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Authors: C.E. Lawrence

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BOOK: Silent Kills
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CHAPTER THREE
He would have her. He
would
have her—just as he had all the others, with their sweet, milky skin, juicy with youth and hope—and blood. The viscous liquid he needed to complete his dark desires, to live through them, with them, by them. Of course no one understood—how could they?—but that didn’t make his need any less pressing, his desire any less strong.
And the more he had, the more he wanted—
needed
.
Davey put on the CD as he prepared to drink from the beaker he had stored carefully in the refrigerator. He sank into the red satin chair and listened to the singer’s smooth baritone, with his impeccable British consonants. He had heard the song a dozen times, and yet each time he found something new to admire. The pounding bass line matched his own heartbeat, and the metal guitar strings vibrated in his soul, his body resonating as though it too were an instrument in service of the song:
The youth that time destroyed can live in me again
But I require blood—the time is coming when
I’ll come to you at night, as the owl hoots at the moon
I’ll be by your side to watch you as you swoon
Don’t be afraid, my love—open up your arms
Welcome death’s embrace, and save me with your charms
Salvation will be mine—I stand upon your door
Science will ensure we’ll be together forever more
The song was so sad, and yet so true—it pierced his heart like the swift, sharp blow of a dagger. He leaned back in the chair and drank. The taste was bitter, metallic, but he welcomed it. He could feel his body absorbing the energy of his victim, her vital life force, and as he drained the remainder of the liquid, he felt himself becoming one with her.
CHAPTER FOUR
The victim’s brother had already been interviewed by the original detective assigned to the case, but, after reading the case notes, Lee and Butts wanted to speak with him themselves. A meeting was arranged for later that day at the precinct house, after his classes at Hunter College. According to the case notes, he was a math and physics major.
Francois Nugent was a cocky kid, but it was all a pose to hide his insecurity. He was also too smart for his own good. He showed up at the station house fifteen minutes late, the arrogant swing of his narrow shoulders only emphasizing his youth and vulnerability. He wore a leather vest over a pressed white shirt, straight old-fashioned-looking trousers, and patent leather shoes—a subdued version of the steampunk look. With his square wire-rimmed glasses and slicked-back hair, he suggested a Russian literature student or an apprentice to an accounting firm, circa 1890. Instead of the ubiquitous student knapsack, he carried a leather satchel; on it was a button that read,
TESLA WAS RIGHT
.
Detective Butts thrust out a broad hand. “Detective Leonard Butts, Homicide. This here is my colleague, Dr. Lee Campbell.”
The boy stared at Lee. “You’re the profiler. I read about you in the paper.”
“That’s great,” Butts remarked, gesturing to a chair. “Mind if we get down to business?”
Nugent took the chair Butts offered, but continued to stare at Lee. “Are you going to help find my sister’s killer?”
“That’s the idea,” Butts said. “Now, if you don’t mind—”
The boy’s lower lip quivered and he took a deep, shuddering breath. “Do you think it’s someone she knew?”
“We think he met her at that club,” Lee said.
Francois Nugent slammed his fist down on the table. The sudden outburst of rage was startling. “Damn! I got there late—she was gone by the time I—”
“Look,” Butts interrupted. “You mind if
we
ask the questions? The sooner we get some answers, the sooner we track down the sicko who did this.”
Nugent looked up at him, startled. “Yeah—whatever,” he said, gazing out the window, his mood abruptly sulky. Lee glared at Butts, but the detective pointedly ignored him.
“Okay,” Butts said. “Now, it says in the case notes that you’d been to this club before, but she—”
“It was her first time.” He spat the words out bitterly. “I’d been trying to get Candy to come with me for months, and she finally agreed. Her first goddamn time,” he said softly, the anger leaking out of him, replaced by a bewilderment Lee recognized only too well. Fate had reserved a special corner of hell for everyone, he thought, and this boy was just coming face-to-face with this truth. As his life tumbled down around him, the only thing he could respond with was existential puzzlement, the universal response to evil or great misfortune. Lee knew every stage of that journey. Sometimes he thought he was finished with it and had come out the other side, and sometimes the blackness of despair descended so viciously it took his breath away.
