Blind Sight

Book 12: A Mallory Novel

by Carol O'Connell

Genres: Mystery; Thrillers

Synopsis

The nun is dead, her body lies on the mayor's lawn. And it isn't alone. There are four of them altogether. They've been killed at different times, in different places, and dumped there. There should be five – but the boy is missing. Jonah Quill, blind since birth, sits in a car driven by a killer and wonders where they are going. Though he is blind, Jonah sees more than most people do. It is his secret, and he is counting on that to save his life. Detective Kathy Mallory is counting on herself to save his life. She will find him – she just hopes it will be in time.

Release date: September 20, 2016

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Print pages: 352

Sample

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2016 Carol O'Connell

 

Prologue

 

The unusual was common here, yet the heads of local people did turn to stare as she walked by. Others, the sightseers, only looked at landmarks for the way life used to be. They had little interest in life ongoing all around them, and so the woman robed in black moved past them. In plain sight. Unseen.

Shops and cafés opened under a blue sky over St. Marks Place, and the first wave of tourists, a dozen or so, gathered round their guide as he spoke of a bygone era when this neighborhood was edgy, dangerous, drugged up—and fun, when the nights had reeked of marijuana for three city blocks. “No need to score reefer in those days,” he said. “You’d just breathe deep and get stoned. It was a party that went on for years.”

“Decades,” said a portly, white-haired New Yorker, who had lived all his long life in an apartment above the family bodega. He turned his back on the tourists to work a squeaky crank on the wall. With a few swift turns, he lowered a striped awning to give his flower stall some shade. The stall was shallow, sized to fit a narrow sidewalk that was choked with sneakers and sandals as the walking tour walked on.

Cars were forced to share the roadbed with two aging rock ’n’ rollers on foot. The bodega’s proprietor had a good eye for such people. Pilgrims, he called them. They stopped to snap pictures of their shrine, a brownstone that had appeared on an album cover dating back to music on vinyl and songs that were old when those two were young.

Stepping out from the shade of his awning, the elderly man looked up at the sky. Cloudless. How he loved these early summer days when shoplifting children were still jailed in their classrooms. By a movement caught in the corner of one eye, he knew something dark was coming his way, and this, the first shock of the morning, brought out his widest smile.

“Angie!” How many years had gone by? Too many. “So grown up!” Such a liar he was. Angela Quill had not aged a day. She was in her twenties now, but those big gray eyes were the eyes of a child who had yet to grow into them.

When he released the girl from a bear hug, he stepped back to stare at what she wore, what she had become. The veil—even that was no longer common in her trade. But what of the rest? A white wimple framed her face. The wide black robe had enough material to clothe three of her. And there was length enough to hide her feet—so out of place in this age of raised hemlines for holy women.

He plucked out his hearing aid to fiddle the volume and cure a squeal in the works. “What? Say again?” Oh, she was a cloistered nun? He never would have chosen that path for her. Such women were shut away from the world, sealed up behind walls until they died.

Yet here she was—out and about in the city. How could that be? What—

She wanted to buy flowers, but the ones in his stall were all wrapped by the dozen in bouquets. Would he sell her only two roses? She had money for two.

“For you? Here.” He loaded her arms with two dozen red blooms—so happy was he to see her again. “And I won’t take your money.” They talked a while, and his every sentence began with “I remember when—” When she was only ten years old, Angie had been his flower girl, his inspiration for the stall. After an early killing frost, the little girl had taken dead rose bushes from his upstairs window box. Come spring, she had given the fruit of their seedpods to him as tender potted plants. Nowadays, all his plants and cut flowers arrived on a truck. It was not the same—not so charming as a canny child who could bring roses back to him from the dead.

Did he know the time?

“You have to go? So soon?” His attention was called away by a customer—only for a moment. When he turned back to speak with Angie, she was not beside him anymore and nowhere to be seen. How could she leave him with no goodbye? And she had not taken her roses with her. Not all of them. Only two. And a few dollar bills had been left behind. His eyes searched the street. Her long black robe should have made her a standout in this season of barelegged people.

