The Night Caller

by Lutz, John

  “You know Queen’s South Homicide has the case.”

  Coop watched two young uniformed officers climb into a patrol car, the way he and Billard had done years and years ago. Young knights of the law. “I know, Art, but word gets around.”

  “I made sure it found its way here,” Billard said. He shrugged and ran a hand over his bald pate. “So what do you want to know?”

  Coop sat down in the hard chair. He’d expected a little more resistance. Maybe even wanted it. Because the first question was going to be hard to ask. He swallowed and said, “They find any sign of sexual assault?”

  “Traces of the sort of powder used to keep latex gloves from sticking together during packaging were found on her body. All over her body.”

  “But she was dressed.”

  “Maybe undressed; then her clothes were put back on her. Or maybe they were never fully removed, only unbuttoned and rearranged.”

  Coop spoke through clenched teeth. “Penetration?”

  “Not much.”

  “What do you mean, not much?”

  “There’s something we’re not telling the public, Coop.”

  “But you’ll tell me, Art. You’ll tell me!”

  “I didn’t tell you,” Billard said reluctantly. “But if I had, I’d make sure you knew that this one is a tight, small-circle secret even inside the department. The public’s not to know—just a very few NYPD personnel, and the killer. Understood?”

  “Understood,” Coop said.

  “A small plastic saint was found wedged in her vaginal tract.”

  “A saint?”

  “Augustine,” Billard said. “The sinner who found salvation. It’s the sort of cheap statuette that can be bought almost anywhere that sells religious items. The ME says it was placed in her after her death. There’s that, anyway.”

  Coop bowed his head. That, anyway. He got on with it, calling on professionalism, hiding behind it. “Death was by strangulation?”

  Billard nodded. “Killer used some kind of ligature he took with him.”

  “They turn up any witnesses?”

  “Not yet.”

  Coop felt his fist clench in his lap. “That’s hard to believe, Art. Assuming they did a decent canvass, they should’ve turned up somebody by now who saw or heard something.”

  “What can I tell you? They’re doing their best.”

  “Suppose they’re not trying hard enough. Or people aren’t talking.”

  Billard leaned back and folded his hands over his broad stomach. There was a subtle shift of mood in the room. Coop wasn’t surprised. Billard gave him the shades-down look cops give civilians. “I’m not following you.”

  “What if a cop was the killer? And he’s being protected?”

  “You don’t really believe that, Coop.”

  “It’s Maureen’s idea.”

  “Maureen. Well, she’s a piece of work.” Billard had never liked Maureen.

  “I can’t prove her wrong. She’s asking how come no one saw or heard anything, and I don’t know what to tell her.”

  “This was a weekday in October, Coop. Not many people around down at Breezy.”

  “My neighbors—”

  “The Mallons were at their apartment in Jackson Heights. The O’Briens were at their jobs in Manhattan. The nearest people were three houses away.”

  “They still should have heard something,” Coop said stubbornly.

  Billard unfolded his hands and placed them on the desktop. He hesitated a moment, then said, “There probably wasn’t much to hear, Coop.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Forensic guys have been over the scene thoroughly. No sign of forced entry. No sign of a struggle.”

  Coop dropped his gaze to the worn, clean linoleum floor. Why should he be surprised by what Billard was telling him? His own thoughts had been running this way earlier. He just hadn’t wanted to take the next logical step.

  “She let the killer in, then,” he said slowly. “It was somebody she knew.”

  “Looks that way.” Billard hesitated again. “It may have been somebody she was very close to.”

  Coop looked at him.

  “The way she was laid out afterward, her hair spread so carefully around her head. The killer wanted to make her look like she was asleep. When you see that at a crime scene, it usually indicates remorse.”

  Coop realized he’d been holding his breath and there was a lump in his throat. He swallowed a bitterness that had collected at the base of his tongue, and made himself breathe evenly.

  “You okay, Coop?”

  “Sure.” Except for the fear. “Go on.”

  “Lots of prints in the house, most of them Bette’s. We checked them out through NCIC and VICAP and came up empty. Several were untraceable, which only means our killer might never have been fingerprinted—no military service or arrest record. The only physical clue is the footprint.”

  Coop sat up straighter and looked at Billard.

  “We found a shoe print in the dust on the floor right inside the front door. If Bette knew him and let him in as we suspect, it might well be the killer’s.” He reached into a desk drawer and laid a photograph on the desk. “This is digital,” he said, “computer enhanced.”

  Coop leaned over the desk and examined the photo. The footprint was only a partial, the sole of a large shoe. The design on the sole was a series of crisscrossed indentations reaching to the shoe’s edges.

  “Distinctive sole tread pattern,” Coop said.

  “We haven’t been able to trace it yet. We’re still trying, contacting foreign and domestic shoe manufacturers. We’ll match it eventually.”

  “Can I have a copy of this, Art?”

  “Take that one. We got more, and it’s on disk anyway.”

  Coop slipped the photo into a side pocket of his sport jacket, thinking as he had many times about how much police work had changed since he’d first joined the department. The only disks they’d talked about then were the ones in your spine that got rearranged after years of wearing out patrol cars.

