Scream Catcher (16 page)

“So what do we do?” P.J. interjects, not without a laugh. “Hold him down, tickle him till he pees his pants?”

MacSweeney lets loose with a fake courtesy laugh.

“Strategically speaking you have to educate the court. That will be my job as the profiler. I will
describe
the monster that is Hector Lennox, but I will do so in a most complimentary way. I will use terms like ‘sophisticated,’ ‘ingenious,’ and ‘stealthy.’ I will describe in detail his signature and his M.O. and the differences between them, including his obsession with collecting his victims’ screams. By the time I’m through I’ll have propped him up so far that he’ll want nothing more than to admit to being the brilliant mastermind he’s always thought of himself.”

“But will it guarantee an indictment?” Blanchfield asks, facial expression shifting from cynical to cautious.

“A profiler’s behavioral testimony can never be used as evidence. But what it can do is
push
a Judge towards issuing an indictment. At the very least it could persuade the old man to revoke bail, have the suspect remanded to county jail pending a full FBI investigation.”

“The case would be out of our hands at that point,” Mack surmises.

“Correct Captain,” MacSweeney says. “You’ll then make up the supporting cast.”

Another pause ensues during which Jude finds his eyes attracted to the framed headline hanging on the wall above the trophy case:
“Blanchfield Steals County Prosecutor!”

“What about this M.O. and signature stuff?” Lino speaks up from beneath a thick mustache. “Can you enlighten us, Agent MacSweeney? So we’re all on the same page.”

The profiler smiles like the stage is all his. And it is.

“In the beginning,” he explains, “we assumed Lennox might be in possession of a Dissociative Condition, meaning that because of the mental and physical abuse he suffered as a child he developed a defense mechanism for dealing with the pain. He formed a split in his psyche. On one side was Hector. On the other, the ever-emerging Black Dragon.

“The video games he relentlessly played as a child locked inside his lonely windowless room allowed him to role play, fantasize and escape. Mostly they afforded him a means of controlling his hatred towards his father. On the video screen appeared a computer image which the young Hector made dead with the joystick trigger. In the boy’s subconscious mind that image bore the likeness of his abusive father.”

Mack raises his hand like a school kid.

“But how will this convince the Judge that the accused is really Lennox?”

“Lennox will
want
to be exposed eventually,” MacSweeney explains. “I believe he wanted to be arrested. When he discovered that the still alive eyewitness was a former cop, chills must have run up and down his spine. Here was his chance for a high profile kill game. The arrest would provide him not only with a prologue to his new script, it would afford him a substantial challenge—a situation he has no choice but to get himself free of, just like the plot of a real video game. It also makes everyone present at this meeting a player in a new kill game. At least potentially.”

“Then it’s quite possible the situation has become more dangerous since the suspect’s arrest and conditional release,” Mack says. “It’s even more possible that a new kill game has started concurrent with his arrest.”

“If that is the case,” Lino adds, “what the hell can we expect now?”

“That’s the big question isn’t it?” MacSweeny answers. “Lennox’s M.O. is a learned behavior. It can never change. He chases a victim around a designated space and catches his screams before killing him. That’s a fact that will never be altered so long as he’s free and able to operate. The person he kills represents his father. He keeps chasing and killing Daddy Lennox over and over again. He keeps making his Daddy scream.

“But his
signature
can be found in the many different and increasingly complex game scenarios he sets up for the kill. These things are subject to change. They are the tanning factory, the river, the gravel pit behind Sweeney’s Boxing Gym. It is his having set himself up to be arrested.

“So what can we expect?

“If he is allowed to walk, he will choose a new gaming location. Because in his subconscious mind his father is alive again and it’s time to die again. Just a like a video kill game in which people die violently in one game but then return alive the next. And as for his next victim? Your guess is as good as mine. I would wager the mortgage that the victim or victims is sitting inside this cyber room right now.”

The demon inside Jude pokes and tugs at his stomach. He believes his father recognizes the dread he feels. Because that’s when the old Captain paints his own face with one of his famous fake smiles before returning his attention back to Blanchfield.

