Silent Slaughter

by C. E. Lawrence

  The detective grunted when he saw Lee. “’t’Bout time. What the hell were you doing in Philly?”

  “Long story,” Lee said, looking at Elena Krieger, crouched over the body. “Who’s the victim?”

  “Name’s Victoria Hwang. She lives uptown, but her parents live down here. We sent a uniform to their place to tell them a little while ago.”

  “Is there a note?”

  “Uh, yeah.” Butts looked away. “There’s something I should tell you about that.”

  “What?”

  “It’s addressed to you.” He handed Lee a pair of white latex gloves. “Give Detective Krieger another coupla minutes, and then we’ll have a look.”

  “Where’s Jimmy?” Lee asked as he pulled on the gloves.

  “Chen? Over there,” Butts said, pointing. “Interviewing potential witnesses.”

  Jimmy was surrounded by a group of middle-aged Chinese men, who were smoking and talking with animated gestures. Jimmy towered over them. Butts pointed to a faded red sign tacked over one of the rusted doorways. The top of the sign was in Chinese. The bottom read: NY TTF

  “TTF?” said Lee.

  “Table Tennis Federation,” Butts replied. “It’s a big deal down here, apparently.

  “His knowledge of Mandarin should come in handy,” Lee said, looking at his friend. A stocky Chinese man with thick shoulders and eyeglasses was explaining something to Jimmy as his companions watched, nodding. Jimmy’s face was serious, as he bent his long back down to lessen the distance between them—he had at least half a foot on the other man.

  “Chen says this place is a big deal,” said Butts. “All kinds of people train here, even Olympic athletes.”

  Peering down the narrow stairs leading to the basement room, Lee could hear the rhythmic plunk of a dozen Ping-Pong balls and the occasional shout of victory or defeat. Apparently the presence of a murder victim a few yards away wasn’t enough to dim the enthusiasm of the table tennis community.

  He turned his attention back to the alley, the pavement glistening damply in the gray afternoon light. The warm snap had melted most of the snow in the city, but this narrow passageway saw little sunlight, and the street was still wet. Lights glowed softly in some of the apartment windows facing the alley. The whole scene was disconcertingly beautiful.

  Elena Krieger straightened up and brushed the dirt from the knees of her tight-fitting navy ski pants.

  “Well,” she said, joining them, “there’s a new twist.”

  “What’s that?” asked Lee.

  “He took two fingers this time,” Butts said.

  Krieger glared at him. “I was about to say that this girl is Asian.”

  “You think that’s why he left her in Chinatown?” Butts asked Lee.

  “It could be significant, but it’s hard to say. It could also be because there are more alleys downtown.”

  “Or maybe he attacked her here,” suggested Krieger.

  Lee shook his head. “Even if he did, he probably transported her somewhere else to—”

  “To do what he does,” Butts finished for him.

  “Right. He has to complete the ritual somewhere private, where he won’t be disturbed.”

  “His place?” Butts suggested.

  “I think we should keep our minds open about that.”

  “Why’d he take two fingers this time?” asked Butts. “Does that mean his signature is—whaddya call it—evolving?”

  “I’m not sure what it means,” said Lee.

  “Oh, my God,” said Krieger.

  “What is it?” Butts said.

  “One is the loneliest number. Do you think he was referring to—to the fingers?”

  “Could be,” said Lee. “But still, why would he take two this time?”

  Just then Jimmy Chen finished with the Ping-Pong players and walked over to join his colleagues. The Chinese men stood for a moment smoking and talking in low voices. Then, taking a final drag on their cigarettes, they filed back down the stairs to the table tennis club.

  Jimmy glanced back over his shoulder at them. “I told them to keep their damn cigarette butts away from our crime scene. If I see one butt in this alley, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

  “Learn anything?” asked Butts.

  “None of them saw anything. The guy who discovered the body said there was no one else in the alley when he found her. Communicating was a bit of a challenge, though—some of those guys speak Cantonese.”

