Night Victims n-3

by John Lutz

  “Probably with complete privacy,” Horn said, thinking how difficult it would be even for sophisticated listening devices to separate their speech from other voices and the raucous sounds of the city.

  He walked with Kray to the low wall, and they sat side by side a good hundred feet away from the man and woman with the perplexing camera.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep this conversation and my presence in the city a secret,” Kray said.

  “I’ll keep it as secret as possible,” Horn said, thinking Larkin, Paula, and Bickerstaff.

  “Agreed.” Kray settled back on the wall’s top surface and seemed to relax slightly, crossing his legs and clasping his hands over one knee. “I came to warn you.”

  Horn felt the coolness of the hard wall penetrating the material of his pants. “I’ve had a lot of that lately.”

  Kray smiled. Not for the first time, Horn thought that he looked like a full-size military action toy that had aged gracefully. G.I. Kray, rising through the ranks.

  “I figured out what Mandle was doing with his victims’ initials before the media did,” Kray said. “It would seem he’s going to take one more victim before your wife, the E woman.” Kray glanced at the paper still tucked beneath Horn’s right arm. “I’m here, in part, to warn you he might not. That kind of sequential diversion is part of his training. Mandle might go directly to Anne.”

  “We’ve thought of that,” Horn said.

  “There are so many ways Mandle knows how to kill that you can’t have thought of them all. He can kill all the conventional ways and dozens of unconventional.”

  “Like with a sharpened steel screw.”

  “Or his hands and feet. Another thing you should know is that Mandle’s an expert with explosives.”

  Horn felt a sudden unease. That was one method Anne might not be sufficiently protected from. “What kinds of explosives?”

  “Just about every kind. Both in using them and in making them. Plastique, black powder, liquid chemical. . You’d be surprised how many common, easy-to-obtain substances can be mixed or transformed into explosive elements.”

  “Our profilers think Mandle’s locked into compulsion, even though he altered his routine with his last victim. They think he’ll take an E victim.”

  Kray unclasped his hands and brushed his fingertips over the silky material of his slacks, as if reminding himself he was in civilian clothes. “You know serial killers,” he said. “I only know soldiering. And I know what kind of soldier Aaron Mandle was. I can’t impress upon you strongly enough how difficult it will be to stop him.”

  “Even with your help?”

  “I’m not in a position to help you directly. The army doesn’t know I’m here. And of course we don’t know what approach Mandle will take.” Kray reached into the breast pocket of his shirt, felt around behind a pair of sunglasses, then drew out a folded slip of white paper and handed it to Horn. “That’s the phone number where I’m staying at the Rion Hotel.”

  Horn accepted the paper and glanced at it, then slipped it into his own shirt pocket. He knew the Rion, a midsize, overpriced, and discreet hotel near Gramercy Park. Foreign dignitaries and celebrities who wanted privacy often stayed there.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep me somewhat informed,” Kray said. “And call me if you need any sort of question about Mandle answered. Or anything else. I mean that. I’m partly responsible for what I’ve created through his training. I want him caught and this time put away for good so he can’t harm anyone else.”

  Kray stood up from the wall and briefly and adeptly brushed off his clothes, front and back, as if sitting on a wall were as untidy a proposition as yard work.

  “This conversation never took place,” Horn said, before Kray could.

  Kray smiled. “Actually, I was going to say you never saw me. I guess serial killers aren’t the only ones locked into compulsion and routine.”

  “There’s a difference.”

  “And thank God.”

  Kray shook hands with Horn, remembering to reach for Horn’s noninjured left hand. Horn watched the colonel put on his sunglasses, then nod, turn, and stride away. He niftily dodged a few people walking toward him on a collision course, then within a few seconds, was lost from sight in the stream of pedestrians.

  Horn stood up and tugged his pants legs free from where they were stuck to the backs of his thighs. As he continued his walk to the Home Away, he repeated in his mind his parting words to Kray: There’s a difference.

  And if only we understood what it is.

