Silent Kills (20 page)
Authors: C.E. Lawrence
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Joselin Rosario was puzzled. The inventory of supplies at the blood bank was off, and she didn’t know why. Though there was a number of volunteers in and out during the week, she didn’t think any of them were thieves—or at least she didn’t want to think of them that way. She was fond of them all, and had worked with some for years, mostly ladies from the Upper East Side who had lost their husbands, and with them, their purpose in life. Comfortably well off and living in rent-stabilized apartments—some since World War II—they turned from flipping omelets and folding socks to volunteer work. And the Blood Center, God bless it, was always happy to have volunteers.
There was little old Mrs. Levinson, with her bad wig and white toy poodle, Zsa Zsa, who curled up quietly next to her while her mistress gave out forms to prospective blood donors, sharpened pencils, and helped people find the restroom. And Mrs. Orinsky, whose makeup was always flawlessly applied, no matter the temperature outside. She had danced with the Rock-ettes in her youth, and was proud of her still-striking “gams”—that’s what she called them, like someone out of a 1930s gangster movie.
And Mrs. Henrietta Walmette. She always introduced herself that way, first and last name, as though she were a contestant on a TV quiz show. She wore such garish splotches of rouge on her cheeks that Joselin wondered about her eyesight. She powdered the rest of her face dead white, so that she resembled a badly made-up corpse. But she was sweet and kindly and had the most adorable Southern accent. She liked to go on about being related to the Dukes of Durham—that’s what she called them, only with her accent it came out, “the Dooks of Durm.” She claimed to be Doris Duke’s second cousin, and when she told her stories, Joselin just smiled and nodded. She had been brought up to respect her elders, and so even if these ladies were a bit ridiculous, and wore enough makeup for a whole troupe of circus clowns, they were kindly and well meaning and Joselin felt it was her job to look out for them.
Today she felt uneasy. She had had a sinking feeling in her stomach ever since she woke up this morning, and that usually meant something unpleasant was going to happen. She had had “the gift” ever since childhood—
premoniciones
ran in her family. Her grandmother had them, and Joselin looked just like her, everyone said—so she imagined she had inherited her grandmother’s ability as well.
premoniciones
ran in her family. Her grandmother had them, and Joselin looked just like her, everyone said—so she imagined she had inherited her grandmother’s ability as well.
Just to be sure, she counted the needles in the supply cabinet for the third time. There were still half a dozen missing. And a package of blood bags was unaccounted for, as well as a box of gauze and a thermometer. Why would someone steal a thermometer? Come to think of it, why would someone steal any of these things? Could it be a med student had come in to donate blood and then grabbed a few items to take home to practice with? But practice on whom, and why? Instead of answers, each question engendered another question.
She sat at the receptionist’s desk in the lobby sipping her
café con leche
while nibbling a piece of
dolce des tres leches
(“cake with three milks”), her favorite. She had a weakness for Dominican delicacies, which half explained her generous rump and thighs—the other half of the explanation being genetics. (Her mother, Mari-alis, had a backside like a baby elephant.) No worries, though—men in her culture didn’t like their women built skinny like the reeds that grew along the parking-lot fence near her apartment in Washington Heights.
café con leche
while nibbling a piece of
dolce des tres leches
(“cake with three milks”), her favorite. She had a weakness for Dominican delicacies, which half explained her generous rump and thighs—the other half of the explanation being genetics. (Her mother, Mari-alis, had a backside like a baby elephant.) No worries, though—men in her culture didn’t like their women built skinny like the reeds that grew along the parking-lot fence near her apartment in Washington Heights.
