Silent Screams (24 page)

The results from the vet in Jersey were exactly as Lee had expected. The cat had indeed been poisoned—arsenic, mixed in with canned tuna fish. “
Poor Groucho. He never could resist tuna fish
,” Lee’s mother had said on the phone. There was no way to determine who had done it, of course—but Lee didn’t have much doubt. He urged Fiona to stay at George’s and not leave the house unless she was accompanied by a policeman.

Their meeting in Chuck’s office the next day had a desultory feeling. There didn’t seem to be any way to stop the Slasher—in fact, he seemed to be hitting his stride. Chuck sent out a notice to all precinct commanders in Manhattan to be on alert, but none of them thought it would do any good. The level of vigilance was already high citywide after the attack on the World Trade Center.

Long after darkness closed in on the city, Chuck sent them all away. The mayor had called a press conference for the following day, and he had to meet with the mayor that night to catch him up on their progress—or lack of it.

As everyone was leaving, Chuck beckoned to Lee.

“Got a minute?”

“Sure—what’s up?”

Chuck looked down at his shoes.

“I’m worried about you.”

“Look, Chuck, I—”

“No, please—just hear me out, okay? I was willing to believe on some level that the attack in the subway might be unrelated to this case, but after the incident in Jersey, I’ve been thinking long and hard about this, and we’ve got to face it, Lee: he’s after you now.”

“But why me in particular?”

“That’s what I’ve been asking myself, and I don’t have any answers. But it’s getting too dangerous for you. I wish you’d just—”

“I know what you’re going to say. Now let me say something. I
need
this case, okay? If we allow him to win, I’ll never be able to get over it. Besides, we don’t know for sure that whoever is after me is really the Slasher.”

Chuck folded his arms. “No, we don’t. But what do you think the odds are?”

“I don’t know—just like I don’t know how he knows the details of my sister’s disappearance, or even if he does. But I have to be the one to find out. You can see that, can’t you?”

Chuck looked down at his shoes again. They gleamed like a new penny.

“For God’s sake, Lee, put it all together. The gunshot, the text message, the—”

“Look, just give me a couple more days, okay?” Lee said. “Please—I’m begging you.”

Chuck bit his lower lip and looked out the window at the darkened city. “Okay, okay,” he said. “Christ, even in school you could always get your way in the end. I’ll let you stay—but for God’s sake, Lee, be careful, will you?”

“I promise.”

What neither of them said was that all the vigilance in the world couldn’t keep the Slasher from making his next move.

Lee went home and played the piano for two hours straight. He spent the entire first hour thrashing through a Bach partita he was working on. It was gritty, sweaty work—the Devil himself had taken up residence in the left-hand passages. What was really irritating was that he could just imagine Bach himself playing the damn thing without so much as a minute of practice.

“Goddamn genius,” he muttered as he grappled with a knotty modulation. No matter what he played, though, the same song kept intruding, running through his head:
I’ll take Manhattan
…

He made a pot of coffee and drank it until his teeth ached, as he looked through his case notes. After several hours of this, he had to stop, but he was too caffeinated to sleep, so he turned on the radio. A Verdi opera was playing, and he wasn’t in the mood for tremulous tenors and overwrought sopranos, so he tried television.

He watched the Turner Classic Movies’s rerun of
Gaslight
for a while, but Charles Boyer’s sadistic, tormenting husband routine irritated him. If only villains announced themselves so baldly, he thought. If only their evil intentions were so obviously displayed. He wanted to grab Ingrid Bergman and shake her, lovely as she was, scream at her to wake up and realize what was going on.

“Trying out a little projection, Campbell?” he muttered as he changed channels restlessly.
Well, it’s always easier from the outside looking in, isn’t it? Everything is easier—spotting people’s neuroses, destructive patterns, self-delusions. Much harder to spot your own. Physician, heal thyself, indeed
.

There was nothing else good on the television, so around 2
A.M
. he sat down at his computer and logged on to the Internet. The moment he typed in his password, an instant message appeared in the upper left-hand corner of his monitor. Lee’s chest tightened when he saw the name on the screen: Holyman.

Anger flooded Lee’s body, making his stomach tighten.
So he
was
behind Groucho’s death
. He decided not to give the man the satisfaction of a response.

Lee leaned back in his chair. This man was trying to get him—but had told him nothing important, except that he had done his research about Lee’s family. He counted to ten and typed.

