The Night Watcher

by Lutz, John

  Stack realized he was smiling. “Rica?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  Damned if he didn’t feel better after talking to her. Maybe it helped, spilling your guts like that.

  When they reached the first Manhattan address, Stack braked the unmarked and parked at the curb near a mailbox with white and yellow graffiti spray-painted all over it. Rica looked out the car window at a ratty-looking walk-up apartment building.

  “If our guy lives here,” she said, “he’s not a very successful firebug.”

  “Maybe he’s only visiting,” Stack said. “No telling where O’Reilly got these addresses. His contacts tend not to like him, so sometimes they feed him wrong information.”

  Rica reached for the door handle. “Like you said, let’s split up and get this business out of the way.”

  “There’s a diner down at the corner,” Stack said, when she was getting out of the car. “If you finish before I do, go there and I’ll meet you.”

  Rica nodded, turned, and walked toward the old brick building. She heard Stack drive away behind her. That was okay; she didn’t feel alone or in any danger out of the ordinary. Maybe this firebug, Larry Chips, wouldn’t even be home.

  Nobody had to buzz her into this dump. The vestibule smelled like tragedy and stale vomit. There was no name in the slot for the apartment number on O’Reilly’s list. She pressed the intercom button but without much hope. The button barely moved under ancient layers of paint.

  Naturally the apartment, 5D, was on the top floor. The penthouse, Rica thought, as she sighed and began climbing creaking wooden stairs.

  Her breathing was a little ragged by the time she reached 5D and knocked on the door. A faint female voice sounded from inside the apartment; then there was silence. Rica knocked again. “Larry Chips? Police. Open up so we can talk.” She moved to the side, not liking it that whoever was in there hadn’t come right to the door.

  Finally the door opened and a skinny African-American man in his thirties peered out at Rica. The unmistakable scent of marijuana smoke wafted from the place. Rica decided to let that one go; she wasn’t here for a drug bust.

  She flashed her shield. “I’m looking for Larry Chips.” She knew Chips was white.

  “Not here,” the black man said. He had huge almond eyes that wanted to focus anywhere but on her.

  “Does he live here?” A toilet flushed inside the apartment. The stash going into the New York sewer system?

  “Naw. He been stayin’ here, is all.”

  “So, is he here now? I only wanna talk to him.”

  “He ain’t been here for a long while.”

  “You expect him back soon?”

  “I mean, been three, four days since he been here.” The dark eyes slid to the side, couldn’t help it. “He got himself parkin’ tickets or somethin’?”

  “Something,” Rica said. This guy was playing for time. Maybe Chips was on his way down the outside iron fire escape even as they chatted. “I’m coming in,” Rica said in a neutral tone, and moved forward.

  The man backed away from her as she opened the door all the way. He was even skinnier than he’d looked from the hall, wearing ragged, faded jeans too short for his bony legs, a torn gray T-shirt, and jogging shoes without socks. Rica got a glance at trash all over the place, very little furniture, a diminutive black girl in a dark jacket standing motionless near a wooden chair.

  Jacket. Jogging shoes without socks.

  Rica caught movement outside the dirty window, saw a hand disappear from gripping the iron rail of the fire escape, just as the man in the jogging shoes bumped into her, shoving her hard on his way out the door. The girl broke and ran at the same time.

  Rica ignored them, regained her balance, and rushed to the window. What the hell was Chips doing, if the runner was Chips? Possibly all this was about was the drug thing. But the toilet had flushed, and there’d been time to flush it again if necessary.

  Rica reached the closed window and wrestled it open, wincing at the blast of cold outside air. She was about to throw a leg over the sill when the glass pane shattered and she instinctively fell back.

  Lying on the floor, she shook her head and stared up at the bullet hole in the glass.

  He’s shooting at me! What the hell did I stir up here?

  Rica scrambled to her feet, pulled her two-way out of its belt holster, and held down the transmit button. “Officer in need of assistance. Need some backup here!” She barked the address, along with brief information as to the suspect’s position.

