Loud Praise for C. E. Lawrence and SILENT SCREAMS
“Criminally compelling, Silent Screams by C. E. Lawrence nails you to your seat with a fascinating NYPD profiler who’s hurled into the case of his lifetime. This journey into violence and the soul is unforgettable.”
—Gayle Lynds, New York Times bestselling author of The Coil and The Book of Spies
“Pulse-racing, compelling, first rate. Lawrence knows how to build and hold suspense with the best of them. Once you get into this one, you can’t get out.”
—John Lutz, New York Times bestselling author of Mister X
“C. E. Lawrence delivers finely honed suspense, with unique twists, and accurately captures the logic and intuition of a profiler under pressure.”
—Katherine Ramsland, professor of forensic psychology, and author of The Forensic Psychology of Criminal Minds
“C. E. Lawrence’s Silent Screams is so compulsively readable, you won’t just tear through the pages, you’ll scream through them.”
—Chris Grabenstein, Anthony and Agatha awards winner, and author of Rolling Thunder
“Authentic, realistic. If you want to read a serial-killer thriller that’s solidly based on frightening reality, this is the one.”
—Louis B Schlesinger, PhD, Professor of Forensic Psychology, John Jay college of Criminal Justice
“Lawrence assembles a quirky group of detectives and experts, all strong characters who can support future books in the series. Fans of Keith Ablow will enjoy this dark, intriguing thriller.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Wickedly brilliant … where the roles of hunter and hunted are skillfully blurred … an escalating torrent of murder you won"t soon forget.”
—Gregg McCrary, author of The Unknown Darkness: Profiling the Predators Among Us
“A sophisticated knowledge of forensic investigations … Silent Screams beckons C. E. Lawrence to become a repeat offender in the thriller genre.”
—Marina Stajic, PhD, DABFT, president of the American Board of Forensic Toxicology
ALSO BY C. E. LAWRENCE
Silent Screams
SILENT
VICTIM
C. E.
LAWRENCE
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
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Copyright © 2010 C. E. Lawrence
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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eISBN-13: 978-0-7860-2591-6
eISBN-10: 0-7860-2149-7
First printing: December 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Loud Praise for C. E. Lawrence and SILENT SCREAMS
ALSO BY C. E. LAWRENCE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHAPTER FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIFTY
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
CHAPTER SEVENTY
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
For Joan and Rusty,
who are so dear to me
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Once again, thanks first and foremost to my editor, Michaela Hamilton, a.k.a. Fearless Leader, whose continuing support, wisdom, and insight keep me going on cold winter nights—and thanks to Marvin Kaye for introducing me to her. Special thanks to my dear friend Gisela Rose, for her superb editing skills and invaluable perspective. Thanks also to my agent, Paige Wheeler, for her professional advice, good cheer, and support. Special thanks once again to Robert (“Beau-bear”) Murphy and Rachel Fallon for their generosity in providing ideal retreats in which to work—large parts of this book were written in Long Eddy, New York, and Toot Baldon, U.K. Thanks also to Bev and P. G. Gardner for their generosity in putting me up at “Chalet Gardner,” where I worked out some key plot points with the help of delicious chocolates and the Vermont countryside. Also thanks to Kat Houghton and Coco for sharing their charming Chatham retreat with me, to Mike for pulling me out of the mud, and to Kathy Szaj for looking after the home fires for me. My deepest gratitude to the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock, New York, which has become my second home. Thanks too to Hawthornden Castle International Writers Retreat for providing a wonderful month in the most idyllic setting I can imagine—and to Martin, Angie, Mary, and Doris for letting me stay up late. Thanks to my mother, Margaret Simmons (a.k.a. Title Maven
), and Joan Lawrence for their insightful feedback and continued support, to Anthony Moore for setting up my website, and to my sisters, Katie and Suzie, who are always in my heart.
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
—WILLIAM CONGREVE, The Mourning Bride, 1697
PROLOGUE
There she is—just look at her with her chic little itsy-bitsy leather knapsack and her oh-so-hip camel coat and her CFM boots. Well, she wasn’t so approachable as those boots might suggest, now, was she? Too bad—if she hadn’t been so uppity and above it all, maybe she would live to see another day.
