Fear the Night n-5

by John Lutz

  The rest of the drive home she tried to put her mind at ease.

  It didn’t work.

  “You want the rest of this cinnamon bun?”

  Repetto was seated across the table from Meg the next morning, in a maroon-upholstered window booth at the Harrison Diner on First Avenue. The place had a double door to form a kind of air lock, but each time someone entered or exited, a breeze played over his ankles. Since the air conditioner hadn’t yet chased away the heat left over from yesterday, it felt pretty good. The sweet scent of the oversize, overiced bun on his plate dominated even the grilled bacon smell permeating the diner.

  “They heated it up,” he added.

  Meg silently shook her head no.

  Repetto had been studying her since she’d slid into the booth. Her hair wasn’t as neatly combed as usual, and her eyes had a weary, dreamy quality. He had to admit it made her more attractive.

  Then it struck him. He knew the look. She was in love. Or something like love.

  Not like Meg the terse. Meg the cynical.

  A new Meg?

  “You seeing someone?” Repetto asked, and took a sip of his coffee. Repetto driving to the point.

  She looked sleepily at him. “Seeing-oh, you mean seeing someone.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Her face reddened and he knew he’d struck a soft spot. “Does my personal life have something to do with my work?” He could see her confusion. She didn’t know what to say or do, so she feigned anger.

  “You know it does.”

  “Do I ask you if you’re seeing someone?”

  “You can.”

  “Are you?”

  “No. My wife would kill me.”

  Meg noticed the expression on his face didn’t change. What did his words mean? Men were such accomplished deceivers. It was fucking genetic. “Look,” she said, keeping her tone level, “if my personal life starts getting in the way of my job, I’ll let you know.”

  “But will you know?”

  “Whether I will or won’t, I just told you the way it is.”

  Feisty but controlled, letting me know I crossed the line. He stared at her, trusting her. She might be in love or in heat-he knew the signs-but she wasn’t going to let it interfere with the investigation. That was all he should be concerned about and all he needed to know.

  Repetto took a sip of coffee and sat back. Who might be her secret love interest? Since they’d teamed up, Meg had spent most of her waking hours with him or with Birdy.

  Repetto felt a sudden alarm. Might Meg feel that way about him, Repetto himself?

  No. He didn’t think so. Not judging by her reaction to personal questions that maybe he hadn’t had a right to ask.

  Birdy?

  It was difficult to imagine the fidgety, wary Birdy being involved in a secret extramarital affair with Meg. Nobody Repetto knew was more married than Birdy. Besides, he and Meg both knew the rules. They both knew what this investigation meant.

  No, not Birdy.

  But Repetto had seen unlikely relationships develop between seemingly incompatible partners on the Job. He knew how sex and love could turn people into … other people.

  He used the back of his forefinger to nudge his plate toward Meg. “You sure you don’t want the rest of this cinnamon bun? They’re really good. I’m just not hungry.”

  “No means no,” she said, not smiling.

  There was no part of that Repetto didn’t understand.

  On the roof of the Myler Building, high enough above the turmoil of the Times Square area that it seemed isolated, the Night Sniper shifted his weight, achieving comfort and balance. The rare Azner Line Premium rifle was assembled, its scope adjusted, and it now rested against his thigh.

  A cloud passed over the moon, then moved on quickly in a light-hazed night sky. A warning to the wise. This one would be an easy shot, so he mustn’t let himself become complacent.

  He felt confident, though. Even smug. He remained a step ahead of Repetto and his team.

  Where they might assume he’d leave his next note, was where they would, in fact, find his next victim.

  Too late.

  The entire audience in the Bellam Theater rose to its feet, applauding, shouting approval, exhorting the cast to come back onstage for yet another curtain call.

  The cast obliged. The star of the hit Broadway musical American Cat Burglar in London, Libby Newland, was center stage, hands joined with the cast members on either side of her. She was smiling big and meaning it.

