Silent Screams (13 page)

“Who among us can say he’s never had a violent fantasy?”

John Paul Nelson looked over the assembly of students, who looked back at him uncomfortably, as if he had just accused them personally of being criminals.

Lee sat in the back of the lecture hall, watching as Nelson surveyed the young faces, blank as unformed clay. It was Monday morning, and today the heat was on with a vengeance. Hisses of steam erupted at irregular intervals from the radiators lining the assembly room walls. As soon as the lecture was over, Lee planned to give Nelson Chuck’s urgent invitation to join their investigation. He had tried to reach Nelson by phone the day before without success—sometimes, he knew, Nelson would turn off both his phone and answering machine.

“Anybody?” Nelson continued, a smile struggling to break through the corners of his mouth. “So you’ve all had a violent fantasy at one time or another in your life, then. Good—then you’ll be able to follow what I’m about to say next.” He picked up the remote and aimed it at the slide projector.

One click and a familiar face appeared on the screen: the hangdog, boyish features of Jeffrey Dahmer, with his sad, basset hound eyes and splotch of blond bangs. A murmur floated up from the crowd and dissipated, smokelike, when Nelson turned to face them.

“I see most of you recognize him. Ask yourselves: what separates him from us?”

The blond girl snaked an arm tentatively into the air.

“Yes?” Nelson said.

“Uh…nothing, sir.”

“Nothing? You mean you don’t have an answer?

She cleared her throat and pushed a strand of straight pale bangs from her eyes. “No, sir; I mean ‘nothing’ as in nothing separates us.”

“That’s an interesting point of view. Would you care to elaborate?”

The girl shifted in her seat and tightened her grip on her notebook.

“What I mean is that they’re more like us than us than they are different from us. I mean, they’re different in degree but not in kind, you might say.”

Nelson raised his left eyebrow. “Nicely done, Ms. Davenport—I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

Lee smiled. For all his arrogance, Nelson was always ready with praise for students who asserted their own opinions. Lee had never really studied Dahmer’s face before, but now, seeing him closely, he looked lost, so lost, like a little boy abandoned by his parents—which, of course, he was.

Nelson cleared his throat. “Mr. Dahmer was not an alien, a scientific oddity, an exotic species of some kind—a mutation, a marsupial, or a manta ray.”

He paused and looked at Ms. Davenport, who gazed up at him with rapturous devotion.

“Alike in kind,” he mused. “I want you all to consider Ms. Davenport’s felicitous phrasing. We are all alike in kind—even the most degraded, despised, or dispossessed.”

He walked back to the slide projector and picked up the remote again. A click and Dahmer’s face disappeared and was replaced by a colorful illustration. Two interwoven strands—one red, the other blue—climbed like vines around one another, twisting in and out in perfect symmetry.

“This is what we all share: DNA, the double helix, the structure of life as we know it. Or perhaps this is only the starting point, and everything we are cannot be reduced to ink stains on a piece of paper.” He clicked again, and a symmetrical, dark-on-white design appeared—a black splash of ink that Lee recognized immediately as a Rorschach blot.

“What is this?” Nelson asked, stroking his chin. “A butterfly? Or maybe an anvil? Or do some of you see a manta ray? Or a uterus? How about a dead body? If you do see a dead body, are you a serial killer in the making? Or maybe the serial killer is so repressed that he’s the one who sees the butterfly?”

He seated himself on the edge of the desk and swung his right leg back and forth. “Flaubert famously said, ‘Madame Bovary, c’est mois.’ In order to write about a character, a writer insinuates himself into the character’s mind—slips into his skin, as it were. The criminal profiler must do the same, like the actor who becomes the character he plays.”

The theater had certainly lost a gifted actor when Nelson turned to a career in psychology. With his forceful personality, resonant voice, and charisma, Lee thought Nelson would have been a natural for the stage.

“For most of the repeat offenders we have come to know as serial killers, fantasy plays an enormous role. Often, their very identity represents a kind of fantasy: Ted Bundy, the concerned citizen, political activist, and loving friend; or John Wayne Gacy, the community organizer, Rotary member, and friendly clown who performed at children’s parties. These were facades created to hide a darker personality the offender wishes to keep hidden from society.”

