The Night Watcher

by Lutz, John

  “You got something?” Stack asked, unnecessarily.

  She turned and stared at him with an expression he’d seen on her face only a few times before, during sex.

  “I’ve got everything,” she said.

  FORTY-FIVE

  October 2001

  Amy Marks had never gotten over the death of her husband and infant twin daughters. After the first six months, the grief was less a sharp blade in her stomach than a dull ache, but it remained. She’d emerged from clinical depression but continued to take a cocktail of prescription drugs daily. No longer did she attend her cognitive therapy group sessions, but that was her decision and not her analyst’s. It was also her decision to stop going to her analyst last year, when she enrolled at the Montrose Real Estate Academy, where she was taking courses that would allow her to pass her state exam and become a sales agent.

  Myra Raven had been wonderful since the death of Ed and the twins. She’d provided another apartment for Amy to stay in, found an MD to treat her in conjunction with a psychologist, and picked up all her medical bills. She’d even paid for Ed’s funeral. Amy was aware that part of Myra’s motive was guilt, that she felt largely responsible for what had happened that night when Ed and the twins died. After all, if the contract for the co-op Amy and Ed thought they’d purchased had gone through, the destruction by fire of their family wouldn’t have occurred.

  Amy had been in hell for months after the fire; then her pain became such that she simply surrendered to it, let it carry her into a numbness that would have left her as dead as Ed and the twins if Myra hadn’t given her a make-work job as file clerk at the agency. The job gave Amy a routine as well as an income, a simple responsibility she could fulfill despite the weight of her grief.

  When the other file clerk quit to be married, Amy’s job was expanded. She had to be even more responsible and self-disciplined; a mistake now might be costly to the agency and more difficult to rectify. The effort had been good for her, made her feel useful for the first time since the fire. It helped give her the strength to look into the future and enroll at Montrose.

  But the night of the fire was always with her, the flames, the cold, sure knowledge of death, the sight of Ed clinging to life high in the air, her own screams, over and over, changing nothing. At times she could feel the almost weightless forms of the twins in her arms, clutched tightly to her, silent and unmoving while she embraced death as if she were nurturing it. Somewhere in her mind, the night, the pain, played almost constantly in her thoughts, in her dreams, darkening like a gray tinting agent each of her days. The only thing that helped, finally, was to lose herself in her studies at Montrose, learn more and more about the business she found herself in.

  And the more she learned, the more she wondered about the aborted deal that had deflected her family from the coop they’d tried to purchase, and placed them in the firetrap walk-up that led to death. When she secretly used a company computer to do an archives search and examine the incomplete transaction, she was surprised to find no record of it. Odd, considering how tightly controlled and easy to track the flow of cash was in the agency. Money had been deposited for a down payment, returned, and the unit was eventually sold by another real estate agency, but under its Myra Raven Group listing.

  Maybe not so odd, Amy decided, after mulling it over. She was studying sales, not accounting, so how would she know? It wouldn’t do to ask bookkeeping about it, where they might think she was questioning their competence. Or to ask Myra, who’d warned her more than once it was destructive for her to continue dwelling on the past, on Ed and the twins. So Amy remained silent, following what was probably good advice, and picked at mental scabs as little as possible.

  About a week later, she’d entered Myra’s office without knocking, to drop off the afternoon’s mail. A surprised Myra shifted a hip and thigh to one side, against her desk, and gave Amy a look that was unmistakably furtive and hostile before quickly regaining her composure. She also gave Amy a long lecture about the sanctity of her private office and the necessity of knocking.

  Chastised, Amy listened quietly and patiently, only later deciding she was sure of what she’d noticed as Myra leaned her weight against the desk. Amy had heard a faint but distinct metallic click. Like the snicking of a well-oiled latch.

  It took her four mornings of coming to work early, then finding a way to sneak into the building on Sundays to spend two secret afternoons in Myra’s office, to discover the source of the metallic click, and of Myra’s furtiveness and momentary hostility the day of the interruption: The trick panel on the side of the cherry-wood desk, and the gleaming steel safe concealed inside.