  “Not much more to tell, Coop. Whatever Maureen thinks, Queen’s South Homicide has been doing a thorough job on this investigation. They’ve interviewed people all up and down your street, all over Breezy Point. Nobody looks even remotely possible for this crime. They’ll keep trying, of course, but they’re talking now as if it was somebody from the outside—somebody Bette invited down to see her. Who else knew she was staying at the cottage? Apart from you?”

  Coop shrugged hopelessly. “She told me she wanted peace and quiet. It sounded like I was the only one she was telling.”

  “I know you two were close. Any idea why she wanted to stay out there alone on Breezy Point?”

  “Not much of one. She told me she was feeling stressed and wanted to get away for a while and relax.”

  “She say why she felt stressed?”

  “No. I got the impression it was her job, but I could be wrong. She sounded a little nervous, but not like she was anywhere near some kind of breaking point.”

  “What it all probably means, Coop, is nobody but an intimate would have known she was staying at your beach cottage. Someone she knew and trusted killed her.”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Was there anyone—”

  “She wasn’t in the habit of telling us about her boyfriends. Maureen or me.”

  Billard started to say something more, then changed his mind and clamped his lips closed. Old cops knew where not to trespass.

  “Do you mind if I look the place over later today?” Coop asked.

  “The beach house? Sure. Hell, it’s your place. Crime scene people are done with it.”

  Coop moved toward the door. “If you learn anything new, will you let me know, Art?”

  “Sure.” Billard tilted his head to the side and regarded Coop with his cop’s flat eyes. “You’re planning on getting active in the case, aren’t you?”

  Coop looked back at him, knowing that
his own eyes were just as flat, just as unreadable. “No. I’m only asking.”

  Billard ended the staring contest, shaking his head and looking away. “You know as well as I do we can’t stop you from going around asking questions, as long as you don’t cross certain lines. You sure that’s what you want to do, though?”

  Coop didn’t reply.

  “How’re you feeling, Coop?” Billard went on after a moment. “I mean, how’s your health?”

  “Still like I told you at Seconds. I’m okay.”

  “But you also gave the impression you don’t believe…that it’s gonna last. You get into real stress, you might shorten what time you have. Maybe, you stay stress free, you got years. You might even change your mind, go in with me at Seconds.”

  “I’m not going to count on years, Art. I’m not going to leave things undone.”

  “They’ve got good people down at Queen’s South. They won’t let this drop.”

  “The case is getting old. We both know the clearance rates drop with every hour that passes after a homicide. And this one was four days ago.”

  “Yeah, we both know.” Billard looked at the floor. “And we both know what we’d say to a homicide victim’s father, if he talked about investigating the murder himself.”

  “I won’t fuck up the case, Art.”

  “That’s not what I’m worried about. There are emotional dangers when a cop gets involved in an investigation of the murder of someone he loved. You’re bound to find out things you don’t want to know. The truth can be like a bullet to the heart.”

  “I’ve never been afraid of the truth,” Coop said, knowing as he spoke the words that they were a lie.

  Billard didn’t press him any harder. He gazed out the dirty window at nothing. “Okay, old friend. I’ll keep you apprised of any new developments in the case. But it should work both ways. What you learn, we need to know.”

  “That isn’t any problem,” Coop said. “I want to nail Bette’s killer.”

  “We all do,” Billard said. “But you’re the one who better be the most careful.”

  Billard sat at his desk thinking for a long time after Coop had left. Thinking about what he hadn’t mentioned to Coop. That the tacky plastic saint, about five inches tall, had been inserted in Bette’s vagina to a depth made possible by a strategically placed knife cut.

  St. Augustine. Billard the lapsed Catholic was pretty sure St. Augustine was the saint who had a lengthy and illegitimate carnal affair with a woman before seeking the solace and wisdom of the church. What if anything that might mean, Billard didn’t know. Other than that St. Augustine was the department’s ace, an aspect of the crime that, outside a tightly knit group inside the NYPD, only the killer would know.

  What Billard knew was that this was one of those times he was glad he didn’t have a daughter.

  Chapter Five

  The first potential witness Coop talked to was the rent-a-cop manning the kiosk at the entrance to Breezy Point. It didn’t go very well. Yes, the police had already interviewed him, and no, he didn’t have anything to tell them. He didn’t remember any suspicious vehicles or any strangers passing him on the afternoon of the murder. And as Coop knew, there were ways to sneak onto Breezy Point without passing him.

  Coop thanked him and drove on to park across from his beach cottage. He sat in the car for a while. The narrow street lined with one-story wooden cottages was as quiet as it had been last week. Only a few houses had cars parked in front of them. An old neighbor named Jack Reynolds, who never remembered Coop’s name, sat on his deck, reading the Daily News. He didn’t look up when a couple passed by, heading for the beach. They were well bundled, for the wind was strong and chilly. Coop sat and watched for several minutes without seeing anybody else.

  He supposed he had to accept it: someone could have come here, killed his daughter, and gone without being seen or heard. It was possible.

  He got out of the car and crossed the street. Jack Reynolds didn’t look up from his paper.

