He made his way to an aisle where he was alone.
No one seemed to be paying the slightest attention to him. Traffic still hadn’t moved enough that the cars he’d left stuck behind the Saturn had caught up. Behind him, from up the street, he heard horns honking but couldn’t be sure if it was because of the obstacle he’d left in the stream of traffic.
He sensed the tempo and walked faster, feeling safer. Still some danger, though.
Immersed in the hurried parade of flawed humanity, he blended. He walked toward the intersection at the same speed as other pedestrians. Turn this corner, then another, and he’d be lost in the crowded mad maze of the city.
Horn was almost winded. He was about to stop and bend over with his hands on his knees, when he saw the knot of people ahead and caught a glimpse of white fender.
He drew a deep breath and continued at a fast but unsteady walk, feeling his heart hammering as he wondered what Anne would think if he arrived on a gurney at Kincaid Memorial Emergency.
The white Saturn was parked in a traffic lane.
People were standing around staring at it, their hands on their hips, as if it might gain a mind of its own and move. Traffic had built up behind the Saturn, but drivers were grudgingly giving enough ground to let blocked cars get around the illegally parked vehicle.
When Horn reached the car, he paused for a few seconds while he tried to catch his breath, waiting for the ache in his side to let up. Then he flashed his shield and asked everyone to move on and not touch the Saturn. He used his cell phone to call in the plate number.
When the phone chirped ten minutes later, he was told the car was registered to C. Collins, address not far away on the East Side.
Horn didn’t even put the phone back in his pocket. He stood there holding it, his chest still heaving as his lungs worked to pull in oxygen. He knew what was coming next.
And it came. Another ten minutes and the cell phone chirped again.
The Saturn’s owner, an exotic dancer named Christina Collins, had slept late and hadn’t even realized her car was stolen until the police knocked on her door and gave her the bad news. She was terribly upset, Horn was told. She wondered if she’d ever get her car back.
Eventually she’d get it back, Horn thought. And he was sure nothing about it would be different. Not even new fingerprints.
He wondered if he’d ever get his breath back.
24
Horn looked in on the late Neva Taylor and found the now-familiar scene of sadism and death.
Despite the horror on her immobile pale features, it was obvious that Taylor had been a beautiful woman. This was, Horn noted, the first victim with red hair. The killer was continuing what might be a deliberate variation in the types of his victims.
“Same sad story,” said the assistant ME, a woman with short blond hair and a wattled neck.
“Was she a natural redhead?” Horn asked.
She leaned close and examined the roots of Taylor’s splayed red hair. “What you see’s the real thing. And in case you’re wondering, pubic hair isn’t the best way to judge. Sometimes it isn’t the same color as natural hair on the head.”
“I wasn’t wondering.”
The woman smiled at him. “No, I guess you weren’t.” In a more businesslike tone, she said, “At least thirty stab wounds in this one, skillfully applied to prolong suffering before death.”
“Look like the same weapon?”
The woman nodded. “A long, thin blade, very sharp. Plenty of bleeding, but gradual and absorbed by the sheets and mattress. Not the bloody river you’d ordinarily get with that many wounds.”
“Must have been a helluva way to die.”
“There had to be a lot of pain. But then, that’s what the shit-head who’s doing these murders is all about, isn’t it? Inflicting pain? Torture?”
“That’s exactly what he’s all about.”
“He’s good at it.”
Horn walked over and examined the open window. There was the expertly removed crescent of glass dangling on a strip of masking tape. The unlocked brass window latch. No noticeable marks on the sill. No blood on the floor. Nothing to suggest the killer had been in the room, except for the corpse on the bed.
A camera flash sent miniature lightning through the room. A police photographer documenting everything visual about the crime scene.
“Smile,” he said, as he approached the victim and squinted through the viewfinder.
Nobody did, especially not Neva Taylor.
The woman from the medical examiner’s office moved back to give the photographer room. “It’s like a spider crawled into the building, immobilized her, and slowly drained her of life,” she said to Horn. She must have been reading the papers. “You think this sick asshole really thinks he’s a spider?”
“He seems to identify with them.”
“I don’t see how anybody could identify with bugs,” the photographer said, going about his business of launching one flash after another. Zeus with a Minolta.
“I don’t see how anybody could ask a corpse to smile,” Horn said.
The photographer grinned at him around the camera. “Yes, you do. You’ve got it harder than I do. You have to look at this kind of stuff without the emotional distance a lens gives you.”
“A photographer-philosopher,” the ME said, not as if she were kidding but was actually surprised to hear such wisdom from the lips of a guy who shot pictures of crime scenes.
The photographer jokingly aimed his camera at her and she quickly turned her head.
“Your sidekicks are up on the roof,” she said, finding herself facing Horn.
“I figured.”
“Our kind of job,” the photographer said. “There’s no place to go but up.”
“Unless I throw you out a window,” Horn told him.
It was windy on the roof of the Weldon Tower, but it felt pretty good on such a warm day. The city was a vista of beautifully sunlit buildings softened by late morning shadow. It all looked antiseptically clean from here, and not as if anything of horror would be happening behind the thousands of windows.
“You almost need a jacket up here,” Paula said.
Horn didn’t think so, but he didn’t disagree with her.
“We got pretty much what we expected here,” Bickerstaff said. He pointed to an adjacent building about thirty feet away. “Looks like that’s where he came from. We’ll do the usual checking with that building’s doorman and tenants.”
And probably come up with nothing, Horn thought.
“There’s marks from a grappling hook of some kind on the base of that antenna,” Bickerstaff continued, “and the roof ‘s surface indicates some activity almost but not directly over the victim’s bedroom window. Looks like our guy came down the outside wall between the rows of windows so he wouldn’t be seen, then swung or walked himself over about five feet to center on Taylor’s window.”
“No fresh hole in the brickwork,” Paula said, “but we think he wrapped a line around that vent pipe, since it was right where he wanted it.”
Horn walked over and stooped down to examine the four-inch pipe protruding from the roof. There was a circular mark on it, maybe a slight indentation, that looked fairly new. Paula was probably right in her