Lee wondered if this was just a put-on. Was he saying this to set up an insanity defense later?
I hear voices from God ordering me to kill, Your Honor
. David Berkowitz—a.k.a. Son of Sam—had tried it, claiming his evil impulses were the result of urgings from the neighbor’s rottweiler, but the jury hadn’t bought it. Later he confessed the dog voice thing had occurred to him after his second killing. Berkowitz was highly intelligent, and so was this man.

Lee decided to go fishing, to play along. Maybe he’d find out something.

Lee wondered if Holyman had something to do with Laura’s death. He doubted it—though Laura fit the victim profile, it had been over five years since she disappeared. He wouldn’t have taken five years between killings—unless, of course, he was in prison for something else. What, though? This was not the kind of person who would be a “common criminal”—definitely not drugs or alcohol. He tried a tactic to appeal to the man’s sense of isolation.

The mayor stood on the platform, the sun reflecting off the bald spot on his head. Camera crews jostled with each other to get the best angle, the closest shot. People in the crowd craned their necks and stood on tiptoe, climbing up onto the bases of street lamps, straining to see better. Chuck Morton stood behind him and to the left, next to the Manhattan DA and the police commissioner. The police presence on the street was heavy. Patrolmen dotted every corner, and there were still a few National Guardsmen roaming around in their military outfits.

There was an oddly festive atmosphere in the air. Ice cream vendors wheeled their carts down Park Row, men selling brightly colored helium balloons plied their way through the crowd, and there were pretzel and hot dog vendors on every corner, all of them doing a brisk trade. After a cold, dark February, the temperature had shot up to nearly sixty degrees. Lee could smell coconut oil, bringing with it the incongruent memory of summer days at the beach. He and Butts stood at the edge of the crowd, near the iron gate leading into the park.

Lee couldn’t help thinking of the scene at public hangings, or the crowd that surrounded the guillotine as Madame Defarge calmly knitted her way through the carnage.
Knit one, purl two
. He suspected most of the people here didn’t believe they were in danger from the Slasher, and that they were just attracted by the event itself.
Oh, look, Harriet, the mayor’s giving a press conference open to the public. Let’s grab the kids and head on down
. After 9/11, people seemed to gather in groups in public more often, as if there truly
was
safety in numbers.

“What do you think?” Butts said, sucking on a salted pretzel. “Is this guy full of it or what?”

“Well,” Lee said, “I guess we’ll see.”

The mayor raised his arms, and the buzzing in the crowd subsided. He looked out across the rows of expectant, upturned faces, eager for him to lead them once more, to recite magic words of comfort, once again restoring order out of chaos. The crowd grew silent, and Lee could hear the rushing of the wind through the caverns of lower Manhattan, picking up speed as it crossed over the flat expanse of New York Harbor, to wind its way through the twisted labyrinth of downtown skyscrapers.

A gust of wind lifted a tuft of the mayor’s thinning hair, and he put a hand up to stop it, then seemed to forget all about his hair as the shifting wind brought with it the thin, acrid smell of smoke from the still smoldering ruins a few blocks to the south. The mayor hunched over the microphone and tapped it. There was a buzz, a short, high-pitched burst of feedback, and then silence as the sound crew adjusted their dials. The mayor cleared his throat, and the crowd leaned in to hear his words.

“My fellow citizens,” he began, adjusting the mike stand, “this has been the most trying time in this great city’s history. The events of five months ago proved that New York is indeed the greatest city in the world.”

He paused for the wave of applause that rose from the crowd below, cresting upward and echoing off the narrow streets. “Now, once again, we are challenged by another kind of terrorism—this time violent actions of a lone, mentally disturbed individual. But this great city survived the worst attack ever on American soil, and we will not be cowed by the evil deeds of a single, psychotic individual!”

Again the pause for applause. The mayor removed a stringy strand of hair from his forehead and placed it back on this top of his head. He knew where the applause breaks were in his speech, and his audience didn’t let him down—they clapped long and hard, with a few cheers and whistles sprinkled in.

“And so,” he continued, “I am creating a special task force to oversee the apprehension of the man known as the Slasher.”

More applause. Lee looked at Chuck, standing behind the mayor, his normally impassive face grim. He shifted from one foot to the other, coughed, and looked away.
He’s not enjoying this
, Lee thought. It was clear that his friend did not like the mayor. He wondered if the mayor knew this. If he did, he was too professional to show it.

