The Night Watcher (10 page)

Stack and Rica spent the next several days trying to link the victims together. But for all their work they came up zero. The Torcher’s victims seemed to have virtually nothing in common other than that they all lived in apartments. They were respectively a tax attorney; a plastic surgeon; and the latest, James Healy, who’d made money buying and selling taxi medallions—a lucrative and distinctly New York business. For the last few years Healy had fancied himself a day trader and bought and sold stocks at his home computer. Roy Wilson, who died in the apartment adjacent to Healy’s, didn’t count. His death had been accidental, as had the death of his daughter, Eden.

The deliberately killed victims were male, reasonably well-off financially (which they would be in order to live where they had), but beyond that were downright dissimilar. As far as Stack and Rica could determine, the victims’ paths had never crossed. Two were single, one was married. All had stock or bond portfolios, but who didn’t these days if they had a few extra dollars to rub together? Photographs of the three victims before death were no help. The three men looked nothing alike. It would be a real stretch of the imagination to think anyone could see them as the same type.

That there was no forced entry didn’t necessarily mean killer and victim were acquainted. Maybe only that the victim had answered a knock on the door.

Stack knew what the next step had to be, and O’Reilly instructed them to do just that: get off the victims, for a while at least, and look for some commonality in where they’d lived and died. The physical properties. If those apartments had something in common, that something could be the catalyst that led to murder. Obviously the killer had to be someone who’d been in all three. That narrowed the list of possible suspects considerably among the millions of people who lived in or were a short train or plane ride from New York City.

Stack and Rica had come in early this morning and sat for hours studying crime scene photos of the burned apartments where Torcher victims had died. It had taken Rica about fifteen minutes to realize they were wasting their time.

“All we’re looking at is charred wood and drywall and ashes,” she said, leaning back in her chair and stretching. She threw her shoulders back, putting on a breast show, but Stack ignored it.

He agreed with her but kept shuffling through the photos in each murder file. “What we need are shots of the apartments before they were burned.”

“Just the kitchens,” Rica said, “where the bodies were found.”

“Not necessarily. If the apartments rather than the victims had something in common that might have set off our firebug, it might show in photos of the other rooms.”

“Or the other rooms themselves.” Instantly Rica wished she could reach out and grab her words before they reached Stack. She knew he wouldn’t let them pass.

Methodical, relentless Stack. She thought she’d say it before he did: “I suppose that’s our next move, visiting each of the apartments.”

“Nope, we’re going to the funeral,” he said. “Eden Wilson’s going to be buried this morning.”

Rica should have remembered. They would go to the funeral and watch for anyone in any way suspicious. It wasn’t unknown for killers to give in to a compulsion to attend their victim’s funeral, and their firebug was driven by compulsion. And maybe this time, guilt. At least they could hope.

“Then,” Stack said, “we visit each of the apartments.”

The man could be frustrating, but he made her glad she wasn’t a criminal.

Eden’s funeral took place after a service in a small mortuary in Brooklyn. Her mother, who’d buried her husband and Eden’s father only days ago, looked numbed from grief and medication. The girl’s grandparents looked old, much older probably than they had last week.

After the service, Stack and Rica drove the unmarked in the funeral procession to a cemetery situated on a slight hill and crowded with headstones and religious statuary. It was near a busy highway and would seldom be silent. No place for a child to be laid to permanent rest.

Hunched against the late-morning cold, Rica read the engraving on Eden’s headstone:
In the violent world around us, in God she is secure.

Rica sure hoped so.

Standing near a concrete Christ with outstretched arms, she tuned out the graveside service and let her gaze slide over the group of mourners. They all appeared profoundly grief-stricken, many of them crying. The death of a child…

Rica and Stack had studied the mourners earlier in the mortuary, if or how they approached the closed casket with the girl’s photograph resting on it, how they interacted with each other. Everyone there seemed to be known to at least one other person. No one behaved in any way unusual under the grim circumstances.

