Silent Victim (7 page)

When Lee got back to his apartment he found two messages from Dr. Williams: one on his landline and the other on his cell. He had neglected to take his cell phone with him uptown. It was all he could do to concentrate enough to lock the door behind him.

He called her back, and this time she picked up.

“Yes, Lee—you need to come in today?” Her voice was composed, but he heard the concern in it.

“Do you have any open time slots?”

“I can see you after my last patient—six o’clock okay?”

“Great. Thank you so much.”

He hung up. Just hearing her voice—low, calm, and comforting—made him breathe easier. It was like the murmur of water over stones, a smooth, soothing sound.

He looked at the kitchen clock, a sunburst of bronzed Mexican pottery he had found at a yard sale upstate. It was just after six. He gazed at the piano, its polished wood gleaming in the slanting rays of the sun in the western sky. He looked down at his hands—they were shaking again.

He went to the kitchen, opened a can of chocolate protein shake, and forced himself to drink it. It tasted like chalk. He chased it down with a glass of tap water, then went back to the living room. The piano waited for him—silent, watchful, the evening light lingering on the keyboard as the sun slipped northward and out of view behind the crowded buildings of Manhattan.

He sat down and dove into a Bach partita. No scales, no warm-up to get him in the mood—just Bach, straight up, no chaser. The sound washed over him, as primal and powerful as the first time he heard it. The notes twisted and danced on the page, in his fingers, on the keyboard. As he played, he experienced the piano as the percussion instrument it was—a great, resounding drum with eighty-eight voices, made up of tones and half-tones, a glorious creation of wood and metal and ivory, all melded together by engineering genius.

As he dug his fingers in deeper, pounding the keys in an ecstasy of fury and release, he was enveloped by a feeling of profound gratitude. He was able to participate in the grand dance of music, communing with great composers—a gift shared by even the lowliest of musicians. It wasn’t about ego, or showing off—there was a purity about this that existed nowhere else in his life.

It was only when he stopped that he felt the tears sliding down his face.

Afterward, he sat in the green stuffed armchair by the window and thought about Ana Watkins. What he didn’t tell Chuck or Butts—what he had never told anyone—was that he had very nearly fallen for her. He had to admit, she was good—she pushed every button he had with such dexterity it left him breathless. She played the hapless victim, tossed aside by the men around her, a fragile waif orphaned by the storms of an unfortunate life. She drew out his need to protect and shield women, a need instilled in him by his mother long before his father walked out. His father’s desertion only intensified his determination to make up for the sins of all men, brutish and uncaring creatures. His mother had already decided, without realizing it consciously, that Lee’s job—indeed, his duty—was to make up for the transgressions of thoughtless scoundrels like Duncan Campbell.

And so when Ana Watkins leaned into him, her thin body trembling with terror and desire, he met her halfway, pulled toward her with an inexorable magnetic force. Even as he felt himself falling into the sinkhole of self-disgust, he was helpless to stop, spinning like a top when he tried to pull back against the centrifugal force of their mutual desire. They shared a fervent and fumbling embrace in a rain-darkened alley one Friday night, soaked and sweating under a burned-out streetlamp. He managed to pull away after a prolonged and very wet kiss, but he felt himself weakening even as his forehead burned with shame and his ears rang with the sound of self-condemnation.

Fortunately for him, fate—or luck, or chance, or whatever it was—intervened before he betrayed his ethics and his profession. Ana came down with a serious case of bronchitis, and an elderly aunt swooped down from New England to nurse her back to health, breaking the forward momentum of their passion. Left standing alone, he took a shaky step backward before regaining his footing and his self-respect. When Ana recovered, he insisted on meeting only at the clinic in Flemington, and only on days when his accountant was sitting in the outside office.

Faced with this new reality, Ana discontinued her sessions and slunk away. He considered himself lucky that she didn’t report his conduct to the state licensing board. Perhaps she had enough of a conscience to realize that would be less than honorable, since she had instigated the whole thing. He had not heard from her until she called two days ago.

And now she was dead. The only thing he could do for her now was to find her killer.

The walk to Dr. Williams’s office on East Twelfth Street was less than fifteen minutes on average—he was there in less than ten. There was no one else in the waiting room when he arrived, and he sat listening to the murmur of voices coming from the rooms around him. Dr. Williams’s office was on the fifth floor of a medical building and shared a waiting room with two other therapists. On the left was the office of a short, dapper man with spectacles and a goatee who could have been the young Freud himself. In the office to the right was a tall, willowy woman, an Upper West Side type with long silver-gray hair and owlish glasses. Lee found these women intriguing: they seemed to eschew conventional notions of fashion and beauty, and yet they had a natural quality and style that was its own kind of beauty.