He paused to let this sink in and drank from a bottle of Evian water on his desk. Lee thought Nelson looked tired, the lines under his blue eyes deepened. He leaned against the desk again and crossed his arms.

“R. D. Laing said that the more identity
is
fantasy, the more intensely it is defended. Doesn’t that make sense? If you
know
who you are, then there’s no need to defend against an attack—real or imagined—because you’re secure in your knowledge. But even though the subject knows on some level that his false self is unreal, the alternative is unthinkable: not just death, but complete annihilation.

“The subject can’t see that maybe his false self could be replaced by a real, authentic one. His tragedy is that he can’t see what lies beyond—to him it appears to be an endless void in which he wanders like a zombie, a creature ostracized from human society, doomed to walk the earth, empty eyes staring vacantly out of a face with no mind, a body with no soul.

“And so he defends this false identity with all the ferocity of a lioness fighting to save her cubs—because his instinct for self-preservation tells him to.”

Ms. Davenport raised her hand. “So are you saying in effect that with these people, there’s ‘no there there’?”

Nelson smiled. “Pithy as usual, Ms. Davenport.” He turned to the rest of the class. “Ms. Davenport here has summed up my whole complex theory in a few words—but essentially, she has it. The shell the offender constructs for the outside world is no more ‘real’ than the fantasy life he lives in private.”

He leaned forward, and his face was very earnest, almost vulnerable. “Most of us take our identities for granted. You, Ms. Davenport, for example. Let’s say you’re the first child, the smart one, the organizer, efficient and responsible. Your mother and your siblings could always count on you, and you knew that about yourself before you remember having language. Knowing this about yourself gave you a certain sense of security in the world.”

Ms. Davenport blushed, a deep purple that spread from the base of her neck to the thin blue veins on her forehead.

Nelson continued. “I don’t know anything about Ms. Davenport’s family, of course. But let’s just say she had a younger brother who was the family clown, the funny one, a little irresponsible maybe, but he could always make people laugh, and that gave him some security, a sense of who
he
was.

“My point is that we all take these things for granted—by the time we can verbalize
who
we are, we already have a sense of it from the way other people relate to us, and the way we relate to them.

“But for the person who goes on to become a serial offender, this is not the case. He is lacking a basic sense of who he is, and consequently has a sense at times
of being nobody at all
. He feels impotent and powerless. So he creates a fantasy world that is that exact
reverse
of what he perceives to be reality: a world in which he is omnipotent, is all powerful, and has total control over others. This control most often involves violent sexual fantasies—again, the exact
reverse
of what he perceives on another level as reality: total
rejection
of him by women (or men, if he is homosexual).

“Jeffrey Dahmer cut off his victims’ heads and put them in his freezer
so they wouldn’t leave him
. That level of desperation is directly related to the level of rage these criminals express against their victims—who are often substitutes for people in their lives who did in fact harm them. So, for example, a vicious killer of women could be acting out rage toward his emotionally abusive mother.”

Nelson looked out over the room of upturned faces. “What’s the difference between a killer’s signature and his MO?” Nelson inquired, leaning back on his heels. “Yes, Ms. Davenport?”

“The MO is short for modus operandi—the way a killer usually operates—but it can change. The signature refers to the repetitive ritualistic acts, often unnecessary for the commission of the crime, but which are necessary to the killer in order for him to receive emotional or sexual satisfaction from his crime.”

“What might constitute a signature, for example?”

The skinny blond boy with the raspy voice shot up a hand.

“Yes?”

“Things like postmortem mutilation or the way the body is posed—those could be signatures, for example.”

“Right again.” Nelson smiled. “A signature is deeply significant to the killer—and to the criminal profiler—because it arises out of some unconscious drive or obsession, and does not change in its basic essence, though it may evolve.”

A dark-haired boy in the front row raised his hand. “Evolve? What do you mean by that?”

“Well, for example, the posing of the body may become more elaborate, more detailed—the Boston Strangler’s, the Green River Killer’s, and Jack the Ripper’s victims all had certain similarities, but in all these cases the rituals escalated and become more ornate as time went on. This represents the killer becoming more at ease with what he does—he feels freer to act out his fantasy in increasing detail. Or, in a mentally ill, disorganized killer, it can represent the increasing pressure of his mental illness.”