  Of course the safe was locked, and a search of the office for the written combination was futile. But Amy knew every combination was written down somewhere, or it was linked to someone’s numerical identity so it would be almost impossible to forget.

  She became obsessed with getting into the safe, and at her desk and on the subway and in her bed before sleep, would try to figure out what numbers Myra would choose for the combination. Whenever she had the opportunity she’d try the numbers on the safe. Myra’s birth date in various combinations. The agency’s address, Myra’s home address, phone number…all in various sequences.

  Finally, in a company four-color brochure, she came across the founding date of the Myra Raven Group, kept scrambling the numbers in different sequences, and the safe opened.

  What was inside changed everything.

  Over the next week, whenever she found the opportunity to be alone and unobserved in Myra’s office, Amy absorbed it all. There were the names and addresses of influential co-op board members who accepted payoff money in return for approving Myra’s clients for residency to the exclusion of other applicants. There were the dates and amounts paid. And lots of detailed notes. The safe held a secret record of how the agency had become the most successful in the city. No wonder Myra wanted the contents to remain secret; they were her insurance policy against the threats of her coconspirators, and incriminating enough to put her in prison.

  One of the names was of particular interest to Amy: Hugh Danner. His address was in the Ardmont Arms, where Ed and Amy had been rejected as residents.

  Amy stared at the name and address, and read accompanying notes giving details of how the money she and Ed had passed through Myra’s hands went to Danner, and how Danner had double-crossed Myra, cast the deciding vote for the board to reject Amy and Ed, and kept their money.

  How Hugh Danner had killed Amy’s family.

  Seated cross-legged on the carpet in Myra’s office, staring at the papers before her on the floor, Amy felt all the grief return to her as if it had been circling in time, a dark bird of prey glimpsed only now and then in dreams, patiently winging and waiting and gaining strength before descending on her again.

  Its sharp beak found her mortal core and tore at it, releasing her rage.

  FORTY-SIX

  March 2002

  “When I noticed the name Amy Marks on the Myra Raven Group employee list, it all came together,” Rica said, still seated at the computer just beyond where Stack sat at his desk.

  “The Ardmont Arms co-op board minutes,” Stack said, already ahead of her. “Hugh Danner argued and voted against Amy and her husband Ed’s application for residency.” He was standing now, adrenaline chasing away any semblance of fatigue. “Danner’s was the decisive vote. Amy’s husband, Ed, was a cop, right?” He realized the back of his hand had knocked his coffee cup from his desk. That was okay. Not much coffee left in it and it hadn’t broken. He ignored the cup lying where it had clinked against a wall.

  “Yeah, the one who died in that fire, remember?”

  Stack remembered, the news of the apartment fire, the deaths of infant children as well as their father. Like most cops, he’d given generously to a benefit fund. “There was something about that fire…”

  “I’ve got the report here in the computer. Ed Marks was trapped by the fire. He remove
d his tie and knotted one end to a radiator so the other end dangled out a fourth-floor kitchen window, hoping if he used the tie to lower himself before dropping, the fall might not prove fatal. But the length of the tie wasn’t enough. And Amy Marks watched it all, holding a dead infant daughter under each arm.”

  “Holy Christ! Isn’t that the kind of thing you try not to think about!”

  “But if you’re Amy Marks, you think about it anyway.”

  “Every minute, one way or the other, somewhere in your mind, whether you know it or not.”

  “Ed Marks wouldn’t have survived his burn wounds anyway,” Rica said. “In fact, he might have been dead before he hit the ground.”

  “Burned to death…” Stack leaned back and propped himself, half seated, against the edge of the desk with his arms crossed. “Black ties were used to bind the Torcher victims. Black ties are part of an NYPD patrolman’s uniform.” He straightened up and moved toward his desk chair to sit back down, then found that he couldn’t. Tension almost hummed in him. He could sense the culmination of the investigation, the hunt, the way a carnivore smelled blood. “Amy must have blamed the co-op board residency rejection by Danner for the destruction of her family in a firetrap walk-up. So in her grief she avenged their deaths.”

