The Night Caller (16 page)

That evening, Coop listened to his answering machine message from Earl Gitter, the reporter who’d done the Distraught Dad piece, asking for an interview. Then came Deni Green’s message:

“Coop, old buddy, I know I’m rash, a bad girl sometimes, but we need each other. Alicia called and wants some material on the book, says she’s getting pressure from the managing editor. And sure, we want to find the asshole who killed Bette. But first things first, especially if both things are almost one in the same—that is, starting to outline the book, and finding the serial killer who offed your daughter. My book—”

The chip had run out of recording room and the machine cut her off.

Good,
Coop thought, pushing the
DELETE
button.

He got a Beck’s dark from the refrigerator, his one beer that he allowed himself every other day, and carefully poured it into a frosted glass he kept in the freezer. Making the beer the object of a ceremony seemed to improve its taste. Then he went back into the living room and sat down in the chair facing the television. Using his right hand to lift the glass to his lips, he used his left to work the TV’s remote.

Channel One, the local news, flickered to life on the screen.

It was the top of the hour. The “bug” in the lower right hand corner of the screen informed him that outside temperature was twenty-one degrees. Glad he was inside, Coop watched the attractive anchorwoman take viewers through the news: Another subway pushing attack, a tourist from Omaha almost killed; three children dead from smoke inhalation in an apartment fire in the Bronx; another jogger beaten and raped in Central Park; a newborn infant discovered in a Dumpster in the Village…

Depressing. So much so that Coop pressed the mute button on the remote. Soundlessly before him appeared a steamy five-car pileup on the Queensboro Bridge, an old woman speaking frantically while a trickle of blood ran down her forehead from above her hairline, a guy in a suit and tie shielding his face with a newspaper as he was being led to a waiting police cruiser.

Coop switched off the TV and sat in silence, sipping his beer. It bothered him a bit that sometimes loneliness seemed like a friend. He rested his head against the soft back of the chair and closed his eyes.

The phone rang and he sat motionless, letting the machine answer. After his message, Deni’s voice:

“Coop, pardner, we really should talk. Hey, Coop, I bet you’re screening your calls. I do that a lot, myself. You’d be surprised, the loony phone calls a successful writer gets. My guess is you’re sitting there reading the paper, trying to tune me out. Listen, Coop. Hey! Hey! Hey, fuck you, Coop!”

Feeling better, he grinned.

After sleeping late the next morning, he called Longpoint Bank, where Cara Callahan worked, to ask her if she’d thought of anything more that might be useful.

He was told that Cara had left the bank, and he was given the name of her new employer—another bank.

As Coop replaced the receiver, he realized it was the bank where Ann Callahan had worked.

He sat by the phone and thought about that for a few minutes. Then, instead of calling, he decided he’d talk with Cara again in person, maybe catch her during her lunch break.

At five minutes to noon he was parked on East 57th, across the street from Mercantile Mutual.

He was astonished when she emerged from the bank. The red hair, the gray coat and red scarf, even the shoes. They might have been removed from her sister’s corpse. For a second he was looking at Ann Callahan.

She turned left and strode along the sidewalk toward Third Avenue. Coop climbed out of the car, turned up his coat collar, and followed on his side of the street.

When she went through a door under a sign reading
DARBY’S DELI
, he jogged across the street.

Before entering the deli, he peered in through the steamed window displaying fresh-baked bread and pastries. Cara was in line at a counter. Beyond the counter were tables and chairs, even an archway into another room with more seating. As he watched, the man in front of Cara carried a tray with food on it to one of the tables.

Coop walked a few doors down and stood as if studying books in a shop window, making sure she wasn’t ordering food to go, giving her time to sit down before entering. He’d learned from experience that it was wise to approach people he wanted to question when they were in restaurants and had just sat down to a meal. They were far less likely to get up and walk away.

When five minutes had passed, Coop entered the deli.

There was Cara seated at a table near a window. If he’d continued walking past the door, she might have glanced out and seen him.

She sensed him standing there and looked up from spreading mustard with a plastic knife on a pastrami sandwich. Those green eyes—Cara’s, not Ann’s dead eyes staring up from the brown grass beneath the campus trees—fixed him where he stood. He couldn’t help but notice that her new red hair suited her eyes and complexion.

He was relieved when she smiled and said, “Coop! Sit down, please. Have you had lunch?”

“No, but I’m not hungry.” He sat on a wobbly chair across the table from her. “I called at Longpoint Bank and they said you’d gone to work here.”

