The Night Caller

by Lutz, John

  They were wrong but they were right. In time he understood everything. The simplicity beneath the complication. Horror and liberation. Always a price.

  Two of the other passengers got off at lower floors. The Night Caller and a small, nervous man the lighted panel indicated was going up to eight, blood and radiology, were the only occupants by the time the elevator reached six.

  As the doors slid smoothly open, The Night Caller stepped out and barely glanced at the knot of people on his right, about to board the adjacent elevator going down.

  His step faltered and he did a double take.

  Cara Callahan had just boarded the down elevator with half a dozen others!

  He wasn’t imagining it! He was positive! Earlier he’d seen her with the Distraught Dad. Now at Mercy! Cara Callahan!

  She must have been talking to people here—on the sixth floor!

  Instead of continuing on his way to recovery, he spun quickly in a U-turn and entered the down elevator.

  He made it just before the doors slid closed, cutting off the view of the duty nurse at the counter about to greet him, now staring curiously.

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Coop walked the streets, head down, shoulders hunched, hardly feeling the cold. The shoe prints had finally yielded their meaning. He was sure now the killer was some kind of hospital worker. A doctor?

  He had a hard time believing that one. Though most of the fatal wounds had been skillfully inflicted. He recalled the medical report in the Marlee Clark case describing how the deep hack at the back of her neck, just beneath the skull, had severed the ganglion, in effect separating body from brain as neatly as a guillotine blade. Theresa Dravic had been killed the same way. Ann Callahan had been taken with a precise knife thrust. And Georgianna Mason had been alive most of the time in her bathtub while the can opener was used on her, yet little blood or water had been splashed from the tub. That had to require some kind of skill, to render her alive but helpless to resist such a thing. And there was apparent skill in the knife cuts to allow deeper insertion of the plastic saints in the vaginal tracts. Medical skill.

  Bette had gone into Mercy for diagnostic tests. Ann Callahan had gone there for her knee operation.

  Coop stopped at another public phone. He looked around, realizing he was on Riverside near the park. He dug in his pocket for more coins, stuffed them into the phone with cold fingers, and called Maureen’s home number.

  Her phone rang seven times before she answered.

  “What do you want?” she asked gruffly, after he’d identified himself.

  “A favor. For me and for Bette.”

  “Describe it,” she said, sounding dubious.

  “Can you go into your office at the insurance company tonight?”

  “Tonight? At this hour? Why would I want to do that?”

  “To check on something for me. For us. Using your company computer and software.”

  “What about Deni Green? Doesn’t she have a computer?”

  “Deni is dead.”

  “Dead…” Maureen repeated numbly.

  He told her what had happened, then said, “You’re the only one who can help now. And Deni wouldn’t have been able to get into the confidential information I—we need, anyway.”

  “What kind of confidential information?” she asked weakly. Obviously Deni’s death had shaken her badly.

  “Medical and insurance records. If you have access to the computer and databases, I need you to check the names of women I think might be victims of the same man who killed Bette. I need to know if they had any insured medical procedures performed on them during the last several years. Can you check through their medical insurance?”

  “It would be easy if my company insured them. Possible if they had other insurance, but it would take a little longer. What specifically are you searching for?”

  “I want to determine if they had hospital stays, at which hospitals, and who were the attending physicians and other medical personnel.”

  “That last might be difficult. I’d have only the billing records to work with.”

  “Will you try?” Coop pleaded. “Will you please go into the office and try?”

  “No.”

  He held his temper. “Why not?”

  “I won’t need to go in. My home computer gives me access to the one at work. I can do what you want right here at my desk in my living room. Or at least I can try. I don’t guarantee results. Do you want me to phone you when and if I find out anything?”

  “No,” he said hastily. “I’ll check back with you every hour or so. I’m going to be moving around. Do you have a paper and pencil handy?” he asked, before she could question him about his whereabouts.

  She told him to wait a moment, then returned to the phone.

  He gave her the names and exact spellings of the victims, working from memory, even supplying her with some of the addresses. He would have added the names Dickerson had given him, but the napkin he’d copied them on at Starbuck’s was in his apartment.

  “I’ll get back to you,” he said when he was finished. “And thanks, Maureen.”

  “I’m doing it for Bette,” she said, and hung up.

  What Maureen hadn’t told Coop was that the last time she’d talked with Deni, in the writer’s apartment, Deni had shown her a list of several other probable victims in different parts of the country. While Deni was in the bathroom, Maureen had taken the opportunity to run off a duplicate of the list on her office copy machine. She’d planned on using the list to goad Coop into more aggressive action.

  She turned away from the phone and switched on her computer, then began rummaging through her desk drawers to find the list. Along with the names Coop had supplied her, it would be interesting to match its names with on-line insurance claim files.

  Standing behind and very near to Cara in the crowded elevator, the Night Caller studied her slightly distorted reflection in the gleaming steel sliding door. Her image was dreamlike, wavering with her slightest movement as if she were underwater. Perhaps the dream image was accurate. There were Eastern religions that considered God real and life an illusion, a dream.

