The Night Caller (18 page)

The Night Caller felt the need.

More often now. Wasn’t that how the police and the amateur psychologists said it worked? The pressure built. The serial killer’s compulsion to kill increased, his behavior became more irrational, his caution deteriorated, and the time separating his victims from one another decreased. A kind of Newton’s Third Law of flesh and blood and bone—leading to a mistake.

Idiots all. The police, the TV talk show pundits, the FBI profilers, the fools who wrote books on the psychology of serial killers and on self-defense for women…. Yet this was the one thing they were right about: The waves of need, the essential points of release, did draw closer together.

Sooner and soon, but not now. Not yet.

He looked out the window at the cold, dark night beyond his reflection in the glass, then went to the closet and got his coat and hat. After pulling the long, checked muffler from where it was tucked inside his coat sleeve, he wrapped it around his neck, then slipped into the coat. Using the windowpane for a mirror, he placed his hat on his head and adjusted its angle, wrapped the muffler tighter about his throat. Now his face was barely visible, the way he liked it.

Then he switched off the lamp, his reflection disappeared, and the city lay vulnerable before him. Lighted windows dotted its jagged skyline; headlights and taillights moved in an orderly glare below; rows of streetlights intersected madly like lives lived, each bright pinpoint starring in the crystalline night.

It was time to go out, to make his usual rounds. The walking did him good, calmed what lived inside him, what paced in his breast even as he lay still in his bed at night. He looked away from the galaxy below, and up through the skylight at the stars unobscured by clouds. “Julia,” he said softly, a curse, a murmured prayer.

Then he moved toward the door, through the dark, liking the dark.

As he stepped outside the building, the city night struck him with cold and noise. He put on his lightly tinted glasses, made sure his muffler was tight around his neck, then began to walk.

Despite the hour, there was considerable traffic, and quite a few people on the sidewalk. No one seemed to be paying much attention to him, or even giving him a second look. He shouldn’t be surprised. Any two people might pass on the street, preoccupied, not really looking at, much less recognizing each other. He might walk past the Distraught Dad and his cocksucking writer collaborator; he might know them but they wouldn’t know him, since they had no idea what he looked like.

So how much danger did the Distraught Dad and the hack writer actually pose? A used-up cop, and a thick-necked scribbler who preferred cats to men? What could they do to him other than amuse him?

Possibly nothing would pass between him and them even if their paths crossed. Though he’d seen their pictures in the paper, he might not recognize them at a glance. People didn’t always look like their photographs. He didn’t himself. Didn’t even resemble his reflection in the dark windowpane. Someone else looking out at him or in at him, right side left side, left side right side. Someone else entirely?

No, not entirely.

One person he invariably recognized when their paths crossed, definitely and forever, was the woman the police and news media would someday call his latest victim.

They had no idea how right they were.

She would be his latest, but not his last.

His latest, whom he’d already met.

Seattle was unseasonably warm but not unseasonably gray. During the late fall and winter, gray was what Seattle residents had learned to endure, and sometimes even came to miss if they left the area.

Detective Sergeant Roy Lyons, lying on the beach during the third day of his vacation on Topsail Island off the North Carolina coast, was for some reason wishing the glaring sun would cease so he could look at the sky without wearing tinted glasses or wincing. Next to him his wife Laverne was lying on her stomach, her bikini top untied so there would be no horizontal pale line on her back where the sun hadn’t fried her. She was propped up on her elbows, alternately sipping Pepsi through a kinked plastic straw and reading a book. A mystery with a cat on the cover.

“Jesus!” Lyons said, and sat straight up on his towel.

“Huh?” Laverne asked, not looking away from her book.

“I forgot!”

“I checked everything before we left,” she said. “At least try to relax.”

“Nothing about the house. I forgot to notify someone about something.”

“At work?”

“Yeah.”

“It’ll wait, Roy.”

Maybe,
he thought, plopping back down.

