Night Victims (The Night Spider)

by John Lutz

  “This,” Bickerstaff said, “is wonderful scotch.”

  “And you,” Horn said, fixing his gray-green eyes on Paula, “are Cajun.”

  “You have a good ear for accents,” Paula said.

  “Ah, I do,” Horn said, “but the fact is I read it in your file. I learned as much as I could about the two of you before deciding if I wanted you with me on this case. I am sure. About both of you. I want you to be sure about me.”

  “I’ve heard about you,” Bickerstaff said. “I am sure.”

  “I heard from Roy,” Paula said.

  “You left the New Orleans Police Department because of a personality clash with a superior who had a record that didn’t stack up against yours,” Horn said to Paula. “They gave you top recommendations so they could move you along out of town, and you had somebody influential in the NYPD to act as your angel.”

  “My uncle, Captain Sean Boudine,” Paula said, figuring Horn would already know that but wanting to seem open and cooperative.

  “Politics out, politics in.”

  “Isn’t that the way it works?” Paula said.

  Horn smiled. “‘Fraid so.”

  Bickerstaff sipped his scotch and said nothing, obviously intrigued by their exchange.

  “Boudine’s a fine man and a good cop,” Horn said. “And because of him you managed to move into plainclothes Homicide immediately, though in truth you’re in a probation period.”

  “In truth,” Paula agreed.

  “And I know you want to retire at the end of the month and go ice fishing in Minnesota,” Horn said to Bickerstaff. “I was retired myself and looking forward to deep-sea fishing in the Florida Keys, landing a blue marlin. What I’m proposing is we both push that off into the future, until this case is resolved. When we do get around to catching those fish, it’ll be all the sweeter for the both of us.”

  “Agreed,” Bickerstaff said, amazing Paula.

  “Have you got any plans that need putting aside?” Horn asked her.

  “I’m a working cop,” she said. “I plan on being one a year from now. That’s about as far ahead as I want to look.” So here I am, sitting around with a guy who wants to squat in front of a hole in the ice and another one who wants to catch a fish with a sword on its nose. Is this a wise career move?

  Horn sipped his drink, then rested the glass on his knee, holding it with the middle finger and thumb of his left hand. “I’ve read the murder files on all three dead women, as I’m sure you have. I don’t think I have to ask if there’s any disagreement on whether we have a serial killer at work here.”

  “You don’t,” Bickerstaff said.

  Horn looked at Paula, who nodded.

  “I also see by your records that neither of you ever did any rock or mountain climbing. Neither have I. But it seems a certain degree of skill had to be involved for our perp to reach those bedroom windows. That’s something that needs looking into. He’s also got some skill with a glass cutter and masking tape. Two of the windows were locked, and he silently—almost had to be silently—cut a crescent in the glass at the latch, using tape so the section removed wouldn’t fall to the outside sill or ground. And it looks like some kind of wax or oil was put on the tracks before he raised the windows so they’d move easily and without making much noise.”

  “An experienced B-and-E man,” Bickerstaff suggested.

  “Cat burglar,” Paula said. “They climb.”

  “Don’t usually kill,” Horn said. “Our man has a rare combination of skills.”

  “The autopsy reports suggest he knows anatomy and how to use a knife,” Paula said. “He kept his victims alive so they’d suffer as long as possible.”

  “Medical background, you think?”

  “Maybe. But the postmortems suggest he doesn’t have skills at that level. More like a butcher or simple torturer with experience.”

  “A cruel bastard!” Horn said, with a vehemence that surprised Paula.

  “Which brings us to kinky sex,” Bickerstaff said. “You think the victims mighta known their killer? That they mighta wanted to be wrapped in their sheets that way for some kinda S-and-M thing, then he surprised them by going too far?”

  “There’s nothing in their backgrounds to suggest that,” Horn said. “So for now, we can rule it out.”

  Good enough for Paula.

  Horn looked from her to Bickerstaff. “You two have got a few days on me when it comes to this case. Is there anything else you think might be worth mentioning?”

