by John Lutz
As if they were blood.
“I’ll talk again with Lora.”
“That’d be best.”
But Repetto knew he wouldn’t initiate the conversation. It would be better if she broached the subject, made the suggestion herself. He knew Lora, and Bricker knew both of them. There was no way Lora could hold Repetto to his word and watch him stay on the sidelines while the Night Sniper took more victims. That would, in a way, make her and Repetto responsible for the dead; they’d be the killer’s once-removed accomplices.
Dal was right; it was Repetto’s call. But Repetto was patient, confident of the decision Lora would soon make. She was a good woman, a brave woman with a nagging conscience.
“Got time to stop in at the deli?” Repetto asked. They’d gone around the block, and the unmarked Ford was visible beyond the corner deli. “I’m gonna pick up something for breakfast to take back to the apartment. You can join us.”
Dal thought about it. “Sounds good, but I really got no time to stop. I’ll get some fruit, maybe. Eat while I drive.”
They walked to the deli’s outside produce and flower stalls. Like the flowers, most of the fruit was flown in from sunnier climes where it thrived this time of year. Repetto preferred it in season, so he’d wait until Dal had chosen, then go inside with him to the register and buy something sweet and sinful in shrink-wrap to take back to the apartment.
“Peaches look best,” Dal said.
He braced his thighs against the wooden stall, leaning forward and stretching out his right arm so he could reach a large, ripe peach in the last row.
Repetto saw the bullet slam into the back of Dal’s head and heard its impact a moment before the rolling crack! of the rifle.
Bricker settled down on the peaches, his arm still extended, the fingers of his right hand straining forward. Repetto was aware of peaches forced over the edge of the stall, bouncing and rolling at his feet. Bricker’s head tilted to the side, as if he were trying to get more comfortable on his pillow of peaches, and the blood came. And came and came.
Repetto backed away, unable to stop staring at Bricker, at the blood on the peaches, the blood now trickling from the stall onto the sidewalk.
“Christ!” he heard someone say. “Looka all the blood! Fuckin’ flood!”
People were moving around Repetto. He could hear their soles shuffling on the pavement, see them like shadows at the corners of his vision. It was unreal. All so unreal.
“. . guy’s clock has stopped … dead. .dead. .”
“Get back. Please, you get back from him!” Kim’s voice. The deli’s owner. Kim knew Repetto and had come outside despite the possibility of another shot.
“Don’t matter, man. He’s dead. Looka the fuckin’ blood!”
Does there have to be so much blood?
“Watch where you step. .”
“Get a cop!” a woman said.
Blood.
“Somebody inside’s calling the police.” Kim’s voice. “Somebody’s already calling.”
“Get a cop!” the woman insisted, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Get a cop.”
Repetto stood motionless except for his chest heaving with his rapid breathing. His face was pale stone. The people around him might have thought he was in shock, but he wasn’t. Not yet.
“I am a cop,” he said.
Well before sunrise, he awoke hot and heavily perspiring, lying on his back beside Lora. Repetto guessed she hadn’t been asleep, but had been crying since they’d gone to bed a few minutes past midnight.
For a moment he wondered why she was quietly sobbing; then the realization of yesterday collapsed in on him. He reached out gently with his left arm and pulled Lora to him, and she nestled her head against the base of his neck and continued to sob. Neither of them spoke. What had happened to Dal, to them, was black and ineffable.
After almost an hour, still welded together by grief, they fell asleep.
When the bedroom was slashed with morning light from the parted blinds, Repetto awoke as exhausted as he’d been last night. He carefully disentangled himself from Lora, who was still asleep. He thought about kissing her forehead, then decided against chancing that he might wake her. Instead he studied her as if she were a precious puzzle, loving her, knowing they needed each other now as never before. As quietly as possible, he climbed out of bed and went into the bathroom to shower.
With his left arm and hand he’d been gentle with Lora, but he became aware that the fingers of his right hand ached from having clutched the wadded sheet as he fell asleep, and perhaps as he slept.