She took another bite of cake and leaned back in the chair, stretching her legs out underneath the desk. Her husband Luis liked her just the way she was,
gracias a Dios
. He liked to come up behind her when she was cooking
pollo a la brasa
, place his big, meaty hands on her bottom, and squeeze like he was testing a melon for ripeness. Her sister rolled her eyes and said Joselin shouldn’t put up with such behavior, but she liked it when he did that—it made her feel womanly and sexy. Even though she always slapped his hands away, it made her laugh, and she would let him kiss her neck and ears later on, after dinner. Sometimes they slipped away into the bedroom for a hasty fumble, even when her aunts were sitting in the parlor sipping
café con leche
with their cakes and lemon cookies.
gracias a Dios
. He liked to come up behind her when she was cooking
pollo a la brasa
, place his big, meaty hands on her bottom, and squeeze like he was testing a melon for ripeness. Her sister rolled her eyes and said Joselin shouldn’t put up with such behavior, but she liked it when he did that—it made her feel womanly and sexy. Even though she always slapped his hands away, it made her laugh, and she would let him kiss her neck and ears later on, after dinner. Sometimes they slipped away into the bedroom for a hasty fumble, even when her aunts were sitting in the parlor sipping
café con leche
with their cakes and lemon cookies.
But now Joselin was worried that a thief was at large, and she wasn’t sure what to do about it. The front-door buzzer rang. She left her half-eaten cake in its paper bag on the desk and went to answer it.
Standing outside in the rain, soaked to the skin, was the new boy—Danny? Donny? No, Davey—that was it. She opened the door to him, clucking her tongue like a disapproving mother hen. She and Luis had waited a few years before having kids, but if she had had a son when they were first married, he would be about the same age as this young man.
His dark hair was plastered to his head, and rain dripped from the tip of his nose.
“
Mira, ven aqui!
” she said, shaking her head. “You look like a drowned rat. Where’s your umbrella? Come in, before you die of pneumonia!”
Mira, ven aqui!
” she said, shaking her head. “You look like a drowned rat. Where’s your umbrella? Come in, before you die of pneumonia!”
He slipped into the room and closed the door behind him. Joselin turned to get him a towel.
It was the last thing she ever did.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
There were very few misfortunes that a piña colada at Waikiki Wally’s did not alleviate. The restaurant was Lee’s favorite hangout—Kathy called it his home away from home. With its tropical waterfall, hula-dancing waitresses, and superb food, it had everything.
Friday evening found Lee sitting at the bar nursing his second drink of the night, Hibiscus Heaven, a wickedly effective concoction involving at least two types of rum. He knew he was self-medicating, but he didn’t care. Kathy wasn’t coming to New York this weekend. She said that work was piling up, but he didn’t believe her. Something was going on—he just didn’t know what. She had given him the “we need to talk” line, but there had been no time for it, with his case heating up and her workload getting heavier.
A lanky Asian transvestite from Lucky Cheng’s flounced through the room in four-inch heels and leather miniskirt, long black hair flowing. The two restaurants were owned by the same people and shared a kitchen as well as a basement tunnel connecting them. Surprisingly, they attracted much the same customers—bachelorette parties, the bridge-and-tunnel crowd out for a night on the town, and tourists who had read the countless articles about the famous drag queen acts at Cheng’s, which boasted “Asian queens from Singapore, Japan, India, China, Indonesia, Hawaii, and the Philippines.”
But Wally’s had its locals too, and Lee was one of them.
“How are you doing tonight?”
Lee turned to see Malaya, Wally’s Filipina hostess, who danced a mean hula on Saturday nights. She was seated at the other end of the bar sipping a Zombie from a frosted green highball glass. Her black hair cascaded down her back like a waterfall, and a single white orchid perched behind her right ear. He couldn’t tell if it was fake or real. Kathy was good at that kind of thing, he thought, wishing she were there.
He lifted his own glass. “Better and better—you?”
She raised hers in response and smiled. “Not bad.”
“Off duty until tonight?”
“Yup. The place won’t heat up for hours yet.”
“I know—that’s why I like to come here early.”
She smiled again. “I hear you. You’ve seen one bridesmaid party, you’ve seen them all.”
He took a swig and let the liquid linger on his tongue, savoring the sweetness of rum and tropical fruit juices. It was one of the things that made his work bearable. On the one hand, it felt ridiculous to be sipping Hawaiian cocktails when a family was grieving the loss of a daughter. On the other hand, he couldn’t do their grieving for them; all he could do was help find her killer.
