The Night Watcher

by Lutz, John

  He padded back into the bathroom and showered, then rubbed himself dry with a soft towel that was warm from being draped over a heated brass rack. His hair was short and dried quickly. He combed it, shot it with Myra’s hair spray, then used Myra’s roll-on deodorant.

  Back in the dim bedroom, he found his clothes and put them on. It wasn’t the best thing for his health, to go outside in the cold right after a warm shower, but it was an occupational hazard this time of year, and Billy had built up immunities. Besides, his thick Armani coat, out of style this season but still warm, was hanging in the closet in Myra’s foyer.

  After fastening his blazer button, he went to the bed and leaned over Myra. He kissed her on the forehead, once, twice, to be sure she was somewhat awake.

  “Good night, Myra. You were wonderful, as always.”

  She managed a smile, then turned her face back to the pillow, muffling her words. “Nigh’…Billy.”

  He felt lonely, almost as if he were leaving his own home and wife, as he walked from the bedroom and the sleeping woman behind him. In the entry hall he shrugged into his coat and turned up its black leather collar.

  Glancing at his reflection in the gold-framed mirror, he smiled handsomely, blatantly admiring his boyish blond looks, telling himself the world wasn’t always shitty. This had been a good night but he didn’t yet know how good.

  Myra paid the service direct or had used a charge card, but he knew there would be an envelope for him on the marble-topped credenza.

  Next to the door.

  FIFTEEN

  On the forty-seventh floor of the Whitlock Building on West Fiftieth, six-year-old Eden Wilson rolled over in her sleep and moaned. She didn’t quite wake up, and if she had, she wouldn’t have known what awakened her. Something was penetrating even her deep sleep, making her uneasy. Something was different.

  Her mother and father, Roy and Edith Wilson, slept soundly in the next room, unaware of any changes in their co-op apartment. They didn’t realize their unit shared an air-conditioning duct with the adjacent apartment. The two halves of the vent were separated only by a thin vertical section of sheet metal, and between the units the heated metal had popped its tapping screws and pulled away from the sides of the duct. That allowed smoke from the apartment next door to find its way into the Wilson unit.

  Then flame.

  Only a tiny flame at first. Almost like a hesitant scout exploring in advance of a larger and more dangerous force.

  That flickering red force soon arrived and traveled along a wallpaper border that had a bunny-and-flower pattern. As the flames worked their way around a smoke alarm whose batteries had run down, pieces of the wallpaper border curled and dropped burning onto the synthetic fiber carpet.

  Eden sighed and rolled over in her sleep as a cinder glowed brighter among carpet fibers and began spreading its pulsating redness in a rapidly enlarging circle.

  The glowing circle became flames at its circumference, and the flames grew. They grew tall enough to reach the kicked-off bedsheet draped to a few inches above the floor. The taste of material emboldened the fire and it spread along the stitched seam edging. The growing ring of flames on the carpet had reached the closed hollow-core wood door, thin particleboard sheets braced inside only with cardboard tubing. Flames devoured the adhesive along the edges of the door and began working on the particle wood and the enameled door frame.

  At the foot of Eden’s bed, the flames worked higher toward the box springs and mattress. They found a blond doll balanced on the corner of the mattress and enveloped it. The doll melted, contorting as if in play death, and dropped onto the floor.

  Eden awoke and sat bolt upright in bed, gazing around her in wonder. Then she drew up her legs, clutching her knees, and began to scream.

  In the next room her mother and father were choking, lost in a suffocating pall of black smoke, trying to crawl in the direction of the door, unable to find even each other.

  Rica awoke with the phone chirping in her ear. As she fought her way up out of sleep and reached for the receiver, she noticed the clock’s red LCD display: 3:21 P.M.

  Too early, she thought. Way too early. And too cold. The radiators weren’t clanking and wheezing, or doing much heating. She’d have a talk with the super again, tomorrow. Misery, she thought, licking her lips and propping herself up on one elbow. Misery. The caller better have a good reason to rouse her.

