The Night Watcher

by Lutz, John

  Stack waited, looking as if he might be thinking idle thoughts.

  Ned kept his frightened gaze fixed on Stack and moved away from the table.

  Stack grinned in a way that frightened Rica and shook his head. “You guys and your rights…C’mon, Rica.”

  Rica followed as he strode from the kitchen. He thanked Corlane politely; then he and Rica put on their coats and left the restaurant.

  They’d walked half a block through the cold, fast, before they slowed down and Rica spoke. “Jesus, Stack!…”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said mildly. “Ned’s not our firebug.”

  “Stack—”

  “Put it out of your mind, dear.”

  Which, to Rica’s way of thinking, meant she should put it someplace where she would never talk or think about it again.

  Which she did. More or less.

  After they emerged from the restaurant, the Torcher had to walk fast to keep them in sight. Detective Stack’s face, when it had been in the light, was set and grim as death. His partner Erica looked stunned.

  Something had happened in the restaurant. Maybe an argument. The woman was in love with Stack, and he was with her but didn’t know it yet. She was a pushy bitch, Detective Erica Lopez. It could be that every now and then she went too far. She unnerved Stack in ways she didn’t seem to suspect. It was easy to see that, watching them from a distance, enjoying objectivity, seeing facial expressions when one or the other was turned away. The Torcher was getting to know them, had learned to read their body language. Sometimes Detective Lopez’s body language was too easy to read. It was her sexuality that was putting off Stack. Why? Was he involved with another woman? Maybe he was married and had five kids.

  The media hadn’t gone into the personal lives of either detective. Using alternative sources, the Torcher had learned something of each pursuer, but the information was more professional than personal. Their affair struggling to be born was interesting, even something to be envied, but to the Torcher it really didn’t matter. Stack and his partner were on the wrong path; that was what mattered.

  They bore watching, but they were on the wrong path and were safe if they stayed there.

  For now.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Myra juggled her brown paper bags from Blooming-dale’s while she fished in her purse for her key, then unlocked her apartment door. She’d bought two expensive business suits after ruining two during the last week by getting ink on the jackets. Myra had taken to using fountain pens rather than ballpoints, expensive pens from Mont Blanc and Argaan. Their writing was so much more distinctive, unique calligraphy that put the brand of her personality on everything she signed, every memo she dashed off. Trouble was, it was taking her a while to get into using ink from a bottle again, working the little plungerlike devices she’d been given to fit into each pen instead of the cartridges. She didn’t want to go to the cartridges and lose the experience of using a precision writing instrument in the classic manner, but—

  Something was wrong!

  Someone had been in her apartment.

  She placed the paper sacks on the table near the door, careful to keep any crinkling sound to a minimum, then took a few silent steps on plush carpet and stood gazing around the living room. That someone had been here in her absence was more than just a feeling. But what was different? How did she know?

  Everything was softly lighted from the lamps that she kept on a timer. And there was light from the opposite hall beyond the kitchen. Had she left a bathroom or bedroom light on? She thought back on it and couldn’t be sure.

  But it wasn’t just that the light wasn’t quite right. That didn’t account for the knowledge and wariness deep in a primitive part of her mind. It was, more than anything, the air in the place. It wasn’t the still, slightly stale air of an apartment that had been unoccupied all day and most of the evening. There was a subtle freshness, and the slightest movement, to the air, as if someone had stirred it in passing not long ago.

  Deftly she slipped off her high-heeled shoes and padded silently in her nyloned feet toward the rear of the apartment. Her coat was unbuttoned, and at the lower periphery of her vision she was aware of her ruffled white blouse rising and falling with her rapid breathing.

  It was when she was a few feet from the open bathroom door that there was a slight change of light. A pale shadow.

  She wasn’t alone in the apartment!

  Someone or something in the bathroom had moved.

