Night Victims (The Night Spider)

by John Lutz

  When Marla returned to the living room, Vertigo was still rewinding. The counter on the control panel was showing a blur of descending numbers, indicating the machine’s breathless speed.

  Marla sat on the sofa and stared at the swift backward flow of numerals, the reversal of tape and time. Cause and effect becoming effect and cause. Consequences known ahead of time. If only it could be that easy. . . editing life like editing tape.

  She sipped her water with its faint tang of lemon and thought about bourbon and soda. About Thomas Horn.

  All the things she couldn’t have.

  Horn sat next to Anne in fourth-row-center orchestra, and watched the closing first act number of Mortgage and Marriage. Anne seemed to like the elaborately staged musical; Horn figured it would have a brief run. The male lead was miscast and had little voice, preventing the female lead and supporting actors from salvaging the play. The poorly choreographed dance numbers were a waste of wonderful talent, seeming more like exercise classes than Broadway dance numbers. The reviewers tried to warn us, Horn thought. The Time’s theater critic had been right. It happened.

  The dancers in the chorus struck awkward poses while the athletic young man who played the bank’s loan officer did a series of back flips across the stage. Then the theater went dark.

  Intermission, thank God!

  When the houselights came up, Horn stood and stretched. Anne looked over at him and smiled. She did like this monstrosity of a musical. So did the people around them, who were talking and laughing and saying how good the first act was. It made Horn wonder. He whispered in Anne’s ear, then edged out into the crowded aisle to make his way to the lobby and join the line outside the men’s room. Unlike the stage, it was a place where people knew what they were doing.

  As he emerged from the auditorium into the cooler air of the carpeted lobby, a man standing near the bar detached himself from the knot of people waiting to order drinks and came toward him.

  Horn was astounded to see it was Luke Altman.

  “Great first act,” Altman said, smiling.

  “I’ve got to think,” Horn said, “that you being here is more than coincidence.”

  “I thought Breaking the Code was still playing.”

  “A spook with a sense of humor.”

  “Not so unusual. Nothing’s funnier than geopolitics.” Altman reached into the pocket of his dark blue suitcoat and pulled out a letter-size white envelope. “While I happen to be here enjoying the show, I might as well give you this.”

  Just as if you didn’t follow us here from home or the restaurant.

  He handed the envelope to Horn, who accepted it and slid it into the inside pocket of his sport jacket.

  “It’s a list of names,” Altman said. “Former members of that special unit you mentioned during our last conversation.”

  “Why have you changed your mind?” Horn asked.

  Altman shrugged. “Because I did a more detailed check on you, Thomas Horn. You’re a very capable fellow. And looking over your record, one can only conclude that you never give up. That even a stake through the heart wouldn’t make you give up. Since you’d probably get what you wanted, eventually, we thought we might as well give it to you up front and prevent you from making a lot of waves.”

  “So you’re taking the easiest course.”

  “Oh, no. You wouldn’t want to know the easiest course.”

  “You said former members.”

  “Present members needn’t concern you. They’ve already been considered and cleared.” He smiled. “These men wouldn’t have the time or opportunity to commit civilian crimes.”

  Horn knew he was probably right.

  The lobby lights blinked. Act Two of the debacle was about to begin.

  “We’d better get back to our seats,” Altman said. “I want to see if the cute young couple gets loan approval from the banker who does back flips.”

  “I don’t look for a happy ending,” Horn told him. “At least not one anybody’d believe.”

  “It’s your business to be cynical,” Altman said. “In my business we hope for long runs.” He turned and strolled toward the carpeted stairs leading to the balcony.

  Horn knew this theater; there was a side exit on the landing.

  He took what little intermission time was left to continue to the men’s room. He found an empty stall and had a preliminary look at Altman’s list.

  Only nine names. Apparently, the members of this special unit stayed in the military, or often didn’t survive long enough to complete their hitch.

  It occurred to Horn that his wasn’t necessarily the most dangerous profession.

