Читать книгу The Night Watcher - John Lutz - Страница 9

The week after the Ardmont Arms fire, Stack walked into Mobile Response, located in the Eight-oh Precinct, with Rica on his heels. The Mobile Response Squad had been formed to conduct investigations the regular detective division couldn’t adequately handle because of case overload. It was authorized to operate in all five boroughs and had come to be regarded as a crack outfit.

Stack enjoyed the special status, though he knew for a fact that case overload wasn’t the only reason for the squad’s existence. It sometimes served as a kind of pressure valve; the higher-ups stepped aside and let sensitive, potentially damaging cases find their way to the MR Squad in order to minimize any political or PR damage. It was a situation Stack could live with. Departmental politics had worn him down at the edges. But only at the edges.

Though he wasn’t the ranking officer, the mood of the place was subtly altered by his arrival. Detectives at their desks seemed to bend to their work. Those standing and talking or drinking coffee sidled back to their desks or the swing gate to the booking area and either busied themselves or left. Stack took the work seriously, and when he was present, so did everyone else.

He was a big man, six-feet-two and 230 pounds. Now in his forty-seventh year, he was beginning to thicken around the waist, but his shoulders were broad and his big hands made fists like rocks. Even without NYPD politics, he might have climbed through the ranks on ability or looks alone. His head was large, his forehead wide. His dark hair was parted on the side, cut short around the ears and beginning to gray. Level gray eyes studied everything calmly from beneath thick dark brows. His cheekbones were prominent and his jaw was firm with a cleft chin. If it weren’t for a slightly crooked nose that hadn’t been set right after one of the bad guys broke it with a beer bottle, he would have been merely handsome instead of interesting and…well, scary. To civilian employees and probationary patrolmen he was Detective Stack. To his fellow officers who had been through the wars with him, he was simply “Stack.”

Sergeant Redd at the booking desk had told Stack that acting MR Squad Commander Jack O’Reilly wanted to see him. The regular commander, Lieutenant Vandervoort, was hospitalized after major surgery for colon cancer and would be gone for at least a month. If chemotherapy was required, Vandervoort would be gone longer.

“Still working on that hot one, Stack?” a detective-second-grade named Mathers, whose nickname, of course, was Beave, asked with a grin.

“You must mean me,” Stack heard Rica say behind him. Mathers and several other officers laughed.

“Try to be more professional,” Stack said, when he and Rica were out of the squad room and in the short hall, lined with file cabinets, that led to the commander’s office.

“They don’t take me seriously,” Rica said.

“I take you seriously.” Stack immediately wished he’d phrased it differently. He was aware of how Rica felt about him, and he didn’t want her misplaced affection to become obvious to the others in the department.

Rica, trundling along beside him, didn’t answer. But he could feel her smiling.

She’d gotten more blatant about her fondness for Stack as his divorce from Laura progressed. Stack knew what Rica was thinking: Laura had finally had enough of being a cop’s wife—which was true. And Rica, being a cop herself, was exactly what Stack needed. Not true, thought Stack. It wasn’t that Rica was unattractive—she was petite, with dark hair and eyes, and with a firm and compact physique that prompted locker room speculation when she wasn’t around. Not that she wasn’t respected for her abilities. It was, in fact, Rica Lopez’s remarkable talents as a homicide detective that kept Stack from having her transferred to break up their partnership.

Stack had never made any remarks about Rica when some of the other cops, male and female, were commenting on her looks. What worried him now was that, since word of his impending divorce had gotten around, he’d stopped hearing raunchy remarks about Rica. Apparently no one wanted to comment on her when he was present.

“You want me to go in with you, Stack?” Rica asked beside him as they approached the partly opened door to the commander’s office.

“Sure” he said. “Maybe O’Reilly wants to chew some ass.”

Stack opened the door all the way, then stood aside so Rica could enter first. As she moved around him he caught a whiff of her perfume. Lilacs or some such. When the hell had she had time to put that on? Cops weren’t supposed to smell like lilacs.

The office was the only one in the precinct house that was carpeted—a thickly napped beige surface that ran wall to wall and stopped at a wooden baseboard that over the years had been painted countless times in the same bureaucratic pale green. The walls had wainscoting that disappeared behind a row of gray file cabinets. Two deep, brown leather chairs sat facing the large and ancient mahogany desk. All in all, a place where you might enjoy brandy and a good cigar while trying to avoid prison.

The wall behind the desk was paneled in oak. On it hung framed color photos of the New York police commissioner and the chief of police. Around the photos were mounted Vandervoort’s plaques, medals, and framed commendations, along with photographs of Vandervoort shaking hands with pols and assorted department VIPs. Somehow a photo of O’Reilly shaking hands with the chief of police at an awards ceremony had found its way onto the wall. There was a lot of bright winter light streaming through the window and glancing off all the award plaques and photographs. It made O’Reilly’s right cheek appear especially pockmarked. Old acne scars, Stack figured.

