Silent Screams (4 page)

Lee wrapped his knee-length tweed coat tighter around himself and headed for the subway. Like so many of the nicer things he owned, the Scottish tweed was a present from his mother, brought back from a recent trip to Edinburgh. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in a store window, his haggard face looking mismatched with the elegant coat.

He ducked his head low against the biting wind and hurried onward. At times like this, there was one man he could turn to, who always seemed to know what to say, what to do. He smiled as he slipped through the turnstile to make a trip he had made a hundred times before, during his student days at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He needed to see his old mentor: the irascible, brilliant, moody, and thoroughly misanthropic John Paul Nelson.

Professor John Paul Farragut Nelson was not a happy man.

“Good God, Lee! Can’t you give it a rest? You just got out of the hospital, for Chrissakes!”

Nelson savagely stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette in the glass ashtray on his desk and stalked over to the window. His office at John Jay College was spacious but cluttered, with books and research papers stacked on the floor on both sides of his desk.

Lee shifted in his chair and looked down at his shoes. He had expected a lecture, but his old professor was more worked up than he had anticipated. Nelson jammed one freckled hand into his right pants pocket and ran the other one through his wavy auburn hair.

“Do you
really
think you can be of any help in this case?”

“Well—”

“You had a
nervous breakdown
, for God’s sake! And you think you can come waltzing back to work a few weeks later as if nothing ever happened?”

Lee stared at the floor. He knew Nelson well enough to know that when he got like this, arguing with him would only infuriate him more, like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Nelson actually resembled a bull at this moment, with his short, thick body tensed, nostrils dilated, his face as red as Lee had ever seen it—redder even than after an evening of Nelson’s legendary bar crawling and untold shots of single-malt scotch.

A tall, skinny student with a punk hairstyle and a silver nose ring wandered past the office and poked his head in the door—but after one look at Nelson’s face, quickly withdrew. Lee watched as the kid’s spiky, bright orange hair disappeared down the hall. He looked back at Nelson, who was rummaging through his desk—probably looking for cigarettes. He never seemed to be able to remember which drawer he kept them in. Lee had always been a little mystified by the interest the celebrated Professor Nelson took in him, an interest that began the first day he took his seat in Nelson’s Criminal Psychology 101, nicknamed “Creeps for Geeks.” It was a required course, even for the technicians who investigated crime scenes, the CSIs who were generally thought of as nerds by the other students.

Nelson’s teaching style reflected his personality. Imperious, brilliant, and impatient, he had a temper that could sweep up as suddenly as a storm over the waters of Killarney Bay, where he had traced his ancestry back for centuries. It was rumored that his father had been a member of the notorious Westies, a murderous Irish gang in Hell’s Kitchen that flourished in the middle of the twentieth century. It was said their ruthlessness and brutality made the Mafia look like choirboys.

In spite of Nelson’s reputation for remoteness, his interest in Lee had been immediate and fatherly. Lee thought maybe it was because he was a good ten years older than the average John Jay student, or perhaps it was their similar Celtic heritage. Nelson treated Lee with a kindness he did not display to the other students. In fact, he didn’t seem to regard the human race as worthy of the kind of affection he usually reserved for his Irish setter, Rex. Nelson doted on the animal and spoiled him as extravagantly as any Upper East Side lapdog.

Nelson’s interest in Lee’s career continued after he left John Jay to join the NYPD as its only criminal profiler, an appointment Nelson helped make possible. The bar crawling continued, as did the late-night discussions of German composers, French philosophers, and Celtic poets.

Now, however, Nelson did not appear at all pleased with his prize student.

“I thought you had more sense than that, I really did,” he said as he lit the cigarette he had dug out of the recesses of his desk.

