’ He sat down in a chair beside Mallory’s desk. ‘How did Aggy die? Was it an accident?’

‘We won’t have the autopsy report till next week,’ said Mallory – and not to spare this gentle soul the details of a death with drawn-out suffering, but to forestall the questions that always followed a finding of murder.

Riker opened his notebook. ‘You don’t have any idea what Aggy’s last name was? She never mentioned any relatives?’

‘No, sorry. She didn’t talk very much. I can tell you she had mental problems. Poor woman. Some sort of compulsive disorder. There was this thing she did with her teeth.’ Mr Alpert turned his head from side to side as he clicked his teeth, biting the air like a dog snapping at flies. ‘Like that.’

Riker broke off the tip of his pencil. ‘Okay, a mental case. You were helping her.’

‘Oh, no. Aggy was helping me. She worked in the mission kitchen six days a week. Never late, not once in almost two years. When she didn’t show up one day, I got worried. The next day, I filed a report with the police.’

‘So she’s been missing for a week,’ said Mallory. ‘Did you go to her apartment? You didn’t give her address in your report.’

‘I had no idea where she lived, but I know she wasn’t homeless. Her clothes were always clean, and she had spending money.’ He pulled a snapshot from his back pocket. ‘This was taken at our last Christmas party. She’s the one in the middle.’

Riker studied the image of Aggy, so busty before Dr Slope deflated her by removing the breast implants. ‘Do you know who her friends are?’

‘I’m her friend.’ Mr Albert shrugged to say he couldn’t name another one. ‘She’s a bit off-putting – incessant praying and that odd thing she does with her teeth. But she knows a lot of homeless people. When she’s not working in the soup kitchen, she carries around baskets of sandwiches and gives them out to panhandlers. Some of the street people call her Saint Aggy.’

The two partners were late to join the rest of the squad assembled in the incident room, where every wall was lined with cork from baseboard to ceiling molding. The front wall was covered with Riker’s messy mosaic of autopsy pictures and crime-scene shots. On the floor was the carton of lists to track down items of the murder kit, but this CSU box remained sealed, and now it was kicked into a far corner by the angry commander of Special Crimes, who called it ‘Useless crap!’

The energy in the room was climbing. Detectives filled half the folding chairs, notebooks out, pencils ready, waiting for the boss to get on with the show. Other men milled around, and some gathered by the pinned-up array of maps and diagrams for the Ramble. That patch of the cork wall was Mallory’s work. Each paper was equidistant from the ones surrounding it; her thumbtack style had machine precision. She sat at the back of the room, alone.

Jack Coffey took his place behind the lectern. ‘Listen up!’

Most of the men took seats, but some remained standing, and Mallory was still alone, flanked by empty chairs – as if she had picked up some contagious disease on the road during her lost time.

‘This wasn’t a spree attack,’ said the lieutenant. ‘We got space between each one of the Ramble hangings – three to four days.’ He pointed to the carton at the back wall. ‘Don’t waste time chasing down Heller’s crappy leads. If we get a suspect who keeps pulleys and winches around the house – great. Otherwise, screw it. CSU’s a dead end. We concentrate on the victims.’

And now it was Riker’s turn to address the squad. His back was still turned to them as he pinned up pictures of the Hunger Artist’s surviving victims, Humphrey Bledsoe and Wilhelmina Fallon. Last, he added the mission photo of the dead woman, known only as Aggy. ‘Okay, guys.’ Every head turned his way. ‘This is what we got so far. A comatose pedophile, a bitch socialite, and a dead saint with a boob job. Theories? Any?’