Nelson glanced at his watch. “Okay, that’s it. Don’t forget to do the reading I’ve assigned for our next class.”

As the students filed out, Lee walked up the side aisle to where Nelson stood gathering his notes and slides. When Nelsen looked up and saw his friend, he smiled, but his smile faded when he saw Lee’s expression.

“Oh no,” he said. “There’s been another one?”

“I’m afraid so. Chuck wanted me to ask—do you think you could—”

“He wants me to consult?” Nelson sounded as though he was trying to hide his pleasure at being asked to join the investigation.

“If you’re not too busy.”

“Of course not.” He paused and studied Lee, his freckled face serious. “How do you feel about my coming on board?”

“I’d be honored. And I have a feeling we’re going to need all the help we can get.”

Detective Leonard Butts looked around Chuck Morton’s office as though he had found himself in the den of a small and rather dirty burrowing animal. He studied the chair nearest him as if calculating the number and severity of diseases he might contract by sitting in it, then lowered himself into it with an air of resignation. Lee glanced at Chuck to see if he noticed Butts’s attitude, but if he did, he didn’t react. Morton walked over to his desk and perched on the edge of it, his muscular arms folded. Nelson sat in a chair in the corner, a paper cup of coffee held between his freckled fingers. Detective Florette sat in the opposite corner, looking like he had stepped straight off the cover of
GQ
—blue striped Brooks Brothers shirt with French cuffs, black Givenchy loafers polished to a glossy sheen. They had all been waiting, somewhat uncomfortably, for Butts to appear.

“Well?” Nelson said. “What have you got?”

Morton picked up a manila envelope from his desk and tossed it to Nelson, who caught it with his left hand.

“Brooklyn,” Morton said, rubbing his eyes. “She was found Saturday. Same MO—strangulation, mutilation, left on the altar.”

Nelson raised his left eyebrow, which could signal anything from surprise to disgust. Nelson looked at the photos in the file and then turned to Lee.

“You went to the crime scene?”

“Yes. There was a difference this time: there was evidence of a struggle—a lot of it.”

Chuck rubbed his forehead wearily. “This time the pathologist said the wounds were ante-mortem.”

Nelson raised an eyebrow. “So now he’s torturing them before he kills.”

“Yeah.”

“That means either he’s restraining them physically or chemically,” Nelson mused. “Is the tox screen in yet?”

“Nope,” said Detective Butts.

Nelson stared at him.

“Detective Butts is the primary on this case,” Morton said, “since the first vic turned up in his precinct. I’ll be overseeing the investigation from here, but for day-to-day details go to him.”

Detective Butts shifted in his chair, a look of satisfaction on his broad, pockmarked face.

“Mmm,” Nelson said, placing the photos on Chuck’s desk. “What do we know about the victims?”

“The first one we know for sure was his was Marie Kelleher,” Butts replied with a glance at Lee. “A sophomore at Fordham. Nice Catholic girl, religion major, steady boyfriend, no known enemies.”

“Yeah, right,” Nelson muttered. He looked down at the stack of photographs. “What about this girl?”

Detective Florette held up the crime scene report. “Annie O’Donnell, twenty-one years old, a senior at Brooklyn College, philosophy major. Ditto with the nice Catholic girl. Boyfriend—not so steady, but seems like a nice kid.”

“So he goes for nice girls,” Nelson remarked, staring out of the grimy windows at the gray February sky. “If this Jane Doe Number Five—”

“Pamela,” Lee said.

“Right. If she’s his too, she’s probably a nice girl as well.”

“Okay,” said Morton to Lee. “What can you tell us so far?”

“Well, first of all,” Lee said, “these fantasies have been in place for a long time—way before he committed his first murder.”

Detective Butts stared at him. “So now you’re a mind reader?”

“Okay, Detective, that’s enough,” Chuck snapped. He turned to Lee. “How do you know that?”

“In part because it’s usually true of serial killers, but here in particular the crime is very specific, very ritualized. There’s been a lot of forethought and planning—it’s not in any way an impulse killing.” He glanced over at Nelson, who nodded his approval.

“Okay,” said Morton. “What else?”

“He’s likely to have a history of arson, abuse of animals, maybe a few arrests for Peeping Tom type activities—maybe even stalking. On the other hand, he may have no criminal record at all.”

“That’s not much of a help,” Butts muttered.