“So she wasn’t into this—this ‘scene’ before?” Butts said.
Nugent looked at him, pity layered with contempt. “No, she wasn’t into steampunk, if that’s what you mean.”
“Right,” Butts said.
He might appear clueless to this boy, Lee thought, but he knew Butts was sniffing around like a bird dog on a scent. It might take time, but he would get what he wanted. Butts’s nose for evidence was good, and Lee always suspected he put on the awkward act to put witnesses at ease. Then he would zero in for the kill when they least expected it.
“What about your parents?” Butts asked. “Do they approve of this—hobby of yours?”
Francois rolled his eyes. “First of all, it’s a lifestyle, not a ‘hobby,’ and secondly, they don’t even know about it.” He kicked at the table leg with the tip of his polished leather shoe. “They don’t even know about Candy yet.”
“Why not?”
“They’re somewhere in Kenya—no one’s been able to reach them.”
“What are they doin’ there?”
“They’re defending some rare tiger from poachers or something ... I don’t know. Or fighting to save orphans. They love orphans. Christ,” he said, his fists tightening until his knuckles turned white. “They’re off protecting some kids they don’t even know, halfway around the world, but they can’t be bothered to look after their own—” He broke off and stared at the ground again, his eyes hard. “Sorry—what were you saying?”
“Oh, nothin’ much—just asking about your parents.”
“Like I said, Maman and Papa are off doing good works in faraway lands. I’ll have them call you when they return.” He snorted. “Some homecoming that will be.”
“I take it you don’t like your parents very much?” Lee said.
Francois picked at one of the brass buttons on his vest. “I don’t
dis
like them. I just think they should be here while Candy’s still—
was
still so young.”
“Who looked after you when they were away?”
“Flossie.” He looked at Lee and Butts as if expecting a reaction. “I know—that’s her name, right? Flossie. Like something out of the damn Bobbsey Twins. Except her last name is O’Carney—Flossie O’Carney, from County Cork. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”
“Is she your—” Butts appeared to be searching for the right word.
“She’s our nanny,” Francois broke in. “Though she’s really more of a surrogate parent. She’s completely devastated. I think the news hit her harder than it will Maman and Papa.”
“Why do you call them that?” Lee asked.
“Our dad is French, and our mom—well, let’s just say she has her pretensions. That’s what we’ve always called them.”
“Is there anyone you’ve seen at the club who you might suspect of doing something like this?”
Francois stopped fidgeting and looked Butts straight in the eye. “I have thought of nothing else for two days,” he said, “and I swear to God if I even suspected any of them, they wouldn’t be alive right now.” The level of commitment in his voice was chilling.
“That’s no way to handle justice,” Lee said. “You can’t take the law into your own hands.”
“Yeah, right,” Francois retorted with disgust. “You wouldn’t say that if you had lost
your
only sister.”
“He
has
,” Butts said angrily.
Francois’s face fell and he flushed. “Oh, Jesus, I forgot. I read about it in that article about you, but I just—oh, God, I’m sorry.”
“Never mind,” said Lee. “I know how you feel, but you have to let us deal with whoever did this. I need you to promise me that.”
Francois’s grip tightened on the strap of his satchel, and his jaw worked, clenching and unclenching.
“I need your promise,” Lee repeated.
Francois shook himself as a dog might shake water from his coat. “
Okay
—I promise.”
“Good.”
“It’s not like I know every one of them, anyway,” he muttered. “People come and go all the time in that crowd.”
“Yeah,” Butts said. “We’re tryin’ to track down everyone who was there that night.”
Detective Rodriguez had already done quite a lot of that work, using credit card receipts to track down the club patrons, though a few people had paid for their drinks with cash.
“Problem is, almost no one remembers seeing her, and those who may have seen her didn’t get a good look at the guy she was talkin’ with. Forget about a needle in a haystack—we ain’t even got a haystack.”
