The Night Caller (15 page)

The Night Caller sat beneath the slanted skylight in his Manhattan loft apartment and used its diffused light to read the newspaper. He’d been at his work heavily much of the day and hadn’t had time to catch up on the news. But he enjoyed his coffee and his paper, and had been glad to settle down with them to read in the fading evening light. He much preferred natural light, perhaps because he spent so much time in artificial or fluorescent brightness. An unhealthy glare. He was sensitive to such things. Because of his nature he was sensitive in many ways, and in some ways callous.

At first he paid little attention to a feature piece captioned
DISTRAUGHT DAD SEEKS DAUGHTER’S KILLER
. The usual gross sensationalism.

But when he started to move on to the next page, his gaze fell on a name buried in the text. Sue Coppolino.

He sat forward, concentrating now on the page before him.

Someone, this Distraught Dad, along with a woman who was apparently some kind of writer, had interviewed Sue Coppolino in prison about Marlee Clark’s murder. Other names leaped out at him from the text. Some of them called to him. They knew him. They knew him still. There were faces. Faces. His thoughts scattered like roaches exposed to sudden light. He could hear them! Hear their insect legs and brittleness scurrying on concrete!

Terror locked him tight. Was he losing control? Was the center not holding? That was the darkest thought of all. More horrifying even than the roaches.

Start at the beginning,
he told himself.
This concoction of fact and lie is written in organized fashion, so use it to organize your thoughts.

After waiting for his heartbeat to slow, he forced himself to begin reading the first paragraph.

Ten minutes later he stood up and carried his untouched and cooled cup of coffee into the kitchen. After pouring the coffee down the sink and placing the cup in the small dishwasher, he opened a cabinet door near the refrigerator. He got a glass and poured into it two inches of Southern Comfort from a bottle he kept in the cabinet. Was he drinking more lately? Too much?
No,
he told himself.
Don’t, don’t.
Now wasn’t the time to worry about
that.

Seated again on his small leather sofa, he sipped from the glass while staring at the newspaper he’d left lying on the floor, staring at the photographs of former NYPD detective Ezekiel Cooper and the writer Deni Green. Ezekiel, he thought. A biblical name. Did this man fashion himself some sort of angel of vengeance? Of justice? And what about the woman Deni Green, who looked like a cruel man with a malicious glint in her eye? He knew that glint, had seen it in the mirror of the past.

One thing he’d determined from reading the article was that these two hunters (as the journalist had called them) knew nothing about their prey.

Yet sitting here, their prey felt a twinge like something tiny but alive stirring inside him. The police weren’t such fools that they spilled everything they knew to a cheap journalist at a second-rate newspaper. Why would these two hunters be so foolish?

And what could they know, anyway? Why should he even care about them? He was certainly their intellectual and spiritual superior, and he’d been careful.

He smiled and took another sip of Southern Comfort.

What
could
they possibly know?

Nothing, he decided. But he certainly knew a great deal about them. There it was, lying on his apartment floor in a newspaper. It often amazed him, how gullible people were.

Gullible enough to underestimate him. People had underestimated him all his life. The reason why was obvious.

That they were wrong had always been obvious to him.

Well, not always.

But he had learned.

As they were learning. His enemies’ confusion was his strength.

He thought that was somewhere in the Bible. Like Ezekiel.

Deni he was certain wasn’t in the Bible.

God damn them both.

Lying back on the sofa, staring up at the shadows of clouds moving like dark thoughts across the skylight, he sipped Southern Comfort and began drifting into sleep knowing God wasn’t relevant.

The Night Caller found solace in the fact that he didn’t need God. No need for God to damn them, after all; he could damn his own enemies. He could destroy them. They didn’t know their fate. He did.
Cita mors ruit.
Swift death rushes upon us. He decided when.

He was their fate.

In time. In sleep. Sleep and time came together and consciousness tilted and faded. The glass of Southern Comfort slipped to the floor, bouncing once on the carpet, then rolling in a wide arc and spilling its few remaining amber drops like scattered sequins among the coarse fibers.

Control went. Sleep came.

Sleep always came. For everyone. Prison and sanctuary.

Coop was sitting in his car with the engine idling and the heater on when Maureen left work at Allied National Insurance that evening.

There she was, walking with her head down, close to the building to avoid the biting wind. Maureen was wearing her drab brown coat buttoned tight all the way to her chin, its collar turned up. It didn’t appear that she was wearing socks beneath her practical artificial leather shoes. She wore no hat or gloves despite the cold. Coop figured she thought the cold was natural, so it must be good for her.

She had to walk past him, and when she did, she noticed him and broke stride.

Coop leaned over and opened the passenger side door. “Come on in for a minute out of the cold,” he said. “We need to talk.”

