Night Victims (The Night Spider)

by John Lutz

  “Like a nightmare,” Horn said.

  “Oh, I think it is a fairly common nightmare. For women, anyway.”

  “How can he be sure they’re asleep before entering their apartments?”

  “Probably by observing them from outside their windows with a night scope or infrared glasses.”

  “So he can see in the dark,” Horn said, “like a real spider.”

  “And your killer’s a nocturnal predator, like a real spider. Or like a former SSF trooper.”

  Horn regarded Kray curiously. The colonel had to know what he was wondering.

  “I took a chance coming here,” Kray went on. “I’m going to have to trust you.”

  “Why?” Horn asked.

  “SSF troopers are the most skilled secret assassins in the world, but after they’ve served, and after psychological readjustment, they become—almost to a man—fine citizens in the military or in civilian life. But the fact is, one of the reasons I’m here is that I feel partly responsible for having aided in creating such capable killers.”

  “You said almost to a man.”

  Kray smiled again, sadly, as if he might break into MacArthur’s “Old Soldiers” farewell speech. “Nothing’s perfect, Captain Horn. That’s why the SSF exists. I’d like to think I can depend on you to keep what I’m about to reveal confidential, but I realize the risk; at some point you might have no choice but to pass on the information and its source.”

  About to reveal? “I can promise you I’ll try to maintain confidentiality, Colonel.”

  “I can’t ask for more.”

  “It’s obvious you think one of your SSF troopers might not have adapted well in his return to civilian life.”

  “I have to admit it’s possible.”

  “Do you have a particular man in mind?”

  “No. I’m going to leave that up to you. I’m a soldier, not a detective or criminologist.” He reached into a side pocket of his uniform coat and brought out a folded sheet of white typing paper. “I’m going to give you this list of names; all are former SSF troopers.”

  Perfect, Horn thought. Another list.

  “Those in present service don’t have the opportunity to commit such crimes.”

  Horn had heard that sentiment before. It was probably true.

  “I’m going to place the list on your desk, then finish my scotch and leave. I’m asking that you forget I was here, or how these names came to your attention.”

  “Agreed,” Horn said.

  Kray stood up, squarely aligned the list on a corner of the desk, then tossed down the rest of his drink. “There’s no need to show me out.” He smiled. “I’ll finish the excellent cigar on the street. Cuban, isn’t it?”

  “Cuban,” Horn confirmed.

  He thought Kray might do a smart about-face, but the colonel simply turned around in normal fashion, tucking his cap under his arm, and strode from the den.

  Shortly thereafter Horn heard the front door open and close.

  He walked to the foyer and saw that Kray’s coat was gone from its hook. There was only a puddle on the floor beneath where it had been draped to indicate the colonel had ever been there.

  Horn went back into the den and picked up the list from the desk. Kray might have no idea that Altman had already contacted the police. These names might be duplicates of the ones on Altman’s list.

  But they weren’t.

  Horn didn’t recognize any of the names.

  He stood thinking. A lot of things were possible. The SSF units might be organized in cells, unaware of each other’s existence in order to retain strict secrecy. Or the names supplied by Altman might be cutoff names to deflect any investigation into the unit. If that was the case, Altman might not even be aware of it. Why would the federal government trust Altman?

  Because if he was CIA, Altman was the government.

  Either way, Altman the spook wasn’t supplying as much information and cooperation as he pretended.

  Horn decided not to inform him of Kray’s list and a secret unit beyond the one revealed by Altman and the military.

  He placed the list in his desk drawer, then glanced at his watch. 10:30 P.M. Anne was running some kind of late-shift efficiency study and wouldn’t be home for several hours.

  Horn decided to hell with today and went to bed.

  There was no shortage of concerns to keep him from sleep. This morning they had run out of suspects, and now they had a list of too many suspects, all of which probably wouldn’t pan out. Demonstrable progress on the case had stalled, another woman had joined the grisly parade of victims, and Nina Count was trying to force a showdown by publicly taunting the killer. Horn thought he could expect another call from Assistant Chief Larkin. And probably, before very long, another murder. It was a bewildering deluge of dread.

