Night Victims

by John Lutz

  The Lincoln’s brake lights went dark, its rear end dropped about six inches, and the big car shot forward.

  Only to come to a halt again less than twenty feet down the street.

  The Night Spider thought about edging around it, but there was no room. Not without going up on the sidewalk, which wouldn’t take him very far, as crowded as they were with people still heading for work. Kill about a dozen, then the car would come up against mass, would be stopped, and they’d be on him.

  Don’t panic. Horn’s sitting in the same tra—

  Or is he?

  The Night Spider hadn’t actually seen Horn get into the car, only stand by the door. He might have noticed how slow the traffic was because of the gawkers near the Weldon Tower. The Nina Cunt was right that the man wasn’t stupid.

  He might have made his calculations, then decided he had a better chance of catching up with the Saturn on foot.

  Might be running now like an aging football back, shoul-NIGHT VICTIMS

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  ders hunched, head down, knocking people aside, making time . . . gaining ground!

  Traffic was inching ahead again. The Night Spider veered the car slightly so its right front wheel was only a foot from the curb, then braked to a halt near a NO PARKING sign, obstructing traffic.

  He switched off the engine, slid over the console to the passenger seat, then scrambled out the right-hand door onto the sidewalk.

  “Hey, asshole!” the cabbie yelled behind him. “You gonna leave that there?”

  The Night Spider ignored him and joined the throng of pedestrians striding past the stopped traffic. He sped up, but not too much. Just enough so that he was surrounded by people who’d been ahead of the white Saturn when he’d exited it.

  Then he turned into the entrance to a used-books store.

  Familiar musty smell. Only a few other customers.

  He made his way to an aisle where he was alone. Poetry, Self-Help, Inspirational. With a quick glance around, he removed his flesh-colored latex gloves and stuffed them in a pocket. After counting to ten, he went back outside to the hot, crowded sidewalk.

  No one seemed to be paying the slightest attention to him. Traffic still hadn’t moved enough that the cars he’d left stuck behind the Saturn had caught up. Behind him, from up the street, he heard horns honking but couldn’t be sure if it was because of the obstacle he’d left in the stream of traffic.

  He sensed the tempo and walked faster, feeling safer. Still some danger, though. Wonderful!

  Immersed in the hurried parade of flawed humanity, he blended. He walked toward the intersection at the same speed as other pedestrians. Turn this corner, then another, and he’d be lost in the crowded mad maze of the city.

  *

  *

  *

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  Horn was almost winded. He was about to stop and bend over with his hands on his knees, when he saw the knot of people ahead and caught a glimpse of white fender.

  He drew a deep breath and continued at a fast but unsteady walk, feeling his heart hammering as he wondered what Anne would think if he arrived on a gurney at Kincaid Memorial Emergency.

  The white Saturn was parked in a traffic lane.

  People were standing around staring at it, their hands on their hips, as if it might gain a mind of its own and move.

  Traffic had built up behind the Saturn, but drivers were grudgingly giving enough ground to let blocked cars get around the illegally parked vehicle.

  When Horn reached the car, he paused for a few seconds while he tried to catch his breath, waiting for the ache in his side to let up. Then he flashed his shield and asked everyone to move on and not touch the Saturn. He used his cell phone to call in the plate number.

  When the phone chirped ten minutes later, he was told the car was registered to C. Collins, address not far away on the East Side.

  Horn didn’t even put the phone back in his pocket. He stood there holding it, his chest still heaving as his lungs worked to pull in oxygen. He knew what was coming next.

  And it came. Another ten minutes and the cell phone chirped again.

  The Saturn’s owner, an exotic dancer named Christina Collins, had slept late and hadn’t even realized her car was stolen until the police knocked on her door and gave her the bad news. She was terribly upset, Horn was told. She wondered if she’d ever get her car back.

  Eventually she’d get it back, Horn thought. And he was sure nothing about it would be different. Not even new fingerprints.

