Night Victims (The Night Spider) (11 page)

“You should get out of the park,” the Night Spider said. “It’s going to be dark soon. Not a safe place.”

A wide, confident grin. “It’s okay, I’m with my mom.”

Trudging along the path about a hundred feet away was a large, lumpish woman pushing a blue baby stroller. She was moving slowly and looked tired.

“So wacha doin’, spyin’ on people?” There seemed no hostility or disapproval in the boy’s question.

“Peregrine falcons,” said the Night Spider.

“So what’re those?”

“Birds that hunt other birds. They live in angles and on ledges of buildings high up and snatch other birds right out of the air.”

“Sounds neat.”

“It is neat. That’s why I’m a bird watcher. In case your mother asks what the stranger you were talking to was doing. Bird watching. It’s my hobby. I especially like peregrine falcons.”

The boy raised his eyebrows curiously. “So these falcons just fly over an’ grab the other birds, like pigeons or some-thin’ just flyin’ along, an’ then eat them?”

“That’s pretty much it. They do it fast. Things flying along up high aren’t as safe as they think.”

“And you watch it?”

“That’s why I’m here. I watch it and write down what happens.”

The boy started to say something more, but his mother called sharply and he waved a hand and bolted away to join her. His sneakered feet made soft slapping sounds on the paved path.

The Night Spider watched the slight, receding figure for a while, then raised the binoculars back to his eyes.

Found the correct window.

. . . aren’t as safe as they think.

12

“Schnick as in prick,” Bickerstaff said, as they climbed out of the unmarked.

“Try to behave,” Paula told him.

Gary Schnick’s building didn’t have a doorman, but when Paula and Bickerstaff entered the spacious, rather shabby lobby, a fat man in gray overalls watched them with a sideways gaze from where he sat on a sofa. The lobby had a cracked gray-and-white-tile floor, red concrete planters with obviously fake ferns in them next to the scattered furniture, and an odor that suggested insecticide.

Paula and Bickerstaff studied the bank of tarnished brass mailboxes.

“He’s in 106,” Paula said, spotting Schnick’s name above one of the boxes in the top row. Something white was visible through the slot; Schnick hadn’t picked up his mail today. Above the name slot was an intercom button, but Paula could tell by the many layers of paint over it that it didn’t work.

“Help you?” a smoker’s hoarse voice asked behind them. “I’m the super.”

It was the guy in the overalls, looking much bulkier now that he was standing.

“We’re looking for Gary Schnick,” Bickerstaff said, showing his badge. “So far we found his mailbox.”

The obese super’s complexion turned the drab gray of his uniform. His reaction interested Paula. Bickerstaff, too. They moved closer to the man.

“I can tell you he’s not home,” the super said. Paula noticed he smelled like stale sweat and cigars.

“What else can you tell us?” she asked.

The super’s doughy face widened, and flesh beneath one of his eyes began to tick. His mouth worked for a few seconds but no sound came out. Clearly there was an inner struggle going on here.

“Gary didn’t mention any police,” the super finally said.

“So what did he mention?” Bickerstaff used his quietly menacing voice. Watching all those Clint Eastwood movies paid off.

“Said where he was gonna be,” the super spoke up immediately. “Told me to call him if anybody came around looking for him. Didn’t mention any police, though.”

“Police you got,” Paula said. “What’s your name?”

“Ernie Pollock.”

Bickerstaff made a show of writing it down. “Okay, Ernie, what can you tell us about Schnick?”

Pollock sucked in air, expanding his already immense torso. “Nice guy, is about all. I don’t hardly know him well enough to tell you more’n that. He does some kinda accounting work in his apartment. He offered once to do my taxes. I told him, hell, they ain’t that complicated. My girlfriend Linda does ‘em for me. She says we’d get married, only it’d cost us.”

“Seems to cost everyone,” Paula said. “Ever known Schnick to have overnight female guests?”

Pollock rubbed his sleeve across his glistening forehead. He was sweating as if he were working at it. “Once in a while, is all. But, hell, he’s young and single. There was never anything like a parade up there.”

“He ever cause any kind of trouble?”

