Night Victims

parked car.

“It’s part of his campaign of terror,” said Dr. Ellen Nickels, NYPD psychologist and profiler. Horn was alone with her in her silent, monotonal beige office not far from One Police Plaza. It looked like a movie set and smelled as if all that leather and wood had been recently oiled and waxed. “Anne might receive more such mail, maybe anonymous phone calls.”

“Or not so anonymous,” Horn said. He told Dr. Nickels what Marla had said; the doctor was impressed. She was an attractive woman in her forties, with a no-nonsense, short hairdo and dead-serious brown eyes behind square-rimmed thick glasses.

“This person you’re talking to,” she said, “keep talking to him.”

“It’s a her,” Horn said. “A waitress at a coffee shop I frequent.”

Dr. Nickels smiled. “She’s dispensing wisdom with the coffee.”

“Why just Anne’s name on the card?”

The doctor appeared puzzled. “Because it was for her.”

“I mean, why not a message?”

“Oh, I think the message was implied.”

“And the dashes between the letters of her name?”

“Probably for emphasis. Detective Horn, this man you’re hunting isn’t always going to be predictable. In part because he’s mentally unstable. And, in part, because his mental illness doesn’t necessarily detract from his cleverness.”

Horn nodded. Tell me something new.

The doctor must have read his thoughts. “You probably know the psychology of serial killers better than I do.”

“They’re not all the same,” Horn said.

“No, they aren’t. Usually they don’t arm themselves in court then escape on their way to Rikers Island. This one seems deadlier than most. I think I can speak for every woman in the city when I say I want him apprehended as soon as possible. Has the lab had any luck with the card or envelope?”

“None. No prints on either, and no residue of saliva or DNA on the envelope flap. The card’s for sale everywhere in New York, and the postmark’s Brooklyn and means nothing.”

“Cautious and diligent, your Aaron Mandle.”

Horn looked at her. “No, not always cautious.”

She smiled shrewdly and nodded, as if she knew exactly what he meant.

Not always cautious enough.

41

More than anything, Alice Duggan wanted to die, to escape the pain. Her entire body seemed to be on fire. She couldn’t cry out, with the heavy tape over her mouth. She no longer even tried. Only lay still, listening to her own whimpers, praying for it all to end.

The bed creaked as the dark, lithe figure beside her moved to the side of the mattress and straightened up. She barely paid attention to it-to him-now. The pain was inside her forever, and he was merely a dark, moving shape in her nightmare. It was horrible, he was horrible, but even in horror, in terror, there was a saturation point. There must be!

And now there was the hope, the knowledge, that it would soon be over, that the nightmare the world had become would fade and disappear, as would she. Alice would no longer be Alice. Alice would be safe.

In the blurred lower edge of her vision she saw the lean figure standing before her dresser. Preening in the mirror?

No, picking up something. A statuette.

On Alice’s dresser were two twelve-inch-tall plaster figures: one was Fred Astaire, the other Ginger Rogers. Alice had fallen for them as soon as she’d laid eyes on them at the

Twenty-sixth Street flea market. They’d adorned her dresser for more than a year. Sometimes, when she was in a role that required a hairpiece, she used Fred as a wig stand.

But the nightmare intruder had reached toward the right side of the dresser. It was Ginger he was holding, hefting it in his hand as if testing for weight.

He returned to the bed where Alice lay whimpering.

She saw him raise Ginger and closed her eyes.

The heavy plaster statuette crushed the bridge of Alice’s nose. She felt blood spurt warmly from it and run down onto her neck. More blood began trickling at the back of her throat, then suddenly flowed heavily. She tried to spit it out, but the backwash from where it was blocked by the tape across her mouth made her swallow. She choked, gagged, frantically tried to spit out the blood again but couldn’t. The mattress and springs began shuddering and making a low, fluttering sound. Her body began to tremble and rock so hard she momentarily levitated off the bed.

The blood flow continued. She had no choice but to inhale, to try desperately to breathe. It was instinctual, automatic, to inhale and expect air. To struggle to live.

Alice began to drown.

“I knew this one,” Horn said to Marla. “Not personally. I saw her onstage. She was the stand-in for the star in Leave Her, Take Her, She’s Mine”

“Broadway?”

“Off.”

“Uhm.”

“Why did he beat as well as stab her?” Horn asked.

The Home Away had closed, and he and Marla were walking along dark streets to her subway stop. The media were alive with news of Alice Duggan’s murder. night spider on the hunt again! the Post proclaimed in a gigantic headline. The story was above the fold in the Times. There were long-winded speeches in the state capitol and at

City Hall about reviewing procedures to transfer prisoners. Television pundit panels wondered how it could be-how it could conceivably be-that a serial killer so lethal hadn’t been under constant guard and in direct view of law enforcement eyeballs. Was it incompetency or conspiracy that had led to Mandle’s escape? Alice Duggan’s parents in Pittsburgh were interviewed every time they ventured out of their house. “New York,” Rollie Larkin had remarked dryly to Horn in his office, “is getting press like John Rocker’s revenge.”

Horn listened to the regular clacking of Marla’s heels on the pavement as he strolled beside her. She hadn’t answered his question immediately. It wasn’t an easy one.

“If I had to guess,” she said finally, “and I do, I’d say Mandle wanted to disfigure his latest victim for two reasons: He wanted to show you what he was going to do to Anne, to taunt you, and he wanted to further terrify Anne.”

“I feel taunted,” Horn said. “And I sometimes wish Anne were more terrified so she’d agree to go into hiding.”

“She’s confused right now as well as scared, and trying hard to establish her independence after years of marriage.”

“She always had plenty of independence,” Horn said a bit defensively.

“I’m talking more about her mental state than whether she pretty much did what she wanted.”

They walked for a while without talking. Horn wondered if he’d irritated Marla with his claim of Anne’s independence.

But no; she’d been thinking.

“Another possibility,” Marla said, “is that Mandle is changed after his conviction and escape. That now there’s