Gun drawn, Mallory walked into the kitchen and found the floor near the table littered with shatters and sparkles of glass and water. She checked every closet and room and then returned to the kitchen. She felt along every wet inch of the table top, searching for any small object which might do the job of the wooden match Charles had used to prime the vase in his office. There was nothing.

Well, the boy was smart, but not supernatural. So, the glass had simply fallen.

The unbeliever knelt down to the tiles with a dustpan and swept up the glass, and then mopped the floor and carefully wrapped the shards of the glass in plastic.

A barrage of soft thuds came from the next room. When she walked in, the cat’s body was arched, ears flattened, eyes round. It had knocked the bowl of fruit on to the carpet. An apple was rolling toward Nose, and the cat was backing up on tender feet as though the carpet might be on fire. Mallory snapped her fingers at the cat to get its attention. The cat ran the length of the room and leapt into her arms.

Another trick?

She put the cat down again and snapped her fingers once more. And the cat was in her arms.

What else can you do?

She dropped the cat, and crawled along the carpet, picking up the fallen fruit. The cat stayed beside her, loving up against her, mewling for some small attention, anything at all.

Mallory poured the wax fruit back into the bowl. Nose licked her hand, and she drew it back. Now she scanned the carpet and its recent proliferation of white cat hairs.

Houseproud Helen Markowitz would never have allowed an animal in the house, yet she had fed every stray that came through the yard. And for ten days of winter, a mongrel had lived in their garage, lapping up leftovers and licking Helen’s hand and adoring her with its great brown eyes.

Helen had shown young Kathy each scar of abuse on the animal’s pelt. You can learn a lot about people from their animals, said Helen. She had learned so much about the mongrel’s owner that she made no attempt to find him. Helen lost the tag on the dog collar and found another home for the animal with a family on the next block.

It’s not the dog who is lost, Helen had said. The one who abused this animal is lost.

Helen had never used the words of Kathy and Markowitz’s shared vocabulary: dirtball, scumbag, scum-sucker. The bastard who had split the dog’s pelt with kicks and broken its ribs, he was only lost to Helen.

Everyone has a dark side, Helen told her. When the dark kills off all the light of the soul, this is a lost person.

Small Kathy had figured, Naw, he’s a scumbag, and she knew the dog’s former owner deserved a few kicks to his own ribs. Her young sense of justice was very dark, and it had an elegant simplicity that was not much changed over the years. But, for Helen’s sake, she had tried to behave as though the light shone for her, too.

Mallory reached out one hand and gently stroked the cat’s head. Helen would’ve liked that.

The cat closed its eyes in contentment.

Duty done, she quickly withdrew her hand, wiped it on the leg of her jeans, and left the cat sitting in the middle of the living room, its eyes wide open now and looking everywhere for the vanished Mallory.

The Amanda Bosch file had an honored place in the top layer of the mess on Riker’s desk. He was rumbling through the contents of a lower drawer, fingers grasping what he thought were recent park site photos. But he had gone down too far in his haphazard method of filing, and now he held the snapshots he had taken at Kathy’s graduation from the police academy.

There was Helen Markowitz, smiling broadly, not realizing the cancer in her body was already planning to cut her life short in one more year. Markowitz had never really recovered from the loss. If not for Kathy, he might have followed Helen years sooner.

It had always angered Riker to think back on Helen’s death and how quietly she had gone to it, sedated, unprotesting. The hospital gurney wheels had whispered Markowitz’s wife into that sterile operating room, and only the body had come wheeling back to them. She had slipped under the surgeon’s knife and slipped away.

There should have been more noise to mark the event. In low tones, the doctor had told Markowitz and Kathy how sorry he was. Unspoken were the words, The show’s over. And so Markowitz and Kathy had sat together on a cheap plastic couch in the terrible silence of that waiting room, two unimportant people in the aftermath of an event which had not been properly called to an end. It was a play which tapered off to a mumble and had no curtain to tell the audience it was time to go home.

Riker, understood what Kathy meant when she had turned to him then and said, ‘This is a rip-off.’ It was.

Now someone was standing before Riker’s desk, not wanting to interrupt a thought, only politely waiting with just the minimum of shuffling noise to announce himself.

Riker only knew one person who was that polite. It was no surprise to look up into the smiling face of Charles Butler. And this was another reminder of an old friend. Markowitz’s smile had no such loony aspect, but, as with Charles, one tended to smile back, regardless of grim thoughts and small heartaches.

‘Pull up a chair, Charles. You waiting around for Mallory?’

‘No. Jack Coffey invited me in for a little chat about Amanda Bosch.’

‘He probably thinks Mallory’s holding out on him. She probably is. But then, to be fair, Coffey holds out on Mallory, and I hold out on both of them. We’re a very dysfunctional family, we three. You didn’t rat her out, did you?’

‘Of course not.’

So Mallory was holding out.

‘What can I do for you, Charles?’

‘Coffey tells me it was your idea to give this case to Mallory. May I ask why?’

‘Because of Amanda Bosch. When a kid dies young like that one, there ought to be some fanfare, you know? Sicking Mallory on the perp was the worst thing I could think of doing to him.’

‘But it’s dangerous.’

‘If she’s right about him, she only has to flush him out. If she’s wrong, she may have to shoot him.’

‘You’re not worried about her?’

‘No,’ he lied, because he really liked Charles.

‘But the way she’s going about it, she might as well – ’

‘We can’t put anybody in jail without evidence. Sometimes we know who did it, and we can’t touch him. People do get away with murder – I won’t tell you how often, but it happens. Now I’m betting this bastard doesn’t get away from Mallory. I’ve got a hundred bucks riding on the kid.’

‘But she’s hanging out there like a target.’

‘She is a target – she’s a cop. And she won’t give it up either. If you’re thinking she’d be safer with you in civilian life, just get rid of that fairy tale. This job gives her a rush. Now she’s got a lock on this case, and she’s flying. And what can you offer her, Charles?’

‘Nothing. I know that.’ Charles stared at his shoes for a moment. ‘But you’re looking for court supportable evidence against this man. Her methods aren’t strictly within the law, are they?’

‘I know she’ll break rules to get him, and this is what I’ve come to. I’m following Markowitz down the slow path of corruption. I’m copping to it, okay? You can have me arrested for it.’

‘Suppose she gets caught breaking the rules? What about her career then?’

‘Charles, you must know how Markowitz used her. I know the old man liked you and he trusted you, but I don’t think he shared much of the department dirt. If we did everything by the book, the results would look pretty poor. Mallory could get things for him, impossible things. He never asked how many laws she broke in a day. What she got by illegal means wasn’t evidence, nothing admissible in court, but it was stuff Markowitz could use to finesse a perp into a nervous breakdown. Mallory knows things about this killer. She has under-the-skin intimate knowledge. When she’s done with him, he’ll think she was there in his pocket when Amanda Bosch went down. Mallory will get him. I’m counting on it. She is a thing to behold.’