It Happens in the Dark (32 page)

“Did you keep their original script?”

“
And
their handwritten notes. It’s all yours—
after
tonight’s performance. I invited a Hollywood super-agent, and I want him to get the full effect
with
the twins onstage. Real psychos playing psychos. Wonderful, aren’t they? There’s nothing quite as scary as the genuine article.”

“So they confessed.”

“No, they’re not quite
that
stupid. It was the way they pitched the story. When I suggested a minor change, one of them said, ‘But it doesn’t happen that way.’ His brother elaborated . . . talking about the way a tiny body goes on moving . . . after a little girl has lost her head. It scared me shitless. That was the moment when I fell in love with the whole idea. . . . You
are
planning to put them away, right?”

“Count on it.”

But not today.

Even if she could get Clayborne’s evidence at gunpoint, it would not be enough to charge the Rinaldi brothers with the Nebraska massacre, not without James Harper’s cooperation, and there was no chance of that. The sheriff’s John Doe warrants were in her back pocket, but if she served them without that lawman’s positive ID, the twins would be back on the street long before curtain time. “If anyone gets hurt tonight . . . while you’re jerking me around?”

“You’ll shoot me,” he said. “Understood.”

“I don’t need a gun to mess you up.”

Axel Clayborne rocked the chair on its back legs, smiling again—and too wide. Mallory’s hand flashed out and slammed the back of the chair into the wall. The actor knocked his head against the blackboard—
hard
.

And painful
.
Good.

His knees in the air, the actor’s torso was almost horizontal and tenuously balanced. With a nudge of her foot, the back legs of the chair were sliding out from under him.

A dangerous position.

He laughed.

This was
fun.

“Those little psychos will be on best behavior tonight.” Clayborne placed one hand on his heart. “I promise you, it’s guaranteed. They know there’s a movie deal in the works, and the agent needs to see
all three acts
.”

Such a happy smile.

Mallory let go of the chair, unwilling to hurt him anymore—since he
liked
it. She walked away, laying plans to keep Clayborne’s bargain and break it, too.

SUSAN:
You didn’t tell me how your grandmother died.

ROLLO:
No wounds. They only had to lift the bat and the axe. She died of . . . anticipation. Oh, but you should have seen her face.

—
The Brass Bed
, Act III

Riker owed his partner twenty dollars for a lost bet. How had Mallory known that the commander of Crime Scene Unit would make a personal appearance for a carton of old chalk?

No hellos were exchanged as the detective stepped to one side, and Heller lumbered past him, demanding to know “Where the fuck is it?”

Though Riker was outranked here, he had never been one to snap to attention. He closed the alley door and locked it. Then, in no special hurry, he led the man to the staircase inside the false wall.

Only a few minutes passed before Heller emerged from the stink hole below. He was angry, an excellent strategy for survival in Copland. Always shoot first. “My guys were supposed to work the audience area.
Maybe
the stage. But
not
the whole damn building! If the supervisor hadn’t busted his appendix that night, you guys never would’ve gotten away with expanding the crime scene.”

Riker’s turn. He would not contradict this man with the mention of larger crime scenes in years gone by. No, he only needed to say, “That door wasn’t marked on Clara Loman’s diagram.”

Heller did not pull out a weapon. So far, this was going well.

Mallory joined them in the wings by the blackboard, armed with a girlie, pink hairbrush. She seemed surprised to see the CSU commander—as if she had not placed a bet on his visit. “What’re
you
doing here?”

The angry man shot a quizzical look at Riker, who was
not
faking surprise.

Heller turned on Mallory. “Your partner called me. He said you needed the damn chalk picked up for testing.”

“Oh, I could’ve dropped that off.” She reached out to the stage manager’s desk and picked up a small plastic evidence bag containing a single box of chalk from the carton downstairs. Handing it to him, she said, “No rush. I already know Axel Clayborne’s prints are on that package. In fact . . . I’m not sure I really need it.” And now she toyed with the pink hairbrush, idly picking strands from the bristles.

Heller was a slow-moving bear of a man, but his brain could work at frightening speeds. If Mallory had no need of the chalk, then the hidden door, the one overlooked by his old mentor, might never find its way into a report. Clara Loman would not lose face; she would never even know about this.

And Heller would never find out that the flawed crime-scene diagram had been drawn
before
Loman had arrived to take over the crew of CSIs.

In the pantheon of extortion scams, this one was beautiful. All that remained was the matter of Mallory’s price. Riker stared at the hairbrush in her hand. Alma’s brush? Alma’s hair? He shook his head to warn Mallory off. No way could she get away with this. Heller would
never
put one foot wrong. Evidence was not for sale.