  Myra knew she should turn and leave as silently as she’d made her way this far. But that might not be possible, the way her heart was pounding and her breath was trying to catch in her throat. Surely whoever was there could hear her loud struggle for oxygen.

  And there was something else preventing her from sneaking away. Frightened though she might be, she was also angry. This was, damn it, her apartment!

  She hadn’t gotten this far in life by playing the shrinking violet. Or so she told herself as she reached to her left and picked up a heavy brass ballerina figurine from a marble-topped half-moon table.

  She gripped the ballerina by her impossibly long legs, raised the heavy statuette above and slightly behind her head, then took a deep breath and stepped into the bathroom doorway.

  Gasped!

  Billy Watkins gasped and cut himself.

  He was standing at the washbasin, shaving.

  “Jesus, Myra! You surprised me!”

  Myra lowered the ballerina and slumped against the door frame, able to breathe again.

  “Sorry, Billy…I thought…”

  “That I was an intruder?” He grinned through the layer of shaving cream still on half his face. “You were gonna take on a burglar with that?” He pointed one of her disposable blue plastic razors, dripping water, at the ballerina.

  “I didn’t look forward to it,” she said.

  “Don’t you make any noise at all when you come in?”

  She smiled at him. “Not when I think somebody might be searching through my personal things, deciding what he should leave me and what he should have.”

  “I’m glad I never decided to rob you,” Billy said.

  Myra giggled nervously.

  Billy stared at her. “What’s funny?”

  “You look like the Phantom of the Opera whose mask has slipped.”

  Billy turned and looked at himself in the mirror, tanned handsome guy, shirtless and with a white mask over the left side of his face. The shaving cream had even gotten up on his temple as he jumped when he was surprised by Myra. He grinned at her in the mirror. “I guess I do at that. If only I could sing, hey?” He raised his chin to examine the drop of blood just above his Adam’s apple.

  “I’m sorry I made you hurt yourself,” Myra said.

  “I won’t bleed to death.” He dabbed at the cut with a damp washcloth. “I was gonna surprise you, Myra.” Still watching her in the mirror. “Turns out we surprised each other.”

  Myra studied his reflection in the mirror, the way steam was rising from the hot water in the basin and clouding the glass down around his tight, tanned stomach, how some of the shaving cream had dropped down among the golden hairs on his chest. “You can still surprise me, Billy.”

  He carefully put down the washcloth, blood up. “You want me to finish shaving?”

  “I don’t see the point,” Myra said. “Come as you are.”

  Later, they lay together in her bed, sipping champagne and watching a classic replay of a Yankees-Red Sox game on ESPN. It was the one when Mike Mussina had come within one pitch of throwing a perfect game. Billy and Myra were both big Yankees fans. The Yankees were winners.

  An SUV commercial came on between innings, and Billy scooted up so his back was against his wadded pillow and picked up the remote. “We can come back to the game. I seen this commercial about a thousand times and it gets on my nerves.”

  “Mine, too,” Myra said. She didn’t mention that she’d considered buying one of the SUVs, in white with a tan l
eather interior. Her Lexus was pushing three years old. She noticed the shaving cream had almost completely evaporated from Billy’s face. Intriguing.

  Billy was like most men—not as interested in what was on TV as in what might be on. He aimed the remote and systematically worked through the channels down to one, the local news.

  A fire was being covered. No surprise, Myra thought. Television news loved fire. It was such a wonderful visual; it had fascinated and held the gaze of human beings since before recorded time. There on the TV screen was an apartment building blazing away against the night. Billy had muted the sound, and after a few seconds closed caption lettering automatically appeared at the top of the screen, cutting off the upper part of the woman news-caster’s hairdo that had lifted almost like a wig and was whipping in the wind. “…Upper West Side, Brad. Neighbors have informed us that the burning apartment’s tenant, Victoria or Vicky Pike, had just been switched to the day shift where she worked and was probably home earlier tonight, when the fire broke out, then promptly ripped through the second-floor co-op. As you can see behind me, firefighters struggled valiantly to control sheets of flame shooting…”

  Victoria Pike?

