style="font-size:15px;"> Chris was silent for a moment. Finally, he said, “I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about here, sir.”
Headley looked at him, puzzled at first, then horrified. “Christ, you didn’t think I meant …”
Chris gave him a blank stare. “Of course not.”
“Jesus, no.” He shook his head. “No, I’m thinking more … about those skeletons in the closet. If there were a way to discredit her somehow.” The mayor put a hand to the back of his neck and tried to squeeze out the tension, like he was wringing a sponge dry.
“Let me nose around,” Chris said.
“Good, that’s good,” the mayor said. “You had me worried there for a minute.”
Chris Vallins tilted his head to one side, as if to say, Yes?
“That you might have thought, even for a second, that I was suggesting we push the woman out a window or something.”
“Forgive me,” Chris said. “I know you’d never hurt a soul.”
Jerry Bourque’s first stop on the way home had been an art supplies place down on Canal Street. Then he’d gone into a grocery store with hot table service and filled a container with a few steamed vegetables, lasagna, a dollop of mashed potatoes, two chicken fingers, and some shrimp chow mein. The fact that some of these items did not typically go together did not bother Bourque. They charged by the weight of the container, so you could throw in a bit of whatever you liked.
As he came through the door of his fifth-floor, two-bedroom apartment in the Lower East Side, he tossed his keys in a bowl on a table in the hall, then went into the kitchen. He took his phone from his jacket pocket and set it, and his food, on the counter. He placed the bag from the art store on the already cluttered kitchen table. He slid out ten sheets of white illustration board, each twenty by thirty inches. He stacked them neatly at one end of the table by several small, screw-top bottles of art paint, a selection of box cutter–type knives, a metal ruler, some brushes and pencils, several three-foot-long strips of balsa wood, a glue gun, and a large, eighteen-inch-square paper cutter with an arm strong enough to slice through the art board. Or his fingers, if he wasn’t careful.
Fingers.
He tossed his sport jacket and the book filled with photos of old New York onto his bed in the bedroom. The other book, about the nearly completed Manhattan skyscraper, he set on the kitchen counter. He took his dinner out of a bag, opened the lid of the rigid cardboard container, and took a fork out of the cutlery drawer. He picked up a remote to turn on a small television that hung from the underside of the cabinetry.
He went through the stations until he landed on a local newscast, took a bottle of beer from the fridge, then leaned up against the counter and ate his dinner while standing. There’d been a truck rollover on the Van Wyck, spilling a load of bananas across two lanes. Four were dead in an elevator accident. The mayor was fighting allegations of giving a big city contract to a friend.
“So what else is new,” Bourque said, his mouth full of chow mein.
Some nut set off a bomb in Boston. England was still being battered by high winds.
Bourque finished his meal, put the food-stained container into a garbage bin under the sink and his fork into the dishwasher, next to three other forks, the only other items in the appliance. He took five minutes and looked at the pictures in the skyscraper book.
“Wow,” he said to himself several times.
Then he went into his bedroom to take off his tie and dress shirt and suit pants. He tossed the shirt into a bag that would be dropped off at the dry cleaner at week’s end. The pants he lay carefully on the bed, then took a gripper hanger from the closet, clamped it to the cuffs, and hung them up. He stripped off his socks and tossed them in a laundry basket. Come Sunday morning, he’d fill his pocket with quarters, head to the basement laundry room, and do a wash.
Now, dressed only in boxers and a T-shirt, he went back into the kitchen and sat at the table. Next to the paints was a twelve-inch metal ruler, which Bourque used to draw several long, straight lines on the cardboard sheets, then several small boxes in a grid formation.
Standing, he sliced off some of the cardboard sheets with the oversized paper cutter, then with the box cutter lightly scored the art board along some of the pencil lines, allowing him to bend the cardboard to a right angle without separating the pieces. Sitting back down, he cut some strips of the balsa wood to match the length of the scored lines, applied some hot, drippy adhesive from the glue gun, and used them to brace the corners. The tip of his index finger touched some of the hot glue.
“Shit!” he said. He peeled the set glue off and sucked briefly on the finger.
He spent the next hour making three rectangular boxes of different sizes, painting them various shades of gray, then detailing the perfectly arranged boxes on the sides, making them look like windows. At the bottom edge, he drew detailed entrances and oversized windows. He did all of this without drawings or plans or blueprints of any kind. What he saw in his head he turned into three dimensions.
One of the purposes of this exercise, beyond the fact that he just liked doing it, was to push out of his head the events of the day. Some evenings it worked, some evenings it did not.
This was one of those nights when it did not.
Bourque’s mind kept coming back to the body with the smashed-in face on the High Line. After his appointment with Bert, he and Delgado had paid a visit to the coroner’s office. The naked body, minus fingertips, yielded at least one clue that might lead to an identification. On the dead man’s right shoulder was a two-inch-long tattoo of a coiled cobra.
A DNA sample had been taken. A search of his clothes yielded nothing helpful. No credit card or time-stamped gas bar receipts had been found in the dead man’s pockets. His jeans and top were cheap off-the-rack items from Old Navy.
Bourque had taken another look at the socks. They looked relatively new; the area around the big toes did not show signs of an imminent hole. And the corpse’s toenails had been due for a trim. Bourque had heard back from the bookstore and been told the shark socks were made somewhere overseas, sold online and in countless stores across the city, but if he still cared, they had sold twelve pairs in the last month. Six were put on credit, six were paid for with cash. Bourque took down the credit card information.
His one pleasant memory of the visit to the coroner’s office had been standing close enough to Delgado to smell her hair. Whatever shampoo she used had a scent—mango?—that was strong enough to overrule the lab’s stench of bleach and antiseptic.
Bourque forced the investigation from the front of his mind as he held out at arm’s length the first completed building of the evening. He turned it around and admired it. If he noticed a spot where the paint was thin, he gave it a touch-up.
“Okay,” he said to himself. “Installation time.”
He got up from the kitchen table and opened the door to the second bedroom. But there was no bed, or dresser, or even a chair. There were four metal card tables, arranged into a large square roughly six by six feet, and almost entirely covered