  He was the last one in the theater to return to his seat, just before the houselights died and the curtain rose. He caused quite a stir, trampling toes and asking to be excused over and over.

  As the auditorium faded into darkness, he saw Anne glaring and smiling at him simultaneously, as if he were at the same time annoying and amusing.

  He ignored her and what was happening onstage and thought back on his conversation with Altman out in the lobby. Altman had a subtle sense of humor you usually didn’t find in a spook. Give the bastard that.

  And nothing else.

  19

  Paula noticed a space across the street from the Home Away and didn’t have to double-park. Driving Manhattan’s narrow streets had proven no problem for her, despite the fact that in New Orleans, once out of the French Quarter, she’d seldom had to worry about both sides of the car.

  “You might remark on it,” Paula said.

  Bickerstaff went all innocent. “Remark on what?”

  “My luck at finding parking spaces in this rabbit-warren of a city.”

  “Oh. Sure. But who needs ‘em? Why don’t you just double-park all the time like me?”

  “So some citizen won’t be tugging on my sleeve asking me to move so he can get his car out.”

  “Yeah, I guess there’s something to that. Anyway, I was thinking about other things and didn’t notice.”

  Paula wished he’d think about dropping off his suit at the cleaners. On damp days it was beginning to give off an unpleasant musty smell. “You were thinking about ice fishing, I suppose.”

  “You’re unnecessarily cruel to me, Paula. I was wondering about the list the spook gave Horn. We start trusting information from the CIA, we might be headed off in the wrong direction.”

  “If you can’t trust your government, who can you trust?”

  “We both know the answer to that.”

  Paula dropped the visor showing the car was NYPD so they wouldn’t get a ticket. Then she and Bickerstaff got out and crossed the street to the diner that had become their unofficial headquarters since Horn had gotten involved with the case.

  Bickerstaff held the door open for her, probably because he thought it would annoy her.

  The diner was warm, like the morning outside, and most of the customers eating breakfast were at the counter or tables nearest the door. Paula saw Horn seated in his usual booth, in a small alcove a comfortable distance from the other customers. He had his head down and was reading a folded newspaper, a cup of coffee and his half-eaten breakfast before him on the table. Damned corn muffins! Paula knew that because of Horn she was going to try them one of these mornings—animal and vegetable fat, and probably even mineral fat, if there were such a thing, racing straight to her hips.

  She had to admit the toasted muffins smelled good, along with the fresh coffee. She and Bickerstaff said hello and slid into the booth to sit opposite Horn.

  He set aside his newspaper. Paula saw that he’d been reading a theater review.

  He used his forefinger to prop his reading glasses back up on the bridge of his nose. “Marriage and Mortgage,” he said. “Stay away from it.”

  “Amen,” Paula said.

  “The play,” Horn said. “That’s what Anne and I saw last night. It was torture.”

  “What did the spook think of it?” Bickerstaff asked, makin
g Paula wince. How could Bickerstaff be such a good cop and come up with such inane questions?

  “The idiot liked it. What do you think that says about him?”

  “That he really is CIA,” Bickerstaff said.

  Marla the waitress came by; Paula ordered coffee and juice, Bickerstaff bacon and eggs. Paula caught the way Marla looked at Horn as she topped off his cup. Probably nothing, but still. . . Marla wasn’t all that old, and not bad-looking. And Horn was a handsome guy for his age. Well, a handsome guy, period, if you liked the Cro-Magnon type with brains.

  “Here’s the list,” Horn said, when Marla had drifted back behind the counter. He’d taken folded white slips of paper from his pocket. “I made copies for each of you.”

  Paula and Bickerstaff accepted their copies and unfolded them. Nine names, with addresses and phone numbers.

