Night Victims (The Night Spider) Read Online Free PDF Page A

walked over and locked it. People were something in this city. But then, people had been something in New Orleans.
    She started to remove her shoes, then remembered the state of the kitchen and left them on. At the kitchen door, she was relieved to hear a soft but deep humming sound. Thank God, or Ernie, the refrigerator was still operating.
    Paula made herself a J&B and water (from the bathroom washbasin) on the rocks, then went back into the living room, sat down on the sofa, propped her stockinged feet up on the coffee table, and used her cell phone to call the corner deli.
    In her cozy if abused apartment, with only the humming refrigerator and muffled traffic noises nibbling at the silence, she sipped her drink while waiting for supper to be delivered, thinking about the bulging, agonized eyes of a dead woman with thirty-seven stab wounds. What had those eyes seen in the last long minutes and hours before her death? What emotional storm had raged behind them?
    Christ! Thirty-seven!
    Paula’s case.

4
    Thomas Horn lived in a three-story brownstone on the West Side near Columbus Avenue. It had a basement with street-level barred windows, fancier wrought-iron bars on the first-floor windows, and wonderfully elaborate, if less formidable, bars on the second- and third-floor windows. There were green wooden shutters on all of the windows facing the street and green wooden flower boxes with geraniums and ferns on the first-floor windows. These windows were on either side of four concrete steps that led up to a stoop and stained oak double doors. The tall, heavy doors had small, triangular leaded windows in them. The worn concrete steps were flanked by black wrought-iron railings that echoed the elaborate bars on the upper-floor windows. The effect of all this was that of an urban fortress that had somehow fallen to Martha Stewart.
    In the beamed and wainscoted living room Horn sat in his usual green leather chair near the seldom-used fireplace and watched his wife, Anne, slump down on the sofa and ease off her practical low-heeled black pumps. Working women’s shoes. Horn sometimes thought it a shame that a woman with ankles like Anne’s had a job where she walked quite a bit and needed such comfortable shoes. She was in hospital administration at Kincaid Memorial Hospital and was, in fact, chief administrator of the imaging and radiology department. A responsible job that paid well and, until recently, had provided her with satisfaction.
    An attractive women with long blond hair, a model’s complexion, and clear blue eyes, she raised one nylon-clad foot and massaged it with both hands. Horn loved her.
    She smiled at him and said, “Something’s on your mind.”
    He wasn’t surprised she could tell. “Why don’t we have a drink, then go down to the Regency for dinner and talk about it?”
    “It requires a drink?”
    “‘Fraid so.”
    “I’ll go change.”
    She was smart enough not to press. Not yet. Something Horn very much liked about her was her feel for timing. He watched her climb the carpeted stairs in her bare feet, holding her shoes in her right hand. Timing wasn’t everything in life, but quite a lot.
     
    When Anne came down fifteen minutes later she was wearing faded jeans, sandals, and a white blouse. Her hair was piled loosely on top of her head, she wore little makeup, and looked about forty though she was actually fifty.
    She came over and lightly pecked Horn on the cheek. He’d made her a martini and himself a Glenlivet on the rocks. He sat down in the green leather chair, and she sat in a corner of the overstuffed sofa on the other side of the oriental rug whose pattern reminded Horn of some kind of large game board.
    “So how was your busy day?” he asked.
    She shrugged. “How was your day of hard-earned leisure?”
    Christ! Did she somehow sense what he was going to tell her? “I’m getting used to it.”
    She smiled. “Are you now?”
    Change subject. “Anything new on the Vine