Silent Slaughter

by C. E. Lawrence

  “She did, honey. She had a wonderful singing voice.” Lee noticed they were both using the past tense to talk about her. He wished he had more time to spend with his niece, but the case was pressing on him. He couldn’t resist lifting the phone receiver every ten minutes or so to see if the line was back on, but it was still dead.

  When Lee came downstairs with his overnight bag a little after three, his mother stood in the doorway to the parlor, arms crossed, a frown on her face.

  “May I have a word with you?”

  “Sure,” he said, following her into the living room.

  He thought she was going to try to talk him out of going again, but apparently she had given up on that.

  “Look, I know you’re really busy right now, but . . . I was wondering if you could make some time to spend with Kylie—just talk to her, you know. I know she really looks up to you.”

  The pounding in his head increased, and his mother’s face was beginning to blur. He blinked his eyes in an attempt to focus.

  “Well, I—”

  “I really feel like I can’t handle this on my own.”

  “What about George?”

  She gave a dismissive wave of her hand. “Oh, you know George—he’s a big, sweet baby. God knows what Laura saw in him.” She clapped a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry, I didn’t really mean that. It’s just that he’s—well, he’s very kind, but—”

  “Kind of clueless.”

  “I’m afraid so. Big and sweet and clueless. Like a teddy bear.”

  He pressed his fingers to his right temple and blinked again.

  She peered at him, frowning. “What is it? Your head bothering you?”

  “No, no,” he lied. “Look, I’d really like to help with Kylie, so why don’t we make a plan for her to visit me in a week or so? Do you mind sending her on the bus?”

  “That’s fine—she likes the bus.”

  “I’ll see if I can talk to her then. Meanwhile, keep me posted, okay?”

  She sighed and looked down at her long hands, with their elegantly tapered fingers. “You sure you have to go back today?”

  “I’m sorry, but they just found another girl.”

  “Oh, God,” she said, looking out at the Currier and Ives landscape of eighteenth-century stone buildings surrounded by soft, billowy snow. “Brigadoon”—that’s what his mother called her property—had been featured on the cover of New Jersey Life, and Elegant Homes had done a spread on it a few years ago. In addition to the main house, there was a stable with its own walled paddock, a carriage house and a springhouse. Under Fiona’s stewardship, Brigadoon was a fusion of comfort, taste and elegance. Now, though, his mother’s face reflected the despair he knew she must be feeling. Her only daughter was gone, probably dead, and now her only grandchild seemed to be spiraling into a lonely place where she might soon be out of reach. Fiona Campbell was a relentless optimist, but even she seemed to be bending under such burdens.

  “Why do they do it, Lee?” she said softly, almost to herself. “What makes people do wicked things like that?”

  “Nobody really knows for sure,” he replied. “But it’s my job to try to stop them.”

  She took a deep, shuddering breath and turned to him. Her face was a mask of pain, but her eyes were dry.

  “Then you go do it,” she said. “You go do your job.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Lee went straight from the Port Authority to the Thirteenth Precinct, where the other members of the task force were already gathered. The station house was deserted except for a desk sergeant and a sleepy-looking civilian clerk. He nodded at the sergeant and went through to Butts’s office, where he found the others seated around a bulletin board covered with crime scene photos.

  He took a seat next to Jimmy Chen, who was dressed in a blue turtleneck and soggy hiking boots instead of his usual Italian suit. Everyone in the room looked damp and bedraggled, except for Krieger, who was crisp and immaculate as usual in a white cable-knit sweater, ski pants and black thigh-high boots. In the corner underneath the window, the room’s only radiator sputtered and hissed.

  “Where did they find her?” Lee asked.

  “MacDougal Alley, behind a row of garbage cans,” Butts said. “She had been dead for over twenty-four hours, so he put her there before the storm.”

  “Who found her?”

  “Guy walkin’ his dog,” said Butts. “The dog started digging in the snow, wouldn’t give up, so the guy goes over to see what’s up and finds her.”