Dr. Williams’s door opened, and Lee’s heart contracted. His throat felt dry and lumpy. He heard her familiar low, soothing voice, and then a male voice. Moments later a thin, intense-looking young man emerged from the office. He averted his eyes as he passed, focusing on the floor ahead of him. Lee had noticed, there was an elevated need for privacy in therapists’ offices. People who might smile and make friendly eye contact in say, a dentist’s office, studiously avoided noticing one another. He wondered if it was some vestigial feelings of shame or embarrassment, or perhaps the need to protect the tender ego, which could undergo quite a shredding process during the course of treatment. He knew this not only from his own experience, but from years of private practice as a therapist. It was a terrifying and wrenching journey, and sometimes it felt—as it did today—nearly unendurable.

Dr. Williams stepped out into the corridor and beckoned to him. She was a very tall, elegant black woman with long limbs and a handsome, fine-featured face. Today she wore a long black skirt decorated with African motifs in earth tones, a yellow silk blouse under a short rust-colored jacket. He felt as though he could weep at the sight of her, but he just nodded meekly and followed her inside. She settled herself in her usual spot, a tall, ergonomic leather swivel chair, her back to the window. Lee sat opposite her, in a similar black leather chair with a matching footrest.

Dr. Georgina Williams had the most amazingly steady energy of anyone he had ever known. Of course, it was always possible he was projecting onto her the ideal personality for a therapist. They even joked about how he sometimes called her Yoda, but she really did seem to possess the perfect combination of calmness and intuition. She never pressed him with unwanted insights, and had an uncanny ability to come up with the perfect metaphor or key question most of the time.

The room was decorated in a style both comforting and relaxing. The walls were painted in earth tones, the lighting was muted, the prints on the wall were tasteful but not disturbing—a Monet haystack, a Matisse still life of a goldfish bowl, and a colorful Klee in cheerful primary colors. There were also a couple of original landscape paintings that looked to be Hudson Valley scenes. The bookshelf in the back of the room contained mostly works on psychology—classics by Jung, Freud, R. D. Laing, and Alice Miller, among others. There was also a small collection of poetry, in particular a book of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. Wooden sculptures of African masks served as decorative bookends.

As always, she looked alert but relaxed. On the table next to her chair was a blue vase with white lilies of some kind.

“So,” she said, studying him, “you’re not doing well today.”

“No,” he replied. “I had … an episode.”

“A bad one?”

“Pretty bad, yeah.” “How do you feel now?”

“Better, now that I’m here. But I always feel better here.” “You feel safe here.”

“Yeah.”

He looked at the potted palm in the corner next to her—was it his imagination or had it grown rapidly in the last few weeks? It suddenly looked much larger.

“But not out there,” she said.

“No. Not out there.”

She crossed her long legs at the ankle. He noticed she was wearing heeled sandals—in a heeled shoe, he imagined she would be taller than he was, and he was well over six feet. “Are you on a case?”

“Yeah.”

“So is this episode related to that?” “Partly, yeah.” “In what way?”

He told her about the visit from Ana, the shock of seeing her body, his fainting in the office.

“That’s very upsetting,” she said when he had finished.

“That’s not all,” he said, his palms beginning to sweat. “I had a—a phone call.”

“What kind of phone call?”

He felt the old reluctance to talk, to drive a knife into old wounds, to feel its sharpness. He wished he could just sit here for a while, drinking in the calming atmosphere, but that wasn’t the deal. And he knew perfectly well what the resistance was about, knew also that he had to overcome it. He took a deep breath.

“It was about the red dress. A man’s voice—I didn’t recognize it. He said he knew about the red dress.”

“But I thought you never released that detail to the public.” “We didn’t.”

“So who is he, and how could he know?” “That’s what I’d like to know. It’s bringing everything back again.”

“Your sister’s disappearance?”

“Yes.” He almost wished she would say her
death,
because there was no doubt in his mind that Laura was dead. “Anything else?”

He knew what she was hinting at, but he wasn’t ready yet.

“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t talk about it.”

“Okay.”

“That’s it—
okay?”

“I’ve never forced you to talk about anything—you know that.” She uncrossed her legs and leaned back in her chair. “What, you were hoping I would? You want me to push you into dealing with it, so you don’t have to make that decision?”