  This was the way every performance of Burglar ended, with what in these uneasy times was a good house, more than half the seats sold, everyone on their feet and applauding. But Libby knew that financially the play was struggling to stay in the black. What a hit it would have been if the Night Sniper creep wasn’t out there somewhere, scaring the hell out of everyone as soon as the sun went down, holding people prisoner where they lived, or making them simply decide not to drive into the city after dark. Even Libby had to admit it wasn’t worth the risk, though she never shared that thought. She didn’t think you should let other people tell you how to live, especially people with guns. She hated guns.

  The cast gave a final bow from the waist, then jogged offstage in a way that made it clear they were spent from the performance, but still spirited. Some of them waved their appreciation of the audience’s response, or maybe of the audience’s courage in attending the theater.

  As the houselights came up, the audience, smiling and making favorable comments, began filing toward the aisles and exits.

  “Another one down,” Libby’s leading man, Victor Tobin, said, as she made her way to her dressing room. He was a tall man with generous actor’s instincts and ever-present Listerine breath. Vic was a little short in the voice department but could dance like Najinsky. He was, more than anything, a pro. Libby thought sharing the stage with him was a pleasure.

  “It’d be nice to play to full houses,” she said, stopping for a moment to let two black-clad stagehands pass with a plywood prop.

  “It seems odd,” Tobin said beside her, “to be playing to full-house matinees and half-house evening audiences.”

  “Night Sniper asshole,” Libby said, by way of explanation. She opened her dressing room door.

  Tobin grinned. “Dead on, Lib.” He bent down and gave her a peck on the cheek before moving on.

  As soon as she was alone in her dressing room, Libby got a chilled bottle of carbonated water from the tiny refrigerator and downed half of it. It was too warm in the room, so she switched on the floor fan in the corner, wishing these old theaters would work on their air-conditioning.

  There were three knocks on the door; then it opened and Beth from wardrobe entered.

  The play had run long enough that there was no need for words between the two women. Their actions after each performance had become routine. The elderly, saturnine Beth helped Libby out of the tight black Lycra costume she’d worn in the closing dance number, then draped it over a padded hanger on the metal rack against the wall. After taking a few garments from the rack that needed cleaning or sewing, she waited to see if Libby required anything more.

  Libby glanced around, smiled, and shook her head no, and Beth withdrew to help someone else with awkwardly placed Velcro or zippers.

  Leaving the door open a crack to facilitate the flow of air from the fan, Libby sat down before her lighted mirror and looked at herself, the ultimate London cat burglar. Elfin, mischievous, even feline.

  Anyone would pick me out of a lineup as a cat burglar. Maybe I missed my calling.

  Nobody in the theater world would agree with that last part.

  Time to disassemble the cat burglar. Libby carefully removed her wig and placed it on its form for Beth to comb tomorrow morning. Since the shedding of the Lycra dance costume, Libby was wearing only panties, no bra, and decided to stay that way to remain cool while she removed her makeup.

  The door opened all the way and a male dancer named Edmund stuck his
head in. “Oops! Wrong room,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “You don’t seem sorry,” Libby said, smiling as the young man closed the door.

  When she was in her street clothes, her dark, short-cropped hair a charming mess, she put on an ankle-length light raincoat, tinted glasses, and a jaunty denim cap. She had an appointment to meet her agent and a TV producer in Marteen’s Lounge, where they would have a few drinks and talk over a possible television series based on the success of Burglar.

  Libby was sure nothing would come of the idea, but she knew this was the way it went in her business. Meet someone over drinks or food, then listen, talk, listen, forget it, take a phone call six months later, and you had work. The acting life. She loved it, and finally it was starting to love her back.

  She adjusted the angle of the denim cap that made her look sixteen and as if she should be hawking newspapers, then lowered the dark glasses on her nose so she could peer over the tops of the frames at her image in the mirror.

  Nothing left of the cat burglar.

