The Night Watcher (6 page)

“All Helen Sampson does is work, eat, and sleep,” he said.

“She doesn’t eat much,” Rica said. “That’s because she’s grieving and has no appetite.”

Stack grunted his agreement and sipped coffee through the little triangular hole in the plastic lid. He thought maybe it was time to tell O’Reilly that Helen Sampson checked out okay. That they were probably wasting time and effort that could be spent on other crimes instead of the Danner murder. Stack had a gut feeling this was one of those times in a case where the best thing to do was sit back and wait and see what—if anything—developed.

“We just gonna sit here?” Rica asked beside him. Something in her tone suggested she thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea. She seemed to have edged closer to Stack on the car’s bench seat.
If she weren’t so pushy…

“There wouldn’t be any point in that,” Stack said tersely. Throw some cold water on her. Them.

She said, “The city’s got more than its share of unsolved homicides. Maybe it’s time to think this might be another one.” She knew he wouldn’t consider her a quitter. Nobody ever accused her of that. It was just that they were going in circles on this Danner thing. “My gut tells me we should move on,” she added.

He lowered his coffee cup from his lips and glanced over at her, obviously a bit surprised and pleased.

“Are our guts in sync?” she asked.

“In sync,” he said, starting the car with his free hand. “Let’s cut Helen Sampson loose and concentrate our efforts somewhere else while we wait for any new developments.”

“O’Reilly might not like it,” Rica said.

Stack put the car in drive and accelerated away from the curb, sloshing a little coffee from the triangle in his cup lid so it ran down his thumb. “Screw O’Reilly.”

“In sync,” Rica said.

Dr. Lucette remembered now.

At least some of it.

He’d thought Sharon was back from downstairs, from her pedicure at Shear Ecstasy. But when he’d turned to look up at the figure standing near his chair, it wasn’t Sharon. He wasn’t sure who…

He winced as he recalled the object descending toward him, a club or sap of some sort. The flash of light and pain behind his right ear, then a dark downward spiral.

Above him a bright object sent out waves of glitter, making his eyes, his entire head ache. He tried to call out, to ask what was going on, but he couldn’t speak. Something covered his mouth so tightly that he couldn’t so much as part his lips. He could only moan. When he tried to raise a hand to rip away whatever was keeping him from speaking, he found that he couldn’t move his arm. Nor his other arm or either leg. He strained every muscle against whatever was binding him. So immobile was he that he might as well have been sealed in amber.

He heard a strangled whimper. His own.

For God’s sake, don’t lose it! You’ve been in tougher spots. In Vietnam. Not so long ago. Take inventory. Figure this thing out!

He was lying on his back and must have been bound tightly for some time. His arms, folded beneath him, were numb from lack of circulation, his legs firmly pressed together at ankle and knee. The brilliant object above him—steadier and with less glitter now—was the kitchen light fixture. So whoever had struck him and knocked him unconscious in the living room had dragged him in here and tied him up.

But why?

A sole or heel made a scuffing sound, ever so softly, on the tile floor. Someone moving beyond the top of his head, beyond his vision. He tried with little success to turn his head, rolling his eyes, as he attempted to see whoever was there. But he couldn’t. They remained just outside his field of vision. And now there was a strong smell, familiar, almost like gasoline.

Gasoline!

The doctor screamed against the tape over his mouth and his entire body vibrated so that his heels hammered on the tiles. Cool liquid splashed on the floor near him, then on his shoulders and chest. Into his eyes so that they stung. An instant before he had to clench his eyes tightly shut, he saw a wavering dark form looming above him, holding an object, a container. More of the cool liquid splashed on his stomach, his pelvic area, his thighs, and down his legs. He felt the coolness in his crotch, then beneath his buttocks. For God’s sake!…

He smelled smoke!

Smelled fire!

At first the sensation in his legs and sweeping up his body was incredibly cold. He was reminded of the time years ago when as a child he’d fallen through the ice in the shallow lake behind the house. His mother—

Then came the heat.
The pain!
Even through his panic he knew enough to hold his breath as long as he could. Minutes! Hours!
Sharon!

The air trapped in his lungs rushed from him in a hopeless sob.