  She thumbed the phone’s illuminated on button and pressed plastic to ear. Mumbled something even she didn’t understand.

  “Rica?”

  It was Stack. “Yeah. Me. Here. Half awake.”

  “Make it the rest of the way,” Stack said. “We got another co-op fire, on East Fiftieth near Second Avenue. Forty-seventh floor.”

  Awake now. “Jesus! The FDNY equipment can’t reach that high.”

  “I’ll be by to pick you up outside your building.”

  “Give me fifteen minutes,” Rica said.

  “Make it ten. I’m on a cell phone and on the way.”

  “Great,” Rica said. “I’ll have time to put on shoes.”

  He was there in nine minutes. And she was waiting, Stack noticed with satisfaction, as he steered toward the curb. He worked the button that unlocked the doors and she slid into the seat beside him, huffing and shivering from the cold. She said nothing, staring straight ahead as she buckled her seat belt. She might be angry, or simply distracted, or not all the way awake. He had no way of knowing and decided not to push to find out.

  Stack stomped the accelerator, pulling the car back out onto cold and vaporous streets that by Manhattan standards were almost deserted. He’d encountered no more than twenty or thirty vehicles, mostly cabs, all the way to Rica’s apartment. The city that never slept was catnapping. Stack didn’t use the cherry light or siren, but he took the corner fast, breaking through a mist of steam rising ghost-like from a subway grate.

  “How’d you get the call?” Rica asked.

  “Fagin, the FDNY guy.”

  Rica remembered Fagin, young Abe Lincoln at the Dr. Lucette fire in the Bennick Tower. “He say anything about it?”

  “Said it’s been burning quite a while, but he didn’t tell me what the exact situation was. We didn’t talk all that long. He was busy.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  A cab came out of nowhere, skidding to a stop just inches from slamming into the unmarked. A horn’s angry blast followed them.

  “Prick was going too fast,” Rica said.

  Stack smiled. He got out the cherry light, rolled down his window, and placed the light on the car roof. Then he kicked in the siren and cranked the window back up. Good Stack. Law and order personified.

  “That cooled it off in here,” Rica said, tightening the scarf around her throat as if cold air were still blasting in. She wished she’d brushed her teeth. She felt as if she had a mouthful of moss and must have had breath like diesel exhaust.

  Stack sped through the next intersection, letting the siren yodel that they were coming, they were going. He glanced over at Rica, who was wrestling something from one of the big pockets in her bulky coat.

  He was surprised when she drew out a steel Thermos bottle.

  Carefully, while he was on a straightaway, she unscrewed the black plastic cap and poured steaming coffee into it.

  “We’ll have to use the same cup,” she said. “Intimate.” She handed the cap to him to sip from first.

  Stack took a long pull, burning his tongue and not caring, then lowered the cup and smiled. “Thanks, Rica! That brought me all the way to life.”

  “I’d make somebody a good wife,” she said.

  “Somebody.”

  He handed the plastic cup back to her, then tapped the brakes and turned the corner onto Second Avenue. Far down the street they could see a reddish glow in the night sky, as if a smaller sun were paying a nighttime visit.

  “My God!” Rica said.

  “Better drink your coffee now,” Stack told her, stomping the
accelerator pedal so she was pressed back against the seat.

  They flashed ID and walked among the haphazardly parked fire equipment and ambulances, careful to stay out of the way. An aerial ladder reached ineffectively up the side of the building, and a firefighter clung to it and held a hose, playing a stream of water almost straight up toward half a dozen fiery windows. Other streams of water, from street level, were trained on the floors beneath the fierce red glow that was at times trying to escape through heat-shattered glass. Stack guessed the idea was to try to keep the fire from working its way downward. At this point, not much could be done about upward. Several patrol cars were parked among the FDNY vehicles, and there were uniforms holding back a crowd that was probably mostly made up of tenants who’d fled the building. Stack motioned for Rica, and they walked over to where a uniform was standing near the front of one of the cars.

