Night Victims n-3

by John Lutz

  And nothing else.

  19

  Paula noticed a space across the street from the Home Away and didn’t have to double-park. Driving Manhattan’s narrow streets had proven no problem for her, despite the fact that in New Orleans, once out of the French Quarter, she’d seldom had to worry about both sides of the car.

  “You might remark on it,” Paula said.

  Bickerstaff went all innocent. “Remark on what?”

  “My luck at finding parking spaces in this rabbit-warren of a city.”

  “Oh. Sure. But who needs ‘em? Why don’t you just double-park all the time like me?”

  “So some citizen won’t be tugging on my sleeve asking me to move so he can get his car out.”

  “Yeah, I guess there’s something to that. Anyway, I was thinking about other things and didn’t notice.”

  Paula wished he’d think about dropping off his suit at the cleaners. On damp days it was beginning to give off an unpleasant musty smell. “You were thinking about ice fishing, I suppose.”

  “You’re unnecessarily cruel to me, Paula. I was wondering about the list the spook gave Horn. We start trusting information from the CIA, we might be headed off in the wrong direction.”

  “If you can’t trust your government, who can you trust?”

  “We both know the answer to that.”

  Paula dropped the visor showing the car was NYPD so they wouldn’t get a ticket. Then she and Bickerstaff got out and crossed the street to the diner that had become their unofficial headquarters since Horn had gotten involved with the case.

  Bickerstaff held the door open for her, probably because he thought it would annoy her.

  The diner was warm, like the morning outside, and most of the customers eating breakfast were at the counter or tables nearest the door. Paula saw Horn seated in his usual booth, in a small alcove a comfortable distance from the other customers. He had his head down and was reading a folded newspaper, a cup of coffee and his half-eaten breakfast before him on the table. Damned corn muffins! Paula knew that because of Horn she was going to try them one of these mornings-animal and vegetable fat, and probably even mineral fat, if there were such a thing, racing straight to her hips.

  She had to admit the toasted muffins smelled good, along with the fresh coffee. She and Bickerstaff said hello and slid into the booth to sit opposite Horn.

  He set aside his newspaper. Paula saw that he’d been reading a theater review.

  He used his forefinger to prop his reading glasses back up on the bridge of his nose. “Marriage and Mortgage,” he said. “Stay away from it.”

  “Amen,” Paula said.

  “The play,” Horn said. “That’s what Anne and I saw last night. It was torture.”

  “What did the spook think of it?” Bickerstaff asked, making Paula wince. How could Bickerstaff be such a good cop and come up with such inane questions?

  “The idiot liked it. What do you think that says about him?”

  “That he really is CIA,” Bickerstaff said.

  Marla the waitress came by; Paula ordered coffee and juice, Bickerstaff bacon and eggs. Paula caught the way Marla looked at Horn as she topped off his cup. Probably nothing, but still. . Marla wasn’t all that old, and not bad-looking. And Horn was a handsome guy for his age. Well, a handsome guy, period, if you liked the Cro-Magnon type with brains.

  “Here’s the list,” Horn said, when Marla had drifted back behind the counter. He’d taken folded white slips of paper from his pocket. “I made copies for each of you.”

  Paula and Bickerstaff accepted their copies and unfolded them. Nine names, with addresses and phone numbers.

  “These names are all former members of a secret Special Forces mountain unit that conducted black operations in the war in Afghanistan as well as various other trouble spots around the world. I’ve already done some preliminary checking. Three of the men are deceased, two are permanently impaired by war wounds, and one is grotesquely overweight. It happens that two of the remaining three live in the New York area. The third lives in Philadelphia, not all that far away. The plan is for you two to split up today and see what you find out about the two in New York. I have connections in Philly and will have that one looked into to see if our guy there rates our continued interest. Each of the slips of paper I gave you has a circled name. Those are the men you drew when I handed out the lists just a moment ago. Look at who and where they are and let me know if there’s a problem.”

  Paula looked. Her circled name was Will Lincoln, with an address in Queens.

