Winter House

Chapter 2

CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER EDWARD SLOPE MIGHT HAVE BEEN taken for a military man as he walked down the hall to his office. He had a stride that bordered on a march, and his face had all the animation of a granite war monument.

The doctor was an early riser. Though he had minions, a small army of them, he was always the first to report for work. He cherished the quiet hours of daybreak, when the dead were content to wait until he had finished the newspaper, and the living would not intrude upon him while his coffee was still hot. If there was a God, then one of the assistant medical examiners could crack open the first corpse of the morning, and he might get caught up on a backlog of files. But first – a little solitude. He unlocked the door to his office with a plan to work on the Times crossword puzzle.

Or not.

Kathy Mallory was asleep in his chair.

Well, this put a lie to Detective Riker’s theory that she slept hanging by her heels like a bat. While her uncivilized eyes were closed, she looked rather like a child napping after a busy tour of duty on a homicide squad – and a bit of illegal trespass. A velvet pouch, holding bright bits of metal, lay open upon his desk blotter.

Poor baby.

Apparently, sleep had overtaken her before she could put her lock picks away.

Oh, surprise number two.

Her eyes snapped open in the mechanical fashion of a doll – or a robot. There was no middle gear of rousing from sleep and dreams. She was simply awake, and this lent credence to his own theory that she had an on-off switch.

„Good morning, Kathy.“

„Mallory,“ she said, reminding him of the rules. She liked the chilly distance of formality.

Well, isn ‘t that just too bad.

He had known her as Kathy since she was ten years old, though she had insisted at the time that she was twelve. His oldest friend, Louis Markowitz, had bargained her down to the more realistic age of eleven so that he could complete the paperwork for her foster care.

Eleven, in a pig’s eye.

But who could discern the true age of a homeless child who was also a gifted liar – and worse. She was the fault in the doctor’s personal myth of himself as an intractable man. Upon the death of her foster father, killed in the line of duty, Edward Slope had tried to fill that void, loving her enough for two, but he was no pushover. And this business of breaking into his office – well, he was not about to let that slide. He reached across the desk to grab her lock picks, planning to use them as a show-and-tell exhibit while he lectured her on -

The lock picks were gone.

She had pocketed them in a sleight of hand, and the doctor knew this drill all too well: if he had no evidence of her illegal entry, then there had been no crime that she would own up to.

Kathy Mallory laid her hands flat on the desk, her desk now. How she loved these little hieratic strategies of furniture and psychological leverage. „I need an autopsy, all the trimmings.“

„Get in line.“ Slope settled into one of the visitors’ chairs. „It might take a few days.“ He opened his newspaper, her cue to leave, as if that ever worked. „I’ll have Dr. Morgan determine the – “

„No. It has to be you.“ She was almost petulant. „It has to be now.“

„You don’t have the rank to make that kind of a request,“ he said, tacking on, „Kathy,“ just for fun.

„Mallory,“ she said, insistent.

She held up a stack of photographs, then fanned them like a deck of cards and dealt them out, one by one – just like her old man. Louis Markowitz had been a portly soul with hound-dog jowls and a charming way about him. Charm had never been an option for Kathy, and yet, every now and then, the doctor fancied that he found traces of Lou lingering on in his foster child, sometimes a gesture or a phrase.

Briefly put, Lou’s daughter knew how to manipulate him.

Even though he was fully aware of her calculation, this deliberate and casual way she had of breaking his heart, he played along every time. The doctor leaned forward to examine the crime-scene photographs, torso shots all of them, and every camera angle showed a pair of scissors driven into the victim’s chest.

„Good aim,“ he said, „no hesitation marks. Hardly any blood loss, so it was a quick death – but you already knew that.“ Truly, he was intrigued by the request for a full autopsy, but he could not simply ask her a direct question. Their relationship had the strict parameters of a duel. And now, as he leaned back in his chair, he was even more generous with his sarcasm. „So… you had some doubt about what killed this man?“

„No, but it wasn’t the scissors.“ She wore the only smile in her limited store of expression that was not forced. It was the smile that said, Gotcha.

In the early gray light of her bedroom, Nedda Winter lay very still, not even drawing a breath – waiting for the panic to subside. It was always alarming to open her eyes and find herself alone. And how quiet it was. She had lived too many years with constant companions, never awakening in any normal sense, but ripped from sleep with the early morning orchestra of a one-note moaner in the next bed, and beyond that one, the screamer’s bed and a chorus of harpies singing an angry song of Shut up! Shut the hell up! or Nursey, Nursey, I’m cold, I’m wet. Nedda had played the audience for them, staring vacantly in the direction of their noise and wondering how she would get through another day. Her nights had been whiled away with plans for her own slow death. But that was over now. She had a new plan and something to live for.

