Silent Kills (19 page)
Authors: C.E. Lawrence
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The drive back to the city that afternoon was surprisingly quick, and he didn’t have to look very long for parking. He managed to pull into a spot on Fifty-eighth Street just as a black SUV with Jersey plates was leaving—a real stroke of luck in the city, where you could easily hunt for over an hour before giving up and forking over your life savings to a parking lot.
As they walked toward the restaurant, Kylie danced in little circles on the sidewalk, chanting, “Jekyll and
Hyde,
Hydee Hodee Hyde!”
Hyde,
Hydee Hodee Hyde!”
Lee thought about the phone call from Krieger earlier. His cell didn’t work well in that part of Jersey, but he had no idea how Krieger got Fiona’s number—or how she knew he was there. It was intrusive of her to call him there, but her enthusiasm was touching. She was clearly making an effort to be a team player—though mostly what she did over the phone was complain about working with Butts.
A match made in hell, those two
, he thought.
A match made in hell, those two
, he thought.
He glanced at his watch. It was almost 6
P.M.
Lines started forming on the sidewalk outside by 5:30
P.M.
most days, and when the doors opened at six, visitors were ushered in by one of the dozen or so costumed actors employed by the restaurant. Kylie loved talking with them, as did a lot of other kids who came to the place.
P.M.
Lines started forming on the sidewalk outside by 5:30
P.M.
most days, and when the doors opened at six, visitors were ushered in by one of the dozen or so costumed actors employed by the restaurant. Kylie loved talking with them, as did a lot of other kids who came to the place.
The restaurant’s version of “scary” was jaunty and innocuous, like a horror house ride at Disneyland. The actors who roamed the place in character were mostly young, eager, and good at interacting with the customers.
They turned the corner onto Sixth Avenue and joined the line already forming on the sidewalk. The front of the club was a garish hodgepodge of architectural styles, including a faux Greek Ionian column, a gigantic Egyptian-looking death mask, topped off by a grinning skeleton head carved in marble. It looked as though it had been designed by a bipolar architect with a severe case of
ADD.
ADD.
As they stood on the street, Lee checked out the other patrons. There was the usual assortment of tourists with Michelin Guides poking out of oversized handbags. (New Yorkers did not carry handbags—knapsacks, briefcases, shoulder bags, tiny purses, satchels—but never handbags.) Out-of-towners were easy to spot—their haircuts were shorter, their cheeks were like ripe apples, and they wore expressions of innocence and trust on their wide, freckled faces. Their bodies were softer, rounder, lacking the gym-chiseled hardness of many New Yorkers.
The women wore either no makeup at all or too much, with blue or green eye shadow—colors not seen on New York women since the 1970s. Their hair looked as if it had been done at home or in a mall, not some trendy, pricey studio salon on Fifth Avenue.
A blond family with four fat, pink-faced children stood huddled together, their pale heads bent over a map of the city. Their faces sang with the goodness and contentment that comes from years of living in the irony-free zone of the American midlands. These were not city people. When they opened their mouths, out shot that Midwestern twang, flat as the miles of cornfields in Iowa.
“Where do you want to go tomorrow?” the father asked, his voice hovering like light aircraft in a jet stream of optimism and faith in the goodness of his fellow man.
These were people who clapped on the downbeat.
Chuck had been one of these people when he arrived at Princeton freshman year from Ohio. With his bright blond hair and blue eyes, he had an aura of innocence, but he had gradually changed. Just moving east had begun the transformation, which had been completed by the time he graduated from the New York Police Academy, on a fast track to become precinct commander before moving to his present position as captain of the Bronx Major Crimes Unit.
Lee tried not to think about his friend right now, because thinking about him meant thinking about Susan. He turned to his niece.
“Which floor do you want to be on?”
There was seating on all four floors of the restaurant, each one with its own gothic theme.
“The Laboratory!” she cried, hopping up and down. The oldest boy in the blond family looked at her, awe in his blue eyes.
The heavy gold door to the restaurant swung open, and a tall, cadaverous man in a red satin cape stepped into the street, squinting in the light. He was heavily made up, with dark circles around his kohl-lined eyes and a thin trickle of red that ran from the corner of his mouth.
“Would you please walk this way?” he intoned in a heavy Transylvanian accent. The children of the Midwestern blond family stared at him, their eyes as big as walnuts.
