Night Victims. John Lutz

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      “Like a microscopic dog that didn’t bark in the night,” Horn said.

      Paula grinned. “Sherlock Holmes.”

      “I’d have guessed Lassie,” Bickerstaff said.

      “Got a handkerchief in your purse?” Horn asked Paula.

      She searched but couldn’t find one. “Only tissues.” Among other items she pulled from her purse while rummaging through it was a white latex glove of the sort used to examine crime scenes.

      “That glove’ll do,” Horn said.

      Paula and Bickerstaff glanced at each other.

      They followed Horn into the bedroom, where he got a wire hanger from the closet, straightened it, and tied the white glove on one end. He then went to the window and opened and closed it, wedging the hanger between frame and sill so the end with the glove stuck outside about eighteen inches.

      “Oughta do,” he said.

      Understanding now, Paula led the way out of the apartment. She was starting to like this, Horn thinking a little outside the box. Sometimes a little was all it took. Outside was outside.

      She could hardly wait to get to the roof.

      As soon as they were on the roof, Bickerstaff wedged a piece of tile in the service door so it wouldn’t close and trap them up there. Then they went to the low brick parapet at the roof’s edge, approximately above the window to Sally Bridge’s bedroom. About ten feet from the parapet, Horn held out a hand and stopped them. “Look at the tar and gravel near the edge,” he said. “It seems it might have been disturbed.”

      Paula looked. The gravel adhered to the blacktop roof seemed to have been rearranged recently, some of it even kicked or scraped loose.

      Horn went to the parapet and examined it, then leaned over it, staring straight down.

      “I see the glove sticking out right under the disturbed gravel,” he said, turning away and standing up straight. And there’s a spot on the parapet where the tile’s been rubbed clean. And look at this.”

      Paula and Bickerstaff moved closer to see where he was pointing. There was what appeared to be a fresh hole low in the brickwork of the parapet, as if something sharp had been driven into the brick and mortar at an angle.

      “A whatchamacallit, maybe,” Bickerstaff said. “One of those steel spikes mountain climbers use to fasten ropes to cliff faces.”

      “A piton,” Horn said. He glanced around, then walked over to where a grouping of vent pipes protruded from the roof.

      He stooped down next to one. “Look at the way the grime has been rubbed away from the base of this pipe. My guess is our killer drove in his piton near the roof’s edge, then ran the roof end of the rope back to this vent pipe. He then wrapped it around the pipe as a safety precaution in case the piton broke free when he draped the other end of the rope down the building wall and began his descent.”

      Paula stared at the base of the old lead vent pipe. Horn was right. Something had definitely been tied around it, then perhaps tugged at and rotated to test for tightness and strength. “How did you know one of the pipes would be marked up?” she asked.

      “Mountain climbers are nothing if not cautious. They believe in backup, just like cops.”

      Paula was liking this more and more. “So our killer doesn’t necessarily climb buildings; he goes to the roof and lowers himself to the bedroom window he wants to enter.”

      “Probably easier when you stop to think about it,” Bickerstaff said. “But how did he get to this roof? If he used the front entrance, he’d risk being seen coming or going. And if you look around, there’s no way he coulda got up here other than stairs or elevator.”

      Horn put his fists on his hips and turned in a slow circle. The adjacent buildings were too far away to leap across.

      “Maybe if we look on one of those other building roofs we’ll find a board or something that enabled him to cross over to this roof.”

      “Or maybe he tossed or shot a line over here,” Paula said.

      “Yeah. Like Spiderman,” Bickerstaff said dryly.

      “Not exactly,” Horn told him, nodding and smiling at Paula. “He might have tossed a grappling hook over here and snagged it on something, maybe one of those vent pipes. Then he attached his end of the line on the other roof and hand-walked to this one, or used a sling or pulley of some sort.”

      They went to the parapet and vent pipes and searched for fresh scratches, and found a pipe that might have suffered a little recent damage from a grappling hook catching hold.

      “I dunno,” Bickerstaff said dubiously, scratching his double chin. “Those marks don’t look all that recent to me.”

      “But look at the tracks in the tar,” Horn said, “from where he overshot with the hook and dragged it back to catch on the vent pipe.” He pointed to long, parallel gouges in the blacktop that led to and then straddled the protruding pipe. Subway tracks, Horn thought, seeing Anne thinking deep thoughts.

      “Lowering himself from the roof like that,” Paula said, “probably nobody’d notice him in the dark even if they did happen to glance up. Not if he wore dark clothes. I kind of like the theory. And I don’t see any other way he’d be able to get to this roof without risking coming and going through the lobby.”

      “Let’s put off supper for a while,” Horn said, “and talk to doormen and neighbors in the adjacent buildings. See if anybody saw or heard anything suspicious the night of the murder.”

      Neither Paula nor Bickerstaff objected. Paula wasn’t hungry anymore. Her heartbeat had picked up, the way it sometimes had when she went hunting long ago with her uncles, when they sensed they were closing on their prey.

      Bickerstaff simply pulled a candy bar from his pocket and started peeling off the wrapper.

      “Since we’re gonna eat supper late,” he said, “anybody else want one of these? It’s a high-energy sports bar.”

      “Those things are about six hundred calories,” Paula said. “They’ll even put weight on your eyeballs while they petrify your arteries.”

      “Maybe. But I carry them ’cause I figure I might need energy when I least expect it.” He patted the bulging side pocket of his rumpled suitcoat. “I got chocolate peanut butter with almonds.”

      Paula held out her hand.

      8

      Pattie Redmond had used her Styles and Smiles employees’ 20 percent discount to buy two of the 40-percent-off blouses, one of which—the gray one—she wore with her navy slacks, the ones that showed off her slender curves. Why not impress the hell out of Gary?

      After get-acquainted drinks at the Village bar where they’d met, Gary suggested they have dinner at a Peruvian restaurant just a long walk or short cab ride from Pattie’s West Side apartment. Since Gary had never asked where she lived or even СКАЧАТЬ