The Chalk Girl

talk; the five o’clock shadow of his beard appeared at nine every morning; and he had the most brutal face that God ever gave a detective – all of which made him invaluable during interrogations. He entered the private office on cat’s feet and delicately placed his copy of the Daily News on his boss’s desk.

Jack Coffey turned to page nine, as directed by the desk sergeant of the Upper West Side precinct, and there he found a picture of the surviving victim from Central Park, eyes closed and posed in a hospital bed beneath the headline: Do You Know This Man?

‘And none of you guys caught this?’ Coffey looked up at his detective. ‘Does anybody on this squad read anything but the sports pages?’

Janos always politely considered his responses and delivered them softly. ‘I like the movie reviews.’

Though the Times had scooped the big story of the day, there was a reference to Central Park in this newspaper, too. But it was only a passing mention of the place where a dehydrated, naked man had been found. At least the photograph had been buried on the inside pages by an editor who favored rat-eaten little old ladies like Mrs Lanyard over unidentified coma patients.

‘Now our perp knows the guy’s alive,’ said Coffey.

Oh, and the article had thoughtfully provided the name and address of the hospital – so a killer would know where to go if he felt inclined to clean up this sloppy loose end of a living witness.

‘So Coco was hiding behind a door.’ Charles Butler had been restored to his rightful place in the universe. Mallory ruled. She always won.

‘No,’ she said. ‘The kid lied about the door.’

‘I doubt that. Her stories are for entertainment, not deception. Coco has no guile.’ Charles was staring at the raised section of floor on the other side of this spacious room. ‘Hello.’ He walked toward a short flight of steps leading up to that next level. ‘I knew something was off about this place. My parents had friends in this building. That’s a chimney wall. So you have to wonder . . . why would anyone wipe out a fireplace?’ That would be a real-estate sin in Manhattan. He climbed the stairs to stand on the higher floor, and Mallory joined him.

‘Coco was hiding here,’ he said, so confident of what he would find when he lifted the area rug to expose a handle set into the woodwork. ‘And she was behind a door – a door in the floor.’

Mallory leaned down to pull on the handle, lifting a square of wood to look into a dark hole. ‘This is where the bastard kept her.’ She ran one hand over the rough texture on the underside of the trapdoor. ‘He soundproofed it.’

‘It’s a pedophile’s dream house,’ said Charles. There would be no fear of a child’s rescue, not by the accidental discovery of a building handyman letting himself in to fix a broken pipe. ‘You couldn’t do this sort of renovation in any of the smaller rooms. And not over there by the windows. The raised floor would’ve overshot the sills. That’s why he had to take out the fireplace.’

He descended a short ladder into the secret room beneath the floor, where he had to hunch down to look around. ‘No light switch. At Coco’s age, lots of children are afraid of the dark, and fear makes a good control device. So you’ll excuse her if she left this frightening place out of her little narrative about a man who turned himself into a tree.’ By the light from the opening above, he could see stuffed toys and a bed that appeared to be unslept in. Thank you, God. Something crunched beneath his feet as the trapdoor was slowly closing.

‘Give me a minute,’ said Mallory, ‘then open it – just a crack.’

When Charles had finished his countdown, he lifted the square of wood by a few inches, and he was looking through the fringe of the area rug that once again covered this hiding place. The detective had closed the drapes and lit the only lamp. His side of the room was deep in shadow.

Mallory walked to the pile of clothes on the floor and stood in the place of a sadist, her eyes on the trapdoor. ‘Too dark. The perp didn’t see Coco.’

‘She probably didn’t see him, either, at least not in any detail.’ Charles climbed out and walked to the window, carrying a tiny pair of eyeglasses with one broken lens. ‘I found these on the floor – after I stepped on them.’ He pulled back a curtain for a few inches of light, the better to read the small print of the prescription on one stem. ‘If the glasses belong to Coco, she’s nearsighted.’

Through the slit in the drapes, he stared at the planetarium across the street. Poor eyesight explained why the child had mistaken the mock sun for the moon. She had not seen the orbiting planets – nor could she distinguish a green burlap bag from the leaves of trees. He looked down at the spectacles in his hand, regarding them as yet another wound to a little girl. ‘This is why Coco could only tell you about the coveralls and the dolly, nothing about the Hunger Artist’s face.’

‘But we’re the only ones who know that.’

And now the only evidence was gone. The broken eyeglasses had disappeared from his hand and entered the pocket of Mallory’s blazer. The late Louis Markowitz had once described his foster child as a world-class thief, born to steal, and the policeman had said this with some degree of pride, adding, ‘What a kid.’

Mallory perused the shadow side of the room, where the crack of a door in the floor had certainly gone unnoticed. ‘So the perp doesn’t know I have a witness.’

‘Actually . . . you don’t.’ Charles smiled. ‘I do. Custodial guardianship, remember? That’s why your man in Missing Persons called me. The Chicago police found the grandmother’s body an hour ago. Dead of natural causes. Coco has no other family. But she has me.’

He allowed a moment for the import to settle in. And now, with all the leverage he was ever likely to have, he laid down new rules for dealing with his young ward.

Mallory did not like them. Charles did not care.

The commander of Special Crimes Unit stood behind the pink curtain surrounding the coma patient’s bed. In a face-off with Dr Kemper, the hospital administrator, he held up a newspaper open to the page with the crime victim’s photograph. ‘Somebody sold this picture to a reporter.’

Kemper, a thin weasel of a man, took on an attitude of personal offense, one hand pressed to his breast, when he said, ‘It wasn’t one of my people.’

The lieutenant pointed to the patient. ‘This guy’s wearing a hospital gown in the photo – so we can rule out the ambulance crew. They only saw him naked.’

‘I’ll look into it.’

What Jack Coffey hated most about this man was the smooth way he lied with a smile. The lieutenant turned to a nurse, who stood close to the administrator’s side like a lady-in-waiting. ‘Go out in the hall and tell Officer Wycoff to bring in that woman.’

When she had left on this errand, Jack Coffey only glanced at the prince of pricks who aggravated him so much. ‘I don’t need you anymore. Take a hike.’

The hospital administrator’s smile widened as he made his hasty getaway. On the other side of the pulled- back curtain, Officer Wycoff stood beside the visitor he had found so suspicious. The woman was young, still in her twenties, and tall. No wedding ring. Though she had the unlined face and sexless body of a plump child, the quaint word spinster came to mind, perhaps because her mouse-brown hair was pulled back in a schoolmarm’s bun. And the next word he thought of was wallflower. She wore a simple gray dress, the better to blend into a concrete city and disappear. There was only one standout feature, lush eyelashes that looked fake, but he knew they were real. This woman wore no makeup at all.

She twisted to one side, trying to see around him for a peek at the mystery patient. Coffey stepped aside, and she stared at the man on the bed. Her hand tightened around the shoulder strap of her purse as she shook her head. ‘I don’t know him.’

And did he believe that? Well, no.

She was turning round, ready to leave, and quickly. Coffey nodded to the officer, who caught the woman by one arm and restrained her. Eyes wary, she turned back to face the lieutenant. ‘I have to go.’

Jack Coffey consulted Officer Wycoff’s small notebook. ‘You gave your name as Mary Harper?’ He held it up so she could read the open page. ‘And this is your address?’

‘Yes, I live on the Lower East Side.’

‘No, you don’t. That address puts your apartment in the middle of the East River.’ Coffey reached out and slipped the purse strap off her shoulder. ‘So you made a false statement to the police. And now I get to search this