Читать книгу Silent Screams - C.E. Lawrence - Страница 12

Professor John Paul Farragut Nelson was not a happy man.

“Good God, Lee! Can’t you give it a rest? You just got out of the hospital, for Chrissakes!”

Nelson savagely stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette in the glass ashtray on his desk and stalked over to the window. His office at John Jay College was spacious but cluttered, with books and research papers stacked on the floor on both sides of his desk.

Lee shifted in his chair and looked down at his shoes. He had expected a lecture, but his old professor was more worked up than he had anticipated. Nelson jammed one freckled hand into his right pants pocket and ran the other one through his wavy auburn hair.

“Do you really think you can be of any help in this case?”

“Well—”

“You had a nervous breakdown, for God’s sake! And you think you can come waltzing back to work a few weeks later as if nothing ever happened?”

Lee stared at the floor. He knew Nelson well enough to know that when he got like this, arguing with him would only infuriate him more, like waving a red flag in front of a bull. Nelson actually resembled a bull at this moment, with his short, thick body tensed, nostrils dilated, his face as red as Lee had ever seen it—redder even than after an evening of Nelson’s legendary bar crawling and untold shots of single-malt scotch.

A tall, skinny student with a punk hairstyle and a silver nose ring wandered past the office and poked his head in the door—but after one look at Nelson’s face, quickly withdrew. Lee watched as the kid’s spiky, bright orange hair disappeared down the hall. He looked back at Nelson, who was rummaging through his desk—probably looking for cigarettes. He never seemed to be able to remember which drawer he kept them in. Lee had always been a little mystified by the interest the celebrated Professor Nelson took in him, an interest that began the first day he took his seat in Nelson’s Criminal Psychology 101, nicknamed “Creeps for Geeks.” It was a required course, even for the technicians who investigated crime scenes, the CSIs who were generally thought of as nerds by the other students.

Nelson’s teaching style reflected his personality. Imperious, brilliant, and impatient, he had a temper that could sweep up as suddenly as a storm over the waters of Killarney Bay, where he had traced his ancestry back for centuries. It was rumored that his father had been a member of the notorious Westies, a murderous Irish gang in Hell’s Kitchen that flourished in the middle of the twentieth century. It was said their ruthlessness and brutality made the Mafia look like choirboys.

In spite of Nelson’s reputation for remoteness, his interest in Lee had been immediate and fatherly. Lee thought maybe it was because he was a good ten years older than the average John Jay student, or perhaps it was their similar Celtic heritage. Nelson treated Lee with a kindness he did not display to the other students. In fact, he didn’t seem to regard the human race as worthy of the kind of affection he usually reserved for his Irish setter, Rex. Nelson doted on the animal and spoiled him as extravagantly as any Upper East Side lapdog.

Nelson’s interest in Lee’s career continued after he left John Jay to join the NYPD as its only criminal profiler, an appointment Nelson helped make possible. The bar crawling continued, as did the late-night discussions of German composers, French philosophers, and Celtic poets.

Now, however, Nelson did not appear at all pleased with his prize student.

“I thought you had more sense than that, I really did,” he said as he lit the cigarette he had dug out of the recesses of his desk.

Lee couldn’t help noticing that Nelson’s hands were trembling. Taking a deep drag from the cigarette, Nelson absently twisted the wedding ring on his left hand. His wife had been dead for nearly three months now, but he continued to wear the ring. Lee wondered why. To keep potential mates away? Out of loyalty and devotion to her memory? Nelson rarely discussed Karen, but her picture hung in the living room of his spacious apartment, showing her fresh faced and smiling from the stern of a sailing yacht, her short brown curls blowing in the wind—with no hint of the cancer that was to gnaw stealthily away at her in the years to come.

The wind seemed to leave Nelson’s sails. He blew out a puff of smoke and sat down behind his desk, linking his hands behind his neck.

“All right, lad,” he said. “What is so compelling about this case that it can’t wait?”

Lee was used to Nelson’s abrupt mood changes.

“I just have a feeling I can help here, that I—well, there’s something about this killer that I can feel, that I understand.”

Nelson leaned forward and studied the younger man.

“I don’t know that that’s necessarily a good thing.”

“Yes, I know. I realize the danger of—”

“Of compromising your objectivity.”

Now it was Lee’s turn to be angry.

“This whole notion of objectivity is a fantasy, you know.”

Nelson looked startled, but Lee continued.

“There is no such thing! It’s a comforting fiction created by people who don’t want to get too close to things that go bump in the night.”

Nelson took another drag from his cigarette. “If you’re suggesting that it’s relative, I would agree with you.”

“No, what I’m suggesting is that it doesn’t exist at all. The whole idea is some outdated Age of Reason notion, some classical model that went out with powdered wigs and knee breeches—only we just haven’t realized it yet. It’s an impossible ideal.”

Nelson grunted and stubbed his cigarette out on the floor. “Impossible or not, as a criminal investigator you owe it to your victims—and to yourself—to be as objective as possible. Otherwise your conclusions become clouded by emotion.”

Lee felt his shoulders go rigid as he looked at Nelson. “What are you saying?”

