Читать книгу Silent Screams - C.E. Lawrence - Страница 13

“You know,” Detective Butts remarked, “all this hocus-pocus stuff doesn’t solve crimes. Shoe leather does.”

“Right,” Lee answered. He had heard it all before, and was tired of defending himself to cops. He wasn’t an official member of the police force—he had not attended the academy, and carried only an ID card identifying him as a civilian consultant to the NYPD. He was keenly aware of the separation between him and the gun-toting members of the police force. People like him were not necessarily included in the tight, exclusive circle of the Brotherhood of Blue.

It was the next morning, and they were standing in front of an examination room at the medical examiner’s office, waiting for the pathologist who had done Marie Kelleher’s autopsy. She entered hurriedly, apologizing for her lateness. Gretchen Rilke was a rather glamorous-looking woman, blue-eyed and pink-cheeked, with thick, dyed blond hair and a suggestive lilt of Alpine hills in her accent.

“I was in a conference call that went late,” she said, pushing a strand of implausibly yellow hair from her eyes. With one hand she pulled the body from the morgue freezer compartment, the oversized drawer sliding smoothly on its metal rollers. With the other hand she pulled back the sheet covering Marie’s body just enough to expose her neck. In spite of the bluish tinge to her pale skin, it was still hard to think of her as dead.

“You see the bruises?” Gretchen asked.

Lee looked at the thick collar of purple discoloration that ringed Marie’s neck. It appeared darker now, which could be a result of the harsh fluorescent lighting—but he knew that bruises could deepen or even appear after death. Now, under the bright lights, he could see several separate bands of bruising.

“I see,” he said.

“This indicates that he repositioned his fingers, probably several times.”

“So he didn’t kill her all at once?” Butts asked.

The pathologist shook her head. “No. There’s no crushed cartilage, and no serious damage to the larynx.”

“So,” Lee said, “that means he applies minimum force—enough to make her lose consciousness. And then he waits until she comes to and starts all over again.”

“That scenario would be consistent with the physical evidence,” Dr. Rilke agreed.

“Shit,” Butts muttered. “This is one sick bastard.”

“Okay,” Lee said, almost to himself. “He’s not in a hurry. This means that he’s comfortable where he is—that he’s not worried about getting caught. He’s killing them somewhere other than the church. And no sign of sexual assault?”

“Right,” Dr. Rilke answered.

“And no sign of a struggle?”

“Her fingernails aren’t even broken, so she didn’t have time to fight back. There are no defensive knife wounds, so I’m guessing he took that out after she was already subdued.”

Lee gulped in some air, avoiding breathing through his nose. “So the carving was postmortem?”

“That would be consistent with the amount of bleeding—or lack of it,” she replied. “On the other hand…”

“What?” Lee said, his stomach twisting around itself. He swallowed hard. He hated visiting the morgue.

“Well, he didn’t carve that deeply, so it’s just possible it was done while she was still alive.”

Lee felt his stomach give a heave. He swallowed again and concentrated on taking deep breaths.

“How would he get her to stay still, though?” Butts asked.

“There were no signs of ligature around her wrists or ankles, right?” Lee asked.

“No,” Rilke answered. “But she might have been too weak to struggle by that time.”

“Any idea what he used?” Butts asked.

“Nothing fancy. An ordinary kitchen paring knife would do the job. Something with a pretty short blade—probably a couple of inches at most.”

“Could it have been a scalpel?”

“The wounds are too jagged for that—even in unskilled hands, a scalpel would do a neater job.”

“Too bad we can’t use handwriting analysis on this,” Butts remarked.

“No, I doubt there would be a correlation,” Lee agreed, “although there might be something about the way he forms certain letters…”

“It’s not much of a sample to go on,” Dr. Rilke pointed out.

None of them wanted to say what they were all thinking: the last thing they wanted was to have a larger sample, because that would mean having another victim.

“No prints at all?” Lee asked.

“No,” said Rilke. “We superglued the body—nothing. He must have worn gloves.”

