Night Victims (The Night Spider)

by John Lutz

  “Satiated with death . . .” The concept seemed to intrigue her. “God, wouldn’t it be wonderful if Mandle suddenly decided he’d taken enough lives?” There was a slight note of hope in her voice, beneath her despair.

  “Wonderful,” Horn agreed, “but not the sort of notion I’d stake my life on.”

  Horn left the brownstone before ten o’clock to stroll down to the Home Away and have a late-night snack, hoping Marla was working. The evening was warm, with a breath of breeze, and reminded him of other warm evenings of his life: swimming illegally in a lake as a teenager; cruising in his first car, an old Ford convertible; romancing Anne; sweltering during summer stakeouts; helplessly watching a mugging victim bleed to death on a sidewalk in Queens . . .

  Enough of warm nights.

  He was a hard man who’d long dealt with hard facts; he’d never been able to afford a world of fancy. Now here he was feeling as if he were walking in a dream. Had he really awoken, or was he still home, lying asleep on the sofa? Was the warm evening a dream while he was suspended in the world between sleeping and waking? So many mornings he hadn’t wanted to wake up . . .

  But he knew he was awake and walking in the city of his younger days, away from his wife’s voice and toward another woman. Looking forward to seeing the other woman. Feeling the stirrings of new beginnings.

  Brakes squealed and rubber rasped on concrete.

  “Watch where you’re fuckin’ walkin’!”

  Horn backed away from the cab he’d almost stepped in front of and waved an apology to the driver.

  He stood chastised and did not look back at his fellow pedestrians on the sidewalk, who were staring at him with blank cops’ faces as they waited for the traffic signal to change.

  Marla was off work until morning. Horn got his usual booth but had to settle for an omelet and decaffeinated coffee served to him by a new waiter named Leonard who spoke so softly it was hard to understand him. That seemed to work both ways because he brought Horn a cheese omelet thinking Horn had said “cheese” instead of “please” when he’d ordered.

  Horn, who chose his battles carefully, said nothing, fearing more complication.

  He’d taken only a few bites of the omelet when his cell phone beeped in his pocket.

  Good. Someone I can understand.

  But at first he wasn’t sure who was on the other end of the connection.

  “Waldo Winthrop,” repeated the caller.

  “Sorry, I don’t know any—”

  “Newsy. I used to be Nina Count’s assistant.”

  “Newsy! Sure, I remember you. How’d you get this number?”

  “Captain Horn, you insult my professionalism.”

  “Sorry, Newsy. So I take it you’re still in the business.”

  “As an independent.”

  “You mean you sell information?”

  “To news outlets. Not to you, Captain Horn. Nina wouldn’t have wanted it that way. She liked you.”

  “I liked her.” But Horn knew others in the information business, at her station, who hadn’t been crazy about Nina and her news-diva ways. And resentment of her rubbed off on her assistant. After Nina left for Atlanta, it probably hadn’t taken long for the corporate sharks to close in on Newsy and chase him out of his job.

  “One of my informants in the NYPD told me the story’s been leaked,” Newsy said.

  “What story?”

  “About how the Night Spider’s spelling out your wife’s name with the first initials of his victims. And now it’s E’s turn.”

  “I don’t suppose it’d do any good if I asked how it leaked?”

  “Hey, Captain Horn . . .”

  “Okay, Newsy. Thanks for the information. I owe you.”

  Horn deactivated the phone and slipped it back in his pocket.

  Leonard had been hovering in the distance with the coffeepot, obviously waiting for Horn to finish his phone conversation. Now he closed in and topped off Horn’s cup, spilling a liberal amount of coffee on the table.

  Leaks.

  45

  Newsy was right to warn him.

  The next morning’s Post all but shouted the glaring headline E-E-E-K! superimposed over the gray silhouette of a tarantula. Kudos to the art department.

  Horn bought a paper and continued his walk toward the Home Away, glancing at the text and stopping now and then to read more carefully.

  The Post contained a painstakingly accurate description of the Nora Shoemaker crime scene, almost as if it were lifted directly from a police report.