Rica was sure that attending the memorial service and funeral had yielded her and Stack nothing. It had to be attended, though, and by the chief investigators themselves rather than the NYPD representatives who’d covered the other, adult victims’ funerals, whose reports Stack and Rica had read, dismissed, and filed away as useless. It was all a sad part of routine police work, of the deceased’s devolution from person to a set of facts and statistics.

The funeral ended the way they all do, with a tentative, heartbroken sense of loss and sad new beginning. Eden Wilson was completely gone now, and her brief existence had been summed up. All that was left was memory losing its battle against time.

Gray clouds had become darker and caused the shadows of the tombstones to disappear. The wind was colder and carried light rain like specks of ice that seemed to burrow into exposed skin like acid.

Rica was never more glad to leave a place.

The next evening, Stack and Rica sat wearily on a gray sofa in the lobby of the Whitlock Building. Other than a section of carpet that had been removed and awaited replacement, dark scrapes on one of the walls, and scuff marks on the marble floor, there was little indication that a major fire had occurred here. Life did go on.

They were both bone tired. They’d visited the apartments in the order in which they’d burned, carefully examining and then photographing each. They saw nothing linking them together. They’d concluded that Danner had owned no valuable art; Dr. Lucette had possessed only moderately expensive and rather tasteful erotic art; Healy’s taste in art ran to dogs playing poker. None of any sort of art seemed to be missing. Art theft seemed not to be a motive. Nor for that matter theft of any kind. Plenty of jewelry and cash had been left behind in each apartment.

All indications were that major amounts of money hadn’t been kept in the apartments. Only the twenty thousand dollars in Danner’s bedroom safe had been a considerable enough sum to suggest motive. And of course the money hadn’t been removed from the safe.

“White,” Stack said in a tired voice.

Rica looked over at him. “What?”

“All three apartments were painted one shade or another of white.”

“Almost every apartment in New York is white,” Rica said. “It makes them look larger.”

Stack realized his own apartment was white.

“It’s like some kind of game with him!” Rica said in frustration. “Only he can see and we have to play in the dark!”

“It’s a game with all of them, but a damned serious game.”

Stack’s cell phone chirped. He glanced at Rica as he pulled it from an inside suit coat pocket, pressed it to his ear, and said simply, “Stack.”

Rica sat staring at the scrapes on the wall and listening to his end of the conversation:

“Yeah, I’m sorry…It isn’t me saying no, it’s my lawyer…For God’s sake, we both have lawyers, so it makes sense that we oughta listen to what they say, take their advice…Yeah…yeah…yeah…”

One of The Beatles,
Rica thought.

“Yeah…”

Nope. Too many “yeahs.”

“Yeah, that makes sense…I don’t mind, Laura, but I’ve gotta let Gideon Fine know. That’s right, because he is. Yeah…yeah…yeah. No, it sounds reasonable, and I can’t think why I shouldn’t, but then I’m a cop, not an attorney…yeah…yeah…yeah.”

Stack hung up. “Laura,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“She’s ticked off because my lawyer told me not to write that letter of recommendation for her. He said it was unwise to put sterling praise in writing about someone I might yet be engaged with in litigation.”

“She must see the sense in that.”

Stack made a face. “Hell, I don’t know. Why does a divorce between two people who aren’t contesting it have to be such a walk on eggs?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” Rica said, “but it is. And eggs break real easy.”

“Since my lawyer told me not to put anything in writing,” Stack said, “Laura wants me to drop by and talk to this co-op board in person.”

“You mean, like, testify before them?”

“No, no, they’re not a panel of judges or a grand jury. It’ll be more of a conversation, is all.”

“See what your lawyer says about that,” Rica suggested.

“Oh, I will. I never liked it when lawyers played cops; I’m not gonna try playing lawyer.”

“I know you can be persuasive, Stack. You’re a nice guy and want to help Laura. But don’t try to talk your lawyer into giving you the okay.”

“I won’t.”

But she knew he would.

They sat silently and watched an elderly woman walking a small, sweatered dog that looked like a schnauzer but probably wasn’t enter the lobby. She nodded, smiling at them, as she crossed to the elevator. Rica thought she remembered the woman from the night of the fire but couldn’t be sure. She
was
pretty sure about the dog, though, that had been weaving around legs in the crowd of tenants watching their building burn.

