The Night Caller (25 page)

First he made sure that she was out. Then, carrying his brown leather briefcase, the Night Caller let himself into Deni’s apartment with her key and was greeted by a large, startled cockroach on the floor just inside the door.
Sloppy, unclean bitch!
He scooped up the roach with his free hand an instant before it made it to a dark space beneath the molding, then hurled it against a wall hard enough to kill it.

He sat down at the writer’s computer. It didn’t take long for him to render it blank and without threat or meaning, as she herself would soon become.

When he was finished, he sat and thought the old thoughts, waiting until he heard her key rasping in the lock. He snatched up his briefcase as he rose from the chair, and went with cat silence to the closet where he assumed she would hang her coat.

He knew from experience how she would react when she opened the door and there he was. There would be a long, long moment of shock and horror and seeping dread, in which he had all the time in her world to act, because his time was different from hers. She would gasp, hold her breath as something dearer to her than she knew. Maybe she’d faint. The point was, once she opened the closet door, she would know the abyss.

But she didn’t open the door.

Not this time.

Fate was patient as stone. He waited and watched as she removed her coat just inside the apartment door, then tossed it on the sofa. She was a slob with no predictable habits. But he’d known that about her by her apartment. What did it matter, how she veered this way and that as she moved toward her moment?

She disappeared down the hall and he removed from his pocket the heavy wool sock filled with finely grained sand, then placed the briefcase on the floor. In less skilled hands the soft sap would have been ineffective. Not in his hands.

Just as he was about to leave the closet, he heard water running. The unmistakable hiss and whisper of it splashing hard in a column into the old cast-iron tub. If he waited a while longer she would be in the bathtub, like Georgianna Mason. That was all right. He could improvise. He was the future and knew the future and could mold it to his purpose.

Unpredictable again, she strode into the living room wearing a large pink bath towel wrapped around her and sat at her desk. She switched on her computer and tried to boot it up, but it didn’t respond. The erasure of its operating system had already preceded hers.

She was still staring, puzzled, at the glowing monitor, when he silently opened the closet door, rapidly closed the distance between them, and struck her just so with the sap.

The bitch somehow moved as he’d swung his arm. Only a few inches, but it had been enough to inconvenience him.

He raised the sap again and rained blow after blow on her head and shoulders. She tried to grip his arm, then finally slumped down and rested her head on the desk.

By the time he’d gotten his briefcase from the closet and removed from it the Manhattan phone directory and twelve-inch length of heavy iron pipe, she was seated straight up again in her desk chair, but in a daze. Her fingers fluttered as she raised her hands before her eyes.

He wasn’t surprised by that. He’d rather expected it.

In one smooth motion he rested the phone book squarely on top of her head and smashed down on it with the pipe. He’d struck four or five quick, violent blows before she slumped again over her desk, her head resting in the crook of an elbow as if she were asleep.

But she was tough, this one. Tougher than any of the others, who certainly on some level understood and cooperated in their dying.

The Night Caller leaned over her, felt for a pulse, and found none. Casually, he reached out and snapped one of her fingers. No response to extreme surgical stimulus, he thought, smiling.

He’d come prepared for what was to be next. Earlier that evening, while Cara Callahan had been down in her building’s well-lighted and safe laundry room, the Night Caller had used his duplicate of her door key to let himself into her apartment. He’d browsed about as he always did at first, getting to know her better, and found the gun.

No need for her to have
that,
he thought, and slipped the gun into his pocket. He wondered how she’d obtained a replacement so soon for the one that had been in her purse and was now in his apartment.

Later, when he got back to his apartment, he saw the words
Police Special
engraved in the second gun’s blue steel, and he knew where she’d gotten the gun. That had given him the idea. The cop. The Distraught Dad. Old Testament bastard. The Night Caller would make sure he had something more than a crude concept of justice to occupy his mind. The idea had come unbidden, like a revelation from the Book.

Still keeping an eye on the surprisingly resilient Deni Green, he placed the revolver in the fold of the phone directory, using the bulk of its pages to muffle the shot as he pulled the trigger and fired a round into the nice soft back of an upholstered chair so the bullet wouldn’t be misshapen.