  “The footprint in Sally Bridge’s bedroom,” Paula said. “The lab brought it out more. Looks like a man’s bare right foot, medium-sized. Not as good in court as a handprint, but a match might help build a case if we catch this guy. When we catch him.”

  Horn sat back and lifted his glass of scotch but didn’t sip. He simply stared at it while he rotated the glass and made the light change in the amber liquid. “Yes, he apparently climbs barefoot.”

  “Or, more likely, undresses before he kills so he doesn’t get bloody,” Bickerstaff said.

  “I’d agree,” Horn said, “except there doesn’t figure to be much spurting or flowing blood, the way he shrouds his victims in their bedsheets before going to work with the knife. Aside from method, that single partial footprint is the only thing remotely like a substantial clue at any of the three murder scenes.” He took a sip of scotch. “Still, we don’t want to form too many preconceived notions at this point. We’re not dealing with someone who thinks logically in the ways that we do, which is why we need to get inside his mind, gain some idea of his particular and peculiar logic.” He smiled.

  “You know, they don’t all murder their mothers over and over.”

  “But plenty do,” Bickerstaff said.

  “Plenty.” Horn shrugged. “Maybe even this barefoot, rock-climbing, glass-cutting, sheet-winding killer with a sound knowledge of human anatomy.”

  “He sounds more individual,” Bickerstaff said, “when you put it that way.”

  “Oh, he’s individual, all right. Unique and dangerous.”

  And that’s why he interests you, Paula thought, looking at the expression on Horn’s set features. Maybe you belong in that hunting catalog after all.

  “As far as we’re concerned,” Horn said, “this investigation enters a new phase tomorrow. I want you two to pore over and collate the information on all three cases, do some follow-up interviews of the people who discovered the bodies; the family, friends or neighbors who knew the victims. Sometimes people have fresh recollections after days or weeks have passed. Don’t just look for something new— look for combinations of information that might mean something new. Don’t toss aside anything. We can get together and decide among us whether it’s important. Meanwhile, I’m going to visit the crime scenes, starting with the Sally Bridge murder. A new perspective sometimes turns up something meaningful.”

  He motioned for both of them to remain seated but stood up and went to one of the bookshelves with doors beneath it. From inside one of the doors he retrieved two cell phones; he gave one to Paula and the other to Bickerstaff. “Pertinent phone numbers are already in the data banks. I have a cell phone of my own. That’s primarily how we’ll stay in touch. You two will report only to me and be pretty much on your own. We meet back here at the same time, two days from now, and compare notes.”

  Paula and Bickerstaff took that as a signal that the meeting was over. They stood up, Bickerstaff wheezing as he struggled out of the grasp of the deep sofa cushions.

  “Needless to say,” Horn told them, “we keep all this from the media. They’ll catch up to it sooner or later, but maybe we can choose when and be able to use them in some way.”

  “That would be nice for a change,” Paula said, slipping her cell phone into her blazer pocket.

  As Horn ushered them into the foyer, a tall blond woman came down the stairs. Her hair was piled gracefully on her head and she was wearing jeans and a bleached-out blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She look
ed fresh and clean as only certain blond women could. Late forties, Paula thought, maybe early fifties. The older blond woman in the mantel photo.

  “My wife, Anne,” Horn said, and introduced everyone as the woman walked the rest of the way down the stairs. Paula had the impression she’d timed this casual meeting so she could get a look at them, see what her husband was getting into.

  Anne smiled graciously and said she was sorry they were leaving. Horn told her not to worry, they’d all be seeing plenty of each other. Paula noticed that Anne smelled subtly of perfumed soap or shampoo and wondered what the scent was. She wouldn’t mind smelling that way.

  The handsome, mature couple stood with the door open as Paula and Bickerstaff left and climbed into the unmarked.

  “You’re going to enjoy this, aren’t you,” Paula said to Bickerstaff. Not a question. Maybe an accusation.

  Bickerstaff shrugged as he buckled his seat belt. “We’re gonna do it, Paula. It’s our choice whether we enjoy our work.”