“Is there anything else?” Francois asked, clearly anxious to leave.
“Naw,” Butts said. “Detective Rodriguez already asked you if your sister had any enemies, that kinda thing.”
“But you can’t think this is the work of someone who
knew
her,” Francois said, his fingers twitching as he fidgeted with the strap of his leather satchel.
“We don’t know,” Lee said. “But at this point it’s a mistake to assume anything about the perpetrator.”
“ ‘At this
point
?’ ” Francois said. “What’s that supposed to mean? At what ‘point’ will it be acceptable—when someone else dies?”
“We don’t want that to happen any more than you do,” Butts said, trying to placate him, but the boy was off and running.
“Look,” he said. “You ask me to promise not to do anything on my own, and then you talk to me about not making assumptions! Well, let me tell you something, man. This guy is just getting started. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out.”
“I agree with you,” Lee said.
“So why don’t you go after him?”
“That’s exactly what we plan to do,” said Butts. “So now if you’ll excuse us, we’ll get on with doin’ our job.”
Francois leapt from his chair as though it were electrified. He headed for the door, but before he could open it, Lee stopped him.
“Just one more question.”
Francois turned and looked at him warily. “What?”
“What was Tesla right about?”
“Oh, you mean this,” the boy said, pointing to the button on his satchel.
“Yes. What does it mean?”
“Nikola Tesla invented electricity, not Edison—but Edison got all the credit and became famous.”
“Really?” Butts said. “Why was that?”
Francois shrugged irritably.
“The usual crap—politics. Not what you know but who you know, that kind of thing. Tesla was a genius, but Edison was better at self-promotion. Tesla worked for him, for Christ’s sake, but Edison never acknowledged his work. Then later, Edison electrocuted animals in public to show that Tesla’s AC current was dangerous. What a jerk.”
“How ’bout that,” Butts mused. “I never knew that.”
“So what was he right about?”
“Alternating current. It was better than what Edison proposed, direct current, but Edison didn’t understand that because he wasn’t the mathematician Tesla was. So he fought Tesla every step of the way. He may not have had science behind him, but he had public opinion, and that’s what mattered.”
“Yeah,” Butts sighed. “Isn’t that so often the case?”
What mattered now, of course, was catching a predator, and young Francois Nugent had put his finger on one hard truth about this case: This killer was just getting started.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Oh sure,” Kathy Azarian said, “I know what steampunk is.”
She was seated cross-legged on Lee’s living room sofa in his East Village apartment eating a Bosc pear, her feet neatly tucked under her like a cat. He didn’t understand how women could be so flexible. His mother said their joints were more pliable so their hips could expand during birth—but this brought to mind the disturbing image of a rattlesnake dislocating its jaws to swallow its prey whole.
He sat in the red leather armchair opposite Kathy. “God, I’m really out of the loop.”
“Yes, you are, darling—but it’s part of your charm.” She pronounced it “dahling,” ironically, in her half-joking way.
“You
really
know what steampunk is?”
“Sure,” she said, biting off another pale yellow chunk of pear and slurping it down. “Some of my colleagues are into it. I have a pathologist friend who has a closet full of Victorian goth stuff.”
Kathy Azarian was a forensic anthropologist, and though he had yet to meet any of her colleagues, they sounded like an odd bunch. But then, so were his, come to think of it.
She wiped off the juice dripping down her chin. That was another thing about her he couldn’t understand: she was always eating, and yet she somehow remained slim. She was only about five foot four; he couldn’t imagine where all that food went. He even once caught himself wondering if she was bulimic.
A wayward strand of hair fell over her eyes as she bent over for another bite, and Lee’s stomach pitched and rolled like a schooner in a stormy sea. Her wavy dark hair was looser than his tightly curled black locks, but otherwise, they were physical opposites. Lee was tall and pale and blue-eyed, whereas Kathy’s Armenian an-cestr y gave her skin a lustrous copper sheen even in winter, and her eyes appeared to be kohl-lined even when she was wearing not a scrap of makeup.