  “These names are all former members of a secret Special Forces mountain unit that conducted black operations in the war in Afghanistan as well as various other trouble spots around the world. I’ve already done some preliminary checking. Three of the men are deceased, two are permanently impaired by war wounds, and one is grotesquely overweight. It happens that two of the remaining three live in the New York area. The third lives in Philadelphia, not all that far away. The plan is for you two to split up today and see what you find out about the two in New York. I have connections in Philly and will have that one looked into to see if our guy there rates our continued interest. Each of the slips of paper I gave you has a circled name. Those are the men you drew when I handed out the lists just a moment ago. Look at who and where they are and let me know if there’s a problem.”

  Paula looked. Her circled name was Will Lincoln, with an address in Queens.

  “No problem,” she said.

  “Not here, either,” Bickerstaff said.

  “This might all be going nowhere,” Horn told them, “but be careful with these two guys. We don’t want them to know they’re being investigated until we learn a little about them.

  Check to see if they have priors, maybe talk to some of the neighbors. You’re either going to get a solid citizen who’s done his duty for his country, or you’re going to be stepping into a tiger pit. And you probably won’t know the difference until it’s too late.”

  “My guess is we’ll be able to eliminate all three of the remaining names,” Bickerstaff said.

  Paula grinned. “He doesn’t trust the CIA.”

  “I don’t trust anyone,” Bickerstaff said sadly. “Neither should you, Paula.” He glanced out of the corner of his eye and bit off whatever else he was going to say.

  Marla with the coffee.

  Anne left the bright morning as she walked through a side entrance to Kincaid Memorial Hospital. It was considerably dimmer and cooler inside than out. She strode down a long hall, still under construction, to the spacious and tiled main lobby. It seemed there was always construction going on in Kincaid. Expansion was turning the place into a maze. She wondered how anyone who hadn’t learned their way around the hospital ever found anything.

  There were several people standing near the circular reception desk; three volunteers were giving out information and validating parking tickets. In the center of the lobby was a fountain. It was behind the bronze nude figures of a man, woman, and child clutching each other’s hands that the mayor had tried to have removed a few years before because it was “Too suggestive.”

  Skirting the flower shop and escalators, Anne went past the main elevators to a Hospital Personnel Only elevator and pressed the Up button. A breast cancer surgeon, Dr. Rebecca Fore, strode past in a neat gray business suit and nodded a good morning to her.

  Anne watched the dark-haired, attractive woman, who was about her age, walk away and wondered if she, Anne, should be doing Dr. Fore’s kind of work instead of hospital administrative duties. Something that saved people’s lives. I could have gone to medical school. I had the grades. Even, at times, the desire.

  But she knew better. Surgeons were a special breed. A rare combination of arrogance, compassion, and intelligence that translated into artistry with the scalpel. And they didn’t wear down in an occupation that would burn out the average person in a few years. Anne knew she was not of that breed.

  “Anne Horn?”

  She turned to see a heavyset, bearded man in jeans and a black T-shirt lettered got meth? She didn’t recognize him.

  “Yes?”

  He smiled almost pityingly; it had been so easy. “This is for you.”

  And he handed her a subpoena.

  Paula drove Bickerstaff back to the precinct house to pick up another unmarked, then went to the squad room and ran checks on Will Lincoln in Queens. Several of the other detectives said hello. Sergeant Crawford brought her a cup of coffee without being asked. But no one inquired about progress on the Night Spider murders. Even if they weren’t directly involved in the investigation, they knew how it was going from the way the media were raking the NYPD. They thought Paula might be sensitive about the subject. If they said something she took the wrong way, she might also take their heads off. And of course Thomas Horn was running that show, and no one wanted to cross him by ragging one of his own. Paula thought that might be why nobody’d called her Rambo.

  The battered old Dell computer on the corner desk, complete with aged yellow Post-its stuck to the frame of its monitor, gurgled and winked and did its thing. Paula sat forward to be closer to the monitor.

  Lincoln turned out to be William Ambrose Lincoln, thirty-six, married, with two children from an earlier marriage. He’d had no previous trouble with the law. On a whim, Paula fed his name into the Internet.

