The Chalk Girl

Ortega had seen the missing child. He looked at his watch. Hours had passed since the rat attack in the meadow on the other side of West Drive. ‘We’ll never find her around here. Kids make good time on the run.’ He despaired of locating one little girl in parkland that was miles long, half a mile wide and filled with a million trees to hide her. And yet his partner aimed the cart with confidence and sure direction. ‘So what do you know that I don’t know?’

‘Coco’s not hiding,’ said Mallory. ‘She’s trying to connect with people. She’ll stick to this road.’

His partner had the inside track on lost children. She used to be one – if it could be said that she was ever a real child. She had arrived at the Markowitz household with a full skill set for survival at the age of ten or eleven. Her foster parents, Lou and Helen, had never been certain of her age because the child- size Kathy Mallory had also shown a genius for deception. But stealing was where Riker thought the kid really shined in her puppy days.

Eliciting fear was a talent she had later grown into.

After passing the park exit for 77th Street, Mallory pressed the gas pedal to the floor and jumped the curb to aim the cart at two boys with skateboards in hand. They wore kneepads and wrist guards and helmets, all the cushions that parents could provide to keep their young alive in New York City. True, these youngsters were teenagers, but someone loved them. When the cart braked to a sudden stop, the front wheels were inches from their kneecaps – and the boys laughed. No shock, no awe, for this was a toy car. And then the fun was over. They had locked eyes with Mallory.

Oh, shit.

Words were unnecessary. She only nodded to say, Yes, I’m a cop. Yes, I carry a gun – a big one. She tilted her head to one side and smiled, silently asking if they might have a bit of weed in their pockets that would interest her.

Teenagers were so easy.

Riker held up his badge and waved them over to his side of the cart. He reached into his pocket for the photograph of Mrs Ortega’s fairy figurine. ‘Okay, guys, this is how it works. One smartass remark and my partner shoots you. We’re hunting for a lost kid. The girl looks something like this.’ He showed them the photo and read one boy’s mind when he saw the smirk. ‘Forget you saw the wings.’ He nodded toward Mallory. ‘She will hurt you.’

‘Yeah, we saw the kid,’ said the taller boy. ‘Well, you’re headed in the right direction.’ He pointed back the way he had come with his friend. ‘Take the first path on the right. She was running east.’

‘She went into the Ramble?’ Riker shaded his eyes to look toward that area of dense woods, once notorious as a haven for addicts and muggers with knives and guns, and for bob-and-drop rapists with rocks. In more recent times, the wildwood had been invaded by bird-watchers, joggers and grandmothers. ‘How long ago?’

‘Maybe an hour – half an hour.’

‘Talk to me.’ Mallory zeroed in on the other boy’s guilty face. ‘What else happened?’

This teenager looked down at the grass and then up to the sky. ‘She asked me for a hug.’

‘But she was dirty.’ Mallory stepped out of the cart. ‘Probably a homeless kid.’ Her voice was a monotone. ‘You thought you might catch something – bedbugs or lice.’ She circled around the boy, snatched his skateboard and tossed it under the wheels of the cart. And still, he would not look at her. ‘That little girl had blood on her T-shirt, and she was scared, wasn’t she? But you had plans for the day, places to go – no time to call the cops.’ Mallory held up her open hand and showed the boy his own pricey cell phone. He stared at it in disbelief as he patted the empty back pocket of his jeans.

‘You think I can hit the water from here?’ She glanced at the long finger of lake water bordered with an orange construction fence, and she hefted his phone as if weighing it. ‘Talk to me.’

The teenager turned his worried eyes to Riker, who only shrugged to say I warned you about her.

It was the other boy who spoke first, maybe in fear for his own cell phone. ‘The girl was a little strange . . . I thought she was gonna cry when—’

‘When your friend blew her off?’ With only the prompt of Mallory folding her arms, both of them were talking at once, and now they remembered – suddenly and conveniently – that Coco had run toward another park visitor.