Lee couldn’t help noticing that Nelson’s hands were trembling. Taking a deep drag from the cigarette, Nelson absently twisted the wedding ring on his left hand. His wife had been dead for nearly three months now, but he continued to wear the ring. Lee wondered why. To keep potential mates away? Out of loyalty and devotion to her memory? Nelson rarely discussed Karen, but her picture hung in the living room of his spacious apartment, showing her fresh faced and smiling from the stern of a sailing yacht, her short brown curls blowing in the wind—with no hint of the cancer that was to gnaw stealthily away at her in the years to come.

The wind seemed to leave Nelson’s sails. He blew out a puff of smoke and sat down behind his desk, linking his hands behind his neck.

“All right, lad,” he said. “What is so compelling about this case that it can’t wait?”

Lee was used to Nelson’s abrupt mood changes.

“I just have a feeling I can help here, that I—well, there’s something about this killer that I can
feel
, that I understand.”

Nelson leaned forward and studied the younger man.

“I don’t know that that’s necessarily a good thing.”

“Yes, I know. I realize the danger of—”

“Of compromising your objectivity.”

Now it was Lee’s turn to be angry.

“This whole notion of objectivity is a fantasy, you know.”

Nelson looked startled, but Lee continued.

“There is no such thing! It’s a comforting fiction created by people who don’t want to get too close to things that go bump in the night.”

Nelson took another drag from his cigarette. “If you’re suggesting that it’s relative, I would agree with you.”

“No, what I’m suggesting is that it doesn’t exist
at all
. The whole idea is some outdated Age of Reason notion, some classical model that went out with powdered wigs and knee breeches—only we just haven’t realized it yet. It’s an impossible ideal.”

Nelson grunted and stubbed his cigarette out on the floor. “Impossible or not, as a criminal investigator you owe it to your victims—and to yourself—to be as objective as possible. Otherwise your conclusions become clouded by emotion.”

Lee felt his shoulders go rigid as he looked at Nelson. “What are you saying?”

Nelson held his gaze. “I think you know.”

Lee didn’t reply, and the silence between them lay thick as the layers of books and manuscripts stuffed everywhere in the cluttered office. He glanced at the brass busts of Beethoven and Bach on Nelson’s desk. Beethoven’s face was tragic: the tightly compressed lips and broad nose, the stormy, tortured eyes under a mane of wild hair; the stubborn chin, jutting out defensively against the world, as if bracing himself for what Fate was to throw at him…the picture of determination, the triumph of human will in adversity. How different from the bourgeois contentment of Bach, with his big nose and face ringed by a wig of riotous Baroque curls. Nelson had a particular fondness for Beethoven. He had read Lee excerpts from the Heiligenstadt Testament, Beethoven’s tragic letter to his brother after learning of his impeding deafness.

Lee laid a hand on the bust of Beethoven, the metal cold and hard under his palm. “You think this is about my sister, don’t you?”

Nelson raised his left eyebrow. “This victim is about the same age Laura was when she…” he looked away as if embarrassed.

Lee’s grip on the bust tightened. “When she died,” he said.

Even though Laura’s body had never been found, Lee was certain that his sister was dead. He had known it from the very day of her disappearance, so finally and irrevocably that the countless questions and speculations from well-meaning friends, family, and news reporters became intolerable.
“She’s dead!”
he wanted to scream at them.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
But his mother’s denial was like a wall of granite between them.

He needed no such pretense around Nelson, who understood the inside of a criminal’s mind better than anyone Lee knew. Looking unblinkingly at hard human truths was what the criminal psychologist did, his raison d’être.

“She
is
dead, you know,” Lee said, his voice as steady as he could manage. “And like it or not, to some degree, for me every case is about Laura.”

Nelson sighed. “All right. I just think maybe you’re getting in too deep too soon.”

Lee paced the small room impatiently. “I know I can
see into
this killer, if I can only get a chance! I’m already beginning to see his patterns at work—”

“What patterns? There’s only been one body.”

He stopped pacing and faced Nelson. “Oh, no, that’s where you’re wrong. There’s another one—I’m sure of it.”