“Maybe the crime scene reenactment wasn’t a total loss after all, P.J.,” Mack offers. “We’ve already established that the man who calls himself Christian Jordan and who killed in the gravel pit is in possession of the same M.O. and signature as Lennox. He’s been ID’d by Jude as the man who killed Andy Manion yesterday morning. Those two things alone will spark a reasonable suspicion in the mind of Judge Mann. It should in the very least get the fucker remanded back to county … pardon my French.”

“I’m glad you think so, Captain,” Blanchfield says, stone-faced. “But that still leaves us with our original problem: a highly unreliable witness.”

“I’m not sure I see the problem here, P.J.,” MacSweeney insists. “You have all the ammunition at your disposal to make a believer out of Judge Mann. Because the only alternative will be to release Lennox. And if that happens he
will
kill again. I tell you this: he’s playing a kill game right now in the sanctity of his own home; his own mind. No surveillance bracelet is going to keep him from playing. Because once a man like Lennox engages in a real-life, real-time kill game and finds that he likes it, he develops a taste for it—an obsession to challenge himself with more complex games. The arrest and subsequent remand to his home under GPS supervision will have provided him with just such a unique challenge. Not to mention one further significant fact.”

“What fact is that?” Mack begs.

“Your son Jude is alive. Jude witnessed the murder behind Sweeney’s Gym. Lennox will want to finish the job he attempted behind the gym but failed at. He will want to catch Jude’s screams.”

Silence follows.

For Jude it is a thick quiet. Palpable, like hot humid air.

He begins to feel like he is drowning in it.

If this were a normal face-to-face meeting, he might use the opportunity to visit the men’s room, splash cold water on a numb face. But being on camera makes him want to sit in place, not make a single move.

After a time, Lino raises his hand.

Smoothing out his black mustache, he says, “Has anyone contacted French authorities about exhuming a grave marked with Lennox’s name?”

“Good question, Lt. Lino,” MacSweeny says. “I’ve asked some of our operatives in the area to scour the cemeteries, see what they can come up with. Thus far their efforts have yielded nothing.”

With that, the Profiler asks Blanchfield if she will be needing anything else for now.

She shakes her head, runs her hands through straight blond hair. Her face resembles a roadmap of doubt. MacSweeney, a world renowned FBI Profiler, is trying to aid the case and yet Jude gets the feeling that Blanchfield still isn’t the least bit confident that the prosecution’s case against Lennox will stand up in court. In any case, all she asks of the agent is that he be available for the courtroom video in the morning.

Of course he will be.

He also insists that with any luck, he’ll be sending up a team of investigative agents as early as tomorrow afternoon, no matter the outcome of the Prelim Hearing.

That decided, the prosecution team extends each of their individual goodbyes to the expert profiler as his face disappears from the monitor.

Lake George Village

Thursday, 10:35 A.M.

Leaving the building, Jude assumes Mack will drive him straight home where the former cop will spend his last night before the Prelim getting his head together.

If such a thing is possible.

But instead father and son make a slight detour. Having pulled out of the new concrete parking garage behind the courthouse, Mack crosses over Main Street, careful to avoid the wall- to-wall tourists. He then makes his way onto Mohawk Street, drives for maybe a full mile until he comes to a narrow alley where he pulls off to the side, cuts the engine.

Jude doesn’t have to say a word to know why his father stopped outside that dark alley. Because inside it, behind a rusted wall of chain-link fence, is a basement apartment rented in the name of Christian Jordan, the man they all know as Hector Lennox. It seems strange to Jude that come the next morning they will meet face to face before Judge Mann … Lennox the accused and Jude the eyewitness to a murder.

Mack pulls a cigarette from his pocket, lights it, blows out the smoke.

“This bother you?” he poses, opening his window all the way.

“Since when do you bother to ask?”

“Shit,” the old Captain says, staring sadly down at the lit smoke.

Although it isn’t often that he sees his father like this—face tight, pensive—Jude knows that Mack has something important to say. He can also tell the old man is working up the courage to come out with it.

