Night Victims

12

“Schnick as in prick,” Bickerstaff said, as they climbed out of the unmarked.

“Try to behave,” Paula told him.

Gary Schnick’s building didn’t have a doorman, but when Paula and Bickerstaff entered the spacious, rather shabby lobby, a fat man in gray overalls watched them with a sideways gaze from where he sat on a sofa. The lobby had a cracked gray-and-white-tile floor, red concrete planters with obviously fake ferns in them next to the scattered furniture, and an odor that suggested insecticide.

Paula and Bickerstaff studied the bank of tarnished brass mailboxes.

“He’s in 106,” Paula said, spotting Schnick’s name above one of the boxes in the top row. Something white was visible through the slot; Schnick hadn’t picked up his mail today. Above the name slot was an intercom button, but Paula could tell by the many layers of paint over it that it didn’t work.

“Help you?” a smoker’s hoarse voice asked behind them. “I’m the super.”

It was the guy in the overalls, looking much bulkier now that he was standing.

“We’re looking for Gary Schnick,” Bickerstaff said, showing his badge. “So far we found his mailbox.”

The obese super’s complexion turned the drab gray of his uniform. His reaction interested Paula. Bickerstaff, too. They moved closer to the man.

“I can tell you he’s not home,” the super said. Paula noticed he smelled like stale sweat and cigars.

“What else can you tell us?” she asked.

The super’s doughy face widened, and flesh beneath one of his eyes began to tick. His mouth worked for a few seconds but no sound came out. Clearly there was an inner struggle going on here.

“Gary didn’t mention any police,” the super finally said.

“So what did he mention?” Bickerstaff used his quietly menacing voice. Watching all those Clint Eastwood movies paid off.

“Said where he was gonna be,” the super spoke up immediately. “Told me to call him if anybody came around looking for him. Didn’t mention any police, though.”

“Police you got,” Paula said. “What’s your name?”

“Ernie Pollock.”

Bickerstaff made a show of writing it down. “Okay, Ernie, what can you tell us about Schnick?”

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?”