“I didn’t hear any—” Nelson put his hand to his forehead. “Wait a minute—there was a girl out in Queens a few weeks ago, a Jane Doe. Is that the one you mean?”

“Yes,” Lee said. “They called her ‘Jane Doe Number Five.’ I’m certain the two are linked.”

“Same signature?”

“Not exactly, but—”

“Wasn’t the girl in Queens found outdoors—not far from Greenlawn Cemetery, if I remember?”

“Yes, but she wasn’t far from a church, and I’m convinced that he would have left her there if something hadn’t stopped him.”

Nelson rubbed his chin, thick with reddish-brown beard stubble.

“I’ll be damned. I wonder if there are others.”

“I don’t think so. The Queens killing was hurried, opportunistic. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was completely unplanned. The one yesterday was much more organized, very carefully thought out. And he—” Lee paused and looked at Nelson.

“He what?”

“It hasn’t been released to the public, but he carved her up.”

Nelson sucked in a large quantity of smoke and flicked cigarette ash into a solid green jade ashtray he had brought back from Turkey.

“Go on,” he said quietly.

“The words to the Lord’s Prayer—or at least the beginning of it. Post mortem, thank God.”

“Jesus.”

“That took some time to do.”

Nelson rubbed a hand over his face. “God, Lee, I’m still afraid you’ll be getting in over your head on this one. Are you taking your medication?”

Lee fished a bottle of pills from his jacket and held them in front of Nelson’s nose. Nelson studied the bottle.

“Not much of a dosage. When Karen was sick I was on twice that much.”

Lee put the bottle back in his pocket. “This stuff is expensive.”

Nelson gave a laugh—a short, mirthless puff of air. “Tell me about it.”

Lee looked out the window at the cars and pedestrians on Tenth Avenue, everyone hustling up the avenue—jostling, honking, competing for space in the rush hour traffic, all in a big hurry to get somewhere, to be part of the endless, restless motion that is New York City. He remembered being one of those people, before depression came along, lifted him off his feet, and slammed him facedown into the pavement.

The view from down there was different. It was strange to look up and see people still hurrying along with their lives intact, while for him just getting out of bed was an act of enormous willpower. Now, looking down at them on the street below, he had the same feeling of distance, of being an alien in a world where everyone except him seemed to know where they were going. He envied them, but he also felt that he knew something they could never know. He had seen into the very center of things, into hell itself, and come back alive somehow—damaged, perhaps, but alive.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Nelson standing behind him. Was it Lee’s imagination, or were his blue eyes moist? It was hard to tell with the light coming from behind him.

“I can see that nothing I say is going to stop you. So let me just say this: be careful, Lee.”

“I will.”

“Good. Now go out and get that son of a bitch.”

Lee looked down at the street again. Somewhere, in the throng of people, with a face that could blend into any crowd, a pair of footsteps clicked along the sidewalk next to a hundred others, footsteps belonging to a murderer with only one thing on his mind: his next victim. Lee silently vowed to do whatever he could—at whatever cost—to get between that killer and his goal.

“You know,” Detective Butts remarked, “all this hocus-pocus stuff doesn’t solve crimes. Shoe leather does.”

“Right,” Lee answered. He had heard it all before, and was tired of defending himself to cops. He wasn’t an official member of the police force—he had not attended the academy, and carried only an ID card identifying him as a civilian consultant to the NYPD. He was keenly aware of the separation between him and the gun-toting members of the police force. People like him were not necessarily included in the tight, exclusive circle of the Brotherhood of Blue.

It was the next morning, and they were standing in front of an examination room at the medical examiner’s office, waiting for the pathologist who had done Marie Kelleher’s autopsy. She entered hurriedly, apologizing for her lateness. Gretchen Rilke was a rather glamorous-looking woman, blue-eyed and pink-cheeked, with thick, dyed blond hair and a suggestive lilt of Alpine hills in her accent.

