The Chalk Girl

SIXTEEN

This morning, my parents go totally nuts, running through the rooms, screaming my name. Then my father finds me waking up on the floor of my bedroom closet. I don’t remember how I got there. Maybe I was hiding from dreams of Aggy the Biter or Spider Girl. Humphrey is never the stuff of my nightmares. That creep giggles and hits like a little girl.

But there I am in my pajamas and not quite awake – in the closet.

My father shakes his head and says, ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’

Well, I’ve already lost his respect, so I say, ‘I have a scary life.’

And Dad walks away.

—Ernest Nadler

After putting Coco to bed, Charles Butler spent the remainder of his evening restoring the broken spine of a rare volume. He sat at a cluttered table in the workshop adjoining his library. It was a small space crammed with glue pots, spools of thread, all the tools a bibliophile could want – and perfect peace. The solitary window was triple-pane glass to block out the noise of the street, and the walls were quite thick. Though, as a concession to his tiny houseguest, he had left the door ajar.

This was where he came to work out the knotty dilemmas of life – like Coco forming a bond that would damage her when it broke. For his own part, he had managed a professional distance; the child well understood the relationship of doctors, dentists and the like with their patients. That was not the attachment he worried about. Hours into his bindery project, the book was mended, but he had no solution to the problem of severing the tie between Coco and Mallory.

And then he heard the scream.

Heart in his throat, he ran out of the workshop, passed through the library and down the hall to his guest room. One outstretched hand preceded him through the door. A flick of the wall switch lit a bedside lamp that shared the nightstand with a large jar and its captive fireflies from the Ramble.

The child was frightened, and her thin arms raised up to him for a hug.

‘So you had a bad dream.’ He held Coco close and rocked her. ‘Do you remember what scared you?’

‘Yes!’ She wormed free of his arms and reached under her pillow to pull out a small device that looked rather like a cell phone.

But Charles had never seen one quite like it.

There was no pad of tiny numbers that would have posed some difficulty for Coco. Instead, there was a single large button that glowed when the child pressed it. The button plate was a lighter shade than the surrounding plastic, though, on the whole, this alteration had the seamless look of something manufactured by a machine – and Mallory might as well have signed the contraption. In fact, she had signed it. The big glowing button bore a capital M in the exact shade of the detective’s red nail polish.

Coco smiled, connected now to the one she loved best. ‘I had a bad dream,’ she said to the phone, and then she listened for a moment. ‘It was about rats and wheels . . . They both squeak . . . Yes, the delivery man’s wheels . . . Yes, all the way to the tree.’

Charles nodded, though these words had not been addressed to him. Sounds were a problem for Williams people. Lightning storms could terrify, while vacuum cleaners only caused anxiety. And what of the delivery man and his sounds – the noise of nightmares. Whatever Mallory was saying to the child, it had a calming effect. Coco lay back, smiling, eyes closing to tired slits.

Charles held out his hand, saying, ‘May I?’ She handed him the customized cell phone and then burrowed deep into her pillow. He put the phone to his ear. ‘Mallory? This isn’t what we agreed upon.’ His rules had stipulated no unsupervised visits by police, any police. ‘Covert phone calls are not exactly in the spirit of the—’

‘Put the phone back under her pillow,’ said Mallory. This was an order. ‘If you don’t, she’ll cry.’ And on that note of emotional blackmail, the connection was broken.

The child held out her hands to take the phone, and Charles gave it back to her, unable to cut this new tether to Mallory without causing more trauma – and tears.

The damage just went on and on.

And when – exactly when – had Coco received the one-button cell phone?

He had not taken his eyes off the detective from the moment of her arrival until their departure from the Ramble. Later – long after dark – had Mallory been watching from the street below? Had she seen the light come on in his workshop window? Yes. That would have been her opportunity to break into his apartment for a visit with the little girl.

There was not a lock in the world that could keep her out.

Charles walked to the bedroom door, reached out for the wall switch and turned off the lamp – but not the light. What? He stared at the jar of winged insects on the bedside table. Did it glow more brightly now? Oh, yes. Since he had put the child to bed, her small handful of fireflies had increased their numbers tenfold and then some – with a little help from Mallory, the stealthiest of burglars, a champion snatcher of bugs.

It was childhood’s perfect nightlight.

The squad room was dimly lit, but the lights burned bright down the hall in the geek room, Mallory’s domain. During her three-month absence, other cops, who only knew their way around laptops, had been lost in this small space packed with electronics, nests of wiring and computer elements stacked in alien configurations. And now Riker noticed that more toys had been added since his partner’s homecoming four weeks ago.

Once upon a time, this had been her after-school playground. In those days, when she was shorter, only twelve or thirteen years old, the computers allocated to Special Crimes had been antiquated castoffs from other departments, always crashing, totally useless. But Lou Markowitz’s foster child had shown a natural affinity for these machines, and Lou had set her loose in this electronic playpen one afternoon.

As Riker recalled, only an hour or so had passed before the little runt had come stealing into Lou’s office, saying, ‘With the right parts, I can fix the computers like new.’

The former commander of the unit had been preoccupied with a murder at the time. And so Lou had missed this moment as the beginning of a brand-new crime wave – even as he was abetting it, giving her the forms she needed to requisition her parts. And then the boxes had begun to arrive in the squad room – not small boxes of spare parts, but great big boxes, new computers. Lou had been baffled by the first delivery. What the hell? There had been no paperwork to backtrack a requisition, and no one had even asked him to sign for the packages. Then he had noticed little Kathy dragging her loot down the hall to the geek room, and he had averted his eyes – for years. Perhaps the old man had seen this as a kind of progress: His baby felon was stealing for a higher purpose.

