The Chalk Girl

THREE

I’m two grades ahead of my age group. So I have classes with all three of them. In History, Aggy the Biter sits next to me, clicking her teeth. Every now and then, she reaches across the aisle to pinch me. Testing the meat?

—Ernest Nadler

Riding shotgun with his partner would have been more exciting in a real car. Mallory rarely used a siren, preferring to frighten other motorists with close encounters that threatened their paint jobs and taillights. But today she was limited to the top speed of this small park vehicle, a glorified golf cart with a peanut-size engine.

Riker played navigator, consulting a map of narrow roads, meandering trails and the highways of Central Park. As they traveled north, he drew an X over a brand-new city landmark, the spot where the rats had eaten an out-of-towner. They were drawing close to the playground near 68th Street, where Mrs Ortega had seen the missing child. He looked at his watch. Hours had passed since the rat attack in the meadow on the other side of West Drive. ‘We’ll never find her around here. Kids make good time on the run.’ He despaired of locating one little girl in parkland that was miles long, half a mile wide and filled with a million trees to hide her. And yet his partner aimed the cart with confidence and sure direction. ‘So what do you know that I don’t know?’

‘Coco’s not hiding,’ said Mallory. ‘She’s trying to connect with people. She’ll stick to this road.’

His partner had the inside track on lost children. She used to be one – if it could be said that she was ever a real child. She had arrived at the Markowitz household with a full skill set for survival at the age of ten or eleven. Her foster parents, Lou and Helen, had never been certain of her age because the child-size Kathy Mallory had also shown a genius for deception. But stealing was where Riker thought the kid really shined in her puppy days.

Eliciting fear was a talent she had later grown into.

After passing the park exit for 77th Street, Mallory pressed the gas pedal to the floor and jumped the curb to aim the cart at two boys with skateboards in hand. They wore kneepads and wrist guards and helmets, all the cushions that parents could provide to keep their young alive in New York City. True, these youngsters were teenagers, but someone loved them. When the cart braked to a sudden stop, the front wheels were inches from their kneecaps – and the boys laughed. No shock, no awe, for this was a toy car. And then the fun was over. They had locked eyes with Mallory.

Oh, shit.

Words were unnecessary. She only nodded to say, Yes, I’m a cop. Yes, I carry a gun – a big one. She tilted her head to one side and smiled, silently asking if they might have a bit of weed in their pockets that would interest her.

Teenagers were so easy.

Riker held up his badge and waved them over to his side of the cart. He reached into his pocket for the photograph of Mrs Ortega’s fairy figurine. ‘Okay, guys, this is how it works. One smartass remark and my partner shoots you. We’re hunting for a lost kid. The girl looks something like this.’ He showed them the photo and read one boy’s mind when he saw the smirk. ‘Forget you saw the wings.’ He nodded toward Mallory. ‘She will hurt you.’

‘Yeah, we saw the kid,’ said the taller boy. ‘Well, you’re headed in the right direction.’ He pointed back the way he had come with his friend. ‘Take the first path on the right. She was running east.’

‘She went into the Ramble?’ Riker shaded his eyes to look toward that area of dense woods, once notorious as a haven for addicts and muggers with knives and guns, and for bob-and-drop rapists with rocks. In more recent times, the wildwood had been invaded by bird-watchers, joggers and grandmothers. ‘How long ago?’

‘Maybe an hour – half an hour.’

‘Talk to me.’ Mallory zeroed in on the other boy’s guilty face. ‘What else happened?’

This teenager looked down at the grass and then up to the sky. ‘She asked me for a hug.’

‘But she was dirty.’ Mallory stepped out of the cart. ‘Probably a homeless kid.’ Her voice was a monotone. ‘You thought you might catch something – bedbugs or lice.’ She circled around the boy, snatched his skateboard and tossed it under the wheels of the cart. And still, he would not look at her. ‘That little girl had blood on her T-shirt, and she was scared, wasn’t she? But you had plans for the day, places to go – no time to call the cops.’ Mallory held up her open hand and showed the boy his own pricey cell phone. He stared at it in disbelief as he patted the empty back pocket of his jeans.