  And hit big.

  This was great. The guy had his own Web site. It had to be him, even listed his phone number, and street and e-mail addresses. A business Web site; he wouldn’t want to have a potential buyer not be able to locate him.

  Interesting site. It turned out Will Lincoln was a sculptor. There was a photograph of him. He was balding but with lots of wavy dark hair around the ears and neck, had strong features, and looked a little like a younger Warren Beatty. And there were photographs of his work. Abstract creations of welded steel. One piece was barely recognizable as a horse. The rest of it was a mystery to Paula. She tried to find something in the tortured, angled metal that suggested sadism and serial murder, but if such a message was there, she couldn’t decipher it. Lincoln’s work must be good, though, because his Web site included lists and dates of exhibits he’d had around town. There was one now, at a gallery down in the West Village.

  A sculptor, Paula thought, leaning back from the computer and taking a sip of the horrible coffee Crawford had brought her. Somebody with imagination and time. And climbing experience. And trained to kill efficiently and silently.

  Paula’s senses became more alert. William Lincoln, the more I learn about you, the more intriguing you become.

  “You want some cream for that coffee, Paula?” Crawford was asking.

  “No. It might only make it worse.”

  “I am wounded,” Crawford said in a hurt tone.

  “Have some coffee. Make it fatal.”

  Crawford slunk away.

  Paula’s pulse quickened as she logged off the computer and left the precinct house to drive to the Village.

  20

  Neva Taylor dreamed.

  She was floating in soft liquid but could breathe freely of perfumed, intoxicating air. A lake, she guessed. A very special lake from her childhood, somewhere secret in her memory. It all seemed so normal, as if she were suspended just below the surface at a depth determined by someone nearby. Someone in control.

  Someone watching her.

  In her dream she turned lazily and saw through the shimmering brightness a face behind a glass pane. Was she in an aquarium like that one in Florida where tourists paid to watch shapely women costumed as mermaids swim underwater? Stroke . . . half fish . . . approach the glass . . . stroke . . . smile . . . stroke . . . h
alf turn, a rhythmic exercise in youth and grace and flirtation, in voyeurism and need. To drift . . . to float. . . Everyone’s final dream . . .

  The lone face on the other side of the aquarium glass was unclear in the wavering distance, but the eyes were fixed and dark and brilliant and demonic.

  Everyone’s final dream!

  A rasp drawn sharply and roughly over steel woke her.

  Her own shrill gasp, as her breath caught like a burr in her throat. Her eyes wide, she lay in late-morning brightness and numbing terror, the recently painted white ceiling close to her like a lid on a box.

  Trapped?

  Still gasping for breath, she became aware that her fingertips were digging painfully into the mattress. Finger by finger she willed her hands to relax.

  Gradually the sunlight blasting through the separation of the drapes overwhelmed her fear. Nothing could happen to her in such a golden wash of light.

  Her strained neck ceased to hurt. Her head sank back into her soft pillow and she made herself smile. A dream, a nightmare. That was all she’d experienced. No connection to the real world, unless one chose to believe certain suspect psychics.

  Barely moving her head, she let her gaze slide across the reassuring familiarity of her bedroom: her dresser; a glimpse of the opposite wall and plastic light switch in the mirror; her chair, over the back of which the dress she’d removed last night lay draped; the top half of the door frame, white enameled with perfectly mitered wood, form and function and reason neatly joined.

  Not a dream but the real world.

  Relieved, comforted, she turned her head slightly so she could see the clock radio. My God, almost ten o’clock! Overslept. Late for work. Not like me! Not at all like me!

  She swiveled her body and sat on the edge of the mattress, her toes sensitive to the coarse texture of the throw rug by the bed. She was tired, as if she’d had a shallow sleep, as if something had disturbed but not quite woken her. It was like some dark dread on the edge of her consciousness. Father dying; not dying while I slept, only when I woke, but dying all the time until the end.