  Then she carefully edged back to the window, wishing her heart would slow down. It was making her entire body tremble. Gun drawn, she craned her neck until she could peer down the fire escape.

  About two floors down, a blond man, wearing one of those distressed brown leather bomber jackets, paused and gazed wistfully back up at her. He really doesn’t want any of this to be happening. He held tight to the fire escape ladder with his left hand as his right came up fast from his side. As Rica drew back inside, a bullet pinged off the maze of iron outside the window, raising a cloud of rust.

  Rica held her breath and poked her head and gun hand back out the window, ready to return fire though she figured the sprinter would be on the move again.

  She was right. The man was leaping from the first-floor balcony, not bothering with the gravity ladder.

  He was running when he hit the pavement, almost fell but maintained his balance, arms flailing, then kept going. Rica was aware of people in the alley below, a couple of what looked like teenagers cutting through, a wino searching through a trash container. The teenagers had broken into a run at the last shot. The wino was frozen. Rica couldn’t shoot down there and send a 9mm round ricocheting all over the place looking for a home.

  The suspect could move. He must have broken an unofficial record as he sprinted to the mouth of the alley and disappeared around the corner.

  At the opposite end of the alley a police car pulled up. Two uniforms piled out. One of them tackled the front teenager. The other gave chase as the second boy banged into a trash can but made it around the corner before he could be grabbed.

  “The other way!” Rica shouted, pointing in the direction the blond man had run. “The other goddamn way!”

  The cop who’d tackled the teenager had him on the ground and was finishing cuffing him. He looked up at her and held his hand cupped to his ear to indicate he hadn’t understood.

  “Fuck it!” Rica spat in disgust, knowing that the blond sprinter—Chips?—had made his escape. She ducked back inside, careful not to cut herself on any broken glass lying around.

  Glad to be in out of the cold, she looked carefully at the apartment for the first time. Not just messy, a horror. There was no furniture other than a soiled mattress and the wooden chair. Rags were piled in a corner. There were burn spots on the old hardwood floor where fires had been built, probably on what looked like a blackened cookie sheet near the mattress. Rica was sure nobody lived here, only camped out.

  Still with her 9mm in hand, she carefully checked out the tiny L kitchen that was barren of appliances, then the bathroom.

  She was alone, as she’d thought. The skinny guy and his girl companion had probably taken the stairs and reached ground level before Chips. Or maybe had a way off the roof.

  She raised the toilet seat lid and backed away, making a face as the stench and revulsion hit her. This wasn’t the toilet she’d heard flushing. Must have been from the floor above. The water service was off here, though that hadn’t slowed down anyone wanting to use the facilities. On the cracked tile floor was a bent, flame-blackened teaspoon, a small length of rubber tubing. More than weed was on the menu here. Maybe the man and the woman who’d fled had good reason to run.

  And had probably taken the reason with them.

  Rica heard voices, a lot of clomping around in the hall.

  She walked back into the destroyed living room. “It’s okay. In here.”

/>   She holstered her gun and stood watching as three blue uniforms stormed in.

  “We didn’t get him,” one of them said, a big guy with a bull neck and a white mustache. “We got two teenyboppers down in the alley. Black males, claim they know zilch.”

  “Witnesses,” Rica said. “Treat them like witnesses or Al Sharpton’ll get you.”

  Two of the uniforms left. White Mustache stayed with Rica. He wrinkled his nose. “Smells like shit and weed in here.”

  “That’s exactly what we’ve got,” Rica said.

  EIGHTEEN

  “What’s with this Larry Chips?” O’Reilly asked the next morning in his office. He was standing behind his desk, apparently too irate to sit. Stack and Rica sat in the matching chairs facing his desk. “Why’d the guy do a rabbit when you knocked on his door?”

  “We can’t know for sure why anyone in the apartment ran,” Stack said. “The place was supposed to be unoccupied; it had been vacant for more than a month. The owner’s an absentee landlord who lives in White Plains, and he said he has no idea who was in there when Rica knocked. Had to be squatters.”