Mallory stared at the door that led down to her chalk supply. “You’re right about the expanded crime scene. If Loman had replaced that supervisor
just
a little earlier, it never would’ve happened. And I’m the one who ordered the CSIs to search upstairs. Loman stopped them. She found out the actors had keys to their dressing rooms.”

“And an expectation of privacy.” Heller stared at the pink hairbrush in her hand, an item that had most certainly come from one of those off-limits dressing rooms.

“Right. We can’t get a search warrant until we charge somebody.” She plucked one hair from the brush and held it up to the light. “When Dr. Slope does strand tests, he doubles the usual lab requirement. He takes a hundred hairs for the sampling. . . . You, too?”

“Slope gets his samples from bodies, not brushes,” said Heller. “That kind of evidence won’t stand up in court.”

“Of course not,” said Mallory. “Take
this
brush, for instance. No idea who it belongs to, but she sheds like a collie. Must be two hundred strands here. I found it on the floor backstage, right out in plain sight.”

Was Heller buying that? No, of course not, but Riker did notice the man’s slight nod to say he was following her train of thought all the way to hell.

“You’re right,” said Mallory. “A sample from
this
brush would never be admissible as evidence. . . . It wouldn’t even be worth an entry in a CSU log—or an official test in the Police Lab.” She reached out and took the bagged package of chalk from Heller’s hand. “Don’t waste time on this. Riker took down Clayborne’s statement. Let’s forget I ever found the chalk.”

When Heller left the theater, he was carrying a tox-screen sample, a small bag of Alma Sutter’s hair.

•   •   •

One bet lost, Riker’s wallet was a bit lighter when he sat down beside his partner, center stage on the brass bed. It could have been worse. Given the chance, he would have made a second wager and bet his pension that Mallory could not win a lab test with no paper trail.

His pension, the moon and maybe a bottle of bourbon.

Sucker.

He could hear Lou Markowitz ragging him all the way from the boneyard. Riker felt that he had let that old man down, but any lecture he gave to Lou’s kid right now would only sound foolish and hollow. And
knowing
this, he said, “Kid, there were other ways of handling—”

“It was
fair
,” said Mallory. “The CSIs crippled us from the start, and Heller knows it.”

“So why not get Loman to run that hair-strand test?”

“Off the books? She’d never do it,” said Mallory. “Rules of evidence are her religion. Not in the beginning, though. I think she got rigid as she got older.”

“
Her
religion . . . but not Heller’s? That guy lives for the—”

“He owes
everything
to Clara Loman. She probably cleaned up his early mistakes. I figure Heller must’ve made at least one
huge
screwup in his rookie days. That man knows ten ways to kill me without leaving evidence. He’d do that and worse to save Loman’s job.”

His partner had a gift for sussing out weaknesses in people—all the soft places where they could be hurt, and she would apply that talent to puppy dogs and felons alike. She had no sympathy for any living thing.

In sidelong vision, Riker caught a flash of movement on the other side of the stage, and now an orange cat was creeping toward them with a limp rat in its teeth. This catch was deposited at Mallory’s feet, followed by a soft meow, and then the tabby slowly backed up before turning tail to make a run for the wings.

Shaking her head, uncomprehending, Mallory stared at the dead rat on the floor.

Riker guessed that she had never received a present quite like this one. He had grown up with cats in the house, and he knew they only left these gifts out of love—or fear. The orange critter had run off with no limp, no obvious sign of injury, and so he had to ask his partner, “What did you
do
to that poor dumb animal?”

•   •   •

Empty deli bags and paper cups littered the lieutenant’s private office, and he was now on Jack-and-James terms with the Nebraska lawman. The door was closed, as were the blinds for the window on the squad room, and the wall clock told him the timing would be close for his end run around the NYPD chain of command.

Jack Coffey’s stomach was still knotted up from a meeting with Commissioner Beale. He had volunteered the autopsy results on Dickie Wyatt and Peter Beck, but the commissioner and his buddy, the councilman, had decided that Slope
might
be mistaken about these two calls of murder. In the case of the junkie director, the commissioner had argued that drug mules swallowed heroin, did they not? And, yeah, they did, when the drug was safely encased in balloons, but
nobody
ever used heroin as a chili ingredient.

Idiots.

However, with luck and good timing, the lieutenant could shut down that play before it began. No one else would die, not tonight.

A dejected Sheriff Harper turned the last page of the ghostwriter’s play. “So this whole town knows all my case details?”