‘You think I can hit the water from here?’ She glanced at the long finger of lake water bordered with an orange construction fence, and she hefted his phone as if weighing it. ‘Talk to me.’

The teenager turned his worried eyes to Riker, who only shrugged to say I warned you about her.

It was the other boy who spoke first, maybe in fear for his own cell phone. ‘The girl was a little strange . . . I thought she was gonna cry when—’

‘When your friend blew her off?’ With only the prompt of Mallory folding her arms, both of them were talking at once, and now they remembered – suddenly and conveniently – that Coco had run toward another park visitor.

‘We figured he’d call the cops.’

‘Yeah,’ said Riker, ‘sure you did.’ Pissant liar.

The teenager gave him a snarky so-what smile – no respect.

Smug lies to cops should have consequences, but rather than shake the little bastard until his perfect teeth came loose, Riker turned away and climbed into the cart. Behind him, he heard a splash followed by the boy’s ‘Oh, shit! My phone!’ Then Mallory was back in the driver’s seat, and the cart lurched forward with the satisfying crunch of a skateboard under one wheel.

The detectives traveled down a narrow road and into the woods at the reckless top speed of hardly any miles per hour. The Ramble was a sprawl of thirty-eight acres, thick with trees and lush foliage, beautiful and disheartening. On Riker’s map, this area was a daunting maze of winding paths. ‘We’ll never find her in here.’

‘Sure we will. The kid’s running scared. She’ll make all the easy choices.’ Mallory passed every turnoff, staying on the widest path and only slowing down for a closer look at a low, flimsy, wire fence. And now a full stop. One section of the fence had been pulled down to the ground. Old lessons of the late Lou Markowitz – she would always stop to look at every odd thing. And then she drove on.

As they rolled out of the Ramble and onto open ground down near the Boathouse Café on the east side of the lake, Riker answered his cell phone. ‘Yeah?’ He turned to his partner. ‘We’re headed the right way. We got a fairy sighting on the mall.’

Beyond the lake of rowboats and ducks, past Bethesda Terrace, they drove onto the park mall and into the mellow tones of a saxophone near the old band shell. Four people were coming toward them, frightened and running faster than the cart could go. The detectives traveled past them and down the wide pedestrian boulevard lined with giant trees, benches and street lamps from the gaslight era. High above them was a canopy of leafy branches, and up ahead was the sound of a Dixieland band, which seemed to orchestrate the civilian scramble for park exits. The music stopped when Riker flashed his badge.

‘False alarm,’ said the banjo man, holding up his cell phone. ‘We thought the kid was lost, but then she hooked up with a tour group.’

And the trumpet player said, ‘I gave them directions to the park zoo.’

The cart rolled on, pedal to the floor.

‘Hold it!’ yelled Riker. They braked to a sudden stop as a gang of rats cut across the paving stones in front of them. ‘What the hell?’ Downtown in his SoHo neighborhood, the rodents were all dilettantes who never turned out until ten o’clock at night, and they avoided people. They were rarely seen except as shining eyes reflecting streetlights and watching from the dark of alleys and trashcans. Sometimes he would see one scurrying close to a wall, but he had never seen galloping rats, backs arching and elongating. No doubt these were people-eating escapees from Sheep Meadow. Most of the vermin had cleared the path when one brazen animal stopped in front of their vehicle. The lone rat reared up on his hind legs and faced them down – absolutely fearless – almost admirable.

Mallory ran over him.

Upon entering the zoo on foot, the detectives decided not to show the fairy photograph. Instead they worked off the simple description of a small redhead in a bloody T-shirt. Here, where civilians were sheltered from hysterical screamers and marauding vermin, there were no signs of panic. A tranquil visitor pointed them toward the exhibit at the heart of a plaza, a raised cement pool where sea lions lazed atop slabs of rock, dozing and baking under the noonday sun. And there was the little girl, standing on the steps that surrounded the enclosure. A zoo employee kept his distance from her while making a long reach to hand over the traditional ice-cream cone for the lost child.

Mallory called out, ‘Coco!’

The tiny girl dropped her cone and ran toward them, laughing and crying, her puny arms outstretched to beg an embrace. The desperation on her dirty little face saddened Riker. A hug might well be oxygen to her, the stuff of life itself. She needed this. Mrs Ortega was right – Coco had no survival instincts. The clueless child had picked his partner as a source of warmth and comfort.