But it’s too late for that. Even if she got down on those skinny, leather-clad knees and begged for mercy, we wouldn’t listen, would we? No, because bad girls must be punished, and she has been a very naughty girl. Very naughty indeed. She couldn’t be bothered with the likes of us—not even enough to be polite. Thought it was oh-so-funny that we would approach her, and wanted everyone around to know how amused she was by it.
She’ll soon be laughing out the other side of her mouth—what’s left of it. She has to be taught a lesson in manners, one she’ll never forget.
CHAPTER ONE
The phone call was unexpected—unbidden and out of the blue. It took him so much by surprise that Lee Campbell found himself stumbling for words. The last thing he expected on a Friday night was a call from a former patient—and certainly not this former patient.
“Is this Dr. Lee Campbell?” The voice was high and breathy, petulance lurking underneath the seductiveness, like a bad Marilyn Monroe impersonator. He recognized it at once.
“Uh—yes.” Yes, Ana, he wanted to say, but some part of him still hoped that it wasn’t her.
But of course it was.
“This is Ana Watkins.”
“Oh, yes—hello, Ana. How are you?” His professionalism clicked in automatically, keeping his tone steady and objective—or so he hoped.
“I’m downstairs—can I come up and see you?”
“Downstairs?”
“At McSorley’s, actually.”
How did she know where he lived?
As if reading his mind, she said, “You’re in the directory.”
Not true, but never mind. His explanation that he wasn’t in private practice anymore didn’t seem to put her off. She insisted that she wouldn’t take up much of his time, but that it was very important to her.
“Please? I wouldn’t ask, but—”
But what? he thought irritably. You didn’t cause enough trouble the first time around?
“I’ll come down and meet you at McSorley’s.”
“It’s too loud in here,” she said, and he could hear the din of clanking glasses and boisterous laughter in the background. McSorley’s was always loud on a Friday night.
He glanced at the clock. It was just after six.
“I have a dinner meeting at seven.”
“I won’t take long—I promise.”
He peered out the window down at the street. It was August, but as evening drew in a cold rain whipped the naked branches of the trees on East Seventh Street. They shivered in the chilly gusts, shaking like frightened skeletons. He caught a glimpse of his own ghostly image staring back at him—curly black hair, angular face, intense, deep-set eyes. He knew it was a face many women considered handsome, and wished that Ana Watkins weren’t one of them.
Lee had an impulse to pour himself a Scotch, but decided against it—he needed his mind clear for the encounter. When the downstairs bell rang he took a deep breath and buzzed her into the building.
Her footsteps on the carpeted stairs were light and quick, the tread of a young person. He opened the door and fixed a smile on his face. She entered in a cloud of lilac perfume, and as soon as he breathed the aroma, he inhaled the memories of that time in his life along with it. It all felt so long ago.
She had changed very little—tall and thin and so pale that she always reminded him of an albino. She wasn’t an albino, she had told him in their first session together, but her pallid skin lacked the shade and depth of ordinary skin; it looked two dimensional, like paper. She wasn’t exactly pretty—her nose was too big and her lips were too thin—but she was striking, and she knew it.
She took in the apartment with one nervous glance, probably noticing more than she appeared to. Lee remembered her IQ was 160, or so she had claimed. That could have been a fiction, of course—much of what she had told him was. She was one of his earliest patients, and he had not yet acquired the skill of seeing through the myriad lies and obfuscations of the narcissistic personality. Still, there was no doubt that Ana was bright—very bright. Her sessions may have been frustrating, but at least they were never dull.
She slipped off her gray raincoat and dangled it from her outstretched arm, as though she expected Lee to take it from her. That was so like her—her helplessness always had an aggressive quality, and she could turn even a small gesture like removing her coat into a demand. Evidently years of therapy had failed to change this. He suppressed a sigh and took the coat, hanging it on the antique bentwood coatrack his mother had found at an estate sale in Bucks County.
“Do you have any coffee?” she asked, rubbing her thin hands together and blowing on them.
