The Night Watcher Read Free

work seriously, and when he was present, so did everyone else.
    He was a big man, six-feet-two and 230 pounds. Now in his forty-seventh year, he was beginning to thicken around the waist, but his shoulders were broad and his big hands made fists like rocks. Even without NYPD politics, he might have climbed through the ranks on ability or looks alone. His head was large, his forehead wide. His dark hair was parted on the side, cut short around the ears and beginning to gray. Level gray eyes studied everything calmly from beneath thick dark brows. His cheekbones were prominent and his jaw was firm with a cleft chin. If it weren’t for a slightly crooked nose that hadn’t been set right after one of the bad guys broke it with a beer bottle, he would have been merely handsome instead of interesting and…well, scary. To civilian employees and probationary patrolmen he was Detective Stack. To his fellow officers who had been through the wars with him, he was simply “Stack.”
    Sergeant Redd at the booking desk had told Stack that acting MR Squad Commander Jack O’Reilly wanted to see him. The regular commander, Lieutenant Vandervoort, was hospitalized after major surgery for colon cancer and would be gone for at least a month. If chemotherapy was required, Vandervoort would be gone longer.
    “Still working on that hot one, Stack?” a detective-second-grade named Mathers, whose nickname, of course, was Beave, asked with a grin.
    “You must mean me,” Stack heard Rica say behind him. Mathers and several other officers laughed.
    “Try to be more professional,” Stack said, when he and Rica were out of the squad room and in the short hall, lined with file cabinets, that led to the commander’s office.
    “They don’t take me seriously,” Rica said.
    “I take you seriously.” Stack immediately wished he’d phrased it differently. He was aware of how Rica felt about him, and he didn’t want her misplaced affection to become obvious to the others in the department.
    Rica, trundling along beside him, didn’t answer. But he could feel her smiling.
    She’d gotten more blatant about her fondness for Stack as his divorce from Laura progressed. Stack knew what Rica was thinking: Laura had finally had enough of being a cop’s wife—which was true. And Rica, being a cop herself, was exactly what Stack needed. Not true, thought Stack. It wasn’t that Rica was unattractive—she was petite, with dark hair and eyes, and with a firm and compact physique that prompted locker room speculation when she wasn’t around. Not that she wasn’t respected for her abilities. It was, in fact, Rica Lopez’s remarkable talents as a homicide detective that kept Stack from having her transferred to break up their partnership.
    Stack had never made any remarks about Rica when some of the other cops, male and female, were commenting on her looks. What worried him now was that, since word of his impending divorce had gotten around, he’d stopped hearing raunchy remarks about Rica. Apparently no one wanted to comment on her when he was present.
    “You want me to go in with you, Stack?” Rica asked beside him as they approached the partly opened door to the commander’s office.
    “Sure” he said. “Maybe O’Reilly wants to chew some ass.”
     
    Stack opened the door all the way, then stood aside so Rica could enter first. As she moved around him he caught a whiff of her perfume. Lilacs or some such. When the hell had she had time to put that on? Cops weren’t supposed to smell like lilacs.
    The office was the only one in the precinct house that was carpeted—a thickly napped beige surface that ran wall to wall and stopped at a wooden baseboard that over the years had been painted countless times in the same bureaucratic pale green. The walls had wainscoting that disappeared behind a row of gray file cabinets. Two deep, brown leather chairs sat facing the large and ancient mahogany desk. All in all, a place where you might enjoy brandy