“Supergluing” meant using cyanoacrylate (superglue) to develop latent prints that might not otherwise be visible.

“We gotta get going,” Butts said, looking at his watch. “The parents in Jersey are expecting us.”

“Okay, thank you,” Lee said to Gretchen, who smiled grimly.

“Good luck.”

“Thanks,” he replied, thinking, We’ll need it.

Forty minutes later Lee and Butts were seated next to each other on the DeCamp bus to Nutley, New Jersey. As the bus rumbled out of the Lincoln Tunnel and onto the corkscrew stretch of highway leading up the hill past the town of Weehawken, Lee turned to look across the river at Manhattan. The mid-morning sun lingered low in the eastern horizon, lurking behind the buildings, its furtive rays refracted by the glass skyscrapers of Midtown. The river appeared perfectly still and opaque under the hazy gray February sky.

Marie Kelleher’s parents had already come into the city once to identify their daughter’s body, and Chuck Morton, trying to spare them further grief and stress, had dispatched Lee and Butts out to the couple’s house in Nutley to interview them.

Lee leaned back in his seat and stretched his legs out under the empty seat in front of him. The DeCamp bus was expensive, but it was comfortable and quiet. It wasn’t crowded at this hour; they were traveling in the opposite direction of the commuters headed into the city. The few people scattered around the bus were reading, staring out the window, or napping. Talking on cell phones was forbidden, according to the sign behind the driver. Thick block letters warned that passengers who disobeyed could be ejected from the bus.

“Good old-fashioned detective work—that’s what solves crimes,” Butts remarked as he opened the magazine in his lap and leafed through it. “Yep,” he murmured, “that’s what it’s all about: knockin’ on doors, gathering evidence.”

Lee gazed out the window as the gray granite cliffs of Weehawken whizzed by. He’d heard this line before, many times, not just from beat cops and guys like Butts, but also at John Jay. The culture of law enforcement had little patience for what most cops considered the “touchy-feely” aspect of crime solving. Most cops were not comfortable around profilers, any more than they were comfortable around psychiatrists.

“It’s not that I think it doesn’t figure into the equation,” Butts said, staring down at a print ad promising whiter teeth. The woman in the picture grinned up at them, her parted lips displaying a row of broad, perfectly even teeth that gleamed like ivory dominoes. “But it’s really all about evidence in the end, you know? Cold, hard evidence—that’s what catches criminals.”

Lee didn’t reply. They had no evidence so far: no hair, no fibers, no DNA—nothing. He didn’t feel optimistic about getting any, either. This killer would only get better at covering his tracks as time went on.

Detective Butts was leafing through the magazine, his bulbous head bent low over the pages. Lee couldn’t help liking the man, in spite of his bluntness—or maybe because of it. He was like a lumbering old bulldog—grumpy, moody, eccentric—and yet Lee had the feeling he was someone you could count on in a crisis.

“What did you find out about that broken lock in the church basement?” he asked.

Butts looked up from the magazine. “The maintenance staff didn’t know anything about a broken lock, and no one I talked to in administration remembered making the call. But sure enough, there was one down there when they looked, so someone must have known about it.”

“Hmm,” Lee said. “That’s interesting.”

“Coincidence, you think?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

Nutley was not a long ride—about thirty minutes, with the light traffic they encountered traveling westward—and soon they were trudging from the bus stop up the hill to the modest middle-class neighborhood where the Kellehers lived. The house itself was a tidy little white clapboard structure, with green awnings over the windows and a small wooden windmill on the front lawn. Nothing looks its best this time of year, Lee thought as they walked up the narrow sidewalk to the front door. The grass in front of the house was brown and windswept, and even the little windmill looked desolate and abandoned in the dull late winter light.

The Kellehers were expecting them, and they were soon seated on opposite ends of the living room sofa, cradling cups of instant coffee in their hands. Their hosts sat opposite them in matching wing chairs. A fake electric log gave off an eerie red light in the hearth behind them.

