Without turning to look back, Mallory knew by which doorway the woman behind her had left the street, that the woman had used her own key drawn from a snap-lock purse, and by the quick steps, that the woman was suddenly afraid. Good. Civilians should be afraid. They would live longer, and longer still if they were more aware of their surroundings.
She walked north to the parking garage which held her car. A block short of Houston, she stopped. She listened. She turned to stare at the space of sidewalk behind her, eyes narrowing, the better to search the empty air for traces of a human who had recently been standing there.
Nothing. No one.
She was alone on the street, said her eyes, reporting back with the facts. But she could feel that other pair of eyes on her.
A memory came jumping with light's speed to the front of her brain, all decked with flashing red warning lights. "Most people never look up," Markowitz had told her in her rookie days. She pulled back and looked up as a black shape was falling towards her, rushing to meet her and send her to a better world than New York City. With the married reflexes of forked lightning and quick city rats, she jumped clear as the large block of concrete crashed into the pavement beside her and left a web of cracks in its wake.
She scanned the long line of the roof and caught the movement of a dark shape against the night sky, only a shadow moving across the edge of the roof. Her gun was clear of its holster and in her hand. But she had lost that fraction of a second between here and gone. The shadow had pulled in.
She moved to the side of the building and jumped for a handhold on the ledge of the fire escape. She was shot through with adrenaline and never felt the strain of the muscles which pulled her body straight up to the first grated landing. She took the stairs of the six-storey building at a dead run, rubber soles touching to metal on every third step.
On the roof, without a moon and only the glow of city lights, she saw the fast receding shadow was rooftops ahead of her. She jumped the barriers between one roof and another, and then she was airborne in the wider gulf where two buildings did not join. The shadow was not so quick but had the advantage of time and space. Its dark coat was flapping in the high wind like the wings of a bat, and then it was flown. Gone into air.
All her senses told her she was alone in the dark. Both feet touched to ground at one time, and her gun hand came to rest at her side. She stepped lightly across the tar surfaces of the rooftops, checking fire escapes and roof doors. One door had been left open. She stared down into the dark of the stairwell, looking for disturbances in the air, the trail of body heat, the sound and sensation of a fugitive life form. Nothing came back to her but the stillness of those nine-to-fivers sleeping therein, and she knew the thing had not gone this way. She checked the door of the roof beyond and the metal stairs of its fire escape.
Finally, she pulled her eyes back from the street below, drew back from the edge of the roof and stared out at the skyline of lower Manhattan, the panorama of the night owls' lighted windows, all the eyes that never saw anything when the cops came knocking at the door.
Jack Coftey sat alone in his office which was still called Markowitz's office. Margot Siddon had gotten to him. All that talk of knives, her lips curling into a smirk. He had pegged her then as another punk kid from the village, another copbaiter. Screw that.
Now he looked down on the file Biker had placed on his desk. Stapled to it was the requisition slip Markowitz had signed. Markowitz, the lover of details, must have ordered it after the interview in the Cathery apartment. The two-year-old account of the assault on Margot Siddon included the knife wound to the face, the cutting of the facial nerves. And the scar had been there for all to see, and all he had seen was the smirking insolence which only the knife could be accountable for and not the girl, the victim.
Oh, all the damned victims.
What else had he missed? Christ, he was tired.
Riker's own notes had been added to Margot Siddon's old file. The sergeant had tracked down the case officer for personal comments. Coffey was looking down on a school photograph of a nice-looking kid with a normal smile, taken shortly before that cruel bastard had said, "Now watch the dancing knife, little girl." And according to the case officer's statement, Margot had actually watched the blade cutting into her skin, watched the blood flow, in shock from the violence he had already done to her, stark-naked by then, covered only with blood.
All the damned victims.
He turned off the overhead lights, ready to leave but too tired to get in motion. He flicked on the desk lamp, and the softer glow illuminated the walls repainted and denuded of Markowitz-style clutter. But Markowitz had come stealing back to reclaim the place. The floor was littered with folders tonight. Another stack of case files filled the two chairs on the other side of the desk, and on the new, unmarred blotter next to his new computer terminal sat a stack of letters and diaries to read and handle in the old-fashioned way.
It troubled him that the writings of the old women had tapered off more than a year ago. Either they had ceased to have anything of interest to write about, or they had all become so fascinated by some thing or event that the writing of letters and the keeping of journals had been displaced by another, more interesting occupation. This nagged at him. In one case, all the writing he could find had been in a storage trunk. No letters of any kind had been found in the apartment. Yet the woman had the history of a dedicated diarist, not missing a day for the ten years of leather-bound books he had recovered.
All the victims had been one-dimensional before he began reading their private thoughts. None of the heirs had been able to give him even the most routine aspects of an old woman's life. Who were their friends, what interests might the victims have in common? The relatives could tell him nothing. And the day-hire women told him only the most mundane habits of their elderly employers. Tonight, he had invaded the victims' minds in search of who they had been, and also rounded out the profiles of the heirs. The victims' fears had centered on losing touch with the only relations they had, their touchstones with the world, the continuity of blood.
In a fluid, old-fashioned script, one old woman berated herself for all the irrational questions asked just to keep conversation going, to prevent the rare visit from ending all too soon. And there were sometimes tear-blind rages for the lack of understanding, the inability to communicate with a generation she had nothing in common with. The crying jags, the terrible giving-up to the futility of putting up any fight. The anger at being treated as a child – as though crying robbed her of her maturity. The frustration of misunderstandings that came about because the young only half-listened and never did grasp the simplest fact that arthritic hands couldn't open child-proof caps. The common thread which ran through the women's lives was the need to be touched.
Samantha Siddon had that need. The page open before him was the last entry in the diary of the fourth victim, dated one year ago:
She tolerates the hugs at meetings and partings. It must seem to her, in those moments, that I am clinging to my very life, and so I am. She is all the warm flesh that I may touch and be touched by. One dies without the touch. What if she should never return?
He left the light burning when he walked out of the office and moved down the hall to the incident room where they kept all the things which Biker had retrieved from Mallory and all the physical evidence. It was a chaos of bloody carnage in full-color prints and bits of paper which must somehow chain together. Too many clues, Markowitz had said. And now there were too many suspects. Two of them could be working in tandem. The Cathery boy who fitted the FBI profile was just too perfect in every respect but motive. Jonathan Gaynor, the sociology professor, had inherited the largest fortune of all. Margot Siddon was the neediest heir.