After introducing everyone, he stepped back and clapped a hand on Chuck’s shoulder. Lee saw Morton stiffen at the gesture. He managed to force out a stony smile, but Lee wasn’t fooled. The mayor didn’t seem to notice, though, and Lee concluded that he hadn’t gotten where he was by paying attention to every little slight. Like most successful politicians, the mayor had control over his emotions in public. He managed somehow to look both serious and hopeful.

“I am confident that Captain Morton will be successful in leading the elite task force to the successful capture of this heinous criminal.”

“Elite task force, huh?” Butts muttered under his breath. “Wait till the wife hears that one.”

“What does this mean for us?” Lee asked Chuck later, as the three of them walked uptown, passing the Chinese merchants piling empty wooden crates and bags of garbage on the narrow curb of Mott Street, the fading sun casting a golden glow over the jumble of streets and alleyways.

“Not much. More paperwork, more of City Hall breathing down my neck, but it’s really just a political gesture. He doesn’t want the FBI barging in, for one thing, and so he’s fluffing up his feathers and strutting around the yard a little.”

“Politics,” Butts said, kicking at an empty carton.

“I think I’ll leave that up to the mayor,” Chuck said.

“I just hope he does right by us,” Lee remarked.

“What I want to know is where the
hell
is Nelson?” Chuck fumed. “Does he do this often?” he asked Lee. “I mean, just drop out of sight like this?”

“Since the death of his wife his behavior has been pretty unpredictable,” Lee replied.

Chuck kicked at a discarded soda can on the sidewalk in front of him.

“Well, he really picked a bad time to go on a bender, if that’s what he’s doing.”

Lee looked over his shoulder at the thin trail of sunlight dipping in and out between the buildings. He was afraid something had happened to Nelson, but he didn’t want to say that to Chuck, who had enough to worry about right now. But he knew he needed to fill Morton in on what happened last night.

“The killer contacted me last night—or at least I think it was him,” he said.

Chuck stopped walking.

“What? How?”

Lee told Chuck and Butts about the instant messages of the previous night, including the threat to “strike closer to home” next time.

“Wonder what he meant by that?” Butts mused.

“I’ve been trying to figure it out. Maybe he meant closer to me?”

“But he just
did
Manhattan,” Butts pointed out.

“Or maybe he means
his
home,” Chuck suggested.

“But that wouldn’t make sense in terms of the patterns of most serial killers. His first victim would be the one closest to his residence. Besides, the message was meant for me.”

“Jeez,” said Butts, shaking his head as he stepped over a wayward garbage bag on the sidewalk.

“Can we trace him, do you think?” Lee asked Chuck.

“I’ll check with the folks in the Computer Crimes Division, but I think there are ways he can hide his trail, if he’s smart.”

“Plus, we don’t know for sure if this is him,” Butts said. “Could be a copycat, a wannabe.”

“True,” Lee agreed, but in his heart he didn’t believe it.

“I’ll send the guys in Computer Crimes over later to check out your machine and see if they can trace the source of the messages,” Chuck said.

“Did you get the test results from the communion wine yet?” Lee asked.

“Yeah,” Chuck said. “The report came in this morning: zip, nada.”

“No blood?”

“Not even very much wine. It was a pretty watered-down Zinfandel, according to the lab. That’s it.”

Lee couldn’t decide if the Slasher was trying to throw them off, or if he was just becoming more disorganized, as the dismemberment of poor Sophia might suggest.

“What about your contact who put you in touch with that homeless guy? Anything from him lately?” Butts asked.

“No, he seems to have gone underground.” The truth was that Lee was worried about Eddie too. It was unusual for him to be out of touch for this long.

But when Lee returned to his apartment, there was a message on the machine from Eddie.

“Hey there, Boss Man. Good news! I may have a real break in the case. I’ll call back later. So long for now.” Lee wished Eddie would call his cell phone, but Eddie hated cell phones. He didn’t like answering machines either, and only grudgingly left messages on them.

Feeling relieved that Eddie was okay, Lee sat down at the piano and warmed up on a few jazz standards before tackling a new Haydn sonata. The left hand was a series of octave arpeggios, and soon the back of his hand ached from the prolonged stretching. After thirty minutes or so he took a break and poured himself a Rolling Rock. A favorite aunt of his had always kept a few cold ones for him at her house, and he bought them in memory of her.