  When the car had driven away and the front door was closed, Horn said to his wife, “I thought you might want to take their measure. What do you think?”

  “The man looks like he shouldn’t climb stairs; the woman doesn’t look big enough to open an olive jar. I don’t like the idea of you having to depend on them, maybe for your life.”

  “The man’s a good cop with a lot left in him.”

  “He looks like he should use what remaining energy he has to work out in a gym and try to lose some weight.”

  “He’s about to retire.”

  Anne shook her head. “Don’t you know what always happens in crime novels and movies to cops who are about to retire?”

  “If this were a book or movie,” Horn said, “I’d be chief.”

  She frowned. The parallel lines again, deeper with each year, with each new worry in her life. Her cop husband, her job, the lawsuit against the hospital, and now her pensioned-off husband’s involvement in a murder case. “I really don’t like the feel of this, Thomas. You sure they’re going to be okay?”

  “They’ll do just fine,” Horn said, grinning to show his confidence. “A wheezy fat man with savvy, and a feisty Cajun. I could do a lot worse.”

  Anne smiled. “Isn’t that profiling?”

  “Full frontal nudity wasn’t possible,” Horn said, and kissed away the lines in her cool forehead.

  The last glance back at Horn and his wife in the doorway as the car pulled away stuck in Paula’s mind. The alpha male with his mate, made clever by experience and still plenty able. Like some rock-hard Cajuns she’d known. Her uncles, who’d roamed the Louisiana swamp with their shotguns modified to fire solid lead slugs, poached for whatever could be sold or eaten, the bigger the better. Hunters, southern version.

  Horn was the northern version. Despite his obvious sophistication, the image of him in the deep woods in camouflage, armed with a high-powered rifle, still and silent and sighting through the scope at a distant and elusive moose, persisted.

  Poor moose.

  6

  Central America, 1998

  Hector Ruiz carried his ancient but well-oiled Kalishnikov automatic rifle loosely by the barrel, not in any way recommended in arms manuals. His fellow guerilla fighter, Armand Mora, stood beside him in the deep shade of the forest canopy. They were exhausted after spending the night in the forest. Armand had a slight shrapnel wound in his thigh from when a grenade had detonated near him during their fight the day before with government troops who were searching for them and trying to cut off their escape route back into the hills. To make matters worse, an American commando force was rumored to be operating in the area.

  Hector was perspiring heavily and the palms of both his hands were scraped. He used his free hand to brush bits of bark and leaf from his clothes as both men stared at the object he had lowered from the tree using a rope.

  The object was the body of a dead girl no more than thirteen. She was wrapped in mud-caked leaves held fast by vines wound around her thin form. The leaves and mud were dark, discolored by blood.

  Last night Hector, standing watch, had looked up to find the moon and see if it might foretell rain. He’d noticed a dark, still object high in the branches of the tree, and his heart leaped; for a second he thought he might be looking at a government sniper. But there was a looseness about the dark bulk above, as if it weren’t lying on or affixed to a limb but might be tied there, suspended.

  In the morning he’d climbed high into the tree to satisfy his curiosity, only to raise more questions.

  “What must have done this to her?”

  “It looks as if she was stabbed to death,” Armand said, his dark eyes wide. “Stabbed many times. See the slits in the leaves?”

  Hector slung his Kalishnikov over his shoulder and nodded. “She was dangling in a kind of sling made of vines. This poor child . . . who would do such a thing?”

  “Not the Americans. Probably the government troops. They’re bastards! Think of some of the things they did to those of us they captured.”

  “But this young girl—”

  Hector stopped talking, astounded, as Armand’s right ear exploded from his head. Armand’s eyes wore the vacant gaze of the dead as he dropped straight down to lie beside the girl.

  Hector whirled to run, but the automatic weapons fire that had erupted from the surrounding forest brought him to his knees, killing him before his upper body struck the ground.

  7

  New York, 2003

  Pattie Redmond hung up the phone behind the counter at Styles and Smiles and looked pensively out the window at the backed-up morning traffic on Second Avenue.

