‘Okay,’ said Riker. ‘Let’s say the intruder wasn’t the killer.’

‘But someone with his own key,’ said Charles. ‘Maybe a lover. If he saw the crime scene – it was horrific – that might’ve left him unhinged. Now he’s not the man who murdered Natalie Homer – ’

‘So he’s the one who did the copycat hangings.’ Mallory turned to Riker. ‘It fits with the anniversary kill, a woman with Natalie’s long blond hair. Then Sparrow – ’

‘Poor Sparrow.’ Riker poured the last drops of wine into his glass. ‘Nothing personal, the freak just needed another blonde.’

On toward midnight, Mallory circled the block once more, then cut the car’s engine and turned off her headlights as she coasted silently to the curb. Her eyes were fixed on a third-floor window dimly lit by the screen of Riker’s television set. She knew what he was doing up there. He was chain-smoking cigarettes and sipping bourbon – medicine for missing his ex-wife. Every glass in the apartment might be dirty, yet she knew he would not be drinking from the mouth of a bottle.

Riker’s rules – only winos did that.

Mallory covertly kept him company for a while, sitting in the dark of her car, keeping watch on his window. It was the kind of thing one partner did for another – as if she could fly that high when his gun went off.

A year had passed since the last time his ex-wife had inspired a day-long binge. Mallory had helped him stagger up all those stairs, then rolled him on to an unmade bed, where he had slept in his clothes, but not his shoes. And she had also removed his gun that night and taken the bullets away.

He was a sorry alcoholic; that would never change. And Mallory was also constant.

The light in the window went out.

‘Night, Riker.

She started up her car and headed home.

He would not kill himself in the dark; it would be too difficult for a blind and trembling drunk to thread his finger into the trigger. And she could not foresee him dying in the bathroom by the glow of his plastic Jesus night-light.

CHAPTER 8

The rear office was flooded with morning light. Charles thought the room temperature had chilled by a few degrees since he had last looked in, but little else had changed. Mallory was still averting her eyes from the paper storm on her cork wall, an anathema to someone who straightened paintings in other people’s houses. She sat at a metal workstation, but no longer communed with her network of computers. The three machines hummed amongst themselves while she leafed through Louis Markowitz’s old notebook. The only human sound was the tap of Lars Geldorf s pacing shoes.

Impatient to begin the day, the retired detective removed his suit jacket and loosened his tie, but this clue was lost on her. Occasionally, she looked up from her reading to watch his travels about the room – her room – as he inspected metal shelves stocked with electronics. Geldorf wore a brave pretender’s smile and nodded in a knowing way, though he had no idea what her machines could do. They were new, and he was old.

She rose from her chair and approached the cork wall to stand before a haphazard arrangement of crime-scene photographs. Charles observed tension in her face, a small war going on at the core of her as she struggled with the urge to place every bit of paper at perfect right angles to the next.

Lars Geldorf hurried across the room to join her. And now Charles understood what the last fifteen minutes of silence had been about. Mallory was teaching the old man to follow her lead. There should never be any doubt about the hierarchy in this room, and Geldorf should not call her honey one more time. Charles decided that she must like the old man, for this was the mildest and most drawn-out show of contempt in her repertoire.

She lifted the edge of a grainy photograph to expose a small square one pinned beneath it. Then she looked under the other eight-by-ten formats in this group, each one covering a picture from an instant camera. ‘All you’ve got are Polaroids and blowups.’

‘Yeah,’ said Geldorf. ‘So?’

‘Where are the originals?’

‘That’s all of’em, kid.’

‘Mallory,’ she corrected him.

‘Suppose I call you Kathy?’

‘Don’t.’ And that was a threat. ‘So there was no police photographer on the scene?’

‘Yeah, we had one, a civilian. But he didn’t last three minutes.’ Geldorf waved one hand to include all the images of a hanged woman, two days dead in the heat of August, an incubator of maggots. ‘The photographer got sick and dropped his camera. We couldn’t get it to work after that. So we borrowed one from a neighbor.’

Mallory stared at a shot of the hanging rope draped over a light fixture. ‘What’s that brown smear on the ceiling?’

‘Bugs on their way to a meal,’ said Geldorf. ‘Cockroaches love their grease. And here.’ One bony finger pointed to another photograph depicting a large brown glob on the kitchen floor.

‘Roaches swarming over a frying pan.’ He squinted. ‘You see those little logs on the floor? Those are sausages and more bugs. The ceiling light was coming loose and cracking the plaster. Must’ve been a nest of’em up there. I had more blow-ups made.’

Geldorf edged a few steps down the wall, where the medical examiner’s materials were grouped together. He perused the pictures of flies hanging with their spawn. ‘Charles? What did you do with my best cockroaches?’

‘They’re pinned up under the maggot pictures. Seemed like the only logical place for them.’

‘What?’ Mallory stared at him, clearly wondering where logic entered into this.

Geldorf answered for him. ‘Flies are the only useful bugs at a crime scene. Roaches can’t tell you nothin’.’

‘Right,’ said Charles. ‘So I pinned them up under the more useful – ’ There was not much point in finishing his thought, for Mallory had tuned him out. She was staring at her nails. Perhaps she had found a flaw in her manicure that would take precedence over an insect monologue.

She looked up. ‘Done? Good. Let’s get the roaches up front.’

When Charles had removed the covering pictures of flies and their larvae, Mallory appraised the giant cockroaches pouring out of the ceiling and making their way down the rope to the corpse. The photo that caught her attention was a shot of the victim’s apron and a rectangular stain spotted with brown insects.

Geldorf stepped close to the wall. ‘Looks like she dropped her frying pan in the scuffle and splattered the grease. There was a utility blackout at dusk, so – ’

‘No.’ Mallory looked down at the baseboard where the actual skillet leaned against the wall. She tapped the picture of the apron stain. ‘That’s not a grease spatter.’

Charles knew she was paraphrasing a line in Louis Markowitz’s old notebook, the words, No splash – a smear. Louis had found that observation worthy of an underscore but it was never explained until now. The two long edges of the rectangle were fairly well defined. This was not a splatter pattern.

Mallory turned to the retired detective. ‘Natalie was cooking a meal, maybe expecting company. You interviewed her friends?’

‘She didn’t have any,’ said Geldorf. ‘When she was married, her husband wouldn’t let her get a job. Never gave her any money. She hardly ever left the apartment. After the divorce, I guess she forgot how to make new friends.’ He stared at the close-up of the sausages on the floor. ‘It was probably a meal for one.’

Charles noted Mallory’s skepticism, then counted up the sausages. During a summer of utility blackouts that made refrigeration unreliable, Natalie Homer would not have purchased more food than she could eat at one sitting, and such a slender woman could not eat so many sausages – not by herself. Who was the dinner guest? He inclined his head toward the smaller man. ‘Natalie was also alienated from her family, right?’