But no. Poof. Gone. And so fast. How had she—

A woman screamed.

Angie? Oh, God, no!  

Coming his way was a gaggle of teenage girls with high-pitched shrieks of laughter. So loud. He turned down the volume of his hearing aid. And the scream was blamed upon them. Damn kids. They could stop a man’s heart.

 

* * *

 

“Heads up, everybody.” The walking tour came to a halt in front of a vacant store, and the guide pointed to the apartment house on the other side of the street.

The resident of the second floor, an elderly shut-in, thought this man might be pointing up at her, but no, he sang out the name of a long-dead poet who had once lived here.

She wished the tourists would go away. They impeded her view.

The woman in the wheelchair was a creature of the clock, and precisely fifty minutes remained of her customary hour at the window, time enough for a bit of breakfast and her crossword puzzle. Also, she secretly kept company with the old man down on the sidewalk across the street. Though she had not spoken to him in years, she was that rare old-timer of St. Mark’s Place who knew him by name and could recall a day when Albert Costello was a lively, talkative man. Now he was a hermit. However, he did have ritual outings, and so she knew right where to find him every morning at nine o’clock, when she would wheel her chair to the window and there—

Oh! Where was that skinny old fool?

She had looked away from the window to fill in a few blank squares of her puzzle. In only those few seconds, her companion had disappeared, abandoning his post down there by the streetlamp—and long before their shared hour had ended.

Where could he have wandered off to? Albert was as old as she was. He could not move that fast, not even if he had only traveled as far as the door to his apartment building. She scanned the river of tourists on the sidewalk below, but his dear balding head was not there in the swim with them.

Well, that was different.  She liked her puzzles, but this one was disturbing.

            A woman’s scream from the street was less interesting.

 

* * *

 

The tour guide faced a clothing store. “That used to be a jazz club. Charlie Parker played there. Greatest sax man who ever lived.” His group paused to snap photographs of the famous nightspot that was not there anymore.

And now they had the attention of a young man in blue jeans, who stood on the sidewalk, tying an apron around his waist. The local trade never amounted to much before noon, but he was in need of a smoke before all those freaking tourists descended on the café. Aw, they were turning his way. Too late? Well, still time for a puff, maybe two.

A cigarette dangled from the waiter’s mouth as he leaned against the brick wall and struck a match. He watched a child come round a corner, a blind boy tapping a white cane on the pavement—and ditching school. Good for you, kid. Then, with a flick of the wrist, the boy’s cane collapsed to a short wand in a conjuror’s sleight of hand.

Neat trick. Was the kid even blind? So sure-footed was this little boy that he was either a faker or very much at home on St. Mark’s Place.

A woman screamed. But no heads in the approaching tour group were turning to point the way to any trouble. No, these people were focused. Hungry. And screaming that could not be backed up with blood was written off to street noise. Nothing more.

The tour group no longer blocked his view of the—

The blind boy had disappeared. One second he was there—then gone. He must have ducked into a doorway. But the illusion of a vanishing act remained with the waiter as yet another neat trick.

 

* * *

 

Incredibly, the troop of sightseers had witnessed nothing, every pair of eyes turned elsewhere as they spilled into the narrow street and crossed over.

The lady from Bora Bora watched them file into the café. Though she was hungry, breakfast could wait until her son arrived. She looked to the west, the direction of his university. No sign of him. Where was her student prince? She spoke Tahitian, French and a smattering of Japanese, but she had no words that Americans might understand. And so, for the past week, her eldest child had been her guide through this part of the world. He was late to join her for a last meal and a kiss goodbye before she must leave for the airport.

She did not mind the wait. Her homeland in the South Pacific was a place of great beauty and deep peace, but this other island, Manhattan, was an intoxicating display of action—theater of the street. Without her son to translate, some acts would always be inexplicable. And the most recent one had been over in a snatch of seconds when two people had disappeared.