  What’s missing in people like Aaron Mandle? Or what dark demons possess them? And when? And how?

  If only we understood and could stop them before they begin.

  Horn picked up his pace and redirected his thoughts, reminding himself his job was to deal with such human anomalies only after they had begun.

  And specifically, urgently, his job and his personal mission were the same-to stop Aaron Mandle.

  As soon as Horn entered the Home Away, he was struck by a sense of dread.

  Several customers were eating breakfast in booths, and Marla was taking the food orders of a couple with two small children at one of the tables. She glanced at Horn and couldn’t avert her gaze, though she appeared to want to look away.

  Toward the back of the diner, Paula and Bickerstaff were seated in a booth. Bickerstaff ‘s back was to Horn, but he was twisted around so he could see toward the front of the diner. He and Paula were looking at Horn; Horn didn’t like the expressions on their faces.

  When he approached them, and before he could say anything, Bickerstaff said, “Did you get it on your cell phone?”

  Horn realized he’d turned off his phone while walking toward the low wall with Kray, thinking it might be the kind of conversation he wouldn’t want interrupted. He reached into his pocket and switched on the phone by feel.

  Without waiting for Horn to answer Bickerstaff, Paula said, “A woman named Emily Schneider was found dead in her apartment this morning, shrouded in her bedsheets. Multiple stab wounds. Everything about the murder fits.”

  “It had to be Mandle,” Bickerstaff said.

  They watched him absorb the news, Paula with a concerned little frown.

  Horn stood motionless and uttered one word: “Anne. . ”

  Anne!

  In his pocket, his cell phone began chirping urgently, like a live thing trapped.

  46

  Patrolmen Lee Sanford and Amos Prince of the One-three precinct didn’t need lights or a siren as Sanford drove their radio car toward a Lower East Side address in response to a Crimes in the Past signal.

  Sanford, a fifteen-year veteran of the NYPD, was a tall, thin, taciturn man with the solemn demeanor of a grave digger. The much younger Prince was a stocky African-American who, as far as Sanford was concerned, smiled too much and too broadly and was maybe a little too hip to be a cop. They’d been partners in the patrol car for a little over a month. It had taken three weeks before Sanford decided Prince might be a good cop despite his runny mouth and devotion to rap music. Prince was beginning to suspect his partner Abe Lincoln might just do when it came crunch time. Might.

  Sanford pulled the car to the curb in front of one of a row of almost identical brick six-story walk-ups.

  “This is it,” Prince said, seeing the crudely painted address next to the building’s door. “Let’s do it.”

  “Wanna make sure,” Sanford said, sitting motionless behind the steering wheel and studying the notes he’d scrawled when the call had come through.

  Prince squirmed. “C’mon, Lee. Time to get outta Car Fifty-four.”

  Sanford gave him a sideways morose look, then put down his notes and opened the car door. Relieved, Prince reached for the door handle on his side.

  “Had to be on the sixth floor,” Prince said as they climbed rickety wooden steps that led from landing to landing. Barely enough light made it through the landings’ dirty windows for them to see where t
hey were going.

  They were both breathing a little raggedly when they reached the door with a painted-over brass 6-B on it. Prince knocked on the age-checked enameled wood.

  The door opened almost immediately and a worried-looking stout woman wearing jeans and combing her long dark hair looked out at them. “It’s you,” she said simply.

  “Us,” Sanford confirmed.

  “You put in a call for the police,” Prince reminded the woman.

  She looked agitated, dark eyes narrowing. “I hear this shit, I gotta come home early from work.”

  “What kinda shit?” Prince asked.

  “Teenage, is what. I got two sons, fourteen and fifteen. You got teenagers, Officer?”

  “Git outta here!” Prince said.

  “Rafe and Georgie, only four days since school let out and they already found trouble.”

  “What kinda trouble?” Prince asked.

  Sanford gave him a disapproving look. He knew they should let the woman run her mouth; she’d get around to it in her own time. What she had to say might be hard for her to get out.

  “I get a call at work from Georgie-”

  “The fifteen-year-old?”

