Fear the Night (2 page)

2

A spring shower that was almost mist was falling the next evening when Assistant Chief Lou Melbourne wrestled his bulk out of a cab in front of Vincent Repetto’s residence on Bank Street in the Village.

Repetto, who’d gone to a living room window to see if it was still raining, noticed Melbourne crossing the street. The two men were about the same age—midfifties—but almost exact opposites. Melbourne was short and very much overweight, balding, with a pug face and clothes that were always a size too small. He had on a blue jacket that didn’t look water resistant, and he walked fast for an obese man and with an economy of motion.

Repetto was several inches over six feet, lean and with long arms and big hands. The progeny of a Dutch mother and an Italian father, he still had most of his dark hair, but it was fast turning a gunmetal gray. His eyebrows, graying but not as fast, were permanently arched in a way that gave him an expression of alert and aggressive curiosity.
I will get to the truth,
said his arched gaze. His clothes tended to black and gray and were well tailored, but tonight he was wearing faded jeans and a white pullover with NYPD on its chest.

Melbourne, crossing the street diagonally, saw him watching through the decorative iron bars on the window and raised a hand in a wave. Repetto nodded to him, then left the window to open the door. Two months ago, Melbourne had presented Repetto with an engraved silver platter at one of his many retirement parties. Repetto appreciated it. A man couldn’t have too many silver platters.

“Lou, you should have an umbrella,” Repetto said, as Melbourne took the concrete steps to the stoop, then hesitated.

“They bring bad luck.”

“Like making it rain?”

Melbourne grinned. “Like making it rain harder because you have an umbrella.” After wiping the soles of his shoes on the doormat, he shook hands with Repetto. “How you been in your brief retirement, Vin?”

“I haven’t quite figured that out yet.” Repetto used the handshake to pull Melbourne in out of the rain, then waited while Melbourne worked out of his jacket. Repetto draped the jacket on the antique brass coatrack and ushered Melbourne into the living room.

Repetto and his wife, Lora, lived in a narrow redbrick house that had been built over a hundred years ago. Lora, who was an interior decorator, had chosen almost all the decor and furnishings. The upper floor was her office and sometime storeroom. Living quarters were downstairs.

The living room, where Repetto invited Melbourne to sit on a soft Queen Anne sofa, was furnished eclectically, mixing traditional with Victorian and Early American. On the wall behind the sofa stood a tall nineteenth-century walnut secretary. A Sheraton library table with stacks of books was along another wall, a Cape Cod window seat nearby where Lora sometimes sat sipping tea and looking out at Bank Street. The house was on a quiet, brick-paved block in the West Village, a desirable piece of real estate.

Repetto had married into money. Lora’s mother and father had died young in a boating accident and left her well off. She wasn’t your usual cop’s wife, but then Repetto wasn’t your usual cop. He’d risen through the ranks by virtue of his own hard work and ingenuity. When he retired after catching a stray bullet in the lung during a hostage situation that went sour, then being kicked up to captain, he was considered the shrewdest—and toughest—homicide detective in the NYPD. His specialty was serial killers.

When Melbourne was seated, Repetto asked him if he wanted a drink. “Some good eighteen-year-old scotch?”

Melbourne smiled and shook his head no. “I’m on duty, sort of.”

Uh-oh.
Repetto settled down in a brown leather wing chair facing his old friend and superior officer.

Still smiling, Melbourne glanced around. “I don’t see any ashtrays. And I don’t smell tobacco. I guess for health reasons you gave up those Cuban cigars you used to smoke. The bad lung and all.”

“The lung’s pretty much healed. I still get winded too easy, though.”

“But still no cigars.”

“I allow myself one every few days. The doctors said it’s okay as long as I don’t inhale.”

“Sure they did.”

“Other than that, I don’t smoke. For Lora.”

“She make you lighten up?”

Repetto didn’t bother to answer.

“So it’s true what they say about life after you retire and you’re home with the wife.”

“What do they say?”

“She takes over the company.”

“Yeah, that’s true. She’s been a cop’s wife over twenty years, Lou. If she doesn’t want me to smell up the house with cigar smoke, I won’t. She deserves to be spoiled.”

“She doesn’t want you dying of lung cancer.”

“That, too.”