She smiled again in a way he liked. “At the deli?”

“At Mercantile Mutual, just down the street. Where your sister Ann worked.”

She took a bite of sandwich and chewed, regarding him.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “See if you might have thought of something else about Ann, something that might be useful.”

“I don’t think so, Coop.”

“When I saw you on the street, I thought for a second you were Ann. The clothes, the new hairdo, everything…”

“People deal with grief in different ways,” she said.

“I’ve seen a lot of those ways, Cara.”

“Maybe I’ve always been jealous of my little sister, and now I want to live her life. Doesn’t that give me a motive for murder?”

“It might, if you talked that way to the wrong people. And now you have what you always wanted. That isn’t what’s happening, though, is it?”

She gave him her beautiful smile again, warm sun in the gathering winter. “No,” she said. She hadn’t yet twisted the cap from her bottle of Diet Coke. She did so now, poured half into a paper cup, then slid the bottle over to Coop.

He thanked her and took a sip. “It isn’t hard to figure out, Cara. The red hair, the way you’re wearing your makeup. And the new gray coat and red scarf that are almost exact duplicates of Ann’s.”

“The coat and scarf don’t really go well with the hair. Ann never did have the best color sense.”

“They’re distinctive together, though. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s what I want.”

“Now you work where Ann worked. And I suspect she mentioned to you or you found out from some of the others at Mercantile Mutual that she sometimes ate lunch at this deli. You’re even sitting by the window where you can be seen from the street.”

“I think Ann’s killer might have lived or worked, or at least spent time, in this neighborhood. If so, he’s probably still in the area. He might have first seen her here, first gotten his idea to stalk her and kill her.”

“It’s possible he first saw her on the college campus where she died,” Coop said.

“Sure. But I’m betting he saw her around here and then waited for his chance. He might even work in the bank.”

“The police don’t think any of the employees look good for her murder, Cara.”

She sat back and looked directly at him. “The police can be wrong. I can be wrong that the killer spends time in this neighborhood, maybe even banks at Mercantile Mutual. But I could be right, and at least I’m doing something about Ann’s murder. Aren’t serial killers usually attracted to a certain type of woman, one who resembles their mother or a girlfriend who jilted them? Someone like that?”

“Very often they are,” Coop admitted.

“Well, I’m now very much the same type as Ann, and I’m going to work and eat where she did, walk in her footsteps, ride the same bus and subway on the same route. I’m going to listen and ask questions at Mercantile, learn more about Ann’s daily habits from the people she worked with. Her life and the killer’s must have intersected somewhere before the night of her death, and Ann didn’t have much of a life other than work and home.”

“What you’re doing might be successful enough to get you killed.”

“Or to identify the killer. He probably got to know Ann. They must have talked somewhere sometime before he simply decided to murder her. Maybe he’ll decide to get to know me.”

“It doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes serial killers prey on strangers.”

“Not this one. It appears the victims knew him, even trusted him.”

“Who told you that?”

“No one. It was in that newspaper piece a few days ago. Your friend Deni Green mentioned it to whoever wrote it.”

Damn Deni,
Coop thought. “I’d rather you didn’t do this thing,” he said. “You’re trailing bait for a killer.”

“That’s not exactly what I’m doing. But what if it were? Bait sometimes catches fish that get fried.”

“Sometimes the fish turns out to be a shark, and the bait turns out to be a meal. That’s where you are now, Cara, in shark waters.”

The smile again, but this time there was something different about her eyes, the same hard light he’d seen in them before.

“For a while,” she said, “that’s where I intend to swim.”

Seattle Detective Sergeant Roy Lyons sat at his desk and stared glumly at the phone. Yesterday a woman had attacked a man with a long electrical device she’d been using to kill slugs in her garden, some kind of thin, heated, and sharply pointed metal rod. In the dank Washington climate, Seattle residents often had to deal with slugs that were a particular threat to plants. Unconventional and imaginative methods were sometimes used, as in this case. The Slug Slayer, as it was called by its manufacturer, looked to Lyons a lot like an electric dipstick heater used to warm and thin a car’s oil in cold weather so the engine would start. Whatever it was, the Slug Slayer did slay slugs, and it could double as a heated sword. The woman’s neighbor, one pesky Adam Adamski (Could that really be his name?), was hospitalized with punctured and singed intestines. The swordswoman was free on bond.