  “Fourteen. He tells me Rafe’s got a gun. I say is Rafe there and let me talk to him and Rafe comes to the phone. You got a gun? How’d you get it? Where’d you get it? Jesus! I tell Rafe to put down the gun and the two of them stay right where they fuckin’ are and stay away from the gun. Okay?”

  “You did right,” Sanford said.

  “Not that they listened to me one little bit. They came home with the gun.”

  The woman suddenly realized Sanford and Prince were still standing in the hall. She stopped combing her hair and moved aside so they could enter her apartment. The messy living room was unoccupied except for a grungy 9mm handgun lying on the coffee table next to a soda can.

  “That it?” Prince asked unnecessarily, pointing to the gun.

  “Course that’s it.”

  “Where are the boys?”

  “In their rooms. I didn’t send them there. They don’t like cops.”

  “At their age? They should still love us, the way we give them directions and help them get across the street and such.”

  Sanford had crossed the magazine-and-newspaper-littered floor and was leaning down looking at the gun. Besides being grimy, it was just beginning to rust and its barrel was clogged with dirt. It was also exactly the same model as the 9mm semiautomatic in Sanford’s holster. A cop’s gun. “Where’d the boys say they got this?”

  “Off a dead body.”

  “Really?” Prince asked. “That must have been some wild experience for the little shit-kickers.”

  “Where?” Sanford asked.

  An hour later Horn, Paula, and Bickerstaff were standing with Sanford and Prince in the basement of a condemned and boarded-up building off First Avenue in lower Manhattan. They were about ten feet away from the body, trying to avoid the smell that was made even worse by the usual musty and stale-urine stench of abandoned urban buildings. If the ancient basement had ever had anything other than a dirt floor, it was no longer evident. Lights had been carried down, the ME was in attendance, and techs were buzzing around the half-buried and badly decomposed body that had loose earth scooped over it. They weren’t the only things buzzing around it. The dead man was stripped to the waist and wearing what looked like the filthy remnants of work pants.

  Paula saw that the ME was the little redheaded geek. Harry Potter.

  “This guy’s been shot,” Harry Potter said to Horn.

  “Fatal wound?”

  “I haven’t checked his pulse yet.”

  “Do I have to ask again?”

  “Mighta killed him eventually. Gotta examine a stiff like this in the morgue to make sure of anything, what with all the decomposition, insects, and dirt. Guy shoulda known we were coming, used some underarm deodorant.”

  Paula felt her stomach kick. She could do without the sick cop humor. It was difficult enough trying to breathe only out. The techs were wearing surgical masks. Paula wished she had one but didn’t want to ask. She got one of those looks from Bickerstaff, even though he was standing with his hand cupped loosely over his mouth and nose.

  “What the hell were two teenage boys doing down here?” Paula asked. “The place looks ready to fall down around itself.”

  “Their mom said they came here to look for antique bottles,” Sanford said. “They collect them. The basements of these old buildings are a good place to hunt for them. One of the kids noticed a hand sticking up outta the dirt, so they dug and right away found the gun, found some more of the dead body, and got out fast.”

  “I’ll just bet,” Bickerstaff said. “You say they took the gun with them?”

  “Would a boy leave behind a gun?”

  “Wouldn’t be natural,” Paula said.

  “Mom oughta whip their asses!” Prince said. “Least the dead guy’s not a cop.”

  “Probably not,” Horn said. “We’ve got no missing cops, but we do have a few missing guns.”

  “Fucker mighta stole one from a cop,” Prince said.

  Horn’s cell phone beeped, and he walked away a few feet to answer.

  When he was finished with the call, he motioned for Paula and Bickerstaff to come over, leaving Prince and Sanford out of the conversation.

  “We’ve got the computer match on the gun,” he said. “It’s NYPD and registered to Sergeant Donald Perlman.”

  It took Paula and Bickerstaff a moment to recognize the name.

  “Holy shit!” Bickerstaff said. “One of the guards Mandle killed when he escaped from the van taking him to Rikers. And Mandle got away with the guards’ guns.”

