by John Lutz
A camera flash sent miniature lightning through the room. A police photographer documenting everything visual about the crime scene.
“Smile,” he said, as he approached the victim and squinted through the viewfinder.
Nobody did, especially not Neva Taylor.
The woman from the medical examiner’s office moved back to give the photographer room. “It’s like a spider crawled into the building, immobilized her, and slowly drained her of life,” she said to Horn. She must have been reading the papers. “You think this sick asshole really thinks he’s a spider?”
“He seems to identify with them.”
“I don’t see how anybody could identify with bugs,” the photographer said, going about his business of launching one flash after another. Zeus with a Minolta.
“I don’t see how anybody could ask a corpse to smile,” Horn said.
The photographer grinned at him around the camera. “Yes, you do. You’ve got it harder than I do. You have to look at this kind of stuff without the emotional distance a lens gives you.”
“A photographer-philosopher,” the ME said, not as if she were kidding but was actually surprised to hear such wisdom from the lips of a guy who shot pictures of crime scenes.
The photographer jokingly aimed his camera at her and she quickly turned her head.
“Your sidekicks are up on the roof,” she said, finding herself facing Horn.
“I figured.”
“Our kind of job,” the photographer said. “There’s no place to go but up.”
“Unless I throw you out a window,” Horn told him.
It was windy on the roof of the Weldon Tower, but it felt pretty good on such a warm day. The city was a vista of beautifully sunlit buildings softened by late morning shadow. It all looked antiseptically clean from here, and not as if anything of horror would be happening behind the thousands of windows.
“You almost need a jacket up here,” Paula said.
Horn didn’t think so, but he didn’t disagree with her.
“We got pretty much what we expected here,” Bickerstaff said. He pointed to an adjacent building about thirty feet away. “Looks like that’s where he came from. We’ll do the usual checking with that building’s doorman and tenants.”
And probably come up with nothing, Horn thought.
“There’s marks from a grappling hook of some kind on the base of that antenna,” Bickerstaff continued, “and the roof ‘s surface indicates some activity almost but not directly over the victim’s bedroom window. Looks like our guy came down the outside wall between the rows of windows so he wouldn’t be seen, then swung or walked himself over about five feet to center on Taylor’s window.”
“No fresh hole in the brickwork,” Paula said, “but we think he wrapped a line around that vent pipe, since it was right where he wanted it.”
Horn walked over and stooped down to examine the four-inch pipe protruding from the roof. There was a circular mark on it, maybe a slight indentation, that looked fairly new. Paula was probably right in her assessment.
“How do you figure he detaches the lines when he goes back to the other rooftops?” she asked.
“Sayles told me there are grappling hooks, even knots, that can be detached by whipping or snapping the rope or cable.”
“Nifty,” Bickerstaff said. “Must take practice.”
“And training,” Horn said. “That our guy is an expert climber is about the only thing that narrows our search.”
“And that he gets in and out so clean,” Paula said. “Even a good B-and-E artist leaves a scuff mark or clue here or there. Other than a couple of indistinct footprints, we’ve been given nothing of much substance to work with.”
“Will Lincoln has the skill set,” Bickerstaff pointed out.
“And an alibi,” Paula said. “Me. I’ve practically been living with the guy. Last night he knocked down some beers at a bar in Queens, then went into his garage studio and worked until about three in the morning. I saw him pass the lighted window now and then, and I saw him leave the garage and go into his house when he was finished working.”
“And let me guess,” Horn said. “The ME says the victim died sometime before three o’clock this morning.”
“That’s it,” Paula said. “Closer to midnight. Will Lincoln didn’t do Neva Taylor.”
“Unless he found a way to leave his garage and return without you knowing it,” Bickerstaff said.
“I don’t think it was possible,” Paula said. “Besides, I’m sure he didn’t know I was out there watching him almost all night.”
“So Altman was playing straight with us when he gave us the list,” Horn said.
Bickerstaff stuffed his hands deep in his pockets, cool on the roof like Paula. “It’s almost enough to make you trust the Feds.”
“I think I saw him down in the street,” Horn said.
Bickerstaff looked at him. “Altman?”
“The Night Spider.”
Horn had their attention, judging by the way their jaws dropped.
He told them about the dark-eyed man in the white Saturn, his pursuit of the car, and the chase’s ultimate unsatisfactory conclusion.
“Jesus!” Bickerstaff said. “Maybe there’ll be prints in the car.”
“I’d be surprised if he didn’t wear gloves to steal cars the way he does for his ritual killings.”
“Clean,” Paula said. “He operates so damned clean.”
“That’s the thing about him,” Horn said, admiring Paula’s knack for homing in on what was pertinent. And for not shooting off her mouth, holding her thoughts till they were ripe. She was impressing him more and more.
Bickerstaff, still with his hands jammed in his pockets, looked around at the skyline and distant river. “It’s peaceful up here.”
“Which is why we’re leaving,” Horn said.
“Like nothing bad could ever happen in this city. But we know better. Hey, Paula?”
“Uh-huh.” Do we ever!