  “That’s not a very secluded spot,” said Lee. “Why didn’t someone didn’t see her sooner?”

  “He put a tarp over her this time,” said Butts. “The lab is checkin’ it for trace evidence.”

  “Same MO otherwise?” Lee asked.

  “Ligature strangulation, yeah,” said Butts. “But there seems to be a change in what you would call his signature.”

  “How so?” asked Detective Krieger, cocking her head to one side. “Didn’t he take a finger this time?”

  “He did,” Butts said, holding up a photo of the girl’s left hand, missing the pinky finger. “Exact same one as before, in fact. But this is different.” He held up a photo of the young woman’s nude torso. As before, there were minute, evenly spaced puncture wounds, but this time the pattern was immediately apparent: it was a pentagram.

  “More of that—what did you call it?” said Butts.

  “Piquerism,” said Lee.

  “Yeah.”

  “What, is he into witchcraft now?” Jimmy Chen asked.

  They all looked at Lee. He blinked his eyes to eliminate the blurred edges around everything; a couple of trolls with sledgehammers had now taken up residence inside his head.

  “I don’t think we should jump to conclusions,” he said. “We have to look at everything in context. What do we know about the victim?”

  “Name’s Mandy Pritchard. She’s a part-time student at Columbia.”

  “So he has a thing for college students,” Jimmy mused aloud.

  “Could be a coincidence,” said Krieger.

  “Maybe,” said Lee. “But I think we have to consider someone who moves comfortably in the world of academia, someone who would fit in on a college campus.”

  “Another student?” suggested Butts.

  Lee shook his head. “I don’t think so. This guy is likely to be older—maybe even much older. He’s as pure an example of an organized killer as I’ve ever seen. And he calls himself The Professor.”

  Krieger frowned. “So are we talking about a real professor?”

  “Not necessarily. There are a lot of people who come and go on a college campus.”

  “But the notes,” Jimmy said. “Don’t they indicate a high level of education?”

  “Did he leave one this time?” Lee asked Krieger.

  “No, he didn’t—or at least we haven’t found it yet,” she replied.

  “Interesting . . . I wonder why he didn’t leave one this time.”

  “Maybe he was in a hurry,” Jimmy suggested.

  “Except that he’s completely organized and plans every detail carefully,” said Lee.

  “Could he be losin’ it?” Butts asked. “Starting to fall apart from the stress?”

  “That would be great, but I don’t think so. Everything else points to just as much control as before.”

  “The lab is looking for DNA, prints, trace evidence—anything they can find,” said Butts, listlessly fingering a chocolate doughnut. It took a lot to put the detective off his food, and Lee didn’t envy Butts being in charge of this case.

  “Maybe this time we’ll get lucky,” Jimmy suggested.

  “Yeah, right,” said Butts, but no one believed it.

  “I was hoping for a handwritten note, but he’s too smart for that,” Krieger commented.

  “So what’s with the pentagram?” asked Butts. “Looks like some kinda devil worship to me.”

  Lee studied the photo. The tiny puncture marks were evenly
spaced, even more precise than the last time, and made up a perfect pentagram.

  “No,” he said slowly. “He’s not falling apart. If anything, he’s getting more confident.”

  In the corner, the ancient radiator hissed and clanked, the metallic rattling keeping time with the pounding in Lee’s temples. Looking at his colleagues’ grim faces, he wished he could take his words back, but it was too late. It was too late for a lot of things; the question was whether it was too late to stop this killer before he struck again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  The meeting ended around nine, all of them bleary-eyed and exhausted, leaving to make their way home through the snowy streets. Butts left to grab a bus out to Jersey—he had wisely declined to drive in, given the weather. Lee was the most fortunate, living less than a mile from the precinct house. He had brought only a backpack to his mother’s, so he slung it over his shoulder and decided to head home on foot. The pounding in his temples was lessening, but he still felt fuzzy and unfocused, and he figured the walk might clear his head.