She moved close to the door and leaned down to gaze sternly at him, the wind plastering her hair to the side of her face like a claw. “Need? I don’t need to talk with you.”

“Please, Maureen. It’s about Bette.”

She was motionless for a few seconds. He was getting cold.

Finally she lowered herself into the car, staying as far away from him as possible, but left the door hanging open.

Cold air swirled around his ankles. “Close the door, Maureen.”

“No. This will do just fine.”

Coop guessed it would have to. “I’m asking you to listen while I try to explain why you shouldn’t talk to Deni Green again about Bette.”

“Deni is working at solving Bette’s murder, just like you’re supposed to be doing.”

“Deni and I are supposed to be working together,” Coop said. “She didn’t tell me she was going to talk with you.”

“Why should she have to? Because she’s a woman?”

“For God’s sake, Maureen—”

“Do you tell her whenever you’re going to talk with someone? Did you tell her you were coming here to talk with me?”

Coop said nothing. She had him in one of her conversational traps. And, he had to admit, maybe she had a point.

Maureen was smiling at him triumphantly.

“It was Deni’s sneaking behind my back that prompted this conversation,” he said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”

“I wish you’d sneak behind somebody’s back and learn something. Instead, you play your stupid games with your police friends. You don’t have to do that. You’re not bound to their code. You’re no longer a policeman.”

“But I need their cooperation if I’m going to find Bette’s killer.”

“It doesn’t seem like cooperation to me. Deni said the police haven’t been much help at all.”

“She’s wrong.”

“So, is the suspect in jail? No. In fact, there isn’t even a suspect.”

“There will be. But what I want to impress on you is that Deni’s writing a book, and she’s being pressured to do it fast. She wants to make money out of this, Maureen. That’s why she’s pumping you for information. And believe me, when it comes time to use that information, she won’t care who gets hurt.”

“Her ulterior motives don’t interest me, as long as she finds Bette’s killer.”

“But she doesn’t know how to look. She’s not a cop and she’s never been one.”

“In her way, she’s probably solved more crimes than you. Her profession has prepared her for precisely this kind of investigation.”

“That’s absurd! She’s a writer. She sits at a keyboard and makes things up. She commits crimes on paper, then solves them on paper. This isn’t on paper, Maureen. This is life.”

“It helps to have someone cerebral in this investigation. The police simply gather information until they might have enough of it for a solution to fall into their laps. They don’t solve deductive puzzles the way Deni does in her Cozy Cat mysteries. They don’t synthesize their information and extrapolate.”

Coop could almost hear Deni talking. “Did she tell you that?”

“She didn’t need to tell me. It’s obvious to almost everyone but an ex-cop.”

“She doesn’t know as much as she thinks. Or as you think.”

“Have you ever read a Cozy Cat mystery?”

“No. I tried but couldn’t.”

“Then how can you judge her capabilities as a detective?”

“I don’t recall taking the Cozy Cat test at the police academy.”

Maureen swung a leg out of the car. “You’re being sarcastic now instead of reasonable. I’m leaving.”

“I’m sorry. But if you continue to talk with Deni, you’re putting her, me, and possibly yourself in danger.”

Maureen twisted her body so she could look directly at him. “Me?”

“None of us knows exactly how a killer like this thinks. Deni and I pose an obvious threat to him, maybe even a challenge that will attract him and make him kill more often. And if Deni writes anything that gives him the impression you might know something, anything that could pose the slightest threat to him, he might make you a victim.”

She snorted. “That’s ridiculous! Anyway, what do you care?”

“I care, Maureen.” He caught himself and said no more, knowing how she’d react if he told her that her pain was his and he felt sorry for her.

“Serial killers only murder certain types of victims,” she said.

“Not necessarily.”

“Yes, necessarily. That’s the point of their murders to begin with.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Deni told me. She also said serial killers subconsciously want to be caught. That’s why they kill more and more often and take more chances. And that’s why somebody smart enough can get into their minds. You only need to help them be caught.”

Coop felt like telling her what bullshit that was. Instead he said calmly, “We don’t really know how all of these killers think. And I’m not so sure they kill more and more often because they want to take chances and be caught. It could simply be because they’re coming unraveled and losing control.”

“This one certainly seems to have control of the situation,” Maureen said. She swiveled sideways to stand on the sidewalk outside the car. Coop watched the wind pluck at her coat, twist it where it had come unbuttoned to expose a knee that looked somehow obscene in its ruddy nudeness. Then she slammed the door hard enough to make something fall and tinkle loosely behind the dashboard.

