The Night Watcher

by Lutz, John

  The lights there had come on with the outer lights, so she crossed to her big desk, clear of paperwork and clutter, clear of almost everything but a phone, a leather-edged desk pad, and success, and stooped down alongside it. The scent of lightly oiled, expensive wood was somehow reassuring. She felt beneath the desk, tripped a tiny lever, and with a barely audible click the entire end panel popped out just far enough for her to grip its back edge. She swung the panel wide to reveal the secret and fireproof safe where she kept the records she wanted no one but herself to see.

  It took only a few seconds to work the safe’s simple combination and open the insulated steel door.

  Myra gasped and felt a chill run through her as she tried to comprehend what she was seeing. What it might mean.

  The safe was empty. The records had been removed.

  There was a whispering sound behind her, like a faint breeze through dark summer leaves. Childhood secrets. Damp basements. Someone breathing!

  Myra realized someone was standing behind her and tried to turn and straighten up at the same time. Pain exploded brilliant and cold in the back of her skull, then shattered into icy needles throughout her body. She couldn’t be sure if she’d managed to stand up very far, only that now she was sinking. Losing consciousness but not terror.

  Control! She struggled to keep control, to stay aware. To be.

  Somewhat surprised, she found herself kneeling. She tried to open her mouth to protest but couldn’t unclench her teeth, might have heard, or herself made, some kind of muffled, wounded animal sound.

  Something struck her again, this time lower, on the back of the neck. Different pain. Numbing pain. She knew there was no point in fighting unconsciousness now; she welcomed it. Don’t hit me again! Please! Myra Ravinski silently pleaded. It really isn’t necessary…

  The last thing she saw as the side of her face slammed unfeelingly into the floor was a folded umbrella leaning in a corner.

  Not her umbrella.

  Oh, God!…

  It was almost midnight. Stack and Rica had spent much of last night and most of today putting together what was known about the electronics store murder and Chips’s escape after he and Blainer had exchanged shots. Aran Ahib had been the victim’s name. Forty-two years old, married with two children. His wife had already driven in this morning from New Jersey and identified him.

  If heat had been on Chips before, it was twice as intense now. His name and photo were everywhere, his capture top priority in every cop’s mind. He was probably the Torcher. He’d killed a man, then was preparing to burn him to death along with the building where the crime occurred. He’d shot at and wounded a cop in making his escape.

  Only Stack, who’d earlier pushed for Chips to be designated the prime suspect, was becoming less sure, now that everyone else seemed convinced Chips was the Torcher.

  “You sure we still wanna go over more of those Myra Raven co-op board minutes?” Rica asked. She was getting tired. The hunt was on for Chips as their firebug.

  “You think we should be concentrating on Larry Chips?”

  Rica wondered why Stack didn’t look tired. “Sure. Isn’t everyone else?”

  He leaned back and looked at her. It was different, she thought, the way he looked at her now, since—

  “None of the other Torcher victims had been shot,” Stack pointed out. “This fire was going to be in a place of business. The victim lived in New Jersey. And I’ll bet that tomorrow the lab tells us the accelerant isn’t the same as in the other Torcher murders.”

  “I’ve thought of all that,” Rica said. “But Chips is what we’ve got, and he is a fleeing homicide suspect. It’s not like running the bastard to ground would be wasted effort, even if he isn’t the Torcher.”

  Stack propped his feet with their clunky black shoes up on the desk and grinned at her. “Rica…”

  She sighed. “I know….” Getting used to their new relationship, giving him an uneasy, appraising look as if she were somebody who’d just sealed the deal on a high-mileage used car. “Ever consider Italian loafers?” she asked.

  “This a political correctness trap?”

  “No. You know. The shoes. Loafers with pointed toes, maybe tassels.”

  “Uh-uh. Never seriously considered them. You gonna try to make me over, Rica?”

  “Over and over again.”

  “Hmmm.”

