The Night Watcher

by Lutz, John

  “Ain’t we just in a hell of a business?” she said, when she finally felt steadier and straightened up.

  But Stack had already gone down to the street to use the detectives’ band radio in their unmarked to call for the techs and the medical examiner, leaving her with the burned man and the questions that hung in the air like smoke.

  THREE

  The week after the Ardmont Arms fire, Stack walked into Mobile Response, located in the Eight-oh Precinct, with Rica on his heels. The Mobile Response Squad had been formed to conduct investigations the regular detective division couldn’t adequately handle because of case overload. It was authorized to operate in all five boroughs and had come to be regarded as a crack outfit.

  Stack enjoyed the special status, though he knew for a fact that case overload wasn’t the only reason for the squad’s existence. It sometimes served as a kind of pressure valve; the higher-ups stepped aside and let sensitive, potentially damaging cases find their way to the MR Squad in order to minimize any political or PR damage. It was a situation Stack could live with. Departmental politics had worn him down at the edges. But only at the edges.

  Though he wasn’t the ranking officer, the mood of the place was subtly altered by his arrival. Detectives at their desks seemed to bend to their work. Those standing and talking or drinking coffee sidled back to their desks or the swing gate to the booking area and either busied themselves or left. Stack took the work seriously, and when he was present, so did everyone else.

  He was a big man, six-feet-two and 230 pounds. Now in his forty-seventh year, he was beginning to thicken around the waist, but his shoulders were broad and his big hands made fists like rocks. Even without NYPD politics, he might have climbed through the ranks on ability or looks alone. His head was large, his forehead wide. His dark hair was parted on the side, cut short around the ears and beginning to gray. Level gray eyes studied everything calmly from beneath thick dark brows. His cheekbones were prominent and his jaw was firm with a cleft chin. If it weren’t for a slightly crooked nose that hadn’t been set right after one of the bad guys broke it with a beer bottle, he would have been merely handsome instead of interesting and…well, scary. To civilian employees and probationary patrolmen he was Detective Stack. To his fellow officers who had been through the wars with him, he was simply “Stack.”

  Sergeant Redd at the booking desk had told Stack that acting MR Squad Commander Jack O’Reilly wanted to see him. The regular commander, Lieutenant Vandervoort, was hospitalized after major surgery for colon cancer and would be gone for at least a month. If chemotherapy was required, Vandervoort would be gone longer.

  “Still working on that hot one, Stack?” a detective-second-grade named Mathers, whose nickname, of course, was Beave, asked with a grin.

  “You must mean me,” Stack heard Rica say behind him. Mathers and several other officers laughed.

  “Try to be more professional,” Stack said, when he and Rica were out of the squad room and in the short hall, lined with file cabinets, that led to the commander’s office.

  “They don’t take me seriously,” Rica said.

  “I take you seriously.” Stack immediately wished he’d phrased it differently. He was aware of how Rica felt about him, and he didn’t want her misplaced affection to become obvious to the others in the department.

  Rica, trundling along beside him, didn’t answer. But he could feel her smiling.

  She’d gotten more blatant about her fondness for Stack as his divorce from Laura progressed. Stack knew what Rica was thinking: Laura had finally had enough of being a cop’s wife—which was true. And Rica, being a cop herself, was exactly what Stack needed. Not true, thought Stack. It wasn’t that Rica was unattractive—she was petite, with dark hair and eyes, and with a firm and compact physique that prompted locker room speculation when she wasn’t around. Not that she wasn’t respected for her abilities. It was, in fact, Rica Lopez’s remarkable talents as a homicide detective that kept Stack from having her transferred to break up their partnership.

  Stack had never made any remarks about Rica when some of the other cops, male and female, were commenting on her looks. What worried him now was that, since word of his impending divorce had gotten around, he’d stopped hearing raunchy remarks about Rica. Apparently no one wanted to comment on her when he was present.

  “You want me to go in with you, Stack?” Rica asked beside him as they approached the partly opened door to the commander’s office.

  “Sure” he said. “Maybe O’Reilly wants to chew some ass.”