When he was finished toweling dry, he stared at the man in the bathroom mirror.
Captain Vincent Albert Repetto stared back at him, the same as yesterday, yet unalterably changed.
7
Homicide Detective Meg Doyle steered the unmarked police car onto the exit ramp and watched for the turnoff for the service road. Beside her sat her partner, Bert (Birdy) Bellman. They’d left the city half an hour ago, after Meg had picked up Birdy at his house in Queens, and they’d had a quick breakfast of doughnuts and coffee as they drove. Cops eating doughnuts. Life imitating art, Meg thought. Blame it on Krispy Kreme.
They were up early and on the road because Dal Bricker’s funeral was in New Jersey. His graveside service, anyway, for friends and family. He was already buried, after a full-dress NYPD funeral complete with dignitaries, bagpipes, and rifle salute. Today was the quieter, more private good-bye to Sergeant Dal Bricker. Immediately after the service, Meg and Birdy would be introduced to Repetto.
Meg was looking forward to meeting Repetto. He was something of a legend in the NYPD, and she wasn’t surprised that the higher-ups would call on his expertise. That Repetto was also the Night Sniper’s choice simply made it unanimous. Stories still drifted around the department about Repetto, how he’d personally cornered the Midnight Leather Killer and traded shots with him before the suspect leaped to his death from forty stories up. About how two Mafia thugs had been sent around to intimidate Repetto and found themselves outmatched. Afterward, in their hospital beds, they’d been charged with assault, and their rights were read to them by Repetto.
Meg found the cemetery road and turned onto it. She was a diminutive woman of thirty-nine who would have risen higher in the NYPD by now if she’d been able to control her tongue. Not that she had a temper; it was more that her words were out and doing harm before she could stop them. Since her divorce from Chip she tended to say what she thought, what she knew, what was the truth-a dangerous habit and hard to break. Her figure was trim, her eyes a dark brown, her features elfin. Her dark, short-cropped hair grew in a cowlick that made it stand on end in front in a way reminiscent of a rooster comb. When she’d been a uniformed cop she’d kept her cap on as much as possible. Now aerosol hair spray battled her cowlick, not always successfully.
Birdy Bellman, on the other hand, was bald except for a few lank strands of hair plastered in a grid across his gleaming pate. His eyes were hooded and his face a series of vertical planes that made him always appear somber. He got tagged with the Birdy nickname because he often made silent pecking motions with his head when he was tense, which was almost always. Tense on the outside, anyway, while his brain was placidly and relentlessly working. Meg thought that if Birdy really was a bird he’d be a vulture. One that ate bad roadkill that had given him indigestion.
Some part of Birdy was always moving, fingers tapping, a foot bouncing in frantic rhythm, a hand clenching and unclenching, releasing the frustration and excess energy that plagued him. Sometimes Meg thought Birdy should see a shrink.
“There it is,” he said beside her, drumming his fingers on his knee.
The car had reached the yawning iron gates to the cemetery. Meg slowed and made a left turn, noticing that the hinges on the gates were rusted over. The cemetery was an old one and encroached upon by commerce, the dead being crowded by the living.
Because they’d been doing duty, neither Meg nor Birdy had be
en able to attend yesterday’s ceremony. Meg had never visited here. Glancing around, she thought it must have been a peaceful place before the highway was widened. The grounds were reasonably well kept, and tall poplar and maple trees lined the blacktop road that wound among pale tombstones and statuary.
Meg saw a knot of mourners up ahead and slowed the car, then parked it at the end of a line of vehicles strung out behind a shiny black Cadillac. She got out of the dusty unmarked Chevy and slipped into her lightweight black raincoat that was in keeping with the event. Birdy had worn his dark suit with a maroon tie that had some kind of spiral pattern. He looked halfway presentable. Birdy’s wife had suffered a stroke two years ago and since then had been bedridden. Meg thought he’d done a pretty good job of dressing himself.
The service was under way, so Meg and Birdy edged up to the fifty or so mourners and stood politely and silently. Assistant Chief Melbourne, in his full-dress uniform, noticed them and nodded.