Or maybe it would wait too long, give a killer enough time to claim another victim. A woman walking around now, smiling, loving, laughing, or crying, who might do none of that very much longer if Lyons continued to leave his lazy ass plunked down on a beach towel while he soaked up rays and thought vacation thoughts.

Lyons sat up again.

“For God’s sake, lie down and relax, Roy! You’re in my sun!”

“Hand me the beach bag,” Lyons said.

Laverne sighed and complied.

Lyons took off his tinted glasses and let them dangle on their cord against his bare, perspiring chest as he rooted through the bag for his wallet. When he found it, he removed it and pulled out the prepaid phone card he’d bought at the airport.

He worked his feet into his rubber thongs and stood up. “I’ll be back.”

“Arnold Schwarzenegger said that in a movie a while back,” Laverne told him, “and it wasn’t long before he had a heart attack. You should relax, Roy, think about play, not work.”

“Right after I do this,” Lyons said.

“This what?”

“Phone call. There’s a pay phone down the beach near a concession stand. You want me to bring you anything back?”

“Another Pepsi,” she said, turning a page.

Ten minutes later he was at the concession stand. He must have walked too fast through the sand, because the cheap thong on each foot had created what would probably be a blister where the rubber tube was wedged between his big toe and the one next to it. He limped over to where there were two phones near some trash receptacles in the shade of a thatched roof. Bees buzzed around the receptacles, which were open fifty-gallon steel drums painted green. Lyons wondered briefly what it would feel like to be stung where he was sunburned from yesterday.

A woman in a bikini something like Laverne’s was talking on one of the phones, standing with her bare shoulders hunched and trying to ignore the bees. Lyons went to the next phone and used his card to call the squad room in Seattle, then Marty Sanderson’s extension.

Sanderson was out, but Lyons identified himself, then had the call patched through to his partner’s cell phone.

“Roy!” Sanderson said, surprised, when the call had gone through. “How’s the weather down there?”

“Not like in Seattle. You step outside and your clothes start to get wet from the inside here.”

“It’s not raining here,” Sanderson said. “Beautiful day. Not a cloud.”

“You’re lying, Marty, but that’s okay. I didn’t call for a weather report.” Lyons heard a car horn honk thousands of miles away. Sanderson must be outside, or in his car in traffic. “Remember that lab photo of the bloody shoe print that was found at the scene of the Georgianna Mason murder?”

“Yeah…Christ, the can opener gal with the plastic saint up her twat. Footprint wasn’t visible to the naked eye, but the lab guys used their lights on it, brought it up so it could be photographed.”

“That’s the one.” Lyons heard buzzing and swatted a bee away with his free hand. “Now remember those irritating phone calls we got some time ago from a writer in New York? Puts out some kinda cat mystery novels but she’s working on a true crime book.”

“Yeah. You talked to her, but I remember. She said her book was about the murder of a former New York cop’s daughter.”

“That’s the one.”

“Also said she’d put us in a book if we came up with something she could use. But we had nothing in our files that fit what she wanted.”

“That’s right, Marty. But that was quite a while before the lab brought us that bloody shoe print from Georgianna Mason’s apartment, so I didn’t make the connection right away. The writer asked about one a lot like it. I want you to fax a copy of that print to her.”

“This all came to you on your vacation?”

“That’s how memory works, Marty. Will you fax the photo when you get a chance? I’m sure the woman’s phone number and name, Denise or Deni something, is in the murder file.”

“Sure will. Anything else?”

“No. Now I can go back and relax like Laverne said.”

“Unless you think of something else.”

“Yeah. You’re right. Gotta go now and put on some sunscreen, get back to the beach.”

“I thought you went down there for the sun.”

“I did.”

“Then why the sunscreen? That doesn’t make sense.”

“No,” Lyons said, “it doesn’t.”

He said good-bye to Sanderson and hung up the phone. He thought he really might be able to stretch out alongside Laverne on the beach and relax now. It felt good, having done what he knew was the right thing. Satisfying.

He guessed that was why he was a cop. That and the high pay and frequent outpourings of public gratitude.