He looked out the window at the softly fading evening sun, a pink glow in the western sky. Now, in late August, the light was fading earlier every day, as the sun weakened in its journey across the heavens.

“Has it ever occurred to you that you might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder? All the symptoms fit.”

He gave a wry smile. “A rose by any other name … oh, I don’t know. When I’m like this I barely have enough will to make a cup of coffee.”

“Do you think you’re ready to talk about it?”

“You think I have to sooner or later.” It wasn’t a question—he knew the answer.

She shrugged, a tiny lift of her elegant shoulders. “Not necessarily. It depends on the person. Some people seem to do all right without processing their pain.”

“Look,” he said, looking her directly in the eyes, “you and I both went into this profession because we believed in the value of the therapeutic process. So why don’t you just say what you really think and stop trying to give me an out?”

“Okay,” she said after a moment. “I do think you have to deal with it, and that you’re avoiding it, because when you finally do …”

He knew the rest. Sooner or later, he would have to confront his long-buried feelings about his father’s abandonment. And then, he feared, his rage would rise up like a mythical beast, full and terrifying in its primitive fury, and swallow him up whole.

The visit to Dr. Williams had left Lee feeling somewhat better—still shaky, but better. He was able to sleep, and woke up early the next day to rent a car so he and Butts could drive out to New Jersey and interview Ana’s coworkers at the Swan Hotel.

Ana Watkins had no family left. Her mother disappeared years ago, and, as she had told Lee, her father had died recently. He knew from their sessions together that she was an only child. He also planned to track down the boyfriend, hopefully, and speak with him—anything to shed some light on what might have led to her becoming the third victim of a very bizarre killer.

Butts met him at Enterprise Car Rental in Greenwich Village at nine o’clock, and within a half hour they were zooming west along Route 78.

“Sorry I couldn’t drive today, Doc,” Butts said as they headed west, the skyscrapers of Manhattan looming behind them in the rearview mirror. “The wife always does Meals on Wheels on Wednesdays. You know—brings food to the old folks and stuff. She’s an RN, but gave it up when the kids were born. Still has that need to feel useful, I guess.”

“Sure,” Lee said. “I think we all have that.”

He and Butts drove in silence for a while, lulled by the motion of the car and the soft morning light falling on the blacktop, damp from a rain the night before. The water evaporated in wispy threads of mist as the air heated up and the sun climbed higher in the sky. To his relief, Lee had not awakened with any symptoms from the previous day’s attack, though his emotions were still close to the surface.

As they approached the exit for Route 202, Butts said, “What I’d like to know is why do we have to put up with that Krueger dame?”

“Krieger,” Lee corrected him.

“Whatever.” Butts stared moodily out the window, tracing waving lines with his finger in the thick mist of condensation on the interior of the glass.

“I don’t know the story behind it, but I’ll bet you Chuck Morton had nothing to do with it.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Butts. “He doesn’t like her any more than I do. How about you—can you stand her?”

Lee thought about it for a moment. “She sort of reminds me of my mother.”

Butts shivered. “Jeez. Some mother.”

Lee smiled. “She’s not so bad once you get used to her.”

Butts reclined his seat a little and stretched his arms out over his head. “The scary part is that I just know my kids will be talkin’ about me the same way some day—if they aren’t already.”

They said no more about Krieger, though Lee had a feeling this was not the last he would hear about her. A few miles from the Route 202 exit, Butts’s cell phone rang, and he dug it out of his jacket pocket.

“Butts here.” There was a pause as he listened. “Really? That puts a new spin on things. Thanks a lot, Russ, much appreciated. Yeah, right—thanks.”

He closed the cell phone and whistled softly. “That was Russell Kim from the M.E.'s office—the tox screen on our first two vics just came back.”

Lee knew Russell Kim—a quiet, dedicated Korean pathologist known for his thoroughness and reliability.

“Okay,” he said impatiently,
“and—
?”

Butts paused for dramatic effect. “GBH.”

“Jesus.” GBH, or gamma-hydroxybutyrate, was well known to law enforcement as the “date rape drug.” It was a soporific, and could be added to a mixed drink without the victim being aware of its presence.

“Yup, one and the same.”

Neither of them said what they were both thinking—that Ana’s tox screen results would be identical. Lee tried not to think about her last hours, but he couldn’t help it—he could only hope that perhaps the barbiturate effect of the drug had made the ordeal less horrible, but he wasn’t ready to bet on it.

“That still doesn’t explain the lack of forced entry in the bathtub killing,” Lee said.

