Night Victims

apartment.”

“Which we tried to get you to leave.”

“By getting out, I don’t mean running away,” Anne said. “I won’t do that, won’t give in to fear. It’s my life, and I’m damn well going to live it as I choose. But I’m no fool. I recognize the danger better than anyone. I want to know what you think of my returning to work.”

Horn sat back and extended his long legs, crossing them at the ankles. “I know you want something to do, but this isn’t really the time-”

“It’s exactly the time,” she interrupted, “if I’m going to remain sane.”

“And alive?”

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you. Could you arrange. . Would it make that much difference if I were guarded here or at my office? There’s already some security at Kincaid anyway. I thought it might even be easier.”

“You’d be working day hours?”

“I’ve been promised them.” She smiled. “They do need me if they want to successfully plead their case.”

“You almost sound as if you’re looking forward to a court fight now.”

She shrugged. “When your life’s threatened you gain a different perspective on fear and stress. On what’s important.”

“And going back to Kincaid is important to you?”

“Very.”

He looked at her standing there in the soft light filtering through the sheer curtains. Light like a time machine. She might have been the Anne of twenty years ago. They might have been-

Don’t think it, you idiot!

He sat up straighter, then stood. “What you want can be arranged. But I want something in return.”

“Oh?”

“When things get tight and really dangerous-and they will-I want your word that you’ll follow my instructions.”

“Instructions pertaining to what?”

“To anything. We’re in a game with a psychotic killer who wants you as his victim. There might not be time for me to explain or try to justify whatever it is I’m asking of you.”

“You have my word, Thomas.”

“I’ll talk to Rollie Larkin.”

They looked at each other. She gave him a smile.

He waited for her to stop him and thank him as he left, but she remained silent behind him.

Oh, well, he’d demanded something in return. And leaving her this time, walking away from her, the painful wrench he felt didn’t rip quite so large a rent in his heart.

Horn spoke with Larkin later that day. Anne’s return to work didn’t really require that much extra security since she’d simply be office-bound rather than spending most of her time in her apartment. In fact, it enabled some of the security force to work closer to her, passing as hospital personnel. Ida, Anne’s assistant, had been reassigned. The uniform assigned as Anne’s last defense, who was usually the scar-faced cop Horn had seen several times stationed in the hall, could be outside her office door rather than noticeably hanging around outside her apartment.

“Police profiler can’t understand why our man’s staying in the New York area,” Larkin said, while he and Horn puffed on cigars in Larkin’s office. There was a small exhaust fan humming away in a window, tugging at the smoke. Horn had heard they’d made this a smoke-free building and wondered if it was true, if Larkin didn’t give a damn. Might well be. Horn decided not to ask.

“Maybe he can’t refuse a dare,” Horn said.

Larkin exhaled a cloud of smoke and squinted through it at Horn. “You mean he sees it as a dare that we’re bent on catching him?”

“That could be part of it. And I’m afraid part of it’s me. He’s making this personal.”

“So why doesn’t he go after you?”

“Might, eventually.” Killing Anne would be an initial step in murdering me, using her death to torture me before he finishes the job.

Both men were thinking the same thing. Neither put it into words.

“I don’t see why he doesn’t simply try for Anne,” Larkin said. “God knows, he’s had plenty of practice.”

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Horn said. “What’s the police profiler have to say?”

“What you just said. She also said we might expect more murders after Alice Duggan’s, with approximately the same amount of time between them as between Mandle’s previous victims. That means we might have a couple of weeks, at least, to prevent the next killing.”

And the next intended victim might be Anne, Horn thought.

Larkin flicked ash from his cigar. “If Mandle keeps killing, and it turns out there’s some kind of pattern in the murders since his escape, it’ll be clear he’s toying with you and Anne, doing his sadistic act. But Duggan looks like the earlier random prey. High-rise apartments and windows difficult to reach, that encourage a kind of false sense of security and a carelessness, are what seem to dictate his choice of victims. There’s no apparent similarity in physical type or in the work they did, and their ages varied. Some were divorced, some had never been married, and one was widowed.” Larkin finished his cigar and snuffed it out in an ashtray. “Seems obvious Mandle’s read the literature and knows how to avoid a pattern.”

“So no woman can feel secure,” Horn said.

“Yeah. So any woman in New York might be a victim and has to walk around terrified because of him. Loves power, does Mandle.”

“Single women.”

“Huh?”

“Mandle’s victims were all single and lived alone,” Horn reminded Larkin. “No live-in lovers, no roommates.”

“True,” Larkin said. “Like Anne.”

“Like Anne.”

And, as it turned out, like Letty Fonsetta.

Horn received news of her murder over his cell phone as he was driving away from his meeting with Larkin.

It was like Alice Duggan’s murder. Letty Fonsetta was lying on her back in bed, tightly shrouded in her blood-soaked sheets, a rectangle of duct tape slapped over her mouth. There was a depression in the center of the gray rectangle, from when she’d tried to draw her last, desperate breath, and even that was denied her. A clot of blood clung to her hairline. It was where she’d been bludgeoned. On the floor near the bed was a small, triangular marble clock with blood and a clump of hair stuck to one of its corners. Horn was sure it would yield no fingerprints.

“Only three days since the last murder,” Paula said.

“And her apartment’s only on the third floor,” Bickerstaff added.

“Three’s wild,” Horn said. “Think that means anything?”

“Only if you’re a numerologist or poker player,” Bickerstaff said.

“The short interval between murders,” Paula said, “might mean he’s getting desperate. More driven by compulsion.”

“More dangerous,” Horn said. He wondered if Mandle might be sending a message to Anne and him: Any night now. Sooner than you think. Trying to heighten the terror. “The killer get inside the usual way?”

“He did,” Paula said. “Dropped five stories from the roof, which he reached from an adjoining roof. I’m wondering why, though.”

Horn looked at her. “Why what?”

“Where Letty’s window is, he could have easily reached it from the ground without being seen. It looks out on an alley where he wouldn’t have been noticed. So why didn’t he choose the easy way in and out?”