Night Victims (The Night Spider) (39 page)

He pulled his Mets cap down lower as she approached. A car was coming up behind him. Good. He’d be backlighted, and the headlights might temporarily blind the nurse. She wouldn’t remember him.

She veered ever so slightly toward the curb to give him a wider berth, the way women do, just as the car drove past. Headlights illuminated her almost beautiful features and the hospital name tag pinned to her white uniform top.
Nora.

The nurse didn’t so much as glance at him as they passed.
Nora who works where Anne Horn works. The two women might even know each other.

He slowed his pace, turning his head to see the retreating nurse’s back, then glanced again at Nadine.

Suddenly changing his mind, seizing opportunity, he turned all the way around and began walking in the opposite direction.

Forgetting the girl from the ticket booth and following Nora the nurse. He was smiling, thinking what a sense of irony fate had, and how it sometimes dispensed opportunities like dark party favors.

He stayed well back of Nora, watching the repetitive switch of her hips beneath the tight white uniform skirt, the flash of white stockings above her soft-soled shoes. Motion marking off time. Made for the night. So easy and natural to follow.
She’s the one.

The
R.N.
on Nora’s name tag stuck in his mind. As he walked he wondered what, besides Registered Nurse, the letters might stand for.

R.N. . . . ?

By the time she entered an apartment building about six blocks from the hospital, he’d settled on
Retribution Night.

Two nights later, working the late shift, Anne took the call on the desk phone in her office. It was 2:12 A.M. exactly. She would remember that later when the police asked her.

“Anne Horn?” A man’s voice. He’d called her direct number rather than go through the hospital switchboard, so he must know her. She should know him.

“Yes? Hello?” Her own voice sounded thin.

“I’m calling to ask about Nora Shoemaker. Do you know her?”

“Not personally. If you want to talk to her, you’ve dialed the wrong number. She’s a maternity nurse in another part of the hospital. I can switch you if you—”

“No, no, I wanted to talk to you about her.”

Anne felt a draft on the nape of her neck, an ache in her stomach. She knew it was fear that might be the beginning of terror. “Who is this?”

“I’m calling from Nora’s apartment. I’m afraid something terrible has happened to her.”

“Who is this?”

“I’m sure you know who. I called to tell you not to worry too much about Nora. You’ll be seeing her soon enough.”

“Are we talking about the same Nora?” Anne asked, having trouble breathing, getting her legs to work as she stood up from the desk and silently placed the receiver on the desk.

She ran for her office door and flung it open, motioning frantically and quietly for the guard stationed outside.

He wasn’t the guard with the scar on his face. This one was middle-aged and Anne thought that with the right sort of mustache he’d look amazingly like Hitler. She frenetically pointed toward the phone.

His bright blue eyes narrowed, and he caught on immediately and didn’t make a sound.

Of course, when he picked up the receiver it was dead.

Anne told him about the phone call, spilling out words that sometimes didn’t make sense.

A tracer had been placed on Anne’s office phone. The guard did some punching on the keypad and got the location of the phone last used to call in to it.

The call hadn’t originated from Nora Shoemaker’s apartment, but from a public phone on the other side of town.

“Is Nora Shoemaker in the building?” the guard asked.

Anne took the phone from his hand and checked.

“She worked the last shift and went home,” she said, replacing the receiver in its cradle. Her face was pale. Fear was clawing at her guts.
What he wants! Exactly what the bastard wants!

“Get her home phone number,” the guard said. “Let’s call her.”

Anne complied, then watched the guard’s impassive face as he stood silently for almost a minute with the receiver pressed to his ear.

He hung up the phone. “No answer.”

“She should be in bed.”

“Maybe she doesn’t wanna answer the phone,” the guard said. “Or has her answering machine turned off and the volume down so the ringing won’t disturb her sleep.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“I’m trying.”

Anne’s legs were too weak to support her. She took three unsteady steps and slumped into her desk chair, then glanced down and saw that both her hands were made into fists tightly clenched around her thumbs.