What kind of cop am I, that I can remember a dog but not a person? Height about sixteen inches, eyes brown, hair gray and brindle, clothing red sweater with leg holes.

The dog glanced back at her as if it knew her thoughts.

“So we come up empty again,” Rica said, when the elevator door had glided shut behind the woman and her canine. “Not surprising, since we have no idea what we’re looking for.”

“I know what to look for,” Stack said. “Larry Chips.”

“Gut feeling?” Rica asked.

Stack took a while before answering. “I’m going with my head this time. Chips is the best we’ve got.” He met her eyes with his steady gray appraisal. “How do you feel about it?”

“You ever get in your car and have the feeling you’re going to have an accident, but you ignore it and go ahead and drive off anyway? Then it turns out you were right to ignore the feeling and you didn’t have an accident?”

He kept studying her. “Yeah.”

“Well, that’s how I feel about Larry Chips.”

Etta Daggett said, “Let’s do it.”

She was Leland Brand’s unofficial campaign manager. Not that Brand had declared himself a candidate for the next New York City mayoral election. The next such election was years away, and he was still, after all, an aide to the present mayor. But the present mayor had announced that for personal and business reasons he wasn’t running for another term. The Office of Public Safety, the Division of Safety and Health, and several other city departments were about to be combined into one new office, the Department of Public Well-being. To be appointed commissioner of that office was an obvious stepping-stone to the mayoral candidacy, if the new commissioner played the game cleverly enough. That was where Etta Daggett came in.

On hearing of the proposed departmental realignment, the first thing Brand had done was quietly hire Etta Daggett. She’d handled several present elected officials and had a reputation as a mudslinger and a ball-kicking political infighter. Brand didn’t have much stomach for that kind of thing, but one did what one must.

“What’s the mayor say?” he asked. He was almost Etta’s physical opposite, short while she was tall, military erect while she was stooped, blond while she was dark, alert and handsome while she was deceptively drowsy looking and sporting a mustache of fine dark fuzz she defiantly preferred to depilatories. Brand wore tailored pinstriped suits, white shirts, and drab ties without pattern. His hair was cut short and expensively coiffed, his collars made rigid with plastic stays, his pants pressed as if the creases were sewn in, his colors coordinated as if by computer. Next to him, Etta appeared to have dressed in the dark.

“The mayor is leaning toward appointing you commissioner of the Department of Public Well-being,” she told Brand. “That means you can stake out your claim for the foreseeable future. Ask the right questions and provide the right answers. High-rise apartment fires are a major threat to a city built mostly in the air. Why wasn’t New York ready for this threat?”

Brand raised a golden eyebrow. “The mayor will go along with that approach?”

“Sure. Because there’s something to it. The technology isn’t there to fight fires hundreds of feet in the air. Not on a city budget, anyway.”

“I read about some special helicopters equipped with fire retardant sprayers—”

“So don’t tell anybody,” Etta said. “Most of that shit doesn’t work anyway. It’s usually some guy who invented something in his garage and wants to take advantage of a bad situation. You’re above that. What can we do
now?
That’s your approach. You make a success of this commissioner’s job, then use that success for all the media time you can get, especially in periods of crises.”

“You really don’t think it’s a little early to be moving on the next mayoral election?”

It’s a little late to be changing your mind about it. Or your guts.
“Not the way politics are, what they’ve become. You’ve got no choice but to spend a long time laying the groundwork for a successful campaign. The voters can spend the next several years getting used to depending on you for their safety, their lives, because you know what to do. And then you promise that if elected, you’ll damn well do it.”

“If I may play devil’s advocate,” Brand said, “do what?”

“You mean as mayor?”

“No, too soon for that. As commissioner.”

“Call a fucking meeting with experts! How are you supposed to know off the bat what’s needed here? Fighting fires isn’t your field. You don’t want to go off half-cocked and shoot your dick off. Find out what the experts say about this situation before you act and maybe do more harm than good.”

“The mayor was talking about appointing a committee as well as combining departments.”