“I was in a conference call that went late,” she said, pushing a strand of implausibly yellow hair from her eyes. With one hand she pulled the body from the morgue freezer compartment, the oversized drawer sliding smoothly on its metal rollers. With the other hand she pulled back the sheet covering Marie’s body just enough to expose her neck. In spite of the bluish tinge to her pale skin, it was still hard to think of her as dead.

“You see the bruises?” Gretchen asked.

Lee looked at the thick collar of purple discoloration that ringed Marie’s neck. It appeared darker now, which could be a result of the harsh fluorescent lighting—but he knew that bruises could deepen or even appear after death. Now, under the bright lights, he could see several separate bands of bruising.

“I see,” he said.

“This indicates that he repositioned his fingers, probably several times.”

“So he didn’t kill her all at once?” Butts asked.

The pathologist shook her head. “No. There’s no crushed cartilage, and no serious damage to the larynx.”

“So,” Lee said, “that means he applies minimum force—enough to make her lose consciousness. And then he waits until she comes to and starts all over again.”

“That scenario would be consistent with the physical evidence,” Dr. Rilke agreed.

“Shit,” Butts muttered. “This is one sick bastard.”

“Okay,” Lee said, almost to himself. “He’s not in a hurry. This means that he’s comfortable where he is—that he’s not worried about getting caught. He’s killing them somewhere other than the church. And no sign of sexual assault?”

“Right,” Dr. Rilke answered.

“And no sign of a struggle?”

“Her fingernails aren’t even broken, so she didn’t have time to fight back. There are no defensive knife wounds, so I’m guessing he took that out after she was already subdued.”

Lee gulped in some air, avoiding breathing through his nose. “So the carving was postmortem?”

“That would be consistent with the amount of bleeding—or lack of it,” she replied. “On the other hand…”

“What?” Lee said, his stomach twisting around itself. He swallowed hard. He hated visiting the morgue.

“Well, he didn’t carve that deeply, so it’s just possible it was done while she was still alive.”

Lee felt his stomach give a heave. He swallowed again and concentrated on taking deep breaths.

“How would he get her to stay still, though?” Butts asked.

“There were no signs of ligature around her wrists or ankles, right?” Lee asked.

“No,” Rilke answered. “But she might have been too weak to struggle by that time.”

“Any idea what he used?” Butts asked.

“Nothing fancy. An ordinary kitchen paring knife would do the job. Something with a pretty short blade—probably a couple of inches at most.”

“Could it have been a scalpel?”

“The wounds are too jagged for that—even in unskilled hands, a scalpel would do a neater job.”

“Too bad we can’t use handwriting analysis on this,” Butts remarked.

“No, I doubt there would be a correlation,” Lee agreed, “although there might be something about the way he forms certain letters…”

“It’s not much of a sample to go on,” Dr. Rilke pointed out.

None of them wanted to say what they were all thinking: the last thing they wanted was to have a larger sample, because that would mean having another victim.

“No prints at all?” Lee asked.

“No,” said Rilke. “We superglued the body—nothing. He must have worn gloves.”

“Supergluing” meant using cyanoacrylate (superglue) to develop latent prints that might not otherwise be visible.

“We gotta get going,” Butts said, looking at his watch. “The parents in Jersey are expecting us.”

“Okay, thank you,” Lee said to Gretchen, who smiled grimly.

“Good luck.”

“Thanks,” he replied, thinking,
We’ll need it
.

Forty minutes later Lee and Butts were seated next to each other on the DeCamp bus to Nutley, New Jersey. As the bus rumbled out of the Lincoln Tunnel and onto the corkscrew stretch of highway leading up the hill past the town of Weehawken, Lee turned to look across the river at Manhattan. The mid-morning sun lingered low in the eastern horizon, lurking behind the buildings, its furtive rays refracted by the glass skyscrapers of Midtown. The river appeared perfectly still and opaque under the hazy gray February sky.