  She hadn’t noticed his face, he was sure, when he’d crowded onto the elevator. Her back had still been turned and she was apologizing to someone, perhaps for stepping on his toe. Now, in the reflecting door, his own distorted features seemed much like hers. Only he knew the distortion was more than simply reflection. Yet only he saw the distortion. In reality his cosmetic surgery performed years ago had been as effective as possible. The scars, the nerve-damaged, droopy eyelids that made him appear always weary, the jagged discoloration along the edge of his jaw that pulled one corner of his mouth sideways, lending him a sardonic, smug expression even in his sleep, all had been repaired. The problem was that such extensive surgery had left his face handsome to perfection, but with a masklike wooden quality that drew stares. It was as if the perfectly carved head of a puppet had been fitted to a human being. Pinocchio, but with a perfect nose.

  He’d heard about Cara’s sister Ann’s terror and screaming in the recovery room while under anesthetic for a simple knee operation to remove loose cartilage. Though a local would have been acceptable, on his advice she’d opted for general anesthetic. First the relaxant and amnesiate to dispel anxiety and ensure she’d have no recollection of the procedure, then the Demerol—more than required—all administered intravenously. Perhaps he’d somehow underdosed the amnesiate. The Night Caller was sure the grotesqueness of his face, magnified in the anesthetic haze, was what had frightened Ann Callahan so in the recovery room.

  Now he strongly suspected that Cara Callahan had heard about Ann’s terrible vision. It would be remembered because several of the nurses had been chewed out by that asshole Evans for not controlling Ann. The dreamworld attempting to influence yet another dream.

  The elevator descended toward hell and the lobby. Elevator etiquette was still being observed, everyone staring straight ahead or upward at
a slight angle. Would Cara glance in his direction as passengers got out?

  At the fourth floor the elevator stopped and three people got out. At three, two more departed. The remaining passengers spread out, seeking the natural space around them that made fools feel safer. They thought the elevator was getting larger when it was actually getting smaller, warmer.

  When the elevator stopped at two, four people piled in, two women and two men. One of the men was immense, so heavy he was having difficulty breathing and the bellows sound of his ongoing struggle filled the elevator. Everyone already on the elevator moved to the rear. The Night Caller edged away from Cara, toward the opposite steel wall, so he could continue standing slightly behind her.

  The elevator plunged to the lobby, slowed, found its level, and the doors slid open. Those last to board got out first. The obese man laughed and slid his arm around the shoulders of one of the women. A nurse whose name might have been Amanda stood aside and let an older man and woman file out, then got out herself.

  That was when Cara glanced over at the Night Caller.

  Looked at him again, then quickly away.

  But he knew. He knew them all and had seen the divine spark in her eyes.

  She knew who he was. From the street, the cathedral, the description of her sister’s vision, the mating of minds in space, she knew they’d met before.

  In a brief suspension of time the Night Caller took it all in. No passengers were waiting at lobby level to board the elevator. A woman had just pushed through the revolving doors, noticed the elevator, and was picking up her pace across the lobby so she might get in. Cara Callahan, studiously not looking at him, was stepping forward to get out.

  To do what? Scream? Hurry to a security guard? Phone the police?

  We know each other too well for that, the Night Caller thought, and reached for her.

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Cara almost made it. Her right foot was almost on the lobby tiles when she felt a powerful arm encircle her waist from behind. She tried inhaling to scream but couldn’t as she was yanked back into the elevator.

  Immediately the arm was up around her throat, keeping her silent while she struggled. As she got a hand into her purse and felt around for her gun, she saw the man’s other hand reach forward, his finger press the CLOSE DOOR button. A woman had been hurrying across the lobby toward the elevators. Cara had seen her at an angle, observed her delay as the four people who’d gotten off the elevator crossed her path, momentarily blocking her from view. She would come into sight soon, see what was happening.

  Then the door began to slide closed.

  She thought she caught just a glimpse of the hurrying woman’s dark coat as the view into the lobby was narrowed to a thin vertical slit, then disappeared altogether.

  Cara was alone with the man she was sure had murdered her sister. The man with the face Ann must have dreamed about in the recovery room. He was incredibly handsome—too much so to be real, as if he’d been created by art photographers and air-brushed. His improbably serene face was immobile and unreal, like a mask. The mask Ann must have seen while momentarily drifting up from under anesthetic in the operating room. The mask with the malevolent eyes, fixed on her with a gaze he didn’t think she’d return.

  Cara saw his free hand reach out and his forefinger firmly press the bottom elevator button lettered S. That caused him to shift his balance and loosen his grip slightly. She knew she still had a chance! This one chance!

  Her hand was deeper inside her purse, fumbling through wadded tissue, comb, ballpoint pen, pack of chewing gum. With a horror that numbed her completely, she realized the gun Coop had given her was missing from her purse. She must have somehow forgotten it at the apartment, but she couldn’t remember even having removed it.

  She was jolted by a sharp stinging sensation in the side of her neck, as if she’d been bitten by an insect.

  Or had the man with the marionette face leaned over and very delicately bitten her? A vampire? Was that why he appeared so artificially human? Absurd!

  Then she was falling.