An extremely thin priest in dark vestments was standing beside the freshly filled grave and a simple tombstone bearing Dal Bricker’s name. He was reading a eulogy that Meg was too far away to understand. Not far from him was a huge array of floral displays that had been used in yesterday’s public ceremony. Not far from the flowers stood Vincent Repetto.
Meg stared at him, fascinated. He was a big man, over six feet, with a boxer’s weighty shoulders and long arms. His hands were huge and rough looking beneath white cuffs that showed below the sleeves of his well-tailored dark suit. She thought his eyes were blue but couldn’t be sure. The wind ruffled his iron-gray hair and he looked incredibly sad.
A blond woman next to Repetto moved closer to him and gripped his arm as if for support. Probably his wife. Not far from her stood a young woman, late teens or early twenties, with incredibly long, braided blond hair; she bore a resemblance to the blond woman. Meg knew Repetto had a daughter. Did this woman look something like him, too?
Repetto must have sensed Meg staring at him, because he glanced up at her and the moment was electric. It wasn’t so much sadness she saw in his face now. It was the kind of set, placid immobility she’d seen on the faces of truly dangerous men just before they acted. They were still and silent before they exploded. They were already committed, so there was nothing left other than action. It was only a matter of when.
Meg thought in that instant that the Night Sniper might have made a big mistake; then she looked away.
Halfway up a hill on the other side of the highway, the Night Sniper sat on the cool, hard ground beneath a maple tree. He was concealed in a small copse of trees, with a clear view of the cemetery and Dal Bricker’s graveside service. At first he’d used his scope, which he’d brought with him in his backpack. Then he decided he was close enough to recognize people without it, and if he happened to be seen by someone while he was focused on the cemetery, it might attract suspicion. Cops almost always attended the funerals and memorial services of murder victims, the theory being that sometimes the killers were compelled to observe their handiwork and be among the mourners.
Not among them this time. Not quite.
The service appeared to be over now. The fifty or so mourners were turning away from the grave and milling around almost as if they were in a trance. They were repelled by death but didn’t want to rush away and insult it, provoke it.
There was Repetto, and alongside him the woman who must be his wife, Lora, and possibly their daughter. They were talking to a woman in a hat with a flat black rim. She touched Repetto’s upper arm gently and hugged Lora and the younger woman; then the three women left Repetto and walked together toward the parked cars. Captain Melbourne approached Repetto, along with a man and woman.
Cops in plainclothes. The Night Sniper could spot them even from this distance, and it was made easier because he knew who they were: Detectives Meg Doyle and Birdy Bellman. Research was the Sniper’s specialty. He’d done his homework and knew about both of them. Doyle was a loose-tongued, sometimes insulting young woman made cynical by a recent divorce. Bellman was a middle-aged, frenetic little man who couldn’t sit still very long in one place. The Night Sniper knew something about many of the NYPD homicide detectives. There were plenty of ways to learn, in this high-tech information age when everybody-even homicide detectives-claimed or were thrust into their fifteen minutes of fame. The NYPD liked to brag about its personnel, on the Internet at official and unofficial sites, and in small-print publications that chronicled the world of law enforcement. It was good public relations.
Now the Night Sniper would learn even more about Doyle and Bellman, as he had about Repetto. The intrepid Repetto had experienced great tragedy in his youth, then had fallen into kind hands. The loss, in a sense, had ended, the torn heart partially healed. The Night Sniper had experienced no such luck. Not in time to save him from the streets, and from the demons of the dark.
Luck was the difference. Luck was what defined and separated most people, no doubt including Doyle and Bellman. The Night Sniper would be even more familiar with them soon enough.
To fully experience and appreciate the game about to be played out on life’s stage, the grand theater of death and vengeance that had only begun, it was best to know the players.
His fellow actors, who were about to play the roles of their lives.