Melbourne focused his flesh-padded gray eyes on Repetto. “How’d you and Lora manage it, staying married all this time, you doing the kinda work we do?”

Repetto had to give it some thought. “I don’t know for sure. Maybe somewhere along the line we learned how to stay out of each other’s way.”

“That’s an unsatisfactory answer,” Melbourne said with a touch of bitterness. Twice-divorced Melbourne.

“Lora’s at a meeting with a client,” Repetto said. “You wanna come back to my den and we can smoke some cigars?”

Melbourne cocked his head to the side. “You won’t get in any trouble?”

Repetto laughed and stood up. “I haven’t had a smoke in two days. Haul your ass outta that sofa and come with me.” He didn’t tell Melbourne the den was the only place he smoked in the house, and he had to make sure there was plenty of ventilation.

Repetto’s den was large, carpeted in deep red with thick red drapes, a quiet room, considering it was at street level. There were commendations on the walls, a mounted trout Repetto had caught in Vermont, and several signed and framed publicity photos of Broadway stars.

Repetto walked over to his desk and opened a small mahogany humidor near the green-shaded lamp. He gave Melbourne a Venezuelan cigar and a cutter, then chose a domestic brand for himself. Before lighting the cigar, he went over and opened a window, letting in some dampness and cool night air. Within a few seconds he could feel cross ventilation from the already cracked window on the adjacent wall stir the hairs on his bare forearms.

When he returned to sit in his black leather desk chair, Melbourne had already seated himself in one of the upholstered chairs angled toward the desk and lighted his cigar.

Repetto settled down behind his oversize cherry-wood desk. “You mentioned you were on duty.”

“Sort of. Here to ask you about something.”

Repetto smiled. “Am I a suspect?”

“I don’t believe you lead an exciting enough life now to get in any trouble.” Melbourne puffed on his cigar. “This is great. Cuban?”

“Aren’t those illegal?”

“A rhetorical question, I’m sure.” Melbourne might have winked. He knew Repetto favored and could obtain Cuban cigars. He took another draw and seemed to roll the smoke around in his mouth before exhaling. “What exactly
do
you do these days?”

“Lora and I go to the theater, dine out with friends, plan on doing some traveling. Things we never had time to do when I was on the job.”

“Sounds nice, actually. You always had it good for a cop.”

Repetto was getting the idea Melbourne was hesitant to bring up whatever he’d come to discuss. “Get to it, Lou.”

“I’m asking you back to the NYPD, or at least to work for us.”

Repetto didn’t hesitate. “Nope. Lora wouldn’t stand for it.”

“You’d please her before me?”

“I don’t sleep with you.”

“You wanna hear the deal?”

“No.”

“Okay, here it is. Last night a guy named Martin Akim was shot to death outside his shop in the theater district.”

“Marty Akim? Watches?”

“The very Marty.”

“Holdup?”

“No. Shot from a distance. Relatively small-caliber bullet, misshapen by bone and the wall it hit after tumbling through Akim. People heard the shot, but the way sound echoes around all those tall buildings and concrete and glass, nobody knows where it came from. Far away, though, not close by.”

“Stray shot, maybe.”
Like the one that caught me in the lung.

“We don’t think so.”

“A sniper?”

“Yeah. Here’s the thing. Akim wasn’t the first victim. He was the third in the last six weeks. The first was a sales rep from Cincinnati, in town on business. The second a prostitute down in the Village.”

Repetto leaned back in his chair and drew on his cigar, then exhaled and watched the smoke drift toward the ceiling and make a slow turn toward the open window.

“A serial killer. Your specialty, Vin.”

“Was.”

“Not that you need the money, but we’d like to put you back on the payroll while you track down this sicko.”

Repetto sat forward and looked directly at Melbourne, then removed the cigar from his mouth. “I wasn’t the only competent homicide detective in the department.”

“You were sure as hell the best.”

“And now somebody else is. I’m sorry, Lou, the answer’s no.”

Melbourne stood up. He walked slowly over and looked at Repetto’s commendations, then stood staring at the mounted trout. “You catch this thing?”

“Yeah. Only kinda thing I’m gonna catch from now on.”

“This killer’s been in contact with us. He’s bursting with ego and thinks he’s smarter than we are.”

“Don’t they all think that?”

“Some of them
are
smarter.”

“A few. The ones we never heard of.”

