The Night Caller (19 page)

Maureen hadn’t been this cold for a long time, but she didn’t mind. She shifted the sign propped on her shoulder and looked up at the patch of dark sky between the buildings. Low black clouds were scudding across a background of leaden gray, blown by a wind that found its way down her collar whenever she turned to walk the opposite direction on the sidewalk along with her fellow demonstrators.

Hank, the lead demonstrator and coordinator of Citizens for a Legalized Animal World (CLAW), stood off to the side near the curb, the wind pressing his luxurious gray beard to one side, his benevolent moon face beaming beneath his black knit watch cap. He raised his long arms and screamed, “More rat blood, lower ratings!” several times in succession.

Maureen and the other demonstrators took up the chant. Maureen’s voice was loudest. She waved her sign that she’d carefully lettered herself:
RATS HAVE RIGHTS!

This TV network whose headquarters they were picketing had dared to broadcast a series episode wherein impoverished children used rifles to hunt rats in a junkyard. This did not conform to CLAW’s view of how the world should work.

Most of the people streaming past on the sidewalk didn’t seem to pay much attention to what CLAW was doing here. A few of them smiled or laughed out loud.

“Rats are social animals just like us!” Maureen would scream at the smilers. “They have families, look out for each other, even sacrifice themselves for the group! How would you feel if you were one of the rats in last night’s episode of
Pizza for Five
?”

An older, gray-haired man dressed in black leather and wearing a gold hoop earring veered toward her, smiling. Despite the smile, he had an old, ruined face that could only be sad.

Maureen held her ground. “How would you feel, sir, to be hunted by sadists with rifles? Do you know they used real live rats for those scenes?”

“No, I didn’t,” the man said.

“Rats have rights!” Maureen screamed at him. “For God’s sake, show some compassion for fellow living beings!”

“I’m with you, sister. I did a hitch in ’Nam. I was a rat.”

“Then maybe you should join us,” Maureen suggested, mollified.

He shook his head no. “They were rats, too,” he explained.

“This is different.”

“Maybe give the rats guns,” he said.

Everyone around Maureen began to shout and jeer. She looked away from the man she was talking with and saw that three men in business suits had ventured down to the lobby and were standing just inside the building’s locked glass doors. They were all sleekly groomed, well fed, and infuriatingly smug.

A large stone suddenly bounced off one of the glass doors, causing the executives inside to flinch and back away. Then another stone was hurled, harder than the first. With a loud cracking sound, the glass in one of the doors turned milky white.

More stones began bouncing off the shattered but cohesive safety glass. They weren’t the sort of stones one found lying about on a Manhattan street; obviously they’d been brought to the scene for this purpose.

It was exhilarating, seeing and hearing the stones smash into the glass. Maureen was no longer the slightest bit cold. Her cause possessed and warmed her like a great internal firestorm welling from her heart. Let anyone else think what they might! She was doing right with the power of right. She was lending that power to lesser, helpless creatures whose own pain was mute. A woman screamed something Maureen couldn’t understand, and a roar of agreement rose into the cold air.

Maureen waved her sign. “Rats have—”

A firm hand gripped her elbow.

She turned and found herself in the clutches of a large uniformed police officer. “We are a legal assembly!” she shouted.

“You’re obstructing the flow of traffic,” the officer said. “Not to mention inciting a riot.”

She could barely hear him over the shouts of the crowd.

“This is America!” she shouted.

“Be that as it may, you’re going to have to come along, ma’am.”

She struggled only briefly, dropping her sign and accidentally stepping on it. “Rats have—”

“I know, ma’am.”

“Stop it right now! My husband—”

“I know, ma’am,” the cop said unsmilingly.

“I demand that you read me my rights.”

The officer did better than that. He recited them from memory in a low monotone. As he did so, she saw from the corner of her eye Hank being led into a nearby white police van without rear windows.

She was aware that the cop who held her had stopped speaking and was guiding her toward the van.

Maureen kicked him in the leg.

He winced. “Now, ma’am…”

She kicked him again, and out of nowhere another cop had her. She was on the hard, dirty pavement before she knew it, her arms pinned behind her. Her right cheek was against the wet sidewalk. Cold handcuffs were applied to her wrists. They hurt.

“I demand—”

She was helped to her feet and dragged unwillingly to the police van, through the low-lying fog of its exhaust fumes.

“I demand—”

“Careful you don’t bump your head, ma’am.”

And she was in the dim interior of the van, seated alongside a woman who was quietly sobbing. Hank was seated opposite her, beaming triumphantly.

“Hot damn, we got arrested!” he said. “Did you see all the TV cameras?”

Maureen hadn’t. She shook her head numbly. She’d never been arrested. The inside of the van seemed to be closing in on her and smelled awful. She was afraid. The sobbing going on next to her didn’t help. The other CLAW members slumped in the van appeared merely saddened and resigned.

“We’re under arrest,” she repeated after Hank. “We’re really under arrest….”

Hank gave a loud whoop.