They followed behind the vampire into the dimly lit interior of the club, the heavy wooden door closing behind them with a thud. He led them down a darkened corridor, his red satin cape trailing behind him, catching the light from the gaslit wall sconces, casting off a faint scent of hibiscus. The glass-sided elevator was broken, as it had been last time Lee visited the restaurant. The elevator was a great favorite of most children, and Kylie was no exception. Her face crumpled into a pout when she saw the
OUT OF ORDER
sign, but she brightened when they reached the third-floor dining room, The Laboratory, as it was called. Some people got off at the Grand Salon on the first floor, still others at the Library. When they reached the third floor, only Lee and Kylie and the fat blond family were left.
OUT OF ORDER
sign, but she brightened when they reached the third-floor dining room, The Laboratory, as it was called. Some people got off at the Grand Salon on the first floor, still others at the Library. When they reached the third floor, only Lee and Kylie and the fat blond family were left.
“Third Floor, Laboratory,” Count Veracula said, ushering them past the bar into the dining room.
“What’s on the top floor?” the blond boy asked.
The vampire put his face close to the boy’s and laughed maniacally. “You don’t want to know!”
At first the child looked as if he were about to cry, but he mastered his fear and gave a brave little chuckle.
“It’s the Attic,” the count continued, “where they put bad little boys!”
“Well, that wouldn’t be you, would it now, Earl?” his father said, laying a protective hand on his son’s shoulder. His hand was plump and soft, with dimpled knuckles. Earl shook his head vigorously, never taking his eyes off the count.
“That’s gooood to hear,” Count Veracula purred. “Because you don’t want to be put up there—do you?” he said, turning to Kylie.
“No!” she responded forcefully, crossing her arms and jutting her chin out defiantly. The gesture was so much like Laura that Lee’s stomach went a little hollow.
Kylie was generally good-natured and high spirited, but she could plunge into a deep fit of pouting if you crossed her. Lee never knew what might set her off. One thing he knew—she was looking forward to escaping Fiona’s rigid dietary laws. Though Kylie’s father was much more lenient, her grandmother objected to anything she considered “junk food”—and her definition of what constituted junk food was pretty strict.
She believed it could rot a child’s stomach, and insisted on preparing “good, fresh, hearty fare” for her only granddaughter. They rarely ate in restaurants, a function of Fiona’s frugality as much as her views on nutrition. Lee admired his mother’s values as well as her discipline, but wished she was a bit more flexible—in that and in many other things.
“Well, then, I’ll leave you all to it,” the count said once both groups were seated at the long red banquette along the wall. He leaned over and murmured to the youngest girl in the blond family, “Stay away from the fricassee of squirrel.” And with that, he slid away toward the front of the restaurant.
The girl looked up at her mother. “Do they
really
serve squirrel here?”
really
serve squirrel here?”
“No, Janette, I’m sure they don’t,” she responded, but her tone suggested she wasn’t quite sure.
“Uncle Lee,” Kylie said, “was my mother killed by cereal?”
He stared at her, not sure he had heard correctly. “What?”
“Billy Romano at school said she was killed by cereal.”
He realized what she meant. It would have been funny if it weren’t so tragic: “serial killer” sounded like “cereal killer” to young ears.
“No, honey—he was using another word, but the truth is that we don’t know who killed her.”
Her lower lip quivered as she played with her napkin, wrapping it around her wrist. “But she’s dead, right?”
That was a sticky question. In all likelihood, Laura Campbell was dead, but there was still that tiny speck of hope that she wasn’t, a pinpoint of light in an otherwise dark and dreary tunnel. It was that pinpoint Lee’s mother clung to, as if she would someday get her daughter back if she wished for it hard enough. Lee preferred to turn his back on hope before it could turn its back on him. He had given up early and publicly, certain that Laura was a murder victim, most likely of a serial killer. This was based in part on the fact that everyone who knew her—even casually—had been eliminated as a suspect for one reason or another. That left a stranger as the killer, and since she had no money, rape was the most likely motive, all of which pointed to a serial killer, or at least one in the making.
However, the complete lack of clues or forensic evidence of any kind left the police dangling at the end of a long, twisted rope. Eventually, the case had gone cold, and the light at the heart of the family flickered dimmer and dimmer as the years went by.
Lee looked at his niece, who was still a little girl, but beginning to shed the softness of childhood the way a duck sheds its excess feathers in the spring.
“The truth is that we don’t really know for sure, but I think so, yes.”
“Then why did Grandmother say she was still alive?”
Lee rubbed his forehead, which was beginning to throb. Kylie should never have been put in the middle of the disagreement between him and his mother, and yet here she was, asking this heartbreaking question. He glanced at the Midwestern family and saw the oldest boy casting longing looks at Kylie.
“We don’t know for sure what happened to her because she has never been found.”
“So she disappeared?”
“Yeah. She just disappeared. And we’ve never been able to find her.”