While Paula and Bickerstaff were still supervising or doing legwork on the Neva Taylor murder, Horn went home and used his desk phone in his den to call Anne at the hospital. She seemed calmer now about the lawsuit, but there was still an edginess to her that bothered Horn. He suspected what it might be but didn’t know how to make sure, or even if he could do anything about it if he were sure.
Hard years had taught him hard lessons. One of them was that the damage to cops’ wives was sometimes cumulative, building up over time until the women simply had had enough. Then, usually, they would walk. Maybe they’d wait for the kids to leave home, or for this or that to be resolved, but at a certain time they went. Horn couldn’t think of any cop’s marriage that had broken up that way and that had been made right. It was as if something inside these patient, long-suffering women snapped and couldn’t be repaired.
Horn never thought it could happen to Anne. She seemed to have learned to accommodate his profession—the waiting, the worrying, and the upside-down priorities, and coming in second to dates with drug dealers, rapists, and killers. And she wasn’t a wife who sat around and fretted constantly about him; she had a profession of her own, a life of her own, outside their marriage.
No, not outside it. Not completely. He knew that the conflicts and pressures of her job, especially since the Alan Vine tragedy, had always been a part of their marriage. They’d always shared. Everything. Maybe that was a mistake.
“The trouble with relationships these days,” a grizzled desk sergeant Horn knew often said, “is that there’s too much communication.” He’d gone on to describe the things he’d done without his wife’s knowledge and that he knew she’d done, supposedly without his.
He never seemed to be kidding. Horn knew now that maybe he hadn’t been. The sergeant retired two years ago and was living in Mexico with his wife of forty-two years.
And here was Horn, on the job again.
Like Anne, damn it! He had the right!
Mentally settin
g personal problems aside, still not knowing exactly how he felt about them or what to do, he wandered into the kitchen. Comfort food would help, and he was genuinely hungry anyway.
He saw the blur of rain on the kitchen’s dark windowpane and could hear the steady drip of water from a nearby downspout. Lightning briefly illuminated the view of the small garden Anne liked to call a courtyard, and a few seconds later distant thunder rumbled. A summer storm. Airborne gloom. Just what he needed to improve his glum mood.
Using meat loaf take-home from the last restaurant meal he and Anne had shared, he found some cracked wheat bread, got ketchup from the refrigerator, and built a thick sandwich. Then he located a bottle of Heineken dark in the refrigerator and opened it. He got a beer glass down from a cabinet, sat at the table, and ate, listening to the rain and what had become a metallic drumbeat from the downspout.
When he was finished with the sandwich but not the beer, he carried the half-full glass into his den and sat down at the antique oak desk Anne had gotten for his birthday ten years before. He couldn’t hear the rain from here. Good. He searched his Rolodex. Nina Count should still be at the station, and he knew she’d talk to him. Knew she was probably expecting him to call.
“Captain Horn!” She sounded overjoyed to hear his voice. “You have something to tell me.”
“Not that you’d want to hear, Nina.”
“C’mon, Horn, we’re old friends.”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea what you’re trying to do.”
“Of course, and you appreciate it. I’m trying to flush out your suspect for you. And I will. Just give me a little time.”
He considered telling her about his encounter with the driver of the stolen Saturn earlier that day but decided it would only whet her appetite for danger and ratings. Besides, she’d find out eventually anyway, being Nina.
“My contacts in the NYPD tell me I’ve already had some success,” she said. “You were involved in a dramatic chase this morning. With a little luck, you would have apprehended the Night Spider. It’ll be on tonight’s eleven o’clock news.”
Christ! She was something! “Good. I’ll be able to learn all about it.”
“I’m not completely unselfish about this, Horn. If I’m successful at what I’m attempting, I get viewers and you get the killer. So we both win. You should be grateful for what I’m doing.”
“I would be, if flushing out the killer was all you’re trying to do. You’re taunting this murderous psychopath, Nina. If He’s the Night Spider, you’re offering yourself as a juicy fly.”
“My God! I never thought of that!”
“Bullshit, Nina.”
“Yeah, I suppose so.”
“If you’d seen what was left of his flies, you wouldn’t be doing this.” But he knew better; if she weren’t a brash and competitive newswoman she’d probably be a trapeze artist or in some other occupation where you could work without a net.
“I understand the risk,” Nina said. “And I really am doing this partly for you. And to get this murderous head case off the street.”
“Whatever you learn that’s pertinent, Nina, I want to know it almost as soon as you do.”
“Of course. The minute anything happens I’ll give you a buzz.”
He wasn’t sure if she was putting him on, so he held his silence. It was obvious that nothing he could say would change her mind anyway.
“Are you worried about me, Horn?”
“Yes,” he said honestly. “And pissed off that you’re making my job more difficult.”
“How exactly am I making it more difficult?”
“I told you I was worried. I meant it.”
“Why, Horn! If you weren’t married I’d be intensely interested.”
“Playful doesn’t become you, Nina. And I’m too old for you. Too beat up. And too sane.”
He hung up, burdened by the sad knowledge that what he’d said was true.
Something else not to think about while he finished his beer.
But he found the beer flat and too warm to drink. It left a bitter aftertaste.