From his usual doorway across the street, Coop watched Cara leave Mercantile Mutual after work and stride toward the corner. There was confidence and alertness in her walk, but nothing suggesting wariness.

He knew that she’d put in an appearance at some of the shops or restaurants she’d discovered Ann had frequented before her death. Eventually she would walk or bus downtown, then at the 53rd and Lex subway stop she would take the F train across the East River to Queens. There she would either board the bus that ran to the turnaround point where her sister was murdered, or she would spend a little time walking, or in a shop, before taking the F train on its western run back to Manhattan and going to her own apartment on the Upper West Side.

He stayed on his side of the street and began tailing Cara. She was walking fast, and his heartbeat and breathing picked up. He could see his breath fogging before him. Exercise, yes. But Dr. Gregory might not approve of this kind of exertion.

It was a grueling routine, and it took all of Coop’s skills to keep from being spotted as he shadowed her. Not only this evening, but others. So far he thought all her efforts were in vain; no one suspicious seemed to appear regularly among the people she passed on the sidewalk, or who rode with her on the subway. Coop couldn’t be so sure about the bus; there was no way he could board and ride with Cara and her fellow passengers without being noticed by her. Some of the time he managed to hail a cab and had the driver tail the bus. He would sit silently except for his instructions to the driver, watching whoever boarded the bus and got off, people’s lives touching tangentially and usually without their awareness.

Following Cara, Coop realized how many people there actually were in the New York streets, on the city’s subways and buses. It was no surprise that up to now Cara had been wasting her time.

Yet some nights as he walked behind her it came to him with a chill that the killer had probably walked behind Ann in much the same manner, maybe on these very streets. Cara looked so much like Ann, especially at a distance, that Coop might be virtually striding in the murderer’s steps, seeing almost precisely what he’d seen, thinking some of the same thoughts. Some of them.

The sensation was uncomfortable. He stamped his feet and turned up his collar to the cold, his mind shying away from identifying so closely with a mass murderer.

And he was sure now, along with Deni, that a serial killer was out there. Aside from circumstantial evidence, only the murderer’s “signature” linked the killings, and that itself was a tenuous connection. Clear prints of that distinctive crisscross-pattern shoe sole found at another of the murder scenes would go a long way toward proving definitively that a serial killer was operating nationwide, and obscuring evidence of his existence by varying cities and murder methods. Of course the last two victims—Bette and Ann—had been murdered by the same person. St. Augustine could attest to that. Coop tried to think of some connection between Bette and St. Augustine but couldn’t. He didn’t think she’d even attended church for years. But of course he didn’t know everything about her. That was one thing that scared him, what he might find out. And he was sure it frightened Maureen, despite what she said.

Maureen had been right about one thing—serial killers usually were compelled to prey on certain types of women. The murderer could only to a degree vary the similarity of his victims, his preferred type.

And right now Coop was following a brave or foolish woman who had forged herself into that type by using her dead sister as a model. Was she an angel of vengeance, or a death wish walking?

Despite the cold, Cara walked a long way on Second Avenue this evening. Near East 61st Street, she turned west toward Third Avenue and trudged for a while with her head bowed against the breeze whipping between the buildings. Her pace was quicker now, more purposeful. Coop was unprepared when she suddenly turned and disappeared into one of the buildings.

As he approached where he’d last seen her, he realized she hadn’t gone into the building at all. Instead she’d apparently entered a small cathedral set between two newer, taller buildings. It was a medieval misfit among modern structures, its stone darkened by age, its Gothic spires dwarfed by the soaring vertical planes on either side. Rusty downspouts had long ago bypassed leering stone gargoyles that were made even more hideous by chipped and worn noses and chins. A tarnished brass plaque set in stone near tall, arched doors identified the building as St. Alexius Cathedral.

This explained why Cara had walked such a distance this evening, Coop decided. She must have learned that Ann had come here at times, possibly to pray for a way out of her dreary existence. Cara had walked rather than taken a bus or cab because the frugal Ann might have walked—and been seen and made a target by her killer.