Her heart settled into a normal rhythm, and her gaze calmly roved over the daisy pattern on the century-old wallpaper. The flowers had been yellowed with age generations before she was born. All the other bedrooms of the house had been repapered in her absence. Here, nothing had changed. The furniture was the same, just as she had left it when she was twelve years old, except for the trunk that once sat at the foot of her bed. All of the Winter children had had such trunks. By custom of the house, hers had probably been consigned to the attic when she was assumed to be dead. Otherwise, this might be like any morning from her childhood.

Only the music was missing.

She reached out to her bedside table and turned on the old radio. It was tuned to a station that played only jazz, her father’s favorite music for as far back as memory would take her. When Quentin Winter was alive, trumpets and piano riffs had filled this house, day and night, loudest in the party hours. Mellow saxophones had dominated at the break of a new day, and, toward midmorning, Daddy had played the blues as background music for his hangovers.

Nedda pulled on her robe and entered the bathroom, where her eyes bypassed that strange old woman in the mirror. She looked down at the wide array of pharmacy bottles lined up on the sink. One by one, she flushed her morning doses down the toilet. The medication had been prescribed for an illness that she had never had, and now she watched the tablets swirling around the toilet bowl. What luxury this was after all the years of picking up the pills that other patients had spit out, then ingesting them, tasting other people’s bile and inheriting their diseases and sundry germs. How difficult it would be to make anyone understand that this slow attempt at suicide had been the act of a sane woman. Now, in the absence of any medication, she was getting stronger every day, disappointing her brother and sister.

Barefoot, she left her room. On the other side of the door, she met her dead stepmother on the day of the massacre. In the manner of a puppeteer, memory worked Alice Winter’s limbs, and the pretty woman crossed the threshold of the bedroom to rouse another version of Nedda – -young Nedda with the long red hair. The house itself had been drowsing, running off the low batteries of nine sleepy children on a Sunday morning.

As Nedda started down the staircase, her father, with only a few more hours to live, was climbing toward her. Fifty-eight years ago, she had stood on tiptoe to kiss him in passing. Now she simply watched him go by in his silk pajamas and dressing gown. What a beautiful man he was, long fair hair like a prince from another age. He was holding a glass with the foul-smelling ingredients of his hangover cure. The disembodied voice of Billie Holiday wafted up the stairs behind him, dogging him from the phonograph below and moaning the blues to Daddy.

In the next century, Nedda completed her descent to the parlor floor, where Bitty was a child-size lump beneath the afghan on the sofa. She sat down in a chair beside her sleeping niece and waited. A few minutes passed before the younger woman sensed another presence in the room. Small hands gripped the afghan, and her eyes opened, cagey at first, only looking through slits for signs of danger. „Aunt Nedda?“

Was there just a touch of fear in Bitty’s voice? Yes, and Nedda winced.

„Good morning, dear. I was just curious. What did you do with the tape from the security camera? The police were asking about it.“

„I put it where they’d never want to look.“ Bitty fumbled with the afghan then produced her Bible from the folds of wool and opened it.

Oh, not a book at all.

The Bible was a clever box, and nestled inside a rectangular compartment was the videotape.

The morgue attendant from the graveyard shift was not at his desk. The chief medical examiner was about to ask Kathy Mallory what she had done with the poor man’s body, but then the double doors swung open and Ray Fallon appeared, alive if not well. He was nervous – Kathy had that effect on him – and sweating from recent exertion.

After handing a deli bag to the detective, the attendant was tipped lavishly but not thanked, not that Fallon cared, so eager was he to get away from her. „Men’s room,“ he said to his boss.

And Slope knew that the man would not be back again until Kathy had left the premises. „You sent him out for your breakfast?“ The doctor affected the lecture mode that he used when he suspected her of cheating at cards. „If you think I’m going to tolerate – “

„I had to get rid of him.“ She dug into the brown paper bag and pulled out a bagel. „I can’t afford any leaks on this case, and he’s the worst. You know you should’ve fired that weasel years ago.“

This was her very best trick – reversal of guilt, and he should have seen it coming because she was right.

Kathy Mallory bit into her bagel. With her free hand, she pulled out the metal drawer where she kept her own personal corpse. The victim was still encased in the body bag, and there was no attendant paperwork attached. None of her crime-scene photos had included any body parts above or below the torso, and now she pulled back the zipper to give the pathologist his first look at the face. „It’s Willy Roy Boyd.“

„Ah,“ said Slope, „your lady-killer. So, given his current condition – dead – I’m guessing that you lost your temper when he made bail.“

Her strip show continued downward until she had exposed the pair of scissors sticking out of the man’s chest.

„Point taken,“ he said. „Not your style.“ If Kathy had inflicted this wound, the scissors would have been placed more symmetrically and at a perfect right angle to the flesh. She was peculiar that way, compulsively neat.

