The Night Watcher. John Lutz
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on a folded sheet of white paper.
Even without the binoculars, the window was now easily visible from the park. Against the black wall of the building it was like a fiery star burning against a night sky.
Or like a blazing eye high above the city, gazing back at the watcher.
“You Stack?” The tall guy in the FDNY uniform looked at Stack with a mixture of awe and curiosity, as if he’d recognized a movie star on the street but couldn’t be sure.
Stack said he was Stack.
“Lieutenant Ernest Fagin, FDNY Arson.” Fagin stuck out his hand.
“This is my partner, Sergeant Lopez,” Stack said, causing Fagin to look at Rica for the first time. He shook her hand and smiled at her, trying to make up for bad manners. Give him that. He was young and gangly and looked like Abe Lincoln might have as a teenager without the beard.
They were standing in the middle of Dr. Ronald Lucette’s living room on the fortieth floor of the Bennick Tower. The place was a blackened, waterlogged mess except for near the door where the flames hadn’t reached. The stench of burned carpet, wood, upholstery, and flesh was acrid and overpowering.
“Was the fire confined to this apartment?” Stack asked.
“This apartment and part of the adjacent one on the other side of the east wall,” Fagin said. “This could have been one hell of a fire. Traffic wasn’t bad for a change, and we got to it in a hurry.”
“I thought you guys didn’t have the equipment to fight fires this high,” Rica said.
“We don’t have enough to do it from the outside. That’s why response time’s so important. We get to a high-rise early enough to use the elevator or stairs, and we blitz it and get it under control. We don’t manage that, we can still sometimes outsmart the fire and contain the damage.”
“Outsmart the fire?”
“Yeah, we hook up to a standpipe. Should be one on each landing, along with a coiled two-and-a-half-inch-diameter hose, sometimes in a cabinet. Then we pay out the hose and at least manage to contain the fire. But it’s a battle of wits, because there’s only so much pressure that way, so much water, and sometimes the standpipe systems fail. A bad fire, we sometimes direct streams of water from nearby windows of other buildings, using their standpipe systems. But if the flames get a chance to take hold and find plenty of fuel, they block fire exits and short out electrical lines so elevators are inoperable. Then the fire has us pretty much at its mercy.”
It interested Rica that this guy talked about fire as if it had a mind, and an evil one at that. She had heard only that pyromaniacs talked that way.
“There’s only one victim?” Stack asked.
Fagin nodded. “A Dr. Ronald Lucette. Lived here with his wife, Sharon. She was down off the lobby getting her feet worked on or something.”
Stack looked at him. “Her feet? There a doctor’s office down there?”
“Naw, a beauty salon. You know, getting her nails painted, her toes depilatoried, maybe. Hell, I don’t know.”
“A pedicure,” Rica explained to the two of them. “Some women, they got the time and money, they get their feet looking good, calluses filed away, nails enameled by a pro, that kinda thing.”
Both men stared at her. “You ever had one?” Stack asked.
“No.”
“The doctor is in,” Fagin said, “if you want to go see him.”
Rica was starting to like Fagin.
He led the way into the kitchen. Almost everything there was soot-darkened or charred, and there was about an inch of black water on the floor. Some techs were still there, wearing rubber boots and exchanging notes. The ME was packing up to leave. Dr. Ronald Lucette, who Stack knew had been the recent center of attention, was a blackened mess on the floor. He was lying on his right side with his knees drawn up, his arms behind him, reminding Stack of those photographs of the remains of long-ago volcano victims in Pompeii. His grotesque, darkened head was thrown back, mouth gaping, as if he still might be able to draw some cool fresh air and reverse the process that had left him in such a state.
“The fire started right where he is,” Fagin told Stack and Rica. “Some sort of liquid accelerant was poured over and around him when he was on the floor tied up with something. Looks like cloth rather than rope or tape, but I couldn’t tell you what kind. As you can see, it was a nasty, greedy fire. These prewar buildings are what everyone wants to live in, but some of them, with their solid walls and floors, aren’t set up to support universal sprinkler systems.”
“Was there a smoke alarm in here?” Rica asked.
Fagin looked at her, then motioned over his right shoulder with his thumb. The smoke alarm was above the kitchen door, its round plastic lid dangling to reveal that the batteries had been removed.
“If you find the batteries, let us know,” Stack said. “There might be prints on them.” But he knew there was about as much chance of finding fingerprints on the batteries as there had been of finding prints on the umbrella left at the scene of Hugh Danner’s murder by burning.
“We already found the batteries,” one of the techs called over. “No prints of any kind.”
“The killer wear gloves?” Rica asked.
“That or the batteries were wiped,” the tech said. “We dusted what we could of the rest of the apartment. We’ll have to wait and see what we get other than the occupants’ prints.”
Stack looked at Fagin. “What about the wife with the neat feet?”
“She’s in the apartment next door. She just sits and stares.”
“I wouldn’t want to see what she sees,” Stack said.
He moved closer to the body and studied it from different angles.
Rica was peering over his shoulder. “Looks like the victim might have been bound with black cloth,” she said, “but it’s hard to know for sure, with everything in the place blackened.”
“The lab might be able to tell you the original color,” Fagin said. “Some dyes leave distinctive residues.”
Stack straightened up.
The ME had moved closer, a middle-aged woman with ragged blond hair and a lot of loose flesh around her neck. A victim of gravity. Stack didn’t think he’d seen her before.
“I can give you a preliminary autopsy report,” she said. “Death by burning; soot in his mouth and, I’d be willing to bet, in his lungs. Which means the poor bastard was alive when he was set on fire.”
“Like the last one,” Rica said.
The ME nodded. “That’s what I hear.”
“If somebody makes a habit of this,” Fagin said, “one of these days we won’t be able to get to a high-rise fire and contain it, and that’s everybody’s worst nightmare.”
“If it isn’t the worst,” Rica said, “it’s in the running. What are the odds of one of these buildings catching fire high up and collapsing like the World Trade Center towers?”
“Pretty slim,” Fagin said. “The WTC towers were struck by planes; then the fire was from thousands of gallons of jet fuel. And jet fuel burns at temperatures you wouldn’t believe, and for a long time. Nothing like that here. A high-rise fire like this, we generally use a defend-in-place strategy, usually don’t evacuate the whole building, just those people we think might be in some danger.” He got a look on his face Rica had seen before on New York firefighters, and on some cops. “Not like the World Trade Center at all,” he said in a different, softer voice.
Stack pulled a folded handkerchief from his pocket and wiped perspiration from his face. He wasn’t feeling so