Out on the street, swirling stars were flying past her, and then the stars screamed at her with horns and shrieks. She listened to louder noises of the blood rushing in her veins. She could taste the color red as it ran from her eyes and flowed in rivulets into her mouth. The flying stars pulsed with color and grew fat and exploded like bloated pimples of pyrotechnics.

Markowitz was calling her. What was he saying? She smelled baking soda and floral air-freshener.

"I'm dying," she screamed at him inside her brain where he lived in a corner of her gray matter that looked much like the old house in Brooklyn. Markowitz smiled. "Don't be a sucker, Kathy."

"You listen to your father," said Helen coming in from the kitchen of Mallory's mind, wearing a pair of yellow rubber gloves, holding out a lunch box. "Do you have your quarter, Kathy?" And then Mallory was crying and wiping blood from her eyes to feed coins into a silver slot. "I'm dying! She's killed me! Redwing killed me with the tea!" she screamed into the phone, over the wire, to terrify a gentle man, eight city blocks away, who never bothered to hang up the telephone nor lock his door behind him.

The fluorescent hospital lights made everyone look ill, but Charles thought Jack Coffey looked much worse than Mallory. By the eyes shot with red, the condition of the man's clothes and the stubble of beard, he guessed it had been at least twenty-fours hours since the policeman had last seen his bed. With Sergeant Riker, it was more difficult to tell.

Mallory, asleep, achieved a look of innocence she could never have managed with her green eyes open. A bandage at the back of her head covered the worst of the cuts. But for the fresh bruises flowering on her bare arms, she was a study of white on white, palest skin showing above the crisp sheets. A white bandage covered the place on the inside of one arm where a tube joined her to a bottle suspended on a T-bar and dripping fluid into her vein. A machine by her bedside kept track of her life signs with low blips of sound and light.

Riker sat in the only bedside chair, eyes trained on the blips as though he were wired into them. And perhaps he was.

"Redwing's shrewd, but not too bright," Jack Coffey was saying as he leaned back against the wall by the bed. "Just for openers, we got her on possession of drugs. She had enough stuff in that apartment to open a store. It was all lying around in the open, like she didn't think we'd come looking."

Coffey was staring down on the sleeping Mallory, and Charles detected something between tenderness and aggravation in the man's expression.

"We're gonna push for dealing, too."

"What about the little boy?" asked Charles.

She had ranted on and on about the boy, even when she believed that she was bleeding from every pore and dying. The drug had ripped her mind to shreds, and yet she had fought for words to tell him about a damaged child. Mallory, the hard case. No one had ever known her, not really, except maybe Helen Markowitz who had only suspected the best of her.

Unpolished grace, unlikely paladin, thy name is Mallory.

"The kid's in custody," Coffey was saying. "There's more than enough evidence of child abuse. Redwing's going away for a long time. In my sleep, I could nail her on five counts, good for five years each. And that's without the stock scam. The US Attorney can try her for that one from a prison cell."

"No murder charge," said Charles. "So, you don't believe she killed Louis Markowitz?"

"Naw. I talked the DA out of it. He only liked the idea 'cause she has the size for it. But she hasn't got the brains to sucker Markowitz. Maybe we'll get something on conspiracy with the bastard she was working for."

"Redwing gave you a name?"

"She doesn't know it. She calls the head of the operation the Director. Before the surveillance team lost her, they'd tracked her through five neighborhoods, one seance for every day of the week. We figure there's more than forty people in the network. We're gonna start rounding them up this morning."

Riker was looking down on his notebook. "Mallory told me they had more action going than a medium-size bank could handle. Between all the seance groupies, there was enough capital to run a small country."

"We can count on half of them climbing over each other in a race to turn state's evidence in exchange for immunity," said Coffey. "It was one of the craziest scams I've ever seen."

"Let me guess, it's more fun that way," said Charles. "The Director used Redwing to collect insider tips from a pool of majority stockholders. Then, instructions for sales and purchases were spread over this large client base – no single transaction large enough to merit investigation. Redwing provides all the clients with the crystal ball defense should the SEC ask questions. Redwing and the Director split their cut of the profits."

"Nicely done," said Coffey. "But it wasn't a split. The Director paid Redwing a very small commission. We had an SEC investigator explain it to her, just the scope of the single transaction Mallory gave us. Redwing went crazy. She had no idea that much money was changing hands. So now she's willing to cooperate, but she can't tell us much."

"If she doesn't know the Director's name, how did the two of them come together?"

"Pearl Whitman set it up. She went out shopping for mediums. She interviewed quite a few of them, Redwing says, before she found one who was reliably dishonest."

"How did the Director receive payment?"

"No idea. We assume Miss Whitman handled that."

"But the seances continued after Whitman's death. Not likely the Director would continue funneling the stock information without payment."

"The SEC man figures we'll find a foreign account set up for deposit. We won't know until we bring in the whole cartel."

"So why the attack on Mallory? It's not too bright, is it? Calling attention to herself by trying to kill a police officer?"

"She said she thought Mallory was going to expose the whole operation."

"Did she say where she got that idea? Did someone suggest it to her?"

"Dumb as Redwing is, it would've been hard to miss Mallory's brains. And then her pretty face was in the paper on the day of Markowitz's funeral, along with a nice little bio on the cop's daughter the cop. Mallory probably scared the shit out of Redwing when she had herself invited to the seance."

Mallory stirred in the white sheets, and three tired men turned to look at her. The gray window light of morning was humanizing the fluorescent lighting.

"Hey, what did the doctor say?" asked Coffey, nudging Riker's chair with one foot.

Riker looked down to his notebook again and read from the page which was blank but for the word okay. 'It's a new designer drug. Nasty stuff. The doctor who pumped her stomach says he got three deaths put down to this junk in the last year, all from self-inflicted wounds. Victims put their eyes out, rip their veins out. There's no permanent damage to Mallory. She's got a few bruises and cuts. That's it. She'll be okay, but her reaction time's gonna be a little slow for a few days."

"She thought she was bleeding to death when Riker and I brought her in," said Charles. "But there was no blood on her except for that cut on her head and the dried blood from the dog-bite victim."

"It's a lot like LSD," said Riker. "She probably did see the wounds. Even Mallory's got to believe what she sees with her own eyes."

Charles wondered if Mallory had seen the writing on Edith's wall and believed that, too. No, not likely. Not Mallory. She had a first-rate mind. She had probably seen Edith rather clearly then.

So, she was forewarned, and yet she walked into it.