  Stack opened the door all the way, then stood aside so Rica could enter first. As she moved around him he caught a whiff of her perfume. Lilacs or some such. When the hell had she had time to put that on? Cops weren’t supposed to smell like lilacs.

  The office was the only one in the precinct house that was carpeted—a thickly napped beige surface that ran wall to wall and stopped at a wooden baseboard that over the years had been painted countless times in the same bureaucratic pale green. The walls had wainscoting that disappeared behind a row of gray file cabinets. Two deep, brown leather chairs sat facing the large and ancient mahogany desk. All in all, a place where you might enjoy brandy and a good cigar while trying to avoid prison.

  The wall behind the desk was paneled in oak. On it hung framed color photos of the New York police commissioner and the chief of police. Around the photos were mounted Vandervoort’s plaques, medals, and framed commendations, along with photographs of Vandervoort shaking hands with pols and assorted department VIPs. Somehow a photo of O’Reilly shaking hands with the chief of police at an awards ceremony had found its way onto the wall. There was a lot of bright winter light streaming through the window and glancing off all the award plaques and photographs. It made O’Reilly’s right cheek appear especially pockmarked. Old acne scars, Stack figured.

  O’Reilly stood up behind the desk, a tall man with a lean waist, wearing a white shirt, blue suspenders, and dark, chalk-striped suit pants. The coat that matched the pants was on a wooden hanger looped over one of the hooks on a coatrack near a five-borough map pinned to the wall. Despite the acne scars—or maybe partly because of them—he had a face like a mature, perverted cherub’s, with wary, rapacious blue eyes and receding ginger-colored hair, a lock of which was somehow always curled over the middle of his forehead. Stack had long ago pegged O’Reilly as a smart-ass with ambition, an eye for opportunity, and a blind spot the size of Soho. The assessment had proved accurate.

  Obviously relishing his acting commander’s role, O’Reilly nodded to them solemnly and motioned for them to sit in the leather chairs facing the desk. Then he sat down himself, folded his hands before him, and smiled faintly, as if posing for a photograph. Took the acting part of his title seriously, Stack thought. He glanced at Rica, who had looked over at him, and knew she was aware of his thoughts. Not the first time. Damned, intuitive little—

  “So fill me in on the Ardmont Arms fire,” O’Reilly said to Stack.

  “The victim was Hugh Danner, forty-nine, single, a corporate tax attorney. He lived alone at the Ardmont for eight years. Well liked at Frenzel, Waite and Conners, his law firm. No known enemies so far. He’d been seeing a woman named Helen Sampson—”

  “Seeing her?”

  “Screwing her, by all accounts.”

  “Okay, just so we’re clear.”

  Stack heard Rica sigh, then pressed on. “The Sampson woman owns a little bookshop in the Village. She’s broken up, says she and the victim had been getting along well. That they’d always gotten along well.”

  “And I guess she told you two how much everybody loved Danner.”

  “More or less,” Rica confirmed.

  “Well, don’t we know how people have different ways of showing love?” O’Reilly said, staring down at his desk.

  A rhetorical question if ever Stack heard one.

  He found himself also looking at the desk. It was uncluttered, barren of work in progress. Not at all
like when the incredibly sloppy and overworked Vandervoort sat behind it.

  “The ME said cause of death was shock and asphyxiation,” Stack said.

  O’Reilly looked up at him. “Asphyxiation? Like smoke inhalation?”

  “He breathed in flame when his shirt was on fire. It burned away his lungs.”

  O’Reilly looked disgusted. “Mother of Christ! What a way to die!”

  “The lab said the fire was started with, and helped along by, an accelerant. A combination of ordinary gasoline mixed with household cleaning fluid that makes it thicker. A detergent. That way it sticks to the body and won’t go out as long as there’s an oxygen source, sort of like napalm.”

  “The lab’s trying to figure out the brand name of the cleaning fluid,” Rica said.

  O’Reilly didn’t look at her. “And this Hugh Danner was tied up before he was set on fire?”

  Stack nodded. “With strips of cloth, apparently. Most of it burned away, but not in time to help Danner.”