“Maybe she ran away from home,” Kylie said hopefully. “Janice Collins did that once.”
Lee’s cell phone rang. The caller ID said UNAVAILABLE. He almost didn’t answer, but curiosity got the better of him. As soon as he said hello, he wished he hadn’t picked up. The flat, reptilian voice, familiar by now, was taunting as always.
“Are you having fun?”
Lee didn’t respond.
“It’s quite a festive place for children, isn’t it? Your niece must be having a ball.”
Cold terror shot through his veins. He felt his neck muscles tightening. He took a deep breath and spoke softly into the phone.
“Look, you dirty little coward, if you want to talk to me, why don’t you show me your ugly face sometime?”
The man on the other end chuckled. “Oh, what would be the fun in that? Bye for now.”
Lee shoved the phone into his pocket and wiped his sweating palms on his napkin. When the waiter arrived for their drink order, he ordered a double scotch. He looked over at the blond family at the next table. They were laughing at something Count Veracula had said. Their rosy, trusting faces looked as if they had never been troubled by thoughts of killers who trawled the streets looking for young women to murder.
He hoped they would never have to think about such people. After all, that was his job.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Kylie slept in the backseat all the way back out to Stockton. There was no traffic in the Holland Tunnel, and he swept through the industrial waste section of the Meadowlands, breathing in the toxic fumes from factories through the open car windows. He thought about the poor suckers who would report to work in just a few hours, to their jobs driving forklifts in the long, flat warehouses, or bending over what he imagined were endless, boring assembly lines. He wasn’t even sure what kind of factories existed in this unfortunate part of New Jersey, only that they smelled terrible.
As he rattled up the ramp to the Kosciuszko Bridge, trying to steer clear of the potholes, he thought about what this part of the state must have been like before the invasion of the white man and industrial pollution. The long, low marshes, surrounded by banks of tawny grassland, probably teemed with fish and wildlife, more than enough to feed the local population of Native Americans, tribes from the Abenaki and Wappinger nations. Sometimes late at night Lee imagined the spirits of long-departed tribes, wandering in bewilderment through lands that once belonged to them. It was well known to any student of New York history that Manhattan was bought by Peter Minuit for a few trinkets.
Before long he reached the cutoff to Route 202, barreling southwest through the darkened countryside as his niece slept on peacefully in the backseat. He remembered long car trips as a child with his parents, remembered leaning forward to talk to his mother while she drove, his sister sleeping beside him, his father asleep in the front seat. He loved those times—being alone with his mother, and the sensation of being awake while the rest of the world slept around him. He still liked that feeling, and enjoyed wandering the streets of Manhattan late at night while most of his fellow New Yorkers were asleep in their beds. Night offered things that daylight didn’t, he thought as he passed Somerville and Flemington, driving deep into New Jersey farmland. In that he and this Van Cortlandt Vampire were alike, he mused—though he doubted that would help him catch his elusive prey.
When he arrived at the house Fiona was asleep, so he carried Kylie up to her room and tucked her in, then tiptoed up to the rambling third-floor bedroom he had shared on so many summer nights with his cousins. The attic had been converted to a bedroom before his family moved into the house, and though he and Laura each had their own bedrooms on the second floor, they loved giving up their own bedrooms to their aunts and uncles and moving up to the third floor to share it with their cousins. The boys slept in the bunk beds in the smaller room to the right of the stairs, with its low angled ceiling, while the girls took the other side with the two twin beds.
Life seemed so innocent then. Summers were spent in the swimming pool, picking berries in the woods, and eating as much watermelon as you could hold. Lee knew that the colored lens of nostalgia softens memory into the texture of a watercolor painting, but the secrets of his adolescence, like the
Playboy
magazines his cousin Billy hid under the covers, had a soft, appealing innocence, quite unlike the secrets of the young killer he was attempting to catch.
Playboy
magazines his cousin Billy hid under the covers, had a soft, appealing innocence, quite unlike the secrets of the young killer he was attempting to catch.
He was fairly certain this Van Cortlandt Vampire, as they were calling him, was young. Not just because the usual profile of serial killers was of a white male between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five (though certainly some were much older), but because there was a gruesome whimsy to his crimes. They were not, Lee thought, the work of an older man—they were the work of someone stretching his imagination into places reserved for the young. This was nothing more than a gut feeling, but Lee was learning to trust his intuition, even without concrete evidence to back it up.
As he crept up the stairs, memories of his childhood swirling in his head, he inhaled the familiar musty, sweet smell of the attic room, the faint aroma of cobwebs and cedar chips, of stored bedding and discarded dreams.
He stripped to his underwear, slipped into the bottom bunk, and fell into a dead sleep as the old house quivered and settled around him, holding him close in its ancient embrace.
