THE PARENTS IDENTIFIED THE WRONG BODY." RIKER paced the bedroom floor, working off his anger. "And they knew it wasn't their kid. That's why they never filed a wrongful-death suit against the city. Happens every time a suspect gets shot by the police. The relatives always do that. But not this time."
"There must've been blood tests on the body," said Johanna.
Riker shook his head. "What for? Thirty bullet wounds made the cause of death pretty damn clear. And the next of kin identified the corpse. That satisfied all the requirements for the state. So why run the blood tests? Why fool with a good thing?" Weary now, he sat down beside her at the edge of the mattress. "It all worked out so nicely for everybody. NYPD looks good for closing a major case in record time. The city avoids a megabucks lawsuit for shooting the wrong suspect. And that psycho kid goes free. I'm sure the parents loved that part."
"Then this is just theory. You don't actually – "
"There's more. I got all the proof I need. The parents went to Europe after the shooting. Probably got their kid settled in with a new identity. Maybe four weeks later, they came back to town. So I go by their place and talk to the doorman. This is around the time I started picking up on the shadows, people following me everywhere I went. Sometimes it was Mallory. She's easy to spot. Thinks she can do surveillance. She can't. But one of them wasn't a cop. It was a little freak in a bad wig, not your basic undercover outfit. He was young, and his size was right." He turned to Jo. "So – still think I'm sane? Or am I as crazy as Timothy Kidd?"
And now it was Johanna who needed a change of subject. She took his hand, interlaced her fingers with his and said, "Tell me your damn first name. Tell me… or I'll make you clean the toilet."
Janos found Mallory alone in Jack Coffey's office. "The old guy wants out.
"He knows the conditions," said Mallory. "Did the pervert kiss him yet?" "No, the lawyer bought the little guy off with a gold watch." Janos held up a slip of paper. "But the old guy gave up the name and address for your phony blind man."
Great! Just great!
Riker was on his knees, wearing a damn apron, and his head was deep in the toilet, though not on some philosophical mission to see where his life had lately gone; he was brushing stains that required close-up squinting. Oh, and this was the best part of his big dream: into the bathroom walks Edward Slope, the chief medical examiner himself, all decked out in a three-piece suit.
"A house call? From a body snatcher?" Riker sat back on his heels, then slumped against the tiled wall. "Can't you wait till I'm dead?"
"I want you to see something." Slope opened an envelope and pulled out a batch of photographs. One of them wafted to the floor. It was the picture of a body on the doctor's dissection table. "That's the well-bred young man who tried to kill you six months ago. I did the autopsy myself. As you can see, he's quite dead. It only took the police a few hours to track him down. He was shot to pieces before you got out of surgery."
Another photograph joined the one on the floor. The corpse was full of holes, the face was gone. Riker remembered this particular picture as the one Mallory had liked best. She had brought it to his hospital room and held it up like a trophy. At the time, he had been surprised that she had not brought in the actual body, bronzed and nailed to a plaque for her wall. He looked up at the medical examiner and smiled with only half his face to let the man know that he was not buying any of this. Never had, never would.
Edward Slope hunkered down and papered the floor with the rest of his evidence. "This psychotic little geek is as dead as roadkill. It was a very thorough job, nine cops and precisely thirty bullets. You were told about this. Did you think your own people would lie to you?" And now, perhaps recalling that one of these people was Mallory, he amended this query. "All of them liars? Every cop in Special Crimes Unit?"
"Well, that's what cops do," said Riker. "Every day, we lie to suspects. Goes with the job. Yeah, they'd all lie to me, especially after pumping thirty rounds into this poor bastard – whoever he is." He picked up one of the photographs and tore it in half. "He's not the kid who shot me."
Dr. Slope produced papers from his coat pocket. "These are the lab results. I ran all the tests, Riker. You know me. I never leave anything to chance. You have to believe in fingerprints, in blood and DNA. And there's the gunpowder residue on the boy's hand. And there's more."