  He wondered if he’d ever get his breath back.

  24

  Horn looked in on the late Neva Taylor and found the now-familiar scene of sadism and death.

  Despite the horror on her immobile pale features, it was obvious that Taylor had been a beautiful woman. This was, Horn noted, the first victim with red hair. The killer was continuing what might be a deliberate variation in the types of his victims.

  “Same sad story,” said the assistant ME, a woman with short blond hair and a wattled neck.

  “Was she a natural redhead?” Horn asked.

  She leaned close and examined the roots of Taylor’s splayed red hair. “What you see’s the real thing. And in case you’re wondering, pubic hair isn’t the best way to judge.

  Sometimes it isn’t the same color as natural hair on the head.”

  “I wasn’t wondering.”

  The woman smiled at him. “No, I guess you weren’t.” In a more businesslike tone, she said, “At least thirty stab wounds in this one, skillfully applied to prolong suffering before death.”

  “Look like the same weapon?”

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  The woman nodded. “A long, thin blade, very sharp. Plenty of bleeding, but gradual and absorbed by the sheets and mattress. Not the bloody river you’d ordinarily get with that many wounds.”

  “Must have been a helluva way to die.”

  “There had to be a lot of pain. But then, that’s what the shit-head who’s doing these murders is all about, isn’t it?

  Inflicting pain? Torture?”

  “That’s exactly what he’s all about.”

  “He’s good at it.”

  Horn walked over and examined the open window. There was the expertly removed crescent of glass dangling on a strip of masking tape. The unlocked brass window latch. No noticeable marks on the sill. No blood on the floor. Nothing to suggest the killer had been in the room, except for the corpse on the bed.

  A camera flash sent miniature lightning through the room. A police photographer documenting everything visual about the crime scene.

  “Smile,” he said, as he approached the victim and squinted through the viewfinder.

  Nobody did, especially not Neva Taylor.

  The woman from the medical examiner’s office moved back to give the photographer room. “It’s like a spider crawled into the building, immobilized her, and slowly drained her of life,” she said to Horn. She must have been reading the papers. “You think this sick asshole really thinks he’s a spider?”

  “He seems to identify with them.”

  “I don’t see how anybody could identify with bugs,” the photographer said, going about his business of launching one flash after another. Zeus with a Minolta.

  “I don’t see how anybody could ask a corpse to smile,” Horn said.

  The photographer grinned at him around the camera.

  “Yes, you do. You’ve got it harder than I do. You have to look NIGHT VICTIMS

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  at this kind of stuff without the emotional distance a lens gives you.”

  “A photographer-philosopher,” the ME said, not as if she were kidding but was actually surprised to hear such wisdom from the lips of a guy who shot pictures of crime scenes.

  The photographer jokingly aimed his camera at her and she quickly turned her head.

  “Your sidekicks are up on the roof,” she said, finding herself facing Horn.

 
“I figured.”

  “Our kind of job,” the photographer said. “There’s no place to go but up.”

  “Unless I throw you out a window,” Horn told him.

  It was windy on the roof of the Weldon Tower, but it felt pretty good on such a warm day. The city was a vista of beautifully sunlit buildings softened by late morning shadow. It all looked antiseptically clean from here, and not as if anything of horror would be happening behind the thousands of windows.

  “You almost need a jacket up here,” Paula said.

  Horn didn’t think so, but he didn’t disagree with her.

  “We got pretty much what we expected here,” Bickerstaff said. He pointed to an adjacent building about thirty feet away. “Looks like that’s where he came from. We’ll do the usual checking with that building’s doorman and tenants.” And probably come up with nothing, Horn thought.

  “There’s marks from a grappling hook of some kind on the base of that antenna,” Bickerstaff continued, “and the roof ’s surface indicates some activity almost but not directly over the victim’s bedroom window. Looks like our guy came down the outside wall between the rows of windows so he wouldn’t be seen, then swung or walked himself over about five feet to center on Taylor’s window.” 174

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  “No fresh hole in the brickwork,” Paula said, “but we think he wrapped a line around that vent pipe, since it was right where he wanted it.”