Coco wrapped her arms around the tall blond detective, who not only tolerated the embrace but smiled down upon this poor bloodstained baby – Mallory’s ticket to the street. No more desk duty. A lost child was found, and this had the makings of a great press release to lessen the damage to tourism done by bloodthirsty rats. The mayor would be so grateful.

Redbrick walls, trees and flowers enclosed the courtyard of the zoo’s café. The luncheon crowd was terrorized by screaming gangs of toddlers and faster youngsters pursued by frazzled young women. Older women, veteran mommies, sat quietly, waiting for the children’s batteries to run down. And strolling pigeons were beggars at every outdoor table.

Coco, a born storyteller, alternately chomped a hotdog and gave the detectives more details of her odyssey through Central Park. No question could have a simple answer without the embroidery of fantasy. In respect to the spots on her T-shirt, she said, ‘The blood comes from the same place the rats do.’ She pointed upward. ‘There are rats who live in the sky.’ She looked from Riker’s face to Mallory’s, correctly suspecting skepticism in their eyes. ‘Some do,’ she said with great dignity and authority. ‘Sometimes it rains rats, and sometimes it rains blood.’ She shrugged one thin shoulder to tell them that this weather phenomenon was a bit of a crapshoot.

Mallory’s indulgence was wearing off. ‘You saw the rats with the woman who—’

Riker put up one hand to forestall a grisly account of Mrs Lanyard’s demise. ‘So you saw all those rats in the meadow, huh?’

‘Yes. Then everyone ran away. Me, too.’ In the child’s version, a few dozen rats became a horde of thousands, and all of them were big as houses with teeth as long as her arms. ‘Rats are prolific breeders.’

Riker wondered how many six-year-olds had prolific in their small store of words.

‘Whose blood is that?’ Mallory was not a great believer in sky rats and blood rain.

‘It’s God’s blood,’ said Coco.

Riker stared at the red stains. The elongated shapes did suggest drops falling from above, but so much of the world was above the head of this child. ‘Where were you when the blood landed on your T-shirt?’

‘In the park. There are lots of rats in the park. Most people never see them. They’re usually nocturnal.’

‘Nocturnal? That’s a long word for a little girl,’ said Riker. ‘How old are you?’

‘I’m eight.’ She said this with pride. It might be true. She was smaller than other children that age, but her words were bigger.

Mallory placed her own hotdog on Coco’s tray, and the child fell upon it as if she had not been fed for days. ‘You were in the park at night? That’s how you know rats are nocturnal?’

‘I read that in a book.’ The little girl demolished the second hotdog. ‘Granny used to give me book lessons every day. That was before I went to live with Uncle Red. But when it got dark, he had himself delivered to the park. I went to look for him, but he turned into a tree.’

‘So you were here all night?’ Now Riker was incredulous. ‘All by yourself?’

‘Yes. I listened to the tree all night long – every night. You know the way trees cry. They don’t have mouths, so it sounds like this.’ She covered her mouth with both hands and made a muffled plaintive sound.

Riker felt a sudden chill with this hint of something true. He stared at the blood on the child’s T-shirt.

Whose blood?

Mallory used a napkin to gently wipe mustard from Coco’s chin, rewarding her with this little act of kindness – training her – like a puppy. ‘Let’s go find your Uncle Red.’

It was the freelancer’s day off from the despair of never landing a full-time job, and all he had with him was a damn camera phone. Though he had seen it happen with his own eyes, no photo editor would ever believe that rat had fallen from the sky. He had snapped the picture seconds too late, only able to capture an image of a rodent riding the back of a woman. He had followed the screaming lady on a chase of many twisty paths before losing her.

It was his first time in the Ramble, which had no helpful signs with cute names for these trails, and he had been traveling in circles for nearly an hour. As he walked, he looked down at the image displayed on his camera phone, looking for landmarks of the place where the rat-ridden woman had begun her mad dash. Finally he was on the right path again. Yes, this was where he had seen the rat come down from the sky. Looking upward at the overreaching branches, he conceded that the rodent had most likely fallen from a tree, though it was still a hell of a shot.