  He fell asleep worrying about whether Anne would smell cigar smoke from when Kray walked through the ground floor of the brownstone and out into the night. Kray, who had never been there.

  Rainy nights depressed Paula and put her on edge. She was exhausted but knew she couldn’t sleep, so she hadn’t gone to bed. She’d gotten home late, managing to step in a puddle just outside her building, and scarfed down a deli Chinese dinner she’d picked up on the way. Now she had indigestion, one foot still felt wet despite the fact that she’d taken off her shoes and dried it, and she suspected she might be nurturing an ulcer.

  The Job. Was she an idiot to continue doing this for a living? Why did a monster who crept through bedroom windows and tortured and killed women have to be her personal responsibility? What would it be like to keep regular hours? Have a circle of friends who weren’t intimate with the darker side of life? Not carry a gun?

  What would it be like to have a date?

  Sitting on the sofa with her bare feet propped up on the coffee table, she studied her lower extremities. Ankles puffed from too many hours on her feet. Toenails trimmed short and threatening to become ingrown and painful. She could only dream of pedicures, elegant pink toes beneath her black cop’s shoes.

  Fuck it!

  She made the effort to reach out and get a hand around the half-drunk can of beer she’d left on the table. On the TV screen that flickered beyond her tortured feet, a promo for an upcoming movie had ended with a matchstick-thin former model, wearing skintight bicycle shorts, standing and waving triumphantly on the rocky plateau of some mountain even the Night Spider couldn’t climb. Sure. Cut to lots of quick shots, a montage of one ludicrously smiling face after another, between snaps of fires, murder scenes, and traffic accidents. The eleven o’clock news was coming on.

  Leaning back, Paula took a pull of beer, then with her free hand picked up the remote and pressed the volume button so the sound she’d muted would return.

  There was a flawlessly coifed Nina Count looking glamorous and serious as the camera moved in on her icy perfection. Her elegant hands were folded before her, bejeweled and beautifully manicured.

  “More trouble in the Middle East,” Nina said. “Today a Palestinian . . .”

  Paula figured the woman probably had pedicured feet that would drive a fetishist wild.

  “In local news—”

  Paula began paying attention again.

  “—serial-killer-hunter NYPD captain Thomas Horn came close to apprehending the murderous psychopath that is the Night Spider. In a dramatic morning chase on Manhattan’s East Side . . .”

  Paula sat listening to the news anchor’s account of Horn’s desperate attempt to catch up with the man who might have been the Night Spider.

  Nina Count embellished the story so Horn seemed almost a mythical nemesis of the killer, as if it were just the two of them—Horn and the Night Spider—in deadly macho combat. At the same time, the haughty blond anchorwoman made disparaging remarks about the killer, using terms like sick, pathetic, sexually stunted, cowardly, full of doubt and self-hatred. . .

  Paula wondered, what about psychotic, skillful, and lethal?

  It wasn’t
much of a surprise to Paula that a canny news-woman like Nina Count would have the police contacts to learn so quickly about Horn’s pursuit of the Night Spider. And ratings being essential to TV news, Paula wasn’t shocked to hear Nina trying to develop a story line with recognizable and fascinating characters like Horn and the Night Spider. Viewers would soon become addicts of her nightly installments of the part-soap opera and part-mystery playing out among them in their own city. Never mind that to the people directly involved, it was a tragedy.

  But this wasn’t the first time television and tabloid news had trivialized terror, torture, and death.

  What bothered Paula was how Nina Count talked directly and insultingly, even tauntingly, to the Night Spider, the camera in close on her model-like made-up features. Paula understood the message in those challenging blue eyes, the red lips and pink tongue sensuously wrapping themselves around every degrading remark.

  Does Horn know what Nina Count is up to?

