Night Victims

“She never told me Gary’s last name. The place in the Village she did tell me. Sounded something like a stream or river, but not those.”

“Like Mississippi or something?”

“No, no.”

“Creek?” Paula ventured.

“Brook!” Herb almost shouted. “Brook’s Crooks. It’s near McDougal, I think.”

“I know where it is,” Bickerstaff said. To Paula: “It’s a respectable enough place, hangout for yuppies who work nearby on Avenue of the Americas. They go there and pick each other up, try to mesh their pathetic lives.”

Herb gazed at Bickerstaff with wounded eyes. “God! Such a cynic!”

“You’ve just seen the surface,” Paula said.

“I doubt if it was Gary,” Herb said, “considering how kind and gentle Pattie said he was.”

Bickerstaff simply looked at him, and Herb turned away.

About ten years before, on the Upper East Side, some people were killed with an ice ax of the sort mountain climbers used. Back then the NYPD had called on a mountain climber of note named Royce Sayles to identify the weapon, then to help the police locate the killer. Sayles had then testified in court and helped to gain a conviction. The murderer turned out to be an attorney who was well-known for championing controversial liberal causes. The Times was convinced the police arrested the wrong man. Horn had thought they might be right, but there hadn’t been another ice ax murder on the East Side.

It wasn’t difficult for Horn to locate Sayles. He lived in the same apartment near Riverside Drive and, in fact, was now married to the young widow of one of the ice ax victims. Lucky in love and rent stabilization, Horn thought, as he parked his low-mileage, ten-year-old Chrysler in front of an attractive apartment building with a white stone facade and fake Doric columns flanking the entrance.

A uniformed doorman held the outer lobby door open for Horn and called up to tell Sayles he’d arrived, then directed Horn to the elevators. Directions were needed; the elevators were around the corner in the main lobby and had doors of such convincing faux marble that they blended perfectly with the red-veined marble wall. Only a single brass button gave them away.

Horn had called ahead and Sayles was expecting him. When Horn stepped out of the elevator on the tenth floor, the mountaineer was standing across the hall holding the apartment door wide open in welcome.

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