The Chalk Girl

only intending to peek through a slit.

She sucked in her breath and lost her balance, falling to the floor and dragging down the curtain with its rod. Willy Fallon’s face was pressed up against the glass, fleshy features smeared in monstrous distortions.

Phoebe screamed.

Willy laughed.

THIRTY-TWO

Aggy the Biter pulls back the collar of my shirt. Maybe she wants to admire her handiwork, but the last bite mark has faded since class picture day.

This time, when they threaten to kill me, I point out that they’ve been trying to do that all year. I even know this will make the beating worse. I just can’t help it – sarcasm is my best superpower. But Humphrey just giggles and walks away with the girls.

All day long, I wait for them to come at me. Anticipation is a killer.

—Ernest Nadler

On her knees, Phoebe Bledsoe scrubbed the marking-pen letters from her cottage door. Only two words – and still Willy had managed an error in grammar. The scrawled message YOUR NEXT was faint now, but only a coat of paint would make it disappear.

Phoebe dropped her sponge, startled by the sound of footsteps coming up behind her.

‘It’s only me.’ Mr Polanski came to the end of the flagstone path. Keys jingled on his belt loop as he hunkered down by her side. ‘I called the headmaster at his summer home. He won’t let me change the gate lock. He says it’s an antique. Well, you know how the school feels about every really old thing. So I didn’t even ask if I could put a chain and a padlock on that gate . . . I thought the headmaster might say no.’ The old watchman smiled and held up a small key. ‘This goes to your new padlock, Miss Phoebe.’ And now he handed her another one. ‘That’s the spare. You’re the only one with keys. Do you feel safe now?’

Did she? Would she ever?

Dr Slope was not available, but a more agreeable pathologist was on call this morning. Mallory stood before him, hands on hips, her way of saying, Give up. And the man responded well to intimidation – less work for the detectives.

‘It’s not here.’ The young doctor faced his computer monitor. ‘No death certificate on file, not under that name.’

‘Okay, pal,’ said Riker. ‘Let’s say we’re just shopping for a dead wino. We’ll take anything you had in stock that day.’ The date they had given him corresponded to the death of a homeless man in the Ramble, the unidentified murder victim of Toby Wilder’s plea bargain.

The man in the lab coat scrolled down the screen and then stopped. ‘Got it. There’s only one body that fits. No name, just a number. It was found in Central Park.’ He tapped the keys to call up autopsy photographs. ‘Well, two odd things. There’s a big gap between the time this John Doe came in and when the paperwork was finished. And see here? These pictures show damage from a beating, but the body was never cracked open.’

‘You gotta be kidding me.’ Riker leaned down to the screen image of a savagely beaten corpse. ‘This guy’s a mess. He was a murder victim.’

‘Yes, sir, he was. And that’s noted right here.’

Mallory motioned for the pathologist to get up and get out of her way. She slid into his chair to click through the photographs one by one. ‘No good head shots. The beating really bloodied up his face. We’ll never get an ID from these pictures. Wait. Look at this one.’

Riker stared at a close-up shot of an injury to the flesh. A scalpel lay next to the body, and this was the only guide to scale. ‘A bite mark.’

Mallory nodded. ‘Little teeth. Kids killed the wino.’

Riker turned to the pathologist. ‘Why the third-rate autopsy? A homeless bum wasn’t worth the time?’ He pointed to the screen. ‘Nobody thought that was weird enough for a closer look?’

‘We want an exhumation,’ said Mallory. ‘We want it now.’

‘I understand you two are slandering the reputation of my department?’ The chief medical examiner had suddenly become available to the police.

Kathy Mallory stood next to the computer in Edward Slope’s private office. ‘I need your password to bring up the autopsy photos.’

‘Of course you do,’ said the doctor, sardonic to the bone.

His young assistant sat down at the keyboard with the impression that the detective might actually need help.

When the file was retrieved, copied and laid on Slope’s desk, he scanned the top sheet. ‘This autopsy was done by Dr Costello, not the best pathologist I ever had. He didn’t last long.’ And this file was brief. A few minutes later, he looked up from his reading. ‘I don’t have a problem with the findings in the bloodwork. A call of alcoholism works nicely with a notation that the victim smelled like a brewery. The blood-alcohol level is the highest possible for a man in an upright position.’ Next, he glanced at pictures of the corpse. ‘The cause of death was obviously a beating. It’s quite well documented here.’

He rose from his desk to stand behind the younger pathologist at the computer. ‘Raymond, bring up our social calendar for the same date.’ Slope leaned down to scrutinize the text on-screen. ‘When this body was examined, we had four corpses stacked up from a nightclub shootout. Now, those victims got full autopsies. But we also had three upstanding taxpayers killed in a traffic accident. The one with the severed head was driving a BMW convertible. Could there be a more obvious cause of death? No, I think not. And the well-heeled, headless guy didn’t get any more attention than your favorite wino.’ Edward Slope smiled as another conspiracy theory turned to ashes.

Mallory leaned over his desk and spread out the autopsy photographs until she found the picture that she liked best. ‘So . . . if you’d done this one yourself . . . if you’d seen those little teeth marks.’ She let the rest of her question dangle.

Slope snatched up the photo and stared at it. ‘Very small teeth marks – a child’s teeth.’ And now he went through each shot, taking more time, looking closer. ‘Didn’t I say that Dr Costello was not a shining star in this department?’ He laid the pictures down. ‘To answer your question – I would’ve done a full autopsy and pulled out all the stops.’ He had clearly underestimated the incompetence of his erstwhile pathologist. How could the man have missed this extraordinary evidence of a very uncommon murder? And the answer? It was in the notation, ‘smells like a brewery,’ and the John Doe designation of a homeless man – as if this might justify a three-minute autopsy on a busy day with more reputable corpses stacking up on the tables. ‘This doesn’t change the fact that your wino was beaten to death. And you know bite-mark identification is wildly overrated.’

Kathy Mallory laid down the photograph of a smiling schoolboy wearing blazer and tie – and a partial bite mark on his neck. ‘I say it’s a match. If your man had bothered to write up a kid’s bite marks on the wino’s body, that case would never have been fobbed off on a probie detective like—’

Edward Slope held up one hand, a signal that there was no need to finish that accusation. Smiling, he picked up the school photograph. ‘And now, of course, it’s clearly my fault the Nadler boy was murdered.’

As if in agreement, she said, ‘It’s not too late for a better autopsy on the wino.’

‘Yes, it is.’ The younger doctor sat at the computer, reading text on the screen. ‘The wino’s body was claimed ten years ago for private burial, but that’s the only mention of a second interment. No details, no idea where the body was buried the second time.’

Riker pulled out a notebook. ‘What’s the name on the exhumation order?’

‘There isn’t one,’ said the assistant. ‘There’s no record of the city paying to dig him up. And the body wouldn’t come back here unless there was a question about cause of death. So – if there’s no police interest – we don’t need to sign off on it. Any judge could’ve approved the exhumation.’