  “No problem,” she said.

  “Not here, either,” Bickerstaff said.

  “This might all be going nowhere,” Horn told them, “but be careful with these two guys. We don’t want them to know they’re being investigated until we learn a little about them.

  Check to see if they have priors, maybe talk to some of the neighbors. You’re either going to get a solid citizen who’s done his duty for his country, or you’re going to be stepping into a tiger pit. And you probably won’t know the difference until it’s too late.”

  “My guess is we’ll be able to eliminate all three of the remaining names,” Bickerstaff said.

  Paula grinned. “He doesn’t trust the CIA.”

  “I don’t trust anyone,” Bickerstaff said sadly. “Neither should you, Paula.” He glanced out of the corner of his eye and bit off whatever else he was going to say.

  Marla with the coffee.

  Anne left the bright morning as she walked through a side entrance to Kincaid Memorial Hospital. It was considerably dimmer and cooler inside than out. She strode down a long hall, still under construction, to the spacious and tiled main lobby. It seemed there was always construction going on in Kincaid. Expansion was turning the place into a maze. She wondered how anyone who hadn’t learned their way around the hospital ever found anything.

  There were several people standing near the circular reception desk; three volunteers were giving out information and validating parking tickets. In the center of the lobby was a fountain. It was behind the bronze nude figures of a man, woman, and child clutching each other’s hands that the mayor had tried to have removed a few years before because it was “Too suggestive.”

  Skirting the flower shop and escalators, Anne went past the main elevators to a Hospital Personnel Only elevator and pressed the Up button. A breast cancer surgeon, Dr. Rebecca Fore, strode past in a neat gray business suit and nodded a good morning to her.

  Anne watched the dark-haired, attractive woman, who was about her age, walk away and wondered if she, Anne, should be doing Dr. Fore’s kind of work instead of hospital administrative duties. Something that saved people’s lives. I could have gone to medical school. I had the grades. Even, at times, the desire.

  But she knew better. Surgeons were a special breed. A rare combination of arrogance, compassion, and intelligence that translated into artistry with the scalpel. And they didn’t wear down in an occupation that would burn out the average person in a few years. Anne knew she was not of that breed.

  “Anne Horn?”

  She turned to see a heavyset, bearded man in jeans and a black T-shirt lettered got meth? She didn’t recognize him.

  “Yes?”

  He smiled almost pityingly; it had been so easy. “This is for you.”

  And he handed her a subpoena.

  Paula drove Bickerstaff back to the precinct house to pick up another unmarked, then went to the squad room and ran checks on Will Lincoln in Queens. Several of the other detectives said hello. Sergeant Crawford brought her a cup of coffee without being asked. But no one inquired about progress on the Night Spider murders. Even if they weren’t directly involved in the investigation, they knew how it was going from the way the media were raking the NYPD. They thought Paula might be sensitive about the subject. If they said something she took the wrong way, she might also take their heads off. And of course Thomas Horn was running that show, and no one wanted to cross him by ra
gging one of his own. Paula thought that might be why nobody’d called her Rambo.

  The battered old Dell computer on the corner desk, complete with aged yellow Post-its stuck to the frame of its monitor, gurgled and winked and did its thing. Paula sat forward to be closer to the monitor.

  Lincoln turned out to be William Ambrose Lincoln, thirty-six, married, with two children from an earlier marriage. He’d had no previous trouble with the law. On a whim, Paula fed his name into the Internet.

  And hit big.

  This was great. The guy had his own Web site. It had to be him, even listed his phone number, and street and e-mail addresses. A business Web site; he wouldn’t want to have a potential buyer not be able to locate him.

  Interesting site. It turned out Will Lincoln was a sculptor. There was a photograph of him. He was balding but with lots of wavy dark hair around the ears and neck, had strong features, and looked a little like a younger Warren Beatty. And there were photographs of his work. Abstract creations of welded steel. One piece was barely recognizable as a horse. The rest of it was a mystery to Paula. She tried to find something in the tortured, angled metal that suggested sadism and serial murder, but if such a message was there, she couldn’t decipher it. Lincoln’s work must be good, though, because his Web site included lists and dates of exhibits he’d had around town. There was one now, at a gallery down in the West Village.