After a time Mack says, “Tell me something, Jude. How is it that a former detective can witness a murder, ID the suspect in question, and be considered a highly unreliable witness?”

“I was knocked out, remember? I’m also an admitted head case. The reading public gobbled up my story. Why shouldn’t Judge Mann?”

“You got a good look at him,” Mack insists. “You wouldn’t lie just to make up a good yarn, even if you have become a pro writer.”

Jude sits there for a minute, eyes peeled at the dark alley. The day is sunny, warm and beautiful. But inside that alley it’s dark and cold. It seems like a good home for the dark monster.

“What are you getting at Mack?”

“Between you and me,” he says, drawing in a lungful of smoke, “I don’t like what’s happening. We’ve got Lennox in our sights. Right down there in that back alley, and yet he still feels a million miles away.”

Jude exhales, says, “He should be in county jail right now, shouldn’t he be?”

“If I were the county prosecutor I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I wouldn’t rest until Lennox was behind bars. I wouldn’t be satisfied with just a surveillance bracelet. I would have protested Mann’s decision. Defied it publicly by going straight to the press. I would have ordered the L.G.P.D. to park outside Lennox’s front door.”

“But?”

“But instead Blanchfield orders the opposite. Observe the gag order. Stay away from Lennox. We don’t want to give him a chance to scream harassment; we don’t want to risk blowing a second and last chance at nailing his ass; we don’t want to risk it by being too aggressive.” A shake of his head. “You see the look she had on her face during the MacSweeny video conference?”

Jude nods.

Mack says, “You ask me she had no intention of buying into a single word he said.”

The old Captain smokes, bites down on his lower lip.

“I know you don’t see Blanchfield as an aggressive prosecutor,” Jude says. “But are you trying to tell me it goes further than that?”

“I’m not sure what I’m saying. But I do know this: something’s not right here, kid. I can’t exactly put my finger on it, but I can’t help but think that Blanchfield is playing this one all wrong. So far she’s put more time in trying to prove you an unreliable witness than disproving Lennox’s alibi and that phony Christian Jordan cover story.”

For a split second Jude thinks that now might be the time to tell his father about the e-mail he received the previous morning. The one from a person going by the odd name Fox. The one that told him he wasn’t safe; to watch his back. He thinks seriously about telling Mack but something holds him back. If he has to attribute his apprehension to something, it would be Mack’s anxiety. Jude knows that if the old Captain has to put up with even one more worry, he’ll end up cuffing the entire Parish family to his wrists.

“There’s something else that’s been gnawing at me,” Mack says after a time. “Something that under different circumstances I might not think twice about.”

“What is it?”

“Yesterday afternoon, a young man on my support staff came to me, casually mentioned that P.J. paid him a personal visit yesterday afternoon after we left her office. She was full of questions about the surveillance bracelet, wanted to know if it was as secure as people say.”

“You questioned its security yourself.”

“Yeah, I did. But at the time, P.J. seemed to have no doubt about its effectiveness as a monitoring device.”

“Now what are you trying to get at? That this kid gave P.J. the key to the bracelet?”

Mack shakes his head.

“‘Course not,” he says. “If he did something like that he’d certainly tell me about it.”

Almost on cue, both men peer back into the dark alley.

But inside Jude’s head a flash of something: a bare-chested Lennox removing the monitoring device from his ankle, hanging it on a bare wall. He closes his eyes tight, shakes his head as though to shake the image loose from his brain.

“So far no alarm has sounded,” he points out. “He’s still in there with the thing on his ankle.”

“So far,” Mack says.

The two are quiet for another minute.

But inside the walls of Jude’s skull he’s seeing that same ankle bracelet hanging on a wall. The image is accompanied by an orchestra of strings and pounding tympanis. Strings pluck, snare drums crack, symbols crash, horns blare. Jude senses that as the day wears on and nightfall descends, the orchestra will gradually work its way towards major crescendo, and the demon inside him will be the conductor.