The doctor unzipped the rest of the body. „If I were to roll him over, would I see any other signs of trauma?“

„No,“ she said. „That’s not it.“

And the game went on.

He checked the dead man’s eyes and fingernails. „No obvious indication of poison.“ He stared at the chest. „Those shears make a hell of an entry wound. I would’ve expected more blood.“

„Right. He was dead when the scissors went in, but Dr. Morgan didn’t catch that. He said the scissors contained the bleeding like a stopper in a bottle.“

In defense of his young and unseasoned, possibly incompetent, medical examiner, Dr. Slope said, „Well, that’s one possibility.“ Like hell it was. Hers was the more likely explanation. The dead man was thin, his chest concave, and the shears went deep. One did not rupture the human heart so neatly, not with a weapon of this size and thickness. „I’ll know for sure after the chest is cracked. So you don’t think he was stabbed to death.“

„Of course he was stabbed to death.“ The perverse brat paused a moment to relish this small win, the look of surprise in his eyes. She pointed to the chest. „And that’s the only entry wound.“

Edward Slope had to smile. He was the one who had taught her this twisted game. The student was surpassing the master.

Kathy Mallory picked through the dead man’s hair. Finding something she liked, she said, „See this spot of blood on the scalp?“

Slope adjusted his glasses as he leaned over the corpse. „Yes, and here’s another one on the upper lip. So small.“

„And this drop on his shirt.“ One red fingernail marked the spot. „That’s three drops total. And none of the blood is where you’d expect to find it if the shears had killed him. It’s a back-strike splatter. So the wound was made with something smaller, thinner.“ She leaned down to rifle her knapsack and pulled out a bag tagged by Forensics. It contained an ice pick. „I like this for the primary weapon. I want his stomach contents. I want to know what he ate for his last meal and where he ate it. I want a screen for drugs. If he’s a user, I need to know when he got his last fix. And I want – “

„Stop.“ The doctor put one hand up in the manner of a traffic cop. „First things first. A few drops of back-strike blood doesn’t prove it was an ice pick. I can’t even corroborate a second weapon. I’ve told you a hundred times, textbook scenarios don’t even get close to the spectrum of trauma I see on my dissection table.“

„I didn’t work this out by reading a book.“ She opened the evidence bag and held it close to his face. „Sniff that.“

No need. The odor of bleach was strong. „Someone cleaned it.“

She turned over the evidence bag to show him the white residue of a price tag peeled from the bottom of the pick handle. „It’s brand new, a perfectly smooth surface. Heller says, even without the bleach, his luminal wouldn’t pick up any blood on the metal. But this is the weapon. It fits with the back-strike blood.“

„You know who killed him, too?“

„An old lady.“

„Good,“ said Slope, finding this only fitting since Willy Roy Boyd had murdered three women. And now he better understood police concerns about leaks to the newspapers. He envisioned the headline: Old Lady Kills Lady-Killer.

Kathy Mallory parted the hair on the dead man’s scalp. „This drop runs horizontally. The woman said they were both standing when she stabbed him.“

And blood ran down, not sideways. „So, either the law of gravity has changed or the old woman lied.“

„No, I believed that part. He was on his feet when she stabbed him the first time. But he was down and dead when she pulled out the pick. And that explains the drop of blood in a horizontal streak.“

The doctor nodded. „And then the shears were pushed into a prone corpse.“ He smiled. „Congratulations. Now you can nail an old lady for mutilating a corpse, but he’s just as dead either way, and hardly worth the trouble of – “

„I want that autopsy. I need proof that the ice pick killed him.“

„Any idea why this woman would go to the trouble of planting a second weapon?“

„Yes.“

„But you’re not going to share. No, of course not. What was I thinking? So, obviously, you want evidence to dispute her claim of self-defense.“

„No, that holds up,“ she said. „Willy Roy Boyd was a one-trick pony. He was in that house last night to kill a woman.“

Though Edward Slope’s brain had stripped a few gears, he was damned if he would let it show. The doctor stared at her with his best poker face, but hers was better.

Endgame.

Kathy Mallory had won a full autopsy by the chief medical examiner, for now that he had been suckered in – what were the odds that he would let anyone else touch this corpse?

Waiting for the explosion, boys? The upper half of the wall was a wide window on the squad room, and, with the blinds open, Lieutenant Coffey’s private office was a damned goldfish bowl on view for fifteen pairs of eyes. He pretended not to notice the men beyond the glass as they covertly looked his way.

The lieutenant was young for a command position, only thirty-six, but he was aging fast to fit the job. Stress had chiseled new lines into his face, giving him an expression of constant pain, and, just now, it was a fight to bite back a scream as three detectives brazenly walked up to the glass, the better to observe their boss, the poor bastard with the thinning brown hair, the tension headaches and a knotted-up gut.