  The elevator was descending.

  Her terror remained above, drifting away from her.

  The Night Caller was sure that what happened at the elevator hadn’t been noticed. The woman who’d just entered the lobby didn’t have the angle of vision to see them. And it had all been done quickly. Quickly and neatly. Arm, pocket, button, needle. Animal instinct. Flash of fang, slash of claw. The impulse to survive lent economy of thought and motion.

  He could be reasonably sure no one would be near the elevator in the surgery wing subbasement. The maintenance men, if they were in the lower level at all, stayed at the other end, well away from where the cadavers were stored. And almost always they used the service elevator.

  As the elevator dropped, he glanced down at Cara, slumped on the floor unconscious from the powerful soporific he’d injected in her. He’d felt the disposable needle he always carried in his jacket pocket in case a patient got violent, and with one hand removed its plastic guard and readied it even before the elevator reached the lobby. He hoped that in his necessary haste he hadn’t injected any air that might cause an embolism. But he doubted that had occurred, and it was seldom as serious as laymen assumed from watching TV and reading mystery novels.

  Cara’s beautiful face was still, her expression untroubled. He was glad. He bent slightly, extended his hand, and lifted her long red braid. After running it gently through his fingers, he draped it softly over her shoulder.

  His fear, his panic, had been momentary. A meteoric flash of flame across a sky where otherwise the heavens were in balance.

  Pattern, darkness, light, and shadow, voices not his own.

  Then fate transcended chance.

  Control had been maintained.

  “Julia.”

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  “Nighklauer,” Maureen said, when Coop called her apartment later that night. He was surprised by the vibrancy in her voice. The excitement.

  “You were right,” she went on. “All the names you gave me, the murder victims, had medical procedures performed at two hospitals in the city, and two in Seattle and Miami. All different procedures, some minor, some serious. Ellen Banta, Bette, and Theresa Dravic in New York, Marlee Clark in Miami, and Georgianna Mason in Seattle.”

  “So who’s Nighklauer?” Coop asked. “The doctor who performed these procedures?”

  “No, they were mostly different doctors. One at Greater Dade Hospital in Miami, one at St. Bartholomew in Seattle; the others, including Bette’s diagnostic tests, were performed by two different surgeons at Mercy Hospital in Manhattan.”

  “Then who’s Nighklauer? A nurse?”

  “An anesthesiologist,” Maureen said. “They often bill separately, kind of the freelancers of medicine, so it took me a while to find it. Dr. Victor Nighklauer was the attending anesthesiologist in each procedure. He’s practiced for years in the New York area, but he was requested by a surgeon in Miami to perform an operation on Marlee Clark the tennis star. Her surgeon specialized in sports injuries and was on staff at Mercy the previous year before moving to Florida. After that, he moved to the West Coast, California and Washington, before returning eleven months ago to New York. Not only that, I checked by phone with someone I know at Mercy, and Nighklauer still practices there. He has a handsome but masklike face from a childhood accident he never talks about. The nurses refer to him as the Night Caller, because that’s what his name sounds like when you say it fast, and because of his insistence on visiting his patients late at night after the morning of their operations, to check on them. Most anesthesiologists don’t do that.”

  A masklike face. Coop had a vision of the man in the long coat, collar turned up, muffler bunched high and tight around his throat, hat brim pulled low in front. Concealing most of his face.

  Mercy Hospital.

  Cara had said she was going to talk to the nurses at Mercy Hospital about Ann.

  “So
mething else, Coop. I had some names of probable other victims Deni gave me, going back over the last five years. They were from Florida, California, and Washington state. They all had insurance claims for medical procedures during that period, and Dr. Nighklauer was the attending anesthesiologist.”

  Coop knew these must be the names that were on the list Dickerson had found in Deni’s apartment. “Thanks, Maureen! Now do me another favor. Call Art Billard and tell him what you just told me. Then tell him Cara Callahan and Nighklauer might be at Mercy Hospital. Will you do that?”

  “Cara Callahan?”

  “Please, Maureen!”

  “If you say.”

  He gave her Billard’s home and department number.

  “Don’t forget, Maureen.”

  “Listen, be—”

  But he’d already hung up the phone and had stepped off the curb, looking desperately up and down the street for a cab, ignoring the cold wind that plucked at his collar.

  Folded gurneys, collapsible wheelchairs, worn mattresses, empty oxygen bottles. The Night Caller knew no one would enter the subbasement storeroom. In a corner leaned half a dozen obsolete wheelchairs. Soon, when late visiting hours were over and the night shift arrived, and the hospital upstairs was teeming with people coming and going, he would tie Cara into the wheelchair, cover her with a blanket, and wheel her from a side door. From there it was only a short distance to where his car was parked. He was wearing street clothes and had left his coat, hat, and muffler on four in an employees’ lounge closet. That was all right; he would remove his tie, turn up his shirt collar to conceal the scars on his jaw and neck, keep his head down as if concerned for the patient. Hospital employees would assume he was a volunteer wheeling someone to a waiting car or taxi. Necessary for insurance purposes.

  The Night Caller smiled.

  Thank God for medical insurance.