Lyons’s partner, Marty Sanderson, approached the desk with a cup of coffee in one hand, a file folder in the other. He grinned at Lyons and extended the cup toward him. “Want a slug?”

“Shut up,” Lyons said.

“Oh, ah, yeah.”

“You don’t fool me,” Lyons told him.

“Any luck finding witnesses to the stabbing?” Sanderson asked, obviously suppressing another smile but sticking to business.

“Two men are canvassing the neighborhood. They’re supposed to call when they find a witness. They’ve been at it for several hours and the phone hasn’t rung.”

“I’m here to change the subject,” Sanderson said. “Remember that woman about a month ago who’d been worked over in her bathtub with a can opener?”

“I tend not to forget those things.” He also couldn’t forget what the ME had shown him at the morgue, how a plastic saint had been inserted in her vagina, deeply with the aid of a knife cut. After death, thank God. That information was still secret from press and public. Whoever knew it other than the authorities was the killer. The saint was a cheap plastic statuette sold in religious gift shops. It was also used by florists to embellish floral displays and funeral wreaths. The company that manufactured the things sold them by the thousands. St. Augustine was one of their most popular models.

“Georgianna Mason,” Sanderson said anyway, as a reminder. “Remember we found a heel print in the bathroom?”

“Yeah. The killer was barefoot. He’d probably undressed so he wouldn’t get blood or water on his clothes while he was…using the can opener.” Lyons also remembered that the print of a bare heel was obscure enough that it wouldn’t be useful in court even if they were sure they had the killer and that his heel had made it.

Sanderson tossed the file folder he was holding onto Lyons’s desk. “After getting dressed, the killer must have walked back into the bathroom and stood for a moment to admire his work before leaving. Lab guys found another print with their forensic lights, not visible to the naked eye, this one made by a shoe.”

“They think it was made by the killer?”

“There was blood on the shoe’s sole. That’s why they were able to bring out the print. It took them a while to do it; then the file got misplaced. It was found yesterday. There’s a computer-enhanced image there in the folder.”

Lyons opened the crime folder and looked at the image of a footprint. It was of a man’s shoe, about size ten, he figured. Too bad it wasn’t a jogging shoe; they usually had elaborate and distinctive sole prints, easy to match. This shoe was unusual in that the sole design was a simple crisscross pattern of straight lines running to the edges.

“Might this match the shoes of anyone who was in the apartment just after the body was discovered?” Lyons asked.

“Negative,” Sanderson said. “That’s been checked. And the lab says there are no signs of variation or clotting, so the blood had to have been fresh when the sole came in contact with it.”

“Okay.” Lyons was grateful for the new information, but he doubted that it would lead anywhere in and of itself. Another piece of a sordid puzzle. He left the file folder open and slid it across the desktop toward Sanderson. “See if this print will show on a fax, and start contacting shoe manufacturers and wholesalers. Maybe we can get a match. It can’t hurt to know what kind of shoes the sick bastard wears.”

“Whatever kind they are, I’d like to use their laces to hang him by the neck,” Sanderson said.

“Very unprofessional, Marty.”

The phone rang as Lyons was sitting watching Sanderson walk away through the squad room with the folder.

“Sergeant Lyons?” said the caller. “This is Patrolman Eganer. You know, about the stabbing yesterday?…”

This was good, Lyons thought. Eganer was one of the cops assigned to canvass the neighborhood where the assault had occurred. He was fresh-faced and only a year in the department, but sharp and with a bright future despite the fact he’d probably only shaved once or twice in his life. “What’ve you got?” he asked the young patrolman.

“A neighbor whose backyard is on the diagonal with the one where the guy was stabbed. She says she heard loud voices arguing, looked out her kitchen window, and saw everything. The victim was just standing there, even had his hands in his pockets, when he was stuck with that snail thing.”

“Slug.”

“Oh. Sure.”

“You get a statement?”

“Sure.”

“Fine work, Egener. See what else you can find, then come back here before lunchtime.”

“Sure will.”

Lyons hung up the phone feeling only somewhat better. A man was in the hospital with cauterized stomach wounds, but at least he was alive. There was a good case against his assailant now, a strong possibility that she’d be convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. Trouble for both of them, but a chance for justice.

Trouble, Lyons thought; that was what his job was mostly about. It could be miserably depressing and leave indelible images that would haunt until death. He remembered Georgianna Mason—what had been Georgianna Mason—in her bathtub.

The guy in the hospital, the woman with the Slug Slayer, they only thought they knew trouble.