The case load for Special Crimes Unit had spiraled out of control. And the new mayor, a man with the soul of a corporate raider, was planning to cut the department’s allotment in manpower and funds. Every day was run at a heart-attack pace, and yet, Jack Coffey was showing no early warning signs that this was the worst possible time to jerk him around, nor had he raised his voice to Mallory and Riker, who sat unmolested on the other side of his desk. He was not even holding a gun on them, and the other detectives must find that odd.

When he glanced at the glass wall again, he saw money flashing out there in the squad room. Bastards, they were making book on this meeting.

Never let the troops see you crying like a little girl.

That was his mantra today.

Riker and Mallory were on their best behavior this morning, quietly waiting for him to finish scanning another precinct’s report on a common burglary gone awry. He crumpled the cover sheet in one hand. Well, this was just great, this crap. Why would these two detectives drag this case home to an elite squad of firstgrade gold shields?

„Mallory, close the blinds!“

This was a test, and he was gratified to see her do it, and so quickly, not even dragging it out to jack up his frenzy.

Big mistake, Mallory.

Now he knew that all the leverage in this room belonged to him. Better than that – with the blinds drawn and no witnesses, he could do whatever he liked with these two. He leaned forward and gave them his most benign smile to knock them off balance. The partners exchanged looks that clearly said, Oh, shit.

So they wanted this case really bad.

Well, tough.

But he just had to know why.

He pulled one sheet out of the pile of paperwork, the results of the fingerprint search they had requested. „You’ll be happy to know that neither one of your socialites has a criminal record. What a surprise, huh?“ He also crumpled this paper into a ball and tossed it over one shoulder, then picked up a collection of forms that transferred the dead man to his own doorstep. „And this makes it official. We’ve been screwed in triplicate.“ He took his time crushing these sheets into another ball. He bounced it off the back wall. After spreading out the remaining paperwork, he selected two sheets from the array. „Well, what have we got here?“ Could his sarcasm be more obvious? Did he need to work on that? „I’m looking at two witness statements, one from a little old lady, eighty years – “

„That’s a typo,“ said Mallory. „Nedda Winter’s only seventy.“

„And she’s at least as tall as Mallory,“ said Riker.

„Maybe an inch over,“ she said.

„Yeah,“ said Riker. „Make that five-eleven.“

Coffey glared at his detectives, then looked down at the paperwork, saying, „And next we have a shitpile of biblical quotations from Bitty Smyth, a forty-year-old woman of undetermined’height.“ He paused to glance at Mallory. „Just jump right in if I get anything else wrong, okay?“ His true message to her, delivered only by the tone of his voice, was You speak – -you die.

The lieutenant turned to his senior detective, whose face was always easier to read. „So, Riker, the catching detectives agreed with you. They figured it for a staged crime scene. Fair enough. Heller’s report backs them up. But the old lady explained that in her statement. She was afraid the cops wouldn’t be very understanding if she ‘d killed an unarmed burglar. So she put the ice pick in his hand.“ Jack Coffey leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. „Well, I say no harm done. She gets to slide on that one. I may even send her roses for killing that butcher.“ He swiveled his chair to face Mallory. „I’m surprised that Nedda Winter isn’t your new best friend. Willy Roy Boyd was your perp. You think a quick death was too good for that little freak? Would you rather wait out years of appeals before the state put him down with a needle?“

„That old woman lied about the – “

„Miss Winter gets away with everything, Mallory.“ Coffey picked up the amended statement and scanned the lines for the one he wanted. „She says her medication causes confusion.“

„Ah, bless her.“ Riker flashed a smile at Mallory. „Nedda was good, wasn’t she?“

Jack Coffey was not amused. „Maybe you guys should’ve brought her in here to do your talking for you. I called the old lady myself. It took me five minutes to queer the idea of an inside job. She said there was always a spare key in the planter outside the front door, and she couldn’t remember setting the burglar alarm last night. So much for our perp turning off the alarm with a security code. She also solved your problem with the missing videotape. A patrol cop named Brill took it out of the security camera.“ Coffey looked down at his personal notes. „That was last week after an attempted break-in. The cop returned it to Bitty Smyth, but she never got around to reloading the camera. The ladies figure the housekeeper tossed out the videotape with the trash.“

The lieutenant picked up Mallory’s report, but never bothered to read it. He preferred to make up his own more accurate summary. „Now the catching detectives couldn’t fob the case off on Robbery Homicide. And why not? Because those guys had the brains to bow out early. Then, while you two have your backs turned, the West Side dicks skate out the door and leave their mess in your lap. Now I know the two of you could’ve dumped this case on another squad if you’d only tried harder and talked faster.