He closed the office door so smoke wouldn’t filter into the rest of the brownstone, then sat back down and got an illegal Cuban cigar from the humidor on his desk. After preparing the cigar, using a cutter fashioned after a miniature guillotine, he fired it up with the lighter he kept in the desk’s top drawer. A cigar that cost what this one did, it burned smoothly and drew well immediately.
As he leaned back in his padded chair and smoked, it occurred to him that the problems in his life, the many unanswered questions, were beginning to hinder and entangle him more and more.
Like a web.
25
The doorbell late that night made Horn sit forward in his chair, then snuff out his cigar in the glass ashtray on the desk.
He left his comfortable den and trod through the hall to the foyer. For a moment he wished he were still carrying his service revolver. His uneasiness surprised him, even though circumstances were certainly conducive to apprehension. Not like him, after so many years of doing what he must despite fear that was sometimes terror. Maybe the Night Spider case was getting to him. And this was like something out of a mystery novel—a late hour of a stormy night, alone in the house, a stranger knocks on the door.
Rings the bell.
The rain might have stopped.
And how do you know it’s a stranger?
Horn put his hand on the doorknob and peered through one of the leaded glass windows. It was still raining. And his caller was a stranger.
He opened the door to a tall, broad-shouldered man in a dark raincoat. He was standing partly in shadow and wearing some kind of cap like a delivery man’s, its cloth top covered by clear plastic to protect it from moisture.
“Captain Thomas Horn?” the man asked with a smile. He had wide cheekbones, a hawk nose, and a broad, aggressive chin.
Horn confirmed he was who the man was seeking, his body poised, his gut telling him something was wrong here.
“I’m Colonel Victor Kray.”
Horn stared at the man. He didn’t recognize him. Didn’t believe he was NYPD.
“United States Army,” the man added, perhaps understanding Horn’s confusion.
“Ah!” Horn said. “Come in, please!” He stepped back, offering his left hand, which the colonel shook. If he really was a colonel. Horn kept his right hand ready to knot into a fist.
Once in the foyer, Kray unbuttoned his long raincoat, and Horn saw the uniform, which featured an impressive array of medals on the colonel’s chest. The colonel removed his garrison cap to reveal a head of iron gray hair, short and combed down in something like bangs that were high on his forehead. If Julius Caesar didn’t look like this guy, he should have.
“I thought we might discuss a list someone gave you,” Kray said, as Horn was hanging his wet coat on a hook. A musty, woolly odor wafted from the coat.
“Do you smoke cigars, Colonel Kray?”
“Only when I have something to celebrate.”
“Do you drink scotch?”
Kray smiled. “More often than I smoke cigars.”
Horn invited the colonel into his den, got him settled in an armchair near the desk, then poured two glasses of eighteen-year-old Glenlivet over ice, which he got from the small refrigerator that was concealed inside a cabinet just for that purpose.
Colonel Kray sat, sipped, and looked longingly at Horn’s dead cigar propped in the ashtray. “Maybe I will,” he said.
Horn supplied him with a cigar and, when it was burning, relit his own. He didn’t mention that the cigars were Cuban and illegal, not knowing quite how a military man would feel about that.
Kray puffed on the cigar and took another sip of scotch. “The pleasures of civilian life,” he said.
“You can smoke and drink in the army.”
“Not in a well-furnished den like this one. You’re a successful man, Captain Horn. Not just a lucky one.”
“That, too,�
�� Horn said.
Kray fixed him with a steady stare that was, in itself, a reason for promotion. “What I do now in my duties wouldn’t interest you, Captain Horn. But you might find what I used to do important. I’ve been following the Night Spider murders, mostly through the New York Times on-line and Fox cable news. I struggled with the decision to come here but from the beginning knew I had no real choice. I think I might be able to help you.”
“I could use it,” Horn said, sipping his scotch and watching Kray, admiring his charisma and mannerisms of command that only years in the military could provide.
“In the armed forces of this country there is something called the SSF or Secret Special Forces. Its specialty is fighting in urban settings and mountainous terrain; the two have more in common than many people think. Its purpose is to undertake dangerous missions that must remain top secret whether they succeed or fail. These are brave men, Captain Horn, who can turn the suicidal into the doable, and who are ready to pay the supreme price of death in combat. They’re never captured. We don’t kid ourselves that some people can’t be made to talk.”
“We?”
“I helped to train these men,” Kray said. “And I’ve led them in battle. They can do what your Night Spider does. There is no vertical surface they can’t negotiate, and they know how to come and go secretly and kill silently.”
“Our killer works silently enough that he doesn’t wake his victims until it’s too late for them. There’s never any sign of a struggle.”
Kray smiled. “I’d be surprised if there were. The men I’m talking about are amazingly gentle and adept, as well as deadly. They’re trained to kill enemy troops while they sleep, one after another. And with this killer you’re chasing, the delicacy might be part of the thrill, the ritual, having them sleep as long as possible, then awaken already trussed up and helpless. Or almost. Certainly beyond escaping. He’d be ready to clamp tape over their mouths the instant their eyes opened. That might be what awakens many of them, the tape abruptly altering their breathing.”