The Night Watcher

by Lutz, John

  Without answering, they followed Fagin into the kitchen.

  Everything here was different from the rest of the apartment. The walls and ceiling were charred and water stained, the stench was overwhelming, and in the center of the ceramic tile floor, resting in about an inch of water, was the blackened corpse of a woman assumed to be Bruni L’Farceur. She glistened darkly, raw as a peeled grape, still moist from the sprinkler system. What was left of her jaw was agape, one cheek completely burned away to reveal blackened molars in a horrible grin. She was arched backward, though she didn’t appear to have been hog-tied. Her arms were folded and bound together behind her with what looked like the remnants of strips of cloth. It was also obvious that her legs had been tightly bound together.

  “Like the others,” Stack said.

  Rica moved a hesitant step closer to the corpse. “No gag this time.”

  “There was one,” Fagin said. “Duct tape would be my guess. I removed what was left of it to feel inside her mouth. What was left of it. There was soot on the roof of her mouth. She was alive for a while after she was set on fire, breathing in the smoke of her own body burning.”

  “Dear God,” Stack said.

  Fagin shook his head sadly. “Sometimes I wonder.”

  Rica nudged Stack and pointed. He looked and saw a black umbrella half folded in a corner.

  “Our firebug,” Stack said. “No doubt about it.” He stepped toward the multiple sink basins and saw masses of something floating in them. “What’s this?”

  “The curtains. Looks like they were taken down ahead of time so the fire wouldn’t spread after the Torcher left. Damage control.”

  “You’re saying the killer wanted to contain the fire?”

  “Uh-huh. That’s sure what it looks like. A guilty conscience after the Wickham Building fire?”

  “Serial killers aren’t bothered by that,” Stack said.

  “Maybe all the publicity warning about high-rise fires, all of Leland Brand’s ranting, has actually done some good,” Fagin suggested.

  “A professional profiler would laugh if you told him that,” Rica said.

  “There’s something else you oughta know about this one. It was reported soon after it started. An anonymous phone call. The voice was disguised. I heard the recording. Sounded like some guy with a mouthful of marbles talking in an echo chamber.”

  “Then there’s no getting around it,” Stack said. “Whether because of guilt or some other reason, the Torcher didn’t want this fire to spread. Selectivity is being practiced here. The victim was to be the only one killed, which means murder and not the fire itself was the object.”

  “I don’t buy that last part completely,” Fagin said. “I know the work of a firebug when I see it. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like something sexual, or somebody practicing a religion. Fire does that to some people. The idea might have been to kill only Bruni L’Farceur, but if the fire isn’t part of the compulsion, why doesn’t the killer just use a gun or knife?”

  “I’m not saying the Torcher isn’t a pyromaniac,” Stack said. “I’m talking about motive. There’s some kind of profound and particular link between victim and killer. It’s that way in the killer’s mind, anyway. Or maybe it’s some kind of devious insurance scam, though we see no sign of it. Not yet, anyway.” Larry Chips’s game, Stack thought.

  “It could be we’re seeing simple compassion here,” Fagin suggested. “I mean, for the other occupants, considering what happened last time when the flames took control.”

  “Maybe,” Stack said. “But that would be unique in this kind of case. We’re almost always dealing with a sociopath unburdened by empathy and remorse.”

  “There can always be an exception,” Fagin said.

  “If serial killers ever do feel compassion, it’s only after the crime’s been committed, so it doesn’t stand in the way of their compulsion, their mission.”

  “But we do agree there was an effort here to confine the fire to the kitchen.”

  Both men looked at Rica, as if at the same time they’d just remembered she was there. “So what do you think?” Fagin asked.

  Rica turned her head and spat off to the side, into a Kleenex she’d found folded in her pocket. It wouldn’t do to have her DNA floating around the place. She felt like spitting again but resisted the temptation. The sweet, burned stench was horrible and created a terrible taste along the edges of her tongue.