You’ve got thirty minutes to do the paperwork and close it out as justifiable homicide.“

Jack Coffey was shuffling all the reports and statements into a neat stack when Mallory leaned forward.

Trouble.

„There’s more to it,“ she said. „West Side screwed up. Willy Roy Boyd was hired for a murder. It’s all there,“ she said, pointing to her own report, the one he had never read. „It all fits.“

„Talk fast, Mallory.“

„The West Side precinct has no volume in homicides,“ she said. „They looked at the same evidence and came up clueless. If we just write this one off, then one of those women dies.“

„Not so fast,“ said Coffey. No, he was not getting stuck with this lame case. „If you guys are right about murder for hire,“ and he was not conceding this, „why wouldn’t the ladies ask for police protection?“ He turned to Riker for his answer.

Mallory jumped in. „Two other people live in that house – the old lady’s sister and brother. They were conveniently out of town for the attempted break-in last week, and they weren’t home last night, either.“

„Even if you were onto something,“ and Coffey doubted that, „it’s still not a case for Special Crimes. The department has a task force for that kind of – “

„It’s not a mob hit,“ said Mallory, „and it’s not gang related. Willy Roy Boyd wasn’t connected that way. But he had an expensive lawyer for his bail hearing, and the bail bond cost him a fortune. He’s got no assets, no job, but his wallet was full of hundred-dollar bills. He was hired to kill one of those women. If we don’t work this case, no one else will.“

„And your partner collects ice-pick murders,“ said Coffey. „You left that out.“

This was no joke. His detectives had not been invited to last night’s party on the Upper West Side. He knew that Riker had been tipped to the aspect of the ice pick.

Over time, word had come back to Jack Coffey, mentions of his senior detective turning up at crime scenes in every borough where an ice pick was the murder weapon. Special Crimes had only handled one such case, only one standout among the more common murders via muggings and domestic disputes. No matter how ordinary the crime, Riker had been a faithful visitor at every scene all his working life. And no one knew the reason.

„Why?“ Coffey had to ask or he would have blown out his teeth trying to hold it back. If Riker would only answer him, the man could keep this damn homicide. The lieutenant’s only other consideration was the possible embarrassment of having a taxpayer drop dead after the case was closed out. „Why ice picks, Riker?“

„He doesn’t have any normal hobbies,“ said Mallory, betraying impatience with Coffey’s little side trip.

The lieutenant was a second away from slapping her with a charge of insubordination when her partner spoke up.

„I collect ice-pick cases,“ said Riker, „because my father did. My grandfather collected them, too.“

„I need a little more than that,“ said Coffey, and he was surprised by his own lack of sarcasm.

„Willy Roy Boyd was hired by amateurs,“ said Riker, „but maybe he was killed by a pro, somebody who had a little practice with a pick. Maybe the ladies weren’t the only ones in the house last night.“

„A pro?“ The lieutenant was incredulous at this escalation from a nice old lady to a professional assassin. „A pro… with an ice pick!“ He shook his head slowly from side to side. Oh, no, this was the age of miracles and wonders, long-range rifle sights equipped with infrared devices that could see in the damn dark. „No contract hitman has used an ice pick since the forties – “

„And there’s one old case still on the books, mass murder,“ said Mallory. „How would you like to wrap nine unsolved homicides this week?“

Oh, Jesus freaking Christ.

Jack Coffey could not find the words to toss these two out of his office. The partners politely waited for him to find his voice again. He did. He slammed his fist down on the desk. „No, this is not happening! Riker, tell me she’s not talking about Stick Man.“

Mallory answered for Riker. „Special Crimes Unit would get all the credit, and we need good press right now. The timing is perfect.“ She tacked on the reminder, „It’s budget-cutting season.“

Ordinarily, these would be the magic words, but not today. Jack Coffey, feeling slightly giddy, covered his face with both hands, worrying that tics or twitches might betray his image of a man in control of this meeting.

Mallory, of all people, should never have bought into this fantasy of a superannuated psycho from the last century. She was more jaded, better rooted in reality. Any cop could imagine the horror show of her childhood on the streets of New York, dodging kiddy pimps and pedophiles, ending every day in the exhaustion of a child’s poverty, then chasing down some place where she could be safe for a few hours, where she might close her eyes to sleep. Still feral in many ways, she was suspicious of everyone she met and everything she was told. Her belief in a ghost story intrigued him more than Riker’s.

A fair detective in his own right, Coffey had worked through the puzzle in the very next minute. These two were holding something back, a bombshell. There was no other explanation. „Riker, do you have any idea how old Stick Man would be today?“

„Well, yeah.“ The man’s tone indicated that this might be a silly question since he was the expert on all things related to ice-pick homicides.

