The Night Watcher (25 page)

March 2002

“When I noticed the name Amy Marks on the Myra Raven Group employee list, it all came together,” Rica said, still seated at the computer just beyond where Stack sat at his desk.

“The Ardmont Arms co-op board minutes,” Stack said, already ahead of her. “Hugh Danner argued and voted against Amy and her husband Ed’s application for residency.” He was standing now, adrenaline chasing away any semblance of fatigue. “Danner’s was the decisive vote. Amy’s husband, Ed, was a cop, right?” He realized the back of his hand had knocked his coffee cup from his desk. That was okay. Not much coffee left in it and it hadn’t broken. He ignored the cup lying where it had clinked against a wall.

“Yeah, the one who died in that fire, remember?”

Stack remembered, the news of the apartment fire, the deaths of infant children as well as their father. Like most cops, he’d given generously to a benefit fund. “There was something about that fire…”

“I’ve got the report here in the computer. Ed Marks was trapped by the fire. He removed his tie and knotted one end to a radiator so the other end dangled out a fourth-floor kitchen window, hoping if he used the tie to lower himself before dropping, the fall might not prove fatal. But the length of the tie wasn’t enough. And Amy Marks watched it all, holding a dead infant daughter under each arm.”

“Holy Christ! Isn’t that the kind of thing you try not to think about!”

“But if you’re Amy Marks, you think about it anyway.”

“Every minute, one way or the other, somewhere in your mind, whether you know it or not.”

“Ed Marks wouldn’t have survived his burn wounds anyway,” Rica said. “In fact, he might have been dead before he hit the ground.”

“Burned to death…” Stack leaned back and propped himself, half seated, against the edge of the desk with his arms crossed. “Black ties were used to bind the Torcher victims. Black ties are part of an NYPD patrolman’s uniform.” He straightened up and moved toward his desk chair to sit back down, then found that he couldn’t. Tension almost hummed in him. He could sense the culmination of the investigation, the hunt, the way a carnivore smelled blood. “Amy must have blamed the co-op board residency rejection by Danner for the destruction of her family in a firetrap walk-up. So in her grief she avenged their deaths.”

“Way I see it,” Rica agreed. “Then Amy found the contents of Myra’s concealed safe, learned through Myra’s records that there were other Hugh Danners out there, other co-op board members taking illegal payoffs and rejecting perfectly qualified applicants.”

“And she couldn’t stop avenging the burning to death of her family.”

“Seems to fit,” Rica said, “but are we sure about that last part?” For the first time she was feeling some doubt. Niggling, but there. “One murder, yeah. But all the others?…”

“I’m sure,” Stack said. “The kitchen fires, the symbolic black ties…These are the kinds of homicides that set patterns that have to be acted on. Fire and revenge…They can both become addictive, increasingly compulsive.”

“Like with a psychosexual serial killer? I don’t know, Stack…”

“Ask an arsonist,” he said. “He’ll tell you what fire can do, how it can spread in unexpected ways.”

Now Rica stood up from where she’d been sitting at the computer. “I guess we have to do that.”

She still wasn’t as positive as Stack about Amy Marks, but she’d learned to believe in him. And there was one thing they agreed on and couldn’t escape.

It was time to visit Officer Marks’s widow.

They were halfway there when O’Reilly’s rasping voice broke in on the detectives’ band on the unmarked’s radio. “What’s your ten-ten, Stack?”

Stack gave their location: “Driving south on Second Avenue, near Sixty-third.”

He watched the traffic ahead, taillights reflecting like bloodstains on a street now glistening in a fine mist.

“Keep traveling the way you’re going,” O’Reilly said. He gave Stack and Rica a lower Manhattan address and told them to proceed there.

Stack had put up with about enough of O’Reilly. This wasn’t the time to indulge him in his misconceptions. “I don’t think it’s such a—”

“Larry Chips is trapped in an apartment at that address. We’re about to go in and get him.”

“We?”

“NYPD and FBI. They got the building surrounded and are about ready to move. We need for somebody from MR to be there.”

For the career, Stack thought. O’Reilly’s career. The wipers, on intermittent, thu-thunked to clear the windshield. Stack figured let the FBI have Chips. They were up to their ears in the case anyway. Interstate flight, insurance fraud. “We got another strong possibility to look into, sir. We’re on our way there now.”