“Vin—”

“Talk to me and not to the fish, okay?”

Melbourne turned to face him. “I didn’t come here on my own. I was asked.” He looked at his cigar now and not at Repetto. “He asked me. Told me, actually.”

“He?”

“The killer. He musta seen all the publicity about you when you stepped down. How you were like a combination bloodhound and avenging angel when it came to tracking serial killers. He wants you on the case. He said you were the only one of us who was a worthy adversary.”

Repetto stared dumbfounded at Melbourne, then laughed. “Cease the bullshit, Lou. The answer’s still no.”

“You think I’m kidding?”

“I don’t care if you are. I don’t dance just because some maniac plays a tune. And I know you don’t either.”

Melbourne removed the cigar from his mouth. “This one’s different, Vin. If you’d heard him on the phone . . .”

“The answer’s still no. I mean it. I’m not some pro athlete that can be talked into thinking he might have a little more gas in his tank. I’m retired.”

“You might get winded a little easier and be a little grayer, but you’re not suited for retirement. You’re gonna go crazy without the job.” Melbourne pointed with the cigar. “You’re gonna rot.”

“I’m rotting happily. I told you my situation. I’m not gonna double-cross Lora to work on one more case. Put Delmore on it.”

“The killer laughed at Delmore. Called him up and laughed at him. He wants you, Vin. Only you.”

“ ‘Only You.’ Isn’t that a song?”

“Your song. Yours and the killer’s.”

Repetto knew what Melbourne meant. When Repetto was thirteen years old in Philadelphia his mother had been murdered by a serial killer. It was what had made an older Repetto join the police force, then become a homicide detective. His mother had divorced his dad, a Philadelphia cop, and had custody of him, so Repetto was the one who’d found her in her bedroom when he came home from school. She was lying nude on the bed with her legs spread incredibly wide. There was the blood on the wall, his mother’s blood, the bloody numeral 6 indicating she was the killer’s sixth victim, the blood pooled beneath her body, the blood on her pale flesh and between her thighs.

With his father gone, Repetto was the man of the house. He should have protected his mother. Somehow. Should have been there. Somehow. Even at thirteen he knew it wasn’t logical, but guilt still wrapped itself around his heart. Somehow, he was partly to blame for his mother’s death. He couldn’t get the image of all that blood,
her
blood, out of his mind.

He remembered the word it had brought to his lips. Not
Mother
or
Mommy
or an expression of rage. Simply,
Blood.

Almost a year passed before he again spoke that or any other word. His father had died in a robbery shoot-out only a month after the death of his mother. For the young Repetto it was like being struck by speeding trains coming and going, and being left to die alone.

Two of his aunts took him in and brought him back to being human again, raised him with kindness and love, saved him. Mar and Mol, short for Marilyn and Molly. Mol had died ten years ago. Mar was still alive, and would be in town for Repetto and Lora’s daughter Amelia’s twenty-first birthday next week.

Mar and Mol, the blood ... So long ago and still so vivid.

Repetto swallowed. He thought he’d gotten past this kind of reaction, the thing that had made him stalk serial killers in a way that was legendary in the NYPD. The reason why Melbourne was sitting across from him now.

“Jesus, Lou!” Repetto said. “So this guy doesn’t get what he wants. He’ll get over his disappointment.”

“He’s not gonna quit, Vin. Not this one.”

“I didn’t say he was gonna quit. Delmore can shut him down.”

Melbourne seemed about to say something more, then plunked his cigar back in his mouth as if it might prevent him from speaking imprudently.

“Sure you don’t want a drink, Lou?”

Melbourne stood up. “No, thanks. This excellent Cuban cigar’s more’n enough.” He moved close to the desk and looked down at Repetto. “Listen, you’re probably right. You deserve a rest. Have a good retirement. Food, shows, booze, travel. Enjoy, old friend. I mean that.” He offered his hand.

Repetto shook with him, standing up to show him out. He propped his cigar in an ashtray and walked around the desk.

“Still raining,” Repetto said, when he opened the door to the street. “Take an umbrella. You can keep it as long as you want.”

“No, thanks. Listen, I sincerely gotta advise you, if you don’t want a troubled conscience, better avoid reading the papers or watching TV news. This sicko’s deeply dedicated to his calling.”