"Oh, yeah?" Riker removed his hausfrau's rubber gloves. "Well, here's the kicker, Doc. The proof. There were guards posted in my room the whole time I was in the hospital. They only do that to protect crime victims from live suspects. Nobody, and I mean nobody else gets twenty-four-hour bodyguards, not ever. But every time I opened my eyes, there was a cop watching me, and I could always hear more of'em out in the hall." Riker saw a painful surprise in the doctor's eyes.
Edward Slope was now the saddest man in New York City. "Not all of your guards were cops. The first few days, your doctors only allowed medical personnel to see you." He reached out to retrieve some of his pictures from the floor. "Sometimes it was me sitting in the intensive care unit. That was right after your surgery. You weren't expected to survive. So – if you went sour – well, I thought someone should be there, someone you knew." On hands and knees, he gathered up the rest of the photographs, then made a show of neatly stacking them and avoiding Riker's eyes.
"Later on," said Slope, "there were so many drugs pumped into you. I'm not surprised that you can't recall this – one of those guards was your father. That old man put in a lot of hours taking turns with Kathy Mallory. They were there through all the days when you were swacked on painkillers that only worked half the time. And the others – patrolmen, detectives, they came out of the woodwork to sit in your hospital room – on their own time, willing you to recover. After you were on the mend, they still came, so many of them. My fault. I got the hospital to rescind visiting hours. I wanted someone in your room round the clock. The distraction would keep you from reliving the event when you were most vulnerable. And – Dr. Apollo will back me up on this – most trauma victims have an irrational fear of being alone. So those cops all turned out for you – so you'd always know that you weren't on your own – that you were at the head of a damn parade, the whole police force, thirty thousand strong. Those cops, your guards, they all thought it was important for you to know that. But… obviously, you… got the wrong message." He stood up, preparing to leave, then leaned down to place one hand on Riker's shoulder. "Believe me now. I'm sorry. I never realized…" Rising slowly, stiff and awkward – add on shamefaced – the pathologist turned sharply on his heel and quit the bathroom.
Riker had no sooner recovered from the shock of an emotional Edward Slope than he wandered into the front room and met another unannounced visitor.
Trouble.
He should have told Johanna to bolt the door against the cops.
The commander of Special Crimes Unit was definitely not here on any sentimental errand, not a well-wisher or a cheerleader, not a happy man. Jack Coffey was holding a thick bundle of papers. This could only be Mallory's form to appeal the separation from NYPD. Yes, he could see that now as the lieutenant held up the paperwork within four inches of his senior detective's face, saying, "Don't fuck with me, Riker. Just sign it."
And sign it he did.
Jack Coffey departed without another word said, and Riker closed the door behind him – gently – no slamming.
"So you're a cop again." Jo sat on the couch by the dim light of a single lamp, her body sunk deep in the cushions. She seemed tired and pleased. When he sat down beside her, she rested her head on his shoulder, and they passed a little time this way in companionable silence. Peace – perfect peace. That was Jo's present to him. He wished he had something to give to her, and perhaps it was natural to be thinking of flowers, though she deserved something more exotic than the bloom he had settled upon.
"My old man was tough," said Riker. "It took years to get him to talk, but he finally gave up the whole story. My mother was dying the night I was born, or that's what Dad thought. She was only nineteen, and he wasn't much older. They were dirt poor in those days. They had nothing. Well, Mom wanted to leave me something – something just grand. That's the way my dad put it. So she made him promise to – " He glanced at Jo's upturned face and smiled. "It helps if you know she was really drugged up that night, lots of heavy medication. So Mom was stoned when she made him promise to put Pimpernel on my birth certificate." "My God. She named you after a flower?"
"Yeah. Cruel, isn't it? But it could've been worse. The Scarlet Pimpernel was Mom's all-time favorite movie. But, crazy as she was that night, she knew she couldn't name me Scarlet Pimpernel. Everybody would've called me Scarlet, right? And that was a girl from Gone With the Wind – wrong sex and a whole different movie. So she settled for Pimpernel. But you can't raise a little boy with a name like that, not in Brooklyn. My old man argued with her for hours, even though he thought she was dying. Finally, the poor bastard caved in when she cried. One damn tear. That's all it took to break him, and he swore he'd name me Pimpernel."