“Hank, stop it!” one of the women near him said sharply.

“Please!” Maureen said.

A man in a dark suit and not wearing a coat peered into the van, then disappeared. She’d noticed a fancy badge pinned to his lapel. The van’s rear doors were suddenly slammed shut, and within seconds it began to move.

“What…happens now?” Maureen asked.

Hank grinned at her. “Do you know someone who can bail you out?”

Ignoring the cold, he followed her at a distance as he had before. After leaving her job at Vale’s Discount Jewelry, Theresa Dravic walked not toward her bus stop, but along Columbus Avenue toward Milligan’s Lounge.

The Night Caller kept pace, watching the sway of her long hair, the play of her generous hips beneath her coat, her neat, clipped strides in her black high heels. Would she be meeting Chris at Milligan’s?

It hadn’t taken long for the Night Caller to realize Chris was the potential problem. The potential lover. The sin eater. Short, blocky, swaggering Chris. The potential. That potential had moved up the clock on the doomed Georgianna Mason. Chris was that, was the
that
this time.

But there was more than Chris. The Night Caller knew how certain alcoholics could remember nothing of when they were drunk—until those times when they were drunk again. Another world existing in an alcoholic dimension, with drink as its ticket to enter and reenter. But not only drink. Also certain drugs. The same world, the same dream, different gates.

It wasn’t the Night Caller’s concern that Theresa was becoming an alcoholic. He’d seen her certainly drunk more than once as she walked unsteadily out of Milligan’s, often to sit on a park bench until she sobered up enough to continue her way home. That was all he needed to know. That, along with Chris’s growing presence and influence, prompted him to act. That, and it was time anyway. He always knew when it was time. Time was what kept everything from happening at once. He understood time. Time was something he kept in his pocket.

Would she meet Chris this time?

Deni was smiling as she hung up the phone after talking to Detective Sanderson. At first she hadn’t remembered him; she’d committed to memory instead the lead detective, Lyons. But Sanderson had explained that Lyons was vacationing, and had in fact called him from somewhere in North Carolina.

Then Sanderson told Deni what she so wanted to hear. In further examination of Georgianna Mason’s apartment, the Seattle police lab had managed to detect a bloody footprint not visible to the naked eye. The killer, who apparently had undressed to prevent being bloodied himself by what he’d done to Georgianna, had dressed to leave after the murder and made a mistake. He’d stepped in some of his victim’s blood, possibly without knowing it. Or maybe he had known it and thought he’d cleaned the sole of his shoe adequately. The footprint matched the ones found at the scene of Bette Cooper’s murder, and Marlee Clark’s. Marlee, Bette, Georgianna…Three victims in different parts of the country. That FBI prick Willingham would listen now. He’d have no choice but to believe.

Coop would listen, too.

Deni’s fax machine beeped, indicating that a fax was about to be received. It had to be the one Sanderson promised to send.

She walked over to stand by the machine, and her smile broadened as she watched the fax paper emerge with a somewhat smudged but undeniable image of a shoe sole with a crisscross pattern identical to the others.

All she had to do now was hand the fax over to Willingham. Or to Coop.

As the machine continued its steady electronic grinding sound, Deni stared at the almost completed fax and gave this more thought.

No, not Willingham. That might be premature. Those FBI hard-asses tended to take over a case and become very secretive. They would not only be less cooperative than the police, they would put up a wall between her and what she needed to know to write her book.

It would have to be Coop.

But not necessarily now.

He needed her more than she needed him. She would keep the fax to herself for a while. Teach him who was most important in this project.

She was the one who’d intermittently called the Seattle police and made sure they would forward any new information. Screw Coop. Let him stew in his own sick juices.

The machine beeped twice, then was silent. Deni removed the fax and lovingly carried it across the room to her desktop copy machine.

She made two copies and placed them in a bottom desk drawer. The fax sent by Sanderson she slid into an eight-by-ten yellow envelope. Tomorrow she’d place it in her safety deposit box.

A storm was blowing in from New Jersey, lightning but no thunder yet. The lamp on the desk flickered and wind rattled the panes in her apartment windows. How her mood had changed! The cluttered, tiny apartment seemed cozy now rather than stifling, the rattling windows emphasizing the bad weather beyond the walls. Warm in here. Comfy.

Deni went into the kitchen, located a clean glass, and poured herself two fingers of Crown Royal.

Carrying her drink, she returned to the living room and walked to the window. For a while she stood gazing outside at the rain that had begun to fall and was making the early evening suddenly dark.

She thought again of Coop and glanced at the phone on her desk. She should call him about the Seattle fax immediately, she knew. She felt a little guilty.

But only a little. He certainly didn’t deserve any favors from her, after the way he’d been avoiding her. She was sure she felt any guilt at all only because she was basically a decent person.

“Screw Coop,” she said aloud.

And toasted her wavering reflection in the windowpane.

Coop’s phone rang at 10:30 that evening, just after he’d swallowed his pills and settled into bed. He was exhausted from shadowing Cara in the cold and had decided to skip TV news at eleven and get a good night’s sleep.