  “Good to go,” she said to herself, then left the dressing room and made her way to the glowing red exit sign, saying good night to people as she went. She was sure no one would recognize her on the street when she left by the stage door on the side of the theater.

  She was wrong.

  After closing the heavy steel door behind her, she turned around and felt a terrible pain in her chest. Her thoughts went flying. Her heart began a wild hammering.

  Beyond the mouth of the passageway, almost everyone dropped flat or sought cover at the crack of the shot Libby had barely heard in her sudden shock. She felt dizzy, completely. . disoriented. She heard someone whimper-probably me-and with a dancer’s grace she sat down cross-legged on the hard concrete.

  Libby lost her grip on time and didn’t know how much of it had passed. Her heartbeat was deafening and becoming more irregular, and that terrified her. She was only about ten feet back from the sidewalk and tried to call for help, but she could make no sound other than the soft whimpering.

  Several minutes had passed since the echoing report of the rifle, and out on the street and sidewalk people were beginning to raise their heads and look around, or stand up uneasily and move on. None of them seemed aware that Libby had been shot. None of them happened to glance into the lighted passage where she sat bleeding.

  Warm. . warm. . Am I bleeding?

  She extended her forefinger and tried to touch the wavering red brilliance spreading all around her. She couldn’t reach it. Much too far away.

  When she looked up she saw on the other side of the street a ragged derelict staring directly at her while hurrying along under the burden of a dark backpack.

  He knows I’m here!

  The way he’s staring at me. . we both …

  Nothing more.

  43

  “We got trouble,” Melbourne said.

  He was standing behind his desk in his spacious office. The desk was a slate-topped, massive mahogany affair he’d paid for himself. There was a bank of file cabinets along one wall, and a smaller desk nearby on which sat a closed notebook computer and a neat stack of green file folders. The other walls were festooned with photographs, framed news items, commendations, trophies, and personal letters from celebrities. The rewards of ambition and political acumen.

  Repetto sat in one of the burgundy leather chairs facing the desk, his legs extended and his ankles crossed. His heels were dug into the plush carpet. “I guess by that you mean more trouble.”

  “We should never have clued in the media on the nursery rhyme thing.”

  “We had no choice,” Repetto told him. “They would have caught on to it anyway. Besides, would you want to take the heat if people were killed and we might have warned them?”

  Melbourne ignored the question. He glared at Repetto from beneath eyebrows his barber had obviously forgotten to trim; then he leaned forward and supported himself with the knuckles of both hands on the desk, the way an alpha gorilla might stand. “The Night Sniper chose one hell of a victim last time out.”

  “The thief,” Repetto said.

  “So all the morning papers tell me. But Libby Newland wasn’t your ordinary thief. She was a scene stealer. The public loves-loved-her. The public is pissed off. That piss gets on the pols, who pressure the department higher-ups-”

  “You,” Repetto interrupted.

  “Me. Who, in turn, diverts all that piss and pressure to?”

  “Me?”

  “Uh-huh. The downhill theory.”

  “More than a theory,” Repetto said.

  “Right you are, there at the base of the hill. The stakes have been raised. We have to nail this guy, Vin.”

  “Or I re-retire?”

  That seemed to sober Melbourne. “No, no. . But I need something for the wolves that are snapping at me, so they can play show-and-tell with the others. Some meat to throw them.”

  “Like the Night Sniper himself.”

  “That’d be prime steak. Are you any closer?”

  “With every victim,” Repetto said, “but it’s a hell of a way to gain ground.”

  “Why couldn’t you figure out he might kill somebody in a Broadway show with Burglar in the title?”

  “Because in the past he only used theater and play references to give us clues so we could find his messages.” Repetto uncrossed his legs. He stared at the photographs of Melbourne receiving awards, Melbourne posing with NYPD elites and the city’s top political figures. Not a stupid man, Melbourne. “You ask a good question, though,” Repetto said. “He took a chance killing such a famous thief, gambling that we wouldn’t anticipate it and be ready for him.”

