The Chalk Girl

small, yellowed pages filled with handwritten lines. ‘Those are personal notes from a retired cop. Officer Kayhill was on park patrol fifteen years ago.’

Riker scanned the sheets, straining to read them without his glasses. Damned if he would wear his bifocals in front of this man. After two pages, he turned to Mallory. ‘This backs up the ViCAP questionnaire. Kayhill was there when the kid was found hanging in a tree.’

‘Yeah,’ said the chief of D’s. ‘And I’m sure he filed an incident report, but that seems to have disappeared. If Rolland Mann should ask – tell him you got those notes at Kayhill’s nursing home this morning. The old guy’s senile. No worries about him backing you up. Kayhill’s notes say the victim was alive when he was cut down. But the boy couldn’t talk – no ID.’

And Riker, still squinting at the notebook pages, had just gotten to the part that explained why the boy was mute. ‘And then the kid was shipped off in an ambulance.’ He looked down at the desk blotter as Goddard laid out a document with a raised seal. The words Death Certificate were writ large.

‘This boy’s a good fit,’ said the chief. ‘He’s from the Upper West Side, and his parents reported him missing three days before the hanging in the Ramble. Has to be the same kid.’

For one scary moment, Riker thought his partner was going to challenge Goddard on this point; they had been through the Missing Persons reports for that period and come up dry. But Mallory only picked up the document. ‘This boy died a month after the hanging.’ She handed the death certificate to Riker. ‘Check out the date.’

He held it out at arm’s length and nodded. ‘The same day Rolland Mann made the ViCAP search.’ If this death had resulted from the park assault, then the acting police commissioner had buried a child’s murder.

The little boy who was not there waved both hands in wild protest and silently formed the words, No! and Don’t!

Against the good advice of Dead Ernest, Phoebe Bledsoe answered the telephone.

‘My condolences on Humphrey,’ said the voice of Willy Fallon. ‘I just heard the funeral announcement on TV. Very tacky. Most people place obituaries in the—’

‘I gave my mother your message.’ Phoebe turned to Dead Ernest, who mouthed the words, Hang up, hang up.

‘She still won’t take my calls,’ said Willy. ‘So try again. Try harder! Tell her the third victim is Aggy Sutton. That’s not on the news – not in the papers. But you already figured that out, right? . . . And when you talk to your mother, tell her you’re next.’

Phoebe shook her head.

And Willy laughed, as if she could see this gesture of denial through the telephone line. ‘You were there that day. Does your mother know that, Phoebe? Do you think that might get her attention? Will there be cops at the funeral tomorrow? I could talk to them.’

NINETEEN

It’s four blocks in the wrong direction, but sometimes Phoebe and I follow Toby Wilder home after school. He’s a traveling safety zone. Nothing bad happens when he’s around.

Phoebe wants to marry him. I want to be him. Toby is contagiously cool. He walks to a rhythm of music in his mind, head bobbing, fingers snapping. So cool. And that music – I can almost hear it when it rises to a crescendo in his brain, when he can no longer help himself, and he has to stop and dance on the sidewalk. Passersby smile at the dancing boy, and their heads bob, as if they can hear the music, too.

—Ernest Nadler

They had been kept waiting in the anteroom for thirty minutes. Mallory and Riker had used the time to chat up Rolland Mann’s bodyguard, a detective who had once worked the SoHo precinct and owed a favor to their lieutenant. And so they learned that Detective Monahan hated his new boss, and the acting commissioner had ditched his bodyguard at least once on the day he took over Beale’s office. But Monahan was a savvy cop, and today he had resolved that problem by posting a white shield downstairs to follow the man if he should leave the building unescorted.

Mallory handed Monahan her cell phone. ‘Not today. Call him off.’

‘Detectives?’ On the other side of the room, the secretary cupped a telephone’s mouthpiece. ‘It won’t be long now. They’re almost done.’

The door opened, and two civilians emerged from the private office. The men crossed the reception room with toolboxes in hand and Tech Support IDs pinned to their shirt pockets.

‘He’ll see you now,’ said Miss Scott.

The secretary buzzed Mallory and Riker through the door to the inner sanctum, a large office that had always been a Spartan place. Police Commissioner Beale was a man with the soul of a cost accountant, and frugality was his religion. Apparently his deputy, Rolland Mann, had inside information on the old codger’s heart surgery. One side of the desk was piled with decorator swatches of material for drapes and upholstery – just in case the commissioner died on the operating table. A wide-screen plasma television explained the need for Tech Support. If Beale should survive and return to work, the sheer expense of this TV set would kill him. It hung on the wall with the appearance of a hasty job. Dangling wires bypassed the modern equipment on the shelf below, connecting instead to a videocassette player, a piece of outdated technology.

The man behind the desk struck Mallory as odd – because he was so ordinary. She could understand why the commissioner had chosen him as second in command: Rolland Mann was a younger version of Beale, a bloodless clone of bureaucrats everywhere. It was hard to believe that he had ever been a cop. He was too . . . soft. His face was doughy, and the long, white fingers seemed to have no bones. She sized up the acting commissioner as a worm with attitude. He pretended not to notice that minions from the lower ranks had entered the room during his leisurely perusal of a newspaper.

In the spirit of career suicide, Riker followed his partner’s lead and sat down in a chair with no invitation to do so. Mallory stretched out her long legs and said, ‘Hey.’ Deputy Commissioner Mann looked up, displeased – then confused. She dangled a pocket watch to let him know that she did not have all damn day for his nonsense. Her insolence was just short of a warning shot, the preamble of a bullet being chambered in her gun – taking aim – and then she looked down at the papers in her lap, scanning the lines – keeping him waiting.

Call it an experiment. This was the moment for fireworks, a sharp reprimand at the very least. Insubordination at this level was a major offense. But Rolland Mann only cleared his throat – and that was telling. He folded his newspaper and laid it down. ‘I’m told you’re looking at old cases from the Ramble.’

‘No,’ said Mallory, without looking up from her copy of the ViCAP questionnaire. ‘Just yours.’

And now they had a game.

‘You wasted a trip, Detective.’ He held up his newspaper to display the Hunger Artist headline. ‘There’s no connection between this case and—’

‘Your case,’ said Mallory, leaving off the mandatory sir. ‘You were the only detective on that one. No partner.’ This was only a guess, but she was right. Mann was startled, and now he must be wondering how she had acquired that information – since there was no case file to consult. She held up the yellowed pages supplied by the chief of detectives. ‘These are Officer Kayhill’s personal notes. You remember him. He was the cop who found that kid strung up in the Ramble.’ She shuffled the small, loose papers like playing cards. ‘He mentions your name.’ Mallory looked up. ‘You were there that night.’

Did he seem relieved? Yes. And now he smiled. ‘That led to my first bust as a probie detective.’

Rolland Mann’s old ViCAP questionnaire listed no name or age for the victim, only describing a prepubescent male. Mallory leafed through the rest of her papers to find Chief Goddard’s copy of the death certificate, and she read the dates that began and ended the short life of a child. ‘How old was the boy you found in the Ramble?’

‘I don’t recall. A skinny little kid. I remember that. He weighed maybe seventy pounds soaking wet. Oh, and he was fully clothed.’ The deputy commissioner looked down at the front page of the Times. ‘Your three vics were naked adults. And mine wasn’t found in a sack. The kid was strung up by the wrists. No duct tape, either.’