It was doubtful that anyone had heard the muffled shot, but it was possible. The explosion had been louder than anticipated, so he’d have to hurry.

The Night Caller quickly stuffed phone directory, pipe, and sap into the briefcase. The gun he slipped into his pocket.

He glanced around him, satisfied, then hurried from the apartment. Aside from three preschool children playing on the stairs in the vestibule, no one noticed his passing. He smiled as he stepped carefully around a scattering of toys and upraised faces fresh as spring blooms.
In the midst of death we are in life.

Upstairs, at the sound of a car horn honking in the next block, Deni Green stirred, raised her head, then dropped it back down.

The next morning, Coop was glad to see that the weather had further improved. Brilliance from a cold sun in a clear sky illuminated his kitchen window that looked out on an air shaft. He’d already showered and was seated at the kitchen table, having a breakfast of buttered rye toast, coffee, and orange juice, when the phone rang.

It might be Deni. He decided to let it ring and call her back after breakfast.

But the voice on his answering machine in the next room was Billard’s:

“Coop? You there? If you are, you better pick up.”

Coop put down his toast on the paper towel he was using for a plate, wiped his buttery fingers on the towel, then reached over and lifted the receiver from the wall phone by the sink.

“Hold on, Art.” He punched the pound key and the loud whine in the receiver ceased as the machine switched itself off.

“Coop?”

“Yeah. Something up?”

“Deni Green’s been badly beaten. Hit on the head with a blunt object, also been worked over on the back, shoulders, and arms.”

It took Coop a few seconds to take in what Billard had said. “How bad is she?”

“Hospitalized. Critical condition. It happened sometime last night, apparently. Water was running over in her bathtub, leaking into the apartment below, so the super let himself in and found her.”

Coop flinched at a mental image of Georgianna Mason lying dead in the blood Jell-O of her old claw-footed tub. Had Deni somehow avoided that grisly fate?

“She wasn’t in the tub,” Billard said, “though she was wearing nothing but a towel. Like she was getting ready to take a bath, then remembered something and sat down at her desk. Her computer was on. Looks as if she struggled a bit, maybe fought her attacker long enough that he gave up, or maybe got scared off by something.”

Blunt object…Coop wondered if Deni’s attempted murder might have no connection to the other victims. None of them had suffered multiple blunt object trauma.

He caught himself. Of course she was probably the latest in a long line of victims of the same serial killer. His MO had been altered; that was, after all, his MO. And the killer knew Deni’s name, so it would have been simple to learn her address. Maybe she’d been getting too close. Maybe the killer figured she had to be stopped, tried for her, and was interrupted, frightened away.

Maybe Coop would have to be stopped.

“Where’s Deni now?” he asked.

“Mercy Hospital. In the ICU. Doctors say she has a fighting chance, but we shouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t make it.”

Coop gave the receiver a squeeze hard enough to whiten his knuckles. Maybe the killer hadn’t failed after all.

“She isn’t conscious,” Billard said. “They say she might never be, and if she does regain consciousness, she might not be able to remember what happened even if there isn’t permanent brain damage.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“Deni Green’s apartment,” Billard said. “The techs are still going over it. When I heard the squeal I drove in here, knowing you’d want whatever there was on this one.”

“Mind if I come over?”

“I thought you’d ask that,” Billard said. “Come ahead.”

“I can leave here in a few minutes. You still gonna be there?”

“Sure,” Billard said. “Why would I leave a party like this?”

Coop hung up the phone, took a final searing sip of coffee, then hurried into the bedroom to get dressed. He put on a clean white shirt, a tie that he’d left looped and knotted, then a dark sport jacket. Best to look as much like a working cop as possible. Then he wet his hair and smoothed it back with his fingers. After giving his mirror image a final check, he left his apartment to join the party in Deni’s.