Mrs. Kelleher had a face like a deflated muffin—as though someone had taken a pin to it. Her flesh puckered softly, gathering under her eyes in doughy little pouches, lying in crinkled pockets around her small, pursed mouth, the flesh sinking into itself in tiny, concave crevices. Lee figured her for no older than sixty, but knew without asking that she was a longtime smoker. The room reeked of cigarettes.

Her husband was as square and hard as she was fleshy. Short and broad of shoulder, he had the rugged build of a miner or a construction worker. Wisps of curly graying hair clung to the top of his big, square Irish head. A road map of spidery red blood vessels sprouted on either side of his straight, high-ridged nose, but his blue eyes were clear. Lee concluded that the broken blood vessels were more likely from excessive sun and exertion than alcohol. Or, if he was a drinker, he was off the bottle now.

“Can you think of any reason that your daughter might have been a target? Anything at all?” Butts asked them. The opening condolences were out of the way, and he was zeroing in on the heart of the matter with his usual forthrightness—or tactlessness.

Brian Kelleher cleared his throat and looked down at his wife. “We’re just simple people,” he said in a throaty, faintly accented voice. “We’ve never been associated with bad people—you know, criminal types.” A wave of stale tobacco floated from his clothing, the remnants of many cigarettes, and Lee realized that he, too, was a smoker.

“What makes you think we’d know our daughter’s killer?” Mrs. Kelleher asked, her eyes wide with anxiety. “We don’t know people like that.”

Butts was fidgeting with his notebook, and his eyes roamed the room restlessly. “We’re not saying you do,” he replied. “It’s just that sometimes people remember seeing and hearing something that can later be useful in an investigation. Can you think of anything that might stand out as strange or unusual in your daughter’s life—especially in the last few weeks or so?”

The Kellehers appeared to consider his question, but to Lee it looked as if they were merely marking time. They frowned as if in concentration, studied their hands, and looked around the room. Finally Mrs. Kelleher spoke.

“I can’t think of anything. Can you, dear?” she said to her husband. Mr. Kelleher looked at his wife—clearly, he took his cues from her.

He shook his big square head sadly. “Not really. Marie was a straight-A student, you know,” he added, with a glance at his wife.

“Did you ever see her with anyone strange or unusual?” Butts asked. “I mean, anyone who set off alarm bells or anything?”

The couple looked indignant, as if he had called their dead daughter’s virtue into question.

“Oh, Lordy, no,” Mrs. Kelleher replied. “She was dating that nice boy. He was respectful. We liked him, didn’t we, dear?” she said to her husband, who nodded obediently.

“He told us that he thought she might be seeing someone else,” Butts said.

“What do you mean?” Mrs. Kelleher demanded. Her soft, round face resembled a recently vacated couch cushion.

“Did you know anything about another boyfriend?” Butts asked.

Mrs. Kelleher’s prim face puckered like a prune. “No, of course not! Marie wasn’t that kind of girl.”

“What kind of girl is that?” Lee asked.

“The kind of girl who would be seeing two men at once, of course,” she snapped back. “Marie wouldn’t do that.”

“Because she was a good girl?” Lee said.

“Because she was a good Catholic girl. And, I might add,” she said, leaning forward and placing a plump hand on Lee’s arm, “we both trust in the good Lord to bring her killer to justice. We know he’s watching over us, and that he will help you capture this evil, evil man.”

“I guess He was looking the other way when your daughter was murdered,” Butts muttered under his breath.

“Excuse me?” Mrs. Kelleher said, her little button eyes bright with suspicion.

Lee felt sour distaste gathering in his mouth. Brian and Francis Kelleher held their faith in front of them like a banner. He recognized the smugness lurking behind her eyes: even devastated as she was by grief, Mrs. Kelleher’s voice had the sanctimonious tone of the true believer. These people brandished their beliefs like a weapon. One sweep of the sword of their faith opened a swath between them and the world of nonbelievers—a swift and tidy demarcation.