  He took copies of the crime scene photos, slid them carefully into his backpack and stepped out into the night....

  Across town, Edmund sat at the piano, hunched over the keyboard, concentrating on the manuscript in front of him, his fingers pressing hard upon the ivory keys. The notes wove and danced on the page before his eyes, and he could feel the tiny felt hammers striking the strings—he loved the fact that the piano was a percussion instrument. The glorious harmonies of Bach’s Prelude XXI echoed from the baby grand’s sounding board, filling the air with the mathematical purity of his music.

  He finished the piece and shivered with pleasure. This, truly, was happiness—to be the conduit for the genius of Bach, to live in this moment, more than three hundred years after his death, in this Greenwich Village apartment....

  Lee turned the key in the lock on the front door of his apartment and for a moment had the feeling someone else was there. He flicked on the light, stepped inside and locked the door behind him, listening carefully. He heard nothing except the sound of people in the street outside, their voices muted by the thick layer of snow blanketing the city. He took a few steps in and looked around. Nothing looked out of place—the throw quilt lay on the couch where he had tossed it after his last nap, the last pair of shoes he’d worn were exactly where he’d left them, and the leftover coffee grounds were still in the Krups filter in the kitchen. Yet he couldn’t escape the feeling that something was different—that someone had been there while he was away, leaving an energy trail behind them.

  Then he remembered: Chuck was staying with him. There was no sign of him, though—his bedroom was a model of military neatness, the bed made with hospital corners, his shoes neatly arranged on the floor of the closet. Lee wondered where he had gone; he hadn’t left a note. But then, he had originally planned to spend another night in New Jersey, so Chuck probably wasn’t expecting him back yet.

  He went back out to the living room, where the piano beckoned silently, light from the street lamps shining darkly on its polished wood. He slid onto the bench, lifting the lid to the keyboard, and took out his dog-eared copy of The Well-Tempered Clavier. Peeling away a dried-out piece of Scotch tape holding it together, he placed it carefully on the music rack. Bach was eternal, universal, elemental. No matter how bad things got, there was always Bach.

  He turned to the D Minor Prelude and began, concentrating on precision and technique. There were so many roads into music, so many different ways of playing, so many elements to focus on. One day you could work on legato line and phrasing, the next on dynamics, and so on....

  Across town, Edmund turned to the tempestuous C Minor Prelude. Normally he wouldn’t play it so early in a session, but there was nothing better than playing something stormy to calm the soul. He gave himself over to the Prelude’s restless symmetry and felt his shoulders relaxing as his fingers moved faster, flying over the keys as the music grew more furious....

  Lee played on, lost in the music. It still amazed him that, through black ink markings on a page, he could communicate directly with the greatest creative geniuses the music world had ever known: Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Saint-Saens, Mendelssohn—and the greatest of them all, Johann Sebastian Bach. There was a longing inside him that only the music of Bach would fill. He dove into the next Prelude and felt the tingle of pleasure the opening bars always brought him, a prickling on his skin, endorphins flooding his brain.

  Just as the final chord was dying away, the phone rang. His head full of Bach, he picked it up without checking caller ID. He regretted it immediately.

  “Hello, sugar.” The voice was as smooth as ever, but there was an undertone of panic even she couldn’t hide.

  “Hello, Susan.”

  “Is he there?”

  “You mean Chuck?”

  She laughed softly. “No, Genghis Khan, silly. Well—is he?” She sounded impatient.

  “No, he’s not.”

  “But he is staying with you, right?”

  He had an impulse to lie, just to confound her, but knew she would only make him regret it later. But at least he could torment her a little.

  “He didn’t tell you where he was going?”

  “I guess I neglected to read that part of the memo, sugar.” Her voice was playful, but he knew that the steel underneath it could rip a man’s heart to shreds.

  “He’s staying with me, at least for now.”

  “What do you mean, ‘for now’?”

  Aha. He had the upper hand, if only for a moment.

  “Nothing,” he said, trying to give the impression he was hiding something.