“It was probably a crank call,” the guard said, obviously noticing how scared she was, “but it won’t hurt to send somebody around to Nora Shoemaker’s place and check on her.”

Anne bowed her head, staring into her lap at the whitened fists she couldn’t unclench, and was squeezed by a knowledge that had more to do with the heart and gut than with the mind. Ancient instinct. Signals from the cave.

It wasn’t a crank call . . .  It wasn’t a crank call . . .

44

Horn got the call at 3:01 A.M. A woman named Nora Shoemaker, an off-duty nurse at Kincaid Memorial Hospital, was found dead in her apartment on the West Side. She was apparently another victim of the Night Spider.

Not only that, Anne had received a phone call from the killer intimating that he’d murdered the nurse.

A nurse in the same hospital where Anne worked. It could just as easily have been Anne.

Horn was sure that was the message Mandle wanted to say. And it could happen anytime. Nora Shoemaker’s murder was only two days after Letty Fonsetta’s. And where was the pattern? The nurse was in no way a public figure like Fonsetta and Duggan. Why had Mandle seen her as one of the chosen? Made her a victim?

Horn’s mind was whirling with these questions as he began making calls, demanding that protection be stepped up for Anne.

Then he phoned Anne, who seemed more deeply shaken by the nurse’s murder than by any of the others.

“He might have been
here,”
she said. “In the hospital, making up his mind who to murder. And for no reason other than to terrorize me! That’s why Nora Shoemaker died—to make me more afraid! In a way, I’m responsible for her death.”

“That’s what he wants you to believe,” Horn said. “He wants to panic you. Not just for pleasure, but in the hope that you won’t be thinking straight and you’ll make a mistake. If he makes you feel guilty as well as terrified, that’s fine. You’ll be more vulnerable and he’ll be able to get to you. Nora Shoemaker died because Mandle killed her. Period.”

Her voice quavered but there was strength in it. “I know that intellectually, Thomas. I won’t let this sick freak panic me. My thinking is clear.”

Horn believed her. “For now,” he said, “cooperate with your guardian angels, even if it doesn’t make sense to you. They know their job.”

“All right, Thomas. And you promise to be careful.”

She hung up without waiting for his promise.
Only making conversation. The inane conversation of terror.

He got on his cell phone and woke up Paula and Bickerstaff. Then he got dressed in a hurry so he could drive to Nora Shoemaker’s apartment.

This one was like the others done since Mandle’s escape from the prison transport van. A woman shrouded in her bed-sheets, gagged, then tortured with stab wounds. She was killed by a blow or several blows to the head, with the killer using whatever bludgeoning instrument was handy and suitable for the task. This time it had been a cut-glass candelabra. It had been used with such force and viciousness that two of its six gracefully curved branches had broken off.

No fingerprints, as before.

Ah, but there were differences!

This time no sign of entry from the roof. The knob lock on the apartment door had been expertly slipped. The splintering of the door frame indicated that the chain-lock bracket had been forced not with a sudden, violent effort, but by someone leaning harder and harder against the door, several times in succession, until the screws flew from the wood. It was a method long used by breaking and entering pros who didn’t want to wake anyone sleeping inside.

The method had worked with Nora Shoemaker, who was probably wrapped like a package and gagged before she woke up completely.

What happened to her next must have seemed to last forever, until finally the glass candelabra led her to true eternity.

“There was no doorman,” Paula said over breakfast at the Home Away, where Horn had called a meeting to discuss what they knew before they all went home and caught some much-needed sleep. “There was a keypad outside that the tenants used to open the outer doors.”

“The code changed recently?” Horn asked.

“Changed last week. Not that it makes any difference. After using the keypad to gain entrance to the outer lobby, tenants then use a regular key to open the door to the inner lobby and elevators. All Mandle had to do was wait on the sidewalk for somebody to enter the building, time his approach, then grab the door before it closed all the way. He could enter with them, as if he’d just walked up and was about to go in when they came along. Then he could wait politely while they used their key to open the door to the inner lobby, and ride up in the elevator to a different floor, as if he belonged in the building.”

“Do any of the other tenants remember something like that happening?”