It set his teeth on edge and angered him beyond reason. He didn’t know why—perhaps he heard echoes of his mother’s stalwart stoicism and superiority. It was hubris in the guise of humility, close-mindedness masquerading as wisdom.

He knew he would have to overcome his distaste, and tried to arrange his face in a proper attitude of sympathy and concern.

“You know, my wife and I worked long and hard to raise our girl with solid Christian values,” Mr. Kelleher said, as if reciting a well-memorized speech. The words had all the spontaneity of a church litany. All the while, his wife watched him, smiling. Lee felt such a visceral distaste for them that he forced his thoughts once again to the unspeakable tragedy they had just suffered.

“You see, Inspector—” Mrs. Kelleher began.

“It’s Detective,” Butts corrected.

She was not deterred a bit, though, and continued without a pause.

“You see, Detective, the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. He must have had a reason for wanting our Marie up there with him—because that’s where she is now, sitting in heaven beside God the Father. He must have some plan for her, or He wouldn’t have taken her away from us like this.”

“So your daughter was religious, too?” Lee asked.

Mrs. Kelleher shifted her focus to him. “Oh, goodness me, yes! She never missed church. Marie was the very best child that anyone could hope to have,” she added, dabbing at her eye with the corner of a flowered handkerchief, which gave off an oppressively heavy floral scent. Lee tried to place it: Was it mimosa? Patchouli? Lilies of some kind?

Brian Kelleher put a protective hand on his wife’s shoulder. Lee had more sympathy for him. It looked as though he was just playing along with his wife’s religious passion, and that left to his own devices, he might be a sensible, rational man. Mrs. Kelleher sighed, though Lee had the impression that she was feeling sorry for herself rather than mourning her daughter. Something about this woman rubbed him the wrong way and set off alarm bells in his head.

Another half hour of questioning brought them no closer to useful information about poor Marie. Her parents merely corroborated everything they already knew about her. She was a good student, quiet but well liked. She honored her parents’ faith by attending church regularly—she even worked as a volunteer to feed the homeless in a program her church ran at a local shelter once a month. After refusing another cup of lukewarm instant coffee, Lee and Butts made their escape. Lee felt the Kellehers’ eyes on them as they walked down the short walkway to the street. Neither of them said a word until they rounded the corner toward the bus stop; then Butts exploded.

“What is it with people?” he bellowed. “Those two were more interested in their reputation than in finding out who killed their daughter.” He snorted and pulled a cigar out of his breast pocket. “What the hell,” he muttered as he placed it between his teeth. “Sometimes I just don’t know about people. I mean, why do we even bother, you know?” He bit off the end of the cigar and spat it out into the waste can. “You ever feel that way, Doc?”

“Yeah,” Lee said, “sometimes.” He didn’t want to suggest or even hint to Butts how deeply he had drunk from the well of despair.

“I dunno,” Butts said. “I just don’t goddamn know.”

Neither do I, Lee thought, but he said nothing.

“They’re hiding something,” Butts fumed, biting his lower lip. “I swear to God, they know something they’re not telling. I just don’t know what it is.”

Lee looked at the detective, who was chewing furiously on the cigar, working his jaw as if he wanted to pulverize it.

“I don’t know,” he answered, shaking his head. “It did seem like they were hiding something, but I’m not sure it related to Marie’s death. They did seem more interested in preserving their self-image than tracking down their daughter’s killer, but I’m not sure it adds up to collusion. Sometimes people react to grief in strange, unpredictable ways.”

“Funny, isn’t it?” Butts remarked as they walked down the hill toward the bus stop. “I mean, you say this guy is some kinda religious nut, right?”

“Something like that.”

“Right. So who does he go after? The kid of a coupla religious freaks. Talk about irony, huh? I mean, if that’s not irony, what is?”

Lee mumbled some words of agreement. It was ironic—or was it? He was beginning to wonder if Butts was on to something after all. What if the Kellehers did know more than they were letting on? And if so, what exactly did they know?