He sucked in the pain! It entered him like a demon. The world was pain that would never end! He was choking! Either the floor was moving violently beneath him or he was writhing on it.

My God! Sharon! Help me! Mother!

Then he was floating through the pain. Into darkness as something in his chest exploded over and over again. He wondered if it would ever stop exploding.

Into darkness…

Dr. Lucette hadn’t been a heavy man, but once the fat in his thighs caught, he burned well. As in more than a few prewar New York buildings, the apartment wasn’t supplied with a universal sprinkler system, and he continued to burn. He wouldn’t need any further attention.

“I’m really sorry about this,” Sharon Lucette told Bonnie, her pedicurist, down in Shear Ecstasy off the lobby, “but cherry red looks more like vampire red to me. It’s my fault. I thought I wanted it but when I looked at it,
Yech!
Don’t hate me, okay?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Bonnie said. She wouldn’t even think of hating anyone who tipped as well as Sharon. “It was only one foot and it’s no trouble to paint over it.” She adroitly dipped her small pointed brush into the new shade of enamel.

“Apple red,” Sharon said, smiling down at her left big toe. “Much, much better!”

On the fortieth floor, the flames greedily consuming Dr. Lucette’s foot sent out an exploring tendril, found the rubber kick plate beneath the sink cabinet, then snaked up a dish towel draped over a steel ring inside a wooden door. A few minutes later a slender tongue of flame emerged from the top of the cabinet door and cautiously tasted the glue where counter met cabinet, found it to its liking, and followed the bead of adhesive beneath the countertop to the corner, flicked out, and sampled the wallpaper seam where the paper had separated and protruded because of long exposure to dishwasher heat. It traveled up the thin edge of wallpaper…found the roll of paper towels and devoured it.

Found the drapes.

The dark form that was settled in the shadows beneath the trees in Central Park had a clear view of the fifty-first-floor apartment window in the Pierpont Building. Made visible from the park by the contours of the New York skyline, the window was four blocks away, but brought much closer by powerful binoculars. Flimsy blinds or curtains appeared to be closed, and there was no lamp glowing on the other side of the high window, so patience was required.

It was good that there was a breeze coursing through the park, even if it was a cold one. The stench of the dead doctor still clung to clothes and to porous flesh itself. The breeze would carry the odor of death throughout the city. People would breathe it in and not know, or choose to know—

Ah! The figure beneath the shadows sat straighter, peering intently through the binoculars.

There was a light now in Myra Raven’s apartment window.

In a moment a shadow passed across the curtains; then only light remained. Hers was the only window glowing near that corner of the building.

The figure in the park lowered the binoculars, then jotted something down with a pen on a folded sheet of white paper.

Even without the binoculars, the window was now easily visible from the park. Against the black wall of the building it was like a fiery star burning against a night sky.

Or like a blazing eye high above the city, gazing back at the watcher.

“You Stack?” The tall guy in the FDNY uniform looked at Stack with a mixture of awe and curiosity, as if he’d recognized a movie star on the street but couldn’t be sure.

Stack said he was Stack.

“Lieutenant Ernest Fagin, FDNY Arson.” Fagin stuck out his hand.

“This is my partner, Sergeant Lopez,” Stack said, causing Fagin to look at Rica for the first time. He shook her hand and smiled at her, trying to make up for bad manners. Give him that. He was young and gangly and looked like Abe Lincoln might have as a teenager without the beard.

They were standing in the middle of Dr. Ronald Lucette’s living room on the fortieth floor of the Bennick Tower. The place was a blackened, waterlogged mess except for near the door where the flames hadn’t reached. The stench of burned carpet, wood, upholstery, and flesh was acrid and overpowering.

“Was the fire confined to this apartment?” Stack asked.

“This apartment and part of the adjacent one on the other side of the east wall,” Fagin said. “This could have been one hell of a fire. Traffic wasn’t bad for a change, and we got to it in a hurry.”

“I thought you guys didn’t have the equipment to fight fires this high,” Rica said.

“We don’t have enough to do it from the outside. That’s why response time’s so important. We get to a high-rise early enough to use the elevator or stairs, and we blitz it and get it under control. We don’t manage that, we can still sometimes outsmart the fire and contain the damage.”