“Right. Either the killer gives it to him somewhere else or follows him into the apartment and forces him to drink it there. Either way, we still have missing pieces.”

Lee turned onto Route 202, leaving the interstate to cut straight southwest through the farm fields of central Jersey, heading down to the Delaware River town of Lambertville. His mother and his niece lived not far from where they were going, but he would be seeing them in a few days, and today’s trip was not about pleasure.

“This part of Jersey is real pretty, isn’t it?” Butts mused as they cruised past fields of grazing cows and horses. The sun sparkled on the damp meadows, the long grasses catching the yellow morning light in sprays of silver and gold.

“Yeah,” Lee agreed. But his mind was not on the beauty of the summer morning. He was thinking of the grim necessity of their task—to learn what they could about the life of a young woman whose time had ended far too soon.

The Swan Hotel was an eighteenth-century building tucked in between taller structures built a century later on Main Street in the former factory town of Lambertville, which hugged the valley between the Delaware to the west and the hills rising to the east. Lee knew the town well. When he was growing up it had the appearance of a hardbitten working-class town gone to seed. Lambertville was originally a hub on the D&R canal, but with the advent of the trucking industry, canal and rail traffic slowed to a trickle, and the town dried up.

Just across the Delaware was the hamlet of New Hope, Pennsylvania, accessible by car or by a footbridge spanning the river. With its thriving gay community, boutiques, cute restaurants, and B & B’s, many lodged in eighteenth-century buildings, it was a major tourist destination. Lambertville, its bulkier, lumpy cousin, watched from across the river as New Hope rapidly went from chic to gawdy, and then finally passé. Tourists still flocked to the overpriced boutiques and restaurants—Lee secretly continued to enjoy several of them himself—but the pronouncement among locals was that New Hope was hopelessly prettified, had been overrun by tourists, and—worst of all—had lost its
authenticity.

Meanwhile, on the Delaware’s eastern shore, Lambertville was discovering itself—but without the sense of excess that had doomed New Hope to the scorn of local residents. Young professional couples were buying the handsome, sturdy town houses and fixing them up. Local businesses popped up like mushrooms after a spring rain. The town was slowly shaking off its years of depression and realizing that ugly ducklings too could become swans—and with a minimum of fairy lights, purple shutters and lime-green window boxes. (Lee liked New Hope, complete with purple shutters and fairy lights, but never would have admitted this to his mother, who represented the mainstream, local conservative taste. She had not shied away from pronouncing the harshest possible verdict on New Hope: it was, that horror of horrors, so
tacky.)

Central to Lambertville’s renaissance was the Swan Hotel. A low wooden building dating from 1743, it had been built as a tavern, and, in the late 1950s, was returned to its original use. It quickly became a gathering place for groups of aging Yale graduates, whose rivalry with their fellow Ivy Leaguers from Princeton, just a few miles to the east, was well known. On any given night when Lee was a teenager, you could hear the inebriated strains of “The Whiffenpoof Song” coming from the piano bar at the back of the first floor.

Lee always thought it was an insipid melody with even worse lyrics, but those middle-aged Yalies loved it, and sang it, he suspected, just to encourage the inevitable rebuttal of the Princeton tiger song from their arch rivals, who also frequented the piano bar. The Princetonians never failed to take the bait: they would leap to their feet, red-faced from brandy and clogged arteries, and reciprocate just as unmelodiously, braying like the donkey from the Bremen Town Musicians.

The reason Lee came to the Swan was the piano player, a stocky local plumber who was a great favorite of the well-heeled clientele. A bulldog of a man with a face like Ernest Borgnine and sausages for fingers, he pounded the hell out of that baby grand piano. He could play anything—Rodgers and Hart, Gershwin, Bacharach, Beethoven. He could play by ear and he could play from sheet music—from Lee’s boyhood perspective, there was no limit to the man’s talent.

Now, as he swung the rented Saturn into a parking spot in front of the hotel, he was gripped with nostalgia for those sweet days of youth when he was attending Princeton and would come home for holidays. He and Laura would go together with their mother to Lambertville to eat at Phil and Dan’s Italian diner, then head over to the Swan for an hour or two of music. Laura had a pretty singing voice, and sometimes she would sing a solo, while Lee sat in the corner gripping his beer mug, silently urging her voice not to crack on the high notes, his chest full with pride in his pretty sister. He knew Fiona, too, was proud, though she was always sparing in her praise, true to her Scottish character.

Butts followed him into the building, grunting as he swung the heavy oak door closed behind him. The Swan was much as Lee remembered it, though the low ceilings and dimly lit rooms felt more claustrophobic than they had when he was a boy.