  A sculptor, Paula thought, leaning back from the computer and taking a sip of the horrible coffee Crawford had brought her. Somebody with imagination and time. And climbing experience. And trained to kill efficiently and silently.

  Paula’s senses became more alert. William Lincoln, the more I learn about you, the more intriguing you become.

  “You want some cream for that coffee, Paula?” Crawford was asking.

  “No. It might only make it worse.”

  “I am wounded,” Crawford said in a hurt tone.

  “Have some coffee. Make it fatal.”

  Crawford slunk away.

  Paula’s pulse quickened as she logged off the computer and left the precinct house to drive to the Village.

  20

  Neva Taylor dreamed.

  She was floating in soft liquid but could breathe freely of perfumed, intoxicating air. A lake, she guessed. A very special lake from her childhood, somewhere secret in her memory. It all seemed so normal, as if she were suspended just below the surface at a depth determined by someone nearby. Someone in control.

  Someone watching her.

  In her dream she turned lazily and saw through the shimmering brightness a face behind a glass pane. Was she in an aquarium like that one in Florida where tourists paid to watch shapely women costumed as mermaids swim underwater? Stroke. . half fish. . approach the glass. . stroke. . smile. . stroke. . half turn, a rhythmic exercise in youth and grace and flirtation, in voyeurism and need. To drift. . to float. . Everyone’s final dream. .

  The lone face on the other side of the aquarium glass was unclear in the wavering distance, but the eyes were fixed and dark and brilliant and demonic.

  Everyone’s final dream!

  A rasp drawn sharply and roughly over steel woke her.

  Her own shrill gasp, as her breath caught like a burr in her throat. Her eyes wide, she lay in late-morning brightness and numbing terror, the recently painted white ceiling close to her like a lid on a box.

  Trapped?

  Still gasping for breath, she became aware that her fingertips were digging painfully into the mattress. Finger by finger she willed her hands to relax.

  Gradually the sunlight blasting through the separation of the drapes overwhelmed her fear. Nothing could happen to her in such a golden wash of light.

  Her strained neck ceased to hurt. Her head sank back into her soft pillow and she made herself smile. A dream, a nightmare. That was all she’d experienced. No connection to the real world, unless one chose to believe certain suspect psychics.

  Barely moving her head, she let her gaze slide across the reassuring familiarity of her bedroom: her dresser; a glimpse of the opposite wall and plastic light switch in the mirror; her chair, over the back of which the dress she’d removed last night lay draped; the top half of the door frame, white enameled with perfectly mitered wood, form and function and reason neatly joined.

  Not a dream but the real world.

  Relieved, comforted, she turned her head slightly so she could see the clock radio. My God, almost ten o’clock! Overslept. Late for work. Not like me! Not at all like me!

  She swiveled her body and sat on the edge of the mattress, her toes sensitive to the coarse texture of the throw rug by the bed. She was tired, as if she’d had a shallow sleep, as if something had disturbed but not quite woken her. It was like some dark dread on the edge of her consciousness. Father dying; not dying while I slept, only when I woke, but dying all the time until the end.

  Stop it!

  She shook off her nameless apprehension and stood up, brushing the palm of one hand over her eyes. Floor tilting. Slightly dizzy. The bedroom was too warm, the air stale. The acrid scent of her own perspiration was unpleasant.

  Neva walked to the window and threw open the drapes. The sudden assault of full sunlight made her wince. She unlocked the window and raised it about six inches to admit what she hoped would be a morning breeze, but turned out to be a sluggish shifting of warm air. Life, never quite living up to expectations.