  No almost about it, Horn reminded himself. Sometimes he wondered if every large bureaucracy was so porous. But he knew the answer.

  The fact that since his escape, the first initials of Mandle’s victims spelled the first three letters of Anne’s name was said to have been noticed by “several journalists.” The media protecting their sources.

  Horn removed his half-glasses, tucked the folded paper beneath his arm, and continued walking. The cool summer morning gave him slight respite from his worries. Breezes and rising exhaust fumes sent discarded advertising circulars and scraps of newspaper dancing over curbs and wide sidewalks. The sun’s increasing heat drew a melange of odors both rank and delicate from uncollected trash. The morning traffic roared and blared, a cacophony of constant background noises.

  All of it surrounded Horn and he was glad. The city was beautiful and wonderful in its own flawed way, always moving, always vital, a presence indomitable in fact and mind. Terrorist attacks, murders and muggings, mob families, insolvency, brownouts and blackouts, financial and political scandals, riots and racism—none of them could bring the city down. It was a sprawling organism of sight, smell, sound, fear, and hope, and it fed on crises. It gave Horn life and will.

  “Horn.”

  He turned around to see Colonel Victor Kray standing behind him.

  Kray was in mufti, wearing dark slacks, a gray pullover shirt with a red fleck design woven through it, and comfortable hiking shoes that didn’t go with the slacks. His clothes looked like someone else’s, and he looked like a warrior who was out of uniform yet still required a salute.

  “We should talk,” Kray said. “I tried calling you, knocking on your door, but neither you nor your charming wife was home.”

  “My charming wife and I are separated,” Horn said.

  “I’m sorry. It isn’t a pleasant thing, as I know from experience. It isn’t easy being a career military man’s wife.”

  “Or a cop’s. I was on my way to breakfast. Do you want to—”

  “I’d rather talk here.”

  “On the sidewalk?”

  “Over there.” Kray pointed toward a low concrete wall running parallel to the walk and sectioning off a narrow area alongside an office building. There was gravel on the other side of the wall and a lineup of neatly trimmed yews that seemed to be at attention just for Kray. The top of the wall was tiled and about bench height. A man and woman who looked like tourists were sitting on it near the corner. The man seemed frustrated, trying to explain to the woman how the gadget-laden camera slung around her neck worked. Kray said, “We can talk privately enough there, I think.”

  “Probably with complete privacy,” Horn said, thinking how difficult it would be even for sophisticated listening devices to separate their speech from other voices and the raucous sounds of the city.

  He walked with Kray to the low wall, and they sat side by side a good hundred feet away from the man and woman with the perplexing camera.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep this conversation and my presence in the city a secret,” Kray said.

  “I’ll keep it as secret as possible,” Horn said, thinking Larkin, Paula, and Bickerstaff.

  “Agreed.” Kray settled back on the wall’s top surface and seemed to relax slightly, crossing his legs and clasping his hands over one knee. “I came to warn you.”

  Horn felt the coolness of the hard wall penetrating the material of his pants. “I’ve had a lot
of that lately.”

  Kray smiled. Not for the first time, Horn thought that he looked like a full-size military action toy that had aged gracefully. G.I. Kray, rising through the ranks.

  “I figured out what Mandle was doing with his victims’ initials before the media did,” Kray said. “It would seem he’s going to take one more victim before your wife, the E woman.” Kray glanced at the paper still tucked beneath Horn’s right arm. “I’m here, in part, to warn you he might not. That kind of sequential diversion is part of his training. Mandle might go directly to Anne.”

  “We’ve thought of that,” Horn said.

  “There are so many ways Mandle knows how to kill that you can’t have thought of them all. He can kill all the conventional ways and dozens of unconventional.”

  “Like with a sharpened steel screw.”

  “Or his hands and feet. Another thing you should know is that Mandle’s an expert with explosives.”

  Horn felt a sudden unease. That was one method Anne might not be sufficiently protected from. “What kinds of explosives?”

  “Just about every kind. Both in using them and in making them. Plastique, black powder, liquid chemical . . . You’d be surprised how many common, easy-to-obtain substances can be mixed or transformed into explosive elements.”