At the end of her long journey home, she would speak of the drama that had unfolded on the sidewalk. She would retell it as a fabulous fable for her youngest child, a little boy who loved nothing better than a scary story. “Flying down the street,” she would say to him, “a running woman’s long black robe became dark wings spread upon the wind.”

In a fury, the Bird Woman of St. Mark’s Place had attacked a muscular man and ridden his back—and that part was true. “Claws dug in. Her black wings flapping. His arms flailing.” The tense battle of man and giant bird had just begun when they vanished—in seconds—disappearing behind a brief curtain drawn in the form of a sightseers passing by, and so it seemed that Bird Woman had flown up and away with her prey clutched in talons.

            Though, in truth, at the sound of the great bird’s victory scream, the lady from Bora Bora had never turned her eyes to the sky. The scream had not come from up there. But, for the sake of the story, she would only rely on the magical logic of the moment.

 

 

 

Chapter 1

 

 

 

If they knew why he had come here, all these men would turn him away.

The odyssey had begun in the morning on St. Mark’s Place, not half a mile from this SoHo police station, and now it was night. A bank of tall grimy windows worked poorly as mirrors, reflecting his white hair and face, but not his black cassock, and so Father Brenner’s head appeared to float across the squad room—slowly—though his mission here was urgent.

Long fluorescent tubes of light spanned the high ceiling, some of them twitchy, blinking off and on with a nervous sputter, and telephones glowed with red lights, the tiny alarms of those left hanging on the line. Half the desks were occupied by tired detectives drinking coffee, tapping keyboards and talking among themselves.

All conversation stopped.

Heads lifted here and there to note his passage, and one man winced when it was apparent that the elderly priest was heading for Kathy Mallory’s desk.  

Understood.

Father Brenner reminded himself to address her as Detective Mallory, having lost the right to any familiarity when she was a child in his parish school, enrolled there by her foster mother, Helen Markowitz. That good woman had suspected that Kathy was born a Catholic, but suspicion was all that Helen and her husband ever had to work with. The little girl had told them nothing useful, not even her right age. So she might have been ten years old upon that first meeting in his office, but certainly not eleven, the age on her application.

The child had been presented to him in the guise of a small Botticelli angel. Backlit by sunlight that day, her blond curls had gleamed like a dammed halo.

Here, he paused in his recollection and his steps.

Yes, damned was a fitting word for that early impression. A second look at her had pretty much killed his angel analogy. The long slants of her eyes held a shade of green not found in nature, not God’s work. Even then, long before she would grow up to carry a gun, he had intuited that she was dangerous. Another early indicator was a teaching nun, who had been left with a rather bad limp to mark the close of Kathy’s final semester.

The priest still carried guilt for his blindness to Sister Ursula’s eccentricity.  No, call it cruelty. Crazy old woman.

Upon his first visit to this police station, he had brought Inspector Markowitz’s foster child along to explain the plaster cast on her wrist—and the nun in the hospital. The meeting had not gone well. Guided by a schoolgirl code of Thou shalt not rat, Kathy had refused to confirm Sister Ursula’s assault on her. Honoring the child’s resolve, the inspector had called it a breakeven day, “My kid’s broken wrist for the nun’s mangled leg.” But outside of Kathy’s hearing, Louis Markowitz had offered the priest the angry choice of “Put that nun in a bughouse, or put her down like a dog. Pick one!”

Father Brenner had selected the bughouse option.

Tonight, his eyeglasses sweated down the bridge of his nose. It was taking him such a long time to cross this room and meet with the grownup Kathy Mallory; he was that anxious to see her again. He had spoken with her commanding officer in passing at the downstairs door, and Lieutenant Coffey had waived the protocol of a visitor’s badge and pointed the way up the staircase to the Special Crimes Unit. And so the priest might believe that he was coming upon this young woman unannounced—catching her unawares.

