Silent Victim (5 page)

In you go, nice and easy. That’s it, slide right in. Don’t be afraid—the water’s fine. Don’t struggle, now—there’s no point. The drugs should make you feel all nice and sleepy, so this shouldn’t hurt a bit. If you had been a better girl, there would have been no need for this, no need, but some women are just born bad. It’s sad, but that’s the way it is.

Caleb stood and watched as she floated away, looking so peaceful, her limbs spreading out from her still form, her white-blond hair blooming like water lilies around her head. His father would be so pleased. He could still hear his father’s voice in his head, as if it were only yesterday.

“Your mother was born bad—wicked and evil and bad. So this is what you do to bad women. Watch, boy—no, don’t turn away! And don’t cry. Only sissy boys cry. No son of
mine
will turn out to be a sissy boy, not if I can help it. That’s better—be a man, and take it like a man. Only women cry—don’t you ever forget that. And women are bad—nasty, evil creatures. They have this thing between their legs that makes them bad—this bleeding, gaping thing
that will eat you up or bite off your manhood if you ‘re not careful.”

This one had nice hair—so pale and thick, like a white halo around her head. Just like Ophelia, floating down the stream.

Oh, yes, Ophelia killed herself out of love, my dear, didn’t she? Well, that was a bit of inspiration on my part, I must admit. A nice touch—I hope they like it when they find you. Of course, you won’t look so pretty when they find you, will you? Not pretty at all—you’ll be bloated like a watermelon, I should think, all white and ghastly and gruesome. Maybe some young policeman will even throw up when he sees you—some of them do, you know. I’ve seen them. That would be too bad, but you only have yourself to blame. I could have taught you some manners, but it’s too late now, I’m afraid. Well, it’s getting colder out, so I’m going to have to leave you. Bon voyage—sweet dreams.

Lee arrived at Chuck’s office in the Bronx Major Case Unit a little before nine on Monday morning, feeling tired and worried. Tired because Kathy had spent the weekend—they were still in the early stages of their romance, and didn’t want to waste time sleeping when they could be doing something together. For their first months together, that most often meant sex—Kathy had an unexpectedly voracious libido.

And he was worried because he had tried all weekend to reach Ana on her cell phone, with no luck. He even called the Swan in Lambertville to see if she had shown up for work, but was told she had requested that weekend off. That made him feel a little better—maybe she and her boyfriend had gone on vacation and she had turned off her phone. But she hadn’t mentioned that when she came to see him, and under the circumstances, it seemed an odd omission.

He walked through the station house, which was unusually quiet for a Monday morning. The young desk sergeant tried vainly to stifle a yawn as he waved Lee through to Chuck’s office, and the weary-looking policewoman talking to a thin young Latino man in purple rayon pants looked like she could use another night’s sleep. Lee knocked on the door to his friend’s office, and to his surprise, a woman’s voice answered. “Come in.”

He paused a moment to register what he had just heard, then swung the door open cautiously. He didn’t know what he expected to find, but he certainly didn’t expect what he saw. Instead of Chuck was a woman, perched next to his desk, one hip resting on the windowsill behind his scarred old captain’s chair.

There are some women who, for whatever reason, make men feel inadequate. There are other women who, for perhaps more obvious reasons, make men want them. And then there are those rare women who do both.

Elena Krieger was one of those women.

She was extremely tall—Lee estimated at least six feet—with absurdly long legs, as though the painter’s brush had slipped when creating her, but he decided to keep going anyway. Her silky hair was a strawberry-blond color he associated with Swedish stewardesses and Hollywood starlets. Her body was pure Vegas: beside the long legs, she had the trim waist and solid round breasts of a showgirl. He didn’t see how they could be real: they looked too sculpted, too firm—and the lemon-yellow silk blouse she wore didn’t leave anything to the imagination. At the same time, there was something masculine about her body, the broad sweep of her shoulders, the big bones of her hands and feet. She gave off an impression of power and strength, so that her sexuality had an oddly androgynous appeal. He understood immediately how she got the nickname Valkyrie—she was the personification of a Wagnerian goddess.

Her face couldn’t really be described as pretty. Everything was too big, too prominent: her mouth, her nose, her strong chin. And her eyes were rather small, light colored and deep set, so that they looked even smaller. Still, in the split second that Lee took in all these details, he also registered the fact that he couldn’t think of a single man he had ever known who would kick her out of bed. The part of him that was pure animal instinct, the part that wasn’t madly in love with Kathy, reacted to her as any other red-blooded heterosexual man would: he immediately imagined her naked, available, and interested.

And in that moment he also knew something else about her: she was dangerous. He wasn’t sure who she was dangerous to—maybe herself, maybe the men she came in contact with, maybe other women—but there was no doubt she was dangerous.

