Silent Screams (31 page)

Darkness…more darkness…hands lifting him up…flashing lights…people scurrying about everywhere…then he opened his eyes to see Chuck Morton’s face looking down at him. They were in the back of an ambulance. Lee was lying in a stretcher, his friend crouched over him.

“Kathy—” he began, but Chuck cut him off.

“She’s going to be fine.”

“Where is—?”

“She’s already on her way to the hospital.”

A paramedic fiddled with an IV bag next to him. The ambulance was sitting behind the church, its doors still open. The paramedic didn’t look unduly alarmed, so Lee figured he’d be okay.

“What about Nelson? Is he…?”

Chuck shook his head. “Pronounced dead at the scene. You’re lucky he broke your fall. You landed right on top of him. Broke his neck.”

Instead of relief, Lee felt a deep sadness. That was no way for a life to end, not even such a twisted one.

“How did you know where to find me?”

“I just went where I figured you would go.”

Behind Chuck, Lee heard a familiar voice speaking. “We headed for Dr. Azarian’s house first.”

“Is that…Diesel?” Lee said, and tried to raise his head up to look.

Diesel’s enormous head appeared over him. His metal earring caught the light and reflected silver in the artificial light.

Lee stared at him. “What are you doing here?”

“I volunteered to help. Rhino came too, but there wasn’t room for us both in the ambulance. He’s over there helping the officers keep people away.”

Lee looked across the street to the cadre of police lining the sidewalk and saw Rhino’s powerful, compact form among them.

He looked up at Chuck. “How did—?”

“They said they knew you—that they were helping you on the case. At that point, I don’t have to tell you, we were pretty desperate.”

“Anyway,” Diesel continued, “there was this old lady in the street.”

“Blue hair and eye shadow to match?” Lee said.

“Yeah, right. We asked if she’d seen anyone matching your description, and she told us to go to St. Mary’s.”

“Sort of like an oracle,” Lee said.

“Yes,” said Diesel. “Instead of the Oracle of Delphi, she was the Oracle of Philly.”

“Oh, something else I have to tell you,” Chuck said. “You’re off the case.”

Lee looked up at his friend, who was smiling. “I don’t get it.”

“Internal Affairs requested that I take you off the case.”

“Really? When?”

“Oh, about three days ago.”

“
What
? Why didn’t you say anything?”

Chuck shrugged. “Guess I forgot. I’m telling you now.”

Lee laughed, and felt a stab of fire shoot through his ribs. He remembered the wound Nelson had slashed into his side.

“So—he’s really dead?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Chuck said, without looking at him.

“Dead at the scene, you said?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

Lee peered at him. “What do you mean, ‘pretty much?’”

Chuck cleared his throat. “He was still alive when we arrived.”

Lee looked back at Diesel, aware that they were both avoiding eye contact with him.

“Is there something you’re not telling me?”

Chuck’s jaw was clenched, and Lee could hear his teeth grinding. Diesel was looking down at his shoes.

“What? What is it?”

“I think you should get some rest,” Chuck said, getting up and putting a hand on Lee’s shoulder.

“For God’s sake, what is it?”

“Look, we don’t believe him,” Chuck said. “We think he was lying.”

“Lying about
what
?”

There was a pause, and Lee could hear the sound of car doors opening and closing. Scenes like this always drew far more patrol cars than necessary.

Chuck took a deep breath. “He claimed to know who killed your sister.”

“We think he said it just to upset you,” Diesel added quickly.

Lee’s stomach took a quick dip, like a car lurching down a hilly road. “But if he was lying, why would he tell you?”

Chuck looked him straight in the eye. “Because he knew that sooner or later you’d find out what he said.”

“Did he even know I was alive?”

“My guess is that he gambled on it. You were already being loaded onto a stretcher when he said it.”

“And what did he have to lose, in any case?” added Diesel. “He probably knew he was dying.”

“But people who are dying don’t usually lie,” Lee protested. “What if he was telling the truth?”

“Then he’s taken the truth to his grave,” Diesel replied.

“Come on, Lee, think about it!” Chuck said. “What does your experience and training tell you? What are the chances he’d know who—”

“You’re right,” Lee agreed, but a tiny doubt had lodged itself in his mind and was sprouting, a dark seedling stretching its roots downward, taking hold of his imagination.

“We called your mother and told her you were okay.” Chuck rubbed his palms together, a gesture he made when he was uncomfortable or embarrassed. His nails were pink and manicured. Lee imagined Susan sending Chuck to a manicurist, when he would rather be playing golf or doing yard work. Susan liked everything just so—ironed shirts, starched collars, perfectly organized closets, manicured nails. He imagined Chuck submitting meekly to her prodding.

Thinking of Susan made him think of Kathy, and that made his stomach go hollow inside. He sank back into the stretcher and watched the rotating lights of the ambulance spin around and around, cutting through the darkness like a red blade.

Two weeks later, Lee Campbell stood in his apartment looking out the window at the first buds of spring struggling to open in the March frost. The sidewalks were damp from a recent rain, and the late-afternoon sun bounced off the wet pavement, turning the concrete into a mirror, reflecting the street scene on East Seventh Street. The return of the sun had finally lost its terror for him, and he felt the swelling of the earth in his own breast, a gradual awakening as the warmer weather opened the pores of the maple trees, the sap flowing freely again. All the earth’s transitions struck him as blessed. All four seasons had their unique charms, and they were all irreplaceable. Like people. No one would ever take his sister’s place. He knew that, but now he felt closer to accepting the irretrievable loss.

He turned to the small, dark-haired woman beside him.

“How are you feeling?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” Kathy said, leaning her body against his. “How about you?”

“Fine.”

“You sound like your mother,” she said, frowning.

“Not exactly, I hope.”

“Pretty close.”

“Wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who said it is every woman’s tragedy that they become their mothers—and every man’s tragedy that they don’t.”

“That sounds like him. Wonder what kind of mother he had?”

“A hellion, no doubt.”

“That’s a word you don’t hear everyday.”

“What?”

“Hellion.”

They stood looking out the window together for a while. Below them, the middle-aged couple from the back building strolled along Seventh Street, hand in hand, the woman resting her head on the man’s shoulder. Her curly gray hair was abundant and shaggy. With the sun behind her, her head was framed in a silver halo.

Kathy and Lee were doing a delicate dance around the topic on both of their minds—her abduction and its aftermath, his betrayal by a man he loved like a father.

He turned to her. “Did you have nightmares last night? I don’t remember you waking up in the middle of the night.”

She continued to gaze out the window. “The sleeping pills help.”

“Be careful—they can be addictive. I wish you’d reconsider seeing someone.”

“Your therapist?”

“No, someone else. A specialist in post-traumatic stress.”

“Maybe I will…soon.”

She had been unable to talk about it for several days, and then, slowly, in the course of the past couple of weeks, the story had come out, of how Nelson had ambushed her on her way to her father’s house—right in front of the church, just as darkness was falling—and dragged her inside. How she’d called out for Lee until she lost consciousness, and awakened to see him on the cross. The nightmares that came now were surreal, but no more so than the experience itself. The cuts on her chest were healing, but the scars—both internal and external—would remain. Fortunately, Nelson hadn’t gotten very far—only a capital
T
, which was presumably the beginning of the phrase “Thine is the kingdom and glory forever and ever.”

Amen
, Lee thought, looking down at Kathy, her catching the early spring sunlight as it crept through the French lace curtains.

The hardest thing for her now was remembering—reliving, really—the feeling of being slowly strangled to death, and she would wake up in the night, trembling, unable to breathe. Lee would wrap his arms around her in the darkness and murmur soft, unconvincing words to her about how it would be all right, until she fell asleep again. This had become their nightly ritual, and he hated the feeling of helplessness it gave him.

He put a hand to her cheek. “I’m always going to be chasing people like the Slasher, you know—dangerous people.”

“I know. But hopefully next time it won’t be someone you work with.”

They were both silent, as Lee thought once again how Nelson had managed to mislead them for so long—and how he had been caught almost by accident.

The sound of children’s voices floated upward—a game of tag was going on in front of the Ukranian church. A stout boy with a red face was running, laughing, pursued by a girl in a lime green coat, as the other children cheered them on.

“Get him, Carey!”

“Come on, Jimmy—run! Move your fat ass!”

The boy collapsed in giggles on the steps of the church, as the girl’s momentum took her careening into his arms. The other children closed in around them, laughing and cheering.

“Does it bother you?” he asked.

“Of course it bothers me. One of the things I like about my job is that I do my work after all the nasty stuff has happened. All I have to do is study nice, clean bones in the peace and quiet of my lab.”

“So?”

“So I love you…so I’ll deal with it.”

“I still think you should talk to somebody.”

“All
right
. Jeez, you’re so damn persistent.”

They looked out the window at the coming spring. The blossoms on the cherry trees looked as if they were ready to burst forth in bloom any day now. Lee thought he had never seen Seventh Street looking so magical, so…blessed.

“You know,” Lee said, “I was blinded by my need for him.”

“What do you mean?”

“I needed him to be the father I never had—so I misread clues that pointed to him.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Lee, none of us suspected him! Why should we? He was one of
us
!”

“Exactly. He was one of us. And he misled us every step of the way. When I suggested there were two people at work, he steered us away from it time and time again. And then he called me over to his apartment just so he could fake that phone call. He played me.”

“You can’t blame yourself. No one else saw through him either.”

“Yeah, but in retrospect it all makes such perfect sense. The unexplained absences, the drinking, his out-of-control behavior—we never put it all together.”

She squeezed his arm. Her fingers were thin and strong. “A lot of things make sense in retrospect.”

“He even used his expertise to create a ‘signature’ that would lead us to Samuel—although whether that was his idea or Samuel’s, I guess we’ll never know.” He sighed. “Guess I don’t have very good luck with father figures.”

There was a pause, and then she said, “So your wound isn’t bothering you?”

“Not too much.”

She yawned, stretched, and walked over to sit on the sofa. “Come over here and let Nurse Kathy check you out.”

“Well, if you put it that way…”

He was about to join her when the phone rang. He picked up the receiver, cursing himself for not turning off the ringer.

“Hello?”

It was Detective Butts.

“Yeah, hi. Look, I thought you’d like to know the results of some of our interviews with the neighbors and stuff. None of them could remember Samuel ever being involved with a woman of any kind—which is just what you had said about him.”

“Thanks, I appreciate that,” Lee said, but his heart wasn’t in it. Right now he just wanted to forget about it for a while, to leave it all behind.

“Yeah,” Butts went on. “We got that ‘he was a quiet boy—kept to himself’ thing, you know. Apparently he was very respectful, well behaved. ’Course, it’s the quiet ones you have to watch out for—”

“Which wouldn’t be you right now,” Lee managed to interject.

“What?”

“Look, I’m sort of busy right now.”

“Oh, okay. Sorry to interrupt. I just thought you might like to know.”

Lee smiled. “Thanks, I appreciate that. I’ll talk to you later. We’ll get together next week, okay?”

“Right,” Butts said. “Sounds good. Tell her I said hi.”

“I will.”

He hung up and turned off the ringer.

“Now,” he said, “where were we?”

Kathy laughed and threw back her head. The lamplight reflected a perfect triangle on her exposed throat.

“I believe,” she said, “we were at the beginning.”

Don’t Miss the next C. E. Lawrence thriller from Pinnacle coming Fall 2010!