  “Way I see it,” Rica agreed. “Then Amy found the contents of Myra’s concealed safe, learned through Myra’s records that there were other Hugh Danners out there, other co-op board members taking illegal payoffs and rejecting perfectly qualified applicants.”

  “And she couldn’t stop avenging the burning to death of her family.”

  “Seems to fit,” Rica said, “but are we sure about that last part?” For the first time she was feeling some doubt. Niggling, but there. “One murder, yeah. But all the others?…”

  “I’m sure,” Stack said. “The kitchen fires, the symbolic black ties…These are the kinds of homicides that set patterns that have to be acted on. Fire and revenge…They can both become addictive, increasingly compulsive.”

  “Like with a psychosexual serial killer? I don’t know, Stack…”

  “Ask an arsonist,” he said. “He’ll tell you what fire can do, how it can spread in unexpected ways.”

  Now Rica stood up from where she’d been sitting at the computer. “I guess we have to do that.”

  She still wasn’t as positive as Stack about Amy Marks, but she’d learned to believe in him. And there was one thing they agreed on and couldn’t escape.

  It was time to visit Officer Marks’s widow.

  They were halfway there when O’Reilly’s rasping voice broke in on the detectives’ band on the unmarked’s radio. “What’s your ten-ten, Stack?”

  Stack gave their location: “Driving south on Second Avenue, near Sixty-third.”

  He watched the traffic ahead, taillights reflecting like bloodstains on a street now glistening in a fine mist.

  “Keep traveling the way you’re going,” O’Reilly said. He gave Stack and Rica a lower Manhattan address and told them to proceed there.

  Stack had put up with about enough of O’Reilly. This wasn’t the time to indulge him in his misconceptions. “I don’t think it’s such a—”

  “Larry Chips is trapped in an apartment at that address. We’re about to go in and get him.”

  “We?”

  “NYPD and FBI. They got the building surrounded and are about ready to move. We need for somebody from MR to be there.”

  For the career, Stack thought. O’Reilly’s career. The wipers, on intermittent, thu-thunked to clear the windshield. Stack figured let the FBI have Chips. They were up to their ears in the case anyway. Interstate flight, insurance fraud. “We got another strong possibility to look into, sir. We’re on our way there now.”

  “Like hell your are!” O’Reilly said. “This is the goddamn Torcher we’re talking about!”

  Stack and Rica looked at each other.

  “Amy can wait,” Rica said softly. There was a time to dig in their heels, but this wasn’t it. “Let’s take the call.”

  Stack flashed a stubborn glare her way.

  Men! Some gender! Stack in particular.

  “We don’t want it to be Amy, anyway,” she said, working hard to keep Stack out of trouble. Something he wasn’t used to. “Maybe that asshole O’Reilly’s right.”

  “What?” came the voice over the radio. “What the fuck was that? What’d Rica say?”

  Stack realized he’d depressed the mike button early. He left it that way. “Something about you being right. We’re proceeding to the scene.”

  He held the mike button down for a few more seconds so O’Reilly would hear the siren kick in. If Chips was the Torcher, Mobile Response would have a share of the collar. Under O’Reilly’s command. The visit with Ed Marks’s widow would have to wait.

  Compromise.

  Stack thought it left a bad taste.

  Sorrow and rage and fear were like a corrosive chemical mix in Amy. She couldn’t eat or sleep or even straighten up completely from the pain that was like fire. She’d thought there would be some relief when finally it was over, but it hadn’t turned out that way. She knew now that it was over.

  She stood up from where she was hunched in the corner of the sofa and trudged into the bedroom. From a closet shelf she got down a shoe box and opened it.

  Inside was the one thing that somehow had survived the fire that took her family—Ed’s gun. She unwrapped it from the oily rag that preserved it and held it cradled in both hands, then sat on the edge of the bed and stared at it. There was something oddly comforting in its sleek metallic efficiency, the scent of finely machined steel and light oil.

