Mallory's Oracle

Markowitz and his damn money motives. Ah, but the old man had something. This killer was a sick bastard, no doubt about it, but not crazy. Markowitz had tipped to something. Why hadn't the old man given him a sporting chance, just a note in the dust, any damn thing at all.

"No, nothing new on my end. Thanks for calling, Biker. Yeah, see you tomorrow."

Nothing new? Well, she was still alive. That hadn't changed.

Mallory put down the telephone and walked into the den. She pi

Could Gaynor have slipped by? As Mrs Pickering had pointed out, surveillance was not her forte. She had wanted it to be Gaynor. It would have fitted so nicely.

Once Markowitz had caught her cutting the pieces of a picture puzzle to make them fit. "Kathy," he said, in the early days when he was still allowed to call her that, "you can cheat the pieces to fit, but they won't show you the real picture. This is life's way of getting even with you, kid."

She put the Gaynor notes off to one side of the board with the long shots of Henry Cathery playing chess in the park.

She needed a new best suspect and a new angle. She stared at Markowitz's pocket calendar. Suppose he never made it to the BDA appointment that Tuesday night? He hadn't been seen since Tuesday morning. Markowitz hadn't gone to the Thursday-night poker game the previous week. What if he also missed the Tuesday appointment in that week before he died? What had he been doing with his nights?

If Markowitz had figured it out, it had to be linked to one of the first two murders. Or had he worked out a co

She loaded the slide carousel and sat watching the shots of Markowitz killed again and again, melding into shots of the first two murders, and finally her own shots of Gaynor and Cathery and the magic show of the medium, minion and baggage emerging from the yellow cab. "Pick up all the oddball things you can find," Markowitz had told her in her first year in crimes analysis. "Never throw anything away, kid."

"Don't call me kid," she had shot back. And it was always Mallory after that. It had cost him something to call her Mallory after all the years she had been Kathy to him, as though he'd never had a hand in raising her.

She watched the slides, lights playing on her face as the images changed quickly. What would the old man make of all this? Well, first he would say she was leaving tracks, big messy ones. Markowitz the dancing fool would never do that.

So how did he get killed?

The slide carousel looped back to the first shot of Markowitz lying in his own blood. She no longer took pride in the fact that she never cried. Dry eyes closed tightly as she switched off the projector and sat alone in the dark.

The new order she had created for him permeated his entire life these days, extending even into the office kitchen. He opened the refrigerator to gleaming metal shelves which Mallory had stocked with ample makings and condiments for every kind of sandwich known to God and Charles Butler.

It was an odd moment to realize how deep his feeling did go, as he was gathering ham and pickles, mustard and mayo

His eyes avoided the expanse of yellow wall above the stove as he lit the burner and set the tea kettle over the flame.

He regretted the choice of yellow paint for the kitchen. It had been an impulse decision. Like most people, he had believed yellow to be a cheerful, happy color. Too late, he had realized his mistake and called up an item on the subject of color, mentally projecting a page from an old science journal directly onto the white refrigerator door. The article had agreed with his own feeling. Yellow made people jittery.

But even if the walls had been the calming pink of drunk-tank experiments listed in the following paragraph, it might not have had any effect on his state of mind this late evening.

He slathered mayo

He added on a generous slab of yellow cheese.

The tea kettle screamed.

CHAPTER 5

"So we're back on the same pattern with this one," said Riker, slugging down his breakfast beer and spilling a few drops on his shirt. "The Siddon woman looks different from the others, doesn't she? Real peaceful." He held the photograph out to her. She only shrugged as she took it from his hand. Right. What would Kathy Mallory know of peace?

She pi

The exterior wall in the first photograph was splattered with blood, and only patches of Siddon's fawn-colored suit were not soaked through with red. One bloody palm print stained the rough brick a few feet above the head. Mallory put her finger on this photo.

"The victim's print?"

Riker nodded.

She walked back to the other side of die wall where Markowitz's collection had been reprinted from the slides. She stared at the Park photos of the first murder and moved on to the next set. "What about the second kill? Were there any prints on the car?"

Riker leaned back against the board and paused mid-gulp. "Hmm?"

"Estelle Gaynor, the one found in the limo. Were there any bloody prints?"

"You got it all there in Markowitz's report. One thumb and an index finger on the window, hers – no palm prints, not hers anyway. We tracked down all the latent prints. One set belongs to a garage mechanic. Some prints from the old man who owned the car. Nothing else."

He drained the rest of his beer with one swig and moved to the Markowitz side of the wall to stand behind her. She was staring at the detail print of the Cathery killing in the park which showed one bloody print of a full hand on the white trim of the shed.

"You're really reaching for co

"It's wrong somehow," she said, crossing back to her own side of the board to stand before the Siddon prints and the separate shot of the palm's bloodstain.

Riker was hearing echoes of Markowitz who was always listening for the off notes. "Mallory, the woman was fighting for her life." Ah, but wait. He stared at Samantha Siddon's peaceful face. It wouldn't agree with a battle on any scale.

"Slope can't say for sure it's the work of one perp?"

"He's still working on it. Commissioner Beale likes that idea, too. It makes him feel like we know something the newspapers don't know."