  As she turned to trudge into the bathroom, she noticed faint, curved scratches on the outside of the upper window and stopped to look at them more closely. They were deep, more like gouges. She didn’t think they’d been there before, but she couldn’t be sure. They made her think of a giant bird attempting to get in by slashing at the glass with its beak; she couldn’t imagine what had really caused them.

  Nothing to worry about, she thought. Like the real worry of becoming unemployed if she didn’t get to the office and deal with whatever problems awaited. The scratches were on the outside of the glass and didn’t go all the way through. Not even worth a mention to the super.

  By the time she was standing with her head back and her eyes closed beneath warm needles of water in the shower stall, she forgot all about her indefinable dread and the scratches on her window. Her lithe body swayed; soon she was fully awake. The music of her morning was the soft hiss of the shower and gurgle and trickle of water swirling and racing down the drain.

  Her mind played over her ambitions and more practical dreams. She was young, healthy, and beautiful, and, as an old boyfriend used to say of her, “had her shit together.”

  She’d have put it a different way, but it was true.

  Paula parked her unmarked across the street from the New Genesis Gallery in the Village. The gallery didn’t look promising from the outside. It was on the ground floor of a crumbling brick building with green double doors that needed paint badly. A sign on one of the doors instructed her to use the other. Near the corner of the building was a show window in which were displayed several paintings and other works, but Paula couldn’t see clearly beyond the glass because of the sun glinting off it.

  As she watched, a short woman in a dark raincoat emerged from the gallery clutching a brown package. She walked slightly hunched and seemed furtive as she hurried toward the corner.

  Paula opened the car door, got out into the heat, and crossed the street. Her feet were hurting today, as if her shoes were too tight. Probably swollen.

  The interior of the gallery was a surprise. The walls and ceiling were cream colored, and the floor was a subtle design of dark and worn but clean tiles. Oil paintings, with a few watercolors, hung on the walls. All were renderings of bridges. . the Brooklyn, the 59th Street (the one Cajun Paula still called the Queensboro), the Golden Gate. . several Paula didn’t recognize, including a couple of covered bridges.

  Placed around the gallery were steel sculptures. She recognized some of them from Lincoln’s Web site. One she hadn’t seen on the Web seemed to represent a woman
being crucified. Abstract. Interesting. The figure definitely had breasts.

  A door located next to a tall painting of a bridge that disappeared in mist opened and a woman stepped into the gallery. She was dressed in black-surprise. She moved gracefully inside flowing slacks and a sleeveless black blouse. Paula noticed she had nice arms-no cottage cheese-so she must be younger than she appeared. She was a dark-haired woman, attractive, but with seamed, tanned features, as if she’d spent too much time outdoors in a land of blistering sun.

  She smiled inquisitively at Paula in the manner of someone about to ask if she can be of help.

  Paula started to flash her shield but the woman’s hand darted out and closed on her wrist, freezing her outstretched arm while she studied the badge in its leather folder.

  “It’s genuine,” Paula said.

  “I see it is.”

  “So am I.”

  “Then you’d be the only one I know.” The woman released her grip on Paula’s wrist. “I hope you’re here about the asshole who keeps spray-painting obscene graffiti on the building.”

  “No, I’m here about a different asshole.”

  “Okay,” the woman said. “I know plenty of them. I’m Careen Carstair.”

  “You own the gallery?”

  “Part owner. And manager. And buyer. And sometimes seller.”

  “Everything in here by Lincoln?”

  “Just the sculptures.”

  “How much would this stuff be worth?” Paula motioned with her hand to take in the entire gallery.

  “It’s worth what it brings on the market. The paintings go from anywhere between a thousand and twenty thousand; the sculptures less because the artist isn’t as established. Will Lincoln’s still building an audience. That’s an interesting accent.”

  “Cajun. He live in the Village?”

  “No. Over in Queens. Will’s a straight-arrow family man. Got the wife and kids and house in the ‘burbs. I can’t believe he’s the asshole you’re looking for.”

  “No,” Paula said. “But tell me about him. I like his work. Might buy something if it’s on a cop’s salary.”