  “Maybe the bastard’s an art lover,” she said.

  The Torcher enjoyed in particular the restaurant on Second Avenue because the bar featured a fireplace. It was the large stone kind, and real wood was burned so that it crackled and sometimes made sparks fly to be drawn up the flu and into the cold night.

  It intrigued the Torcher how, when you stopped to think about it, fire was everything to everyone. Always had been. Always would be. Of course few people stopped to think about it, but while they went about their business, there was the fire down in the boiler rooms of their buildings. Upstairs in their homes, while they were comfortably watching television or reading a book, there was the fire down in their basement furnaces, pulsing and living at the burning hearts of their lives. When they left their beds and stepped outside in the morning, there in the east was the fire blazing on the horizon and turning the clouds blood-red. Everything to everyone.

  One of the waiters approached the fireplace with iron tongs to cast more fuel to the flames. The Torcher always liked to watch this procedure. At times, when a fresh log was thrown on the fire, insects would feel the heat and emerge from the log’s cracks and their hiding spaces beneath the rough bark, only to be consumed by the twisting, seeking flames.

  There was no escaping the flames. Even when the great logs were burned down to a heap of glowing embers, the fire seemed only to be resting, waiting, catching its breath and testing the oxygen. It seemed to know living creatures. It seemed to know flesh and be drawn to it.

  Sometimes the fire could be exquisite.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  June 2000

  Myra Raven sat across from Hugh Danner in the coffee shop located on the northeast corner of the Ardmont Arms. They were both having iced tea and pieces of each other. Myra was gripped by a barely controlled fury. Danner was just as acrimonious but even more contained, and parrying insults with what sounded like simple logic. He knew he wasn’t fooling Myra with his slick sophistry, but what did it matter? He had the conniving bitch by the cunt hairs, and there was nada she could do about it.

  She took a slow sip of tea, failing to prevent her hand from trembling. “We had an arrangement,” she said.

  He lifted his glass and sipped. Hands steady. Notice, Myra? “Arrangements change, Myra. Everything in life changes sooner or later. Besides, this is business. That’s how you defined it, anyway, when you first approached me.”

  “You can bet our business is finished forever. That’s something that sure as hell isn’t going to change.”

  “Of course, I see your point. Now please try to see mine. The resident whose application I pushed through the board is, according to my sources, due to receive a very influential judicial appointment.”

  Myra glared across the table at him. She hated his smoothness, the pink glow of his skin after a close shave, the primitive jungle of black hairs on his bare forearms, the suave perfection of even his casual clothes, the courtroom manner the bastard probably slept with and no longer even had to practice before a mirror. Whoever he really was—and she was finding out who—he was lost inside the facade he’d built for himself. She understood that about him, probably better than anyone he’d ever met.

  “And the judge will owe you a favor,” she said bitterly.

  “Oh, more than that. He’ll owe me for not mentioning that he paid someone off to make sure he got the co-op his young wife insisted on having as a city pied-à-terre.”

  “And he’ll know what a dishonorable asshole you are.”

  “Oh, sure. You might say the future judge and
I are now partners in crime. It’s a safe arrangement. It wouldn’t behoove either of us to talk about our relationship. Just as it wouldn’t behoove either of us.”

  “That’s all it is with you, maneuvering to see who can get the other party down and stand with a sword to his heart.”

  “That’s well put, Myra. But I prefer to think of it as collaring and leashing the other party. Much more productive that way. And I’m the one holding the leash, because a judge will have much more to lose than I would. He’ll get up and follow when I tug on the leash.”

  “You are truly contemptible.”

  “As you are, if whoever’s passing judgment doesn’t understand how the world really works, the true business of the world. You do understand, Myra, which is why you’re so disturbed by what’s happened. I’ve bested you in a business deal, beat you at your own game.”