  “Well, can you tell him I called?” He could tell she was curious but wasn’t going to take the bait. Her self-control had always been impressive.

  “Okay.”

  “I didn’t do it, you know,” she said, her voice tight. The mask dropped for a moment, and he sensed the pain that drove her compulsive behavior.

  She sounded so pathetic, he almost believed her—almost.

  “Do what?” he said.

  “He must have told you,” she said, annoyed.

  “Chuck doesn’t tell me everything,” he said, wanting to hear her version of events before he showed his hand.

  “He thinks I stepped out on him.”

  Stepped out on him. Who did she think she was, Blanche DuBois?

  “Well, did you?”

  “I just said I didn’t.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  There was a pause, and he could feel the chill descend.

  “Just tell him I called,” she snapped, and the line went dead.

  He stood cradling the phone in his hand, staring out the window at the Ukrainian church across the street. It was cold and still in the weak northern light. He shivered and hung up the phone. He had no idea where Chuck was. His best friend’s personal life might be falling apart, but he had to put that aside. He looked longingly back at the piano, then sat in the red leather armchair by the window and picked up his case notes. Lives were at stake, and that knowledge lay heavily on his shoulders.

  He pulled out the photos of the two victims and studied them side by side. The pattern on Mandy Pritchard was obviously a pentagram, though what it meant, he couldn’t say. The one on the first victim, Lisa Adler, was more ambiguous. It was a kind of spiral, like the shell of an ancient sea creature.... As he sat staring at the photos, his eyelids became too heavy to hold open. The room was warm, the chair was comfortable, and he was unable to fight the lure of sleep. The bump on his head throbbed, but his fatigue was stronger than the pain. His head fell forward as he succumbed to exhaustion and fell into a deep slumber.

  His dreams were filled with dark figures prowling downtown alleyways. His legs wouldn’t move fast enough to run, and he was unable to call for help; no sound came from his mouth as the killer closed in on the young woman lying helplessly in the shadowed doorway.

  Then his dream shifted, and
he was floating in a warm green sea, with tentacles instead of arms. He felt peaceful and free, hovering in the oceanic currents, his soft body gently pulsating with each wave of salt water. The radiator in the corner of the room suddenly clanked, and he awoke with a start. The photo was still in his lap, and he realized at that moment what the pattern on Lisa’s torso reminded him of: it resembled the curve of a chambered nautilus. He didn’t know what the significance of that was—maybe none—but the feeling of his dream was still strong in his mind as he got up, stretched and went off to bed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Sunday morning Lee got up early and went to the gym. Chuck’s bedroom door was closed, so he figured his friend had come in late the night before. After a strenuous workout with the punching bag, he felt better, though there was still a tightness behind his temples. He showered at the gym and took the train to the Bronx to meet Brian O’Reilly’s sister. He had arranged to meet her at her brother’s apartment, where she was going through his things and preparing for the wake.

  Gemma O’Reilly’s resemblance to her brother was startling. She had the same heavy-lidded eyes, full, upturned lips, and square chin. He couldn’t help noticing her striking green eyes, lined with long sandy lashes. It was a good face, with strong, generous features, which Lee’s mother always claimed indicated character. It was one of her odder notions—she thought someone with a weak chin possessed a weak will.

  “Please, come in,” Gemma said, holding the door open. She wore a black turtleneck sweater over forest green stretch pants that brought out the emerald flecks in her eyes. Whereas Brian was burly and bloated from alcohol, she was tall and slim and wiry. She looked at least fifteen years younger than her brother.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said, closing the door behind him. She led him into the kitchen. It was clear that this was where the family did most of their living. “Please, sit down.”

  He pulled a chair up to the table. It was odd to be there again. The kitchen felt strangely still, with the familiar aftermath of death. Lee had experienced it many times, but he had never gotten used to it. It wasn’t emptiness—it was absence. The presence of the two of them only seemed to heighten the awareness that Brian was missing, with his booming voice and larger-than-life personality.