Coop watched her walk away, her head bowed, advancing determinedly into the frigid wind. He thought back to their wedding day, then the early times with Bette. Happiness had seemed automatic for years. Then came the change, gradually at first, then with a rapidity that overtook everything. Had this Maureen always been inside the other, needing only time or some kind of catalyst in order to emerge? Maybe there was someone else inside all of us, waiting to meet challenges, climb to new heights, sink to new lows, surrender reason.

Strangers within strangers. Strangers who sometimes killed.

Coop could understand the medieval belief in demonic possession. It was an easy explanation for some people’s aberrant behavior, and perhaps not so far from the truth. Sleeping demons awakened by who knew what?

Cara smiled at the last customer in line, adroitly counted out cash in twenties, then stuffed the withdrawal slip through the slot in the marble counter behind her teller’s cage.

Mercantile Mutual was modeled on the old-fashioned savings institutions whose areas of wood paneling, brass, and marble lent depositors a sense of permanence and security. In Mercantile Mutual, however, the oak paneling was realistic treated plastic, the brass teller’s cages were actually colored PVC pipe of the sort you might find beneath your sink, and the pink-veined marble was cultured. The decor seemed to have the desired effect on customers, though, and the money was real.

When she was finished closing down her station, Cara said good-bye to Bill Farrow, her fellow teller, then went to the employee’s lounge behind the loan department and got her coat from the closet.

Loan manager Lou Morganstern, seated at the table drinking 7 UP from a can, nodded to her and smiled. “So, Irish, how do you like M-and-M so far?”

“Fine,” Cara told him. She didn’t particularly care for Morganstern, who was a short, balding man of middle age who had a way of staring at women until they turned around. Cara herself had felt the force of his attention, and turned her head just in time to see him glance away with a lingering kind of sly guilt in his eye and at the corners of his mouth. “It’s just what I expected.”

“You’ll do well here, I’m sure,” Morganstern said, “once you learn the ropes.”

“The ropes are pretty much the same in all banks,” Cara told him.

He grinned. “Yeah, different knots, is all.”

Cara was aware she’d gotten her position at Mercantile Mutual because she was Ann’s sister. Even with her experience, she had to start near the bottom, with the promise that she’d move up when a new, Long Island branch under construction was completed. Cara didn’t care why she got the job, or what happened on Long Island, as long as it didn’t interfere with what she had in mind in the here and now. She wrapped her red silk muffler, like Ann’s, around her neck before putting on her coat. It was cold outside, with a threat of snow.

Morganstern finished his soda and casually kinked the aluminum can with one hand as if to show his strength. “We were all sorry about Ann,’ he said. “You kind of surprised everybody when you came in for work that first day, how much you resemble her.”

Cara could see why they’d be surprised. She’d waited until she was hired to dye her hair red like Ann’s. She had to use an artificial braid in back, since her hair was shorter than her late sister’s. Then she’d bought a gray coat similar to the one Ann had been wearing when she was killed, a red silk muffler like Ann’s. When she caught sight of herself in a mirror, she was sometimes startled by her resemblance to Ann. They wouldn’t be mistaken for twins, but no one would be surprised that they were sisters. They were the same type. The type that attracted Ann’s killer.

“You got any other sisters?” Morganstern asked, tossing the can at a trash receptacle. It bounced off the rim and clattered across the floor.

“No,” Cara said, buttoning her coat. “No one. There’s no one else.”

She felt Morganstern’s eyes on her as she went out.

On the street, she got her gloves from her purse and worked them on, then walked the block and a half to the bus stop Ann had used. That was the idea, to be the same type of woman as Ann, to adopt the same hairstyle and dress, to walk in her footsteps, eat lunch where she ate, ride the same buses and subways, board at the same stops.

In Queens, Cara would sometimes ride the bus all the way to the end of the line, near the college campus where Ann had been killed. More often, she would get off the bus after a few stops, cease being Ann, and take the subway back across the East River to Manhattan, then a bus to near her apartment on the Upper West Side.

At the bus stop, she stood outside the flimsy kiosk so she would be more visible, ignoring the two women inside who stood huddled against a poster advertising a Broadway show.

The killer might live or work in the area, or at least spend time here. Whatever quality it was about Ann that had drawn him to her, Cara wanted it to have the same effect again.

She hadn’t told anyone what she was doing. She knew what they’d say, that it was a manifestation of her grief, that it was foolish and dangerous.

That she was bait.

She smiled grimly. Bait…

The raw wind kicked up around her, blowing bits of paper and cigarette butts in a tight circle at her feet, causing her nose to run. She removed her gloves, and as she reached into her purse for a Kleenex, her knuckles brushed the cold steel of the .25 semiautomatic handgun that she’d bought where a friend had told her to go in Brooklyn.

She didn’t feel like bait.