  “I don’t live in the same scummy world of blackmail you do. Which is what you’re planning on doing with that judge, blackmailing him.”

  “However you choose to define it, he’ll feel secure as long as he cooperates. And he isn’t completely without power. Remember, if I destroy him, he can at least hurt me. I wouldn’t want that. And he won’t hurt me, because I can destroy him. Just as you won’t hurt me, or him, because it would destroy you. Your client, the young cop, how can he step up and complain that the bribe he offered wasn’t productive? And how can you afford to see it made public that you grew your company into the most successful real estate agency in Manhattan by paying off influential co-op board members to ensure that your clients would be approved for residency to the exclusion of all other applicants? It’s in everyone’s best interest that none of us reveals any of this. We have a balance here, Myra. And in the end, we’ll all see that it isn’t disturbed.”

  More than Myra’s hand was trembling now. She tried to keep it inside, this developing earthquake of emotion, but she could see that Danning knew she was seriously rattled, and that rattled her all the more. She leaned toward him over the table, clasping her hands in her lap. “Listen, you despicable, butt-sucking scum ball, you don’t realize who you’re playing games with here. I swear to you you’ll be sorry if you don’t return that boy’s money.”

  Danner smiled. He really enjoyed this, she could tell. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to return his money, Myra. Unless you want to use it to buy more cosmetic surgery. Should I tell you where it would do the most good.”’

  She raised her right hand and closed it around her iced tea glass. He saw what she was thinking and merely waited for it to happen, for the cold tea and maybe the glass to follow, striking him in the face. Grounds for litigation, surely. More for him to hold over her head. More control.

  But she merely sat there, staring at him.

  A little more goading, perhaps. “Vulgarity doesn’t become you, Myra. It doesn’t fit with the kind of phony image you created years ago to hide behind. I’ve checked into your background, Myra Ravinski.”

  “My background has never been a secret.”

  “Not exactly a secret, but something you wouldn’t want emphasized, especially in a highly public trial about real estate fraud. The point is, Myra Ravinski, I understand you and I understand how it is. Now you should understand. Get used to your collar, Myra, and it won’t chafe so much. And don’t be so sure that after you think things over, you and I won’t be doing business as usual.”

  Something broke in her, but not in the way Danner had planned. Her hand relaxed on the glass and she raised it and took a sip of tea. No trembling this time. A stillness and a coolness grew in the core of her. There was ice at the pit of her being. If Danner had known about it, understood it, he would have been alarmed.

  She sat back and sighed, regarding him without blinking. “I suppose the truth is you’re right, it’s only business.”

  “Exactly. So you might as well put it behind you.”

  “Yes, I intend to.” She could see he sensed a balance had shifted. Men like Danner could always tell when that happened. She was surprised it had taken him a little longer than most to recognize it. He didn’t like this, didn’t understand the subtle change in her.

  “It’s what happens sometimes in business,” he said softly but in a patronizing tone, trying to retain control. “You got fucked, Myra, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  She nodded and stood up, leaving the check for Danner to pay.

  “That’s how people get AIDS,” she said, smiling as she walked toward the door.

  Ed Marks became an honest cop on the day Myra told him he and Amy weren’t going to get the co-op after all. She repaid their $20,000 loan from her own pocket, he knew. What bothered him was how Amy cried, and how he longed to go see whoever on the board had rejected them and use his nightstick to beat him to death.

  But what bothered him most was that a slimeball he didn’t even know had possession of the knowledge that Ed Marks, a cop and a cop’s son, was dirty. This wasn’t free meals at some hash house so he’d hang around and prevent trouble, or a merchant’s key so he could get in out of the cold sometimes. This was the kind of thing—twenty thousand was big enough money—that would kill his career and make him want to kill himself. He knew what it felt like now, and how it would feel if he gave in to the temptations of the Job again. It was all out there on the street for the taking, something beyond a cop’s salary, a cop’s pension; all a cop had to do was nod or look the other way at the right time. Not Ed Marks. Not if this was the way it could feel afterward. Nothing like this would happen to him again—ever.