He sighed and sat up in bed. Then he switched the reading lamp back on and picked up the phone.

“Coop?” said the voice on the phone, even before he had a chance to identify himself. Maureen’s voice.

“Something wrong?” he asked, wondering if she was calling him for no reason other than to harass him. If that was her game he would simply hang up on her and disconnect the phone cord from its jack.

Silence on the line. He wondered if she’d hung up. “Maureen?”

“I need your help,” she said.

Coop had to admit he was amused, but he did his best not to reveal it to Maureen. She was sitting beside him with her hands folded in her lap, staring straight ahead. As he drove through wet, reflecting nighttime streets toward her New Rochelle apartment, he sat silently, concentrating on the traffic. The only sound in the car was the relentless
thumpa-thumpa
of the windshield wipers.

Maureen’s brush with the law hadn’t taken all the starch out of her. “I suppose you’re waiting for me to say thank you,” she said at last.

“It wouldn’t be out of line,” Coop said, “considering I climbed out of bed and drove to the precinct house to bail you out so you wouldn’t have to spend time in jail with your friends.”

“You make it sound as if I deserted them!” she snapped.

Like a rat from a sinking ship,
Coop thought, but said nothing.

“I wasn’t the only one who got someone to obtain my freedom,” Maureen said.

Coop braked the car and took a corner. “True. That guy Hank beat you out the door.”

“He was glad to see the TV camera crews arrive.”

“At the pro-rat demonstration or the police station?”

“Both. We were trying to be noticed so people would take the time to think about what’s happening every day to animals on this planet. That was the purpose of our demonstration. Hank said the additional publicity surrounding our arrest furthered our cause.”

“I suppose, Maureen. Though in most people’s minds, rats have a lot of negatives.”

“So do people themselves.”

“Sure. But be honest, have you ever harbored any real affection for a rat?”

“Do you honestly want me to take advantage of what you just asked?”

He had to laugh. “I suppose I did set myself up.”

Maureen responded with her own brief and strangled laughter.
Thumpa-thumpa,
said the wipers. “Thanks for bailing me out, Coop,” she told him after another block.

It must have hurt her to say it, he thought, considering her feelings toward him. Must have taken a lot for her to phone him in the first place. But whom do you call when you get arrested if not your ex-cop ex-husband? “You’re welcome.” He shook his head. “Rats….” He laughed again.

This time she didn’t. “I did a lot of thinking while I was waiting for you to come for me,” she said.

“About rats?”

“About Bette.”

“Oh.”

“I want you to do me a favor.” The old Maureen was back.

“Another?”

“All right, another. I’m not asking for myself, but for our daughter. I don’t think enough investigation had been done in Haverton.”

“That’s because the murder occurred in New York.”

“But Bette’s friends and coworkers were only talked to a few times. And what about Lloyd Watkins? He was almost her fiancé. Don’t you think he might have some more information about her, be able to offer some insight?”

Coop thought she might be right about Watkins. He’d had a good story, a solid alibi. Coop had even come to like him. But maybe he’d been passed over too quickly and placed out of the frame. Geography could do that to the way cops thought. Distance worked in a killer’s favor. Distance was one of the reasons why Coop and Deni were searching for a serial killer. One of the reasons other people were not.

“Will you do that for me and for Bette, Coop? Drive back to Haverton and ask some more questions?”

“I’ll go back and talk to people there,” he said, “if you’ll do something for me.”

“What’s that?”

“Stop talking to Deni Green.”

“I only talked to her because I thought it would help.”

“It doesn’t help. She’s not a cop, she’s a writer.”

“But she writes mysteries. Detective stories. She understands the criminal mind and how to solve crimes.”

“Writing about a detective doesn’t make you one,” Coop said. “She writes about killers, too. I doubt that she’s ever murdered anyone other than on paper.”

They’d arrived at Maureen’s street. Coop turned the corner and drove to the middle of the block, then parked before her building. He left the engine idling, but the light rain had stopped so he switched off the wipers.

“All right,” Maureen said, biting off the words. “We’ll exchange promises. When will you leave for Haverton?”

“As soon as I can,” Coop told her. “I have some things to do first.”

“You would.” She didn’t say it as if she were angry, only defeated. Tears glistened in her eyes, about to spill over.

Before he thought, he reached out for her, partially drew back his hand, then caressed her cheek.

She sat stiffly, unmoving. Slowly he leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the lips. “Do you want me to—”

“No, please!” she interrupted.

“We shared a lot of years, Maureen. Some were good years.”

“Some weren’t.”

“Don’t be angry.”

“I’m not.” She stared ahead out the windshield for a moment. “Coop?…”

“What?”

“Nothing.” She sighed hopelessly. “Always nothing.”

Without explaining what she meant by that, she opened the car door and sloshed through puddles toward her building entrance.

He sat in the idling car watching until she got inside, this good woman who loved rats and hated him.

He wondered why she couldn’t love them both.