O’Reilly stood up behind the desk, a tall man with a lean waist, wearing a white shirt, blue suspenders, and dark, chalk-striped suit pants. The coat that matched the pants was on a wooden hanger looped over one of the hooks on a coatrack near a five-borough map pinned to the wall. Despite the acne scars—or maybe partly because of them—he had a face like a mature, perverted cherub’s, with wary, rapacious blue eyes and receding ginger-colored hair, a lock of which was somehow always curled over the middle of his forehead. Stack had long ago pegged O’Reilly as a smart-ass with ambition, an eye for opportunity, and a blind spot the size of Soho. The assessment had proved accurate.

Obviously relishing his acting commander’s role, O’Reilly nodded to them solemnly and motioned for them to sit in the leather chairs facing the desk. Then he sat down himself, folded his hands before him, and smiled faintly, as if posing for a photograph. Took the acting part of his title seriously, Stack thought. He glanced at Rica, who had looked over at him, and knew she was aware of his thoughts. Not the first time. Damned, intuitive little—

“So fill me in on the Ardmont Arms fire,” O’Reilly said to Stack.

“The victim was Hugh Danner, forty-nine, single, a corporate tax attorney. He lived alone at the Ardmont for eight years. Well liked at Frenzel, Waite and Conners, his law firm. No known enemies so far. He’d been seeing a woman named Helen Sampson—”

“Seeing her?”

“Screwing her, by all accounts.”

“Okay, just so we’re clear.”

Stack heard Rica sigh, then pressed on. “The Sampson woman owns a little bookshop in the Village. She’s broken up, says she and the victim had been getting along well. That they’d always gotten along well.”

“And I guess she told you two how much everybody loved Danner.”

“More or less,” Rica confirmed.

“Well, don’t we know how people have different ways of showing love?” O’Reilly said, staring down at his desk.

A rhetorical question if ever Stack heard one.

He found himself also looking at the desk. It was uncluttered, barren of work in progress. Not at all like when the incredibly sloppy and overworked Vandervoort sat behind it.

“The ME said cause of death was shock and asphyxiation,” Stack said.

O’Reilly looked up at him. “Asphyxiation? Like smoke inhalation?”

“He breathed in flame when his shirt was on fire. It burned away his lungs.”

O’Reilly looked disgusted. “Mother of Christ! What a way to die!”

“The lab said the fire was started with, and helped along by, an accelerant. A combination of ordinary gasoline mixed with household cleaning fluid that makes it thicker. A detergent. That way it sticks to the body and won’t go out as long as there’s an oxygen source, sort of like napalm.”

“The lab’s trying to figure out the brand name of the cleaning fluid,” Rica said.

O’Reilly didn’t look at her. “And this Hugh Danner was tied up before he was set on fire?”

Stack nodded. “With strips of cloth, apparently. Most of it burned away, but not in time to help Danner.”

“So the guy was an attorney, solid citizen, all that crap,” O’Reilly said. “And it’s a dangerous thing, a fire in a high-rise building. Whoever used Danner as kindling put a lot of other tenants in peril. I’d like this one cleared from the books as soon as possible.”

Before Vandervoort gets back, Stack thought. He said, “We’re canvassing the building, and we’ll talk some more to the doorman, but so far nobody’s been much help. A search of the apartment didn’t turn up anything that seemed relevant. No drugs, no names of known felons in Danner’s address book. The techs say there was nothing unusual on his computer: some business correspondence; some downloaded soft-core porn; a stock and bond portfolio worth about a quarter of a million.”

“Soft-core porn?”

“Nothing that’d move you, unless you like to watch bare-breasted women operating jackhammers.” Stack was pretty sure he heard Rica roll her eyes. “There were no messages on his answering machine. Gold cuff links and a gold chain in a dresser drawer in the bedroom, and Danner was wearing a Rolex when he burned. It doesn’t appear the apartment was burglarized, but since we don’t know exactly what Danner might have had in there, we can’t be sure. His lady love, Helen Sampson, is going to look around the place with us today, take an inventory, and see if anything might be missing.”

“Good,” O’Reilly said. “You two keep me posted.” He stood up, signaling the end of the conversation.

“Will do, sir,” Stack told him. He and Rica stood also.

As they stepped into the hall, Stack closed the door behind them.

“What the hell was all that about?” Rica asked beside Stack, as they were walking back toward the squad room. “Does he think we’re just wandering around with our thumbs up our asses?”

“He might,” Stack said, “but what I think it was really about was O’Reilly wishing he were Vandervoort.”

And where, Rica wondered, is that going to take us?