‘We figured he’d call the cops.’

‘Yeah,’ said Riker, ‘sure you did.’ Pissant liar.

The teenager gave him a snarky so-what smile – no respect.

Smug lies to cops should have consequences, but rather than shake the little bastard until his perfect teeth came loose, Riker turned away and climbed into the cart. Behind him, he heard a splash followed by the boy’s ‘Oh, shit! My phone!’ Then Mallory was back in the driver’s seat, and the cart lurched forward with the satisfying crunch of a skateboard under one wheel.

The detectives traveled down a narrow road and into the woods at the reckless top speed of hardly any miles per hour. The Ramble was a sprawl of thirty-eight acres, thick with trees and lush foliage, beautiful and disheartening. On Riker’s map, this area was a daunting maze of winding paths. ‘We’ll never find her in here.’

‘Sure we will. The kid’s running scared. She’ll make all the easy choices.’ Mallory passed every turnoff, staying on the widest path and only slowing down for a closer look at a low, flimsy, wire fence. And now a full stop. One section of the fence had been pulled down to the ground. Old lessons of the late Lou Markowitz – she would always stop to look at every odd thing. And then she drove on.

As they rolled out of the Ramble and onto open ground down near the Boathouse Cafe on the east side of the lake, Riker answered his cell phone. ‘Yeah?’ He turned to his partner. ‘We’re headed the right way. We got a fairy sighting on the mall.’

Beyond the lake of rowboats and ducks, past Bethesda Terrace, they drove onto the park mall and into the mellow tones of a saxophone near the old band shell. Four people were coming toward them, frightened and running faster than the cart could go. The detectives traveled past them and down the wide pedestrian boulevard lined with giant trees, benches and street lamps from the gaslight era. High above them was a canopy of leafy branches, and up ahead was the sound of a Dixieland band, which seemed to orchestrate the civilian scramble for park exits. The music stopped when Riker flashed his badge.

‘False alarm,’ said the banjo man, holding up his cell phone. ‘We thought the kid was lost, but then she hooked up with a tour group.’

And the trumpet player said, ‘I gave them directions to the park zoo.’

The cart rolled on, pedal to the floor.

‘Hold it!’ yelled Riker. They braked to a sudden stop as a gang of rats cut across the paving stones in front of them. ‘What the hell?’ Downtown in his SoHo neighborhood, the rodents were all dilettantes who never turned out until ten o’clock at night, and they avoided people. They were rarely seen except as shining eyes reflecting streetlights and watching from the dark of alleys and trashcans. Sometimes he would see one scurrying close to a wall, but he had never seen galloping rats, backs arching and elongating. No doubt these were people-eating escapees from Sheep Meadow. Most of the vermin had cleared the path when one brazen animal stopped in front of their vehicle. The lone rat reared up on his hind legs and faced them down – absolutely fearless – almost admirable.

Mallory ran over him.

Upon entering the zoo on foot, the detectives decided not to show the fairy photograph. Instead they worked off the simple description of a small redhead in a bloody T-shirt. Here, where civilians were sheltered from hysterical screamers and marauding vermin, there were no signs of panic. A tranquil visitor pointed them toward the exhibit at the heart of a plaza, a raised cement pool where sea lions lazed atop slabs of rock, dozing and baking under the noonday sun. And there was the little girl, standing on the steps that surrounded the enclosure. A zoo employee kept his distance from her while making a long reach to hand over the traditional ice-cream cone for the lost child.

Mallory called out, ‘Coco!’

The tiny girl dropped her cone and ran toward them, laughing and crying, her puny arms outstretched to beg an embrace. The desperation on her dirty little face saddened Riker. A hug might well be oxygen to her, the stuff of life itself. She needed this. Mrs Ortega was right – Coco had no survival instincts. The clueless child had picked his partner as a source of warmth and comfort.

Coco wrapped her arms around the tall blond detective, who not only tolerated the embrace but smiled down