The Chalk Girl

Before the civilian could call her a bitch, her partner stepped forward to say, ‘Careful, pal.’ Riker held out his hand. ‘Okay, let’s see your press card.’

‘He doesn’t have one.’ Mallory turned on the civilian. ‘You’re not a photographer, at least not a pro. And I know you don’t work for the Times.’ He backed up with every step she took toward him. ‘So you’re a reporter wannabe, right?’ She had him up against a tree. ‘Just a lousy stringer with no steady paycheck.’ She smiled and lightly tapped his chest with one long red fingernail. ‘I can change that.’

His grin was wide. All was forgiven.

He led them through the trees and across a small clearing, where a painter’s easel lay abandoned on the grass. This might be Tupelo Meadow, but Mallory was uncertain. In her childhood, the Ramble had been a dangerous place, home to every form of lowlife, the detritus of human waste and cast-off needles with the dregs of heroin and blood. In the wake of a real-estate boom on the Upper West Side, the squats of petty criminals had been sold as condos and co-ops, thus pricing junkies out of the neighborhood. These days, on any normal summer day, there should be tourists and local people here, taking in the sun, feeding squirrels and birds. But now, all that remained were their possessions dropped in flight – soda cans and sunglasses, a sandal and a child’s toy. This empty field supported the stringer’s claim of rats swarming here, too – lots of them.

The aspiring reporter nodded all the while as Mallory explained the rules of journalism: Truth was overrated; information was currency; and he would take whatever she gave him, word for word, and nothing more.

They entered the woods on the far side of the clearing to stand beneath the tree that had rained blood on his shirt, and the newspaper stringer was promoted to Mallory’s manservant. She inspected his hands to see if they were clean and then allowed him to hold her linen blazer. She jumped for a low bough and hoisted her body upward. Moving higher, limb by limb, she climbed close to the burlap bag. It hung at least twenty feet off the ground, held there by a rope tied off with a slipknot on a lower bough. The remainder of the rope was coiled in the fork of branch and tree. She unraveled it and let it drop to see the loose end form another coil on the ground below.

Long enough.

The stench from the bag told her that this second victim was not a fresh kill. The cloth had a hole chewed through it to give her a small ragged window on green-tinged flesh that had been gnawed. There was no blood in the wound. This had to be postmortem damage, though she could see fresh red splatters elsewhere on the skin. The rats must have chewed into some artery where blood still remained in a liquid state.

The detective called down to the patrolmen, ‘Grab the rope and pull!’ And they did. With one yank from below, the slipknot on the lower branch came undone, and the bag dropped in a short fall of inches until the officers below held a taut line.

‘Just hold the bag in place!’ Mallory heard a squeak that was almost mechanical. Almost. She turned her head a bare inch, and now she was looking into shiny rodent eyes. The creature had no sense of fear. Its snout was inches from her face. What long teeth you have. It hissed. And then, balance lost, the rat dropped to the ground to land twitching and squealing at the feet of the two patrolmen, who seemed happy to see it.

Was it a sick rat, or just a clumsy one?

Bang!

A dead rat.

With better balance than vermin, Mallory dropped from the bough to land with cat’s grace on a lower one, and so she made her way down through the tall tree and then swung from the lowest branch to stand beside the two officers. ‘Don’t bring the bag down till I lose that guy.’ She nodded toward the newspaper stringer, who stood with Riker in the field, madly writing lines in a small notebook. Whatever her partner was feeding the man, she knew it would be nothing useful.

The second ambulance siren of the day could be heard in the distance as she approached the stringer. One hand with long red fingernails – call them claws – wound around the man’s arm, and she led him farther away from her crime scene. As they walked, she dictated his copy.

Tomorrow morning, when the Times hit the newsstands, her status as lead detective would be a matter of public record – and not her lieutenant’s call. The mayor tended to believe everything he read in the papers, even when half the lies came from his own office, and it was the police commissioner’s job to kiss that fool’s feet and make this news item come true.

‘Nobody else has this story. I can keep it that way till tomorrow morning.’ Mallory took the pen and pad away from the civilian and jotted a brief note to this effect. It was addressed to the city desk editor, a man with debts in the favor bank that were owed to her foster father, and she signed it Lou Markowitz’s daughter. Then she used the stringer’s camera phone to take a photograph for the front page of tomorrow’s edition. In perfect focus, she framed the hanging tree and the uniformed policemen. Click. ‘Okay, you’re good to go.’ She returned his camera phone. ‘Go!’ And he did. He ran.

Riker was doing damage control in the clearing. He waved off the ambulance crew twenty feet from the tree and then made a call to request transport for a corpse. Turning to the patrolmen, he said, ‘Lower the body. We gotta get it out of the bag and lose that rope before the meat wagon gets here.’

Mallory nodded her approval. The worst leaks came from the lowest-paid employees of the Medical Examiner’s Office. So now they had one body for the hospital, one for the morgue – two if she counted old Mrs Lanyard – just a typical day in New York City, and there would be no mention of trees or burlap bags and ropes, no red flags that could be sold to the television networks.

When the bag was lowered to the ground and opened, what flesh remained on a female corpse would not help with identification. The body had been attended to by bugs and rats. And there was no chance of fingerprints; these extremities had been gnawed to the bone. There was silver duct tape on this face, too. It covered the eyes and mouth. And the dead woman had other things in common with the surviving victim: her bondage ropes, both ears sealed with wax, and her nudity.

Mallory loved money motives best. She looked for them where other detectives would see only evidence of insane cruelty. And so this corpse was a disappointment. The blond hair was high maintenance, but the untreated brown roots were years long. No upscale salon would miss this customer.

All around them was the bedlam of the emergency room, the babble of foreign languages and screams that needed no translation. Added to this background music were layers of odors: vomit and a whiff of bowel, medicinal smells and the cat-piss aroma of disinfectant from an orderly’s mop and pail.

When crime-scene investigators arrived at the hospital, the male victim from the first hanging tree was comatose and awaiting a gurney ride to the intensive care unit. The pads of his fingers were quickly blackened with ink and rolled across the white cards that recorded his prints. A technician swabbed a Q-tip inside the man’s open mouth for a DNA sample, and another CSI collected debris from fingernails. Then a man with a camera pulled back the sheet to expose more rat bites and flesh frayed by ropes.

The ER doctor had been ordered to stand aside – quietly – no more complaining, no whining, no yelling. He could only watch, head shaking in disbelief, and then he gasped when Detective Mallory plucked hairs from his patient’s scalp.

The technicians stopped their work, and every face turned toward a late arrival. An angry bear of a man, the commander of Crime Scene Unit, stood at the foot of the gurney. Heller’s slow-moving brown eyes had missed nothing, not the manhandling of the patient, not the petulant doctor who stood helpless with his back to the wall, nor the detective who had ordered his people to start without him – and obviously against medical advice.

Mallory backed away from the gurney, making a deliberate show of this submissive gesture. She knew how to pick her fights. Tomorrow, Heller would find out about the ropes and burlap bags stashed in the trunk of her car. She was saving herself for that battle.

Heller jabbed his thumb toward the doors of the emergency room. His technicians packed their gear and silently filed out. He nodded to the man with the stethoscope, and the doctor resumed his post by the patient’s side. Turning on Mallory, Heller said, ‘That’s one.’ It was their custom to start a fresh count of her trespasses with each new case. He would reach the count of implosion when he discovered that his CSIs had not yet been invited to two crime scenes, but the young detective planned to be long gone by then.

Mallory handed him the bag of plucked hairs and left before he could order her out. She had what she came