“Like hell your are!” O’Reilly said. “This is the goddamn Torcher we’re talking about!”

Stack and Rica looked at each other.

“Amy can wait,” Rica said softly. There was a time to dig in their heels, but this wasn’t it. “Let’s take the call.”

Stack flashed a stubborn glare her way.

Men! Some gender! Stack in particular.

“We don’t want it to be Amy, anyway,” she said, working hard to keep Stack out of trouble. Something he wasn’t used to. “Maybe that asshole O’Reilly’s right.”

“What?” came the voice over the radio. “What the fuck was that? What’d Rica say?”

Stack realized he’d depressed the mike button early. He left it that way. “Something about you being right. We’re proceeding to the scene.”

He held the mike button down for a few more seconds so O’Reilly would hear the siren kick in. If Chips was the Torcher, Mobile Response would have a share of the collar. Under O’Reilly’s command. The visit with Ed Marks’s widow would have to wait.

Compromise.

Stack thought it left a bad taste.

Sorrow and rage and fear were like a corrosive chemical mix in Amy. She couldn’t eat or sleep or even straighten up completely from the pain that was like fire. She’d thought there would be some relief when finally it was over, but it hadn’t turned out that way. She knew now that it was over.

She stood up from where she was hunched in the corner of the sofa and trudged into the bedroom. From a closet shelf she got down a shoe box and opened it.

Inside was the one thing that somehow had survived the fire that took her family—Ed’s gun. She unwrapped it from the oily rag that preserved it and held it cradled in both hands, then sat on the edge of the bed and stared at it. There was something oddly comforting in its sleek metallic efficiency, the scent of finely machined steel and light oil.

Finally she stood up and went to her dresser. She opened the top, flat drawer and looked at the assortment of objects it held: a comb, a small jewelry box that contained earrings, a watch that had been a gift from Ed and no longer worked, a stack of photographs from years ago before their marriage, a box of bullets.

Amy placed the gun in the drawer next to the bullets, then slid the drawer closed and went to the closet, where she returned the shoe box to the shelf.

With a backward glance at the closed dresser drawer, she walked slowly into the living room and sat down.

Stood up.

Began to pace.

Sleep was out of the question, but she was exhausted and wanted to sit.

Yet she couldn’t sit. She couldn’t be still. She could only pace, only walk. The fear, the sorrow, the rage, wouldn’t let her be still. The pain that was like fire.

At first it looked as if the building where Chips was supposed to be holed up, a brick walk-up off First Avenue, was unoccupied. But it wasn’t. As Stack drove the unmarked slowly past the decaying structure, he and Rica saw lights glowing beyond the tattered curtains or yellowed shades in some of the windows. Stack had killed the siren a few minutes after O’Reilly was off the radio; then a few blocks from the building he’d switched off the cherry light and brought it back inside the car. If Chips happened to be looking out a window, the car wouldn’t arouse his suspicion.

Stack rounded the corner at the end of the block, and there were the troops. Half a dozen cruisers and some Ford Taurus unmarkeds. Stack knew the Tauruses were FBI. There was a SWAT team van parked farther down the block. Half a dozen dark, bulky figures stood nearby.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” a tall man in a black topcoat said, when Stack and Rica climbed out of the unmarked. Flashing ID, he introduced himself as Special-Agent-in-Charge Matt Perriman. Stack would have known he was FBI even without the credentials.

After Perriman had glanced at Stack’s and Rica’s shields, he said, “I give the signal, and we close the block on both ends and move in on the building behind the SWAT team.”

“You sure Chips is in there?”

“We got it from an informer who’s been gold so far.”

Stack wasn’t going to ask any more questions. He understood the necessity of keeping faith with a reliable informer. Perriman wasn’t going to reveal anything more, and Stack didn’t blame him.

“Chips is in Two-C, end unit south, second floor.”

“Away from the street,” Stack said.

“We’ve got the back of the building covered,” Perriman told him. He glanced at his wristwatch. “You wanna lead the way?”

Stack was surprised. “No agency rivalry bullshit?”

Perriman smiled slightly. “No time for it these days. The collar seems to be important to your boss. Me, I just want this piece of crap off the streets.”

