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

victim, Sally Chin, had lived on the Upper East Side. She had twice weekly hobbled to her chiropractor’s office on crutches. If not for this habit, no one on her street would have recognized her photograph. And the very shy young Alden Toomey had worked from his home in the West Village, only venturing outside on Sunday to attend church services, the only service that would not make a delivery to his apartment.
    Mallory was right. The nun would not fit the victimology, and neither would her nephew. They were the only two people who would have been reported missing on the day they vanished. Unlike his aunt, Jonah Quill did have a predictable routine, the daily route of a schoolboy, but he had not been following it when he was taken.
    On the other side of the room, his expert on nuns, Father DuPont, stood alongside Detective Janos, a gorilla cop with a face of pure menace and a voice of surprising softness. Janos, a gentle, polite person, confounded everyone he met, and that made him the perfect choice for this assignment. Priest and gorilla faced the cork wall—the bloody one, with pictures of a woman’s body laid open on the autopsy table, her innards hollowed out. For Jack Coffey’s purposes, these shots were better than the crime-scene pictures of wounds that were too modest by comparison.
    Though appointed by the Pope, Cardinal Rice was the town’s best-liked politician in every election year, and he had more influence than God. And so his emissary, Father DuPont, had been shown every courtesy at Special Crimes. Rare was the civilian who was allowed into the incident room, though this man had been invited only to view thisone set of photographs—to soften him up for the detective’s interview. And the priest did seem paler now, sickened and so politely bludgeoned by the bloody ruin of Sister Michael’s dead body.
    —
    MALLORY KNOCKED ON THE DOOR of the mugging victim, Albert Costello.
    Riker leaned against a wall and read her copy of the old man’s police report. It matched the date when the nun and her nephew had disappeared from this same street. “But this guy won’t fit the pattern. The cop coded it as a straight up bop-and-drop.”
    “No, that’s a training-day screwup.” Mallory banged on the door one more time. “The partner, the real cop, signed off on it, but he let the rookie do the paperwork.”
    “How do you know that?” Who, apart from this precinct’s desk sergeant, would know that? Riker could not ask if she was setting him up for a sucker bet. They had an audience.
    “There’s people been livin’ here for years,” said a woman from the first floor, “and they think it’s an empty apartment. That’s how quiet the old guy is.”
    “Oh, yeah,” said the neighbor from an upper floor, when he looked at the photograph filed with the mugging report. “When I’m home on the weekends, I see him outside sometimes, just hanging out on the sidewalk.”
    Another tenant sniffed the air. “Cigarettes? A smoker.” Her face scrunched up. “Well, at least it doesn’t smell like he died in there.”
    Mallory turned to this woman from the top floor. “You pass this door every day, and you never caught a whiff of cigarette smoke?”
    “Hey, I would’ve noticed if it was this bad.”
    The jingle of keys bobbing on a belt loop announced the building superintendent, who was huffing up the stairs to unlock the apartment.When the onlookers and the super had been dismissed, Mallory opened the door and flicked on the light.
    The odor of cigarette smoke was thick, and dust coated lampshades and tables. Riker hunkered down to touch a spill on the carpet. It smelled like beer. “Still wet. The old guy hasn’t been gone long.”
    Mallory was staring at the only clean ashtray in the apartment. Others were in various stages of full to overflowing with cigarette butts. “Our perp’s been here,” she said.
    “What?” Where was this coming from? Riker only saw evidence of one occupant in the beer