  Horn walked over and stooped down to examine the four-inch pipe protruding from the roof. There was a circular mark on it, maybe a slight indentation, that looked fairly new. Paula was probably right in her assessment.

  “How do you figure he detaches the lines when he goes back to the other rooftops?” she asked.

  “Sayles told me there are grappling hooks, even knots, that can be detached by whipping or snapping the rope or cable.”

  “Nifty,” Bickerstaff said. “Must take practice.”

  “And training,” Horn said. “That our guy is an expert climber is about the only thing that narrows our search.”

  “And that he gets in and out so clean,” Paula said. “Even a good B-and-E artist leaves a scuff mark or clue here or there. Other than a couple of indistinct footprints, we’ve been given nothing of much substance to work with.”

  “Will Lincoln has the skill set,” Bickerstaff pointed out.

  “And an alibi,” Paula said. “Me. I’ve practically been living with the guy. Last night he knocked down some beers at a bar in Queens, then went into his garage studio and worked until about three in the morning. I saw him pass the lighted window now and then, and I saw him leave the garage and go into his house when he was finished working.”

  “And let me guess,” Horn said. “The ME says the victim died sometime before three o’clock this morning.”

  “That’s it,” Paula said. “Closer to midnight. Will Lincoln didn’t do Neva Taylor.”

  “Unless he found a way to leave his garage and return without you knowing it,” Bickerstaff said.

  “I don’t think it was possible,” Paula said. “Besides, I’m sure he didn’t know I was out there watching him almost all night.”

  “So Altman was playing straight with us when he gave us the list,” Horn said.

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  Bickerstaff stuffed his hands deep in his pockets, cool on the roof like Paula. “It’s almost enough to make you trust the Feds.”

  “I think I saw him down in the street,” Horn said.

  Bickerstaff looked at him. “Altman?”

  “The Night Spider.”

  Horn had their attention, judging by the way their jaws dropped.

  He told them about the dark-eyed man in the white Saturn, his pursuit of the car, and the chase’s ultimate unsat-isfactory conclusion.

  “Jesus!” Bickerstaff said. “Maybe there’ll be prints in the car.”

  “I’d be surprised if he didn’t wear gloves to steal cars the way he does for his ritual killings.”

  “Clean,” Paula said. “He operates so damned clean.”

  “That’s the thing about him,” Horn said, admiring Paula’s knack for homing in on what was pertinent. And for not shooting off her mouth, holding her thoughts till they were ripe. She was impressing him more and more.

  Bickerstaff, still with his hands jammed in his pockets, looked around at the skyline and distant river. “It’s peaceful up here.”

  “Which is why we’re leaving,” Horn said.

  “Like nothing bad could ever happen in this city. But we know better. Hey, Paula?”

  “Uh-huh.” Do we ever!

  While Paula and Bickerstaff were still supervising or doing legwork on the Neva Taylor murder, Horn went home and used his desk phone in his den to call Anne at the hospital. She seemed calmer now about the lawsuit, but there was still an edginess to her that bothered Horn. He suspected what it might be but didn’t know how to make sure, or even if he could do anything about it if he were sure.

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  that the damage to cops’ wives was sometimes cumulative, building up over time until the women simply had had enough. Then, usually, they would walk. Maybe they’d wait for the kids to leave home, or for this or that to be resolved, but at a certain time they went. Horn couldn’t think of any cop’s marriage that had broken up that way and that had been made right. It was as if something inside these patient, long-suffering women snapped and couldn’t be repaired.

  Horn never thought it could happen to Anne. She seemed to have learned to accommodate his profession—the waiting, the worrying, and the upside-down priorities, and coming in second to dates with drug dealers, rapists, and killers.