He looked around the bar. The only people there besides Malaya and himself were a pair of hipsters dressed in black. The shorter one had a reddish crew cut and sported a snappy pair of dark-rimmed glasses with rectangular frames, a typical look for trendy Williamsburg
artistes
these days. The taller one had legs like a stork, so tightly wrapped in black leather that Lee imagined him peeling off his pants at night like masking tape. They were both drinking Red Stripe, a good Jamaican beer that had recently become popular in the neighborhood. He figured them both for film students or photographers, maybe even painters. They both carried oversized portfolios, expensive-looking leather ones, like the kind painters used to exhibit their work to prospective buyers and gallery owners.
artistes
these days. The taller one had legs like a stork, so tightly wrapped in black leather that Lee imagined him peeling off his pants at night like masking tape. They were both drinking Red Stripe, a good Jamaican beer that had recently become popular in the neighborhood. He figured them both for film students or photographers, maybe even painters. They both carried oversized portfolios, expensive-looking leather ones, like the kind painters used to exhibit their work to prospective buyers and gallery owners.
Laura had loved photography. She didn’t fancy herself as a professional, but Lee thought her pictures were very good. She was even building a darkroom in her basement right before she disappeared. He took a long swallow of Hibiscus Heaven. Why the product of fermented fruit would help tame the hurts of the heart was still a mystery to him, but he had learned to live in the mystery, as Rilke would say.
There was a sweet, sharp sadness when he thought about Laura. Sometimes it was a twinge of half-forgotten pain, and other times it was as vivid and deep as the day he found out she was missing. He used it to spur him onward in his work. Whenever he felt unable to push forward on a case, he thought about her, and scraped the scab off his psychic wound so that it would bleed and sting and remind him of his mission, the thing he had dedicated his life to.
His cell phone rang, and he fished it out of his pocket. The caller ID read simply BUTTS. He flipped open the phone.
“Hi—what’s up?”
“Heya, Doc, I think we got another one.”
“Another victim?”
“Looks that way. We got a body in Midtown that might be connected to our guy. Woman works at a blood bank. Staff volunteer showed up and found her about an hour ago.”
“I’ll be right there.”
He got the address from Butts, slapped a twenty on the bar, and left. The sudden brightness of the sun blinded him, and he reeled backward, regretting his second cocktail. Giving up all thoughts of the evening he had imagined, spent with Kathy, he loped toward First Avenue, his arm flung skyward in search of a taxi.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
“Her name’s Joselin Rosario, and she was the director of the blood bank,” Butts said. “The scene’s already been photographed and processed for evidence. The only remaining task is to remove the body,” he added with a glance at a couple of crime scene techs from the ME’s office standing by with a stretcher waiting to take the victim away.
Lee looked down at her. It was a pathetic sight. Joselin Rosario was an attractive, middle-aged Latina who had obviously taken good care of herself. Her thick black hair was pulled back in a tidy bun, which was curiously intact, as was the rest of her clothing. Her perfectly manicured nails showed no sign of breakage, and there wasn’t a mark on her smooth, café au lait skin. The lack of defensive wounds meant she either knew her killer or was taken off guard by a blitzkrieg attack. Either way, there was no time to fight back—which meant less chance of finding forensic evidence on her body. She lay on her back on one of the plastic-coated lounge chairs used for blood donation, the needle still in her arm. Her dark complexion notwithstanding, her pallor was unusually pale. However, the bag in which her blood had been collected was gone.
“Looks like she made a donation herself—but not a voluntary one,” Butts remarked grimly.
The sound of muffled weeping came from the next room.
“That’s the lady who found her,” Butts said with a quick nod in her direction. “Henrietta Walmette. She was a volunteer here. When she showed up this morning the door was open and she found Ms. Rosario lyin’ here like this. She called 911, and luckily for us the detective they called in had the good sense to see there might be a connection between this and the guy we’re lookin’ for.”
The detective in question was standing across the room drinking coffee and speaking to a couple of uniforms—rookies, by the look of it. Their skin had the remarkable smoothness of the very young, unmarred by care or experience.