  “Our profilers think Mandle’s locked into compulsion, even though he altered his routine with his last victim. They think he’ll take an E victim.”

  Kray unclasped his hands and brushed his fingertips over the silky material of his slacks, as if reminding himself he was in civilian clothes. “You know serial killers,” he said. “I only know soldiering. And I know what kind of soldier Aaron Mandle was. I can’t impress upon you strongly enough how difficult it will be to stop him.”

  “Even with your help?”

  “I’m not in a position to help you directly. The army doesn’t know I’m here. And of course we don’t know what approach Mandle will take.” Kray reached into the breast pocket of his shirt, felt around behind a pair of sunglasses, then drew out a folded slip of white paper and handed it to Horn. “That’s the phone number where I’m staying at the Rion Hotel.”

  Horn accepted the paper and glanced at it, then slipped it into his own shirt pocket. He knew the Rion, a midsize, overpriced, and discreet hotel near Gramercy Park. Foreign dignitaries and celebrities who wanted privacy often stayed there.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep me somewhat informed,” Kray said. “And call me if you need any sort of question about Mandle answered. Or anything else. I mean that. I’m partly responsible for what I’ve created through his training. I want him caught and this time put away for good so he can’t harm anyone else.”

  Kray stood up from the wall and briefly and adeptly brushed off his clothes, front and back, as if sitting on a wall were as untidy a proposition as yard work.

  “This conversation never took place,” Horn said, before Kray could.

  Kray smiled. “Actually, I was going to say you never saw me. I guess serial killers aren’t the only ones locked into compulsion and routine.”

  “There’s a difference.”

  “And thank God.”

  Kray shook hands with Horn, remembering to reach for Horn’s noninjured left hand. Horn watched the colonel put on his sunglasses, then nod, turn, and stride away. He niftily dodged a few people walking toward him on a collision course, then within a few seconds, was lost from sight in the stream of pedestrians.

  Horn stood up and tugged his pants legs free from where they were stuck to the backs of his thighs. As he continued his walk to the Home Away, he repeated in his mind his parting words to Kray: There’s a difference.

  And if only we understood what it is.

  What’s missing in people like Aaron Mandle? Or what dark demons possess them? And when? And how?

  If only we understood and could stop them before they begin.

  Horn picked up his pace and redirected his thoughts, reminding himself his job was to deal with such human anomalies only after they had begun.

  And specifically, urgently, his job and his personal mission were the same—to stop Aaron Mandle.

  As soon as Horn entered the Home Away, he was struck by a sense of dread.

  Several customers were eating breakfast in booths, and Marla was taking the food orders of a couple with two small children at one of the tables. She glanced at Horn and couldn’t avert her gaze, though she appeared to want to look away.

  Toward the back of the diner, Paula and Bickerstaff were seated in a booth. Bickerstaff ‘s back was to Horn, but he was twisted around so he could see toward the front of the diner. He and Paula were looking at Horn; Horn didn’t like the expressions on their faces.

  When he approached them, and before he could say anything, Bickerstaff said, “Did you get it on your cell phone?”

  Horn realized he’d turned off his phone while walking toward the low wall with Kray, thinking it might be the kind of conversation he wouldn’t want interrupted. He reached into his pocket and switched on the phone by feel.

  Without waiting for Horn to answer Bickerstaff, Paula said, “A woman named Emily Schneider was found dead in her apartment this morning, shrouded in her bedsheets. Multiple stab wounds. Everything about the murder fits.”

  “It had to be Mandle,” Bickerstaff said.

  They watched him absorb the news, Paula with a concerned little frown.

  Horn stood motionless and uttered one word: “Anne . . . ”

  Anne!

  In his pocket, his cell phone began chirping urgently, like a live thing trapped.

  46

  Patrolmen Lee Sanford and Amos Prince of the One-three precinct didn’t need lights or a siren as Sanford drove their radio car toward a Lower East Side address in response to a Crimes in the Past signal.