Marie Kelleher’s parents had already come into the city once to identify their daughter’s body, and Chuck Morton, trying to spare them further grief and stress, had dispatched Lee and Butts out to the couple’s house in Nutley to interview them.

Lee leaned back in his seat and stretched his legs out under the empty seat in front of him. The DeCamp bus was expensive, but it was comfortable and quiet. It wasn’t crowded at this hour; they were traveling in the opposite direction of the commuters headed into the city. The few people scattered around the bus were reading, staring out the window, or napping. Talking on cell phones was forbidden, according to the sign behind the driver. Thick block letters warned that passengers who disobeyed could be ejected from the bus.

“Good old-fashioned detective work—
that’s
what solves crimes,” Butts remarked as he opened the magazine in his lap and leafed through it. “Yep,” he murmured, “that’s what it’s all about: knockin’ on doors, gathering evidence.”

Lee gazed out the window as the gray granite cliffs of Weehawken whizzed by. He’d heard this line before, many times, not just from beat cops and guys like Butts, but also at John Jay. The culture of law enforcement had little patience for what most cops considered the “touchy-feely” aspect of crime solving. Most cops were not comfortable around profilers, any more than they were comfortable around psychiatrists.

“It’s not that I think it doesn’t figure into the equation,” Butts said, staring down at a print ad promising whiter teeth. The woman in the picture grinned up at them, her parted lips displaying a row of broad, perfectly even teeth that gleamed like ivory dominoes. “But it’s really all about evidence in the end, you know? Cold, hard evidence—
that’s
what catches criminals.”

Lee didn’t reply. They
had
no evidence so far: no hair, no fibers, no DNA—nothing. He didn’t feel optimistic about getting any, either. This killer would only get better at covering his tracks as time went on.

Detective Butts was leafing through the magazine, his bulbous head bent low over the pages. Lee couldn’t help liking the man, in spite of his bluntness—or maybe because of it. He was like a lumbering old bulldog—grumpy, moody, eccentric—and yet Lee had the feeling he was someone you could count on in a crisis.

“What did you find out about that broken lock in the church basement?” he asked.

Butts looked up from the magazine. “The maintenance staff didn’t know anything about a broken lock, and no one I talked to in administration remembered making the call. But sure enough, there was one down there when they looked, so someone must have known about it.”

“Hmm,” Lee said. “That’s interesting.”

“Coincidence, you think?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

Nutley was not a long ride—about thirty minutes, with the light traffic they encountered traveling westward—and soon they were trudging from the bus stop up the hill to the modest middle-class neighborhood where the Kellehers lived. The house itself was a tidy little white clapboard structure, with green awnings over the windows and a small wooden windmill on the front lawn.
Nothing looks its best this time of year
, Lee thought as they walked up the narrow sidewalk to the front door. The grass in front of the house was brown and windswept, and even the little windmill looked desolate and abandoned in the dull late winter light.

The Kellehers were expecting them, and they were soon seated on opposite ends of the living room sofa, cradling cups of instant coffee in their hands. Their hosts sat opposite them in matching wing chairs. A fake electric log gave off an eerie red light in the hearth behind them.

Mrs. Kelleher had a face like a deflated muffin—as though someone had taken a pin to it. Her flesh puckered softly, gathering under her eyes in doughy little pouches, lying in crinkled pockets around her small, pursed mouth, the flesh sinking into itself in tiny, concave crevices. Lee figured her for no older than sixty, but knew without asking that she was a longtime smoker. The room reeked of cigarettes.

Her husband was as square and hard as she was fleshy. Short and broad of shoulder, he had the rugged build of a miner or a construction worker. Wisps of curly graying hair clung to the top of his big, square Irish head. A road map of spidery red blood vessels sprouted on either side of his straight, high-ridged nose, but his blue eyes were clear. Lee concluded that the broken blood vessels were more likely from excessive sun and exertion than alcohol. Or, if he was a drinker, he was off the bottle now.

