„The detective in charge said the matter was closed – accidental death. The key was an old one. He said it was clear – “

She raised one hand to cut him off. „Oliver did restoration work on old buildings. Not just the woodwork – old screws, pipes, rails. The old man had a lot of experience with metal fatigue. He didn’t risk his life on a fifty-year-old cuff key.“

„That’s your opinion.“

„That’s a fact,“ said Mallory. „He ordered new keys from a machine shop he did business with. I checked that out three hours ago.“

But if Charles recalled the events of the day – and he did – she was still eating pizza in his kitchen only two hours ago.

„The new keys were a better grade of steel – stronger,“ said Mallory.

Malakhai waved a hand to dismiss her argument – her lie. „So Oliver confused a new key with an old one.“

„Sorry,“ said Mallory, not at all sorry. „The machinist still has the old one. He kept it for a reorder. Oliver wanted ten keys. According to the shop foreman, he used a new one for every rehearsal. Now that was a little extreme, wasn’t it? Unnecessary, even with his life on the line. I suppose you could say he was paranoid about metal fatigue.“

Had she gone too far that time? Charles remembered Oliver as a trusting soul who had done business contracts on a handshake, hardly a paranoid personality. But a great many years had passed since Oliver and Malakhai had met. And Mallory was such a confident deceiver, the magician appeared to believe her, electing not to argue the point. „Perhaps he had more than one old key?“

„Wrong again,“ said Mallory. „Oliver told the machinist to keep it safe. Said it was his only key, a souvenir from Faustine’s Magic Theater. You performed there, too. I’d bet even money you had a key just like it. Still got yours?“

„You seriously – “

„I know you’re part of this, Malakhai. You’re just too damn helpful in showing me the error of my ways.“

Malakhai smiled with just a trace of condescension.

„No,“ she said. „You only think I tipped my hand by accident. Wherever you go, keep looking over your shoulder. I’ll be right behind you – and that should worry you. Just ask anyone at this table how twisted I really am.“

Robin Duffy looked up with great surprise, as though she had shot him in the heart.

Mallory turned to the rabbi, who knew her better than all the rest of this company. Her face was an open challenge, defying David Kaplan to deny it – waiting for him to contradict her. And now she must realize that she would wait forever.

The rabbi turned away from her.

While Charles was casting about for words to say in her favor, it was Edward Slope who came gallantly riding to Mallory’s defense.

The doctor put one arm around her shoulders and slowly shook his head in denial of her twistedness. Then he leaned toward Malakhai. „Watch your back. You’ve seen what she does to puppies.“

At the back of Charles Butler’s building, the private office was sheltered from the noise and the tourist hustle of SoHo streets. It overlooked a city garden of monster weeds, trash cans and their attendant rats, but high-pitched squeals and the scrabbles of tiny nails did not penetrate the closed windows of the second floor. The room was furnished with cold metal and decorated with extreme order and death. Mallory never saw this as metaphor, but seriously believed that these environs gave no clue to her personality.

Three computer monitors were perfectly aligned on their separate workstations, soldiers in formation, and each machine had one glowing blue eye. They reported in silent scrolls of text rolling down their screens. One wall of shelves held peripheral electronics, boxes of disks, tools and manuals. The adjacent wall was clear of obstruction from the floorboards to the ceiling molding. Tonight it served as a giant video screen for the taped homicide in Central Park, and Oliver Tree was performing his final act. Mallory set the projection to loop endlessly, to murder the old man, then resurrect him and kill him again and again.

Charles Butler had offered her the warmth of wooden antiques to replace her steel file cabinets, desk and chairs. He had suggested drapes to kill the coldness of the institutional window blinds. And he thought a painting or two might break the monotony of the wall where Oliver Tree was bleeding from four sharp arrows, hanging dead in his chains.

But she preferred her own simple furnishings. They could be reassembled within any set of stark white walls, and she would feel instantly at home in familiar, albeit sterile, surroundings. The surface of the metal workstation was cold to the touch. In deference to her machines, she kept the room temperature several degrees below the range of human comfort.

In the next loop of the projected magic show, Oliver was alive again on the wall, screaming for help and only bleeding from the wound to his neck.

Her chair rolled back from a monitor. After a few quiet hours of research, some of it legal, she had found no trace of Louisa Malakhai. One after another, archivists had lamented that there were no portraits, no certificates of birth or death, no tangible proof that the young composer had ever existed – except for the music, opus number one and only, Louisa’s Concerto.

Mallory reached into the pocket of her blazer and pulled out Louisa Malakhai’s passport. She stared at the mutilated black-and-white photograph inside the cover. Around the scratched-out face were long waving tresses. The light shade must have been the color of bright fire, for Emile St. John had alluded to a red-haired woman.

The passport was Czechoslovakian, but the Interpol connection had turned up no record of Czech citizenship. She flipped through the pages to the last customs stamp. It dated Louisa’s arrival in France to August of 1942. Mallory turned back to the previous stamps and examined them more closely.

Fake? Yes.

Only the final mark was reliable. So Louisa must have used this passport to enter the country. But the letters and numbers of previous stamps were made by the pen of an artist, and not a civil servant with an ink pad. Clever. A new passport might have borne closer scrutiny in wartime Europe. Inside the cover, a circular embossing overlapped the photograph. This raised seal had very few imperfections.

She returned the passport to the pocket of her blazer, where it kept company with Louisa’s French identity card, which had expired late in 1942.

On to Paris?

She looked at the clock on the wall. Just past midnight – too early to go traveling on the Internet. Her European connection would not be at his desk for hours.

Originally, she had cultivated the Interpol man te steal from him, to raid data from his foreign network. But now, she looked forward to his conversations printing across her screen. Because English was not his first language, he was precise in his phrasing, no idiomatic speech or slang. His text was economical, clean and cold. Like the coupling of machines, their intercourse never deviated from software and hardware.

The foreign policeman was her only friend – or the only one not passed down by her foster father, not inherited along with the old man’s pocket watch.

One red fingernail touched the power switch, and the screen went dark. Mallory swiveled her chair toward the wall where Oliver Tree was taking another arrow into his flesh. She watched with detachment, her mind elsewhere, as the next arrow pierced the old man’s heart, and blood streamed over the white breast of his shirt. She switched him off, giving Oliver a respite from his screaming agony, his repetitive dying.

Notebook and pen in hand, Mallory jotted down the data she would need from the platform that took up so much space in the basement. She planned to shrink it to numbers and graphics the size of a monitor screen.