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Authors: C.E. Lawrence

BOOK: Silent Kills
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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“What the hell?” Butts asked Lee as they stared at the tombstone. It was a simpler design than the grand monuments around it, but that made it even more touching. A single headstone with a blank scroll entwined with vines had been carved into the granite, underneath it the writer’s name with the dates of his birth and death.
HERMAN MELVILLE
AUGUST 1, 1819 – SEPTEMBER 28, 1891
Lee shook his head. “I don’t know what it means exactly, but it was obviously purposeful.” He was beginning to think this killer did nothing randomly—which made him easier to analyze, but more dangerous. Organized criminals were always more dangerous.
He and Butts knelt next to the victim’s body. She didn’t especially resemble the first victim, Candy Nugent, who was a petite brunette. This girl was on the tall side, with a muscular athletic build and a sandy ponytail. There was no bruising—except for a small puncture wound in the crook of her right arm.
“Looks like this is where he inserted the needle,” Butts remarked.
“Yeah,” Lee agreed. “He definitely knows what he’s doing. Give me a minute, will you?” he said to Butts, who stood up, brushing the leaves and twigs from his trousers.
Quinlan walked up to them and started to ask a question, but Butts signaled him to be quiet. “Doc likes to have a moment to himself,” he whispered. “To try and get into the head of the killer like, y’know?”
The burly sergeant nodded. Extracting a cigarette from a crumpled pack of Marlboros, he lit it and took a deep drag.
“That shit will kill you,” Butts remarked.
“Everything kills you sooner or later,” Quinlan replied, taking another pull from the cigarette. The smoke curled and twisted in the air above his head before floating, ghostlike, over the row of tombstones.
“Okay,” Lee murmured. “So you leave her here, in front of Melville’s grave ... but why? Is it because you struggle with the concepts of good and evil in
Moby-Dick
? Or maybe it was because Melville was deeply bitter at the end of his life ... is that it? Are
you
bitter?” he asked softly.
Lee stood up and beckoned to Sergeant Quinlan, who stubbed the cigarette out on the sole of his shoe and placed it carefully back in the pack to avoid contaminating the crime scene. Or maybe he was saving it for later. With the heavy taxes the feds had recently imposed on cigarettes, a pack in New York City could go for as much as seven dollars.
“You seen everything you need to see?” said Quinlan. “Ready for the techs to do their thing?”
“Yeah,” said Butts. “We got what we need for now.”
Quinlan motioned to the crime scene crew and stepped aside so they could go to work. “What do you figure—guy’s a weirdo, right?”
“Yes,” Lee said, “to put it mildly.”
Quinlan shivered. “Creepy. The whole thing gives me the willies. What kind of pervert drains the blood from his vic?”
One of the techs, a slim young Asian man, called to them.
“We found something you might want to have a look at.”
In his hand was a single piece of paper. Butts slipped on a pair of rubber gloves and carefully held it up for the others to read. It was regular white paper, the kind you could get in any office supply store, and on it was printed a single stanza of what looked to be a poem.
The youth that time destroyed can live in me again
But I require blood—the time is coming when
I’ll come to you at night, as the owl hoots at the moon
I’ll be by your side to watch you as you swoon
“What do you make of it?” asked Quinlan.
“Looks like some kind of gothic poem,” said Lee.
“Or maybe it’s lyrics from a song,” Butts suggested. “My kid listens to all kinds of weird stuff a lot like that.”
They handed it carefully back to the crime scene tech. It would be dusted for prints and processed for trace evidence, but the words themselves held a clue to the UNSUB’s personality and motive.
“What do we know about the vic?” asked Butts.
“Name’s Liza Dobbins,” Quinlan replied. “Her roommate reported her missing yesterday, brought some photos into the precinct. Said she went jogging in Van Cortlandt Park and never returned. When we found her we put two and two together. When we get her to the morgue we’ll call in the roommate for a positive ID, but there’s no doubt it’s her.”
Butts scratched his chin. “There’s plenty of bodies comin’ into this place, but how do you smuggle one in without some kind of official permit?”
“That’s what we been askin’ ourselves,” Quinlan said.
“Or maybe,” Lee suggested, “we’re asking the wrong questions.”
Quinlan frowned and lit a cigarette. “How do you figure?”
“I don’t know. I’m just trying to think—”
“Outside the coffin?” Butts suggested with a wry smile.
“Yeah, right. One thing is for sure. He has fantasized about doing this for a
long
time.”
In the tree above them, a lone crow landed on a branch and peered down at them with beady black eyes. Sergeant Quinlan looked up at the bird and shivered.
“Let’s get out of here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Lee took the long subway trip home, getting off at Astor Place. As he walked toward his apartment, through the plaza behind the Cooper Union building, he felt something rub up against his shins. He looked down to see a rangy Irish setter pressing up against his leg. The dog tried to lick his hand, wagging its feathery tail frantically.
“Hi there.”
The voice came from his left side. Suddenly panicked, he spun around, his heart pounding. In front of him stood Lucille Geffers, a leash in her hand. “Sorry about that,” she said, holding up the leash. “He managed to get away when he saw you. Come on, Rex,” she said, slipping the leash around the dog’s neck.
Lucille Geffers had been one of his professors at John Jay, and was chairman of the philosophy department. Lee always thought it ironic that she was a philosophy professor, as everything about her was so
earthy
. She was short and sensible, with a brisk, orderly manner. She wore her thick and rather bushy brown hair in a short, sensible cut, and her clothes, often in various shades of beige, were strictly L.L. Bean. She spoke with unusual directness, coming right to the point without any flourishes or social niceties.