Another demand. Lee was flooded with relief that they would not be continuing their sessions together. He had always done his best to disguise one of the uglier truths of the therapeutic relationship: there were some patients he just didn’t like. If his enmity toward a patient ever threatened to compromise his effectiveness, he would find an excuse to suggest they seek out another therapist, but in the case of Ana Watkins, his dislike of her didn’t become entirely apparent to him until after their last session together.
“I can make some coffee,” he said in response to her question, though from the way her fingers twitched and her eyes roamed restlessly around the room, he thought coffee was the last thing she needed.
“Never mind—I’ll be all right,” she replied, the familiar tone of self-dramatization in her voice, as if instead of coffee, she were speaking of a rare and lifesaving drug.
“It’s no trouble at all,” Lee insisted. He wasn’t going to let her win this first stab at manipulation—she had requested coffee, and coffee she would have.
Instead of thanking him, she tossed her tiny red leather knapsack on the nearest chair and flopped down on it as though this were her apartment, not his. It was, of course, his favorite chair—but that was probably why she had instinctively chosen it.
“Make yourself at home,” he said, knowing she couldn’t miss the sarcasm in his voice. He turned and went into the kitchen, glad for the opportunity to collect his thoughts and steel himself for what could be a very sticky conversation. Ana Watkins was, he felt, his first major failure as a therapist.
She was also the first patient who tried to seduce him.
And she had tried hard—very hard—and very nearly succeeded. And now she was sprawled out in his living room, in his favorite armchair, with God knows what in mind. He wasn’t normally afraid of his patients—even the violent ones—but he was afraid of Ana Watkins. There was something about her, an undercurrent of needy malice, which had made it very difficult to be her therapist. Even her attempted seduction had been more of a conquest, like a declaration of war.
As the coffee beans rattled around in the Krups grinder, he wondered what had brought her here, and whether she would tell him the truth or only her version of it. When the coffee grinder stopped, the silence made him wonder what she was up to in the living room. He shoved the filter into the coffeemaker, dumped some water in, jabbed at the ON switch, and ducked back into the living room.
Sure enough, she was standing in front of his bookshelf, a thick volume of poetry in her hands. Like a lot of narcissists, she had boundary issues: what was yours was hers, as far as she was concerned. As he entered, she turned and smiled at him, one lock of blond hair falling artfully over her pale blue eyes. He wouldn’t have put it past her
to have planned that moment the whole time she was standing there. If she inclined her head just so, the hair would fall over her eyes, and then all she needed was to cap it with that sultry, come-hither smile.
“You have a lot of poetry here,” she commented, still smiling.
“I like poetry.” He tried to keep his voice neutral, to avoid showing his irritation.
“I guess so,” she said, slipping the book back into its place on the shelf. Lee recognized the jacket—it was his Anthology of English Verse, from his days at Princeton. He knew its contents well: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Maxwell, William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience. The young woman before him could have been cast as Oothoon herself, with her wispy, waspish body—except that she was only pretending to be innocent. Experience had hardened her into something else entirely.
He poured them both generous mugs of steaming coffee and brought them out on a tray, along with the lead crystal cream pitcher and sugar bowl—more of his mother’s estate sale coups.
“Nice crystal,” Ana commented, helping herself to a heaping spoon of sugar and following it up with a lavish amount of cream.
“Thanks,” Lee answered. To another guest, he might have mentioned the amusing anecdote of his mother’s triumphal purchase, but with Ana he instinctively played his cards close. He sat on the couch opposite her and sipped his coffee.
Sticking her long nose deep into the mug, Ana slurped up the coffee greedily, and to his surprise, it did seem to calm her. Her bony shoulders relaxed, and her thin body seemed to soften. He realized only then how stiffly she had been holding herself. She shook herself, like a dog flinging excess water from its coat. Clutching the mug between her long fingers, she looked at him through lank blond bangs.
“You’re probably dying to know why I’m here.”
Lee noted the familiar, overly dramatic phrasing of the chronically narcissistic, but all he said was, “Yes, I am curious.”
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