“Not in the slightest. I said he was a nice guy. I’m kinda the unofficial doorman here, and he springs for a nice gift at Christmas, which is more’n you can say for some of the other cheap bastards that live here.”

“Now the big question,” Paula said. “Where might we find Mr. Schnick?”

Pollock suddenly turned even paler, fixing his gaze beyond Paula. “There,” he said hoarsely. “Right there.”

Paula turned around to see a short, dark-haired man about forty, wearing wrinkled khaki pants and a perspiration-soaked blue shirt with a red tie plastered askew across his chest. His face was pudgier than the rest of him, which was actually kind of thin. Paula thought Lightfoot was right to wonder what Redmond had seen in Schnick.

When he saw Paula and Bickerstaff with Pollock, Schnick’s jaw dropped and he broke stride, actually did a little skip. His body language became pure babble. First, he almost whirled and bolted, but then he took a stride toward them trying to look casual. Then he shuffled his feet and veered away from them. No, he was back on course now. He knew he had to keep coming toward them, but his body wouldn’t accept the message.

“He always do the hokey-pokey when he comes in?” Bickerstaff asked.

When he drew closer, Schnick nodded at Pollock. “Ernie.” For a second he seemed to consider walking on past, toward the elevators.

Bickerstaff stopped him with one hand placed lightly on the shoulder; he flashed his shield with the other hand.

“They’re cops,” Pollock said unnecessarily.

Paula tried to catch Schnick when she saw him turn a pasty color. He was so slippery with sweat that he oozed through her arms and sank to his knees.

Ow! Jesus!
She’d bent back a fingernail.

Schnick’s eyes rolled back, and she managed to hold on to a handful of damp hair and ease his descent, but with the sore finger she couldn’t stop him from going down the rest of way to lie curled and unconscious on the cracked tiles.

Horn settled into his usual booth at the Home Away. Anne had wolfed down her toast and orange juice at home, then hurried off to her job at the hospital.

It had become their weekday-morning ritual. Horn would rise first and put on the coffee, then share caffeine and conversation with Anne during her breakfast. It used to be that those times were comfortable, their conversation easy and about the trivial but necessary things a man and his wife discussed. But since the lawsuit Anne hadn’t been sleeping well and was almost always irritable in the mornings. Horn found himself looking forward to her leaving, so he could finish getting dressed, and then on some mornings, walk over to the Home Away to have his own leisurely breakfast while he read the
Times.

There was something about her distance and distraction, their increasingly frequent separation—both physical and mental—that bothered him, but maybe not as much as it should. In some ways it made him feel like a young cop again, on the Job, doing something worthwhile with his life.

Searching for a killer.

Though the booth Horn sat in wasn’t that near the window, morning sunlight reflected off the windshield of a parked car and angled in low to cast a rectangular pattern over the table and the newspaper spread alongside his coffee cup. The sun’s warmth felt good on his bare forearms as he read. Part of him was thinking how pleasant sitting there was, how this wasn’t a bad way to spend a morning.

The news was front page above the fold, emphatic for the
Times.
The caption read serial killer might be operating in new york. The text was factual and matter-of-fact, and referred to the killer as the Night Spider only once. It had always amused Horn how the
Times
always politely referred to male suspects as
Mr.,
and he almost expected to come across
Mr. Night Spider.

He finished reading the piece and pushed the paper aside. Then he picked up the
Post
he’d also bought after seeing its headline: night spider nails another. The following story contained pretty much the same general information as the one in the
Times,
though the prose was more sensational. In bringing to the attention of the citizens of New York that a prolific and particularly horrific serial killer was in their midst, it used the term
Night Spider
twenty-three times.

In both papers, the story was at the very least unsettling.

“I see we’ve got another one of those guys killing his mother over and over,” Marla said, as she topped off Horn’s coffee.

“They don’t all do that,” Horn said.

“I know. It’s a lot more complicated than that. I read in the paper you came out of retirement to handle this case. What made you do it?”

“I guess because I was an oldest child,” Horn said.

“No, you weren’t the oldest.”

Horn was surprised. Marla was right; he was the middle of three brothers and the only survivor of the three. “So pop psychology can lead us astray,” he said.