Coop marveled again at what Cara was attempting. It was an instant she sought, the briefest intersecting of lives that would bring a flash of remembrance and murderous desire. Nothing anyone watching would notice, but for two people a glance that would alter universes. Maybe, Coop speculated, church was where you might go to understand such things.

Small as the cathedral was, Coop knew he couldn’t enter it without danger of being seen by Cara. He moved out of the biting breeze and took up his position near the side of a newsstand kiosk and watched for her to come out.

As he stood with his shoulders hunched and his fists jammed deep in his coat pockets, he thought things might have been made simpler, or more complicated, if Cara had entered St. Augustine Cathedral—if there even was one in New York.

He noticed a man walking along the sidewalk on the other side of the street. The man was of average height and weight, wearing a tan topcoat, a voluminous muffler, and a broad-brimmed hat. Something about him tickled Coop’s memory, but he couldn’t be sure he’d seen him before. There were a lot of tan topcoats and matching broad-brimmed hats in New York. But the way the muffler was bunched about the man’s chin, and the hat was angled forward so the brim shadowed his face, might have been what triggered something in Coop’s mind. And from here, it appeared that the man’s glasses might be tinted despite the low evening light. Something else that played in Coop’s memory.

He cautioned himself. As with the topcoat and hat, there were plenty of people who wore glasses with slightly tinted lenses all the time—if indeed they
were
tinted. Or people who simply hadn’t thought to remove their sunglasses as the light dimmed. On the other hand, the hat, muffler, and glasses made it difficult to know what the man looked like. It would be impossible to positively identify him later if called upon.

All of which of course meant nothing. But Coop added the man to his mental list of people to watch for in case their paths crossed Cara’s.

After exactly fifteen minutes, Cara emerged from the cathedral and strolled toward Third Avenue. She usually got off the bus near Second Avenue and 53rd Street before walking along 53rd toward Third and the subway stop. Ann’s path toward destruction. Cara did this time after time, boarding the F train to Queens, sitting or standing, watching and not watching the other passengers, avoiding direct eye contact as the train lurched forward and picked up speed. Subway etiquette, like a mannered dance before death.

Her time in St. Alexius had warmed Cara, so she didn’t seem to mind the walk to the subway stop. But Coop had been standing in the cold while she was inside. He was glad when they descended the steps to the token booth and turnstiles.

He watched Cara use her Metro Card to pass through the turnstiles, and he followed with one of the tokens he habitually kept in his pocket. He always carried tokens since losing someone he’d been tailing years ago for want of a fare. Along with a lot of irate subway passengers, his quarry had noticed him climb over the turnstile. It had been easy for the man to conceal himself in the throng of people on the platform, and board a train about to depart while Coop was still on the escalator.

Coop had his token and timed it right this time. Cara didn’t notice him as he followed her down to the crowded subway platform.

People were standing close together as if for warmth, now and then jostling one another as a breeze wafted from the dark tunnel and a train arrived. Some stood reading or pretending to read books or magazines or folded newspapers, while others stood as if in a trance. Another day in the life was ending. Coop knew that few of them realized how precious and fleeting those days were. At the far end of the platform, a street musician began pounding out a wild, loud rhythm on some paint bucket drums, as if the noise might frighten away what frightened, and bring surcease to those waiting and glancing now and then into the black tunnel.

Cara’s evening walk must have tired her out. No visit to Queens this time. Instead she boarded a Brooklyn-bound F train that would cut crosstown to where she could transfer north or take a cab up Broadway to the Upper West Side.

She was deviating from the trace of her dead sister now, calling it a night.

Coop decided not to follow. He would walk back and take a bus up First Avenue to where his car was parked.

As he was striding toward the escalator, he glanced at an F train headed toward Queens. It was moving so fast the windows passed like shuffled cards. He thought he glimpsed through a window the man wearing the tan topcoat, broad-brimmed hat, and muffler, but he couldn’t be sure.