“Sure,” Bickerstaff said. “Half a dozen. It happens all the time. People are lazy with their keys and too trustful, even in New York. It’s like they go to sleep at night and forget everything that happened to them that day or what they’ve read in the papers, then they get up next morning not knowing again how many assholes are walking around out there. A guy edges in with them when they’re buzzed up or unlock a door, they don’t think much about it. They’ve done the same thing themselves.”

Horn shook his head. “So much for building security.” He sipped from a glass of ice water. He was staying away from coffee so he could actually get a few hours’ sleep and be more effective the rest of the day. “Whatever’s driving Mandle is getting stronger. He’s stepped up the pace, killing with increasing frequency.”

“Like most of those jerk-off serial killers,” Bickerstaff said.

“What I don’t understand,” Horn said, “is why his method of entering Shoemaker’s apartment was different.”

“Another message,” Marla said.

Surprised, the three detectives looked up at her where she was standing near the booth. There were several customers in the front area of the diner this morning. Marla had to work her trade.

“He wanted to let you know you had more than his usual MO to worry about,” she continued. “That he was ahead of you in your game of wits.” She might have been about to say more, but a voice called her name. She turned and strode toward an elderly man in a window booth who was animatedly motioning for her with his empty coffee cup.

“She’s probably right,” Paula said.

“Can we be sure the nurse wasn’t a copycat murder?” Bickerstaff asked.

Horn and Paula looked at him.

“Not likely,” Paula said. “Remember the phone call to Anne.”

“Still possible, though,” Bickerstaff said. “All someone had to do was find out how to get in touch with Anne at the hospital. The news media’s been on this case like flies on a dead carp. Lots of information on TV and in the newspapers.”

“There are too many similarities with the previous murders,” Horn said.

“Not the method of entry,” Paula reiterated.

Bickerstaff grunted and got his notepad from a pocket of his wrinkled suitcoat. He absently propped his reading glasses on the bridge of his nose and consulted his notes. Paula thought he looked ten years older with his glasses on, the way they slid halfway down his nose. And incongruously academic. Mr. Chips with a 9mm.

“We got the three victims,” he said. “Alice Duggan, Nicolette—long for Letty—Fonsetta, and Nora Shoemaker. The first two were in their early thirties, Nora in her early forties. All at least reasonably attractive. The first two were public figures. They were killed after Mandle dropped down like a spider from the roof and entered through their bedroom windows. The nurse was killed after her apartment was entered through the door.”

“Because Mandle wanted to send a message,” Paula reminded Bickerstaff.

He grunted again and nodded. “Thirty-seven stab wounds in the first and second victims, thirty-five in the nurse. All three with their heads bashed in.”

“He might simply have lost track of the number of stab wounds,” Horn said.

“Or was scared away,” Paula said.

“Or got bored.” Bickerstaff dropped his notepad on the table. “I could go on, but it looks like the same killer to me. The nurse’s death looks quite a bit different from the other two until you start listing similarities.”

“Different nonetheless,” Paula said. She yawned.

Made Bickerstaff yawn. He glared at her as if he resented it.

“Let’s catch up on some rest,” Horn said, “before we all drift off here in the diner.”

Bickerstaff said, “You think he knows we meet here?”

The thought hadn’t occurred to Horn or, apparently, to Paula, who was looking at him with a stunned expression.

“I mean,” Bickerstaff went on, “Mandle knows who’s working his case. And we’ve been using this diner like it was a squad room.”

“It’s always possible,” Horn said, watching Marla bring the impatient customer in the window booth a glass of orange juice. For a second, he thought about calling Larkin, getting protection for Marla. But he couldn’t do that. How many women could he insist the overworked NYPD protect? And Rollie would ask, what was Marla Winger to Horn?

Horn had no concrete answer.

“Let’s meet back here about two this afternoon,” he said, sliding out of the booth and standing. He tossed enough money on the table to cover breakfast and a tip.

Both men stood aside and let Paula lead the way toward the door. They all paused to say good-bye to Marla, who was now busy behind the counter.