Fear the Night

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 been 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.