John Lutz - Fear the Night

“Can we work together to the benefit of both of us?” Zoe asked. “My salvation and your career path?”

Weaver carefully lifted the plastic bag containing the computer by its handle and stood. She smiled down at Zoe, looking surprisingly young and pretty in the restaurant’s soft light. “I think we should see where it takes us.”

Neither woman had to tell the other they were in it together now.

“I’ll keep you posted,” Weaver said. She turned and walked out the door with the laptop.

The restaurant was starting to get busy now. People wanted to eat and get home before it became really dark. A waiter led two men in business suits to a nearby table. They were laughing and yammering about some kind of deal they’d pulled off. Some guy they referred to as a schmuck had signed a contract not in his best interest. Unwise arrangements were made all the time.

Zoe knocked back the rest of her beer and got out of there.

Bobby noticed the police cruiser approaching but ignored it, continuing along the sidewalk with his dejected, shuffling gait. It wasn’t much of a stretch for him to act harmless, he realized ruefully. His joints did ache, especially his hip, and there was that recurring pain low in his gut that he suspected might be his appendix acting up. Medical insurance was a dream to Bobby, but at least if the damned thing burst he might be able to get himself to a hospital emergency room soon enough to stop the poison from spreading and killing him.

He sensed rather than saw the cruiser slow as it passed him; then it picked up speed and turned the corner two intersections up. Bobby was sure the officers in the car hadn’t paid much attention to him; he wasn’t the only person on the block. It was even possible the car had slowed down so the cops could appraise the lean Hispanic man down the street, wearing jeans and a numbered sleeveless jersey, dribbling a basketball and dashing around as if to take shots at an imaginary basket fixed somewhere above the concrete stoop of the nearest building. Serial killers had adopted stranger disguises.

Bobby continued to roam with apparent aimlessness, making circuitous routes around the Repetto apartment but keeping his distance. Everything in the neighborhood seemed normal, but he could feel something in the air. It was almost the way it felt years ago, just before a tornado touched down near him in Illinois. Or that time in Philadelphia, minutes before a big warehouse robbery and shoot-out.

He knew this was different. And the Sniper seemed to want his prospective victims, the city itself, to sweat. He was a sadist, though he might not think so. And not stupid. Anxious, but not eager. Probably nothing would happen tonight.

Yet there was that feeling. . Bobby’s cop’s instincts reawakened.

With all the security for Amelia Repetto, the precinct basement office was deserted. Glad of the fact, Weaver sat hunched over the glowing computer on the desk. The air in the office was damp and stale and smelled faintly of insecticide or disinfectant, but she didn’t notice.

Weaver hadn’t been able to lift any prints from Zoe’s laptop. But she wasn’t an expert, and now that she was in league with Zoe, she didn’t want to give up on their scheme. She decided to take someone else into her confidence, someone who couldn’t and wouldn’t reveal any involvement.

Weaver had once been embroiled in a torrid love affair with a married tech in Latent Prints, so she managed to get a confidential rush job on the laptop. The tech was a man with three kids, still with his longtime wife, so he knew how to keep a secret. Weaver wasn’t worried about him talking.

Zoe had spoken the truth. There had been only two sets of prints on the laptop. But there had been only three prints total, very faint. Two, on the keys, had been Zoe’s. The remaining print, on the bottom of the computer, was missed when the laptop was obviously wiped down.

It didn’t take much time for Weaver to run the print through Central Records Division and come up with the name Dante Vanya. He’d been fingerprinted on a prostitution charge, which was later dropped, in 1989 as a juvenile. Still as a boy, his prints went on record again when he was in the jurisdiction of the New York Administration for Children’s Services, in 1990, after a lengthy hospital stay.

Fascinated, hopeful, Weaver did a search on Vanya and found city records revealing that he’d been treated for burns and later placed in the care of a guardian ad litem, while a trespassing-on-city-property charge was considered. In this case the guardian was a charitable foundation called the Strong Society that provided a home for the boy while he recuperated from his burns. Custody had become long-term. Dante had remained a resident of the Strong Society until he attained legal adulthood.

More computer work. Weaver thought, not for the first time, that the Internet was a wondrous thing. The Strong Society had operated a rehabilitation ranch for children in Arizona that filed for Chapter Eleven in 2001. The steward and CEO of the foundation, Adam Strong, had subsequently committed suicide.

Weaver could feel her heart beating faster. She was closing in on something. Every instinct in her body told her so.

She did a computer search on Adam Strong, her fingers darting over the keyboard almost of their own volition.

Within twenty minutes she found him. Adam Wellmont Strong had been born poor but became a wealthy man in the steel fabrication industry during World War Two. He’d died in 1987 at the age of seventy-nine.

Not Weaver’s Adam Strong.

Discouraged for the first time since she’d logged on to the computer, Weaver desperately clicked on various links-until a name jumped out at her: Adam Wellmont Strong, Jr.

She was back on point, squirming now in her chair with eagerness.

Quite a guy, Adam Strong, Jr. He’d been a star quarterback in high school in Flagstaff, Arizona, then suffered a knee injury that ended football for him. But it didn’t stop him from attending college, graduating with honors, then spending two years in the Peace Corps. After the Peace Corps, he’d done some government social work, obtaining mortgage loans for low-income families, then gone to work for his wealthy father’s foundation. While doing social work, he won several skeet and target shooting titles, then had become an alternate shooter on the U.S. Olympic team.

Weaver found herself grinning wide enough to make her face hurt.

After his father’s death, Adam, Jr., inherited both the position as head of the foundation as well as the family land in Arizona, where he created the Strong Society Ranch.

Where Dante Vanya had spent some of his formative years.

Weaver needed to learn more about Dante Vanya. After a more thorough search, she uncovered a New York Times article about a homeless boy who’d been badly burned in a subway station fire. A subsequent article revealed that the boy’s father, a former New York Department of Sanitation worker, had murdered his wife, who was Dante’s mother, then shot himself.

Weaver leaned back from the computer, staring at the monitor. Though the past few hours had required practically no physical energy, she found herself exhausted. Now the air in the office did seem stifling. She was perspiring and her breathing was ragged.

Almost there.

Calmer now, she used the computer to check the various online borough phone books.

No Dante Vanya.

But he could be using a different name. Or simply have an unlisted number.

Weaver went from online phone directories to actual various cross and residence directories.

Dante Vanya didn’t have a listed phone number, but he did have an address on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.