He dropped his gun and never noticed its loss. On the next roof, the pigeon lady stared at the sky, arms fluttering in her own attempt at flight.

‘After two days – the bugs and the heat – you couldn’t take any more. You left your mother all alone in the dark. You knew what the insects were doing to her when you closed that door and walked away.’

His bad leg buckled, and he folded to the ground like a piece of collapsible lawn furniture. And there he made a stand of sorts, on his knees, as though his legs had been cut to stumps. Mallory stepped closer to kick his gun, sending it flying to the far side of the roof.

He was helpless. Both eyes were open now and looking in on some interior hell. She knelt down before him, facing him in the position of prayer. He raised his head a bare inch. Later, she would remember his eyes with an imagined film of dust, as though he had already been dead for some time – for years and years. It would have been a kindness to put a bullet in his skull – an act of mercy.

Resurrection time.

In the absence of kindness and mercy, she planned to rebuild him as her only witness to the murder of Natalie Homer. ‘I know it was a cop who killed your mother. And you’re going to help me nail that bastard. It’s revenge you want, and I can get that for you.’

No, that was not what he wanted, never what he wanted. Mallory could see her error now, a very bad mistake.

Natalie’s son was waiting for his bullet, staring at the revolver with a great hunger. He had foreseen this moment long ago as a little boy in the heat of August, waiting so patiently to be punished. And he had laid this out so clearly in the mad restaging of a crime that he believed was his alone. Three hangings, one endless shriek, Catch me! Kill me! He had even warned his victims and sent them into the arms of the police as his messengers, extensions of a scream.

Mallory could see all the way to the bottom of his madness, the rest of the damage done to a small child. ‘You thought your father sent you away – because he blamed you.’

No response. The scarecrow was shutting down what remained of his mind. Mallory tried to touch him, and he shrank back, a reflex that she understood too well. Her hand froze, suspended in the forbidden act of reaching out. She was always clutching air – touching no one. Yet she tried again, gently grazing his battered face with the tips of her fingers.

A shadow blocked the sun. She heard the sick sound of the bat cracking his skull, breaking it open. There was time to catch him in her arms, and they fell together.

Ronald Deluthe stood over them, listing to one side. The baseball bat dangled from his right hand as he sank to the ground, where he sat bolt upright, legs splayed out, his eyes slowly closing.

The scarecrow’s weight was on top of Mallory. His blood was on her face and in her hair. As she lay beneath the corpse, only her eyes were moving, slowly turning to Ronald Deluthe. She watched as his upper body pitched forward and his head hit the dusty tarpaper between his spread legs.

Mallory had lost her weapon. Her gun hand absently stroked the scarecrow’s hair, then came away with bits of red bone and flesh. But how could this be? She had yet to tell him how his mother had really died – that there was nothing he could have done to save her.

Charles Butler’s Mercedes pulled up in front of the apartment building and double-parked alongside a row of police units and their spinning red lights. An ambulance was at the curb, where two men in hospital whites stood beside an empty gurney.

Riker was the first one out of the car, yelling, ‘What happened? Where’s the wounded cop?’

‘It’s my fault!’ An unnerved civilian rushed up to him, arms waving, as if this might help to gather his thoughts. ‘I’m sorry. I thought he was unconscious. I just took my eyes off the poor man for a minute. My wife was feeling a bit queasy, and I thought she was going to faint. You see, she saw the body in the closet. And when I looked back – well, the man was gone.’

Riker barreled through the shed door, gun drawn, eyes going everywhere. He saw the little redheaded man rolling in wet sheets and moaning. On the neighboring roof, a confused old woman was staring up at the sky where her lost birds had gone.

He found Deluthe beside the shed, slumped over and holding a baseball bat in a one-handed death grip. Mallory lay a few feet away – underneath a corpse.

More sirens were coming, and she listened to them, as if from a great distance of miles and miles. The scarecrow’s flesh was deceptively warm, and so was his blood. It dripped from the broken skull to soak her and stain her.

Riker rolled the heavy weight off her body and met with some resistance, for Mallory’s hands were pressed to the dead man’s face – still trying to make human contact.

CHAPTER 22

Civilian conversations blended with the static of radio calls from police units, and yellow tape cordoned off the sidewalk in front of the apartment building. An ambulance and a meat wagon were parked at the curb, side by side, doors hanging open, awaiting the living and the dead. The man from the medical examiner’s office zipped up the body bag on his gurney. A cigarette dangled from his mouth as he accepted a light from the homicide detective. ‘Dr Slope’s standing by to crack the old man open. So what’s the story on the other corpse?’

‘There’s only one dead body,’ Riker corrected him. ‘This one.’ He looked down at the remains of George Neederland, the missing department-store watchman.

The ME’s man looked up to the sky and a departing police helicopter. ‘Your guys just took another body off the roof. What’s the – ’

‘Repeat after me, pal. There’s only one dead body at this crime scene.’ Riker turned to see another reporter approaching the police barricade. Nearby, a news van was unloading pole lights and camera equipment. He turned back to face down the meat-wagon man. ‘One body. If the press hears a different story, Dr Slope’s gonna fire your ass. I’ll make sure he does.’

In a less threatening mode, Riker turned to thank Alice White for the wet washcloth she pressed into his hand. He grabbed Mallory by the arm and forced her to stand still while he cleaned the red smears from her face. Then he stepped back to appraise the rest of her stains. ‘Damn, you look worse than Deluthe. You’re sure none of that blood belongs to you?’

Mallory turned away from him and walked toward a crime-scene technician, calling out, ‘You! Stop!’

Riker strolled back to the ambulance crew. ‘You’re right, guys. No wounds on Mallory.’ He turned to watch his partner issuing orders and signing the evidence bags for her crime scene, unaware that her bloody clothes and hair were making the civilian onlookers sick.

A paramedic hovering over Deluthe said, ‘He’s coming around again.’

There was no need to shield the youngster from the reporters and their cameras. His own mother would not recognize that swollen bandaged face. More bandages covered his scalp. He was being stabilized with injections and portable machines to keep him out of the danger zone of deep shock.

Riker waited until Deluthe’s eyes flickered open, then continued the lecture where he had left off ten minutes ago. ‘When you found Natalie’s address in the watchman’s file, you should’ve come to me. Never go after a perp without back-up. And that door. That was a major screwup, kid. When you saw the open door, you should’ve known the scarecrow was still in the building.’

The young cop was coughing. It was a fight to get the words out. ‘Is this your way of telling me I’m fired?’ The lame smile made his lip bleed again.