Foolish idea? Oh, yes.

As a child, she had given him the eerie sense that her vision extended to the back of her head—and spookier still—to the inside of his head. He kept this illusion saved away with others in his mythology of her, a book of many pages.

Not a holy book.

So far, the young detective in blue jeans appeared normal enough, though rather well-dressed for a civil servant. As a boy, he had worked in his father’s tailor shop, and he well knew the quality of the wonderful linen blazer draped on the back of her chair. So good was his sartorial eye, he could even attest to her T-shirt’s fine grade of silk. 

Kathy Mallory’s eyes were focused on the glowing screen of a computer, and the light of a desk lamp gave her another halo, but the priest was long past that deception. As he approached, she did not turn to him in any natural fashion. The golden head swiveled—machinelike—and she did not look up to meet his eyes. No recognition at all. He might well be a piece of furniture with a clerical collar. This was an old, cold quirk of hers, one that used to unhinge him with the thought that she was not quite like the other children, not human, no heart, no pulse. 

In a more worldly sense, she was not much changed in her mid-twenties. The high cheekbones were more pronounced, but she was otherwise a taller replica of the child with the cream-white skin and cupid’s bow lips. He often wondered if that lovely face had been the chief complaint of Sister Ursula, the ugly antithesis of Kathy. Yes, that would have set the old woman off. The nun would have regarded the infliction of pain as tempering temptations of the flesh, punishing a little girl for the crime of—

“Sit down, Father Brenner.” Kathy Mallory’s half-smile welcomed him to hell. It was a given that, if she seemed at all happy to see him, it was only because she liked the diversion of toying with his soul—as if she had that power over him.

Well . . . did she not? Obediently, he settled into the wooden chair beside her desk.

“What brings you out tonight?” Her silken voice gave him no clue of inflection. Her red fingernails were more telling, drumming the desktop, prompting him to get on with his reason for bothering her.

He might begin with the news that her old nemesis, Sister Ursula, had died, but before he could open his mouth, she read his mind to say, “I’m sorry for your loss.” Her condolences on the dead nun were delivered with an expression of pure pleasure, the way a cat might smile with a mouse in her teeth—at the moment before she bit down hard to break the creature’s back. No mercy, no forgiveness.

No surprise there.

“I’ve come about another nun,” he said. “A young one, close to your age. I’m afraid for her.” No sympathy was expected on this account. He could only hope to intrigue. “Sister Michael disappeared yesterday. She’s already been reported to Missing Persons. They said they’d look into it. . . . I know what that means.” Goodbye, Sister, and best of luck to you. “But I believe she was kidnapped.”

“So there’s a ransom demand.” Hardly intrigued, the detective turned back to the screen of her laptop, a sign of dismissal even before she said, “Go talk to Major Case. They handle that. We do homicides here.”

And it would take more than one homicide to interest her. Over the years spent following her career with the NYPD, he had learned that the Special Crimes Unit was best known for cases with a high body count, the bloodiest carnage in New York City.

“Ransom?” He scratched his head in a calculated show of vagueness. “Well, I don’t know about that.”

“No note? No phone call?” She faced him again, eyes narrowed. “Then why would you think it’s a kidnapping?” Clearly, she did not believe him.

Good. That should hold her attention. Oh, just the chance to catch him in a lie, to make him twist and squirm—how she would love that. “This is all I know,” he said. “Sister Michael was on the way to visit her mother on St. Marks Place. She started out in the morning, but never got there. That was yesterday. And we both know that Missing Persons is not out looking for her.”

“They’re swamped with runaways.” Her eyes closed in the slow blink of a contented cat, and he knew he had her now, for she was playing harmless when she tossed off the afterthought that, “People are always walking away from their old lives.”