“Outsmart the fire?”

“Yeah, we hook up to a standpipe. Should be one on each landing, along with a coiled two-and-a-half-inch-diameter hose, sometimes in a cabinet. Then we pay out the hose and at least manage to contain the fire. But it’s a battle of wits, because there’s only so much pressure that way, so much water, and sometimes the standpipe systems fail. A bad fire, we sometimes direct streams of water from nearby windows of other buildings, using their standpipe systems. But if the flames get a chance to take hold and find plenty of fuel, they block fire exits and short out electrical lines so elevators are inoperable. Then the fire has us pretty much at its mercy.”

It interested Rica that this guy talked about fire as if it had a mind, and an evil one at that. She had heard only that pyromaniacs talked that way.

“There’s only one victim?” Stack asked.

Fagin nodded. “A Dr. Ronald Lucette. Lived here with his wife, Sharon. She was down off the lobby getting her feet worked on or something.”

Stack looked at him. “Her feet? There a doctor’s office down there?”

“Naw, a beauty salon. You know, getting her nails painted, her toes depilatoried, maybe. Hell, I don’t know.”

“A pedicure,” Rica explained to the two of them. “Some women, they got the time and money, they get their feet looking good, calluses filed away, nails enameled by a pro, that kinda thing.”

Both men stared at her. “You ever had one?” Stack asked.

“No.”

“The doctor is in,” Fagin said, “if you want to go see him.”

Rica was starting to like Fagin.

He led the way into the kitchen. Almost everything there was soot-darkened or charred, and there was about an inch of black water on the floor. Some techs were still there, wearing rubber boots and exchanging notes. The ME was packing up to leave. Dr. Ronald Lucette, who Stack knew had been the recent center of attention, was a blackened mess on the floor. He was lying on his right side with his knees drawn up, his arms behind him, reminding Stack of those photographs of the remains of long-ago volcano victims in Pompeii. His grotesque, darkened head was thrown back, mouth gaping, as if he still might be able to draw some cool fresh air and reverse the process that had left him in such a state.

“The fire started right where he is,” Fagin told Stack and Rica. “Some sort of liquid accelerant was poured over and around him when he was on the floor tied up with something. Looks like cloth rather than rope or tape, but I couldn’t tell you what kind. As you can see, it was a nasty, greedy fire. These prewar buildings are what everyone wants to live in, but some of them, with their solid walls and floors, aren’t set up to support universal sprinkler systems.”

“Was there a smoke alarm in here?” Rica asked.

Fagin looked at her, then motioned over his right shoulder with his thumb. The smoke alarm was above the kitchen door, its round plastic lid dangling to reveal that the batteries had been removed.

“If you find the batteries, let us know,” Stack said. “There might be prints on them.” But he knew there was about as much chance of finding fingerprints on the batteries as there had been of finding prints on the umbrella left at the scene of Hugh Danner’s murder by burning.

“We already found the batteries,” one of the techs called over. “No prints of any kind.”

“The killer wear gloves?” Rica asked.

“That or the batteries were wiped,” the tech said. “We dusted what we could of the rest of the apartment. We’ll have to wait and see what we get other than the occupants’ prints.”

Stack looked at Fagin. “What about the wife with the neat feet?”

“She’s in the apartment next door. She just sits and stares.”

“I wouldn’t want to see what she sees,” Stack said.

He moved closer to the body and studied it from different angles.

Rica was peering over his shoulder. “Looks like the victim might have been bound with black cloth,” she said, “but it’s hard to know for sure, with everything in the place blackened.”

“The lab might be able to tell you the original color,” Fagin said. “Some dyes leave distinctive residues.”

Stack straightened up.

The ME had moved closer, a middle-aged woman with ragged blond hair and a lot of loose flesh around her neck. A victim of gravity. Stack didn’t think he’d seen her before.

“I can give you a preliminary autopsy report,” she said. “Death by burning; soot in his mouth and, I’d be willing to bet, in his lungs. Which means the poor bastard was alive when he was set on fire.”

“Like the last one,” Rica said.

The ME nodded. “That’s what I hear.”

“If somebody makes a habit of this,” Fagin said, “one of these days we won’t be able to get to a high-rise fire and contain it, and that’s everybody’s worst nightmare.”