“Come on,” Butts said, “I’ll introduce you.” He pulled Lee over to the group of cops. “This here is my colleague, Dr. Lee Campbell. This is Detective Grumman, the primary on this case.”
Grumman was a wiry little rat-faced man with quick, jerky movements. If he hadn’t known the man was a detective, Lee would have taken him for a bookie or small-time hood.
“Thanks so much for calling us in before moving the body,” Lee said, shaking his hand, which was surprisingly soft, almost feminine. Grumman didn’t look like a metrosexual, but you never knew these days. Lots of guys you wouldn’t suspect used hand lotion, waxed their chest hair, and plucked their eyebrows.
Grumman shrugged. “It fit your guy’s MO. I been reading about it, and I thought you guys should be called in.” His voice was pure Queens, the vowels as flat and broad as the lanes on the Long Island Expressway.
“We really appreciate it,” Butts said.
“So was I right—is this your guy?” Grumman asked. “Or could it be some kind of copycat?”
“No, this is him,” Lee answered. “There’s not much doubt about that.”
“You want to talk to the lady who found the body?”
“Sure,” Butts said.
Henrietta Walmette was seated on a chair next to an impressive-looking machine Lee figured was used to separate blood platelets or some such thing. She clutched a Styrofoam cup of tea in her hands and was rocking back and forth, a glazed look in her eyes—though figuring out her exact expression was difficult, due to the pound or so of makeup she had plastered onto her face. Tears had carved black crevices of mascara down her cheeks, so that she looked like an aging clown from a Fellini film.
“Ms. Walmette?” Lee said.
The woman turned her tear-stained face to him. “Mrs. Henrietta Walmette,” she said, pronouncing it “Wallamettah.” Her accent was pure magnolias and peach trees, and he was reminded uncomfortably of Susan Morton. “You can call me Henrietta, honey,” she added, with just a suggestion of flirtation. “Oh my God, I must look a fright,” she said sadly, fishing around in her large white purse for a mirror. Flustered, she dropped a lipstick and a small pocket mirror on the floor. One of the young uniforms bent to pick it up for her.
Butts nudged Lee. Henrietta Walmette wasn’t the first woman to be flustered by the sight of his handsome face, and Butts liked to tease him about it.
“Okay, uh, Henrietta,” he said. “I’m Lee Campbell and this is Detective Leonard Butts. Mind if we ask you a few questions?”
“I told the other detective everything I know,” she said, wiping the smudged mascara from her face. “I want to be helpful—really I do.”
“We know you do, ma’am,” Butts replied. “And we appreciate that. But my partner here is—well, a different kind of cop and he might have some specific kinda questions for you. That is, if it’s okay with you.”
Finished with her ablutions, she turned her face up to Lee and gave a brave smile. “Of course—whatever you need, I’ll be glad to cooperate.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Did you notice anything unusual about Ms. Rosario’s behavior lately?”
“Not really, but the other detective already asked me that.”
“Okay,” Lee said. “Did she have any new friends that you know of?”
Henrietta Walmette tugged on one of the heavy gold earring dangling from her pendulous earlobes. “No. She was devoted to her family, you know—they meant everything to her.” A fat tear seeped down her right cheek, winding through the thick layer of makeup. “I can’t stand to think of her poor husband. She loved him so much—he’ll be just devastated without her, I’m sure.”
“I’m very sorry to put you through this,” Lee continued. “Just one more question and then we’ll let you go. Were there any changes at the workplace recently?”
“Well, let me think,” she said. “I only volunteer one day a week, you see, and I—oh, yes, wait a minute! I noticed a very quiet young man I’d never seen before last week when I came in. He pretty much kept to himself, though, and I—”
“Did Ms. Rosario introduce you to him?”
“Why, yes, she did tell me his name, but I ... forgive me, but my memory isn’t quite what it used to be in my younger days,” she said, looking down. The mountain of makeup on her face made it hard to tell if she was blushing.
“Do you think you might be able to remember?” Butts said.
“I started with a D, I think ... Donny, Danny, something like that.”
“Did you get a last name?” Lee asked.
