send somebody around to Nora Shoemaker’s place and check on her.”
Anne bowed her head, staring into her lap at the whitened fists she couldn’t unclench, and was squeezed by a knowledge that had more to do with the heart and gut than with the mind. Ancient instinct. Signals from the cave.
44
Horn got the call at 3:01 A.M. A woman named Nora Shoemaker, an off-duty nurse at Kincaid Memorial Hospital, was found dead in her apartment on the West Side. She was apparently another victim of the Night Spider.
Not only that, Anne had received a phone call from the killer intimating that he’d murdered the nurse.
Horn was sure that was the message Mandle wanted to say. And it could happen anytime. Nora Shoemaker’s murder was only two days after Letty Fonsetta’s. And where was the pattern? The nurse was in no way a public figure like Fonsetta and Duggan. Why had Mandle seen her as one of the chosen? Made her a victim?
Horn’s mind was whirling with these questions as he began making calls, demanding that protection be stepped up for Anne.
Then he phoned Anne, who seemed more deeply shaken by the nurse’s murder than by any of the others.
“He might have been
“That’s what he wants you to believe,” Horn said. “He wants to panic you. Not just for pleasure, but in the hope that you won’t be thinking straight and you’ll make a mistake. If he makes you feel guilty as well as terrified, that’s fine. You’ll be more vulnerable and he’ll be able to get to you. Nora Shoemaker died because Mandle killed her. Period.”
Her voice quavered but there was strength in it. “I know that intellectually, Thomas. I won’t let this sick freak panic me. My thinking is clear.”
Horn believed her. “For now,” he said, “cooperate with your guardian angels, even if it doesn’t make sense to you. They know their job.”
“All right, Thomas. And you promise to be careful.”
She hung up without waiting for his promise.
He got on his cell phone and woke up Paula and Bickerstaff. Then he got dressed in a hurry so he could drive to Nora Shoemaker’s apartment.
This one was like the others done since Mandle’s escape from the prison transport van. A woman shrouded in her bed-sheets, gagged, then tortured with stab wounds. She was killed by a blow or several blows to the head, with the killer using whatever bludgeoning instrument was handy and suitable for the task. This time it had been a cut-glass candelabra. It had been used with such force and viciousness that two of its six gracefully curved branches had broken off.
No fingerprints, as before.
Ah, but there were differences!
This time no sign of entry from the roof. The knob lock on the apartment door had been expertly slipped. The splintering of the door frame indicated that the chain-lock bracket had been forced not with a sudden, violent effort, but by someone leaning harder and harder against the door, several times in succession, until the screws flew from the wood. It was a method long used by breaking and entering pros who didn’t want to wake anyone sleeping inside.
The method had worked with Nora Shoemaker, who was probably wrapped like a package and gagged before she woke up completely.
What happened to her next must have seemed to last forever, until finally the glass candelabra led her to true eternity.
“There was no doorman,” Paula said over breakfast at the Home Away, where Horn had called a meeting to discuss what they knew before they all went home and caught some much-needed sleep. “There was a keypad outside that the tenants used to open the outer doors.”
“The code changed recently?” Horn asked.
“Changed last week. Not that it makes any difference. After using the keypad to gain entrance to the outer lobby, tenants then use a regular key to open the door to the inner lobby and elevators. All Mandle had to do was wait on the sidewalk for somebody to enter the building, time his approach, then grab the door before it closed all the way. He could enter with them, as if he’d just walked up and was about to go in when they came along. Then he could wait politely while they used their key to open the door to the inner lobby, and ride up in the elevator to a different floor, as if he belonged in the building.”
“Do any of the other tenants remember something like that happening?”
“Sure,” Bickerstaff said. “Half a dozen. It happens all the time. People are lazy with their keys and too trustful, even in New York. It’s like they go to sleep at night and forget everything that happened to them that day or what they’ve read in the papers, then they get up next morning not knowing again how many assholes are walking around out there. A guy edges in with them when they’re buzzed up or unlock a door, they don’t think much about it. They’ve done the same thing themselves.”
Horn shook his head. “So much for building security.” He sipped from a glass of ice water. He was staying away from coffee so he could actually get a few hours’ sleep and be more effective the rest of the day. “Whatever’s driving Mandle is getting stronger. He’s stepped up the pace, killing with increasing frequency.”
“Like most of those jerk-off serial killers,” Bickerstaff said.
“What I don’t understand,” Horn said, “is why his method of entering Shoemaker’s apartment was different.”
“Another message,” Marla said.
Surprised, the three detectives looked up at her where she was standing near the booth. There were several customers in the front area of the diner this morning. Marla had to work her trade.
“He wanted to let you know you had more than his usual MO to worry about,” she continued. “That he was ahead of you in your game of wits.” She might have been about to say more, but a voice called her name. She turned and strode toward an elderly man in a window booth who was animatedly motioning for her with his empty coffee cup.
“She’s probably right,” Paula said.
“Can we be sure the nurse wasn’t a copycat murder?” Bickerstaff asked.
Horn and Paula looked at him.
“Not likely,” Paula said. “Remember the phone call to Anne.”
“Still possible, though,” Bickerstaff said. “All someone had to do was find out how to get in touch with Anne at the hospital. The news media’s been on this case like flies on a dead carp. Lots of information on TV and in the newspapers.”
“There are too many similarities with the previous murders,” Horn said.
“Not the method of entry,” Paula reiterated.
Bickerstaff grunted and got his notepad from a pocket of his wrinkled suitcoat. He absently propped his reading glasses on the bridge of his nose and consulted his notes. Paula thought he looked ten years older with his glasses on, the way they slid halfway down his nose. And incongruously academic. Mr. Chips with a 9mm.
“We got the three victims,” he said. “Alice Duggan, Nicolette-long for Letty-Fonsetta, and Nora Shoemaker.
