Silent Screams (12 page)

Everywhere he went, he felt people were looking at him, judging him. There was no forgiveness, no redemption
. He knew that as well as he knew every inch of his bedroom ceiling, having stared up at it all these years while lying on his bed, hoping that his mother wouldn’t call him—no, please don’t—but then she always would, asking him to kneel beside her on the hard floor, smelling the odor of floor wax and hair spray that permeated her bedroom.

But the Master understood him, and one day, he promised, he would find Samuel a girl who would embrace him and forgive him for all his wickedness. They were so young, so innocent, soft as young birds, with smooth skin and eyes as wide as the blond meadows that surrounded his boyhood home. He often thought of that house in Iowa, the rows of cornfields stretching off into the horizon, and the feel of his father’s hand in his as they headed for the barn to bring out the big green tractor.

He never really understood why his father left, except that men are evil by nature, and that they all leave sooner or later. And now there was just Queens, and the sound of trucks on the Long Island Expressway at night, and his mother’s footsteps upstairs as she wandered the house like a lost soul searching for redemption.
The Lord loves you, Samuel—find your salvation in Jesus
.

Rage bubbled up from deep inside him, boiling in his stomach and constricting his throat, choking him. Maybe it was as his mother had said, that if she had never had a child, his father would not have left. He imagined scenarios that might have been if he had never been born: his mother and father together, driving in the car with the wind blowing in the open windows, his mother laughing, her head thrown back—not that tight laugh he knew now, but a softer, happier sound, like the tinkling of wind chimes. One of the girls had laughed like that, a gentle, rolling sound, like the bubbling of a brook. He imagined making a woman laugh like that someday…a sound that she would make only for him, in response to his touch….
Women like that are sluts, Samuel—they’ll corrupt you, you’ll see!

He shook his head to try to erase the voices in his head, but it was no use. He was tired, so tired…. Spread out on the table in front of him was a small collection of silver and gold crosses on their delicate chains. He selected one with a tiny diamond in its center and smiled. His mother would like this one.

The phone rang. Lee pulled himself out of the world of his dream, threw off the covers, and grabbed the receiver, glad to be rid of the image of the sad-eyed priest, relieved to be in his own bedroom.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.” It was Chuck. “We got a hit on the girl in Queens. Some kids came forward to say they thought they knew her. They’re at the station now.”

“Be right there.”

At the station, Lee followed Chuck and Butts down the hall to Interrogation Room Three, still rubbing sleep from his eyes, a cup of coffee in his hand.

Through the one-way glass he could see them: three East Village types, two boys and a girl. They were young, and probably even younger than Jane Doe Number Five. Two of them, the girl and one of the boys, were gothed up to the max—black leather, purple spiked hair, bloodred lipstick, their skin pierced with enough hardware to set off metal detectors in any airport. Lee counted five rings in the boy’s nose alone.

The third kid was less outrageously dressed. Slim and small-boned, he wore a simple buckskin jacket over blue jeans and no makeup, and sported a single nose ring. His hair was brown and combed straight back, rather than spiked up into points like the other boy’s hair, which resembled the crown on the Statue of Liberty. He looked more nervous than his companions, too, glancing at the door every few seconds, as if he expected it to open and disgorge a monster into the room.

The other boy was larger, solidly built but soft, with bits of baby fat poking out between his leather vest and metal-studded black leather pants. Judging by his pale eyebrows and lashes, Lee figured that his hair was probably naturally blond, but it was hard to tell what was hidden under all that purple dye.

His forearms showed evidence of recent wounds—not needle tracks, Lee thought, but the small slashes left after “cutting”—a process where kids would nick themselves with sharp knives, sometimes a dozen or more cuts at a time. It was fashionable among the goth crowd right now, but it reeked of despair, a desperate attempt to numb feelings more painful than physical discomfort.