„All right, let me see if I understand this.“ The lieutenant uncovered his tired eyes to look at Riker. „You’re planning to reopen the Winter House Massacre. Have I got that right?“

The man only shrugged to say, Yeah, that’s about right. And his partner was busy inspecting her running shoes for smudges.

Jack Coffey shook his head. „Riker, you’ve got two minutes of my time. Give me the rest or get out.“

„Okay. The old lady you talked to this morning? That was Red Winter.“

„Of course it was.“ Jack Coffey wore that special smile reserved for dealing with lunatics. „I should have guessed.“ His smile never wavered, though his teeth were locked together and grinding. „So… when you asked Red Winter where she ‘d been for the past sixty years – “

„Fifty-eight years,“ said Mallory. „She was twelve when she disappeared. She’s seventy now.“

„Shut up,“ said Coffey. He only had eyes for his senior detective.

„Well, sure,“ said Riker. „We asked where she’d been, but she just yawned and went upstairs to bed. Left us to lock up the house.“

With one angry sweep of his hand, Coffey wiped his desk of papers and sent them flying to the floor. He was on the verge of the explosion his squad had been waiting on, betting on. And now he realized that he was still smiling – actually grinning – not a good sign, not a healthy sign.

Mallory bent low to pick up the scattered papers around her chair. „We got the medical examiner to lose the ID on Willy Roy Boyd for a week.“ She was already assuming that he would believe the most ludicrous story ever told within these walls. „We have to keep a low profile,“ she said, collecting the sheets and stacking them neatly on the edge of the desk, then bending down for others. „The reporters can’t get near this story.“ She settled back into her chair to concentrate on aligning all the edges of every sheet. „It might be better if the rest of the squad didn’t – “

„I won’t tell a soul,“ said Jack Coffey. And he would not – no more than he would run naked through the streets, scattering rosebuds along the way. He continued to smile, feeling oddly calm. He just needed a little time was all, that and a bottomless bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Most of all, he needed to make these two detectives disappear. So much depended on that: his sanity, his stomach lining and what was left of his hair. Though the blinds were closed, he could sense the troops massing out there, pressing up against the glass, tensing, waiting for him to crack wide open.

Any minute now.

„You got seventy-two hours,“ said Coffey. „I don’t expect to see your faces for three days. Got that?“

He very much wanted to lay his head down on the desk and bang it a few times, but his detectives were still seated in their chairs, perhaps not fully comprehending that they had gotten away with this.

„Leave,“ he said, „now!“ And leave they did.

They left the door open, unfortunately, and he heard a snatch of their conversation.

Riker asked his partner, „Where to now?“

„We ‘re going to mess up a lawyer,“ she said.

„That’s my girl.“

Money was changing hands in the squad room, but the lieutenant no longer cared who had won or lost this round. He knew Mallory was going after the lawyer who had won a bail hearing, against all odds, for a cockroach who had murdered three women. The high school student, Boyd’s youngest victim, had been closer to a child. Jack Coffey had been the one to break the news to her parents, to show them the morgue photograph of their daughter’s face, a shot framed to expose the features least bruised and broken. The mother had touched the photo, caressing it with her ringers, then rubbing the glossy surface, as if desperately trying to break through that artificial dimension to get to her only child.

Both parents had cried.

The morale of the squad had gone down when that serial killer had walked out free on bail, spitting on the sidewalk and spitting on the law. The timing had been a gift from hell, the very hour of the schoolgirl’s burial. And so the lieutenant gave no thought to blowback from Mallory’s upcoming confrontation. Finally, he understood why she needed jurisdiction on the dead body of Willy Roy Boyd.

She wanted payback.

Coffey wondered if Mallory would go after the defense attorney’s testicles. There were some things in life that were worth his rank and pension; neutering a lawyer was high on the list.

He picked through the cards on his Rolodex until he found the number for the parents of Boyd’s last victim. He would call them first and tell them that the man who had destroyed their lives was dead – stabbed to death by an elderly woman. They might find some just irony in that.

No – they would cry.

Nedda Winter pulled back the sheer white drape of the front window for a better view of the old Rolls-Royce. Once it had been her father’s car, and now it belonged to her brother. A dozen suitcases were disgorged from the car’s trunk. Tall Lionel, sixty-nine on his last birthday, handled the bags with surprising ease, though he did this service grudgingly, for most or all of the luggage would belong to his sister Cleo Winter-Smyth. Bitty’s description of the summer house in the Hamptons filled its closets and drawers with her mother’s clothing. And Cleo’s room upstairs was packed with more designer dresses like the one that she wore now.

So why this spectacle of suitcases? What was the point of two houses if one could not travel lightly from one to the other?

