Night Victims

3

Retired NYPD Homicide Captain Thomas Horn didn’t have a hell of a lot more to do these days than eat toasted corn muffins, which was what he was waiting to do on a warm, gray Monday morning in the Home Away Diner on Amsterdam on Manhattan’s West Side.

Horn, still in his early fifties, had retired early because of what happened to the World Trade Center. He’d been on his way to interrogate the CFO of Jagger and Schmidt Brokerage at the firm’s office on the forty-second floor of the north tower. The man had almost certainly defrauded the firm’s clients of several million dollars, some of which was part of the police pension fund.

Since it was such a clear, beautiful morning, Horn had decided to leave his car where he’d parked it after pulling to the curb. He went into a jewelry store to look at gold hoop earrings for his wife, Anne. She’d said she wanted such earrings, and there in the store’s window was a sign stating they were on sale. half off hoopy-doop earrings, the sign had declared in large red letters. gold and silver.

On impulse Horn decided to buy a pair. On impulse he decided to walk the rest of the way to the World Trade Center.

Horn spent more time than he planned in the store because there were already three customers ahead of him. Then the earrings he wanted weren’t on display and the jeweler had to go into a back room and locate them. These little things added up, changing his world.

Though he was in the store less than an hour, a lot had happened during that time. The earrings had saved his life.

After leaving the store slightly before ten o’clock, earrings in his suitcoat pocket, he’d strolled about a block when he saw several people pass him going the other way and knew from their faces and the way they were walking that something was wrong. He hadn’t suspected it was at the World Trade Center, but he picked up his pace.

From conversation overheard along the way, he learned that a plane had struck one of the towers. Now he began jogging in the opposite direction of those passing him, seeing something beyond fear on some of their faces. He saw terror and, in some cases, people staring blankly ahead under the anesthetic of shock. Faces and hands were cut, clothing was torn. What the hell? He wanted to get to the damaged building, urge people to stay in the area and not to panic. His mind went back to the time when, as a child, he’d heard about a plane striking the Empire State Building. A catastrophe but one that was manageable. As a cop he’d learned that most catastrophes could be managed.

“Do yourself a favor and turn around, buddy,” a heavyset man in a business suit told him without pausing as he passed. “Both those towers are gonna fall.”

Both those towers?

Horn had stopped and stood still, puzzled. He noticed the day had dimmed and looked up to see a dark pall hanging low over the tops of buildings. Burning jet fuel, no doubt, from the collision. It must be worse than he’d imagined. He began running again, toward the towers.

And heard a roar like a thousand jetliners coming in for a landing.

A cloud of smoke that was a solid wall rounded the corner at the end of the block and rolled and rushed toward him. Horn’s heart skipped a beat as he looked up to see that the top of the cloud had curled like an incoming wave and was above him. He was going to be engulfed by it!

Something smashed loudly into a nearby parked car. Debris began falling. A woman on the opposite sidewalk disappeared beneath a crashing mass of tangled wreckage. Instinctively Horn dropped and rolled toward another parked car, trying to get beneath it to shelter himself from what was raining down.

And remembered nothing else.

He’d awakened in a hospital bed with his shoulder aching and bandaged. Doctors told him he’d been struck by falling debris, and a steel reinforcing rod had speared his right shoulder. Rerod, construction workers called it. Rescue workers had to bend it to get Horn to fit into the ambulance so the six-foot-long rod could be removed at the hospital. He was sure he’d been able to get under the car, so they figured the rerod must have somehow been shoved in after him by the terrific impact of crashing steel and concrete.

Three weeks later he was an outpatient with an almost useless right arm, and scars suggesting he’d been shot through the shoulder and the bullet had exited out his back.

A month after that he was retired. Pensioned off.

Through grueling physical therapy he’d recovered most of the use of his right arm and hand, and a modicum of strength. There was no way to recover his work, his life in the NYPD.

The Job had been more than a job; it had been what he was about, who he was. But what Horn wasn’t about was self-pity. He knew now he’d have to become someone else. Trouble was, he couldn’t figure out who.

“Corn muffins, Horn.”

He looked up from his steaming coffee cup.

Marla, the waitress who usually served Horn on the mornings he came into the diner for breakfast, had placed a plate with two toasted muffins before him. She was fortyish, maybe older, slim, and attractive, even in her dowdy black-checked uniform that made her somber brown eyes look even darker. She didn’t wear much makeup and didn’t seem to care much about her mud-colored hair, which she wore pulled back in a ponytail.

“Sorry,” he said, “I was daydreaming.”

“Want juice this morning?”

“No, this is fine.”

“You gonna tell me crime stories today?”

“No, I’m slacking off. I’m not some old fart living in the past.”

She grinned. “You hardly qualify for old fart status.” She walked away, then came back with a coffeepot and topped off his cup. “Even if you sometimes think so.”