  Tape of a derailed train somewhere was playing now, helicopter shots of angled and stacked boxcars in a wooded area.

  Paula pressed the Off button on the remote, leaned back, and closed her eyes.

  Horn and Bickerstaff were men. Would they fully realize what was going on with Nina Count? Where she wanted it to lead?

  She wasn’t sure about Bickerstaff, but Horn might have a chance. The more she saw of Horn, the more she understood how he’d gained the respect of some of the most cynical and brutally practical men on the planet.

  And women. We’re—I’m—not immune to cynicism. The things we learn about ourselves! The things we don’t want to know. . .

  Paula finished her beer and placed the empty can on top of a Newseek on the coffee table. Finally tired, she slid sideways to curl on the sofa; her bare feet were pressed together and burrowed beneath a cushion for warmth.

  She knew she should get up before she dozed off, but she was so comfortable she decided to stay where she was. Nights like this had become almost routine. Around 3:00 A.M. she’d wake up enough to rise and stumble into her bedroom, crawl gratefully into bed, and sleep till the alarm woke her.

  That process was preferable to getting up now, brushing her teeth and undressing, and lying in bed for hours before sleep came. She actually got more rest this way.

  Experience had taught her. What she learned from experience helped her to survive, while the knowledge of increasing odds against her gradually sank into her consciousness. Would she learn fast enough to continue staying sane and living through the stress and dangers of her work, what she used to think of as her calling?

  It was a race between what she learned and the risks encountered in her job.

  And every day, in ways large and small and often unrecognizable, she bet her life on it.

  26

  Arkansas, 1978

  They were leaving. He’d thought they never would, but now they were going.

  Twelve-year-old Aaron Mandle could hear them from where he lay almost naked in the dark closet. He’d be out soon, away from the closeness and the smell and the heat and the sticky sweat. And the spiders.

  He wasn’t sure if he wanted to be out. Aaron understood what was with him in the closet and it never surprised him. That was what he was afraid of most—surprises. Bad ones. At least he was safe here from what he didn’t know about. From what confused and terrified him.

  If only it wasn’t so hot in here!

  He tried to blink away the sweat stinging the corners of his eyes, which only made them burn more.

  “The small and the crawl shall inherit the earth.” His mother’s voice. “The weak and the small, the things that fly and crawl, the beak and the talon and pincer and claw.”

  The words were familiar to Aaron, always in his mind to be heard if he listened, or to come to him unbidden, no matter what he was doing wherever he was. Walking in the woods, studying in school those few days he attended, fishing in the muddy lake for bluegill, lying in bed late at night in his room and listening to the cicadas crying to each other over what seemed like miles beyond his open window . . . The beak and the talon and pincer and claw . . .

  “The weak shall inherit,” came a man’s answering voice, then a woman’s saying the same words, as if reciting from a book.

  Aaron had never completely understood about his mother and her friends, the congregation. Religion. God. And his mother used to have something to do with snakes. Before what she called her awakening. Now it was bugs. Spiders. Religion was one of the things that confused Aaron, what it made people think and do.

  “Dust,” said the man’s voice.

  “Dust unto dust,” said a woman.

  “No, I mean there’s a car comin’.”

  “You watch out for yourself, Betheen,” said the woman’s voice. “ ‘Specially now.”

  “Like I always do,” said Aaron’s mother.

  Faintly, away from the heat and the darkness, the screen door slammed. Even muffled like that, it was a sound Aaron knew. The last of the congregation leaving. The people that got loud and talked and sang together like one person, that got so excited on the other side of the closet door they took to screaming things Aaron couldn’t understand. Tongues, his mother called it. The talking in tongues. He wondered if, when he got old enough, he would understand.

  Aaron waited, but his mother didn’t come to open the closet door. He heard her moving around out there, but she didn’t come for him.

  He ignored the spiders on his leg and right arm, and lay still, listening. The spiders were still as well, as if they knew what he was thinking, what he wanted.