“From what I heard,” the chief tech on the scene said, “this is likely to become a homicide, so be extra careful what you guys touch, where you step.” He was a bandy rooster of a redheaded guy in his sixties. Coop remembered him from years ago. Garrity, he thought his name was. Techs seldom talked that way to cops on the scene, but Garrity always had. Nobody told him to shut up, so Coop figured he must have an angel high in the department. Or maybe Garrity was simply smart and had gotten everyone to think that.

“Looks like she was taken by surprise while she was concentrating on her computer,” said Billard, who was standing back against a wall, out of the way. She was found slumped over her desk, her head resting in the crook of one arm.”

Coop looked at the desk, the empty office chair on rollers. Deni’s computer monitor was still glowing, a screen saver showing cats bounding soundlessly across cyberspace.

“Maybe she was about to get in the tub, then ran in here to answer the phone,” Coop speculated.

“There’s a phone in the bathroom,” one of the plainclothes detectives who’d overheard him said. Then he continued writing with a ballpoint pen in a black leather notepad. “It’s working fine.”

“More likely,” Billard said, “she remembered something she wanted to do on her computer, came in here to do it before she forgot, or while the water was running to fill the tub, then was attacked after she sat down.”

“Attacker could have been hiding in that closet,” said the detective with the notepad. He was a tall, lanky guy about forty, wearing a brown suit that looked as if it were tailored by the Salvation Army.

Coop thought he was probably right about the closet, which was on the opposite side of the living room directly across from the desk chair. He’d seen Deni hang her coat in there; it was used only for coats and a vacuum cleaner she seldom used, a few assorted junk items.

“Anything stolen?” he asked.

“Don’t know yet,” the detective said, not looking up from his notes.

It was the answer Coop expected to hear. This was a fresh crime scene; there hadn’t been much time to develop hard information.

“I know who tried to kill her,” Coop said, trying to get the lanky detective to at least look up from whatever he was writing. “I just don’t know his name.”

“Or how to get in touch with him,” the detective said. Then he did look up and gave a sad smile. “Lieutenant Billard filled me in.”

“I don’t suppose you know if she was on the Internet when she was attacked.”

“Couldn’t say. Hasn’t been time for any of that yet.” He looked at the computer glowing on the desk, the endless parade of cats crossing the monitor screen. “She’s a writer, I understand.”

“Right. Cat mysteries.” Coop waved a hand toward a bookcase displaying several of the Cozy Cat novels.

“Cat solves the crimes?”

“Cat helps. The main character is fashioned after Deni Green herself.”

“She own a cat?”

“No, I don’t think she likes them. Or they don’t like her.”

“Way it is with cats,” the detective said. “Finicky.”

“Way it is with people who write about cats that solve crimes.”

“If I may play human detective,” Garrity said, “I’d guess the assailant was frightened away abruptly. I saw the victim just before the paramedics removed her. Her wounds were inflicted with power and viciousness, all of them. Whoever was beating on her didn’t simply get tired or lose enthusiasm. He was trying to kill her and was interrupted.”

Ignoring Garrity, the detective flipped his notepad closed. He walked over to Coop and extended his hand. “I’m Dickerson,” he said, “One-Nine Precinct. I’m the whip on this one. After talking to Lieutenant Billard, I can guess what you have to say, but I need your statement.”

“Of course,” Coop said, shaking the oversize hand. Pianist’s fingers, he thought. Extraordinarily long and strong.

“When we’ve had time to learn more here,” Dickerson said, “I’ll call you, or you can call me, and I’ll bring you up to speed.”

“You all better clear out of here for now,” Garrity said. “Let us do our work so you can do yours. Unless of course you want one of your fingerprints to turn up in the wrong spot and make you good for the crime.”

“There’s a coffee shop down the block,” Dickerson said to Coop, still tuning out Garrity. “We can have a little privacy there while you give me your statement, maybe even get some breakfast.”

Cop-to-cop talk, Coop thought. In what other profession would two people stand near bloodstains at the site of a severe beating and consider going to breakfast?

“I already ate,” Coop said, “but the rest of it sounds okay.”

“We can make it short,” Dickerson said. “There’s no point in you going over to Mercy yet to see your friend, anyway. Indications are she won’t regain consciousness for quite a while.”