  “You mean you couldn’t understand them?” said Butts. “I thought Chinese was Chinese.”

  Jimmy regarded him coolly. “There are fourteen separate language groups in mainland China. The Han Chinese alone speak eight mutually unintelligible languages.”

  Krieger crossed her arms. “In Germany we have regional dialects, but we can all understand one another.”

  “China is an ancient culture,” Jimmy said. “In fact—”

  “Okay, knock it off,” said Butts. “I’m sure it’s all fascinatin’, but we got work to do here.”

  “Detective Butts said the note was addressed to me this time,” Lee said to Krieger.

  “Yes,” she said, looking uncomfortable. “I haven’t had a chance to study it properly yet. After it’s been processed at the lab for fingerprints and trace evidence, I’ll analyze it. Do you mind waiting a while to read it?”

  “All right,” he said, though he did mind.

  “Right,” said Butts. “And once they’re done with Miss, uh, Hwang at the ME’s, we’ll have a chance to look at her—”

  “To see what he did to her this time,” Jimmy added grimly.

  “Yeah,” said Butts. “So until then, let’s try and canvass the area for any more potential eyewitnesses, huh?” He squinted up at an apartment window, where a couple of people were peering down into the alley. “You take this building,” he said to Jimmy, “and I’ll send a coupla sergeants to cover the one across the street.”

  Because they were shorthanded, Krieger agreed to accompany one of the sergeants on interviews, leaving Lee and Butts standing alone in the gathering dusk. They could hear the bustle of Canal Street, the constant stream of pedestrians and traffic on one of Manhattan’s busiest thoroughfares. The occasional squeal of brakes and impatient honking punctuated the rumble of trucks as they clattered over Canal Street’s numerous potholes.

  “You wanna have a look at her before they take her away?” Butts asked as the ME’s black van backed down the alley.

  “Yeah,” said Lee. He trudged over to where Victoria Hwang lay. She was the center of all the action, as the crime scene techs scurried about, collected evidence, dusted for prints—but in a way she looked neglected, lying unattended in the same spot where the killer had dumped her.

  He gazed down at her. She was young, though not especially pretty; she was fully dressed in a red wool coat, and her shiny black hair looked as if it had been combed and carefully arranged. She lay on her back in the same pose as the others, her hands clasped over her stomach. The index and pinky fingers of her left hand had been neatly severed.

  A tech from the ME’s office approached him, a slight young man with pale eyes and freckles. “ ’Scuse me, but mind if we move her now?”

  “Sure, go ahead,” Lee said, stepping aside, relieved. He made a silent vow that she would be the last victim of this killer he would ever have to look at. He just hoped it was a vow he could keep.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  Alone in Butts’s office the next morning, Elena Krieger looked at the letter in her hands, irritated that her palms were sweating. Her fingers trembled—not from fear but from anger—as she read it again for what felt like the thousandth time. The typed text was neat as always, free of obvious grammatical errors or misspellings, a clear indication of the author’s intelligence and education.

  Dear Dr. Campbell,

  I know, it’s so frustrating, isn’t it? You want your suspects—or UNSUBs, as you so touchingly call them—to fit into neat little categories,
and when they don’t, it’s so disappointing. What do you have on me thus far? What kind of killer am I? Power-assertive? Really, am I the kind of man you would see lifting weights at a gym? Hardly—I think I’ll leave that particular activity to you. Anger-retaliatory? I shouldn’t think so. My dear old mum gave me no cause to hate women . . . so just exactly what am I? I guess that’s for me to know and you to find out, hmm? At any rate, I’m sure I’ve left plenty of lovely clues in this missive for that sexy linguist friend of yours to decipher. I’d love to perform some cunning linguistics on her—who wouldn’t? You two should really think about getting together, you know, and creating your own master race. (Oh, you’re thinking now, is he a neo-Nazi of some kind?) Happy hunting!