  She smiled and shook her head, then walked over to the file cabinets for the co-op board minutes. She gave her hips an extra swish, knowing he was watching. Used the bending motion to reach the lower steel drawer to good advantage, stretching the skirt fabric of her tight red business suit.

  “You wear red a lot,” he said.

  She stood up with a bundle of files and stared innocently at him, knowing he saw through her. “You don’t like red?”

  “It isn’t that. The expression ‘plainclothes’ means—”

  Stack’s desk phone jangled. Still looking at her, he lifted the receiver. “Stack.” His gaze remained locked with hers. “Yeah. Yeah.” Something changed in his eyes. They were no longer seeing her. “Okay. Sounds like it. Got it. Thanks.” He hung up the phone. “There’s been another high-rise fire, and we’ve got another body.”

  “Chips again, you think?” She placed the file folders on the desk.

  “I don’t know.” He recited the address of the fire.

  “The Myra Raven Group.”

  “A smaller group now,” he said.

  FORTY-FOUR

  The fire had been neatly contained, and there was the black, half-folded umbrella propped against the desk.

  “Shame about the desk,” the ME said. “It was a beauty.”

  An odd thing for him to say, Stack thought, considering a woman had died here. He glanced around. “Where’s the body?”

  “At Roosevelt,” the ME said. “EMT just left with her. I was called here because the first officers on the scene assumed the victim was dead. She sure looked dead and will probably be dead by tomorrow. Second-and third-degree burns over most of her body.”

  “Can she speak?”

  “Get serious,” said the ME. “She suffered head injuries also. Looks like somebody bludgeoned her, then bound her with black ties before setting fire to her.” He looked over at the discarded umbrella. “The night security guard must have scared your firebug away; then the sprinkler system did its job well enough to keep the victim alive until he got to a fire extinguisher.”

  “Is there a chance she’ll be able to talk—”

  “Before she dies? No. I doubt if she’ll regain consciousness. Her stopping breathing is just a formality. You might as well look on this one as a homicide.”

  Stack thanked the ME and looked around at the charred office and soaked, burned carpet. At what appeared to be the remains of a leather coat and a few strands of black cloth, where Myra must have lain while she burned.

  Men’s ties. Stack wondered if O’Reilly was right and the ties were linked to sadomasochism—ties were a convenient way to bind without much bruising, and could be purchased without embarrassment or undue attention. It was difficult to believe eroticism wasn’t somehow involved. Serial killers were usually psychosexually driven.

  Stack swallowed a terrible taste and tried not to inhale too deeply the sweet burnt scent of roasted human flesh. The smell, even the taste of these fires, wasn’t something you got used to. It was more like something that built and built until you couldn’t stand it any longer. Stack was beginning to understand the vegetarian point of view.

  “I guess Myra’s no longer a suspect,” Rica said sadly. “If she ever really was.”

  Stack glanced over at her. “Isn’t she?”

  “Don’t play cryptic with me, Stack. If you didn’t have stamina and a big—”

  “Rica!”

  One of the techs bustling around the office looked at Stack and grinned in a way Stack didn’t like. If this guy—

  “You see the desk?” the tech asked.

  Wh
at is it with this desk? Stack turned and looked.

  “Near where the victim was,” the tech said.

  Now Stack saw what he meant. So did Rica. She and Stack slogged across the mushy carpet together and looked at the way the desk’s end panel protruded a few inches. Stack poked a ballpoint pen behind the panel, then swung it out.

  “My, my,” Rica said.

  The door of the shallow steel safe that had been concealed in the desk was also slightly open. Standing aside, using the pen again, Stack slowly opened the steel door all the way.

  The safe was empty. Which meant its contents were probably the reason Myra Raven was murdered. If Myra wasn’t the Torcher, she was in the case up to her eyeballs. If she still had eyeballs.

  Stack and Rica looked at each other.

  “You still tired?” Stack asked.

  “Somehow I’m not,” she told him.

  She knew he didn’t have romance in mind.