Without taking her eyes from the window, Nedda spoke to the small woman behind her. „They’re here, Bitty.“ She glanced back at her niece, who was still holding the Bible. „Go up to your room if you like. I’ll deal with them.“

This arrangement was very agreeable to her niece, who stole up the staircase with exaggerated stealth, perhaps on the off chance that Cleo and Lionel could hear escaping footsteps through the solid walls of the house.

Nedda turned her eyes back to the sidewalk activity. Her brother stood beside the car, shaking his head. He was refusing to lug the suitcases up the stairs. Lionel put two fingers to his lips and whistled. The doorman from the neighboring condominium came running, smiling as a dog would smile if it only could. Money changed hands, and Lionel slipped behind the wheel of the Rolls and drove off to the parking garage, leaving his sister to supervise the doorman, who gathered up her bags. Cleo looked up at the parlor window, saw her elder sister standing there, then quickly looked away. This was only one small slight of many.

Nedda understood. She might never be forgiven for coming home again.

Though Cleo and Lionel had been to town only a week ago, Nedda was amazed anew each time she saw her sister and brother, these chic people so little affected by time. In her early sixties, Cleo appeared closer in age to her forty-year-old daughter. There was not a single strand of gray in the perfectly coiffed ash blond hair, and her flesh was suspiciously smooth and firm.

Nedda let the drape fall, then sank down to the window seat. The front door opened, and the foyer was filled with the sound of dueling accents, American diva and Spanish immigrant. The doorman was making short work of the bags, stacking them inside the door, while Cleo surveyed the front room, checking for signs of sudden death. Or would she be more concerned with possible breakage?

Cleo turned to her sister with a vacuous smile; one might call it professional, the way a stewardess can smile at her passengers though she hates them and hopes they will die. „You look wonderful. Your color’s so much better.“

The yellow cast had passed off months ago in the hospice, where Nedda’s siblings had expected her to pass away from natural causes.

Fooled you all. So sorry. I never meant to.

„But you’re still a little pale, Nedda. You really must get some sun and fresh air. We’ll have to get you out to the Hamptons one day.“

The sisters both knew that day would never come. There would be too many questions from the Long Island neighbors. It was so much easier to hide embarrassing relatives in the more anonymous city. And now, small talk exhausted, they fell into a silence – awkward for Nedda, easy for her sister.

When the doorman had lugged the last suitcase indoors, he learned to his dismay that he had not yet earned his money, not until he carried them up the stairs to a bedroom. He looked up at the winding steps – and up, and up, shaking his head in denial. Finally, the job was done, and her brother had returned from the garage on the next block. Lionel preened for a moment before a mirror, running one tanned hand through hair as white as her own.

Her brother could still be called a handsome man and surprisingly youthful in the way that a waxwork can never age. So this was what sixty-nine years looked like in the twenty-first century. Nedda rarely consulted a mirror on her own account, for she was a different creature now, and no such comparison to her former self was possible. Though she had made good use of the third-floor gymnasium, the treadmill and the weights would not give her back any of the time she had lost. She was marked by the wrinkles and stitched up scars of a difficult life.

Not so for Lionel and Cleo.

Nedda had returned to find her siblings well preserved in the amber of younger days. Every creature so preserved was dead, and still the simile held true. There was no life in their dark blue eyes, dead eyes, flies in the amber.

„Neddy“ was all that Lionel said to her by way of a greeting. She could see that it irked him to slip and call her Neddy, but he had never known her by any but that childhood name. In a cruel departure from a good-natured boy of eleven, Lionel the man reminded her of their father now. Quentin Winter had been a cold one, too. It had been said of Daddy, in his youth, that he left footprints of ice across the floor of a warm room on a summer day. She recalled Lionel as a child of five, following his father about in the month of July to see if this was true. In part it was.

She turned to her sister, always searching Cleo’s face for evidence of the child she had been. Up to the age of five, young Cleo had danced through the average day, always in motion to music that had played round the clock, a laughing child, who had no bones, who moved to the beat of drums and cornets with fluid joy. Daddy’s little Boogie Woogie Wunderkind had never been able to pronounce this mouthful, and so she had been called Jitterbug by one and all. But Nedda never forgot herself and called her sister by this old pet name. It was unsuitable now, for Cleo had become somewhat stiff on several levels.

Nedda wondered how she was remembered by her siblings. She shuddered, and this thought passed off like a chill.