Standing at the kitchen counter, he looked out the window, across the yard behind his apartment into the lighted windows of the neighboring building. A middle-aged couple was sitting at their kitchen table, having dinner. The man lowered his head and said something to the woman, who threw back her head and laughed, the overhead light shining on her upturned face.

Next time I’ll strike closer to home.

What the hell did that mean?
Closer to home…whose home?

He took a drink and felt the cold liquid slide down his throat.

Closer to home…

Suddenly it hit him: Closer to home
did
mean Lee’s home, but not Manhattan—it was his family that was in danger! He felt like kicking himself for not realizing it sooner.

He picked up the telephone and dialed his mother’s number. She answered after three rings.

“Hello?” She sounded irritated and a little sleepy. She often fell asleep watching the local news, though she would never admit it.

“Hi, Mom—it’s me.”

“Oh, hello, dear. Isn’t it a bit late to be calling?”

Lee looked at the ceramic clock over the stove, a present from Fiona on one of her many trips to Mexico. The design was a sunburst in primary colors, with a Mayan-style face mask in the center. The time was twelve minutes after ten.

“It’s not that late, Mom. It’s a little after ten.”

“All right,” she said. “Is this something that can’t wait until tomorrow? I’ve been up since six.” That was so like her—since he had caught her asleep, it was important now for her to save face by telling him now how early she had risen.

“No, it can’t wait. Is Kylie at her dad’s house?”

“Of course. He picked her up when he went off shift at eight.”

“Why aren’t you there too? I thought I told you—”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Stan’s with me.”

“Did they get back safely?”

“What do you mean?”

George Callahan lived about fifteen minutes away from Fiona, in Lambertville, a nearby town along the Delaware River.

“I mean, did they get back to his house okay?”

“I don’t know—I suppose so. Why do you ask? What’s going on?”

Lee debated as to how much he should tell her.

“I just want to make sure Kylie is okay.”

“Why wouldn’t she be?” He could hear suspicion creep into her voice.

“Mom, would you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Would you make sure your burglar alarm system is turned on?”

After Laura disappeared, Lee had bought his mother an elaborate, state-of-the-art alarm system, but she rarely used it.

“Why?”

“Will you just do that for me?”

“Stan already turned it on. I wish you’d tell me what’s going on.”

“Look, just do it—okay? Please? I’ll explain later.”

Her heard air escaping from her nostrils. His mother always sighed through her nose—a tight, disapproving sound.

“All
right
. You know those policemen are still watching us all the time, don’t you?”

“They’re watching me, too, Mom.”

“Then you know how it feels.”

“I’ll call back tomorrow, and we’ll talk about it, okay?” He was anxious to call George’s house to see if everything was okay there.

Another sound of escaping air, a thin hissing noise. “Very well. But I wish you wouldn’t be so
mysterious
all the time.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I’ll call you tomorrow.” To press her any more now would just backfire. “Good night. Talk to you tomorrow.”

“Very well. Good night, Lee.”

He hung up and speed dialed George Callahan’s number. George answered on the first ring.

“Hello?” He sounded cheerful—probably on his third beer. George wasn’t a heavy drinker, but he liked to knock back a few after a week of double shifts at the hospital.

“Hi, George, it’s Lee.”

“Heya, fella. How are you doing?”

“I’m fine. I—uh, I was wondering how you guys are doing?”

“You mean Bunny and me?” George called his daughter Bunny, and had ever since she was a baby. Lee couldn’t remember how it had started—something to do with bunny pajamas Laura had given Kylie on her first Christmas, just like the ones Laura had as a child. “We’re fine, just great. I’d let you talk to her, only she’s in bed now. School day tomorrow, you know.”

“Sure, sure. So she’s okay?”

“Fine. Hey, listen, don’t worry. The cops are still keeping an eye on us.”

“Good, good. Is your alarm system on?”

“Yeah, sure. Any breaks in the case?”

“Not yet, but we’re working on it.”

“You’ll get him. I know you will. Hey, let’s have a cookout at my place one of these days, huh?” George said. He loved entertaining, and liked to fire up his barbeque and grill steaks.

“Sounds great.”

“Good. It’s a deal, then.”

“Sure, sure.” Lee wasn’t about to tell George the whole story, any more than he would tell his mother.

“Okay, then, buddy, I’ll see you soon.” Lee heard the sound of a sports broadcaster in the background, and could tell George wanted to get him off the phone so he could watch the sports news.