  The guy she’d just talked to, Gary, was still a question, so maybe she shouldn’t have agreed to meet him for drinks tonight at the same place they’d met last night. It was a bar in the Village, where she and Ellen had gone to pass time before seeing a movie. Pattie’s mom, who lived up in White Plains, had cautioned her about meeting men in bars enough times. Still cautioned her regularly over the phone. A young girl living alone shouldn’t take chances, her mother would tell her. Some things, she would say ominously to Pattie, never change. Like Pattie might meet some nice fella in church, if she went to church.

  Pattie had to smile. She was twenty-four—not so young, at least in her mind. Pretty enough, she knew, with her long auburn hair and too-wide mouth with white, even teeth that almost didn’t look real. Lips a little too large, like they’d been collagened. Gary said it was her smile that attracted him.

  This guy, Pattie had thought last night in the bar, looked like something out of a soap opera. He was tall enough, darkly handsome, and perhaps partly Hispanic—the sexy part. And his suit looked expensive, maybe even Armani. Pattie knew clothes; she’d learned about them working here at Styles and Smiles, which sold men’s as well as women’s apparel.

  Ellen had listened to their conversation and afterward told her that Gary had a practiced line of bullshit. Sure he did. Didn’t they all? He was single—said he was, anyway. And he’d been straightforward enough, just walking over and asking if he could buy her a drink. Ellen thought he might have assumed they were prostitutes, the way they were perched at the bar on those high stools and surveying the room, and for a few seconds Pattie thought the same. She’d even found herself toying with the possibilities. In her mind, toying.

  Line of bullshit? Maybe. But it turned out Gary was more interested in listening to Pattie’s story than in telling his. She hadn’t told him where she lived, but she had mentioned where she worked. So he’d called and—

  “. . . forty percent off each of these, or if you buy two?” a short redheaded woman holding a blue blouse was asking. “The sign says buy two, get forty percent off.”

  “You don’t get the forty percent off if you only buy one,” Pattie said.

  “But if you buy two, do you get forty percent off each of them, or off the total price?”

  “It’s the same thing,” Pattie said. Isn’t it?
r />   “Or do you get forty percent off one but not the other?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Or just twenty percent off if you buy only one?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Pattie said, “you buy both and I’ll give you forty percent off each one.”

  “Isn’t that what the sign says?”

  “Uh, well . . . yes.”

  “You people won’t get anywhere trying to confuse customers,” the woman said. She put down the sweater, turned, and strode angrily from the shop.

  Pattie normally would have been seething. But this morning her mind was on other things. She simply smiled and walked over to return the sweater to stock.

  She caught sight of herself smiling in one of the mirrors by the changing room. The sensuous and vibrant woman looking at her from the mirror made her feel good. She could understand why Gary had been attracted to her. She really could.

  Horn hadn’t expected much from his visit to the first two crime scenes, and he hadn’t learned much. The apartment of the first victim, call girl Marilyn Davis, in lower Manhattan, was still vacant but had been cleaned. That of the second victim, computer programmer Beth Linneker, on the Upper East Side, had already been leased to a new tenant. Both women had lived on high floors where they must have assumed they were safe from street criminals and crime in general.

  In each apartment the killer had entered through the victim’s bedroom window. In the Linneker murder, he’d cut away a crescent of glass and used masking tape, a bit of which was still on the outside glass, to catch and hold the detached glass and keep it from falling and attracting attention. Davis’s window had been unlocked and open slightly to allow in a summer breeze after a brief shower.

  Horn examined each windowsill and found scratches and dents on the wooden one but nothing on the marble sill. It was impossible to tell if the marks were from the killer’s entrance, but some of them looked fresh. In both murders the women had been wound in their sheets. Since there was no sign of struggle, this was done while they were still asleep, or so quickly and deftly they hadn’t time to resist. Duct tape was placed over their mouths to silence them. They’d apparently been killed with the same weapon that was used on Sally Bridge. Davis, with thirty-seven stab wounds, had bled to death. Linneker had a fatal heart attack—after being stabbed thirty-six times. In neither case had the killer left anything behind that hinted at his identity.