  O’Reilly crossed his arms and stared at Rica. “Any ideas why these squatters all took off like they were scalded?”

  “Drugs would be my guess,” she said.

  “There was no sign of anything in the place other than a trace of weed. Not enough to justify fleeing from a cop with a gun.”

  “Could be they took most of their stash with them,” Stack said. “Coulda been anything.”

  “Maybe,” O’Reilly said, “but I gotta tell you the apartment isn’t the kind of place where you usually find major league drug dealers hanging out. More like a dive for transients.” He was still looking at Rica.

  “That’s the way I see it,” Rica said, not so much minding agreeing. When somebody was right they were right. And she thought maybe she was right in how she figured this. “Chips was the first one out of there, and we all know why he might have been eager to leave. It’s possible he bolted and started a panic. That kind of thing can be contagious. The other two caught the mood and fled. Everyone there wasn’t necessarily running for the same reason.”

  “You think Chips is our firebug?”

  “It’s possible. It’d explain why he’d risk a bullet to get away.”

  “If he had a stash of coke on him, that’d explain it, too,” O’Reilly said.

  “He only has a drug record for minor possession,” Stack said. “Two arrests, one conviction for marijuana possession. His drug of choice is fire.”

  “So you’re with Rica on this? You think Larry Chips is the Torcher?”

  “Neither of us thinks it for sure,” Stack said, with a glance at Rica. “We both see him as our strongest suspect. He’s a known arsonist, ran when Rica knocked on a door, took a shot at a cop rather than stop.” He shrugged. “He looks good for it.”

  “Not to me,” O’Reilly said. “Chips is a firebug, all right, but one that’s turned it into a business. You look at his record and it’s all setting fires for purposes of insurance fraud, work for hire, that kinda thing. A sickness but also a business.”

  “People change,” Rica said.

  “Not firebugs. It’s like a sexual thing to them, fire.”

  Rica thought O’Reilly seemed to know a lot about it. She thought she’d prod a bit. “What do you mean, sir, a sexual thing?”

  O’Reilly looked uncomfortable. He cleared his throat and turned it into a cough. “You know, they relate fire to sex in some way. Pyromaniacs have been known to have orgasms at major fires.”

  “You’re kidding me!” Rica said.

  O’Reilly gave her a look as if he might be wondering if she was kidding him. About time, Stack thought.

  Rica crossed her legs so some thigh showed, then sat slightly forward so her breasts were prominent. “Come to think of it, lots of words related to fire are used in sexual talk. “Hot stuff.’ ‘Hot mamma.’ ‘My old flame.’ ‘She’s hot!’”

  O’Reilly coughed again and tried not to look at Rica’s legs.

  “It would get the higher-ups off your back if we named a suspect,” Stack said to him, trying to shut Rica up. “And right now we don’t have anyone more likely than Larry Chips.”

  “And I’d look like an ass if the Torcher turned out to be someone else.”

  That explained it, Stack thought. O’Reilly was as usual interested mostly in self-preservation and advancement. Larry Chips didn’t fit airtight as a suspect, and the Torcher murders had developed into a high-profile case where a wrong guess could haunt an ambitious cop.

  “I’ll leave the guesswork to you two,” O’Reilly said, finally sitting down in his desk chair. “As of right now, Larry Chips isn’t even a suspect. But I’ve got a query in to the LAPD about him. Los Angeles is where he lived most of his life and set most of his fires. We oughta at least find out how long he might have been in New York. What else he might have been up to the past year or so. What I gather so far is that this guy’s a punk with a quirk. Too soft to be a killer.”

  “I don’t want to get off him too soon,” Stack said. “I still think he might be our firebug. And if he isn’t, I’d like to hear it from him.”

  “And I think we oughta look under other rocks,” O’Reilly said. “Especially now, with the kid’s death putting more heat on us. Let’s get the full lab and ME reports, the story on Larry Chips from the LAPD. My guess is he’s only a diversion. Making him the focal point of the investigation won’t be productive at all.”