Lionel walked to the center of the carpet. „Was it here? Bitty wasn’t all that clear on the phone.“

„Yes, that’s where the man died.“ Nedda turned from one sibling to the other, saying, „Charles Buder was here last night. Did Bitty tell you that?“ Cleo broke into a rare wide smile. „The frog prince? No, Bitty never said a word.“ And now something dark had occurred to her, no doubt linked to the shrine in Bitty’s room. The woman sat down, more solemn in her tone, saying, „My God, did the police see the – “ Nedda nodded. „And they brought Charles Buder here? They showed him – “

„The shrine in Bitty’s room? Yes, he saw it.“

Lionel and Cleo turned to one another to hold one of their eerie conversations of the eyes. It was something akin to the made-up languages of small children bonding in secret alliance against the adult – herself. This time, it was easy for her to guess the content of their discussion, and, in answer to their unspoken question, she said, „The police believe that Bitty was stalking Mr. Butler.“

„Charles Butler,“ said Lionel. „Wasn’t he one of the Gramercy Park Butlers?“

„Yes, dear,“ said Cleo, the keeper of the social register. „Charles is the last one, but there haven’t been any Butlers in Gramercy Park for ages. He lives in SoHo, of all places. He owns an apartment building there.“

Trust Cleo to know the details of wealthy families who would not take her phone calls and the environs where she was not welcome. The Winter family had fallen away from polite society long before the massacre.

„Charles Butler,“ said Cleo. „Bitty must’ve been thrilled.“ And, by inflection, she conveyed the opposite meaning. „Well, we must do something before this business gets out of hand. I’ll call Bitty’s father. Sheldon will know how to handle it.“

„Oh, Christ,“ said Lionel, at this mention of his erstwhile brother-in-law, the attorney. „Did the police take Bitty away?“

Both faces turned to Nedda. They were almost twins in expressing the horror of publicity.

She shook her head and stood with them in cold silence, the natural state of their every reunion, until a movement in one of the many mirrors caught her eye. Nedda turned around to see her niece slowly coming down the grand staircase, hesitating now, eyes wide and wondering if it was safe yet. Bitty had never outgrown a child’s stature and a child’s issues, the cowering deference to her mother and her uncle. And yet, one day, brave as any knight, this tiny woman had marched into a hellhole and plucked Nedda out of it, soul and all.

„Hello, dear. Kiss, kiss,“ said Cleo in lieu of actual affection for her daughter. „I’ve decided that we ‘11 have a small dinner party tonight. I think I can arrange for the frog prince to come.“

Bitty’s feet were frozen in place on the last step, and one hand drifted to her heart, as if her mother had shot her there.

„Yes, dear,“ said Cleo. „Your beloved Charles Butler. Won’t that be nice!“

Bitty nodded meekly, then turned away from them and crept back up the stairs.

Lieutenant Coffey was enjoying a rare hour of calm. Two homicides had been closed out before noon, a banner day. There would have been three cases closed by now if Riker and Mallory had only cooperated. But they were both exhausted and badly in need of a rest. They had logged more overtime than anyone else on the squad. And this was how Jack Coffey rationalized his irrational behavior of the morning, allowing them three days to work a bogus case.

Red Winter, my ass.

When he stood up to stretch his legs, he saw the wadded balls of paper he had tossed on the floor. Sooner or later, he would have to uncrumple them. He gathered them up and smoothed the pages out across his desk. Next, he picked up Mallory’s report. He had the time to read it now, but his eyes could not move past the address for the crime scene. She had included the landmark credit with the formal name of the property. Miss Winter was not just another taxpayer with a common surname. She lived in Winter House.

The lieutenant stole guilty glances at the glowing computer screen only a few feet from his desk. The cold-case file would not be there, not a case dating back to the forties. Almost against his will, the chair slowly wheeled toward the computer workstation. He typed Red Winter’s name into the search engine and came up with a selection of several hundred Web sites. After weeding out the sellers of books, videotapes and memorabilia, he settled upon a site for true-crime junkies.

Colorful.

Bloodred skulls marked every selection on the menu, and the Winter House Massacre was listed near the end of this alphabet of bones. When the screen changed again, he was staring at the famous nude portrait of a child with long red hair, and he could see that she had been tall for her age, all out of proportion to the surrounding furniture. Civilians and cops who knew the case had always called her Red Winter. Here, her true name was given as Nedda, the same as the woman – a tall woman – who had stabbed Willy Roy Boyd. Riker had guessed her height at five ten or eleven, and Mallory had placed her age at seventy. Nedda would have been a twelve-year-old girl in the year that Red Winter had disappeared.

No, no, no!

It was easier to believe that he was being set up for an elaborate pratfall. And how many bets were being made on him this time?

Though his blinds were not drawn and the door was not closed, no one disturbed him. His people had sensed that he was best left alone as he sat there staring at a blank space on the wall. From time to time, the men would approach the glass of the goldfish bowl to see if the position of the boss’s body had changed any. And now Jack Coffey gave them a little thrill. His head moved slowly from side to side as his chair rolled back and away from the computer.

It seemed that two of his detectives had found the lost child, Red Winter, the most enduring mystery in the annals of NYPD. And he had only given them three days to expose Stick Man and break the case of the century.