  The screen door slammed again.

  “Gonna be Master Sergeant Oakland Mandle, address Germany!” said his father’s excited voice.

  His father! What was he doing home? He shouldn’t have been here for two more days. When he drove the old station wagon home from what he called “the base” for the weekend.

  “What’re you tryin’ to tell me, Oakland?” Aaron’s mother.

  “That I got the transfer. Gonna be stationed at the base near Mannheim, Germany. Motor Pool command.” His father sounded proud. “So ain’t you happy?”

  It took a while for Aaron’s mother to answer. “I would say not.”

  His father’s heavy footfalls on the plank floor. “We talked about this, Betheen. You knew I was gonna ask for a transfer.”

  “We talked like we always talk.”

  “There’s no reason you won’t like it in Germany.” His father was beginning to get mad. Aaron could always tell. He wished he could stop them both from talking to each other, right now, so they wouldn’t fight.

  “I can’t leave here, Oakland.” His mother’s voice was different, too. Higher, like when she talked to her flock. Or like those times when she didn’t love Aaron. “I know now that here’s where I belong. In this country. Here. With my congregation.”

  “What’re you tryin’ to tell me, Betheen? That you don’t belong with your husband?”

  “That I’m not goin’ to Germany.”

  “The fuck you ain’t!”

  “And there’ll be no blasphemy in this house.”

  “This cracker-barrel piece of shit ain’t gonna be our house much longer. It’s all been arranged by Uncle Sam. Gonna have new quarters in Germany.”

  “Then you’ll live there alone.”

  “You’re comin’, Betheen. An’ those loonies you call your congregation can go to hell.”

  “We’re in hell, Oakland.”

  “The fuck’s that s’pose to mean?”

  “We’re in hell but not forever. The weak and the small, the claw and the—”

  “Shut the fuck up with that nonsense! Good Jesus! I don’t know why I ever put up with it! I’m the one oughta be the fuckin’ saint in this house.”

  “I know what I have to do, Oakland. What’s my command and my duty. You see, you’re not the only one who receives orders and messages. I have my own orders and I must follow.”

  “Follow who?
What kinda messages an’ who from?”

  “There’s legions of the Lord. I’m among those spoken to.”

  “Sometimes you scare me, Betheen, the crazy way you talk.”

  Aaron moved closer to the door so he could hear better and because his elbow was getting sore from leaning on it on the hard floor. He must have made a sound.

  “That Aaron? You lock the boy in that closet again?”

  “Not Aaron, no. Not our son.”

  “Sweet Jesus! You tellin’ me Aaron’s not mine? Is that what all this goddamn nonsense is about?”

  “I warned you about blasphemy in a holy place.”

  “You’re mixed up in the head, woman.”

  “I warned you for sure!”

  “Havin’ one of your spells, is what. This ramshackle dump ain’t holy, an’ neither are you.”

  “The web and the law command the chosen.”

  “Ha! Now ain’t that some shit?”

  “The web and the law. Didn’t I warn? Didn’t I?”

  The floor creaked outside the closet door. There was another small, faint sound.

  Something stirred in Aaron, some cold knowledge before fact. Something he didn’t want to know.

  “Betheen! You damned fool!”

  “Not damned, Oakland.”

  “Best put down that shotgun ‘fore I take it away from you.”

  “Take it away from me an’ what, Oakland?” Aaron’s mother sounded calm now, but there was still something scary about the way she was talking. “An’ you’ll do what?”

  “I’ll shove it up your fat ass, is what!”

  The roar of the shotgun made Aaron’s ears hurt even in the closet.

  He jumped to his feet as if his thoughts had yanked him up, and he hammered on the door with his fists. “Out! Let me out!” His voice sounded so small after the gunshot, as if the world must be deaf around him. The small and the crawl shall inherit. . .

  The closet door opened and light broke in. His mother stepped back, cradling the shotgun as if it were a baby. Her face was hers, only it was like a mask.