  “What do you mean, ‘the kid’s death’?” Rica asked.

  “You haven’t heard? The six-year-old Wilson girl, Eden, died from her bum wounds late last night.”

  Rica felt herself tighten up inside. Six years old…“The bastard has to feel bad about that. Feel guilty.”

  “Why?” O’Reilly asked. “Because you would?”

  “Because anyone human would.”

  “Not a sociopath firebug.”

  “So who or what should be the focal point?” Stack asked.

  O’Reilly looked at him as if the question were absurd. “Why, the victims. What I want you and Rica to do is stay on the victims, talk to people who knew them, worked with them, hated or loved them. Find some common thread among the victims. You think this Torcher freak just chooses victims at random?”

  “It happens,” Rica said. “Maybe especially with the sociopath firebug you just described.”

  O’Reilly gave a hoarse laugh. “Tell her, Stack. Give her a refresher course.”

  Stack didn’t like it, but he told her. “It doesn’t happen very often. Usually a serial killer has a compulsion that causes him to gravitate toward certain types of victims. Trouble is, what marks them as types in the killer’s mind isn’t necessarily obvious to anyone else. If we’re looking for a serial killer whose motive’s something other than compulsion, there still figures to be a common denominator among the victims. If nothing else, they probably knew their killer before he committed the crime.”

  “There’s another possibility,” O’Reilly said, “if slim. So far this firebug has set his victims ablaze in apartments.”

  “Maybe there’s something in common about the apartments!” Rica said.

  O’Reilly smiled at her. “Sometimes, Stack, your protégé shows promise.”

  “In flashes,” Stack said. He doubted that some kind of similarity in apartments was setting off the Torcher. “What do you think might be the killer’s problem, he hates Berber carpet?”

  “Don’t wise off with me,” O’Reilly said. “See if you can use all that cleverness to outsmart this killer. In other words, do your job.”

  Stack would. They were searching for the killer of a child now. If the high-rise fires continued, it was inevitable that there would be more innocent victims, including chidden.

  O’Reilly pulled a file folder over to him and began reading its contents with an expression of mock concentration. Stack had been sufficiently reprimanded and dismissed. He
went to the office door and held it open for Rica, then turned back to O’Reilly. “How’s Vandervoort doing?”

  “It doesn’t look good for him,” O’Reilly said, ignoring the implied disdain in Stack’s question and studiously not looking up. “I’m told he’s going to start chemotherapy next week, maybe radiation to go along with it.”

  Doesn’t look good, all right, Stack thought.

  Out in the hall, Rica said nothing as she hurried to keep up with Stack. She knew he was fuming, and she didn’t want to heighten his anger and embarrassment.

  As soon as they entered the squad room, Sergeant Redd approached them.

  “Your wife wants you to call her,” he said to Stack. “She says it’s important.”

  Stack thanked Redd and veered toward his desk and a phone. Rica kept right on walking toward the coffee machine, not wilting under the force of all the eyeballs aimed at her.

  At his desk, Stack punched out the number of the publishing house where Laura had gotten a job as some kind of assistant. After asking for her and holding for a while he listened to an orchestral arrangement of Eric Clapton’s “Bad Love” before Laura’s voice came over the phone.

  “Hello, Ben. Thanks for calling.” It was a shock to hear himself referred to by his given name, and he realized Laura had been just about the only person in his life who used it.

  Stack felt awkward, almost as if he were talking to a stranger. Time apart had added to the void between them. “How’s the job?” he asked.

  “Fine. I like it here and they seem to like me. They’re going to make me a copy editor.”

  He remembered she had edited medical textbooks somewhere before they’d met.

  “I need a favor, Ben. I bought a co-op and I need some help.”

  Was she going to ask him for a loan? He was in no position. “Help? Sure, if I can, Laura.” He was trying to digest the fact that she was already moving out of the tiny apartment she’d rented by the month and had bought a place. Moving up in the world. Moving fast.

  “I don’t want to borrow money or anything like that,” she said. “I need a reference, is all.”