“Only what’s in the first act,” said Jack Coffey. “Those photos you brought us are crap—useless. And all the bio material on the Rinaldi brothers was made up by a studio publicist. So we’re gonna need a positive ID tonight.”

“Can’t help you there. If those two actors are the Chalmers boys, they’ve changed a whole hell of a lot.”

“Then I’m sure you’ll wanna help us locate the third survivor—the cousin. A family member’s ID would work better anyway.” Coffey was damn sure the sheriff had that witness stashed somewhere handy. A bedridden boy could not travel far. “So, maybe you could make a few calls to your sources . . . ask around?”

“My cell phone’s dead. If I could charge it up—”

“Use my desk phone. I’ll give you some privacy.” As Jack Coffey left his office, he knew the sheriff would only rack up long-distance charges for the sake of form. Harper would want to give the
appearance
of cooperation.

The lieutenant stood outside his office door, looking out across the squad room, where his men were running down the leads of juvenile traffic accidents in Nebraska and every bordering state, though the old police reports would not be generous with details like the kind of injury that would make a teenage boy into an invalid.

Riker was back at his desk, and he held a telephone receiver to one ear as he gave the lieutenant a nod and a grin.

So the lady in Nebraska had finally returned Riker’s call, and the news was good.

Seven hours till curtain time. Time enough?

•   •   •

When Mallory entered the incident room, the squad’s expert on all things narcotic handed her a toxicology report.

“This one’s for Peter Beck. It’s a present from the ME’s Office . . . addressed to you.” Sanger regarded her with mild curiosity, but he would not ask how she had won the deluxe ninety-day drug screen for a corpse with a slit throat.

She scanned the paperwork, noting that the lab test had been ordered the morning after the poker game. “You read this?”

“Yeah. No drugs in Beck’s system, not even over-the-counter stuff.”

And now she could write off the possibility of a previous poisoning attempt on the playwright. Despite the odds, she was left with two different motives for the murders of Wyatt and Beck.

“There’s something else you gotta see.” Sanger led her down the wall to the sheets of cell-phone and landline connections. “Your list of throwaway phones is panning out big-time. The guys in Narcotics are your new best friends.” He touched one printed line. “Here’s where the stagehands connect with a dealer under surveillance. And that guy’s numbers are a damn bonanza—but not for us. Nothin’ to support a trafficking charge on Garnet and Randal.”

Next, he pointed to Alma’s calls sheets, their catalog for the stagehands’ prepaid cell phones. “But look here. Three days into rehearsals the actress makes a drug buy. A few days later, another one. This goes on for weeks—the buy pattern of a recreational user.”

His pointing finger moved down the phone history and stopped. “Here, ten days into rehearsals, and Alma’s making lots of calls. She’s got a habit.” He tapped a line in the third week. “Down here, it’s getting heavy. Six weeks ago, our girl was a user, but she hadn’t found a drug to fall in love with. But today? I
know
she’s got a habit she can’t support—and no rich boyfriend to pick up the tab anymore.” Sanger pinned up statements for Peter Beck’s bank and credit cards. “Looks like the guy cut her off weeks ago.”

“And Alma took a big cut in pay,” said Mallory. “They all did. Except for Clayborne. He got payment up front.” But the actress was dead broke, and drugs were a cash-and-carry trade. “Somebody’s paying down her tab with the stagehands.”

“Clayborne? That fits with the stagehands visiting his place,” said Sanger. “We know he wasn’t making a drug buy that night.”

Would that work? Could the movie star be Alma’s bogeyman—
and
her Santa Claus?

•   •   •

Sheriff Harper emerged from Jack Coffey’s office to see the whole squad in a partying mood, passing pizza cartons from desk to desk, and tabs on soda cans were popping everywhere.

The lieutenant handed him a slice piled high with toppings of meats and mushrooms and dripping with cheese. “
This
you won’t find in Nebraska. What you got out there in the boonies? That’s only a
theory
of pizza.”

“Thanks,” said the sheriff. “Sorry to say I came up dry on my calls. No luck with the third survivor.”

“Oh, the cousin? Don’t worry about it,” said Coffey. “We found Billy.”

Janos placed a soda can in the sheriff’s hand. “Would’ve happened a lot sooner if you’d remembered the guy’s right name. But, hey, nobody’s perfect.”

“Yeah,” said Riker. “If the state troopers get Cousin Billy on the next plane, he might make it to the theater tonight. If not, it’s all on you, Sheriff.”

“I may not be much help with the ID.” James Harper knew that for a fact. He was not about to surrender the twins to any New York cops. “What if I can’t—”