  Coop was braced for the silence inside the cottage but it still took the breath from him. Violent death did that, left a vacuum in its wake.

  There was an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach, and his head felt the way it did when he was on airliners dropping fast in their final approach to land. The silence persisted. He coughed for no reason other than to break it.

  As if cued by the abrupt sound, the refrigerator motor clicked on and droned in the kitchen, the way it had been droning when Coop discovered Bette’s body.

  He wasn’t surprised to see the faint, dusty footprint on the tile floor just inside the front door. Drawing the digital photo from his pocket, he stooped and compared image with reality.

  The computer had done a good job. The enhanced likeness of the print was doubtless a perfect match with the actual shoe sole.

  The print had been made because Bette hadn’t gotten around to cleaning up the place, including sweeping away accumulated dust on smooth surfaces. That kind of untidiness wasn’t like her.

  But then it wasn’t like her to be murdered by someone she knew.

  Coop felt as if the world had been rearranged like a kaleidoscope. Previous patterns seemed to mean nothing.

  If a similar print had appeared in soft earth outside, Billard would have told Coop. But he went back out and looked around the perimeter of the house anyway, making sure.

  Back inside, he kept his eyes averted from the couch where his dead daughter had reclined, and he went about duplicating the NYPD’s efforts. It was always possible he’d find something they’d overlooked. He knew they’d been professional and thorough, but he cared more.

  Aware that he was probably wasting his time, he examined the soles of the two pairs of shoes Bette had brought with her and made sure neither was a match for the dusty half footprint. Then he checked the cottage’s closets to see if anyone had left behind shoes that might make similar prints. He found none.

  In fact, there wasn’t anything very revealing in the cottage. Bette’s clothes, still hung in the closet or folded in dresser drawers, were all casual; she hadn’t planned on getting dressed up while in New York. Beneath a folded sweater in a bottom bureau drawer was a penis-shaped rubber vibrator. Coop didn’t like seeing it but knew he shouldn’t be surprised. In another drawer was a packet of condoms. Okay, no surprise there, either. Bette was—had been—an attractive and vital twenty-seven-year-old woman.

  He wondered how thorough the Queen’s South detectives had been. Was there a list in a file drawer somewhere, an inventory of his daughter’s possessions? Probably. He didn’t like thinking about that, either.

  There was nothing in the desk or her luggage that was connected with her work. She’d meant it when she’d told Coop she wanted to get away from her job for a while, from the small town of Haverton, New Jersey. He wasn’t sure exactly what she did in her job at Prudent Stand Real Estate, but apparently it had been getting to her. Or maybe something else entirely had been upsetting her, and only incidentally making it difficult for her to concentrate on her work. Coop wished now their conversation had been longer, that he’d asked more about her, how she was, what was bothering her, did she know he loved her and did she love him?…

  A lump had formed in his throat. He pushed away thoughts of Bette. Those kinds of thoughts. He was on the job now, with added purpose and more than a little rusty, but on the job.

  He felt unexpected great relief when he closed and locked the cottage door behind him.

  He wasn’t sure if he’d ever stay there again.

  The Night Caller watched Georgianna Mason trudge up Vector Street in downtown Seattle. She was breathing hard, not in very good shape to live in such a hilly part of town.

  Not aware that she was being observed, Georgianna, a slim, attractive woman in her forties, had met two friends for lunch at a hotel restaurant. She and the other women talked incessantly through lunch, exchanging stories and laughing. Then all three women lit up cigarettes. The Night Call
er disapproved.

  Georgianna had walked to the restaurant from her apartment ten blocks away, possibly because the day was so beautiful and without a hint of rain.

  When she was halfway up Vector she turned on a side street and entered a large business building. She was going to do what many savvy Seattle residents did to avoid walking the downtown hills, where the buildings were built into the grades; she would take one of the elevators up several floors and use an exit leading out to the next, higher block.

  The Night Caller walked faster, breathing harder and feeling the strain from the climb in thighs and buttocks, and reached the end of the block soon enough to see her walk from the building’s glass revolving door. Back on the sidewalk, Georgianna hesitated. Instead of continuing in the direction of her apartment, she crossed the street and entered a department store.

  The Night Caller didn’t bother following her. This was fortunate. She’d be occupied for a while. Her time shopping would create opportunity.

  Fifteen minutes later, in a room at the Holiday Inn, the Night Caller used a notebook computer to go on-line, accessing Georgianna’s service by typing her password.

  The cursor darted, the built-in mouse clicked, and Georgianna’s e-mail files were read, her on-line banking and brokerage accounts were examined, and the log of her most recent Web site visits was called up.

  Back to the e-mail. There had been something there. The Night Caller’s breathing became deeper, more rapid. He felt the familiar tugging, subtle but there, like intimations at the very outer edges of a whirlpool. Georgianna seemed to have a new boyfriend, one she’d encountered on-line but never met personally and who lived in San Francisco. Backtracking thorough e-mail and message boards led to a pattern of increasingly sweet and soulful exchanges between the two cyberlovers. Some of them were absolutely cloying.

  This was tragic and wonderful. So intimate and revealing. Georgianna merited closer and more frequent contact.

  The Night Caller liked to keep in touch.