  The Professor

  Krieger’s face heated when she read the dirty pun. He thought he was so smart! She vowed he would be brought to justice if it was the last thing she did. And the snide comment about procreating with Campbell—disgusting. Not that she would mind—he was a very attractive man, though too thin for her taste—she preferred more robust specimens. But Elena Krieger made it a rule never to get involved with colleagues. That could only lead to trouble, and she had enough trouble just being Elena Krieger.

  This UNSUB clearly knew who she was; his last letter had even been addressed to her. Of course, it would be easy enough for someone like him to find out she was working the case, and she tried not to dwell on the sensation that she was being watched. Nevertheless, she knew that on some level, her job put her in peril. It was also part of its appeal to her. She thrived on adrenaline—there was no kick quite like danger.

  She put the letter down on Butts’s desk and looked at her Rolex. She was early—the others would arrive soon. She leaned on the desk and stared out the window at East Twenty-first Street. A couple of uniformed cops leaned against a blue and white patrol car, smoking. A thin whiff of smoke snaked its way through the closed windows, and she wrinkled her nose in disgust. Revolting habit. Though she had occasionally indulged back in her German cabaret days, it now struck her as repulsive—though perhaps not as repulsive as Leonard Butts, with his pudgy, untidy body and messy ways.

  She looked at his cluttered desk and shuddered. How on earth she had been saddled working another case with him she couldn’t understand. He didn’t like her any more than she liked him, and yet here they were, together again. It reminded her of that old American television show, The Odd Couple. Felix and Oscar—Butts was exactly like Oscar, but she didn’t see herself as the fussy, prissy Felix. She did admire his passion for order, though—order was the closest thing Elena Krieger had to a religion, and she was convinced that this commitment to organization had led to her rapid advancement within the NYPD.

  She gazed out the window at the logo on the side of the patrol car.

  COURTESY

  PROFESSIONALISM

  RESPECT

  Right, she thought. Elena had been around the NYPD long enough to see the cracks in that façade. There were good, decent people on the force, but there were also corruption, racism, and egos. God, the egos! Of course, she was aware that hers was one of them—Elena Krieger liked to think she had no illusions about herself. She was equal to the machismo and posturing within the force, but the sheer amount of it could be wearing. She was tired of having to prove herself; both her gender and her identity as a foreigner marked her as an outsider. These days, anyone with an accent was suspect, no matter what country it came from.

  Still, she thought as she looked down at the pair of lumpy uniformed officers lounging against their patrol car, she had an advantage over most of her colleagues. She was hardworking, smart and ambitious. But what really set her apart was her discipline. She knew it was a stereotype about Germans, but if she fit the stereotype, so what? She was convinced that her dedication and capacity for hard work would pay off in the long run.

  She glanced at her Rolex again, her one personal luxury, running her fingertips lightly over its diamond-encrusted face. She had to hand it to the Swiss—they knew how to make watches. She didn’t wear it because it was a status symbol; she wore it because it was a finely crafted piece of machinery. Elena Krieger liked things that worked. She couldn’t stand having anything broken or damaged around—chairs with missing slats, cracked or chipped dishes, ripped upholstery.

  Her personal rule was either mend it within a week or throw it out. It didn’t matter whether or not the object had sentimental value—if it was broken, it had lost its usefulness. Period—no exceptions. She had once discarded a cuckoo clock that had belonged to her grandfather because it couldn’t be mended. Her father had been upset when he found out, but that was just too bad, she thought. He should have taken better care of it.

  Elena Krieger was deeply threatened by entropy. Her entire life was a struggle against chaos, decay and entropy. She had a horror of disease, aging and impairment of any kind. She had long ago made a pact with herself that if she were ever permanently incapacitated, she would take her own life. She had the drugs stowed safely away in the back of her underwear drawer, and her lawyer had a copy of her living will, which stated that she was not to be kept alive if through injury or disease she were to enter “a persistent vegetative state.”

  She stepped away from the window. Her colleagues’ meeting with the NYPD top brass should be over by now. She was glad she hadn’t been asked to join Campbell and Butts to explain why another girl had turned up dead. Well, maybe she was a little peeved at being left out, but she was more relieved than not.