But when did rats start climbing trees?

He stared at the picture on the small screen of his cell phone, the photograph of a woman with a rat in her hair. In the background, there was a smaller figure – a red-haired child, her head tilted back – looking up at what? More tree rats? He stood on the exact spot where the curious little girl had been standing an hour ago. Staring up into the dense leaves, he detected something green but not leafy. A bulging bag was strung up on a high branch, and – holy shit! – it moved. A rat emerged from a tear in the bag, and now the creature was coming down through the leaves, dropping from one bough to land on a lower one. An acrobat rat? It paused on the lowest limb to have its picture taken. Click. Fat and ungainly, the rodent barely kept its balance with tiny vermin hands. A drunken rat? Its fur was slicked down, and the rat shook itself like a wet dog, splattering the freelancer’s white shirt – oh, crap – with drops of blood.

Mallory led a short parade of vehicles. Behind the detectives rode two patrolmen, and the third cart was driven by a park ranger. The little girl sat on Riker’s lap, her head turning from side to side, looking for a dead bird, she said. They were traveling north, heading back toward the Ramble again, with only the child’s cryptic clue of water tied with a fat orange ribbon; and that would be the maintenance crew’s fence around a sliver of the lake, the same place where Mallory had tossed a teenager’s phone into the water. As the three carts rolled along West Drive, the detectives learned that the formal name of Coco’s granny was Grandmother. Uncle Red had no other designation.

And this child had survived more than one night in the park.

‘Stop!’ When the carts pulled over to the curb, Coco jumped out to inspect another drinking fountain, the third one along this route. ‘This is it,’ she said, pointing to the eyeless dead bird in the basin. She recoiled from the buzzing flies that covered the tiny corpse, and she ran to the end of a curved stone wall, holding both hands over her ears.

Mallory called the little girl back to the cart, and the search party headed into the Ramble, rolling on paths too narrow for larger vehicles. Coco could offer them no more guidance, but Mallory seemed to need no directions, and Riker had a fair idea of where she was going. She stopped the cart at the place where she had earlier paused for a closer look at something that passed for minor vandalism. Now she pointed to a small section of chicken-wire fence that had been forced down. ‘Coco, have you seen that before?’

‘I didn’t do it,’ said the little girl. And Riker had to smile, for this was his partner’s trademark line. Coco climbed down from his lap to stand on the path. ‘We’re here.’

The park ranger left his own vehicle. ‘The kid should get back in the cart. We’ve got a rat swarm in the Ramble. That’s why you don’t see any people here. They swarmed, too.’

‘We’re half a mile from Sheep Meadow,’ said Mallory. ‘Aren’t rats territorial?’

‘Yes, ma’am, but these aren’t the same rats.’ The ranger pointed east. ‘Our new exterminator flushed another swarm out of a building on the other side of the Ramble. He was supposed to kill them, but he just got them stoned on chemicals.’

‘He fumigated rats . . . in a park.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said the ranger, his face deadpan, his voice without affect. ‘And now they’re all so wonderfully uninhibited.’

‘Well, that explains a lot.’ Riker settled the child on the passenger seat of the park ranger’s cart. ‘Okay, honey, you stay here and talk rats with the funny man.’

When the detective had joined his partner by the downed section of fence, the ranger called to them, ‘Watch out! The rats are more aggressive now, and they bite. If you see one, don’t run. That only encourages them. I think they like it when you run.’

Mallory pointed to the ground where deep twin ruts were overlapped by shallow ones. ‘A tire-tread pattern for two wheels. That fits with something small, like a hand truck.’

‘A delivery guy’s dolly. Coco said her uncle was delivered to the park.’ Riker’s shoes left no footprints on the dry dirt. ‘So the dolly came through here after the rain, when the ground was soft.’

‘But it hasn’t rained for days.’ Mallory bent low to examine the exposed earth and sparse weeds trampled by the wheels. ‘The dolly’s load was heavy going in and a lot lighter coming back out.’

Light by one body? And might that body belong to Coco’s missing uncle?