“Can you think of any reason that your daughter might have been a target? Anything at all?” Butts asked them. The opening condolences were out of the way, and he was zeroing in on the heart of the matter with his usual forthrightness—or tactlessness.

Brian Kelleher cleared his throat and looked down at his wife. “We’re just simple people,” he said in a throaty, faintly accented voice. “We’ve never been associated with bad people—you know, criminal types.” A wave of stale tobacco floated from his clothing, the remnants of many cigarettes, and Lee realized that he, too, was a smoker.

“What makes you think we’d know our daughter’s killer?” Mrs. Kelleher asked, her eyes wide with anxiety. “We don’t know people like that.”

Butts was fidgeting with his notebook, and his eyes roamed the room restlessly. “We’re not saying you do,” he replied. “It’s just that sometimes people remember seeing and hearing something that can later be useful in an investigation. Can you think of anything that might stand out as strange or unusual in your daughter’s life—especially in the last few weeks or so?”

The Kellehers appeared to consider his question, but to Lee it looked as if they were merely marking time. They frowned as if in concentration, studied their hands, and looked around the room. Finally Mrs. Kelleher spoke.

“I can’t think of anything. Can you, dear?” she said to her husband. Mr. Kelleher looked at his wife—clearly, he took his cues from her.

He shook his big square head sadly. “Not really. Marie was a straight-A student, you know,” he added, with a glance at his wife.

“Did you ever see her with anyone strange or unusual?” Butts asked. “I mean, anyone who set off alarm bells or anything?”

The couple looked indignant, as if he had called their dead daughter’s virtue into question.

“Oh, Lordy, no,” Mrs. Kelleher replied. “She was dating that nice boy. He was respectful. We liked him, didn’t we, dear?” she said to her husband, who nodded obediently.

“He told us that he thought she might be seeing someone else,” Butts said.

“What do you mean?” Mrs. Kelleher demanded. Her soft, round face resembled a recently vacated couch cushion.

“Did you know anything about another boyfriend?” Butts asked.

Mrs. Kelleher’s prim face puckered like a prune. “No, of course not! Marie wasn’t that kind of girl.”

“What kind of girl is that?” Lee asked.

“The kind of girl who would be seeing two men at once, of course,” she snapped back. “Marie wouldn’t do that.”

“Because she was a good girl?” Lee said.

“Because she was a good
Catholic
girl. And, I might add,” she said, leaning forward and placing a plump hand on Lee’s arm, “we both trust in the good Lord to bring her killer to justice. We know he’s watching over us, and that he will help you capture this evil, evil man.”

“I guess He was looking the other way when your daughter was murdered,” Butts muttered under his breath.

“Excuse me?” Mrs. Kelleher said, her little button eyes bright with suspicion.

Lee felt sour distaste gathering in his mouth. Brian and Francis Kelleher held their faith in front of them like a banner. He recognized the smugness lurking behind her eyes: even devastated as she was by grief, Mrs. Kelleher’s voice had the sanctimonious tone of the true believer. These people brandished their beliefs like a weapon. One sweep of the sword of their faith opened a swath between them and the world of nonbelievers—a swift and tidy demarcation.

It set his teeth on edge and angered him beyond reason. He didn’t know why—perhaps he heard echoes of his mother’s stalwart stoicism and superiority. It was hubris in the guise of humility, close-mindedness masquerading as wisdom.

He knew he would have to overcome his distaste, and tried to arrange his face in a proper attitude of sympathy and concern.

“You know, my wife and I worked long and hard to raise our girl with solid Christian values,” Mr. Kelleher said, as if reciting a well-memorized speech. The words had all the spontaneity of a church litany. All the while, his wife watched him, smiling. Lee felt such a visceral distaste for them that he forced his thoughts once again to the unspeakable tragedy they had just suffered.

“You see, Inspector—” Mrs. Kelleher began.