“Doesn’t mean squat. There are already so many committees a committee is needed to figure out how to tell one from the other.”

“Still, committees work even if they don’t work. They give the impression something’s being done.”

“The plan is,” Etta forged ahead patiently, “the mayor will pretend you’re ahead of the curve on this issue and agree with you once you’ve established your position as the new commissioner. That way the public remembers and gives you credit in the voting booth. You’ll still be the Department of Public Well-being commissioner. If things are going crappy, we convince them they can’t switch horses now. Too dangerous. If things are going smoothly, you’re the reason. Win, win.”

“You really think voters are still that gullible?”

“They’re dumber than they ever were, especially if they think they’re sophisticates.”

Etta slouched over to a credenza near the window and poured herself a bourbon straight up, then sampled it. She had no idea what kind it was, since it was in a crystal decanter, but it was smooth.

When she turned, taking a second sip, she saw that Brand was standing there looking mildly confused.

“I’m hired only to advise,” Etta said. “It’s ultimately your call, Leland. But if the mayor appoints you the new commissioner and his obvious heir apparent—and he will—I do advise you to make this high-rise fire thing your issue. It’s a sure winner. This Torcher creep will start a few more fires, cause some more Sturm und Drang while you go up in the polls as his adversary. Then he’ll get caught like they all do, and you can claim some of the credit for that, too.”

“And if he isn’t caught right away? If he keeps setting fires and real panic sets in and more people die?”

Etta smiled. “Then it’s
I told you so
time. You were the one who jumped on this problem early and demanded something be done. If only people had listened! There’s always a silver lining, or one you can paint that color.”

Brand shook his head. “Pathetic, but probably sound reasoning.”

“I’ve gotta talk freely, Leland, in order that we can work together. You came up through the ranks in New York politics, so you’re no cherry. But in the past few years, while you’ve been doing a damned good job
in
City Hall, the game of getting
to
City Hall or anywhere else has gotten rougher. If somebody doesn’t have the stomach for today’s politics, or tomorrow’s, he better grow one.”

Brand walked over to the window and looked out at Lower Manhattan, at the bundled pedestrians and clogged traffic, at the city he really did love. He’d never had any illusions about political life; if he hadn’t known how the game was played, he wouldn’t be an aide to one of the most successful mayors in New York’s history. And he knew Etta was right about how much lower the gutter had slipped in recent years. “What if my opponent, whoever he or she turns out to be, takes the line that I shamelessly worked a human tragedy to my advantage? That my ambition exceeds my morality?”

“You remind your opponent—and the voters—that you goddamn
did
something about the situation. Or at least you tried. Which, if you stop to think about it, will be true.” She noticed he was nodding slightly in agreement, maybe not even aware of the abbreviated little bobbing movements. “You start talking it up now and the mayor won’t have any choice but to appoint you. And the cops’ll feel the pressure—I’ll help see to that. Then whoever’s going around burning people in their apartments will feel the pressure, too. And the thing is, you might really be contributing to ending the city’s latest nightmare.”

Brand grinned at her with something like admiration. “You’re definitely persuasive, Etta.”

She smiled. “No, Leland,
you’re
persuasive!”

“And persuaded,” he said, and walked over and poured a bourbon of his own.

“There’s gotta be
something
linking these victims to each other besides their killer,” O’Reilly was saying. He plopped back down in his desk chair and stared at Stack and Rica, seated across the desk from him. It took a while for his chair cushion to stop hissing. “There must be something you two are overlooking.”

Stack said, “Maybe that something is Larry Chips.”

O’Reilly flushed with anger. “Him again? I told you, he’s a small-timer and a fuckup. Strikes the match in fire insurance scams because he doesn’t want to or can’t turn an honest dollar.”

“Then why’d he bolt on Rica?’

“Who knows for sure? Maybe he was planning on burning down the building and thought we somehow found out about it. A guy like that rabbits out of a drug-dive apartment and you got him built up like Oswald. Chips probably had a dozen reasons to run when he saw a cop.”