“If she wanted to leave her order, she would’ve worn street clothes, not this.” He set a snapshot on the desk. It was a bit damp from his hand. He had carried it all through this day into night. It pictured a young woman in the long robe and veil of a cloistered nun. “And I know she bought two red roses in her mother’s neighborhood. I talked to the man who sold—” Oh, no, he was boring her. Well, onto the bit he had saved for last. “I can promise you that Sister Michael’s mother does not have the mayor’s ear . . . but that man knew about the disappearance before the Missing Persons report was filed.”

He thought she might like that part, but it was hard to tell. She was tensing, as if wound by a spring and set to—

She leaned far forward. And, whip-lash fast, he sat well back.

“What else did you hold out on Missing Persons? They’re not idiots over there. If you’d told them—”

“I wasn’t the one who made that report. . . . I don’t even know Sister Michael.”

Her eyes flickered. A Eureka moment?

“So the church is cop-shopping,” she said. “Reaching out for a detective who’ll play nice with the ugly parts. . . . That’s why they picked you? Because they think we had a warm, cozy relationship when I was a kid?”

A good guess in some respects. 

“I did go to Major Case,” he said. “Their detective sent me away after five minutes. I had no proof of kidnapping. That’s what he told—”

“You think there is proof. You think I can get it for you. So there was a ransom demand.” Her tone accused him of lying. Fair warning. It was confession time at the police station. “Where’d you get your information, Father? I know Mayor Polk won’t play golf with any priest lower than a bishop. Who told you he already knew about—”

“I can’t give you a name.”

“You can!” Her fist hit the desk as punctuation. “Nobody sent you here under the Seal of the Confessional.” Her sudden expression of anger fell away in the flip of a switch to one of resignation, which must be an equally false mask. “All right, just tell me what church politician talks to the city politicians. Does that make it less like ratting out another priest?”

Yes, that would do. “Father DuPont is on the cardinal’s staff. He’d be the one to—”

“And what’s the nun’s name?” She turned away from him to face her computer.

“I told you. Sister—”

“Her real name.”

Not the saint’s name taken with her final vows. The archangel had been a fierce choice for a nun—a name that was the battle cry of the good angles in the War of Heaven. “In her former life, she was known as Angela Quill.”

The detective tapped her keyboard. “So this woman disappears, and you jump to the conclusion of . . . what? A satanic nun collector?” She tilted her head to one side, her face a parody of innocence when she asked, “Why is that?”

“Hey, Mallory.” A man with hooded eyes slouched up to the desk. His dark hair was silvered with enough gray to make him at least twice her age. Raising one hand, he warded off her response. “I know. Half a day shot. I went home for lunch and walked in on a stickup. Took me forever to get through the booking.” He turned an affable smile on the priest. “I live over a bar. The owner’s my landlord. If I’d let the perp walk outta there with the cash, my rent would’ve gone up.” The man sloughed off his wrinkled suit jacket and sat down at the desk that faced and adjoined Kathy Mallory’s. The garment slid from his lap to the floor, and he left it there.

Not a tidy man.

Though the cheap suit did have an odor of spot remover, those shoes had not been polished in recent decades. This wardrobe-challenged detective introduced himself as Riker. “I’m her partner. What can we do for you, Padre?”

Not a Catholic.

Father Brenner pulled a folded sheet of paper from his cassock pocket. The bold type above the nun’s grainy portrait asked, HAVE YOU SEEN HER? This was his mission statement at a glance, and he handed it to the man. “That’s my last one. I’ve been taping them up in store windows.” Sister Michael’s photograph was, more accurately, a picture of what she wore. Her face was the smallest element in the frame, and not what he had counted upon to stand out in the memory of the public. But her long robe and veil would be a rare sight on city streets.

“A dress-code nun,” said Riker. “Wearing that getup of hers must be hell in this heat. Is she from the Brooklyn convent?”