  In a back booth of the bar at the Edmundton Hotel in Manhattan, Milton Fedders was working on his fourth bourbon and water of the evening. Nobody paid much attention to him, another slightly overweight, middle-aged businessman in a rumpled off-the-rack suit, a tie loosened as if he’d had a rough day and had worked late and was choking to death on his fate. Or maybe he was a road warrior sales type and had struck out on a critical deal, and now the flight back to the home office would be a glum one. Clean shaven, thinning gray hair, weak chin, nothing unusual or impressive about Milton Fedders. No way to look inside his mind at the raw, pulsing pain.

  Aran was dead. That hadn’t been part of the plan when Fedders hired Chips. It sure as hell hadn’t. Without lifting his elbow from the table, Fedders raised his glass and took a long sip of his diluted drink. Nothing should have gone wrong. Nothing could have!

  But it had. Now Aran was gone, and his wife Zel was a widow, and the kids…Jesus, the kids!

  Chips had been so positive. He’d been recommended by a reliable source on the West Coast, had come even more highly recommended by a previous client. And meeting Chips had reassured Fedders. Chips had done this dozens of times, he’d told Fedders. Nothing ever went wrong, because it was so simple, because he had the cooperation of the owner, because he was a pro who took pride in his work. Fedders believed him.

  Chips had obviously believed Fedders when Fedders told him his business partner and part owner of the electronics store knew about the arrangement but wanted to stay out of it as much as possible. Fedders had lied some more, said he wanted to protect Aran because he was a nervous kind of guy who didn’t like this kind of thing, burning down the business for the insurance payout, even if there was a guarantee no one would be hurt.

  The truth was that Fedders had floated the idea past Aran only once, and Aran had been horrified by the mere thought of it. Fedders had gone on to assure Aran he’d only been joking, musing out loud. An honest and sweetly naive man, had been Aran. Surely he’d thought the matter was settled, that they were going to continue grossing less than they owed while loan interest ate their business, then put them on the street with their pockets turned inside out.

  So Fedders went ahead anyway and hired Chips, figuring that even if Aran might—even would—suspect he, Fedders, had something to do with the convenient and profitable fire, he would never ask Fedders about it and risk confrontation and learning what he didn’t want to know.

  It should have gone smoothly. Fedders and Aran should both be in a position now to cash the insurance settlement check, pay off the business debt, and have money left over.

  But now Aran was dead. Fedders was despondent. And Chips was wounded and would probably be caught soon. According to the police, Chips was the Torcher. That meant the law would never stop searching for him until he was found. Then, if Chips survived the inevitable confrontation, he would surely talk and bargain for a better position in the legal system, try to save his own life. Everything would be known.

  Not that it mattered now. What really mattered was Aran, and Zel, and the kids. Fedders might be a lot of things, but he’d never seen himself as a murderer. But now he was one. Chips had made him one.

  Then Fedders remembered the cop who’d been shot. He, Milton Fedders, was responsible for that shooting, too. They came down hard on people involved in cop shootings. And who could tell from the newspaper or TV how badly somebody was wounded? If the cop should die…Two deaths. Fedders would be a multiple murderer.

  Fedders actually moaned, then glanced about to make sure he hadn’t attracted anyone’s attention. The bartender, a large black man wearing a red vest, remained standing behind the bar, talking to the loudmouthed guy who’d proclaimed he was from Detroit. The well-dressed couple near the door were still in the booth up front, near the archway into the lobby, interested only in each other and out of earshot anyway. Nobody seemed even to know Fedders was there. Fedders the murderer. Aran…

  Whenever he made himself stop thinking about Aran, he couldn’t keep his mind off what was in his suit coat’s right pocket. It was almost like premonition, like fate at work, when he’d agreed to take in the 9mm Ruger handgun as partial payment for a display model Sony CD player. It was almost as if Fedders, or the down-and-out-looking man who’d brought the Ruger in with an improbable story about finding it in a trash can, had somehow sensed he might have a use for the gun. Milton Fedders, who hadn’t shot a gun in years and didn’t even like guns, who thought they were dangerous to whoever owned them, who had no use for guns.