“We’ll do it together,” Stack said, “now that you guys are on the side of the angels again.”

“Hell of a way to get there,” Perriman said. He turned away and ducked his head the way some people did when speaking into a two-way. Then he turned back and said to Stack, “Wanna tell your men to take up their stations?”

Not really a question, Stack thought, looking at the agent’s grim features. He nodded to Rica, who hurried toward the parked cruisers. Within seconds, two of the cruisers sped away with no sound louder than the swish of tires, then turned the corner to the block behind the building.

When Stack looked back, he saw that the bulky dark figures of the SWAT team were gone.

Perriman glanced again at his watch. “Okay, we’ll walk down the street casually, then we’ll go in the front, behind the SWAT guys. We’ll follow them to the apartment and they’ll go in hard. We’ll enter right behind them.”

Stack and Rica both nodded, and with Perriman set off down the dark, wet sidewalk. What scarce late-night traffic there had been on the street had now ceased, as Stack was sure had happened on the next block. He hoped Chips wouldn’t realize it had suddenly gone quiet outside.

They entered the old building’s gloomy vestibule. Stack caught a strong ammonia scent of stale urine but didn’t have long to notice. The SWAT detail was waiting. They detached themselves from the walls like deep shadows coming to life, then took the stairs silently, led by two men carrying a three-or four-foot-long battering ram slung between them on straps.

There was no hesitation. Stack and Rica followed Perriman and the bulky shadows along the second-floor hall to 2C. Some of the shadows moved to the side and paused, but the two with the battering ram picked up speed, and the tubular ram swung forward, backward, forward as they strode. It was like a dance done in practiced rhythm to music only they could hear.

Their timing was perfect. The ram struck the apartment’s old door with maximum force, splintering it and knocking it completely off its hinges. The SWAT members darted in, guns at the ready.

Stack and Rica exchanged a glance, damned impressed. Like Perriman, they also had their guns out.

Perriman seemed to count silently to about three, then gave a hand signal and led the way through the door. Stack pushed in front of Rica, irritating her because she knew he was trying to protect her, and they actually charged over the unhinged, splintered door into the apartment.

Silence, stillness, dimness…on the edge of the edge…

“Clear!” a deep voice shouted.

There was a rushing sound of collective released breath.

The SWAT members in the cramped living room lowered their weapons. Perriman, Stack, and Rica holstered theirs.

Someone switched on the lights.

The place was a mess, with a bare minimum of flea-market furniture, a TV with the screen broken out, some yellowed newspapers and Spanish-language porn magazines scattered over the floor. Stack noticed it smelled like urine in here, too.

And something else.

A SWAT guy in a dark baseball cap with a gold insignia on it appeared in a doorway and motioned for Perriman, Stack, and Rica to enter what turned out to be the bedroom.

Larry Chips was lying on his back on the bed, his legs straight, his feet together, his hands folded peacefully low on his chest, as if he’d assumed the coffin position to make it easy for the mortician. There was a large and messy exit wound in his stomach just below his sternum.

Blainer’s bullet had found its target, all right.

“Oh, Christ!” Rica said. Looking at Chips’s corpse, the way it was laid out, had reminded her of something.

Stack stared at her. It wasn’t like her to gag at the sight of a dead man. Not after what they’d seen lately. “You okay, Rica?”

“The funeral!” Rica said. “Little Eden Wilson’s funeral! Amy was there. It didn’t ring a bell when we saw her briefly at the Myra Raven Group office, but I’m sure I remember her being there.”

“What’s this about?” Perriman asked.

“We’re not positive,” Stack said. “Another lead that probably won’t pan out.”

He was even more sure than when they’d left the precinct house to visit Amy Marks.

There were voices and footsteps out in the hall and in the living room. The news media had been appropriately notified and had arrived in force and fury.

“No farther,” said a cop outside the bedroom. “Nobody goes any farther than this right now. We’ll have a statement in a minute.”

Rica saw that the blood around the wound, on Chips’s shirt and on the sagging mattress, was dark and crusted. Almost black. One of the SWAT guys, following protocol, rested fingertips on Chips’s neck just below the ear to feel for a pulse, and Chips’s head lolled to the side. Rigor mortis had come and gone.