Free Night Victims (The Night Spider) by John Lutz Page A

around violently as she’d suffered. The white of the one eye visible beneath the tumble of hair could be seen all the way around the pupil, as if she’d taken a terrified peek into the void an instant before death. Her mouth was agape, forming a round depression in the gray duct tape that covered it. To Paula, nothing had ever looked more silent. Where are the screams she tried to form? What happened to the stillborn screams of these women?
    “Pattie,” Bickerstaff said, breaking Paula’s mood.
    “What?” Horn asked.
    “I bet the people she knew called her Pattie. She was probably a pretty thing.” Bickerstaff shook his head. “Fuckin’ shame!”
    “The victim was stabbed repeatedly,” Horn said, slipping into cop talk to put a protective shell around his emotions and to signal Bickerstaff and Paula to do the same.
    “I’ll bet somewhere around thirty-seven times,” Paula said, noting the many slits in the bloody sheets. Each cut must have seemed like a world of pain in suspended time. Paula hoped her stomach, her emotions, were going to hold up here.
    Careful not to tread on any impressions on the throw rug, Horn moved across the bare wood floor to the open window. He peered up beneath the shade. “The glass has been cut so he could open the window and climb in. Looks like soap or candle wax on the tracks to smooth the way and mute the sound.”
    “Our guy,” Paula said. Not that there’d been some doubt.
    Horn led them back into the living room. Strangely, it was like leaving a church.
    “We’ll let the ME and techs go over the place,” he said, “see what they come up with before we conduct a thorough search. Assign some uniforms to question neighbors in this building, and don’t forget canvassing adjacent buildings. Then you two interview the best possibilities in a second pass and compare their stories with the first versions.”
    Bickerstaff was staring down at an angle through the living room window. “Cavalry’s here. Ambulance, two squad cars, and the ME.”
    Paula walked over and looked down at the small shiny vehicles parked at careless angles in front of the building, like toys hurriedly shoved there by a child. Tiny, foreshortened human figures were scurrying toward the entrance. “They’re on the way up.”
    “Fine,” Horn said. “We’re done here, for the moment, anyway.”
    “Let’s go up to the roof,” Bickerstaff said. “Maybe he dropped his wallet.”
    It’s happened before, Paula mused, as they exited Pattie Redmond’s apartment and made their way toward the elevator.
     
    Not this time, though.
    But the roof gave them what they expected to find. There were scuff marks in the heat-softened, graveled tar directly above the victim’s window. The tile-capped parapet was marked by what might have been a rope rubbing on it. And there, low on the parapet, was a deep and freshly forged hole where a piton might have been driven into the mortar.
    “He was here, all right,” Horn said.
    “Notice the pigeon droppings here have been stepped in,” Paula said. Further evidence.
    Horn looked over at her approvingly, but Bickerstaff said, “Sherlock Homing pigeon.”
    The roof of the building next door was only about ten feet higher than the one on which they stood, and only about ten feet away, sharing what amounted to an air shaft. At that edge of the roof they found more scuff marks, and, in farther, a vent pipe that was marked by what might have been some kind of grappling hook that secured a line.
    Horn smiled grimly. “We certainly have his MO nailed.”
    “Now all we have to do is nail the bastard himself,” Paula said, surprising herself with the vehemence of her words. Horn didn’t seem to notice, which didn’t fool Paula. Bickerstaff was grinning at her.
    The three detectives spent another ten minutes on the roof, carefully searching for anything of possible use.
    All they came up with were a tangle of old antenna wire and a crumpled chewing gum