As the grown-up Kathy Mallory would say – yeah, right.

On some level, the child had always been all about getting even with Lou for ending her childhood career as a feral street thief. But once Kathy’s stolen hardware needs were met, she had found a whole new world of things to steal on the Information Superhighway. The child would lay her stolen goods on Lou’s desk, pages of purloined intelligence from data banks in the federal and private sectors. How many times had she stopped the old man’s heart this way? Kathy had always worn her Gotcha smile each time she crept into Lou’s office to hand him one of her – gifts.

Enigmatic brat. That had been Riker’s thought on those curious occasions, though he would never say a four-syllable word out loud. That little half smile of hers had driven him nuts. And then one rainy night after three rounds had been poured in a cop bar down the street, Lou Markowitz had clarified this small mystery, saying, ‘Kathy thinks she’s stealing my soul . . . and it’s true.’ And then the old man had lifted his glass in a toast. ‘That’s my baby.’

Tonight Riker cleared a small table and laid it out with deli napkins and sandwiches. The aroma of hot pastrami filled the geek room. ‘The park worker’s clean, no rap sheet. When the CSU guy picked up the dolly, he collected the coveralls, too. Pollard says you can buy ’em anywhere.’ Was Mallory even listening to him? No, she was communing with her computers, turning from one monitor to another.

He put a cold can of beer in her hand – ladies first – and then popped the metal tab on his own. ‘Coffey never called Tech Support while you were gone.’ Riker settled into the chair beside hers. ‘He wasn’t sure how much of this equipment was legal.’

Mallory tapped her keyboard, her eyes on the screen that displayed the ViCAP logo. Days ago, Detective Janos had used the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program to run a national search of old crimes that would match up with the Hunger Artist. Janos had followed every FBI protocol, answering a tedious hundred and ten questions, writing up addendums, and filing separately for each victim. And after all that work, he had come up dry.

Tonight Mallory was visiting the same federal computers, making no polite knock on the door with a password, no badge number and no tracks left behind. Backdoor access was the phrase she used for robbing the feds blind. ‘There were better places to string up those bodies,’ she said. ‘It’s not like the old days when you could hide an elephant in the Ramble.’

‘Yeah,’ said Riker. ‘The way it is now, any bird-watcher could’ve spotted those sacks.’ Though sacks in trees were not likely to wind up on a police report. ‘Maybe we’re just looking at a high-risk perp.’

‘No,’ said Mallory. ‘I think he’s got some history with that place.’

Riker watched as his partner neatly bypassed the long FBI questionnaire; she wanted no helpful interference from a federal crime analyst. And now an inserted disk released her pet, a virus named Good Dog, a computer canine that could run wild, leaping security fences to roam every file and bring home a bone. Mallory made no mention of winches, sacks and pulleys, batteries or drills. Instead, she typed in a narrow field of description for her dog’s bone: Central Park, NYC, abduction, hanging.

Simple. Elegant. Riker liked it. These few words guaranteed a short list. Swinging by the neck or strung up in a sack, any form of hanging was a rare crime.

‘I’ve got one hit.’ Mallory tapped a key to print out the pages on her screen. ‘Not a match – just a questionnaire from somebody else’s search.’

‘And it wasn’t Janos.’ Riker scanned the pages as they came from the mouth of the printer. ‘This is a real old one – a hundred and eighty-four questions.’ This prior search dated back to a time before the ViCAP forms had been streamlined. Fifteen years ago, some NYPD detective had typed in this description to search the data bank for a similar crime. Back then, the FBI had come up with no matches.

An hour later, when both detectives had finished their late dinner and read all the pages, Mallory said, ‘You know there’s something wrong here.’

Riker nodded. This old case should have been front-page news in its day. ‘It’s the kind of crime you don’t forget, not ever.’ Yet he had never heard of a young child strung up and left to die in the Ramble. How was that possible?

Mallory used one long red fingernail to call her partner’s attention to the line that named the author of this early search.

‘Oh, Christ,’ said Riker. ‘The detective was Rocket Mann?’

The moniker had no good connotation. Also known as Rolland Mann, this former detective, a mediocre cop in every way, had risen quickly through the ranks for no clear reason beyond that catchall term dirty. And today he was only one rung below Police Commissioner Beale.

‘This is bad.’ Riker picked up his copy of the Post and turned to an inside page to show her a news item. ‘Check this out.’ Rhyming lines of bold type above the story read: TOP COP’S HEART STOPS. Old man Beale was in the hospital awaiting bypass surgery.

‘And that makes Rocket Mann the acting commissioner.’ Mallory tapped keys until she was inside an NYPD archive. Slowly she scrolled down the items on the screen. ‘Mann never opened a case file on that boy. No one did. That year, there were only routine assaults and homicides in the Ramble.’

Over her shoulder, Riker read the site-specific list of dead junkies, winos, one tourist shot and two stabbed.

‘No kids,’ said Mallory. ‘Nothing to fit Rocket Mann’s questionnaire. That case got buried . . . and now we get to ask him why.’

The acting police commissioner could not legally refuse an interview, but Rolland Mann could make life hell for the cop who demanded it. Following protocols and ascending hierarchy, one rank reaching up to the next – the first man in the line of fire would be their boss, the commander of the Special Crimes Unit.

Riker lifted his beer to salute his partner. ‘Well, kid, this is the ultimate payback for a month of desk duty. When you tell Coffey we have to interview Rocket Mann, the lieutenant’s head will explode.’

Mallory clinked her beer can with his in a toast. ‘Good times.’