  Finally she stood up and went to her dresser. She opened the top, flat drawer and looked at the assortment of objects it held: a comb, a small jewelry box that contained earrings, a watch that had been a gift from Ed and no longer worked, a stack of photographs from years ago before their marriage, a box of bullets.

  Amy placed the gun in the drawer next to the bullets, then slid the drawer closed and went to the closet, where she returned the shoe box to the shelf.

  With a backward glance at the closed dresser drawer, she walked slowly into the living room and sat down.

  Stood up.

  Began to pace.

  Sleep was out of the question, but she was exhausted and wanted to sit.

  Yet she couldn’t sit. She couldn’t be still. She could only pace, only walk. The fear, the sorrow, the rage, wouldn’t let her be still. The pain that was like fire.

  At first it looked as if the building where Chips was supposed to be holed up, a brick walk-up off First Avenue, was unoccupied. But it wasn’t. As Stack drove the unmarked slowly past the decaying structure, he and Rica saw lights glowing beyond the tattered curtains or yellowed shades in some of the windows. Stack had killed the siren a few minutes after O’Reilly was off the radio; then a few blocks from the building he’d switched off the cherry light and brought it back inside the car. If Chips happened to be looking out a window, the car wouldn’t arouse his suspicion.

  Stack rounded the corner at the end of the block, and there were the troops. Half a dozen cruisers and some Ford Taurus unmarkeds. Stack knew the Tauruses were FBI. There was a SWAT team van parked farther down the block. Half a dozen dark, bulky figures stood nearby.

  “We’ve been waiting for you,” a tall man in a black topcoat said, when Stack and Rica climbed out of the unmarked. Flashing ID, he introduced himself as Special-Agent-in-Charge Matt Perriman. Stack would have known he was FBI even without the credentials.

  After Perriman had glanced at Stack’s and Rica’s shields, he said, “I give the signal, and we close the block on both ends and move in on the building behind the SWAT team.”

  “You sure Chips is in there?”

  “We got it from an informer who’s been gold so far.”

  Stack wasn’t going to ask any more questions. He understood the necessity of keeping faith with a reliable informer. Perriman wasn
’t going to reveal anything more, and Stack didn’t blame him.

  “Chips is in Two-C, end unit south, second floor.”

  “Away from the street,” Stack said.

  “We’ve got the back of the building covered,” Perriman told him. He glanced at his wristwatch. “You wanna lead the way?”

  Stack was surprised. “No agency rivalry bullshit?”

  Perriman smiled slightly. “No time for it these days. The collar seems to be important to your boss. Me, I just want this piece of crap off the streets.”

  “We’ll do it together,” Stack said, “now that you guys are on the side of the angels again.”

  “Hell of a way to get there,” Perriman said. He turned away and ducked his head the way some people did when speaking into a two-way. Then he turned back and said to Stack, “Wanna tell your men to take up their stations?”

  Not really a question, Stack thought, looking at the agent’s grim features. He nodded to Rica, who hurried toward the parked cruisers. Within seconds, two of the cruisers sped away with no sound louder than the swish of tires, then turned the corner to the block behind the building.

  When Stack looked back, he saw that the bulky dark figures of the SWAT team were gone.

  Perriman glanced again at his watch. “Okay, we’ll walk down the street casually, then we’ll go in the front, behind the SWAT guys. We’ll follow them to the apartment and they’ll go in hard. We’ll enter right behind them.”

  Stack and Rica both nodded, and with Perriman set off down the dark, wet sidewalk. What scarce late-night traffic there had been on the street had now ceased, as Stack was sure had happened on the next block. He hoped Chips wouldn’t realize it had suddenly gone quiet outside.

  They entered the old building’s gloomy vestibule. Stack caught a strong ammonia scent of stale urine but didn’t have long to notice. The SWAT detail was waiting. They detached themselves from the walls like deep shadows coming to life, then took the stairs silently, led by two men carrying a three-or four-foot-long battering ram slung between them on straps.