He glanced around. The breakfast crowd was gone and there were only a few other customers in the diner, down near the other end of the counter. Maybe he would talk with Marla. She made him feel better, that was for sure. Sometimes her incisive questions surprised him-her curiosity about the criminal mind and the mind of a cop, about serial killers, which had been Horn’s specialty when he was active.

But when he was about to call her back, the bell above the door tinkled as another customer entered. Marla would have work to do, and Horn didn’t want to pass the time of day with her anyway if the customer sat down within earshot.

Horn sipped his coffee as he turned and glanced to watch where whoever had entered would settle.

He was surprised to see heading toward his booth Assistant Chief of Police Roland Larkin.

“Now you’re retired,” Larkin said with a grin, “I see you’re working on clogging your arteries.” He shook his head. “You were eating those toasted muffins when we were young and riding together in Queens.”

“Not like these,” Horn said. “These are toasted just right and are delicious.”

“And have soaked up all the grease and every flavor from the grill.” Larkin extended his right hand palm down and Horn shook it with his left. Old friends.

“Why don’t you sit down and have some of your own, Rollie?”

Larkin slipped the button on his suitcoat and slid into the seat on the other side of the table. When the coat flapped open, Horn saw he wasn’t carrying a gun. Too important these days. Larkin looked good, Horn thought. Tall and lean, even if a little paunchy, his gray eyes slightly more faded, his hair grayer, his usually rouged-looking cheeks a little more florid. He was the kind of tough but compassionate Irishman who would have made a good priest and had made a good cop.

Marla came over with a menu, all waitress now, as if she’d never seen either man before.

Larkin handed the menu back and told her just coffee.

“You come in here often?” Horn asked, knowing Larkin lived across town.

“First time. Just to talk to you.”

“How’d you find me?”

“I’m a cop. I followed the muffins.”

Marla brought coffee, then left and began working behind the counter, not far away.

“So how’s retirement?” Larkin asked.

“It hasn’t dulled my senses.” Horn took a bite of toasted muffin, chewed, and swallowed. “How come you looked me up, Rollie?”

Stirring sugar into his coffee, Larkin leaned over the table and lowered his voice. “Need your help, Horn. Something’s going on.”

“What something?”

“Last week a woman named Sally Bridge was found murdered in her apartment. She’d been wound up in her bed-sheets and stabbed thirty-seven times.”

“Lot of stab wounds.” Horn took another big bite of muffin.

“Not many of them were fatal. The killer wanted to inflict maximum agony before she died.”

“Husband?” Another bite of muffin, what was left of the top removed and buttered. Horn chased it down with some coffee.

“Bridge was single. And we don’t have the killer.”

“Victim have a love life?”

“About what you’d expect. She was between rides.”

Horn spread butter on the uneaten half of his muffin, watching it melt in. “What is it about this murder, Rollie, other than the thirty-seven stab wounds?”

“The media haven’t tumbled to the fact yet, but it’s the third one like this in the last five months.”

“Ah!” Horn rested the knife on his plate. “Serial killer.”

“Uh-huh. Same guy for sure. He climbs the building and enters through the bedroom window. Then he winds the women up in their bedsheets like they’re wrapped in some kind of shroud. Does it so expertly it looks like they don’t even wake up all the way until he slaps a piece of duct tape over their mouths. Then he goes to work with the knife, all stab wounds, no slices, missing the vital organs. Victims finally give out from the pain, die of shock or blood loss.”

Horn was staring into his coffee cup. “You said he climbs the buildings?”

“Yeah. The women live on high floors, think they’re safe.

But our boy’s a hell of a climber. Uses a glass cutter to get to the hardware if a window’s locked.”

“Victims the same type?”

“They’re between twenty-five and forty-six years old. Attractive, well built but maybe a little on the chunky side. All were single. A call girl, a computer programmer, and a casting director, in that order.”

“Sexual penetration?”

“Not unless you count the knife, all over the body. Narrow blade, about ten inches long, with a very sharp point.”

“Unusual killer,” Horn said.

“And the time between the second and third murders is less than between the first and second.”

“And scales buildings.”

“Must.”

“You’ve got a problem,” Horn said. “To be honest,” Larkin said, “why I came here was to talk you into making it your problem.”

Her case. Paula knew this one was going to be something of a test, with Bickerstaff headed for retirement in Minnesota where he was going to ice-fish. Jesus! Ice-fish! From what he’d told Paula, that meant sitting all day shivering in front of a hole in the ice trying to catch a fish instead of pneumonia. Paula had never had the patience for any kind of fishing.

She watched the unmarked she’d just climbed out of turn the corner at the end of her block and disappear, leaving a faint wisp of ghostlike exhaust smoke in its wake. Then she entered her apartment building, checked her mail-bills, ads, bills, coupons, bills-and rode the elevator to the fifteenth floor where her one-bedroom apartment was at the end of the hall.