Mallory, a born-again believer in sky rats and blood rain, was looking upward as she entered the thick of the trees. It was Riker who saw the patches of human flesh between the leaves of foliage on the ground – then the profile of a face – and now the fronds of a fern were pulled away to expose a naked man lying on his side. Wrists and ankles tied by rope, the body was bent backwards like an archer’s bow. Riker reached down to touch the flesh. Cold and rigid. Late-stage rigor mortis? The one visible eye was sunk deep in its socket, and the bluish skin was mottled.

‘Textbook dead.’ Riker called out to the ranger on babysitting detail. ‘Get the kid outta here!’

As the ranger’s cart drove off with Coco, Mallory shouted at the two uniformed officers, ‘Nobody gets past you! Got that?’

The patrolmen stood guard by the fallen fence while the detectives made a closer inspection of the nude corpse. ‘Dark brown hair,’ said Riker. ‘I’m guessing this isn’t the kid’s Uncle Red. Maybe we still got another body to find.’

He heard the rats before he saw them, quick scrabbling through the underbrush, then twitching into view, dozens of them. The first one to jump the dead man sniffed out the soft delicacies of the eyes. Riker, a man with a fully loaded gun, not a shy or retiring type, was scared witless, but he would not run. Like Mallory, he stood his ground while rats ran around their shoes to get at the body. ‘Hey!’ he yelled, waving his arms. That should have scattered them, but the critters seemed not to notice. All the rules of rodents were suspended today, and all that he could count on was the fact that vermin carried ticks and fleas and plagues from the Middle Ages. And their teeth were so terribly sharp.

His partner picked up a rock and nailed one rat with an all-star pitch. Oh, bless Lou Markowitz for teaching his kid the all-American game of baseball – and trust Mallory to pervert it this way. Calm and composed, she snapped on a Latex glove, then picked up the bloodied rat by the tail and dangled it. The rest of them lifted their snouts to sniff the air. She swung the limp rat wide of the corpse, and it sailed past the startled patrolmen to land on the path by the carts.

Setting an example for the other rats? No, not quite.

The vermin swarmed toward the smell of fresh, flowing blood and gnawed on their not-quite-dead brother rat. The carnage on the path was a frenzy of ripping teeth, blood fly and whipping tails. Mallory’s early childhood on the streets had outfitted her with all the ugliest shortcuts for pest control.

One of the patrolmen called out, his voice young and hopeful, ‘Can we shoot ’em?’

Without a direct order from a superior, these patrolmen would be sent to NYPD Hell if they discharged their service weapons – even for the just cause of protecting a crime scene.

Riker gave them a thumbs-up, and the two officers whiled away their time picking off rats with bullets. Bang! went the guns, Bang! Bang! All around them, screaming birds took flight. The rats that were still alive remained. Still hungry.

The detectives knelt down beside the naked victim. Riker guessed that rigor mortis had set in hours ago. The bound corpse was frozen in his hog-tied pose.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Ligature marks on wrists and ankles were crusted with old blood from a struggle to get free, and that had probably attracted the rats, though the abrasions showed signs of early healing. How long had this body been lying here? A piece of duct tape dangled from the dead man’s chin. Another piece clung to the side of the face, and rough threads from a burlap weave were caught between the lips.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

Mallory looked up, and Riker followed the line of her gaze. His eyes were not so young, and he had to squint to make out the slack shape of green material hanging from a high bough of the tree, and there was a gaping hole at the bottom of this empty bag. Giving up the only vanity of his middle age, he donned a pair of bifocals to see twigs and branches bent and broken where they had slowed the progress of a falling body.

His partner leaned over the rigid corpse at their feet. With one gloved hand, she lightly touched straight lines of sticky residue where the tape had once covered the eyes and mouth. Here the skin was raw. ‘He rubbed his face against the burlap to get the tape off.’

And patches of dried-out skin had come off with it. How long had this poor bastard gone without food and water?

‘Okay, we got a real sick game here,’ said Riker. ‘Look at this.’ He pointed to a wad of wax that plugged an ear cavity. ‘Our freak’s into sensory deprivation. No sight, no hearing, just starvation and slow death.’

The detectives heard the buzz before they saw the insects that always came to lay their eggs in decomposing flesh. The first fly landed to crawl upon the dead man’s eyeball.

The corpse blinked – and then it screamed.