  Sanford, a fifteen-year veteran of the NYPD, was a tall, thin, taciturn man with the solemn demeanor of a grave digger. The much younger Prince was a stocky African-American who, as far as Sanford was concerned, smiled too much and too broadly and was maybe a little too hip to be a cop. They’d been partners in the patrol car for a little over a month. It had taken three weeks before Sanford decided Prince might be a good cop despite his runny mouth and devotion to rap music. Prince was beginning to suspect his partner Abe Lincoln might just do when it came crunch time. Might.

  Sanford pulled the car to the curb in front of one of a row of almost identical brick six-story walk-ups.

  “This is it,” Prince said, seeing the crudely painted address next to the building’s door. “Let’s do it.”

  “Wanna make sure,” Sanford said, sitting motionless behind the steering wheel and studying the notes he’d scrawled when the call had come through.

  Prince squirmed. “C’mon, Lee. Time to get outta Car Fifty-four.”

  Sanford gave him a sideways morose look, then put down his notes and opened the car door. Relieved, Prince reached for the door handle on his side.

  “Had to be on the sixth floor,” Prince said as they climbed rickety wooden steps that led from landing to landing. Barely enough light made it through the landings’ dirty windows for them to see where they were going.

  They were both breathing a little raggedly when they reached the door with a painted-over brass 6-B on it. Prince knocked on the age-checked enameled wood.

  The door opened almost immediately and a worried-looking stout woman wearing jeans and combing her long dark hair looked out at them. “It’s you,” she said simply.

  “Us,” Sanford confirmed.

  “You put in a call for the police,” Prince reminded the woman.

  She looked agitated, dark eyes narrowing. “I hear this shit, I gotta come home early from work.”

  “What kinda shit?” Prince asked.

  “Teenage, is what. I got two sons, fourteen and fifteen. You got teenagers, Officer?”

  “Git outta here!” Prince said.

  “Rafe and Georgie, only four days since school let ou
t and they already found trouble.”

  “What kinda trouble?” Prince asked.

  Sanford gave him a disapproving look. He knew they should let the woman run her mouth; she’d get around to it in her own time. What she had to say might be hard for her to get out.

  “I get a call at work from Georgie—”

  “The fifteen-year-old?”

  “Fourteen. He tells me Rafe’s got a gun. I say is Rafe there and let me talk to him and Rafe comes to the phone. You got a gun? How’d you get it? Where’d you get it? Jesus! I tell Rafe to put down the gun and the two of them stay right where they fuckin’ are and stay away from the gun. Okay?”

  “You did right,” Sanford said.

  “Not that they listened to me one little bit. They came home with the gun.”

  The woman suddenly realized Sanford and Prince were still standing in the hall. She stopped combing her hair and moved aside so they could enter her apartment. The messy living room was unoccupied except for a grungy 9mm handgun lying on the coffee table next to a soda can.

  “That it?” Prince asked unnecessarily, pointing to the gun.

  “Course that’s it.”

  “Where are the boys?”

  “In their rooms. I didn’t send them there. They don’t like cops.”

  “At their age? They should still love us, the way we give them directions and help them get across the street and such.”

  Sanford had crossed the magazine-and-newspaper-littered floor and was leaning down looking at the gun. Besides being grimy, it was just beginning to rust and its barrel was clogged with dirt. It was also exactly the same model as the 9mm semiautomatic in Sanford’s holster. A cop’s gun. “Where’d the boys say they got this?”

  “Off a dead body.”

  “Really?” Prince asked. “That must have been some wild experience for the little shit-kickers.”

  “Where?” Sanford asked.

  An hour later Horn, Paula, and Bickerstaff were standing with Sanford and Prince in the basement of a condemned and boarded-up building off First Avenue in lower Manhattan. They were about ten feet away from the body, trying to avoid the smell that was made even worse by the usual musty and stale-urine stench of abandoned urban buildings. If the ancient basement had ever had anything other than a dirt floor, it was no longer evident. Lights had been carried down, the ME was in attendance, and techs were buzzing around the half-buried and badly decomposed body that had loose earth scooped over it. They weren’t the only things buzzing around it. The dead man was stripped to the waist and wearing what looked like the filthy remnants of work pants.