  He had a use for this gun now. It would be after this drink, maybe some of another. He’d know when it was time. When Milton Fedders, murderer of Aran Ahib and seducer of Zel Ahib, would be ready to go out to his car and use the gun on himself.

  “They’ve got this bastard now,” Leland Brand said to Etta. “It’s only a matter of time before they take him alive or dead.” There wasn’t much doubt in his mind it would be dead. That was what Brand wanted, for the Torcher, Larry Chips, to die. Finality. Voters loved closure. “It’s going our way, Etta. We can do as you suggested, make clear that my involvement, my prompt action and the pressure I applied to the police, led to the end of the Torcher fires.”

  Etta had been standing at the closed glass doors to the balcony, staring out at the cold, brightly lighted city.

  Behind her, Brand said, “You mentioned there was something you needed to tell me, Etta.”

  She stood very still for a moment, gathering her thoughts, her words. Making sure her mind was made up. To gain something, you often had to give up something of lesser value. It required intestinal fortitude, and afterward, if you were smart, you never looked back. That was what she’d told most of her clients. It was true for everyone at one time or another. Now it was true for her. The thing about a fork in life’s road was that you kept moving as it approached. You had to choose or you crashed.

  Finally she turned around to face Brand.

  “The former chief of police is one of your likely future competitors for office of mayor,” she said. “I think we can link him to the funds that disappeared from the board of education five years ago. It’s not a solid connection, but it’s enough. Whether it’s true or not, once we tie that can to his tail, he’s out of the race.”

  Brand grinned. “You do think ahead, Etta. A long way.”

  She smiled. “That’s why you pay me, Leland. A lot.”

  It was with renewed enthusiasm that Stack and Rica tackled the co-op board meeting minutes, along with their growing file on Myra Raven and her real estate agency. They were back at Stack’s desk, Stack in his desk chair, Rica in a padded chair she’d rolled in from another office cubicle.

  They weren’t sure exactly what they were searching for regarding Myra Raven, but both suspected it would be found by scrutinizing the board meeting minutes and cross-checking them with information about Myra or the Myra Raven Group.

  Stack and Rica had settled down for a long night’s work, fueled by a fresh pot of coffee and sheer determination. This was the phase of the investig
ation that would require almost infinite patience. They were sure they’d found the haystack; now it was only a matter of locating the needle.

  “It would have been nice,” Rica said, “if you’d found something in my notes that would have broken the case.”

  “Yeah,” Stack said absently, then glanced up at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “You let yourself into my apartment and looked over my case notes. It’s okay. You got a right, and not just because we’re partners. Cop partners.”

  Stack was starting to feel a chill. “Are you saying somebody was in your apartment going through your desk?”

  “Of course that’s what I’m saying. You—”

  “Not me, Rica. Don’t go back there. You’re coming home with me. Don’t go home tonight.”

  Now it was Rica who felt a shiver pass through her. “That bastard was actually in my place, handling my things…”

  “It looks that way.”

  “We’ll find him,” she said, more angry now than frightened. She picked up a handful of minutes from the desk. “Even if I have to sit here all night and grow to this goddamn chair.”

  Stack watched her, afraid for her. Caring about somebody too much again. Vulnerable again.

  He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about that.

  Less than an hour passed before Rica suddenly sat straighter, then stood up and carried a file folder out to one of the desks with a computer on it. Stack had caught from the corner of his eye what she was doing, knew she thought she might have something pertinent. But that had been the case with both of them before, and each time, further checking revealed some explanation or undercut whatever lead they thought they might have found.

  Stack paused in his work and watched as Rica peered at the glowing monitor and played the computer keys with her left hand, using her right to nudge the mouse this way and that on its Dilbert pad that proclaimed technology was no place for wimps.

  Suddenly all movement ceased, even the almost imperceptible dance of her dark irises as they explored the screen’s contents. She said, “Holy Christ!”