“You better believe it.”

There were no other customers in the diner, and the glass coffeepot she held was almost empty, so she lingered by his booth as she often did.

“So what do you think?” Horn asked.

“About?”

“This serial killer.”

“I don’t have all the facts.”

“None of us do,” Horn said. “That’s the problem. What do you make of it from what you read in the papers and hear on the news?”

Marla seemed a little surprised he was asking her about this seriously, but she walked over and placed the coffeepot back on its burner, and then returned. Her manner was slightly different, but it would take a practiced eye like Horn’s to notice. She wasn’t in her waitress persona now; she seemed involved and thoughtful. There was more going on behind her eyes than over easy and bacon crisp.

“He kills women he doesn’t know,” she said, “or he’d simply knock on their doors then incapacitate them instead of sneaking through their windows.”

“He might have a thing about them needing to be asleep,” Horn suggested.

“I know. I’m only hypothesizing. The victims are all attractive women but not of a particular type.” She saw the curiosity in his eyes. “Television news had their photos on last night. Nina Count’s channel.”

“It would be hers,” Horn said. “She’s a wolf among news hounds.”

“Your killer must have some kind of climbing skills,” Marla said. Something in the look she gave him revealed she was locked on like radar, now that he’d asked her opinion. She wasn’t interested in his asides about a TV anchor-woman. “So he might be involved in rock climbing—that’s a growing sport—or mountain climbing. Or maybe entomology.”

That brought Horn up short as he was lifting his cup to his mouth. He placed the steaming cup back down. “Entomology? The study of insects?”

Marla nodded. “The media aren’t just calling him the Night Spider because he crawls up and down buildings. There’s the way he swathes his victims, like a spider using secretions to wrap and disable a victim before draining it of fluids. And the wounds are stabs rather than slashes, almost as if he’s emulating a spider slowly sapping the life of helpless prey caught in its web. The killer doesn’t seem to be in a rush. Neither is a spider. It feeds at its leisure off insects it’s trapped and wrapped, until they weaken and die and become useless husks.” She smiled without humor. “If I were a bug, I wouldn’t want to be at the mercy of a spider. It doesn’t know mercy, and neither does your killer.”

“You’re saying the killer somehow identifies with spiders?”

“Exactly. I wouldn’t hazard a guess as to how or why, but it looks that way. And for that he needs familiarity with spiders. Like an entomologist.”

Horn sat back, studying her. It wasn’t just what she’d said but the way in which she’d said it. “You weren’t always a waitress, Marla.”

“Who was? I had a life before this.”

“What kind of life? You don’t look that old.”

She laughed. “The past is dead and gone. And I’m . . . let’s just say in my early forties.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to stray where I shouldn’t.”

“That’s okay. I understand. It’s the cop in you.”

“Marla—”

The bell over the door jingled, and she hurried toward the front of the diner to wait on a guy in a business suit mounting a stool at the counter.

Horn used his cell phone to contact Paula and Bickerstaff.

It was Bickerstaff who answered.

“You still interrogating Gary Schnick?” Horn asked.

“Paula’s in the room with him now. This guy didn’t do it. Two of his neighbors saw him arriving home last night a couple of hours before Redmond’s time of death. He doesn’t know that yet, though, so we’re letting him ramble.”

“He might have returned to her apartment later.”

“Could have, but I doubt it. Nothing in his apartment suggests he knows anything about climbing, and his hands are soft from years of pushing pencils and tickling tax returns. This character’s no more a mountain climber than I am. Doin’ it without Viagra’s the extent of his vertical challenge.”

“You press him hard?”

“We did. He had a rough night and looks about ready to fold. Paula’s easing up now. He didn’t even ask for an attorney for about two hours. Then he got some schmuck tax client of his that knows nothing about criminal law. I think they’re bartering, trading services so they can screw the IRS. We were about to release Schnick. His lawyer will be shocked.”

“You want to cross him off our list entirely?”

“Almost entirely. I
know
this guy’s telling the truth, and Paula feels the same way. This is not a hard case. He actually fainted when he knew we were gonna confront him about Redmond’s murder.”