“Name Chips as our suspect,” Stack said, “and we relieve some public angst. There’ll be a lot of media play, and maybe somebody’ll actually spot him somewhere.”

O’Reilly shook his head violently. “This is the NYPD, not
America’s Most Wanted.
Chips is a nonissue.”

Rica said, “Maybe so, but it still might help to get his name in the papers and on TV as a prime suspect. Getting a suspect’s photograph plastered all over television has brought results in the past. If Chips isn’t our firebug, it still might shake some information loose out there. He split from that apartment and risked killing a cop or getting shot himself for
some
reason.”

O’Reilly sighed and leaned back in his chair, studying Rica. Stack thought of a naturalist observing some kind of animal life that didn’t care one way or the other if he existed, but was nonetheless keeping an eye on him. O’Reilly said, “Has it occurred to you, Rica, that a wacko like Chips is very often not thinking clearly?”

“Sure. There are times even I don’t think clearly.”

O’Reilly continued with his analytical gaze, maybe now trying to decide if she was messing with him. She met his stare with admirable neutrality. Stack would have said something to break the tension, only he was becoming amused.

Rica’s equanimity seemed finally to bother O’Reilly and he shifted his weight forward so the chair tilted with him. He propped his elbows on the desk and assumed a pose of concern, letting his gaze roam now between Rica and Stack. “What you gotta ask yourself, you two, is do you really think Larry Chips is good for these barbecues, or is it that you’ve run through every other possibility you can think of and he’s all that’s left?”

“If you’re looking for an honest answer,” Rica said, “it’s a combination of both. And it’s not as if we’d be badgering a law-abiding citizen—this guy took a shot at me, remember?”

Stack wished he could reach over and prod her in the ribs, make her go a little more cautiously here. Who could tell when O’Reilly might look for a scapegoat so he could set right Vandervoort’s poor administrative procedures?

There was a knock on the door, and a clerk Stack hadn’t seen before walked in and handed O’Reilly a folded sheet of fax paper. She was young, cute, and had an almost impossibly turned up nose. No words were exchanged as she made her way back out of the office without looking at either Stack or Rica, while O’Reilly read whatever was on the paper.

“Here’s why Larry Chips took a shot at you and ran,” he said, dropping the paper on the desk. “LAPD says there’s an active warrant on him for a homicide out in LA. He shot and killed a man at a fire he set. Outdoor security camera caught him running from the scene.” He stood up behind the desk so he could look down at Stack and Rica, who remained seated. “So, let’s view Chips as a shooter, not a burner of people.”

“What kind of fire did Chips set out in LA?” Stack asked.

“Not an apartment fire like the ones you’re investigating. He torched a house. The victim rented it from whoever owned the building and probably hired Chips. The tenant’s burned corpse had four slugs in it. Any of our apartment fire victims have slugs in them?”

Stack admitted that none had. Rica said nothing.

“Okay,” O’Reilly said.

You think so, asshole?
Rica thought.

Stack stood up, so she figured she’d better also.

She wasn’t surprised when O’Reilly came up with something else to ask when they were almost out the door. The Columbo syndrome.

“You two looked into the sex lives of whoever was romantically involved with or married to these victims? You know, kinky stuff, that kinda thing?”

“Kinky stuff?” Rica asked.

“Not yet,” Stack said.

“That one boggles the mind,” Rica said, “considering half these people’s sex lives have gone up in smoke.”

“Or a third,” O’Reilly said meaningfully.

Rica was formulating a reply when she felt Stack actually push her out the door.

In the squad room they saw the new young clerk busy at an open file drawer. Stack and Rica walked over to her.

Stack introduced himself and Rica to the young woman, called her
dear,
melted her heart with his smile. Made Rica sick, but the girl didn’t seem to see through him.

“Did the commander ask you to bring that form into his office as soon as it came in?” Stack asked.

“No,” said the clerk. “It came in by fax over two hours ago. He told me to wait twenty minutes after you entered his office, then bring the information in to him.”

“Thank you, dear,” Stack said.

As he and Rica strode from the building, Rica could hear him breathing hard with his anger.

She thought she might even be able to feel heat emanating from him.