  Myra suddenly recognized the burning building.

  “Something wrong, Myra?”

  She realized she’d sat up straight in bed and was staring at the screen.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “See if the ball game’s back on. It makes me think of summer.”

  Billy obediently pressed a remote button and there were the Yankees and Red Sox again.

  Myra settled back with her head propped on the pillow. She was watching the ball game but thinking about the fire. And about other fires. And about the pattern in the fires. It was obvious to her, but would the police notice the pattern?

  “Myra?”

  “Huh?”

  “You okay? You look scared.”

  Scared? Well, she had plenty of reason, and there was nothing she could do about it. Not tonight, anyway. She smiled. “You’re too perceptive, Billy.”

  He touched the tip of her nose. “I been told that.”

  She snuggled closer to him and watched the game into the ninth inning, when pitcher Mussina’s perfect game was broken up by pinch hitter Carl Everett’s soft single to left center.

  “Ouch!” Billy said, watching the ball settle to the ground out of reach of the desperately charging Yankees outfielder. “I know it’s gonna happen, but that hurts every time I see it.”

  Myra watched the disappointed Yankees pitcher’s shoulders slump as he stoically observed the action in the outfield, then turned away, the magic suddenly gone.

  One pitch away from perfection, Myra thought. The dejected young man on the pitcher’s mound was learning what she’d come to understand long ago. There was a universal law: get close to perfection and somebody or something always messes it up. Always. Every time.

  Somebody or something.

  THIRTY-SIX

  “Who was that?” Rica asked, as Stack hung up the phone.

  “Laura. This is moving day for her. Into her new co-op. She called to give me her new phone number.”

  “I’m glad somebody’s making progress,” Rica said.

  She and Stack were at Stack’s desk, sorting through the murder file on Victoria Pike. They’d gotten about halfway through reviewing the preliminary autopsy report, and the results of interviews with Pike’s neighbors. Ernest Fagin had phoned earlier and told them the accelerant mixture was the same as in the other Torcher murders, an important missing piece. Almost everything about the Pike murder fit neatly into the killer’s pattern. Almost.

  Stack had sat back and was absently sipping the cooling coffee he’d forgotten until a moment ago, when the phone rang again and Sergeant Redd told him he and Rica were wanted in O’Reilly’s office.

  “Probably wants to shower you with compliments,” Redd said. “Make your morning.”

  “That’s not the way he makes mornings,” Stack said.

  “He never mentioned what he wanted.”

  Stack thanked the sergeant and hung up the phone. Rica was looking at him expectantly.

  “O’Reilly’s office,” he said.

  “Shit! When?”

  “A few seconds ago.” Stack stood up, while Rica began assembling the material they’d spread all over the desk so they could take it with them. “Leave it,” Stack said. “It’ll only provide more ammunition for O’Reilly, make the meeting longer.”

  Rica grinned and put down the papers and file folders. She waited for Stack to wait for her to precede him down the hall to O’Reilly’s office.

  This morning, as was getting to be his habit, O’Reilly hurled his pen down on his desk to let them know he was pissed to the gills. Quite a dramatic gesture. Stack noticed it was a cheap plastic substitute pen rather than the expensive one he liked to show off. “When the fuck is this Torcher crap gonna end?” O’Reilly asked.

  It took Stack and Rica a few seconds to realize it wasn’t a rhetorical question.

  “When we catch the killer,” Stack said.

  O’Reilly crossed his arms and puffed out his chest, rocking far back so he was glaring down at Stack even though they were both standing. George C. Scott in Patton, Stack thought. He could almost hear the distant trumpets.

  “I won’t even dignify that,” O’Reilly said. He motioned for Stack and Rica to sit in the chairs angled in front of the desk, then sat down quickly himself so his ass met his chair cushion an instant before anyone else was seated. “We got business. What progress have you made on the Torcher thing?”