  “So the guy was an attorney, solid citizen, all that crap,” O’Reilly said. “And it’s a dangerous thing, a fire in a high-rise building. Whoever used Danner as kindling put a lot of other tenants in peril. I’d like this one cleared from the books as soon as possible.”

  Before Vandervoort gets back, Stack thought. He said, “We’re canvassing the building, and we’ll talk some more to the doorman, but so far nobody’s been much help. A search of the apartment didn’t turn up anything that seemed relevant. No drugs, no names of known felons in Danner’s address book. The techs say there was nothing unusual on his computer: some business correspondence; some downloaded soft-core porn; a stock and bond portfolio worth about a quarter of a million.”

  “Soft-core porn?”

  “Nothing that’d move you, unless you like to watch bare-breasted women operating jackhammers.” Stack was pretty sure he heard Rica roll her eyes. “There were no messages on his answering machine. Gold cuff links and a gold chain in a dresser drawer in the bedroom, and Danner was wearing a Rolex when he burned. It doesn’t appear the apartment was burglarized, but since we don’t know exactly what Danner might have had in there, we can’t be sure. His lady love, Helen Sampson, is going to look around the place with us today, take an inventory, and see if anything might be missing.”

  “Good,” O’Reilly said. “You two keep me posted.” He stood up, signaling the end of the conversation.

  “Will do, sir,” Stack told him. He and Rica stood also.

  As they stepped into the hall, Stack closed the door behind them.

  “What the hell was all that about?” Rica asked beside Stack, as they were walking back toward the squad room. “Does he think we’re just wandering around with our thumbs up our asses?”

  “He might,” Stack said, “but what I think it was really about was O’Reilly wishing he were Vandervoort.”

  And where, Rica wondered, is that going to take us?

  FOUR

  June 1997

  Vernel Jefferson had screwed his neighbor’s ten-year-old daughter. He’d been arrested twice before for child molestation, never for anything violent done against an adult. Sweating like Niagara there in the dark tenement hall, Rica didn’t think she’d need her gun. Her partner Wily Stanford was at the other end of the hall, knocking on Jefferson’s apartment door so he could arrest him. Jefferson figured to cave like most child molesters and come along quietly, especially since he was in his sixties and only slightly over five feet tall. Rica the rookie cop was breathing hard, nervous, but she figured this was nothing she couldn’t handle.

  The tenement hall smelled like a blend of every cooking spice known to man, with an underlying stench of stale urine. There was a single dim overhead lightbulb halfway down the narrow hall. Stanford, at the distant end of the hall, was a barely visible figure despite his six-foot frame.

  Rica heard him knock on the door again, louder. “Mr. Jefferson, open up! This is the police!”

  There was no way out of the fifth-floor apartment except through Stanford or down the fire escape. Another uniformed cop was waiting down at street level if Jefferson decided to bolt that way. Rica was insurance in the unlikely event the little pervert would somehow manage to get past Stanford.

  Another apartment door opened near the middle of the corridor. A dark woman with cornrow hair stuck her head out and peered up and down the hall. When she looked Rica’s way, Rica silently motioned for her to get back inside. The woman nodded, drew back out of sight, and the door closed. Stanford pounded on Jefferson’s door now, impatient. It was damn near the end of the shift.

  Rica tightened her perspiring grip on her baton as she watched Stanford hoist his huge foot with its size-twelve shoe and prepare to kick in the door.

  At first she thought the explosion was the sound of Stanford’s foot shattering the door, incredibly loud. When she saw Stanford hurled back against the wall, she thought she might have heard a shot. Then she realized the sound she’d heard was the apartment door shattering, but not because Stanford had kicked it in.

  Someone inside had kicked it out, and with great force.

  “Look out, Rica!” Stanford shouted.

  The form that broke from the apartment was massive and moving fast. The guy wasn’t built like Vernel Jefferson. He should have been an NFL linebacker. He came toward Rica head down, legs and arms pumping. She gulped and moved to stand in the center of the hall, wielding her baton, holding her ground.