Nelson held his gaze. “I think you know.”

Lee didn’t reply, and the silence between them lay thick as the layers of books and manuscripts stuffed everywhere in the cluttered office. He glanced at the brass busts of Beethoven and Bach on Nelson’s desk. Beethoven’s face was tragic: the tightly compressed lips and broad nose, the stormy, tortured eyes under a mane of wild hair; the stubborn chin, jutting out defensively against the world, as if bracing himself for what Fate was to throw at him…the picture of determination, the triumph of human will in adversity. How different from the bourgeois contentment of Bach, with his big nose and face ringed by a wig of riotous Baroque curls. Nelson had a particular fondness for Beethoven. He had read Lee excerpts from the Heiligenstadt Testament, Beethoven’s tragic letter to his brother after learning of his impeding deafness.

Lee laid a hand on the bust of Beethoven, the metal cold and hard under his palm. “You think this is about my sister, don’t you?”

Nelson raised his left eyebrow. “This victim is about the same age Laura was when she…” he looked away as if embarrassed.

Lee’s grip on the bust tightened. “When she died,” he said.

Even though Laura’s body had never been found, Lee was certain that his sister was dead. He had known it from the very day of her disappearance, so finally and irrevocably that the countless questions and speculations from well-meaning friends, family, and news reporters became intolerable. “She’s dead!” he wanted to scream at them. “Isn’t it obvious?” But his mother’s denial was like a wall of granite between them.

He needed no such pretense around Nelson, who understood the inside of a criminal’s mind better than anyone Lee knew. Looking unblinkingly at hard human truths was what the criminal psychologist did, his raison d’être.

“She is dead, you know,” Lee said, his voice as steady as he could manage. “And like it or not, to some degree, for me every case is about Laura.”

Nelson sighed. “All right. I just think maybe you’re getting in too deep too soon.”

Lee paced the small room impatiently. “I know I can see into this killer, if I can only get a chance! I’m already beginning to see his patterns at work—”

“What patterns? There’s only been one body.”

He stopped pacing and faced Nelson. “Oh, no, that’s where you’re wrong. There’s another one—I’m sure of it.”

“I didn’t hear any—” Nelson put his hand to his forehead. “Wait a minute—there was a girl out in Queens a few weeks ago, a Jane Doe. Is that the one you mean?”

“Yes,” Lee said. “They called her ‘Jane Doe Number Five.’ I’m certain the two are linked.”

“Same signature?”

“Not exactly, but—”

“Wasn’t the girl in Queens found outdoors—not far from Greenlawn Cemetery, if I remember?”

“Yes, but she wasn’t far from a church, and I’m convinced that he would have left her there if something hadn’t stopped him.”

Nelson rubbed his chin, thick with reddish-brown beard stubble.

“I’ll be damned. I wonder if there are others.”

“I don’t think so. The Queens killing was hurried, opportunistic. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was completely unplanned. The one yesterday was much more organized, very carefully thought out. And he—” Lee paused and looked at Nelson.

“He what?”

“It hasn’t been released to the public, but he carved her up.”

Nelson sucked in a large quantity of smoke and flicked cigarette ash into a solid green jade ashtray he had brought back from Turkey.

“Go on,” he said quietly.

“The words to the Lord’s Prayer—or at least the beginning of it. Post mortem, thank God.”

“Jesus.”

“That took some time to do.”

Nelson rubbed a hand over his face. “God, Lee, I’m still afraid you’ll be getting in over your head on this one. Are you taking your medication?”

Lee fished a bottle of pills from his jacket and held them in front of Nelson’s nose. Nelson studied the bottle.

“Not much of a dosage. When Karen was sick I was on twice that much.”

Lee put the bottle back in his pocket. “This stuff is expensive.”

Nelson gave a laugh—a short, mirthless puff of air. “Tell me about it.”

Lee looked out the window at the cars and pedestrians on Tenth Avenue, everyone hustling up the avenue—jostling, honking, competing for space in the rush hour traffic, all in a big hurry to get somewhere, to be part of the endless, restless motion that is New York City. He remembered being one of those people, before depression came along, lifted him off his feet, and slammed him facedown into the pavement.

The view from down there was different. It was strange to look up and see people still hurrying along with their lives intact, while for him just getting out of bed was an act of enormous willpower. Now, looking down at them on the street below, he had the same feeling of distance, of being an alien in a world where everyone except him seemed to know where they were going. He envied them, but he also felt that he knew something they could never know. He had seen into the very center of things, into hell itself, and come back alive somehow—damaged, perhaps, but alive.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Nelson standing behind him. Was it Lee’s imagination, or were his blue eyes moist? It was hard to tell with the light coming from behind him.

“I can see that nothing I say is going to stop you. So let me just say this: be careful, Lee.”

“I will.”

“Good. Now go out and get that son of a bitch.”

Lee looked down at the street again. Somewhere, in the throng of people, with a face that could blend into any crowd, a pair of footsteps clicked along the sidewalk next to a hundred others, footsteps belonging to a murderer with only one thing on his mind: his next victim. Lee silently vowed to do whatever he could—at whatever cost—to get between that killer and his goal.