He awoke to the smell of coffee and bacon. He stumbled downstairs to find Fiona at the stove, sipping from a chipped blue coffee mug as she turned strips of bacon in the heavy cast-iron skillet she had used ever since he could remember. He recognized the mug as one he had given her when he was ten—he had picked it out one Christmas because the plaid pattern on it was similar to her family tartan. He thought it was touching that she still used it. Was that for his benefit? he wondered.
He planted a kiss on his mother’s still-firm cheek and shuffled to the far end of the kitchen to pour himself some coffee from the French press.
“Sleep well?” she asked, plucking a strip of bacon from the skillet with a fork and deftly flipping it onto the other side.
“Like the dead,” he said, which was true. He normally awoke with his head swarming with images, but today he couldn’t remember a single dream—couldn’t remember even having any.
“Good,” she said, spearing another slice of bacon.
“Where’s Kylie?” he asked, pouring himself a large mug of coffee. His head was full of cobwebs; he felt as though he had slept for days instead of seven hours.
“She went over to Meredith’s house to play.”
Fiona Campbell refused to use terms like “playdate” or “time-out,” though that’s exactly what Lee remembered her using as punishment when he was a child. She called it Sitting in a Chair, the theory being that you were supposed to contemplate the nature of your transgressions while you sat quietly with your hands folded in your lap. The Chair was the most dreaded punishment, worse than losing TV privileges or being grounded. They had teased her about it when they were older—one thing about Fiona was that she could take a ribbing and maintain her sense of humor. If you could make her laugh, you could usually get her to back down.
But this morning she didn’t look like she was in the mood to laugh. She placed a plate of bacon and eggs in front of him in stony silence, then went back into the kitchen. Lee heard the sounds of a more vigorous cleanup than usual. She was going at it with a vengeance. He looked down at his plate, the egg yolks congealing next to glistening strips of bacon. She knew he liked the yolks runny, but she was afraid of salmonella, so she always overcooked them. He wasn’t feeling hungry anyway. He took his coffee into the kitchen and watched her scrub the stovetop, lifting the skillet with one hand and digging long fingers into the scouring pad, her lips tight.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
To his surprise, she let go of the frying pan and put a hand to her mouth.
Alarmed, he took a step forward. “What is it? What’s the matter?”
She looked at him, and it was obvious she had been crying. “Don’t you know what today is?”
Then he remembered. He had deliberately tried to forget, but now that she said it, of course he knew.
“Oh, right. Sorry—I forgot.”
“It was six years ago today. I only wish I could forget.” Her voice had a bitter edge that was unlike her.
“I’m sorry, Mom—”
“No, it’s all right. I envy you, I really do.” She turned back to the sink and picked up the skillet again, but he grasped her arm.
“Come on, Mom, don’t do that now.”
She pulled away from him. “It has to get done.”
“Not right now, it doesn’t. We should talk.”
“There’s nothing to say. She’s gone, and we just have to accept that.”
“But we don’t know for sure—what if she’s not gone forever?”
She looked at him, accusation brimming in her eyes.
“You don’t believe that for one minute.”
“But you do.”
She turned away. Fiona Campbell hated to have anyone see her cry. He could hear her trying to stifle her sobs. When she spoke, her voice was ragged, defeated.
“Not really. Not anymore.”
He was stunned. Had her faith, her certainty, been a pose all these years? When did she stop believing? Was it his fault? Had he finally convinced her? He thought he would be glad when this day came, when she finally accepted reality, but all he felt was a cavernous emptiness. It was as though she had been holding on to hope for both of them. He was surprised to realize that the thought of Fiona losing her faith was unbearably bleak.
“Come into the living room,” he said, gently tugging on her elbow. She followed him, meek as a child, sobs coming from so deep within her he felt as if they would rip her apart.
They sat on the couch, and he took her face in his hands. “When did you stop believing she might still be alive?”
“Oh, I don’t know—gradually, as the years wore on, maybe.... I don’t know anymore.” She looked out the window at the brown withered leaves on the patio as a gust of wind sent them scattering into the woods. “You think you’ll ever find him?”
He knew who she meant. “I don’t know. But I’ll never stop trying.”
“Why do people do things like that, Lee? What sort of parent raises a child who turns out that way?”
They were on shaky ground now. He wasn’t going to go there.
He shook his head. “I don’t know, Mom.”
That was true enough, he thought. There were mysteries as to why one person turned into a sociopath, and yet another one with an equally terrible childhood didn’t. So many variables, so many unknowns—so many questions. He knew he would spend the rest of his life in search of the answers.
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