He looked at the girl to see if she too was a cutter, but her arms were covered by the sleeves of her lacy black sweater. She was tall, with dyed jet-black hair. Her lipstick was the color of dried blood, and her mouth turned downward at the corners in a habitual pout. Her eyes were ringed with black eyeliner, so that she resembled a surly raccoon. Under all the makeup, Lee imagined she was probably quite pretty. She wore a hard expression, and both boys looked as though they took orders from her. The smaller boy had a sharp, intelligent face, whereas the bigger one looked to be the muscle of the organization. Beauty, brains, and brawn, he thought, watching them. There was usually a leader and followers in groups like this, and the girl was clearly the leader.

The girl was staring at a photo of Jane Doe Number Five. Pushing it away from her to the other end of the table, she frowned at her companions.

“Look, you’re good with kids,” Chuck said to Lee. “Why don’t you handle this one?”

“Okay.” Lee looked to see if Butts was feeling any resentment, but if he was, he wasn’t showing it.

He and Butts and Chuck entered the room together, Lee moving slowly but with purpose, keeping his face as blank as possible. If he read these three correctly, the best thing he could do was to play his cards close and let them come to him. They watched him warily as he sat in the only vacant chair, a scarred green plastic affair with a crack in the seat. He smiled at them.

“Hi,” he said, “thanks for coming in.”

“Look, we just want to help you catch her killer, okay?” the girl said, as though he had challenged her in some way.

“Okay,” Lee answered, not reacting to her belligerent tone. “We appreciate that.”

“Here’s the deal,” she said, leaning forward. Lee tried not to look at the dark line where her breasts met under the lacy shirt. “You don’t ask who we are, and we tell you everything we can. Deal?”

Lee glanced at Chuck, who nodded.

“Deal.” Their desire to remain anonymous meant they were probably runaways. Petty thieves too, maybe, drug users possibly—but mostly they were just scared kids.

“Okay,” the girl said. Her voice was husky, smoky as her kohl-lined eyes—whether from too many cigarettes or drugs, he couldn’t tell.

“You have to understand our culture,” the girl said. “We stick together, right?”

“I can appreciate that,” Lee replied. “I’ll be grateful for anything you can tell us.”

“Okay.” She took a deep breath and looked at her companions, who sat watching her. “She turned up about a month ago at a rave in an abandoned building on Avenue C. Told us her name was Pamela. No last name, just Pamela. Then she turned up one night at CBGB around midnight. Wasn’t that it, Scott?” she said to the larger boy.

CBGB (Country, Blue Grass, and Blues) was a legendary music club on the Bowery, home to many punk and heavy metal bands in its thirty-year history. Lee’s apartment on East Seventh Street was just around the corner.

The larger boy shrugged uncomfortably, as if trying to loosen something from his shoulder. “Yeah, around then.” His voice shook and jumped a little, as though it had only just broken. Lee wondered how old he was.

“How was she dressed? What did she say?” Chuck asked, but his eagerness made the girl more wary. She flicked a strand of black hair from her face.

“She was dressed like a nice girl—middle class, all that. I don’t think she’s from around here.”

“What makes you say that?” Butts asked.

“Her accent—it was different. I don’t know how, but different.”

The smaller of the boys spoke. “New England. She was from New England.”

Both Chuck and Lee turned to study him. He didn’t really seem like he belonged with the other two. There was also an air about him, a thoughtful, refined quality, as though he were a scholar moonlighting among truckers.

“You sure about that?” Lee asked.

“Freddy’s good with accents and stuff like that,” the girl said.

“New England,” he repeated. “I have cousins up there. I recognize the accent.”

“Okay,” Butts said. “New England’s a pretty big place. Can you narrow it down, give us a state, at least?”

Freddy frowned. “Uh, New Hampshire—Maine, maybe. Not sure about that.”

“What else can you tell us about her?” said Chuck.

The girl bit her lip. “Well, she didn’t do drugs or anything, right, Scott?”

“Yeah,” he said, looking at his shoes. “Went to a rave with us but wouldn’t drop any E. Said she’d heard of kids dying after taking it.”

“E?” said Lee. “What’s that?”

“Ecstasy,” said Butts. “It’s a big rave drug.”

“She ever mention friends, family, anything back home?” Chuck asked.

The three kids looked at each other, as if they were trying to decide how much to reveal.

“She said one time that her folks didn’t understand her,” the girl said. “But hey, take a number, right?”