  Stack and Rica identified themselves. At the mention of Stack’s name, the uniformed sergeant, whose name was Mosher, straightened his posture noticeably. He was a graying, portly man in his fifties, and he focused entirely on Stack as he gave an account of his recent actions and what he knew.

  “My partner Vinny and I got the call about forty-five minutes ago. We got here, we could already hear the fire department sirens. Right away we learned from tenants in the lobby that the fire was on the forty-seventh floor. The elevators were working hard, carrying tenants down. Couple of other uniforms from the One-seven arrived, then the FDNY in force. After the elevators were made off-limits so nobody’d get trapped in them, we helped tenants use the fire stairs in back to leave the building; then we got into crowd control.”

  “You One-seven?” Stack asked.

  “From the One-nine, but we were close, so we got here in a hurry when we heard the call.”

  Stack knew that many of the police personnel on the scene were from surrounding precincts. This fire was already a major disaster and might get worse in a hurry.

  He gazed up where Sergeant Mosher had been looking. The building had a fancy stone facade that rose about five stories, then became drab brick. There were people in some of the upper-story windows, above the level of the fire.

  “Not everybody got out,” Mosher said unnecessarily. “Some can’t leave because of the flames or smoke. A few refuse to leave, if you can believe it.”

  “I can,” Stack said.

  Rica, stamping her feet and blowing foggy breath, prodded Stack in the ribs. “Fagin.”

  Stack thanked the sergeant, then turned to see the tall, angular Ernest Fagin making his way toward him, sidestepping equipment and dancing over thick networks of fire hose as if he’d run this obstacle course a hundred times before. Maybe he had. He was wearing boots and a long gray slicker with two broad yellow horizontal stripes but his head was bare. He said hello to Stack and nodded to Rica.

  “You two get filled in?” he asked, shooting a glance at Sergeant Mosher.

  “Not all the way,” Stack said.

  “The fire’s still confined to the northwest corner of the building, but there’s no way we can get water or foam that high from street level.”

  “What about the people trapped up there?”

  “We can’t get an accurate count of how many there are. We’ve got a team working its way up the fire stairs, seeing if they can clear them and get everyone down safely, then move equipment up to the floor the fire’s on.”

  “Standpipe hose?” Stack asked, remembering an earlier conversation with Fagin.

  “We tried,” Fagin said. “The standpipe valve’s not working, but we think we can get it fixed.”

  “Is there a chance?” Rica asked. “I mean, before a lot of people die?”

  “Not much of one,” Fagin told her honestly, pulling a long face as he spoke. Rica thought she saw tears glistening in his eyes, though it might have been the acrid dark haze irritating them. “Do you think this is the work of your guy?” he said.

  Rica shrugged. “No way to know yet.” She glanced up at the fiery show above. “If ever.”

  “We can find out,” Fagin told her grimly. “We can put it back together enough that we can know.”

  A large man wearing a FDNY captain’s emblem on his fire helmet appeared and waved Fagin over. With a backward glance, Fagin left Stack and Rica.

  There was an increased flurry of activity, and several firefighters moved toward the side of the building.

  “I feel useless,” Rica said.

  “The best thing we can do,” Stack said, “is stay out of the way.”

  An engine roared, and a loud air horn blasted as FDNY equipment began repositioning itself. Something was sure as hell going on.

  Fagin jogged around a parked ambulance and came halfway to where Stack and Rica stood. He was wearing a fire helmet now. He grinned and pointed skyward, then made an upward walking motion with his forefinger and middle finger.

  “They must have cleared the fire stairs,” Stack said, watching Fagin wave to them, then hurry back out of sight so he could get to work.

  Standing across the street in the cold, Stack and Rica waited.

  Within fifteen minutes more tenants began streaming from the Whitlock’s entrance. Most of them looked okay, though some were dazed and staggering. A few were on stretchers or being helped by fellow tenants or paramedics. Stack figured they must have been coming down the fire stairs while the FDNY was lugging equipment up. Which meant there was probably no guarantee the stairwell would remain clear enough of smoke or flames for passage. It wasn’t the first time Stack was glad he’d chosen the police and not the fire department as a career.