  “He did,” Horn said. “And only about three blocks from here.”

  Paula stared over at the grisly sight of the half-exhumed body. Wouldn’t it be something. .

  “Naw! Can’t be Mandle,” she said. “Might be somebody he shot, then he threw down the gun. Buried it with the body.”

  “Probably the dead guy was one of the homeless,” Bickerstaff said. “Or a doper using the building as a place to cook and shoot up. Mandle surprised him and had to get rid of him.”

  “Most likely thing,” Paula agreed.

  “I can’t see Mandle leaving the gun behind,” Horn said. “Earlier that night his only weapon was a screw. So now he’s got a couple of guns and he tosses one away? He sure as hell wouldn’t care if it linked him with the crime, considering his position.”

  “Panic?” Bickerstaff suggested.

  “Not our boy,” Paula said.

  Horn glanced over at the techs carefully excavating around the dead man. “Another gun lying anywhere around there?”

  “There was just the one,” called back a tech. “We used a metal detector to look before we started digging.”

  The toe of one of the dead man’s shoes had been unearthed and shone dully with reflected light.

  And that’s when Horn realized what had been skittering along the edges of his consciousness for days, the piece he couldn’t recall and fit into the puzzle. The photograph of the faint footprint in the heat-softened tar on the roof of Alice Duggan’s building. Horn closed his eyes and conjured up an image of that footprint, the gentle curve of the impression in the tar.

  And he was sure: the footprint on the roof had been made by the sole of a shoe on a right foot. A shoe.

  But that would mean!. .

  He walked over to where Harry Potter was stooping near the body. “I need to look at the right foot,” he said.

  Puzzled, the little ME pointed. “Right there it is, sticking up out of the earth.”

  “I mean take off the right shoe. I need to know about the foot.”

  The ME stood up. “That’d be better done in the morgue, when we remove the rest of the clothes.”

  “I need to know now,” Horn said, and something in his voice made the ME step away and nod his assent.

  While the shoe was
being carefully removed, Horn looked over at the confused Paula and Bickerstaff, standing and waiting.

  “We got us one weird-looking big toe,” Harry Potter said behind him.

  Horn turned and looked.

  One weird looking big toe.

  The decomposed body in the shallow grave was Aaron Mandle’s.

  Which meant Mandle had died before Alice Duggan.

  The second gun! The missing second gun!

  It took Horn another ten seconds to figure out what it meant.

  He strode past Paula and Bickerstaff and barely glanced at them. “Let’s go! Fast! I’ll explain later.”

  “Go where?” Bickerstaff asked, picking up the pace and catching up with Horn.

  “To Kincaid Memorial Hospital. Where Anne is.”

  “But that right foot,” Bickerstaff said. “If this is Mandle’s body. .”

  “Since the escape from the van,” Horn said, “we’ve been hunting a different SSF member. A second Night Spider.”

  As they sped through crowded streets toward the hospital, Horn got back on his cell phone. First he called the hospital and told them to be on high alert. Then he phoned Rollie Larkin. He needed something sensitive done quickly by someone with pull.

  He explained to Larkin what had happened and what was needed.

  Larkin called back even before the car reached the hospital.

  “Public records,” he said to Horn. “Easy enough to get, and fast, if you have the clout. Joseph Arthur Vine joined the army in late ‘94, did his basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in ‘95. The odd thing is, no posting after basic training is listed for him.”

  “That’s when he began his SSF training,” Horn said.

  Bickerstaff, driving the unmarked, had to swerve to avoid a double-parked cab. Paula, in the front passenger seat, cursed loudly.

  “What was that?” Larkin asked.

  “Just New York. Can I ask another favor? Will you check with your sources again and find out if Aaron Mandle and Joe Vine ever crossed paths in the service?”

  “We’re going beyond public records, Horn. It would have to be just between us, whatever I told you.”

  “That’s how it’ll be.”

  Larkin said he’d get back to Horn and hung up.