“No, she’s from the Monastery of St. Bernardine. It’s about sixty miles upstate. The nuns have a website and a tractor, but otherwise, their traditions are centuries old. We have no pictures of Sister Michael in other clothes, and no family members to help with—”

“But her mother’s alive.” Kathy Mallory smiled to say that she had caught him in another lie, though he had yet to make even one false statement. “You told me the nun was on the way to visit her—”

“The mother only had the same photo I used for my poster. I called on the woman this morning.”

Detective Riker held the nun’s poster at arm’s length, the distance for a man who ought to wear bifocals. Brows knit together, eyes squinting, he asked, “Is that face—” The man looked to his partner as if she might have an answer to that half a question. 

And she did. As her laptop was angled toward Riker, Father Brenner saw the full-screen display of Sister Michael clad in a torn red camisole that hung from one bruised shoulder by a flimsy string. The makeup was garish. The dark hair was spiked and streaked with purple dye.

It was an old police mug shot.

Kathy Mallory raised her eyebrows, as if only mildly curious. “One of your more interesting nuns?”

Detective Riker stared at the screen image that gave up the name in bold capital letters. “Quill!” He looked down at the poster and tapped the date of the nun’s disappearance. “Two Quills go missing on the same day?”

 

* * *

 

Almost there.

Detective Riker had cadged a ride out of SoHo in the backseat of a patrol car, and now he rolled north past the skyscrapers of Midtown, heading for the Upper East Side, the heart of the search for a kidnapped schoolboy.

How long had his partner intended to toy with Father Brenner before mentioning Jonah, the other missing Quill? Riker wasted no pity on the priest. That old man had known what he was dealing with before he walked in the door of Special Crimes.

Kathy Mallory was also—special.

As the car rounded a corner, he saw a familiar face on the street and leaned toward the patrolmen in the front seat. “Guys? I’m gettin’ out here.” 

The driver pulled to the curb half a block from this precinct’s station house, and Riker stepped out on the sidewalk to shake hands with an old friend, a sergeant like himself, but not in the Detective Bureau. Murray was still in uniform and now in charge of the officers canvasing Jonah Quill’s neighborhood.

After their exchange of Good to see your ugly face and What’s up, Riker was told why the kidnap story had not been fed to reporters. “The kid’s uncle is loaded with money,” said Murray. So, on good odds of a ransom demand, the crime had not gone public. And there were no worries about leaks to the press corps. The police commissioner had menaced news outlets all over town with naked threats to people’s private parts, a time-honored practice officially known as media cooperation.

Riker slung his suit jacket over one arm as he walked down East Sixty-seventh Street alongside Sergeant Murray. They passed by a woman with a Great Dane on a leash, and the detective had to wonder how large the lady’s apartment might be to accommodate a dog the size of a pony. How many acres of floor space? Downtown, south of Houston Street, Riker was considered a social climber because his bathtub was not in the kitchen.

He gave the nun’s poster to Murray as they entered the local police station, a landmark building from the late 1800s. Though Riker’s own station house was also more than a century old, it was less grand. This one, disguised as an oversized townhouse, had been built to blend into a patch of the 19th Precinct that was filthy with millionaires. But the neighborhood had no flavor, no music. There might be some history to it; the detective did not know or care. No rockers had ever sung songs about this part of town, and that said it all for Riker.

Sergeant Murray, not so vain as the SoHo detective, put on his bifocals, the better to study the small face on the poster. “I’ll be damned. Nobody told us about any nun. . . . She looks just like Jonah.” He led Riker up the stairs to the second floor, saying over one shoulder, “Tell you what we got. Cops downtown reported sightings of a blind kid tapping his way up a street with a white cane. They can place him in the East Village that morning. But we got other sightings in the Bronx and Queens.”

“The East Village fits with Sister Michael,” said Riker. “We know she bought flowers on St. Mark’s Place around nine that morning.”

            “Well, this’ll get us some leads.” Sergeant Murray held up the poster for a second look. “What’s up with those dicks at Missing Persons? We should’ve had a copy of this. The nun’s even got the kid