John Lutz - Night Victims

The object was the body of a dead girl no more than thirteen. She was wrapped in mud-caked leaves held fast by vines wound around her thin form. The leaves and mud were dark, discolored by blood.

Last night Hector, standing watch, had looked up to find the moon and see if it might foretell rain. He’d noticed a dark, still object high in the branches of the tree, and his heart leaped; for a second he thought he might be looking at a government sniper. But there was a looseness about the dark bulk above, as if it weren’t lying on or affixed to a limb but might be tied there, suspended.

In the morning he’d climbed high into the tree to satisfy his curiosity, only to raise more questions.

“What must have done this to her?”

“It looks as if she was stabbed to death,” Armand said, his dark eyes wide. “Stabbed many times. See the slits in the leaves?”

Hector slung his Kalishnikov over his shoulder and nodded. “She was dangling in a kind of sling made of vines. This poor child. . who would do such a thing?”

“Not the Americans. Probably the government troops. They’re bastards! Think of some of the things they did to those of us they captured.”

“But this young girl-”

Hector stopped talking, astounded, as Armand’s right ear exploded from his head. Armand’s eyes wore the vacant gaze of the dead as he dropped straight down to lie beside the girl.

Hector whirled to run, but the automatic weapons fire that had erupted from the surrounding forest brought him to his knees, killing him before his upper body struck the ground.

New York, 2003

Pattie Redmond hung up the phone behind the counter at Styles and Smiles and looked pensively out the window at the backed-up morning traffic on Second Avenue.

The guy she’d just talked to, Gary, was still a question, so maybe she shouldn’t have agreed to meet him for drinks tonight at the same place they’d met last night. It was a bar in the Village, where she and Ellen had gone to pass time before seeing a movie. Pattie’s mom, who lived up in White Plains, had cautioned her about meeting men in bars enough times. Still cautioned her regularly over the phone. A young girl living alone shouldn’t take chances, her mother would tell her. Some things, she would say ominously to Pattie, never change. Like Pattie might meet some nice fella in church, if she went to church.

Pattie had to smile. She was twenty-four-not so young, at least in her mind. Pretty enough, she knew, with her long auburn hair and too-wide mouth with white, even teeth that almost didn’t look real. Lips a little too large, like they’d been collagened. Gary said it was her smile that attracted him.

This guy, Pattie had thought last night in the bar, looked like something out of a soap opera. He was tall enough, darkly handsome, and perhaps partly Hispanic-the sexy part. And his suit looked expensive, maybe even Armani. Pattie knew clothes; she’d learned about them working here at Styles and Smiles, which sold men’s as well as women’s apparel.

Ellen had listened to their conversation and afterward told her that Gary had a practiced line of bullshit. Sure he did. Didn’t they all? He was single-said he was, anyway. And he’d been straightforward enough, just walking over and asking if he could buy her a drink. Ellen thought he might have assumed they were prostitutes, the way they were perched at the bar on those high stools and surveying the room, and for a few seconds Pattie thought the same. She’d even found herself toying with the possibilities. In her mind, toying.

Line of bullshit? Maybe. But it turned out Gary was more interested in listening to Pattie’s story than in telling his. She hadn’t told him where she lived, but she had mentioned where she worked. So he’d called and-

“. . forty percent off each of these, or if you buy two?” a short redheaded woman holding a blue blouse was asking. “The sign says buy two, get forty percent off.”

“You don’t get the forty percent off if you only buy one,” Pattie said.

“But if you buy two, do you get forty percent off each of them, or off the total price?”

“It’s the same thing,” Pattie said. Isn’t it?

“Or do you get forty percent off one but not the other?”

“Well. .”

“Or just twenty percent off if you buy only one?”

“I’ll tell you what,” Pattie said, “you buy both and I’ll give you forty percent off each one.”

“Isn’t that what the sign says?”

“Uh, well. . yes.”

“You people won’t get anywhere trying to confuse customers,” the woman said. She put down the sweater, turned, and strode angrily from the shop.

Pattie normally would have been seething. But this morning her mind was on other things. She simply smiled and walked over to return the sweater to stock.

She caught sight of herself smiling in one of the mirrors by the changing room. The sensuous and vibrant woman looking at her from the mirror made her feel good. She could understand why Gary had been attracted to her. She really could.

Horn hadn’t expected much from his visit to the first two crime scenes, and he hadn’t learned much. The apartment of the first victim, call girl Marilyn Davis, in lower Manhattan, was still vacant but had been cleaned. That of the second victim, computer programmer Beth Linneker, on the Upper East Side, had already been leased to a new tenant. Both women had lived on high floors where they must have assumed they were safe from street criminals and crime in general.

In each apartment the killer had entered through the victim’s bedroom window. In the Linneker murder, he’d cut away a crescent of glass and used masking tape, a bit of which was still on the outside glass, to catch and hold the detached glass and keep it from falling and attracting attention. Davis’s window had been unlocked and open slightly to allow in a summer breeze after a brief shower.

Horn examined each windowsill and found scratches and dents on the wooden one but nothing on the marble sill. It was impossible to tell if the marks were from the killer’s entrance, but some of them looked fresh. In both murders the women had been wound in their sheets. Since there was no sign of struggle, this was done while they were still asleep, or so quickly and deftly they hadn’t time to resist. Duct tape was placed over their mouths to silence them. They’d apparently been killed with the same weapon that was used on Sally Bridge. Davis, with thirty-seven stab wounds, had bled to death. Linneker had a fatal heart attack-after being stabbed thirty-six times. In neither case had the killer left anything behind that hinted at his identity.

Maybe Paula and Bickerstaff had learned something new in reexamining the two apartments earlier, as Horn had instructed. Probably it had been a waste of time, like so many things in homicide investigations.

Horn figured he might have better luck stumbling across something new and pertinent in Sally Bridge’s apartment, which was still an official crime scene.

He got the key from the super but when he reached the apartment found he didn’t need it. The yellow crime scene tape had been untied from the doorknob, and the door was unlocked.

When Horn entered he found Paula and Bickerstaff inside.

They’d heard him in the hall and were standing about ten feet apart, staring at the door to see who might come in.

Neither of them appeared surprised, but both seemed relieved. Horn wondered if they thought Bridge’s killer might have wanted something in the apartment and returned for it.

“Learn anything at the other two crime scenes?” he asked, noticing that the apartment still smelled of death, the faint coppery blood scent that could almost be tasted.