“If it isn’t the worst,” Rica said, “it’s in the running. What are the odds of one of these buildings catching fire high up and collapsing like the World Trade Center towers?”

“Pretty slim,” Fagin said. “The WTC towers were struck by planes; then the fire was from thousands of gallons of jet fuel. And jet fuel burns at temperatures you wouldn’t believe, and for a long time. Nothing like that here. A high-rise fire like this, we generally use a defend-in-place strategy, usually don’t evacuate the whole building, just those people we think might be in some danger.” He got a look on his face Rica had seen before on New York firefighters, and on some cops. “Not like the World Trade Center at all,” he said in a different, softer voice.

Stack pulled a folded handkerchief from his pocket and wiped perspiration from his face. He wasn’t feeling so good, wondering if he and Rica and the building itself would ever smell like anything other than charred matter. He stuffed the handkerchief back in his pants pocket.

“Thanks for your input,” he said to everyone in the room. Then to Rica: “Let’s go next door and chat with the new widow.”

“Cheerful goddamn job,” one of the techs said, as Stack and Rica were leaving.

In the hall they passed the paramedics on their way to remove the body. Two hefty guys chomping gum and discussing the merits of different Italian restaurants, their emotions and discipline to duty on two different tracks. Doing their job with linguini on their minds; and when the body bag zipper rasped closed, their job was well on its way to being over for the evening. Stack and Rica, on the other hand, were knocking on an apartment door so they could talk to a woman married to ashes. One body with so many different meanings. Death sure was selective in its impact.

An expensively groomed woman in her fifties, whose only flaw was that she appeared to have been crying, opened the door. After Stack and Rica identified themselves, she led them to another woman slumped in a corner of a cream-colored brocade sofa that looked as if it cost more than a car.

Sharon Lucette was a tiny, attractive blonde in her forties. Her blue blouse was stained with tears. Her dark slacks were rolled up at the ankles and there were wads of cotton stuck between her bare toes, the nails of which were a brilliant crimson that Rica would describe as blood-red. She had been wearing sandals, but they were upside down on the carpet. Next to them were two red-stained cotton wads. When the neighbor who’d ushered in Stack and Rica introduced them to Sharon as police detectives, Sharon wailed.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Lucette,” Stack said soothingly. “We won’t bedevil you at a time like this. Believe me, we know it isn’t easy.” He moved closer and touched her quaking shoulder. “It’s one hell of a world sometimes, the things it can throw at you when you least expect it. An old cop knows that if he knows nothing else.”

When the grief-tortured woman stopped sobbing and looked up at Stack, Rica saw that half her hairdo was perfectly sculpted, and the other half was wildly mussed and flattened to her head where she must have had her face buried sideways in a throw pillow. Her smeared mascara made her look like a stricken raccoon.

She seemed to draw strength from Stack. She sniffed and swiped at her nose with the back of her bare wrist. “I can talk. I’ll try…I want that bitch arrested and punished!”

Stack and Rica exchanged glances. “You have some idea who did this to your husband?” Rica asked.

“I have exactly an idea,” Sharon Lucette said. “Her name is Lillian Tuchman. She was suing Ron and his partners because of her navel.”

Rica touched the point of her pencil to her tongue and began writing in her notepad.

Stack sat down next to Sharon on the sofa and patted her ever so softly on the back, a father calming a desperate child. “Her navel, is it, dear?” he asked gently.

“Yes. She claimed it wasn’t where it should be.”

“Ah,” Stack said.

Sharon Lucette began to talk and couldn’t stop talking. Stack spoke to her encouragingly now and then, guiding her in her grief and obviously feeling genuinely sorry for the distraught woman. These were the only sounds in the hushed apartment: Sharon’s disbelief and pain set to words; Stack’s solicitous, soothing voice; and the sharp point of Rica’s pencil scratching paper.

Rica tried to write as fast as Sharon talked, making sure she wasn’t missing anything pertinent, noticing that the smell from next door had permeated this apartment, too.

Probably it had permeated Sharon Lucette’s mind and would never leave her, awake or asleep.

Rica wished Stack would talk to her sometime the way he was talking to Sharon Lucette.