  The Markses had to get out of their apartment within days. Myra Raven helped them to locate a fourth-floor walk-up to live in temporarily while they continued looking for something better and affordable. The place was decrepit, and Marks wished it had an elevator. It was a good thing Amy didn’t have to go out much, a woman carrying twins taking four flights of stairs. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair.

  Ed Marks found himself thinking more and more often that he’d like to find the bastard who put them in this position and do something about him.

  Myra couldn’t shake what had happened between her and Danner. It bothered her all the time she was trying to unwind the deal with the Marks family. She could still see the wife, Amy’s, face, almost like her own younger face, register the despair when she realized the move wasn’t going to happen. Not the move she wanted, anyway.

  Instead she was going to a Lower East Side walk-up—only for a while, both Myra and Ed Marks promised. An indefinite while. So far Myra’d had no luck in locating another co-op or condo they could afford and that would suit them.

  As the days passed, Myra became more bitter and moody, sometimes snapping at her people in the office. She was on edge, and she was drinking too much, having rediscovered martinis. She wouldn’t have her personal life affecting her business persona. Myra simply would not allow that to happen.

  She sat for hours at her desk, later and later into lonely evenings, sometimes simply staring at the paperwork before her, not really seeing it. Finally she made a phone call she’d never dreamed of making. Another mistake? Maybe, but she was willing to take the chance.

  The next night, when she buzzed up her visitor from the lobby and later opened her apartment door to his knock, she somehow knew that what she’d done was going to work out okay. The tousled blond hair, the twelve-year-old’s kind of grin, the boyishness that somehow went with the lean handsomeness, all of it was strangely reassuring as she stood there staring at him and thinking, Sonny, you are in the right business.

  “I’ll go first,” he finally said, widening the grin and extending his hand. “Hi, I’m Billy Watkins.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  February 2002

  Sometimes cracks were barely visible, and only in the right light.

  Like the yellow lamplight from the other room, angling in through the half-opened door. What the cracks might mean, that was something else.

  Mirabella lay beside Larry Chi
ps and stared at the cracks in the bedroom ceiling of her house in New Jersey, trying to read some message in them, like with her horoscope. Chips had picked her up from work, where they’d had a few drinks before leaving; then they’d driven straight here with Chips behind the wheel. He’d told her to call him Chips, said everyone did, like it was some kind of gambler’s nickname and glamorous. Mirabella hadn’t seen Larry Chips as glamorous from the beginning, only a little better than average looking with a pathetic line of bullshit. He didn’t even realize she was the one who’d picked him up.

  Sex the first night had been great. And the second and third. Chips had moved out of his rat trap apartment he’d probably rented by the hour and into her house, promising to pay half the rent when he got some money. Mirabella knew better than to plan on how to spend her windfall.

  As they’d settled into a routine, the sex became less passionate and inventive, and less frequent. Chips continued to talk a good game, but when it came time to do the deed, he often preferred to sleep off all the alcohol he’d consumed beforehand. She was sure he sometimes only pretended to fall asleep, rather than have sex with her.

  She knew he still found her attractive. He wasn’t simply using her so he could live in her house, eat her food, and use her car. Mirabella understood men. She had known enough of them to learn plenty. Chips was brighter than he seemed and was preoccupied with something. After only their first few nights together she realized he wasn’t standard issue. He came across as a small-timer, and in many ways he was one. But she had a hunch that in some ways he wasn’t small time at all. There were depths and dark sides to this one. She wondered if she really wanted to know what preoccupied him.

  Of course, that he was different was what made her curious about him, and all the more attracted to him. She’d drawn so many losers that she thought this one, just because he was different, might be better. How could she not be intrigued? It was the usual beer and football male shit, like with all the others, and then suddenly his behavior would change and confuse her.