Not a bad place, she thought, as she fitted her key to the dead bolt lock. Secondhand furnishings, framed museum prints, and an old tile bathroom with yellowed porcelain and pipes that clanged but otherwise was in pretty good shape. Kitchen from hell, though the owner was supposed to replace everything in it soon. Sure. More than one burner on the stove would work then.

Paula tensed and stood still. Something was wrong-the dead bolt was already unlocked.

She raised her right hand and eased the door open a few inches, nervously touching the butt of her 9mm handgun beneath her blazer.

“You Ms. Rambo-cwet?” asked a male voice.

Paula pushed the door open the rest of the way.

A portly man with wild gray hair and a dead cigar in the corner of his mouth stood solidly in the middle of her living room. He’d left footprints on the carpet and was wearing dirty white coveralls. A large box-end wrench was stuck through one of many cloth loops on his coveralls, dangling at his waist as if it might be drawn as a gun.

“Rambocet,” Paula corrected. “Like “get” only with a hard C instead of a G.”

“If you say. I’m Ernie Flatt-regular F-of Flatt Contracting. The super let me in. I’m here workin’ on the kitchen.”

“Really?” Paula said, stepping all the way into the apartment and closing the door. “And I was thinking of working on dinner in the kitchen.” Heating water for tea to go with Thai takeout, anyway.

Ernie smiled around the stale stub of cigar that was stinking up the living room even though it wasn’t burning. Smoking the things had left his teeth a jagged jumble of yellow. “Oh, I don’t think you’d wanna do that. I got the water off.”

“Could you turn it back on?”

“Only if you want wet floors. I got the sink pretty much tore out.”

Paula walked over and looked into the small kitchen.

She almost gasped. The old porcelain sink was dangling sideways on the wall. There were dark holes where the leaky faucet and handles had protruded. Holes in the wall. Exposed plumbing. Layers of old paint and faded wallpaper, like an archaeological dig; a rose pattern could be seen where the wood cabinets had been removed. Plaster dust and dark slats of lath were scattered on the floor. Paula’s dishes, a mismatched service for six, were stacked precariously on the table, along with her used toaster and new Braun coffee brewer.

“God!” she said. “I wish somebody’d told me you were coming.”

“I ain’t God, and just be glad I came,” Ernie told her, holding his ground. “You realize how long a waitin’ list I got?”

New York, Paula thought. Everybody was always poised to turn the tables on you.

“Yeah, maybe you’re right,” she said, rolling with the punch.

Ernie smiled broadly, cigar stub twitching. They were friends. “I’ll be outta here in a week or so, things go right. And I’ll be workin’ days while you’re workin’ yourself. Whatddya do?”

“Do? Oh, I’m a cop.”

“No shit?”

“I wouldn’t lie to you, being a cop.”

“No uniform, though.”

“Plainclothes. Detective.”

“Hey! Interesting!”

“It sure can be, Ernie.”

“Well, I was gettin’ my tools together. Just leavin’. I was gonna leave you a note, explainin’ that a bomb or somethin’ hadn’t gone off in your kitchen. I’ll be outta here in a few minutes.”

“How about if I want to take a shower?”

He cocked his head at her, speculating. Ho, brother! Then he understood. “Sure, sure. I left you water service in the bathroom. Just in the kitchen’s where I’ll be workin’. You’ll see when I’m done. You’ll love it.”

He waved, swaggered back into the kitchen, and Paula heard tools clanging around.

She barely had time to take another look at the mail she’d brought upstairs and throw away everything but the bills, when Ernie emerged from the kitchen lugging a large dented black toolbox.

“See you tomorrow,” Paula said.

“Yeah, if I’m still here when you get in from chasin’ the bad guys.” He paused with the hall door open. “I been listenin’ to you, and if you don’t mind my askin’. .”

“Cajun,” Paula said. “I’m from Louisiana.”

Ernie grinned, wagging the cigar stub in his mouth. “Didn’t sound like the Bronx.” He left and closed the door behind him.

Paula immediately walked over and locked it. People were something in this city. But then, people had been something in New Orleans.

She started to remove her shoes, then remembered the state of the kitchen and left them on. At the kitchen door, she was relieved to hear a soft but deep humming sound. Thank God, or Ernie, the refrigerator was still operating.

Paula made herself a J amp;B and water (from the bathroom washbasin) on the rocks, then went back into the living room, sat down on the sofa, propped her stockinged feet up on the coffee table, and used her cell phone to call the corner deli.

In her cozy if abused apartment, with only the humming refrigerator and muffled traffic noises nibbling at the silence, she sipped her drink while waiting for supper to be delivered, thinking about the bulging, agonized eyes of a dead woman with thirty-seven stab wounds. What had those eyes seen in the last long minutes and hours before her death? What emotional storm had raged behind them?

Christ! Thirty-seven!

Paula’s case.