8
Meg, Repetto, and Birdy stood loosely side by side. Repetto raised his old.38 Smith amp; Wesson revolver and fired six rapid shots at the target twenty yards down the range. They were at the outdoor shooting range at Rodman’s Neck in the Bronx, on a peninsula jutting into Long Island Sound. Repetto had insisted they come here in the unmarked directly from the cemetery, after only a brief stop so he could get some things from his car before his wife and daughter drove it home. The other shooters at the range wore casual clothes. Meg and Birdy had removed their jackets, and Birdy had loosened his tie. Repetto remained fully clad in his dark suit, his tie knot neat and severely bound. Blasting away in his mourning clothes.
He reloaded.
Repetto’s handsome but worn features were set and hard with grief and determination. Meg had been told Bricker was like a son to him. Looking at Repetto, Meg couldn’t prevent a lump from welling up in her throat.
“You don’t look so good, Captain,” she said. “We can wait till tomorrow if you want to discuss this, or even later today-”
“I’m okay,” Repetto interrupted. “And time’s important. Otherwise I’d be home with my wife and daughter serving cake to well-wishers.”
In answer, Meg got off two careful shots at her target. It hadn’t felt right; despite taking her time, she hadn’t set herself.
Repetto lifted an old pair of oversize binoculars he’d brought from his car.
“Two in the middle,” he said. “Not bad.”
She felt immediately better.
Birdy used the point and shoot method, firing quickly and relying on instinctive aim. He’d learned it was the best method of shooting if you didn’t have the steadiest hands. When he lowered his 9mm Glock, Repetto peered through the binoculars and said, “Uh-hm.”
He let the binoculars fall on their leather neck strap and turned away from the range to look at Meg and Bellman. Meg felt Birdy shift his weight slightly beside her. Repetto’s eyes, blue and with the cold spark of diamonds, had the same unsettling effect on him that they’d had on her. Here was a man in the thrall of a mission larger than his life. If the Night Sniper wanted a worthy opponent, he’d sure found one.
Meg holstered her gun. She hoped Repetto hadn’t noticed her hand was trembling.
He said, “Two things. One is, despite the temporary rank, I’m on unofficial status, so call me Repetto.” He wasn’t quite ready to be on first-name-basis familiarity. “Two is we are going to nail this son of a bitch!”
Meg surprised herself by smiling slightly. Adrenaline, maybe. “I’ll remember both of them.”
“And I will,” Birdy said beside her in his gravelly voice. Meg saw that his
index finger was nervously twitching where it was extended along the barrel of his Glock.
Repetto had apparently had enough shooting. He slipped his loaded revolver into its belt holster, then led the way back to where the car was parked. From the backseat floor he retrieved the scuffed, black leather briefcase he’d brought with him. He opened the briefcase and drew out two brown cardboard packets with their flaps tied with string wrapped around metal grommets. He laid them on the sun-warmed trunk lid of the car. “These are the murder files on all the Night Sniper victims, copies for both of you. When we leave here, take yours with you and study it.”
“Study it some more, you mean,” Meg said. “When Birdy and I knew we had this assignment, we went over all the material and talked about it.”
Repetto smiled at her through the grief and cold purpose that possessed him. “Good. Come to any conclusions?”
“He likes to play,” Birdy said, slipping back into his suit coat he’d carried slung over his arm. “They all do to some extent, but the game is a big part of this one’s sickness.”
“That’s more or less what Zoe Brady says,” Meg added.
Repetto was surprised. “The profiler’s already talked to you?”
“Not personally. It’s what she wrote in a summary of her findings. Also, he’s a sadist.”
“Aren’t they all?” Birdy said, drumming his fingertips on the trunk.
Meg momentarily rested her hand on his to quiet the drumming fingers. They’d been partners long enough that she could do that and neither of them thought much of it. “For the most part, they are. But if our killer was driven primarily by sadism, he’d want to get up close and see the effects on his victims, instead of shooting them with a long-range rifle from far enough away that he can’t see and feel their shock and fear.”
Repetto looked at her. “But I thought you got from Zoe Brady’s material that she thinks this guy’s engine is sadism.”