She shook her head. “No, I’m afraid we were rather busy that day—I barely spoke to him at all. I handle the front room, you know, and he was working in the back the whole time.”
“Thank you, Ms.—uh, Henrietta, you’ve been very helpful,” Lee said.
“Anything I can do to help—really
anything
,” she replied.
anything
,” she replied.
“Thank you so much,” he repeated, shaking the hand she offered. She clutched his hand a little too tightly, and was reluctant to let go when he pulled away.
When they rejoined Detective Grumman, who had been listening in on their conversation, he shook his head. “No record of anyone new working at this location. ’Course, someone could have gone through the employee files and taken the documents, but we have a call into the other blood centers to see if there’s a record of someone being assigned here in the past few weeks. So if he came here through official channels, we’ll find out.”
“He could have known the vic some other way,” Butts pointed out.
“But he showed up before the place was open, and she must have let him in,” Lee said. “Unless he had a key.”
“Yeah, but it was raining hard out,” Butts argued. “He coulda looked pathetic, and so she lets him in.”
Detective Grumman crossed his arms. “Lady workin’ at a blood bank is bound to be the sympathetic type, don’t ya think?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Butts said. “Still, how does he subdue her so he can ...”
He didn’t need to say it; they were all thinking the same thing. How does someone render another person so helpless that he is able to drain virtually all of the blood from her body?
Grumman signaled to the people from the ME’s office, and they began to load poor Joselin onto a stretcher. One of the rookie cops stepped forward and pointed at her.
“Look—there, on the side of her neck!” He was a smooth-faced young African American.
“What is it, Marshall?” Grumman growled.
“There!” Officer Marshall leaned over and pointed to two tiny red marks that had been hidden by her hair. When the ME people moved the body, her hair had fallen to the side, revealing them.
“Mary, Mother of God, will you look at that?” Grumman said. “If those aren’t Taser marks, I’ll eat my hat.” The fact that he wasn’t wearing a hat didn’t lessen the force of his observation. Sure enough, there on the upper part of her neck were tiny wounds that looked exactly like the burns of a Taser, commonly known as a stun gun.
Butts snorted with disgust. “Damn things should be illegal.”
“Well, at least we know how he subdued her,” Grumman remarked.
“If there’s anything else, it’s bound to turn up at the autopsy,” Grumman said. “Good work, Marshall. Keep me posted, will you?” he asked Butts.
“Sure. Thanks for bringing us in on this,” Butts replied.
Lee left the two detectives at the crime scene and headed home. He needed to be alone to think about this latest development. He took the M15 bus down Second Avenue, watching through the soot-stained window as clouds gathered in an increasingly sullen sky.
When he got off the bus and turned the corner onto his street, the heavens opened as the sky shook with another thunderstorm. He ran the last half block, dashed up the front steps two at a time, and ducked inside just in time to avoid getting soaked. He stood in the front vestibule shaking the water from his damp clothes before climbing the two flights to his apartment.
The rain drummed down with such force that it drowned out all other sounds. Gone were the usual street noises—the footsteps of pedestrians, the whoosh of passing cars, the rumble of buses as they lumbered up Third Avenue, the squealing brakes of garbage trucks. Gone too were the noises within the building—the creak of floorboards or the footsteps of the tenants who lived above him, the rapid patter of paws as their kitten scuttered across the floor after a toy, the low murmur of a radio or television set from next door. Sealed in a cocoon by the pummeling raindrops, Lee felt an odd sense of invulnerability—of
safety.
The interior of his apartment felt like a place apart, a little self-contained universe where he was protected from the perils of the outside world.
safety.
The interior of his apartment felt like a place apart, a little self-contained universe where he was protected from the perils of the outside world.
He gazed out the window at the grey wall of rain hurtling down from the heavens. He found himself wishing it would never stop, and that the heavy drops would halt the forward momentum of time itself. Mothers would tuck their children into bed at night knowing that killers were not lurking in dark alleys waiting to snatch their darlings away; young women would go to sleep secure in the knowledge they would not awaken with a sinister figure looming over their beds. Surely a rain such as this would erase all of the evils of the world, and wash clean all the sins of humanity.
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