In the moment or two it took for all of these thoughts to race across the landscape of his brain, Elena Krieger took the three steps required to cover the width of Chuck’s small office and extended her hand.

“Hello,” she said, with a light dusting of a German accent. “I’m Elena Krieger.”

Lee wanted to say
Of course you are,
but instead he said, “Pleased to meet you,” shaking her hand, which was firm, cool and strong, like a solid piece of oak, or cedar.

“And you are the famous Lee Campbell.”

Lee laughed and felt his face go red.

“Well, if I’m famous, I’m the last to hear about it.”

“Oh, but
of course
you are—everybody knows about you. What happened to your sister was terrible,” she repeated, shaking her head so that her silky bangs swung back and forth like windshield wipers over her wide forehead.

Lee tried to avoid looking at her—frankly, it was distracting. He turned toward the door, which he had deliberately left open.

“Where’s Chuck?” he said, pretending to search for him in the hall outside.

“He’ll be back in a minute,” she said. “That must have been so hard going through what you went through, the nervous breakdown and all. Are you
sure
you’re well enough to work now?”

Stunned by this remark, he turned to look at her. His sister Laura’s disappearance five years ago was the reason he turned from private practice as a psychologist to become a criminal profiler. And his recent nervous breakdown, though not a secret, was a private matter. It wasn’t the kind of thing he talked about; clearly Elena Krieger had done some homework.

Her words were loaded with subtext—he just wasn’t sure what it was. She certainly wasn’t expressing concern for him. She didn’t even know him, and from what he had heard about her, Elena Krieger cared about one thing: Elena Krieger. So there was definitely something else going on—was it a flirtation? Or perhaps she was trying to win him over with this appearance of sympathy, to get him on her side against Chuck. Or perhaps it was something even more subtle and sinister. Maybe she was trying to take him back to those awful days, to force him to relive them, thereby shaking his confidence.

He was pretty sure word had gotten around about his struggle with depression—which was definitely regarded as a weakness in the macho world of the NYPD. Any kind of mental health problem carried more of a stigma than say, having cancer, or any other physical illness. Most cops belittled psychiatry of any kind, so Lee’s position as the force’s only criminal profiler was tenuous to begin with. His own personal struggle with depression made it even more so.

He looked Elena Krieger up and down before answering. He wanted her to know that he was in control of the situation, not her.

“I’m fine now,” he said calmly. “But thanks for asking.”

Her plucked eyebrows arched upward as if she did not believe him, but at that moment Chuck Morton entered the room. He looked back and forth between Lee and Elena, then stated the obvious.

“I see you two have met.”

“Ya-a-h,” Elena Krieger replied, stretching the word out sensuously, like a cat sunning itself. But she was more lupine than feline, Lee thought—like a big redheaded wolf.

“Good,” Chuck said briskly. “Let’s get started, then.”

Lee was startled. He’d had no idea that Elena Krieger was part of this investigation. He couldn’t say that in front of her, so he just said, “Isn’t Detective Butts the primary—”

Chuck cut him off. “Yes, he is, but Detective Krieger has recently been assigned to this station house, so she’ll be working the case, too. Her specialty is forensic linguistics.”

Lee thought two detectives was already one too many, but he said nothing. He could see from Chuck’s discomfort that his friend didn’t want her here any more than he did. It was clear she was here because of some bureaucratic game of musical chairs that neither of them had any control over.

“Where is Detective Butts, by the way?” Krieger asked. “Shouldn’t he be here?”

“He should, and he is,” said a voice behind them, and they all turned to see Detective Leonard Butts standing in the doorway, holding a cup of coffee and a bag of Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

“Glad you could make it after all,” Chuck said. “Have a seat.”

“Yeah,” Butts said. “I told the wife that she’d just have to go to her uncle’s funeral without me, and that I’d catch up with her at the reception. She didn’t like it, but what can you do? Work is work. If you ask me, Monday morning’s an odd time for a funeral anyways.” He slurped happily at his coffee, took a big bite of a cream-filled doughnut, and leaned back in the chair with a satisfied sigh. “Man, these things are good.”

“Have you met Detective Butts?” Chuck asked.

“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” Krieger replied. Lee couldn’t tell whether she was being sarcastic or not.

“This is Detective Elena Krieger,” Chuck said to Butts.

“Elena Krieger?” Butts said.
“The
Elena Krieger?”

She flushed from the base of her elegant neck to her cheeks, though Lee wasn’t sure if it was from embarrassment or anger.

“Well, if there are others with my name in the police farce, I am unaware of it.” Her mispronunciation of “force” took Lee by surprise, and he had to stifle an impulse to laugh.

