The Chalk Girl

It took me four years to get Toby out on early release. His mother was dying. I bought them a year to say goodbye.’

Behind him, Riker heard Mallory’s cell phone ring. A moment later, he turned around, and she was gone.

Rolland Mann’s secretary did not look up from the screen of her computer. Miss Scott wore a secretive, joyful little smile, and he assumed that she had found another job. No doubt he would find her letter of resignation on his desk. But that was not the surprise that awaited him when he opened the door to his private office.

A detective was seated at his desk – leaning back in his chair – just begging to be fired for gross insubordination. ‘Mallory, are you insane?’

‘Oh, yeah. Ask anybody.’ She lifted a newspaper from the desk blotter to expose a weapon lying there, and it was not a police-issue semi-automatic. It was a revolver – a big one.

Rolland observed the traditional body language for dealing with a whack-job cop: the missed beat of the heart, the tension of every muscle, the gaping dry mouth.

The detective’s face was a mask, and neither was there any expression in her voice when she said, ‘Charles Butler tells me you have an interest in a little girl . . . He called it an unhealthy interest.’ She picked up the revolver and studied its muzzle. Now she showed emotion – she loved the gun.

He felt a cold wetness spreading on his crotch. Rolling down his legs. The smell of piss was in the air.

Point taken.

Mallory holstered her weapon and left the office.

TWENTY-EIGHT

We’re better trackers now, Phoebe and me. Today we keep Toby in our sights for a long time before losing him in the Ramble. Then we hear the scream, a grown-up’s voice, lots of anger. We can’t tell where the sound comes from. Though we don’t mean to, we run toward it, crashing through bushes and ferns and into a clearing. The place has the stink of an outdoor toilet. And other smells, beer and vomit. A buzz of black flies. A thousand gnats.

And there’s Toby standing on a path up ahead. Next to him is a wild man – hair matted and stringy, clothes dirty, teeth missing – fists waving. Toby holds one hand to a bright red patch of skin on his face, and we know that crazy bum hit him. Then the man slaps something out of Toby’s hand. It falls on the ground. Golden. Shiny. Toby leaves it there, turns his back and walks away. The crazy man lurches into the clearing. Sobbing, he falls to his knees on the grass.

Phoebe picks up the shiny thing, a gold cigarette lighter. And I say, ‘So Toby smokes cigarettes? How cool is that?’ Phoebe says no, it must be a keepsake. Toby never smells of smoke; he smells like soap. Only Phoebe would know his scent. She would taste him if she only could.

And then we hear the laughter from above. We look up to the high ground of a boulder, and there they are, Humphrey, Willy and Aggy. While we followed Toby, they had followed us.

They jump down from the rock. It’s raining monsters.

—Ernest Nadler

Lieutenant Coffey’s destination was only a short walk from the station house, but he had made a detour along the way. After parking his personal car, he stood on the sidewalk, looking up at an apartment window above the SoHo cop bar. He entered the saloon, an alcoholic’s dream come true, only a short stumble up the stairs to Riker’s apartment.

And now Jack Coffey climbed those steps to knock on the detective’s door.

Riker had his six-pack smile in place when he greeted his commanding officer. ‘Hey, Lieutenant.’

Coffey entered the front room, a dumping ground for take-out cartons, crushed beer cans and unwashed glasses that had done double duty as ashtrays. A tower of dirty socks, junk mail and newspapers was precariously stacked on a straight-back chair. The stack moved. He could not look away. Any second now—

Surprise. A walkway had been cleared from the front door to the kitchen, where dirty dishes were stacked up in the sink and along the countertop. But a small table had been swiped clean of debris. Whatever liquid had been spilled on the linoleum, it stuck to the soles of the lieutenant’s shoes and made a tacky sound as he crossed the small room. ‘Well, this is touching. You cleaned up for me.’

Riker, the quintessential host, put a cold beer in the lieutenant’s hand. ‘Pull up a chair.’

Coffey sat down at the table and tipped back his bottle for a long, cold swallow on a warm summer night. ‘Where’s your partner?’

‘Probably following the money.’

‘She ditched you, right?’ The lieutenant could hear the rattle of the air conditioner in the next room, but it was doing little to cool this apartment. He wondered if Riker had ever cleaned the AC filter. Stupid idea. ‘I went back to my place to go over Mallory’s credit-card charges for the time she was gone.’

‘You ran her card trace from your home computer?’

‘Yeah. I couldn’t put her in the department goldfish bowl. But I did it by the book. I guess she backtracked the search with my badge number. It’s not like I was hiding anything. I figured that was her reason for driving me nuts for the past month.’

‘Naw,’ said Riker. ‘That was just payback for all that desk duty.’

‘Maybe – maybe not.’ The lieutenant tipped his chair backwards on two legs and looked up at the ceiling, a haven for spiderwebs and trapped flies.

‘God knows she’s not normal,’ said Riker. ‘But nobody working homicide is all that well-adjusted.’ He held up a cigarette to ask his commanding officer if he minded the smoke – Riker, who deferred to nobody – and this was evidence of a worried man.

‘The chief of D’s called again. He ran his own trace on Mallory’s cards – for the lost time on the road.’

‘Then he’s got nothing,’ said Riker. ‘So the kid likes to drive. So what? Beats the hell out of booze and drugs to forget the last body count. You know her car?’

‘I’ve seen it,’ said Coffey. ‘A Volkswagen convertible.’

‘Naw, it only looks like one. You lift up the hood, roll back the top, and what’ve you got? A damn Porsche with a roll bar.’

‘Disguised as a VW . . . Oh, yeah, that’s normal.’ But that would explain how she had traveled from place to place so fast, wandering aimlessly at breakneck speeds. ‘She was gone for three months, Riker.’

‘I’ve lost more time than that in drunk tanks. Every cop needs a hobby. I drink – she drives.’

Jack Coffey found a clean deli napkin on the floor at his feet, and he used it to draw a crude map of the lower forty-eight states. ‘The charges she racked up are mostly gas stations, food, hotels.’ The lieutenant drew a row of dashes running out of New York. ‘For a few hundred miles, it almost looks like she’s got someplace to go.’ And then the westward line disintegrated into weaves and jogs and doubling-back circles as the lieutenant’s pen traveled across the paper-napkin country. ‘But she’s got no plan, no destination. The kid’s got nothing.’ Paradoxical Mallory, a girl with a full tank of gas – running on empty and covering lots of ground to go nowhere. His pen pressed down on the West Coast. ‘This is where she ran out of land.’ The pen moved along the edge of America, hugging the barrier ocean as it traveled north on the ragged paper coastline and stopped again. ‘Here’s where she decides to come back home.’ The pen described wide spirals – a cartoon of a clockwork spring, months long from coast to coast. ‘Not your typical tourist route. Circling, circling . . . the way people travel when they’re lost.’

‘But she’s fine now,’ said Riker.

The lieutenant waited until the man met his eyes, and then his words were carefully meted out. ‘She was never fine.’

And she never would be. Life could only beat a little kid half to death so many times and still expect her to grow up normal. But Mallory was a highly functional cop, and the best he had ever known, even better than her old man. It was a tribute he could not afford to pay to her face because – she was not fine. At best, he could say she was back in form, smart and edgy and totally—