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

for this manna, forgetting for the moment that God was his sworn enemy, He Who had stolen Aunt Angie—and then let her die. Jonah’s voice was hoarse as he sent up another prayer to the Almighty Bastard Who art in Heaven, a suggestion for God to drop dead.
    Next in the order of exploration, his one naked foot touched the source of a mildew smell, and his hands dipped low to identify a bucket with a mop inside. Then he let his fingers travel waist-high across the wall to find the ball of a knob and turn it. There was no give to the door—locked—but there was a growl on the other side. Low to the ground. Guttural. Ugly.
    Given more water over the past few days, he might have pissed his jeans when the dog barked and raked its nails on the wood, scratching, pawing, clawing, howling now, mad to get inside—to get at him!
    Jonah had never fainted before, and so he would not call it that, and he would not call it sleep. He—just—switched— off.
    —
    MALLORY AND RIKER remained standing, still waiting for a response from their boss, the very quiet man behind the desk.
    Lieutenant Coffey continued to toy with a paper clip, unfolding it to a straight length of metal, a flimsy weapon at best, but he dared not unlock the drawer where he kept his gun. Calm enough now, he said, “Okay, that’s a first. You want me to believe this freak, this whack-job serial killer . . . hired a professional killer . . . for the wetwork?” No doubt, bet money would change hands between these two when they realized that he was not falling for their bullshit. But Jack Coffey was not inclined to drag this out, and so he reminded them that “The freak takes trophies,” and then yelled, “He cut out their fucking hearts!”
    Riker nodded in agreement. So true. “Talk to Heller. He says—”
    “No!” He was not going to play this out with the commander of Crime Scene Unit, a man with no sense of humor. The lieutenant turned his back on the detectives, swiveling his chair to stare at a street window never washed in this century, as if he could see through it. Good sport that he was, and with no rancor at all, he said, “Go away.”
    And they did.
    —
    KILLING A NUN ? Snatching a kid? Had Iggy lost his mind? Their client was only paying for four low-profile kills. Oh, and a phone call, a lousy heads-up on this mess, that would’ve been nice—a professional courtesy.
    Goddamn hell of a day!
    Gail Rawly was not the one on the murdering end of this enterprise. He saw himself as more of a matchmaker, though his wife believed he was a freelance insurance investigator, and he was—on the side—but only for the sake of filing income taxes. He would never want to run afoul of the Internal Revenue Service.
    If only his partner would be so cautious of the law.
    He switched off the radio’s gory news story when six-year-old Patty entered his home office in footed pajamas. Gail could see his own features in the little girl with his wavy brown hair and ocean-blue eyes. She was carrying a newspaper, helping Daddy, so he might overlook the fact that she was not asleep at this hour. He thanked her for the paper and laid it on his desk. “Back to bed, Princess.”
    No, she would stay. Her pajama feet were firmly planted on the rug to say so, and the lift of her chin said she went where she pleased, did she not?
    Gail turned his eyes to the newspaper. He could not recall the last decade when the New York Daily News had published a late edition. This one had front-page photographs of the nun and the boy. Three of the four bodies dumped on the mayor’s lawn were almost footnotes to this story. And there was no mention of the mutilation, not a line about organs cut out of the corpses.
    What was the client doing with those hearts?
    A phone rang. Before Gail opened his desk drawer, chock-full of cell phones, to see which one it was, he predicted that his caller would be the freak for hearts, wanting to carp about the alteration in the plan. He could