She could be quite tactless at times, and was famous among students for saying indelicate things. She was the furthest thing imaginable from the dreamy, contemplative soul that Lee would have imagined in a philosophy professor. She was also completely lacking in any sense of irony. And she was on just about every faculty committee there was.
“Hello,” Lee said, stooping to pet Rex, who was wagging his tail so hard he looked as if he were about to take flight.
“It’s good to see you, Lee,” Lucille said earnestly, studying him, her head cocked to one side. She was wearing brown corduroy trousers, a beige linen shirt, and Birkenstock sandals. A pair of sunglasses dangled from a lanyard around her neck. “He seems glad to see you,” she added, with a glance at Rex.
“Yeah, we’re old friends,” Lee said, stroking the dog’s silky head.
“How
are
you?” she asked, in a way that made him believe she really wanted to know the answer.
“I’m hanging in there,” he said.
She pulled her mouth to one side and frowned. “From the look of it, just barely.”
He had to smile at this remark, one of her typically blunt statements, which the students used to call Geffers’s Gaffes.
“I’m seeing someone,” he answered, surprised that he volunteered the information to a woman he barely knew.
“You mean a therapist or a woman?” she said.
“Both, actually,” he answered with a laugh.
“This has been a hard year for us all,” she said. “I worry most of all about the students. I can’t imagine what it must be like for them. What a time to go into law enforcement, huh?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s rough.”
“Ah, well, they’re young—they’ll survive,” she said with a shake of her sensible shoulders. “It’s you I’m worried about.”
“I’ll survive too,” Lee replied, touched by her concern. His struggle with depression was no secret, but he’d had no idea Lucille Geffers knew about it.
Evidently irked that their attention was no longer focused on him, Rex pressed his wiry body against Lee’s legs. Rex was a big dope—not all that bright, but good-natured and friendly. He approached all other living creatures with a big silly grin, his tail high, waving gently back and forth, his body wriggling with delight and good intentions. When he was rejected—by an aloof terrier, or a child frightened of dogs, Rex always looked hurt and puzzled. His world didn’t include distrust, unfriendliness, or ill humor.
“He’s a good boy, you know,” Lucille said, smiling down at him.
“Yeah, he’s a good dog.”
They were both at a loss what to say, and stood watching a phalanx of yellow cabs charge up Third Avenue, suspensions rattling and groaning as they barreled into potholes.
“I hear you gave a lecture last spring,” she commented, flicking a coarse strand of wayward hair from her eyes.
“Yeah.”
“I hear it went well.”
“Good, I’m glad.”
Lee gazed up at the Cooper Union, the sun reflecting off its tall, broad windows.
“Want to give another one?” she asked.
“Really?” he said, caught off guard.
“I’m chair of the Guest Lecturer Committee, and we talked about it at the last meeting. I thought Tom was going to call you, but I guess he hasn’t yet.” Tom Mariella was chairman of the psychology department, and had originally suggested Lee as a guest lecturer the first time.
“About what?”
“About what you do—your work with the NYPD, what you’ve learned, that kind of thing. Specifically we’d like it if you talked about serial predators, if you don’t mind.”
“Uh, okay, I guess. When?”
“Can you put it together in about a week? We had a cancellation for next Thursday and would like to fill that slot if possible.”
He thought about it. One of his mother’s favorite sayings came to him.
If you want something done, ask a busy person.
“Okay,” he said.
“Good,” she said, patting his arm firmly. Her fingers were strong and callused, the nails jagged and dirty, the hands of someone who does a lot of gardening, perhaps. “Good for you. I’ll be there—I look forward to it.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“Come on, Rex, time to go home,” she said, bending down to fasten the leash onto his collar. Rex looked up at her, his long pink tongue lolling out of one side of his mouth, a happy expression on his big, silly face. Lee envied the dog his obliviousness to the ways of people.
“Good-bye,” she said, taking his hand in hers and shaking it, looking him in the eye. “It was good seeing you.”
“It was good seeing you too,” he replied, and meant it.
“You hang in there!” she called over her shoulder as she followed Rex up the avenue, her short legs pumping to keep up with the dog, who was pulling eagerly on the leash.
He wandered down East Seventh Street, feeling out of sorts, his world once again tipped off center by this latest request. He knew he should be flattered by the offer, but his nerves were still tender, and he didn’t want to add more pressure to his life.
He climbed up the two flights to his apartment, feeling old and stiff and tired. The minute he opened the door the phone rang. When he picked it up the voice on the other end turned his stomach into a block of ice.
“I was wondering when you were going to get back. Out a long time, weren’t you?”
The voice was scaly, reptilian, cold as ice.
He recognized it at once, though it had been weeks since the last call. His hope that they had stopped forever dried up instantly.
He thought of hanging up, but instead he said, “What do you want?”
“What do
I
want? Goodness, but I should think it’s more about what
you
want, isn’t it?”
“All right,” he said, forcing the emotion from his voice. “What do I want?”
“To find out how I know about the red dress, for one thing.”
This was a reference to Laura’s disappearance. When she went missing, she was wearing a red dress, but the information was never released to the public.
Lee took a deep breath to steady his voice.
“And what else?”
His question was met by a soft chuckle. “Oh, do I really have to say it? To find your sister’s killer.”
“And would that be you?”
The line went dead. Lee stood staring at the phone, the receiver in his hand, then hurled it across the room at the brick fireplace, where it smashed into a dozen pieces.

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