The Chalk Girl

according to the secretary who made all their social appointments, the detective had a better chance of being thrice struck by lightning on a cloudless day. ‘But one can always hope,’ he said. And the line went dead.

Wilhelmina Fallon was pain-free and flying high on medication as she multitasked from her hospital bed, clicking through TV channels and flipping the pages of newspapers until she came to the photograph of a coma patient found naked in Central Park. It took a long time to make a telephone connection to the reporter on that story. Twice she had to suffer insults of ‘Willy who?’ from underlings, a reminder that her party-girl days were old news.

But not anymore.

After identifying the coma patient as Humphrey Bledsoe, Willy placed another call, this one to a TV news station. She was too impatient to wait for tomorrow’s newspaper to restore her to fame.

On the other end of a third phone conversation, a hotel bellman assured her that, yes, he had removed her drugs from the room in advance of the police dropping by. And, yes, the bellman would be happy to take a small cut of her stash in lieu of a cash tip.

Willy had no cash.

The last call was made to her parents, also known as the Bank of Mom and Dad, but Mr and Mrs Fallon were not at home to their daughter. This time the snippy social secretary fobbed off her call on old Birdy, the downstairs maid.

A maid!

Willy had just suffered a kind of demotion. ‘Birdy, tell my parents I want to come home.’ And now she learned from the lowliest employee in the Fallon household that a trip to the family compound would not be advisable at this time. It was almost like a recorded message. Willy imagined the woman reading lines from a list of stock responses to cover every occasion.

‘Birdy, I’m in the hospital. I nearly died. Do they know someone tried to murder me?’

Apparently there was nothing on the maid’s list that might pertain to that question, and the older woman stammered, ‘I – I have to go now, Miss Willy.’

Oh, of course – furniture to dust and floors to mop. This minimum-wage earner was a very busy person – no time for idle gossip with socialites.

Willy wondered if she should teach the old bat a screaming lesson in class etiquette, a shouted stream of four-letter words guaranteed to wither the tender soul at the other end of the line. She clutched the telephone receiver a little tighter, and her voice dropped to a begging whisper. ‘Birdy, please don’t hang up on me.’

Too late. Her connection to home and family was a dial tone.

After the telephone had been ripped from the wall and the pillows had flown across the room, a nurse walked in to find Willy crying and shredding newspapers into tiny pieces. Help was summoned. The words Mommy, Daddy, Mommy, Daddy, followed by a rant of obscenities were taken for a seizure, though the doctor hardly seemed worried or sympathetic as he put a needle into Willy’s arm.

From the other side of the room, she heard the television set call her by name. And the anchorman went on to name Humphrey Bledsoe as another victim of the Hunger Artist. ‘A third victim remains unidentified.’

A third victim?

‘Oh,’ said Willy, ‘I know who that—’

‘Problem solved,’ said the doctor, pulling the needle from her arm. These were the last words she heard as the room began to spin, and her eyes closed on the whirlwind of walls and furniture and newspaper confetti.

THIRTEEN

I can’t use the school toilets anymore. Humphrey and the girls might be hiding in one of the stalls. But sometimes I have to pee or die, and I do it in the garden out behind the school. Now and then, teachers see me zipping my pants up or down, but they never say a word. And this is proof that they know what’s going on. Not ratting me out for peeing on a wall, that’s how they show support. Piss on them.

—Ernest Nadler

The dissection room was a chilly place of bright lights, stainless steel, and white tiles. The medical instruments were best described as cruel. And the term remains had a different meaning here. Yesterday’s rat-chewed corpse from the Ramble was today’s collection of body parts, organs weighed, tagged and bagged, and tissue samples gone for lab tests. A section of the dead woman’s jaw was also missing, and so was the brain and the sawed-off crown of the head. What remained on the table was a hollowed-out torso with putrefied limbs and a face obscured by a loose arrangement of surgical gauze above the bloody hole where the chin had been.

‘If you want me to check for chloroform, a broad-base scan will take at least five days.’ The chief medical examiner stood beside the table and looked down at the body, the source of the stink in this room.

Detective Riker retreated to the wall of sinks and cabinets; he was not keen on the blood-and-guts side of his trade.

Mallory stood at the foot of the table, clicked on her recorder and said, ‘Jane Doe. Bag number two from the Ramble.’

‘She might be the second one found,’ said Dr Slope, ‘but this woman is the Hunger Artist’s first victim. I drew blood that was still in liquid form. That puts time of death within seven days. She was three, maybe four days dead when she got here. Heller can narrow that for you. He does wonderful things with fly larva.’

Mallory stepped closer to the doctor. ‘I can’t wait around for Heller to hatch flies. I need that little detail now.’

‘Always in a hurry.’ The doctor picked up a clipboard from the small tray table and flipped through handwritten notes. ‘Her ordeal did a lot of damage to the organs. It was a slow death.’ He scanned the lines and flipped more pages, sometimes glancing Mallory’s way to see if she was sufficiently irritated yet. Apparently not. More page flipping followed. ‘As you might have expected – no stomach contents. That might’ve helped.’

He smiled. She glared.

He held up an X-ray. ‘There’s a hairline fracture at the back of the skull.’ Dr Slope waited a beat, and then, before Mallory could remind him that she had already seen that X-ray, he said, ‘Well, you know that didn’t kill her. Off the cuff, I’d say cause of death was dehydration. But then I found something else that was much more interesting.’

Riker rolled his eyes. All he wanted right now was one standout detail that would marry up to a missing- person file. And Slope knew that. The stack of reports from the tristate area posed a huge expenditure of man-hours. But now the detectives would have to listen to a lecture. And this was his partner’s fault. Mallory and the doctor had a game to play. It had gone on for years. It would never end.

‘All right, let’s start over,’ she said. ‘Give us the basics. Age, height, weight—’

‘Mid to late twenties. Height, five feet six. Weight, one hundred ten pounds. Does that help?’

No. That would fit a great many missing women from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, but Mallory never answered obvious questions. ‘What about tattoos?’ she said. ‘Injection sites? Birthmarks? Anything useful?’

‘There’s one truly rare feature.’ Slope’s pause was long and maddening, but Mallory was cool. Somewhat disappointed, the doctor walked to the counter and picked up a specimen bottle. ‘This is it.’

Riker saw something white and wormy floating in liquid. ‘Our vic had an alien baby?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Slope. ‘The woman’s most remarkable feature was in her brain.’

And Mallory did not shoot him.

‘I found this tumor on the pituitary gland. It’s not cancerous, but it would’ve caused other problems. It’s been there for a few years. The symptoms would’ve been obvious to her general practitioner. It’s situated in a tricky