Yes, she believed him – and she cried.

He sat on the bed, close beside her and a different man when at last he spoke again. "You feel everything, don't you, Jo? Everybody's pain."

Johanna dropped the letters to the floor and placed one hand on his chest over the worst of his scars, the one perilously close to his heart. She had seen all the wounds while dressing him. It was miraculous that he had survived, and she knew what it had cost him to live with his memories of that event and the crushing weight of stress in every moment of his day.

He gently moved her hand away so his scars could not hurt her anymore.

When Mallory entered the private office, Jack Coffey rose from his desk and quit the room, most likely sensing the tension between the two men who remained and guessing that he was best left out of this conversation.

Chief Medical Examiner Edward Slope was seated with his back turned on Charles Butler, who slumped against one wall in abject misery. Mallory only glanced at him, posing a question with her eyes, no doubt wondering what he had given away. Charles shook his head to tell her that he had made no admissions, but she was not reassured, for his unhappy face said so much. He could not hide a thought and never attempted to lie, which explained why Edward Slope took all of his money in a weekly poker game.

Mallory folded her arms against the medical examiner, demanding, "What's going on?"

"That's what I'd like to know," said the doctor, "but Charles won't confess. Tell me, Kathy, how is Riker these days?"

"Mallory," she said, correcting his forbidden use of her first name. "I haven't seen Riker lately. Why are you here?"

"Charles wants to know if I botched the autopsy on the boy who shot Riker."

"I never said anything of the kind." Charles turned toward Mallory, helpless now, because he was not adept at misleading people. That was her forte.

"I bet Dr. Apollo put that idea in your head," said Mallory. "Am I right? She's the one who thinks the autopsy was rigged?"

"Right," said Charles. "Not my idea."

"That fits." She circled around to the back of the medical examiner's chair and leaned down to speak to him. Her voice dropped into that low range for telling secrets. "Nothing I say goes beyond this room. Deal?"

"Knowing you as long as I have, I'm hardly going to promise that."

"You asked about Riker." She moved behind the desk and sat down. "He's in a bad way." This unpredictable truth telling was truly disarming, and she engaged the surprised man in a staring contest. "If Riker had to take the psych evaluation today, he'd fail it. So don't help me. Rat him out. See to it that he never gets his badge back." And now, assured of the medical examiner's allegiance, she faced Charles. "Dr. Apollo got this idea from Riker, didn't she?"

"Johanna wouldn't say. She only asked if there was anything odd about the autopsy report. Something withheld."

Mallory nodded. "Every time Riker walks into a room, he's checking every stranger for concealed weapons. That's been going on for a long time. Now I'm guessing he thinks the shooter is still alive. His concentration is split. He's looking for the wrong suspect, and that's going to get him killed. I told him the perp who shot him was dead. I told him that six months ago. But I guess he didn't believe me."

"Hard to imagine why," said Edward Slope, perhaps leaning a bit too hard on the sarcasm.

"I don't understand," said Charles. "How could Riker believe a thing like that? Didn't the police shoot this boy quite a few times? Thirty times?"

"Well, we shot somebody,'" she said.

Charles's lips parted to speak, but mere words would not suffice, not just this minute, nor could he get them out, for his mouth had gone suddenly dry.

Edward Slope leaned back in his chair, then graced Mallory with a rare smile. "And people say you have no sense of humor."

Chapter 18

THE PARENTS IDENTIFIED THE WRONG BODY." RIKER paced the bedroom floor, working off his anger. "And they knew it wasn't their kid. That's why they never filed a wrongful-death suit against the city. Happens every time a suspect gets shot by the police. The relatives always do that. But not this time."

"There must've been blood tests on the body," said Johanna.

Riker shook his head. "What for? Thirty bullet wounds made the cause of death pretty damn clear. And the next of kin identified the corpse. That satisfied all the requirements for the state. So why run the blood tests? Why fool with a good thing?" Weary now, he sat down beside her at the edge of the mattress. "It all worked out so nicely for everybody. NYPD looks good for closing a major case in record time. The city avoids a megabucks lawsuit for shooting the wrong suspect. And that psycho kid goes free. I'm sure the parents loved that part."

"Then this is just theory. You don't actually – "

"There's more. I got all the proof I need. The parents went to Europe after the shooting. Probably got their kid settled in with a new identity. Maybe four weeks later, they came back to town. So I go by their place and talk to the doorman. This is around the time I started picking up on the shadows, people following me everywhere I went. Sometimes it was Mallory. She's easy to spot. Thinks she can do surveillance. She can't. But one of them wasn't a cop. It was a little freak in a bad wig, not your basic undercover outfit. He was young, and his size was right." He turned to Jo. "So – still think I'm sane? Or am I as crazy as Timothy Kidd?"

And now it was Johanna who needed a change of subject. She took his hand, interlaced her fingers with his and said, "Tell me your damn first name. Tell me… or I'll make you clean the toilet."

Janos found Mallory alone in Jack Coffey's office. "The old guy wants out.

"He knows the conditions," said Mallory. "Did the pervert kiss him yet?" "No, the lawyer bought the little guy off with a gold watch." Janos held up a slip of paper. "But the old guy gave up the name and address for your phony blind man."

Great! Just great!

Riker was on his knees, wearing a damn apron, and his head was deep in the toilet, though not on some philosophical mission to see where his life had lately gone; he was brushing stains that required close-up squinting. Oh, and this was the best part of his big dream: into the bathroom walks Edward Slope, the chief medical examiner himself, all decked out in a three-piece suit.

"A house call? From a body snatcher?" Riker sat back on his heels, then slumped against the tiled wall. "Can't you wait till I'm dead?"

"I want you to see something." Slope opened an envelope and pulled out a batch of photographs. One of them wafted to the floor. It was the picture of a body on the doctor's dissection table. "That's the well-bred young man who tried to kill you six months ago. I did the autopsy myself. As you can see, he's quite dead. It only took the police a few hours to track him down. He was shot to pieces before you got out of surgery."

Another photograph joined the one on the floor. The corpse was full of holes, the face was gone. Riker remembered this particular picture as the one Mallory had liked best. She had brought it to his hospital room and held it up like a trophy. At the time, he had been surprised that she had not brought in the actual body, bronzed and nailed to a plaque for her wall. He looked up at the medical examiner and smiled with only half his face to let the man know that he was not buying any of this. Never had, never would.

Edward Slope hunkered down and papered the floor with the rest of his evidence. "This psychotic little geek is as dead as roadkill. It was a very thorough job, nine cops and precisely thirty bullets. You were told about this. Did you think your own people would lie to you?" And now, perhaps recalling that one of these people was Mallory, he amended this query. "All of them liars? Every cop in Special Crimes Unit?"