“Okay,” he said, leaning back in the overstuffed red armchair—his favorite, it was beginning to look a bit shabby, the leather frayed and faded on the armrests. “So tell me about the steampunk scene.”
“I’ll ask Josh to tell me about it and get back to you.”
“Your colleague?”
“Yeah. He even goes to a club in Philly—knows all the bands that play there and everything.”
“Thanks.” A thread of jealousy flitted through his head, but he turned and took a deep breath.
Kathy finished the pear and tossed the core in the trash can next to the heavy antique rolltop desk.
“What time is the concert tonight?” she said.
“Eight o’clock.”
A silence fell between them as the sun snaked across East Seventh Street in its westward journey toward the Hudson River. The concert was a performance of the Brahms Requiem at Carnegie Hall, and Kathy had left work early to take the train in from Philadelphia so they could attend it together. Neither of them wanted to spend this evening alone, and he was glad they were doing this together. It was hard to believe a year had passed—his emotions were still raw, and he could only imagine how much worse it must be for the families and friends of those who had perished.
“I guess we’d better get going,” she said, breaking the silence draped over the room like a shroud.
“Yeah,” he said, glad for the excuse to move. He wasn’t exactly looking forward to the event; he imagined he was not alone in wishing this day would be over.
Everyone in New York—even those who had deplored the towers as architectural eyesores—took the attack personally. There was a feeling in the city that the terrorists had not bombed America—they had attacked
New York.
The devastation and its aftermath was felt keenly, personally, in a city that did not identify itself with the rest of America. New York was a place with its own rules, its own code of behavior, even its own way of ordering coffee. In many ways, New York City was as foreign from the rest of the country as Singapore or Bangkok. The rest of the country was attaching oversized American flags to their SUVs and gorging on Freedom Fries, but New Yorkers were still stunned, in a kind of emotional holding pattern.
“What is it about anniversaries?” Kathy said. “It’s so odd. I’ve been feeling so sad all day. What’s this need we seem to have to commemorate things, even bad things?”
“I guess it’s part of the healing process,” he said, grabbing a light jacket from the Victorian bentwood coatrack in the hall.
“They’re going to recite the names of every victim tonight at the Ground Zero ceremony,” Kathy said as they walked down the two flights to the street.
“I know,” he said. There were events and ceremonies all over the city, but they had chosen the Brahms Requiem; Lee couldn’t imagine better company than Brahms at a time like this.
They emerged into the gathering twilight of Seventh Street and walked toward the Astor Place subway. The crowd at McSorley’s had already morphed from the afternoon collection of locals to the rowdier evening crowd of bridge-and-tunnel ruffians—or maybe the locals had decided to observe the anniversary by pouring even more copious amounts of McSorley’s Ale down their throats. Lee heard the sound of raucous singing coming from the back room, half a dozen drunken voices slamming together like bricks, attempting harmony in a heavily sloshed version of an old traditional Scottish tune.
And we’ll all go together to pluck wild mountain thyme
All around the crystal fountain
Will you go, lassie, go?
The familiar lyrics sung by such bravely wavering voices brought unexpected tears to his eyes. It was a song he remembered his father singing to his mother, before Duncan Campbell closed the door behind him the final time, leaving his family for good. Lee had long ago closed his heart to feeling anything toward his father except rage, so the surge of feeling was both surprising and unwelcome. He cleared his throat and wiped his face with his sleeve—but he couldn’t hide anything from Kathy.
“You okay?” she said as they approached Third Avenue, the Cooper Union building looming in front of them in stolid nineteenth-century splendor. A redbrick fortress of art and architecture, its full-tuition scholarships to every single student were a testament to Peter Cooper’s proclamation that higher education should be “as free as air and water.”
“I’m fine,” he said, tucking her arm into his as they crossed Third Avenue. But of course that wasn’t really true. In New York City tonight, no one was fine.
BOOK: Silent Kills
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