  She looked at her watch again. They were fifteen minutes late. Probably that fat little detective had stopped somewhere to eat. It was disgusting the way he was always shoveling food into his mouth. She could hardly bear to look at him.

  The phone on his desk rang, and without thinking, she snatched it up.

  “Elena Krieger here.”

  At first there was silence, then a soft whimpering in the background, and what sounded like a girl’s voice pleading. Elena strained to hear what she was saying—it sounded like “No, please—don’t.”

  “Who is this?” she barked into the phone, fighting the wave of nausea and panic sweeping over her. “Who’s calling?”

  The whimpering stopped. There was the sound of heavy breathing, and a man’s voice said, “Tag, you’re it.”

  Then the line went dead.

  Elena Krieger stood with the receiver in her hand, staring at the phone. The sound of that voice would stay with her for some time.

  Tag, you’re it.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  When Butts and Lee arrived at the precinct, they found a very shaken Elena Krieger. Even her Germanic stoicism couldn’t hide the fact that she was upset; worry lines creased her elegant forehead, and her hand trembled as she handed the note she held to Lee.

  “It was addressed to you, so I thought you should—”

  “Thanks,” he said, taking it from her.

  It was a copy of the original note found on Victoria Hwang, which was still being processed in the lab for possible prints, DNA and trace evidence, though no one in the room expected any good news about that.

  “Before you read it, I—I think he called here,” she said.

  “What?” Butts exclaimed. “Are you shittin’ me? What did he say? How do you know it was him?”

  She regarded him coolly. “To answer your questions in order, no, I am not ‘shitting you,’ and what a lovely expression that is, by the way.”

  Butts snorted impatiently. “Just tell us what happened.”

  She went on to recount the phone call, the girl in the background, and the creepy comment the caller made before hanging up.

  “What did his voice sound like?” asked Lee.

  “Educated, definitely British.”

  “And the girl?” said Butts. “Someone could just be pullin’ your leg. There’s a lot of crazies out there who like to home in on investigations.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “I thought of that. And it might have been someone j
ust playacting—but if it was, she was very convincing.”

  “This town is full of out-of-work actors,” Butts remarked. “And they all need money. I can see some sicko paying one of ’em to do this.”

  “Could the girl’s voice have been a recording?” Lee asked.

  “It was pretty faint, way in the background,” she said. “Yes, it could have been a recording.”

  “You’re thinking he recorded Victoria or another one of his victims?” said Butts.

  “Maybe,” Lee answered. “But why didn’t the call go through the switchboard?”

  “He musta had my direct line,” said Butts. “That’s not so hard to get hold of.” He looked at Lee and nodded at the note. “So, what’s he got to say there?”

  “There’s a lot of posturing—he alternates between taunting us and showing off how much he knows.” He handed the note to Butts and turned to Krieger. “But you’re the linguistics expert. What can you tell us?”

  She bit her lip. “Based on vocabulary and word usage, I’d say it’s definitely written by the same person as the other two. Highly educated, articulate, obviously, as we said before. The phrase ‘my dear old mum’ suggests once again that his origins are the British Isles.”

  “Why do you think he addressed it to you?” Butts asked Lee.

  “He wants to be in the middle of the investigation—to follow it and insert himself every step of the way. He sees me as someone who is trying to ‘figure him out,’ so the note is an attempt to make a connection.”

  The door was flung open, and Jimmy Chen entered, out of breath.

  “I was just at the morgue,” he said.

  “Yeah? What did you learn?” asked Butts.

  Jimmy held out a manila envelope. “We’re dealing with one sick bastard.”

  “We knew that already,” Krieger said. “Let’s see the photos.”

  Jimmy spread the pictures out on the desk. Victoria Hwang’s body, like the others, had been disfigured by tiny pricks in her torso. This pattern was different yet again—it was circular, a series of overlapping swirls, sort of like the center of a sunflower.