“We can infer a lot from the way he leaves the victims. He displays them in a very specific way—”

“No kiddin’,” Butts muttered under his breath.

“—but it’s not for us.”

“Really?” Florette said. “Then who
is
it for?”

“If we knew that we’d have him,” Nelson grumbled.

“He’s motivated by rage,” Lee said, “but it’s directed at God as much as at women. He defiles these women
before God
, so he’s taunting God as much as he’s taunting us.”

Butts leaned forward in his chair, which creaked on its ancient hinges. It was an old-fashioned office chair on rollers, the kind of heavy oak furniture common in the 1930s. Chuck’s desk sergeant had brought it into the office to accommodate the extra people. “What about hair, fiber, prints on the second girl?” he asked.

Morton shook his head. “Nothing.”

“But she put up a fight this time,” Florette pointed out.

“Not only that, but he brought her to the church conscious this time—last time he just used one as a dump site,” Butts added.

Chuck picked up the glass paperweight on his desk and tossed it lightly from one hand to the other. “We’re pretty sure he’s wearing gloves.”

Lee frowned. “Lack of forensic evidence means he’s knowledgeable in the field of criminal investigation.”

“Right,” Nelson agreed, leaning against the dirty radiator, which hissed at him in protest. “Probably reads detective magazines. Maybe even has fantasies of being a cop. You might look through your files to see who’s applied but been rejected in the last few years.”

Morton groaned. “That could take forever. Do you realize how many inquiries we have in a given year?”

“Hey, maybe he
is
a cop,” Butts suggested. When the rest of them stared at him, he said, “Look, I just don’t think we should entirely eliminate the possibility. Some of those guys are pretty weird, lemme tell you.”

“Detective Butts has a point,” Lee said. “The worst thing we can do right now is to close off any options.”

“What I don’t get,” Florette said, “is why there’s no sign of sexual molestation. I mean, the knife is very phallic—”

“But a phallic substitute,” Lee pointed out. “Since there’s no sign of penetration, I think he could be a virgin.”

Nelson raised an eyebrow.

“He’s spent his life converting any sexual thoughts he might have toward women into religious impulses,” Lee continued.

“Until he decides to kill them,” Florette pointed out.

“Which would mean we’re dealing with someone who is extremely withdrawn in his personal and social life,” Lee continued. He turned to Nelson. “He might have fantasized about being in law enforcement, but I doubt he ever acted on those fantasies. He’d be too much of an introvert.”

Nelson grunted. “Maybe.” He took a sip from a paper coffee cup, made a face, and put the cup back down on the desk.

“Not only that,” Lee went on, “but from a geographic point of view, it’s a very odd profile.”

“What do you mean?” said Florette.

“Well, usually killers choose victims within a certain radius of where they live—places where they feel comfortable. But these two locations are miles away, in different boroughs.”

“So maybe he has a job that allows him to travel,” Florette suggested. “Some kind of work having to do with churches.”

“Or it could be an attempt to cover his trail so we can’t use geographic profiling on him,” Lee mused.

“That would indicate tremendous sophistication about crime investigation on his part,” Nelson pointed out.

“What about the person who took a shot at you?” Chuck asked Lee. “Isn’t it possible that’s—”

“What?” Nelson growled, turning to Lee. “You didn’t tell me about that.”

Lee told him about the incident on Third Avenue. “But there may not be a connection,” he added. “I don’t see this guy as a shooter.”

“Yeah, that would really change the profile,” Nelson agreed.

“What else you got?” Butts asked, getting up to stretch his stubby legs. “Isn’t there
anything
?”

“He doesn’t fit neatly into any particular category of killer,” Lee said, “which makes it harder to get a fix on him.”

“But that’s not that unusual,” Nelson said.

“I’d call a sexual killer who’s a virgin pretty damn unusual,” Butts grumbled, plopping back down in his chair.

“That’s another part of the puzzle, isn’t it?” Florette responded, straightening his immaculate starched cuffs.

“Right,” said Nelson. “With a guy like this, at some point sex and violence become linked in his mind—”

“—and to religion,” Lee added.

“There’s another angle on the altar motif,” Florette pointed out. “It’s where couples are married.”

