John Lutz - Night Victims

Pollock sucked in air, expanding his already immense torso. “Nice guy, is about all. I don’t hardly know him well enough to tell you more’n that. He does some kinda accounting work in his apartment. He offered once to do my taxes. I told him, hell, they ain’t that complicated. My girlfriend Linda does ‘em for me. She says we’d get married, only it’d cost us.”

“Seems to cost everyone,” Paula said. “Ever known Schnick to have overnight female guests?”

Pollock rubbed his sleeve across his glistening forehead. He was sweating as if he were working at it. “Once in a while, is all. But, hell, he’s young and single. There was never anything like a parade up there.”

“He ever cause any kind of trouble?”

“Not in the slightest. I said he was a nice guy. I’m kinda the unofficial doorman here, and he springs for a nice gift at Christmas, which is more’n you can say for some of the other cheap bastards that live here.”

“Now the big question,” Paula said. “Where might we find Mr. Schnick?”

Pollock suddenly turned even paler, fixing his gaze beyond Paula. “There,” he said hoarsely. “Right there.”

Paula turned around to see a short, dark-haired man about forty, wearing wrinkled khaki pants and a perspiration-soaked blue shirt with a red tie plastered askew across his chest. His face was pudgier than the rest of him, which was actually kind of thin. Paula thought Lightfoot was right to wonder what Redmond had seen in Schnick.

When he saw Paula and Bickerstaff with Pollock, Schnick’s jaw dropped and he broke stride, actually did a little skip. His body language became pure babble. First, he almost whirled and bolted, but then he took a stride toward them trying to look casual. Then he shuffled his feet and veered away from them. No, he was back on course now. He knew he had to keep coming toward them, but his body wouldn’t accept the message.

“He always do the hokey-pokey when he comes in?” Bickerstaff asked.

When he drew closer, Schnick nodded at Pollock. “Ernie.” For a second he seemed to consider walking on past, toward the elevators.

Bickerstaff stopped him with one hand placed lightly on the shoulder; he flashed his shield with the other hand.

“They’re cops,” Pollock said unnecessarily.

Paula tried to catch Schnick when she saw him turn a pasty color. He was so slippery with sweat that he oozed through her arms and sank to his knees.

Ow! Jesus! She’d bent back a fingernail.

Schnick’s eyes rolled back, and she managed to hold on to a handful of damp hair and ease his descent, but with the sore finger she couldn’t stop him from going down the rest of way to lie curled and unconscious on the cracked tiles.

Horn settled into his usual booth at the Home Away. Anne had wolfed down her toast and orange juice at home, then hurried off to her job at the hospital.

It had become their weekday-morning ritual. Horn would rise first and put on the coffee, then share caffeine and conversation with Anne during her breakfast. It used to be that those times were comfortable, their conversation easy and about the trivial but necessary things a man and his wife discussed. But since the lawsuit Anne hadn’t been sleeping well and was almost always irritable in the mornings. Horn found himself looking forward to her leaving, so he could finish getting dressed, and then on some mornings, walk over to the Home Away to have his own leisurely breakfast while he read the Times.

There was something about her distance and distraction, their increasingly frequent separation-both physical and mental-that bothered him, but maybe not as much as it should. In some ways it made him feel like a young cop again, on the Job, doing something worthwhile with his life.

Searching for a killer.

Though the booth Horn sat in wasn’t that near the window, morning sunlight reflected off the windshield of a parked car and angled in low to cast a rectangular pattern over the table and the newspaper spread alongside his coffee cup. The sun’s warmth felt good on his bare forearms as he read. Part of him was thinking how pleasant sitting there was, how this wasn’t a bad way to spend a morning.

The news was front page above the fold, emphatic for the Times. The caption read serial killer might be operating in new york. The text was factual and matter-of-fact, and referred to the killer as the Night Spider only once. It had always amused Horn how the Times always politely referred to male suspects as Mr., and he almost expected to come across Mr. Night Spider.

He finished reading the piece and pushed the paper aside. Then he picked up the Post he’d also bought after seeing its headline: night spider nails another. The following story contained pretty much the same general information as the one in the Times, though the prose was more sensational. In bringing to the attention of the citizens of New York that a prolific and particularly horrific serial killer was in their midst, it used the term Night Spider twenty-three times.

In both papers, the story was at the very least unsettling.

“I see we’ve got another one of those guys killing his mother over and over,” Marla said, as she topped off Horn’s coffee.

“They don’t all do that,” Horn said.

“I know. It’s a lot more complicated than that. I read in the paper you came out of retirement to handle this case. What made you do it?”

“I guess because I was an oldest child,” Horn said.

“No, you weren’t the oldest.”

Horn was surprised. Marla was right; he was the middle of three brothers and the only survivor of the three. “So pop psychology can lead us astray,” he said.

“You better believe it.”

There were no other customers in the diner, and the glass coffeepot she held was almost empty, so she lingered by his booth as she often did.

“So what do you think?” Horn asked.

“About?”

“This serial killer.”

“I don’t have all the facts.”

“None of us do,” Horn said. “That’s the problem. What do you make of it from what you read in the papers and hear on the news?”

Marla seemed a little surprised he was asking her about this seriously, but she walked over and placed the coffeepot back on its burner, and then returned. Her manner was slightly different, but it would take a practiced eye like Horn’s to notice. She wasn’t in her waitress persona now; she seemed involved and thoughtful. There was more going on behind her eyes than over easy and bacon crisp.

“He kills women he doesn’t know,” she said, “or he’d simply knock on their doors then incapacitate them instead of sneaking through their windows.”

“He might have a thing about them needing to be asleep,” Horn suggested.

“I know. I’m only hypothesizing. The victims are all attractive women but not of a particular type.” She saw the curiosity in his eyes. “Television news had their photos on last night. Nina Count’s channel.”

“It would be hers,” Horn said. “She’s a wolf among news hounds.”

“Your killer must have some kind of climbing skills,” Marla said. Something in the look she gave him revealed she was locked on like radar, now that he’d asked her opinion. She wasn’t interested in his asides about a TV anchor-woman. “So he might be involved in rock climbing-that’s a growing sport-or mountain climbing. Or maybe entomology.”

That brought Horn up short as he was lifting his cup to his mouth. He placed the steaming cup back down. “Entomology? The study of insects?”

Marla nodded. “The media aren’t just calling him the Night Spider because he crawls up and down buildings. There’s the way he swathes his victims, like a spider using secretions to wrap and disable a victim before draining it of fluids. And the wounds are stabs rather than slashes, almost as if he’s emulating a spider slowly sapping the life of helpless prey caught in its web. The killer doesn’t seem to be in a rush. Neither is a spider. It feeds at its leisure off insects it’s trapped and wrapped, until they weaken and die and become useless husks.” She smiled without humor. “If I were a bug, I wouldn’t want to be at the mercy of a spider. It doesn’t know mercy, and neither does your killer.”