It was still an hour away from lunch, so the place was quiet. The maître d', a slim, dark, Middle Eastern man, led them to the atrium, a recent addition on the side of the building, to wait for the manager, who was expecting them. Lee was pleased to see that this part of New Jersey was finally acquiring a more multicultural look. When he lived there it had been very white—and very WASPy.

They settled themselves by the window, underneath a greenhouselike structure with potted plants on the inside and creeping vines along the outside of the glass. The sound of softly flowing water came from a stone fountain in the back of the room, and the effect was calming and peaceful.

They didn’t have long to wait. The manager rushed in, a worried look on his face. Lee had told him over the phone that something had happened to Ana, but had not gone into specifics.

“Hello, I’m Sayeed El Naga,” the manager said, shaking their hands. He too was dark and, judging by his name and accented English, from the Middle East, but unlike the elegant maître d', he was small and balding, with a compact body and nervous, eager energy. He had a darkly handsome face, with large dark eyes, full lips, and very white teeth. He exuded personal warmth and goodwill.

He pulled up a chair and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table, and looked Lee earnestly in the eyes. “You said you have something to tell me regarding Ana. So let’s not waste time—what is it, please?” His tone was polite but firm, as though he expected something less than the truth from the encounter.

Lee met his gaze. There was no point in trying to soften the blow. El Naga had asked for the truth, and it would be a shock no matter how he said it. “Ana is dead. Her death has been classified as a homicide.”

El Naga fell back in his chair as though he had been shot. He stared at Lee without speaking, his mouth open. Finally he said, “When—how? Who did it? Where did you find her?”

Butts stepped in. “They found her yesterday, in the river.”

“The Delaware?”

“No,” said Lee, “where the Harlem River meets the Hudson.”

“What was she doing there?” said El Naga.

She was coming to see me,
Lee wanted to say, but the time of death hadn’t yet been conclusively determined. It was harder to pinpoint with victims who had been in the water for some time, as Ana had.

“We don’t really know yet,” said Butts. “I wish we could tell you more, but we’re trying to figure it out ourselves.”

“Ana hated the water,” El Naga said. “She told me that once,” he added apologetically.

“We’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind,” Lee said gently.

“Yes, yes, of course—anything.”

“Did she have any enemies that you know of?” Butts asked. “Anybody who expressed a dislike for her, or who had a reason to harm her?”

“No, I can’t think of anyone. She was a little strange, you know, had an odd way about her, but she was a good worker, and got on reasonably well with the rest of the staff.”

“What about customers?” said Lee. “Was there anyone who acted suspicious or inappropriate with her recently?”

El Naga furrowed his thick black eyebrows and chewed on his lower lip. “Let me think. This is a pretty upscale clientele, you know,” he said defensively, as if the restaurant itself were a suspect.

“Yes, I know,” Lee reassured him. “I used to come here when I was a boy.”

El Naga’s face brightened momentarily. “Really?”

“Yes—I grew up not far from here.”

“It’s very nice here, isn’t it?” El Naga said. “I like the countryside so very much. I still can’t get used to snow, though—it is quite different where I come from.”

“Yeah, and where’s that?” Butts asked.

“Egypt—Cairo. Very noisy, very dirty, very polluted, don’t you know? I much prefer it here—I have even bought the snow boots for this winter.”

“So was there anyone you can think of who came here who might have acted strangely toward Ana?” Lee prompted.

El Naga’s face grew serious again. “No … oh, wait, yes—there was someone, about a week ago. I remember Ana telling the maître d’ that if he ever came again, would he please give him to another waitress.”

“Did you get a look at the guy?” Butts said eagerly.

“Sadly, no. It was a very busy Sunday brunch, you see, and I was helping out in the kitchen. One of the cooks was away and we were short-staffed. I’m so very sorry I can’t be more helpful,” he added, looking dejected.

“No, thank you for what you’ve told us—it could be very helpful,” Lee said. The man was so earnest and eager to please that Lee wanted to reassure him.

“Oh, one more thing,” Butts said. “Do you happen to have the phone number of her boyfriend—what’s his name again?” Lee had told him the boyfriend’s name was Raymond, but Butts sometimes liked to get information out of people that he already had, just to see how they reacted to the question.

“Uh, it’s Raymond, isn’t it? Raymond Santiago. Yes, I think I do—I believe that’s the number she gave me as an emergency contact.”

“So you never met him?” said Lee.