  A familiar thrashing noise broke into his thoughts and grew louder, and he looked up to see two helicopters suspended above the building. He’d seen a movie once about a fire in a high-rise building, where the people trapped in the upper floors and on the roof were raised by rope or cable to hovering helicopters to escape the flames. It didn’t seem a practical idea even in the movie. He wondered if it was going to be tried here.

  But the helicopters remained pretty much in place for a while, then tilted to the west and disappeared.

  Almost an hour had passed when Fagin crossed the street to where Stack and Rica stood. His face was soot-blackened except for around his mouth and eyes, and he looked exhausted.

  “We’re okay,” he said. “We got the beast under control. I think you two better come up with me, if you don’t mind climbing forty-seven flights of stairs.”

  Stack and Rica stared at him.

  He grinned in blackface. “Only kidding. We got the elevators working.”

  As they walked with Fagin across the street to the Whitlock, the figure that had observed Myra Raven from Central Park now observed Stack and Rica.

  The media had made no secret about who was in charge of investigating the co-op burning deaths. Detectives Benjamin Stack and Rica Lopez. It had been easy enough to find out a great deal about them.

  And tonight, to get a look at them in person.

  SIXTEEN

  Stack fell back into bed at seven A.M. and slept until the alarm woke him at nine. He didn’t mind waking up. He’d been dreaming about flames and black smoke and faces pressed against high windows. It was a relief to realize he was home in his apartment, breathing cool, smoke-free air.

  But last night had been no dream. In the corner unit of the Whitlock Building, where the fire apparently originated, a burned body had been found in what had been the kitchen. Another body was discovered in the adjacent apartment, and a woman and a child were hospitalized with third degree bums.

  At this point, that was really all that was known. Fagin from Arson and the ME were sorting things out, and Stack would get the information today.

  Stack had an hour before he was supposed to swing by and pick up Rica. He showered and dressed quickly, so he’d have time to stop at the deli two blocks down and have some breakfast. Before leaving, he glanced at the Uncontested Divorce Summons with Notice UD-1 form on his desk. His attorney, Gideon Fin
e, had instructed him to fill it out as best he could, then send it to him so it could be completed and filed with the state. Stack and Laura’s divorce was moving smoothly enough through the system. Neither party was having second thoughts, and no blood would be shed over who got the TV or blender. So far there was no animosity; it was a matter of two people finally admitting the tension had at last eroded what they once shared. Laura was always reasonable, and Stack figured they’d remain friends after parting. He told himself he felt good about that. You took away what you could.

  No time to worry over the divorce form now. He wrapped his plaid muffler round his neck, slipped into his coat, and left the apartment.

  In the hall, he noticed that the coat still smelled strongly from the fire. He decided to walk to the deli for breakfast, then back, rather than give up his parking space. That way the cold air could maybe cleanse his clothes of their acrid burnt scent.

  He stopped in at a shop next door to the deli to pick up a newspaper, and noticed the Post headline: TORCHER SETS ANOTHER HIGH-RISE INFERNO.

  Great, Stack thought, reading the paragraph below. The media already knew more than he did, or they were assuming, and they’d settled on a name for the killer: “the Torcher.” The Times mentioned the fire on the front page, but beneath the fold, and they didn’t speculate on how it had started. Stack reached over the Times and picked up a Post. He was curious about how the paper would treat the Torcher murders, what the angle was, what information might have been developed after he’d left the scene. Smiling slightly, he realized he was already thinking of the killer as the Torcher; probably the nickname would catch on.

  He managed to find a small booth by the window and settled in with the toasted corn muffin, orange juice, and coffee he’d bought at the counter.

  After arranging the food before him, he gulped down the cold juice, then spread out the paper and read while he munched the corn muffin and sipped coffee.