“The pleasure’s all mine,” Butts said, shaking her hand vigorously before settling down to renew his attack on the bag of doughnuts. He seemed impervious to her charms—he was clearly more interested in the doughnuts. He munched away happily, hardly looking at her as Chuck went over the details of the case.

“Okay,” said Chuck, taking out crime-scene photos and handing them around. “Now, the reason that there’s some urgency on this is that if these two deaths
are
connected, then we may have a serial offender on our hands—one that’s very difficult to catch. So far we haven’t been able to find any links between these two men, other than they’re both obviously phony suicides.”

“Yeah,” Butts agreed. “We talked to the families of both vics, and we get the same thing. No history of depression or mental illness. The floater is Nathan Ziegler, and he just got hired by Roosevelt Hospital as an anesthesiologist. Bathtub guy, Chris Malette, was doing just fine financially—he was divorced but very amicable with his ex.”

“No history of mental problems?” Lee asked.

“Negative,” Butts answered. “And before you ask, no, his ex does
not
wear that shade of lipstick,” he added, pointing to the writing on the bathroom mirror in several of the photos. “She’s been wearing the same lipstick for years, according to her girlfriends and sister—Passion Fruit Panache. Apparently she’s a creature of habit. So if she did write that note, she bought or borrowed someone else’s lipstick to do it before she killed Baldy here.”

Elena Krieger stared at Butts. “I don’t think you should speak of the dead so disrespectfully.”

Butts stared back at her, then looked up at Chuck. “Is she always like this?”

“I always take our job seriously, if that’s what you mean,” she said iciliy. Lee noticed her accent thickened when she was upset.

“All right, knock it off, both of you!” Chuck said, running a hand through his blond crew cut.

“I beg your pardon,” Butts said. “I mean
Mr. Malette.
The point is that his ex isn’t a likely suspect. And we haven’t found anyone who disliked the guy—at least enough to kill him.”

Morton plucked another of the photos from the pile on his desk. “The writing in the suicide note found on the floa—Dr. Ziegler—is being analyzed by a handwriting expert, but there’s no question it does
not
belong to him.”

“That’s an odd suicide note, in any case,” Lee remarked.

Elena Krieger picked up the photo of the note and studied it.
“I’m sorry—I was wrong. I don’t deserve to live,”
she read slowly. “It sounds more like a confession of guilt than a suicide note.”

“Yeah,” Chuck agreed, “but guilt about what?” “If we can figure that out, we’ll have a big piece of the puzzle,” Butts remarked.

“Also, it’s not addressed to anyone in particular, which is odd. Most suicides who write notes address them to specific people in their lives,” Krieger pointed out.

“Right,” said Chuck. “And look at how carefully the note was wrapped in a Ziploc bag so the water wouldn’t spoil it. Someone really wanted us to find it.”

“You going to release it to the media?” Lee asked.

Chuck cocked his head to one side. “What do you think?”

“I wouldn’t. It’s not elaborate or long enough to give you a personality profile.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Chuck agreed. “I don’t see someone seeing the note in the paper and calling us to say it reminds him of his brother.”

“Yeah, right,” Butts said. “This ain’t no Unabomber.”

He was referring to the capture of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. He was finally brought to justice when David Kaczynski recognized the ranting political polemic published by the
New York Times
and
Washington Post
as sounding very much like his brother Ted.

“No useable prints, I guess?” said Lee.

Butts shook his head. “The guy must have been wearing gloves.”

“Or the
woman,”
Krieger corrected him.

“Whatever,” Butts said, rolling his eyes at Lee. “Anyway, we’re doing a tox screen on all the vics, just in case.”

“You think maybe the UNSUB drugged them first?” Lee asked. UNSUB was shorthand for “Unknown Subject.” He didn’t particularly like using cop jargon, but it was a way to sidestep the morass of gender issues that Krieger was clearly prickly about.

“Anything’s possible—especially if it’s a woman,” Butts replied. “She’d probably have to drug them to control them, unless she’s one strong bi—female,” he said, with a nervous glance at Krieger.

If Krieger noticed the slip, she didn’t react. “What about the writing on the mirror?” she asked. “Any match to the other note?”

Chuck picked up the crime-scene photo and shook his head. “It’s in block letters in lipstick, so our expert says she can’t do much with it.

“But look at the wording,” Krieger said.

Lee took the photo from Chuck and studied it. “I
am very bad. Sorry.”
He put the photo back down.

“They both say they’re sorry,” Krieger pointed out. “With most people who kill themselves, that would be an apology for the suicide itself. But this is different: they seem to be apologizing for being
bad.”

Butts frowned. “So the same UNSUB wrote both notes?”

“It’s extremely likely,” Krieger replied.