The Chalk Girl

His point was made. His boss was nodding. And Mallory was going to get clean away with this.

The lieutenant’s thoughts turned back to his pathetic paper-napkin map as evidence of her lost-soul state of mind. Riker had tried to tell him that he was wrong about the road trip, her unauthorized vacation from the job. And the proof? Mallory was getting away with that, too.

Yeah, her partner was definitely laughing his ass off right about now.

In a building across the street from One Police Plaza, the two detectives stood before a fourth-floor window that overlooked the demonstration. Riker had been braced for trouble all the way downtown, and now his partner broke her long, frosty silence.

‘That’ll be the day,’ said Mallory, ‘when I can’t pass a psych evaluation.’

Riker bowed his head, an act of contrition. He should have known better. It should have been obvious that Dr Kane’s finding of sociopathy was bogus – even if that twisted, frightened shrink had accidentally gotten this one thing right.

‘Here they come.’ Mallory handed him her field glasses.

He focused the lenses on the entrance as a small gang of suits, union reps and lawyers, exited the building with seven female officers in dress blues. They all raised their fists in victory. Riker expected cheers, but the demonstrators remained silent and standing at attention. The now unemployed Dr Kane was the next one through the door. He saw the barrier of uniforms, so many of them. The man clutched his breast and paused long enough to lose his mind before he ran back inside. And now Riker got the joke. The female officers broke ranks, standing at ease and then laughing as they peeled away from Dr Kane’s wide-awake nightmare, a mob of mighty women with guns.

And people said Mallory had no sense of humor. Hah.

All that worry for nothing. Riker looked down at his watch. They had a suspect in custody and awaiting interrogation. ‘We gotta get moving.’

Mallory idly jingled the car keys. ‘I know what you did.’ Her head did not turn his way. It swiveled. Like a cannon. And she said, ‘But I don’t know how you did it.’

Riker sensed that this was no prelude to a warm, fuzzy moment. He held up both hands in a don’t-shoot-me posture. ‘I get it, okay? You never needed any help.’ Did this mollify her? Well, no, of course not. He knew why she had dragged him down here, why he had to see her handiwork up close, a damn army in the service of the ultimate control freak.

‘I know what Goddard was using for leverage on us – on me,’ she said. ‘Now tell me what kind of dirt you used on him.’

Tough one.

Extortion or no, a deal was a deal, and he was honor-bound to keep it. If he ratted out the chief of D’s, he would lose her respect. And if he didn’t? Well, the lady carried a gun. And so he said, ‘Shoot me.’

Willy Fallon sat in the interrogation room with her cut-rate attorney, a baby-faced man in a cheap suit. According to Mallory’s background check, he had graduated near the bottom of his law-school class.

Counselor and client had been kept waiting for an hour before the detectives sauntered in. Riker held up a sheet of paper and began to read a list of the state’s grievances.

In response to the first charge of murdering Rolland Mann, Willy shouted, ‘He tried to kill me first!’

Well, that was predictable, and so Riker said his scripted lines, and his delivery was rough. ‘That’s gonna be a hard sell to a jury. This is what they’ll see.’ He showed her a picture on the small screen of a tourist’s cell phone. ‘Here you are squeezing the poor bastard’s balls.’ Now he clicked to his favorite shot. ‘And here you are again, kicking his ass in front of the bus. Don’t tell us you didn’t see that bus coming. It’s a double-decker.’

The attorney chimed in, ‘That’s not murder. At best you’ve got an assault with mitigating circumstances.’

The detectives stared at this man, as if he might be speaking some off-planet language.

‘I’m trying to work with you guys,’ said the lawyer. ‘Okay? Now my client’s a first-time offender.’

‘No,’ said Riker, ‘she’s not. And we got a few more charges. One of her victims was only ten months old. Willy threw the kid on the subway tracks. So, Counselor – what are we calling attempted murder today? You got mitigating circumstances for that one? Did the baby say something rude to Willy?’

After an exchange of whispers with his client, the lawyer smiled. ‘I’m still willing to work with you.’

Riker pulled a ten-dollar bill from his wallet and showed it to his partner. ‘I say he’s gonna tell us the joke about sending her to drug rehab instead of jail.’

Mallory shook her head – no bet. She laid out an evidence bag filled with capsules and pills. And then she said, so politely, almost apologetically, ‘Your client’s stash is evidence for another charge.’

‘Willy drugged a guy,’ said Riker. ‘Not the one she pushed in front of a bus. This was a completely different guy – the one she tried to push in front of a train.’

‘That’s related to the drug charge.’ Mallory’s comment was low-key, as if she had no stake in this game. She was the soul of sanity and clarity – and no hard feelings, by the way. ‘Toby Wilder was given a lethal dose of narcotics.’

Riker grabbed the evidence bag and held it up to the attorney as he squeezed the stash of pills in a fist. ‘Toby says she drugged his wine.’

‘That was only fair!’ yelled Willy, all but confessing before the attorney could lean over and say, ‘Shut the hell up.’

‘I won’t!’ she said. ‘Toby was the one who strung me up in the Ramble. He tried to kill me.’

‘You’re lying,’ said Riker. ‘You couldn’t identify your kidnapper. And that’s backed up by the ER doc who examined you.’

Mallory, in the spirit of being helpful, pushed the doctor’s statement across the table. ‘He said the blow to the back of your head wiped out ten or fifteen minutes of memory. So you couldn’t—’

‘It had to be Toby!’ Willy’s voice was climbing into a high whine. ‘I know it wasn’t that creep Rolland Mann. He was a fucking amateur at killing. He’s dead, isn’t he? So it had to be Toby.’

The detectives looked at each other in mutual understanding of Willy logic: Their suspect had deduced this by process of lethal elimination.

‘So let’s recap,’ said Riker, addressing the only grown-up on the other side of the table. ‘Your client pushes one victim in front of a bus, and then she drugs another one. Tries to push that guy in front of a moving train. And the charge of resisting arrest brings us back to tossing the baby on the tracks. Maybe you saw the baby-tossing video? It’s on every TV channel.’

‘I do watch the news,’ said the lawyer. ‘So I know Detective Mallory here survived being run over by a train. I’m told there’s two feet of clearance between the rail bed and the—’

‘Don’t.’ Riker, with only this one syllable, promised the lawyer that it was worth his life to continue that thought. ‘When you toss a baby on the tracks, you can count on injury from the fall. And then there’s an expectation of sudden death!’ He pounded his fist on the table to punctuate those last two words and then turned his angry face to Willy. ‘The kid’s gonna be okay, but the mother’s suing you for every dime you’ll ever own.’ And now back to the lawyer once more. ‘So I hope you got paid up front, pal. We talked to Willy’s parents. They’re not laying out one dime for legal expenses. Her credit cards are maxed out, but she’s got about five grand in a paper sack. Will that do you?’

This was clearly a surprise to the lawyer. His smile of confidence faltered and failed. It was easy to read his face when he brightened up a little. Hey – five thousand dollars. The man stole a glance at his wristwatch, probably counting the money flying by per minute. ‘I propose a reasonable plea agreement for lesser charges.’

‘What?’ Riker was on his feet and leaning over the table, as though he meant to throttle the lawyer. His partner rested one light hand on his arm, and he settled back into his chair.

Mallory smiled pleasantly, as if the lawyer had said something sane. ‘I think we can work out a deal.’

On the other side of the looking glass, Jack Coffey shook his head in wonder. He had previously supposed that only in hell could Mallory play good cop to Riker’s bad cop.

A visiting VIP, District Attorney Walter Hamlin, was also seated in the front row of the watchers’ room. This