Night Victims

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.