Night Victims

Paula made herself a J amp;B and water (from the bathroom washbasin) on the rocks, then went back into the living room, sat down on the sofa, propped her stockinged feet up on the coffee table, and used her cell phone to call the corner deli.

In her cozy if abused apartment, with only the humming refrigerator and muffled traffic noises nibbling at the silence, she sipped her drink while waiting for supper to be delivered, thinking about the bulging, agonized eyes of a dead woman with thirty-seven stab wounds. What had those eyes seen in the last long minutes and hours before her death? What emotional storm had raged behind them?

Christ! Thirty-seven!

Paula’s case.

4

Thomas Horn lived in a three-story brownstone on the West Side near Columbus Avenue. It had a basement with street-level barred windows, fancier wrought-iron bars on the first-floor windows, and wonderfully elaborate, if less formidable, bars on the second- and third-floor windows. There were green wooden shutters on all of the windows facing the street and green wooden flower boxes with geraniums and ferns on the first-floor windows. These windows were on either side of four concrete steps that led up to a stoop and stained oak double doors. The tall, heavy doors had small, triangular leaded windows in them. The worn concrete steps were flanked by black wrought-iron railings that echoed the elaborate bars on the upper-floor windows. The effect of all this was that of an urban fortress that had somehow fallen to Martha Stewart.

In the beamed and wainscoted living room Horn sat in his usual green leather chair near the seldom-used fireplace and watched his wife, Anne, slump down on the sofa and ease off her practical low-heeled black pumps. Working women’s shoes. Horn sometimes thought it a shame that a woman with ankles like Anne’s had a job where she walked quite a bit and needed such comfortable shoes. She was in hospital administration at Kincaid Memorial Hospital and was, in fact, chief administrator of the imaging and radiology department. A responsible job that paid well and, until recently, had provided her with satisfaction.

An attractive women with long blond hair, a model’s complexion, and clear blue eyes, she raised one nylon- clad foot and massaged it with both hands. Horn loved her.

She smiled at him and said, “Something’s on your mind.”

He wasn’t surprised she could tell. “Why don’t we have a drink, then go down to the Regency for dinner and talk about it?”

“It requires a drink?”

“‘Fraid so.”

“I’ll go change.”

She was smart enough not to press. Not yet. Something Horn very much liked about her was her feel for timing. He watched her climb the carpeted stairs in her bare feet, holding her shoes in her right hand. Timing wasn’t everything in life, but quite a lot.

When Anne came down fifteen minutes later she was wearing faded jeans, sandals, and a white blouse. Her hair was piled loosely on top of her head, she wore little makeup, and looked about forty though she was actually fifty.

She came over and lightly pecked Horn on the cheek. He’d made her a martini and himself a Glenlivet on the rocks. He sat down in the green leather chair, and she sat in a corner of the overstuffed sofa on the other side of the oriental rug whose pattern reminded Horn of some kind of large game board.

“So how was your busy day?” he asked.

She shrugged. “How was your day of hard-earned leisure?”

Christ! Did she somehow sense what he was going to tell her? “I’m getting used to it.”

She smiled. “Are you now?”

Change subject. “Anything new on the Vine lawsuit?”

“Nothing I feel like talking about. I want this evening to be only about us.”

So they sat and enjoyed their drinks and talked about anything but the Vine suit against Kincaid Hospital, and whatever it was Horn wanted to tell her. Their conversation flowed easily, old friends as well as lovers. Their shared past was the strength and foundation of what they had today.

Twenty minutes later they were strolling along the sidewalk toward the restaurant.

Horn loved walking in New York. The sights, sounds, and smells of the city were his oxygen. The exhaust fumes, even the sweet smell of the garbage wafting from black plastic bags not tightly sealed, soothed his spirit. If he shared the thought with Anne she’d laugh and tell him it was probably the scotch that made him feel that way about carbon monoxide and garbage. Horn had to smile. Anyone in his right mind would agree with her.

The Regency was a medium-priced casual restaurant that served great Italian food and tolerable red wine. Horn and Anne decided on a sidewalk table shaded by a large blue canvas canopy. They were near a dividing wall and well back from the street, so they could talk more or less privately if they didn’t raise their voices.

The waiter came with ice water and menus. Anne ordered a salad and angel-hair pasta, Horn the house specialty, baked lasagna, and a glass of merlot.

The wine arrived, along with bread and Anne’s salad. He sipped, she ate, he talked.

When he was finished telling her about his conversation with Rollie Larkin, she put down her fork and patted her lips with her napkin. “You’re going back to work.” Parallel vertical lines appeared above the bridge of her perfect nose. Subway tracks, Horn used to call them, because they signified she was thinking deep thoughts.

“Only for a while, with special status for the serial killer case. I’ll be in charge, and I got Rollie to assign to me the two detectives who have the case now.”

“You start when?”

“Tonight. The detectives are coming by the brownstone at about nine o’clock so we can talk.”

“As if I didn’t have enough to worry about,” Anne said.

“I know, darling.” He sipped merlot. “The Vine case.”

A ten-year-old boy, Alan Vine, had become comatose on the operating table six months ago at Kincaid Memorial. The boy’s parents were convinced that a mix-up in body scan images had caused the mishap, meaning Anne’s department, and ultimately, her responsibility. She, and the hospital, knew better. The boy’s condition was most likely caused by his rare reaction to his anesthetic. “Blaming the victim,” the family’s attorney said as often as possible. Which, in a perverse way, was true; in this case there was no one else to blame. Not the anesthesiologist who’d performed as he should, not the medical technicians who’d conducted the scan, not the doctors who’d interpreted the images. And not Anne.

Then why did she feel guilty?

“Thomas, you don’t call me darling unless you don’t mean it.” She was the only one who used his given name. Everyone else Horn knew simply called him by his last name. Horn had never minded.

“But I do mean it. Hell, it isn’t hard to know you’re under stress and this is a bad time for me to become active again. That’s why I set it up with Rollie that I’d mostly be advising these other detectives.”

“Do you know them?”

“No. One’s a woman who hasn’t been in the department very long. The other’s old school and is going to retire soon, if I don’t talk him out of it.”

“And I’m sure you will.”

He didn’t answer, and Anne went back to work on her salad.

“I talked to Ashleigh today,” she said. Ashleigh was their married daughter in Connecticut. “Dan Jr. tried to set fire to the garage.”

Horn raised his eyebrows. “He’s only five years old!” he said of his grandson.

“Ashleigh said she found an open matchbook and some burnt matches on the garage floor. And there were some charred sticks nearby stacked in a pyramid pile.”