"And then your father saved you by only putting the initial on the birth certificate."
"Yeah. Sometimes I forget how much I owe him for that. Well, Mom didn't die, not for another fifty years. When she got home from the hospital, her brain was good as new – almost. She agreed with Dad. It would've been a rotten thing to do to a kid growing up in a rough neighborhood. But she wouldn't let him change the initial on my birth certificate. Now my old man won the second round. When the next baby came along, they named him Ned. Nothing fancy – just plain old Ned."
"A pimpernel," said Jo. "I don't think I'd recognize that flower." "I would." He still had the lieutenant's pen in his hand, but now that all the clutter was gone, there was no scrap of paper within easy reach. "Half the house was wallpapered in damn pimpernels. My bedroom, too – now that was child abuse." He took her right hand in his. "I still have dreams about that wallpaper." Riker drew a little flower on her open palm. "It's small, not much to look at. I'd rather give you roses." He loved her smile.
The door was kicked open, breaking the chain before Victor could bolt it again. He was crying when they entered his apartment.
"Victor Patchock?" asked a large man with a thug's face and an incongruously soft voice.
He nodded, believing that he was about to die. When the pair advanced on him, he reached out to the umbrella stand and plucked out a white cane. He waved it high and wide. This was the last stand of a righteous man, whose eyes were scrunched shut. All he could hear was the swish of his cane slicing the air and hitting nothing.
He dared to open his eyes again.
The large man seemed astonished, and the tall blonde at his side was also taken by surprise. She had a gun in her hand, but the barrel was pointed toward the floor. Tilting her head to one side, she seemed genuinely curious when she asked, "How stupid are you?"
Earlier, upon opening his front door, Charles Butler had been pleased to see the chief medical examiner standing in the hall, for this was an opportunity to smooth out the ragged edges of their friendship. Edward Slope had announced that he was making the second house call of his career. What an honor.
Charles's mood was more somber now that he had come to understand the true purpose of the doctor's visit. He placed a drink in his guest's hand, then joined him at the kitchen table and continued his perusal of the crime-scene photographs. The corpse depicted here was no longer recognizable as a seventeen-year-old boy. "I see most of the shots are to the head." Edward Slope nodded. "That would've been enough to make Riker suspicious." His eyes were less focused now that he was feeling the anesthetic benefit of twelve-year-old single-malt whiskey, but he was not finding sufficient solace in his glass. "You probably noticed. The shots to the torso seem almost…"
"Like an afterthought? Yes, I agree." It appeared that the detectives of Special Crimes Unit had thought it unseemly to blow the boy's face away. And so they had added more shots to the torso for the sake of decency.
Dr. Slope set down his empty glass and pushed it away. "They're not trained to make head shots, you know. Cops usually aim for the widest part of the body. Less chance of bullets going wild… and their targets frequently survive."
"No chance of that here," said Charles. He examined the last photograph, then quickly scanned the postmortem report. "But it was self-defense? The newspapers all – "
"If that's what it said in the newspapers, then it must be true." The pathologist covered his tired eyes. "Sorry. That was unfair. The boy fired on them first – one shot before they killed him. I was on the scene when the techs dug his bullet out of the wall. It was a justified shooting. No question."
No question? Ah, but the doctor's face was saying something entirely different.
Charles pulled the X rays from the envelope of autopsy materials. These pictures of naked bone told him so much more than the boy's blown-away flesh could reveal. And he would undoubtedly have to fetch Edward Slope a new whiskey bottle before the evening ended.
"All these bullets." Charles turned to his friend. "I imagine you found it impossible to determine which one killed the boy."