  The man rushing toward her grinned as he flashed beneath the dim lightbulb.

  The hell with this, Rica thought, and drew her 9mm handgun from its holster.

  “Halt! Police! Halt!” Rica’s command sounded feeble even to her.

  But miraculously he did halt. He skidded to a stop about ten feet from her, his face stiff, his bulging eyes fixed on the gun.

  Then his grin returned.

  “Sheeeeit!” he said. He was wearing a sleeveless gray undershirt to show off his muscles and baggy pants. His chest was heaving and he blew breath like a cornered bull as he shot a glance back at Stanford, who was just now getting to his feet, then back at Rica. His smile broadened and he began strolling toward her with a deliberate, casual gait. She couldn’t help thinking he was a handsome guy. Great smile. She smelled his sweat and fear as he got closer. “You gon’ be a good lil’ pussy,” he said softly. “I jus’ know it.”

  And he did know it. Rica was frozen. She could only stare at him as he approached her, then gingerly removed the 9mm from her hand. Then oddly, for he was on fleeing fugitive time, he reached out and squeezed her left tit. Not hard, and his fingers danced in a quick massaging motion as he withdrew his hand.

  The man sensed greater danger from behind and turned to aim and fire at Stanford, who was running toward him, still moving unsteadily after being struck by the exploding door.

  That was when Rica’s paralysis passed. She used the baton in her left hand to strike the man hard on the side of his head. Then she switched hands and clubbed him on his right collarbone. The crack of the bone was something she still dreamed about.

  The gun dropped to the floor.

  He didn’t attempt to pick it up. Instead he turned slowly toward her. He looked betrayed, and damned if she didn’t feel as if she had somehow betrayed him.

  “Nigger bitch!” he said, kind of surprised, and reached for her.

  Training took over. She used the baton as a jabbing weapon, driving its tip deep into the man’s stomach just beneath the sternum. Warm breath that carried the stench of bourbon whooshed out of him as he doubled over. She brought the club down twice on his head, driving him to the floor, knocking him into a daze if not unconsciousness. As she bent over him in the dim hall to wrestle his wrists behind him and click on the handcuffs, she picked up her gun and slid it back in its holster.

  “That’s good fucking work!” Stanford said, as he reached the fallen suspect and got down on one knee to make sure she didn’t need help.

  “I dunno,” R
ica said, breathing hard. “This can’t be Jefferson.”

  Stanford laughed. “Whoever he is, he didn’t want any part of the law. Maybe he’s Jefferson’s brother.”

  In fact, he turned out to be Jefferson’s cousin and dealer, who’d just finished administering a beating to Jefferson for molesting his girlfriend’s young daughter and for not paying money owed on a drug delivery. Vernel Jefferson was unconscious inside the apartment. Cousin Jamal Jefferson hadn’t found Vernel’s stash, which earned Vernel a possession charge to go along with the child molestation. There were three active warrants on Jamal the dealer, one of them for a homicide in Queens.

  It turned out to be a productive night’s work.

  If Stanford had seen what happened with Rica’s gun, he never mentioned it, at least to her. Maybe the hall was too dim. Maybe he’d been woozy from getting cracked with the door and knocked back against the wall. Definitely he might have been shot and killed that night, and it would have been Rica’s fault. Jamal the dealer didn’t mention the gun during his trial two months later, possibly out of embarrassment at being brought down by a five-foot-two female cop.

  Rica knew she’d somehow gotten a second chance.

  At Blender’s Lounge the night after the shooting, where some of the cops from the Eight-oh went to drink when off duty, they toasted Rica. The place was noisy and crowded, warm with so many bodies.

  Ed Kaline, still in uniform, raised a mug of beer high and whistled shrilly for silence. “To Rica Lopez!” he shouted. “A small cop with a big blue heart!”

  Everyone applauded and shouted. Rica felt great, but at the same time wondered if she should have said something about the gun. It didn’t figure anyone would ever find out. Even if Jamal Jefferson mentioned it at his trial, who would believe him? Anyway, it wouldn’t be mentioned in court. How he was captured had no bearing on his case.