Blind Sight (A Mallory Novel) by Carol O'Connell

case to waste time on a days-old mugging.
    The lieutenant opened and slammed every insanely neat drawer to no avail. And when he had checked the call history on Mallory’s landline and savaged her wastebasket, he raked one hand through his hair, a bad habit that increased the bald spot at the back of his head.
    Jack Coffey would credit most of his lost follicles to the stress of running a homicide copshop. Otherwise, he was the average physical specimen who could rob six banks in a day without a single witness able to supply one distinguishing feature. At the age of thirty-seven, what set him apart on a police force of thirty thousand was the early rise to an elite command position, and he would have to agree with his mom that he was one smart cop—because he always knew when Mallory was scamming him.
    Her desktop was so clean that insects would not land here for fear of leaving incriminating prints in the fresh layer of furniture wax. Apart from the telephone, the report’s cover sheet was the sole item on display, and he read it again—all four lines of text.
    He called it bait.
    Yeah, after sending all his calls to her voice mail, Mallory knew she could count on him to go through her stuff and go a little nuts over the one totally meaningless thing that was not there—the damn report.
    He walked away from her desk, cover sheet in hand, with a plan to hunt down the missing report on Albert Costello’s mugging and actually read it—a waste of more time—instead of following a better instinct to crush this paper into a ball, set it afire and spread the damn ashes all over her desk.
    —
    FROM BASEBOARD to ceiling molding, the walls of the incident room were lined with cork, and the pinned-up text and photos for the priority case were spreading virally. Jack Coffey quickly spotted the mugging report. It was fixed to the cork at two corners, and so it had caught his eye as the only sheaf of paper that did not dangle by a single pin. He knew that a carpenter’s plumb line applied to one edge would find it in perfect alignment with heaven and earth. Mallory’s contribution. Where was that neat freak now?
    And “Who the hell is Albert Costello?”
    “Mugging victim,” said Rubin Washington, a broad-shouldered cop with thirty years on the job and an invaluable lack of charm that worked well on hard-core felons. Not a chatty man, he stood before the wall, pinning up the ME’s preliminary. But now, with a glance to the side, he noticed that his lieutenant was still staring at him. “It was a bop-and-drop, boss. It went down on St. Marks Place a few days back. Riker and Mallory went over there to chase the old guy down.”
    Oh, and dare his boss ask, “What the fuck for?”
    “Costello left the hospital, and he doesn’t answer his home phone.”
    And that was so not Jack Coffey’s point. “They’re wasting time on a damn mugging?”
    “Mallory says the nun won’t fit the pattern, but the old man might.”
    There were times when Lieutenant Coffey believed that he was in charge of this squad. Today he was more in line with reality. He walked down half the length of this wall to read a spread of yellow sheets, the handwritten statements gleaned from interviews. He had sent detectives out to canvass the neighborhoods of their victims, in part just to make the point that Mallory could not get all the pertinent background data from a computer. But her theory was proving out from one sheet to the next in this information gathered by mere humans knocking on doors. There was a pattern—but it would only fit three out of four victims.
    The first and most decomposed was Ralph Posey, forty-one years old and a resident of the Upper West Side. He never spoke to neighbors, and he had no job, no coworkers or family to notice if he was alive or dead. He was only known to the local grocer, who bagged his purchases every Monday at noon and professed no surprise at the man’s murder because “He was a shithead.” The oldest