"That's what it said in my report." The doctor emptied the bottle into his glass, then quickly drained it. "None of the police bullets went wild. That was the truly odd part. A shoot-out is a terrifying experience for cops. Fear gets in the way of their aim – but not on this occasion." And now, fortified by alcohol, he found that he could look at the photographs one more time as he replaced each one in the envelope. "What a mess. All those bullets. All on target."
Charles held the X ray up to the light, fascinated and horrified. Among the massive damage of shattered facial bones was the one remarkably symmetrical hole in the boy's skull. It lay between the orbits of the eyes, not one hair off center.
Symmetry, thy name is Mallory.
She might as well have signed her work. Other, later holes and grooves at the top and sides of the skull told the rest of the story. He envisioned the other detectives firing shots at a falling target – a dead one – to obliterate the evidence of Mallory's remarkably cold and steady aim, until the final effect appeared less like an execution.
"I suppose it's better for all of the detectives," said Charles, "if none of them knows which shot was fatal."
The doctor's sudden relief betrayed him. Obviously he was assuming that the omissions in his report were less transparent than he had supposed. Edward Slope could not fail to believe that his secret was safe. His proof of this was sitting right there on the other side of the kitchen table. Charles Butler's face showed no signs of a tell-all blush; he had learned how to lie.
Riker stepped out of the shower as a new man and donned his best suit, the one least stained. When he walked into the living room, he found Mrs. Ortega surveying the new-and-improved state of his apartment. He lightly kicked her rolling cart of supplies. "Get this thing out of here, okay? It's ruining the damn ambiance."
She ignored this, turning her back on him to inspect the rug and run one finger over the surfaces of tables and chairs, checking for dust. "So this is what you've been doing all day?" "Yeah. Not bad, huh?"
"Amateurs, the both of you. I'll take it from here. Just stay out of my way." The intrepid cleaning woman marched toward the tall windows that bore the streaks of his own attempted washing.
"I love you, too," said Riker, but he said it low, almost a whisper, so she would not feel obligated to insult him in return. "Where's Jo?"
"Gone. She said she had to go feed some cat." Mrs. Ortega spat out this last word with great contempt. In her philosophy, the only good fur-shedder was a dead one.
Riker stood before his desk, staring down at the small drawer where he kept his weapon. It had been opened, though the key was still hidden in a crack behind one wooden leg. And the gun was gone.
He wasted no time on this little mystery. The perp who had broken his bathroom window would not have known how to finesse this excellent lock, and there was no sign of forcing the wood. Mallory was the only thief who had recently visited his apartment, and she traveled everywhere with lock picks in her pocket.
So the brat had not trusted him with his own gun. Regulations required him to report a missing weapon, but that would only create more trouble for both of them. And now he wondered if he should demand its return. Or should he wait for Mallory to break into his apartment and put the revolver back in the drawer? Yeah. That would be the polite solution.
All but the cat's head was swaddled in a white cloth binding so that he could not win this fight to stay alive. The veterinarian's hand hesitated with the needle. All the pity in the doctor's eyes was for the woman and not the animal. "You know it's the best thing for him, Johanna."
But not for your reasons.
"You don't have to – "
"Yes, I do." She held Mugs gingerly, minding the phantom nerve that so agonized him. "Now, please."
The needle was injected into Mugs's neck, and minutes passed before it had any effect. His personality was still intact when he met her eyes, looking there for mercy and asking, Why? She cradled him until he was lulled into a drowsy stupor by her slow rocking motion and the sedative. At last he was well beyond pain in real or imagined realms. She wanted to believe that he was not beyond love, that he could luxuriate in the feeling of her arms about him now that it did not hurt him anymore, not in his body or his mind. She kissed him, then held him close until he went limp. Though the poison would come later, this was not like sleep; this was good-bye.
"He's at peace, Johanna," said the doctor. "He'll never feel the next one." The second shot would wrack the cat's body with a violent seizure, a prelude to death. "It's for the best."
"I know that," she said, but a long time passed before she would cease her rocking and open her arms to release Mugs.