  And she wasn’t a wife who sat around and fretted constantly about him; she had a profession of her own, a life of her own, outside their marriage.

  No, not outside it. Not completely. He knew that the conflicts and pressures of her job, especially since the Alan Vine tragedy, had always been a part of their marriage. They’d always shared. Everything. Maybe that was a mistake.

  “The trouble with relationships these days,” a grizzled desk sergeant Horn knew often said, “is that there’s too much communication.” He’d gone on to describe the things he’d done without his wife’s knowledge and that he knew she’d done, supposedly without his.

  He never seemed to be kidding. Horn knew now that maybe he hadn’t been. The sergeant retired two years ago and was living in Mexico with his wife of forty-two years.

  And here was Horn, on the job again.

  Like Anne, damn it! He had the right!

  Mentally setting personal problems aside, still not knowing exactly how he felt about them or what to do, he wandered into the kitchen. Comfort food would help, and he was genuinely hungry anyway.

  He saw the blur of rain on the kitchen’s dark windowpane and could hear the steady drip of water from a nearby downspout. Lightning briefly illuminated the view of the small NIGHT VICTIMS

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  garden Anne liked to call a courtyard, and a few seconds later distant thunder rumbled. A summer storm. Airborne gloom. Just what he needed to improve his glum mood.

  Using meat loaf take-home from the last restaurant meal he and Anne had shared, he found some cracked wheat bread, got ketchup from the refrigerator, and built a thick sandwich. Then he located a bottle of Heineken dark in the refrigerator and opened it. He got a beer glass down from a cabinet, sat at the table, and ate, listening to the rain and what had become a metallic drumbeat from the downspout.

  When he was finished with the sandwich but not the beer, he carried the half-full glass into his den and sat down at the antique oak desk Anne had gotten for his birthday ten years before. He couldn’t hear the rain from here. Good. He searched his Rolodex. Nina Count should still be at the station, and he knew she’d talk to him. Knew she was probably expecting him to call.

  “Captain Horn!” She soun
ded overjoyed to hear his voice.

  “You have something to tell me.”

  “Not that you’d want to hear, Nina.”

  “C’mon, Horn, we’re old friends.”

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea what you’re trying to do.”

  “Of course, and you appreciate it. I’m trying to flush out your suspect for you. And I will. Just give me a little time.” He considered telling her about his encounter with the driver of the stolen Saturn earlier that day but decided it would only whet her appetite for danger and ratings.

  Besides, she’d find out eventually anyway, being Nina.

  “My contacts in the NYPD tell me I’ve already had some success,” she said. “You were involved in a dramatic chase this morning. With a little luck, you would have apprehended the Night Spider. It’ll be on tonight’s eleven o’clock news.”

  Christ! She was something! “Good. I’ll be able to learn all about it. ”

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  successful at what I’m attempting, I get viewers and you get the killer. So we both win. You should be grateful for what I’m doing.”

  “I would be, if flushing out the killer was all you’re trying to do. You’re taunting this murderous psychopath, Nina. If He’s the Night Spider, you’re offering yourself as a juicy fly.”

  “My God! I never thought of that!”

  “Bullshit, Nina.”

  “Yeah, I suppose so.”

  “If you’d seen what was left of his flies, you wouldn’t be doing this.” But he knew better; if she weren’t a brash and competitive newswoman she’d probably be a trapeze artist or in some other occupation where you could work without a net.

  “I understand the risk,” Nina said. “And I really am doing this partly for you. And to get this murderous head case off the street.”

  “Whatever you learn that’s pertinent, Nina, I want to know it almost as soon as you do.”

  “Of course. The minute anything happens I’ll give you a buzz.”

  He wasn’t sure if she was putting him on, so he held his silence. It was obvious that nothing he could say would change her mind anyway.

  “Are you worried about me, Horn?”

  “Yes,” he said honestly. “And pissed off that you’re making my job more difficult.”