“So she didn’t give any specifics?” said Butts.

Scott replied without taking his eyes off the girl. “Told me one time her dad was mean, and mom was a wimp.”

“No mention of friends or towns or last name?” Lee asked.

Freddy shook his head. “I got the feeling she didn’t want to be found…like she was hiding out.”

“For sure,” the girl said. “She was hiding out. I asked one time what it was like where she came from, and she said she didn’t want to talk about it.”

“She have a boyfriend or anything?” said Butts.

Again the three of them exchanged a glance.

“Not really,” said the girl. “Had sex with a couple of guys. Had a weakness for losers. Nothing serious.”

Scott averted his eyes, and the other two avoided looking at him. Scott clearly had been one of her sex partners—the question answered was whether he was the
last
one.

“What about jewelry?” Lee asked. “Did she wear anything special?”

“She hardly wore any—kind of stuck out, actually,” said the girl. “But we accepted her even if she looked different.”

“That’s real big of you,” Butts muttered. Lee and Chuck glared at him.

“She did wear something around her neck all the time,” Freddy said. “A little silver cross, I think. I remember because someone asked if she was Catholic, and she said no, her grandmother had given her the necklace.”

Lee felt the blood rush to his head.

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yeah,” Freddy replied. “It was real pretty. Never saw her without it.”

Lee looked at Chuck, who was biting his lower lip.

“Is that right?” he said, looking at the others.

The girl picked at her fingernails. They were long and pointed, with tiny death’s-head emblems on each nail. “Yeah. I saw the cross. At first I thought it was like, ironic, you know, but she wasn’t really the ironic type.”

Lee turned to Scott. “Did she wear it during sex?”

The boy’s face turned a mottled, boiled-lobster red, and Lee felt sorry for putting him on the spot.

“Yeah,” he answered in a barely audible voice.

“Can you describe it exactly?”

“Uh, silver…just plain silver, that’s all.” He held up his thumb and forefinger. “About this big.”

“Okay,” said Chuck. “Anything else you can tell us?”

The kids looked at one another, and all of them shook their heads.

“If you think of anything—anything at all—you can call us day or night,” Chuck said, handing them each a business card. “You’ve been really helpful,” he added, escorting them out the door. “Thanks again.”

The girl stopped and looked at him. “Whatever. Just catch that guy, okay?”

“Don’t worry, we will,” Chuck replied.

Just then Chuck’s cell phone rang.

“Morton here,” he said, leaning against the wall. He looked exhausted; Lee could see the toll the investigation was taking on his friend.

After listening for a moment, Chuck said, “Are you sure?” After another pause, he said, “Okay. Thanks anyway,” and hung up.

“What is it?” Lee asked.

“That was Delaney from the Ninth Precinct. He sent his guys over there right after I called, but they couldn’t find the bullet.”

“Are you sure it was the right lamppost?”

“Oh, it was the right one—had a deep dent in it. But the bullet was gone. Looks like the shooter got there first and dug it out himself.”

“Christ,” Lee said. “Whoever this is, he’s good at covering his tracks.”

“He’s got to slip up sooner or later.”

Lee wished he shared his friend’s confidence. His cell phone beeped, and a shiver shot through him as he fumbled to dig it out of his pocket. Another text message:

He stared at it, then handed the phone to Chuck.

“What’s this about?” Chuck said after reading it.

Lee told him about the text message of the day before.

“Your sister?” Chuck said, puzzlement on his squarely handsome face.

“What else could it be about? Laura was wearing a red dress when she disappeared.”

“But no one knows that except—”

“Exactly. How did he find out?”

“And is this even the same guy?” Chuck said. “How do we know these messages are from the…the killer?” He resisted using the name Butts had chosen for the killer. He thought “the Slasher” sounded lurid and distasteful.

“We don’t,” Lee answered, but in his mind there wasn’t much doubt.

“I’ll see what we can do about tracing the messages,” Chuck said. “And starting tomorrow, you’ll be under surveillance.”

What neither of them said was that if the Slasher was talking about watching his sister, it meant that Laura was still alive.