“Good point!” said Butts. He tossed an empty coffee cup toward the wastebasket and missed. With a groan, he heaved his bulky body out of his chair, plucked the cup off the floor, and deposited it in the basket.

“Yes,” Lee agreed. “And I think there’s little doubt that he’s Catholic, since both bodies were found in Catholic churches.”

“I’d agree with that,” Nelson said, “but I’m not sure I go along with the virgin thing. He could just be sexually inadequate—impotent, maybe.”

“What else can you say about him?” asked Chuck.

“He’s likely to be of a similar socioeconomic level as his victims, a middle-class Catholic—which is one reason they’d feel comfortable around him,” said Lee.

“But he’s a virgin, huh?” Butts said. “So how old is this guy—thirteen?”

“Well, he’s obviously arrested emotionally, but I’d put him in his early to mid twenties,” Lee replied, “close to the victims in age.”

“Right,” Nelson agreed. “And he lives with—”

“With his mother or another female relative,” Lee finished for him.

Chuck looked at Nelson, who was searching through the coffee cups on the desk for one that still had coffee in it.

“Of course, his chronological age could be older,” Lee mused. “For example, if an offender spends time in jail, he can emerge after a number of years at the same emotional age as when he was incarcerated.”

“You mean like Arthur Shawcross,” said Nelson.

“Exactly.”

Florette leaned back in his chair and frowned. “The Genesee River Strangler?”

“Right,” Lee replied. “He was incarcerated for fifteen years for murder, and when he got out of prison he went right back to killing—with pretty much the same maturity level as when he went in.”

“Jeez,” Butts said. “So we could be lookin’ for a middle-aged guy after all?”

“It’s possible,” Lee admitted.

“Shawcross was pretty stupid, though,” Nelson pointed out. “This guy is much smarter.”

“What about his method?” Chuck said. “Strangulation is a very up close and personal way to kill someone. I mean, there’s rage there, but it’s a pretty controlled rage.”

“I know this is a stretch,” Lee said, “but I think there’s also a clue in the way he strangles them.”

“Slowly, you mean?” Butts asked.

“Well, yes. I think there’s significance to it.”

“He wants to hold the power of life and death in his hands as long as possible,” Nelson said.

“Yes, there’s that,” Lee said, “but I think it’s also something to do with breathing.”

“What do you mean?” asked Chuck, fishing a few bottles of water out of the small refrigerator next to his desk.

“Well, maybe he has trouble breathing—a chronic condition of some kind. I know it sounds odd, but he’s suffering along with them even as he kills them.”

“What kind of chronic condition?” Butts said, holding out his hand for a bottle of water, which Chuck tossed to him.

“I don’t really know…bronchitis, allergies…asthma, maybe. He’s too young for emphysema,” Lee said.

“Interesting,” Nelson mused, “but a bit thin on evidence, don’t you think?”

“I told you it was a stretch. There’s something else,” Lee added.

The others turned to him expectantly.

“I know what he takes from them.”

“Really?” Nelson asked, leaning forward.

“He takes the crosses they wear around their necks. Her boyfriend said that Marie always wore hers, but it wasn’t on her body. And the same thing with Pamela, according to her friends. I’ll lay odds that Annie O’Donnell wore one too.”

“Taking jewelry from the victim is not at all uncommon,” Nelson pointed out, taking the bottle of water Chuck offered him.

“He didn’t take just
any
jewelry,” Lee said. “He took a cross. I think it’s significant. It may relate to the victomology—how he chooses his victims.”

Butts took a swig of Poland Spring and frowned. “Yeah? How so?”

“He’s after good Catholic girls who wear crosses around their necks.”

Lee’s cell phone beeped, indicating he had a text message. He fished around for it in his pocket, his heart pounding.

When he read the message, though, it simply said:

Relief flooded his veins like a sweet river. It was only Eddie. He had completely forgotten Eddie was trying to reach him. He was a little surprised to see Eddie sending text messages—it didn’t seem like his style—but he was glad to hear from him.

“Okay,” Butts was saying. “So all we have to do is find a loser who fantasizes a lot and lives with his mother. Why don’t we just go hang out at a Star Trek convention? You know what we got on this guy? We got bupkes—that’s what.”

Nelson smiled at him, but it wasn’t really a smile—it was a challenge.

“Well,” he said, “we’ll all just have to work harder, won’t we?”