  “From our partial review of the material we got this morning, it’s apparent Victoria Pike is his latest victim.”

  “Apparent how?”

  “Same circumstances—dead body in a co-op kitchen fire, body itself the fire’s point of origin, same accelerant, same MO with the cloth bonds and the umbrella.”

  “Same kinda victim?” O’Reilly asked, looking slyly at Stack from half closed eyes.

  A quiz, Stack thought. “Not exactly. This one was another woman. First L’Farceur, then Pike. The lab says the cloth used to bind her was black men’s ties, but they don’t provide much of a lead. We don’t know the brand, and they’re the cheap kind you can buy all over the place.”

  “Ah!” O’Reilly said. “What do you figure that means?”

  “I don’t figure yet. It’s still too early. We haven’t put together enough information.”

  “Ties are often used by sadists to tie up their victims,” O’Reilly said. “They’re convenient and don’t leave marks. Not that marks would matter in this case.”

  “They’re also easily explained if the police happen to stop you for some other reason,” Stack said. “Easier than ropes or chains, anyway. Besides, we don’t know for sure that ties were used to bind the other victims.”

  “That’s the point. This victim was another woman, so our Torcher’s getting more and more into the sadistic part of his sick fantasies. And don’t rule out a sadist like this might also kill men for pleasure.”

  “That the victim’s a woman could simply be coincidence,” Rica said.

  O’Reilly had produced his expensive pen from somewhere and was tapping it lightly on the desk. “Not much room for coincidence in police work.”

  “We’ll find out if it means anything,” Stack said. “Pike was female, but before she did some serious backsliding she was similar to the other victims all the same, including L’Farceur. She was a successful solid citizen, liked by neighbors and coworkers, even a past member of the coop board where she lived.”

  “That pretty much describes me,” O’Reilly said. “And those co-op board memberships are passed around. Most people don’t wanna take the time or trouble to serve. What about Pike’s occupation? Doesn’t it strike you odd she was a waitress, while the other victims were stockbrokers, attorneys, gallery owners, retired CEOs, and the like?”

  “It would,” Stack said, “only Victoria Pike was
a Wall Street stock analyst before that backsliding I mentioned. She got deep into drugs and the bottle and went from blue chip stocks to blue-plate specials.”

  “Still,” O’Reilly said, “there’s nothing wrong with being a waitress, but it’s not exactly a six-figure income, right?”

  “Not where I eat,” Rica said.

  “And there’s still no getting around that L’Farceur and Pike were the only female Torcher victims. Also, this wasn’t a high-rise fire. Pike lived on the second floor.”

  “That actually could be coincidental,” Rica said, “especially when you figure a lot of buildings have shops and offices on the lower floors. Mathematically, most apartments are gonna be on high floors. And the taller the building, the greater the odds a victim’s gonna live high in the air.”

  O’Reilly looked at her and shook his head. “Maybe you shoulda gone to work for an insurance company, or found a job handicapping race horses.”

  “It could all mean something,” Stack admitted. But there was something else nudging at the edge of his mind, trying to gain entrance. Something—

  “So you and Rica go find out what it means,” O’Reilly said. “Get that fuckin’ Leland Brand off our ass.”

  “I saw the morning paper,” Stack said. “Nothing about Larry Chips. I thought we were gonna give Chips to the media wolves.”

  “I’m getting around to it in my own good time,” O’Reilly said. “Wouldn’t you say that’s my decision?”

  “Sure, but the pressure’s mostly yours, too.”

  “Oh, don’t bet on that one, Stack! If you don’t feel the pressure—”

  “What should we tell them?” Rica asked.

  O’Reilly stared at her, momentarily derailed. “Huh?”

  “The media wolves. If they corner us and ask if we got a suspect, what should we tell them?”

  After making a steeple of his fingers—the guy had more neat moves than De Niro—O’Reilly smiled and said, “Give ’em fuckin’ Larry Chips.”