  “You haven’t figured out how he thinks,” Melbourne said, “but he’s figured out how you don’t think. He’s inside your mind, and at this point you’re supposed to be inside his.”

  “I am to an extent,” Repetto said. “He’s not the sort to take that kind of chance.”

  “But Libby Newland’s dead. She had no police protection, and the Sniper’s escaped as usual.”

  “I don’t buy that knows how we don’t think premise of yours,” Repetto said, “but at the same time, I agree with you. It’s as if he knew we weren’t thinking along those lines. As if he could be confident there wouldn’t be any sort of trap if he tried for Libby Newland.”

  Melbourne straightened up, then sat down hard in his padded desk chair and stared hard at Repetto. “You saying what I think I hear?”

  “I don’t know. But maybe the Sniper has police contacts, knows somebody in the department, has at least some inkling of how we’re playing the game.”

  “That word again.”

  “That’s how he sees it-a game. And it’s one that, right now, he’s winning.”

  Melbourne let out a long breath. “I won’t tell you the NYPD doesn’t leak. Do you have any facts to base your theory-”

  “Not even a theory.”

  “-your notion on?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t let it get outside this office. I-we have enough pressure. Libby Newland was one of the most popular celebrities in New York, a city that worships celebrities. Media and political pressure have intensified like water trying to reach a boil. There’s growing economic pressure here, too, Vin.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “They think business is bad now, it’s gonna grind to almost a dead stop after dark. The city at night belongs to the Sniper.”

  To sudden, random death, Repetto thought.

  Melbourne stood up again behind his desk, so Repetto stood also.

  “We’ll take back the city,” Repetto said flatly.

  Melbourne gave him a crooked smile, like the one in all the wall photos. “I’ll tell the mayor that when I see him.”

  “Quote me,” Repetto said, and left the office.

  Zoe Brady was asleep when she should have been showering and getting ready to go to her office. Her latest produce department conquest lay beside her and l
istened to her breathing. He was an expert on the breathing of sleepers; he’d crept out of dozens of apartments while women lay sleeping. And he had lain beside them weeping as they slept.

  He wasn’t leaving this apartment. Not yet.

  He looked over at Zoe’s relaxed features, her slightly open mouth near the top of the thin sheet, as if she were about to nibble at the linen. Her rhythmic breathing made the edge of the sheet near her lower lip flutter in time to her exhalations. Besides the three glasses of wine she’d had for dinner, Zoe had consumed, in the plastic bottle of diet cola he’d brought her after sex, two powdered Ambiens that he’d crushed between two spoons. He thought it would be at least ten o’clock before she woke up on her own.

  Confidently but quietly, he eased onto his side, then swiveled his nude body so he was sitting on the edge of the mattress. The slight stirring of air brought scents and memories of last night. The woman was perspiring slightly and still smelled of sex. She moaned softly in her sleep as if sharing his recollection.

  He stood up slowly and moved away from the bed, then padded barefoot into the living room. Zoe kept her laptop computer on her desk that was concealed behind a four-panel Chinese screen. During his last visit he’d discovered her ISP password, along with various Web site passwords, written on a piece of paper hidden beneath the base of the brass desk lamp. So many of them hid passwords beneath nearby lamps.

  He booted up the small but powerful Toshiba computer and within a few minutes was online and had access to all of Zoe’s files.

  Her document files were informative. They included working notes as well as personal letters, and summaries of conversations concerning the Night Sniper. He simply scanned the documents, then plugged the zip drive he’d brought into the computer’s USB port and copied them. He would peruse them later in his apartment, along with several other files that were encrypted. He was confident he’d soon be able to break the encryption and read all of Zoe’s secrets. If he couldn’t solve the puzzle of encryption, he’d have to steal the computer and delve deeper into its system. There was always a way, though often it was time-consuming.