John Lutz - Night Victims

Sayles was average size and still looked fit, though Horn remembered him with dark hair and now it was gray. His blue eyes were the same, brittle bright with quiet daring and surrounded by heavily seamed tan flesh. He was wearing pleated gray slacks, a pale blue-on-blue striped dress shirt open at the collar, and a maroon ascot with white polka dots. He looked good in the outfit. Horn wondered how he got by with it, thinking maybe it was the thirty-two-inch waist on a man who was probably in his sixties.

The apartment had tall windows and was bright, what decorators would call airy. On both sides of the windows were bookcases stuffed with volumes of every size and stacks of dog-eared magazines that appeared to have been pored over. The top magazine on one of the stacks was The Economist. The furniture was traditional and expensive. The walls were white, and on one of them was a vast framed landscape oil of a mountain range. There were framed black-and-white photographs of mountains on the other walls. A tall, black-laquered desk that looked to be of Chinese origin was the only incongruous thing in the room.

“Seventeenth century,” Sayles said, noticing Horn looking at the desk. “Beautiful and practical. I obtained it years ago. Spent a great deal of my youth in the northern provinces of China.”

“Really? I didn’t know.” Horn didn’t recall that morsel of information from ten years ago.

“The desk is the only furniture in the room Andrea didn’t choose. She indulged me when I insisted on keeping it.”

“Andrea?”

“Sorry-my wife. I’d introduce you but she’s visiting her family in Vermont. You being a policeman of some note, I thought you would have known all that before coming here.”

“I didn’t know about Vermont,” Horn said. Or China. That’s two.

Sayles smiled and motioned for Horn to sit in a comfortable-looking cracked brown leather armchair. “Get you something? A drink? I feature fine scotch.”

“Excellent,” Horn said, settling into the chair. For a second he thought he might never stop sinking into the soft cushion. He watched as Sayles got a bottle and some glasses from an oak credenza and poured two glasses of Macallan.

“If you want ice or water I’ll have to go to the kitchen,” Sayles said.

“Straight up’s fine.”

After handing Horn his glass, Sayles sipped from his own and smiled with satisfaction. Then he settled into a matching armchair facing Horn’s.

“He lowered himself from the roofs,” Sayles said.

Horn grinned. “Ah, you’re ahead of me. First up the mountain.”

“Wasn’t hard to figure out. And because of the climbing aspect, I was interested and followed the murders in the smaller papers before the major media tumbled to what was happening. Two of those buildings would be almost impossible climbs from ground level. And time consuming. Hard to believe anyone could have spent time scaling them, even at night, without being noticed. But going down instead of up, that’s another matter. Wearing dark clothing or dressed to approximate the colors of the buildings, gaining entrance to those windows without being detected would have been within the capabilities of an expert climber. Except for one building, where the Bridge woman died.”

“That one was more difficult?” Horn said.

“Oh, that one would have required superb skills. Not to mention iron nerve.” Sayles flashed a sad smile. “I might have been able to do it when I was a bit younger.”

Horn sipped his scotch and was further impressed. “A climber that skilled. .”

“Not just skilled,” Sayles said. “Gifted.”

“With that ability,” Horn continued, “wouldn’t he be well-known, at least to other climbers?”

“He would,” Sayles said. “And that’s your problem. I know of no one climbing now who might have exhibited such technique and ability.”

Horn found himself slightly irked by the note of admiration in Sayles’s voice. “What about a good climber with new or revolutionary equipment? Might we be seeing evidence of that and not so much his climbing skills?”

Sayles considered for a moment, then shrugged. “Equipment could account for some of it. With the new lightweight harnesses and slender but almost unbreakable lines, the new friction belayers that allow someone to virtually walk down a wall, abilities are enhanced, especially in descent. But I was also thinking about other problems your killer had to contend with. He had to be silent. He had to be fast. He had to be as invisible as possible from the ground or surrounding windows, and he had to gain access quickly. And, of course, he had to duplicate his feat in the opposite direction when leaving the scene of the crime.”

Horn nodded over his Macallan. “He showed some of the skills of an expert B-and-E man. A cat burglar. By the way, this is terrific scotch.”

Sayles cocked his head to the side and smiled. “Isn’t it, though? The papers I read are calling him a spider. The Night Spider. I suppose because he drops on a line to his victim’s window, then envelopes her, saps her of life, and leaves behind the shrouded and inanimate husk. Much like a spider.”

“I haven’t read the papers today,” Horn said. He wasn’t surprised the advance news hounds had caught the scent. The Sally Bridge murder had stirred a lot of interest because of her show business connections. And the NYPD could leak like a spring shower. “Night Spider,” he said. “I suppose that’s accurate enough.”

“Soon they might be calling you the exterminator,” Sayles said.

“I hope so.”

“Like Arnold Whatsisname.”

“I was thinking James Bond.”

Sayles grinned as if thinking, Damned if you didn’t find a sense of humor in the most unlikely places, even in a retired homicide detective who’d seen hell.

Horn said, “We think the. . er, Night Spider entered buildings adjacent to the victims’, crossed gangways or air shafts to the roof, then dropped down on a line to the victims’ windows.”

“Sounds plausible.”

“Wouldn’t that entail a lot of equipment?”

Sayles ran a finger around the rim of his glass and thought about it. “Not really. As I said, climbing ropes are thin and lightweight these days. And the hardware’s sometimes made of unbreakable but light polymer materials.” The glass rim sang. “Your killer might have simply wrapped the slender line around his waist, had whatever else he needed, including a telescoping or folding grappling hook, in his pockets or taped to his inner thighs. The military developed top secret stuff for Ranger and Special Forces mountain units.” Sayles sat back and took a sip of scotch, his blue eyes watching Horn over the glass rim as if peeking above a foxhole. In this case, he was waiting for another question to be lobbed. It struck Horn as it had years ago what a wily and willful man Sayles was. He knew how to reach mountain peaks, how to get to know the right people, and how to handle media. And now he was living well and more or less anonymously on the momentum of his early success.

“The military,” Horn said. “A climber as skilled as you say might have been in one of those units, and with the right equipment could be the climber who reached those windows.”

“I doubt if even Special Forces can climb like that.” Sayles squinted and seemed to look inward. “But I’ve heard of a secret Special Forces mountain unit in the military that works in conjunction with the CIA in black operations.”

He didn’t have to tell Horn what black operations were- missions done secretly and at times without the knowledge of even the president. For many people in power, some things were better not known.

“The men in those units are the cream of the cream,” Sayles said. “They go on missions that can’t fail and can never be made public. That’s the only place I can think of where you might find somebody not known to the outside world who can climb like. . well, a spider.”