Silent Slaughter (27 page)

Authors: C. E. Lawrence

BOOK: Silent Slaughter

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“Pity,” he said, turning back to Lee. “So what do you say? Shall we share a few tales of pursuit and capture? You go first.”

“You start. It was your idea.”

“Which is exactly why you should go first. My game, my rules.”

“Okay,” said Lee. “What do you want to know?”

Moran’s eyes gleamed. “What it’s like when you close in on your prey. What do you feel, how intense is it, how long does it last?”

“Well,” said Lee, “there’s a moment right before you have them, where it’s all anticipation—the uncertainty and tension is nearly unbearable. . . .” He stood and walked around behind Moran as he spoke.

“Yes? Go on,” the professor said, trying to appear indifferent, but his voice betrayed his excitement.

“You’re afraid they might escape, and there’s that moment right before—”

“Yes?”

“And then you
pounce
!” he said, clamping both hands onto Moran’s shoulders.

Throwing off his grip, the professor leaped from his seat with lightning speed and cocked a fist as if he was going to slug Lee. Arresting his attack midway through, he sat back down again, panting. The long scar on his cheek pulsed purple as his entire face colored with rage. He wiped the sweat from his upper lip and managed a smile.

“Oh, very good—you almost had me there. If I had retaliated, you could have arrested me for assaulting a police officer.”

“Actually, he’s not a cop,” Butts said. “He’s a civilian advisor.”

“And I could have you hauled in for police brutality,” Moran snarled.

His face returned almost immediately to an expression of calm indifference. It was like watching a painter throw a wash over a canvas—deliberate, studied, artful. The man manipulated his emotional responses the way a sculptor molded clay. The only moment where he had lost control was when Lee caught him off guard. It was just a moment, but it was a window into the depth of his rage, his malevolence.

“Well,” Moran said, standing up, “this has been fun—or, rather, would have been fun if you weren’t so pathetically desperate to get a reaction from me,” he said to Lee as he pulled on his expensive kid gloves.

“Not going to ‘show me yours’? Well, then, just one more question,” Lee said. “How did you get your scar?”

Moran turned to him, and he could feel the man’s malice like a hot wind in his face. “We’re done here,” he said.

And then he was gone. The air in the room felt fouled and the lights dimmer than before he had entered.

“Wow,” Butts said. “That guy is pure ice. It’s like tryin’ to cut through a glacier with a penknife.”

“Yeah,” Lee said. “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”

C
HAPTER
S
IXTY-SEVEN

B
utts put a 24/7 watch on the professor, but Lee imagined that Moran wouldn’t have much trouble shaking any tail they put on him. They also agreed to put Detective Chen in charge of a background investigation. Just as Lee was leaving the precinct, Gemma called, and he agreed to meet her at the boathouse café in Central Park.

“I have to get out and get some air,” she said apologetically. “I’ve been inside working on a story all day.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “I’ll take the subway up.”

She was sitting in the corner by the big fieldstone fireplace when he arrived, hunched over a laptop, a cup of hot chocolate in front of her. The room was filled with tourists and red-cheeked children toting sleds and toboggans, their laughter bouncing off the stone walls, creating a cheerful background din. The sharp smell of grilled onions and New England clam chowder hung in the air.

“Hi,” she said, closing her laptop when she saw him.

“Thank you so much for looking into my brother’s death.” She wore a white parka with fur trim on the hood, formfitting ski pants and knee-high tan boots. She looked like a magazine ad for the outdoor life.

“Now what?” he asked. “We have a fake suicide note and a mysterious stranger at Brian’s funeral, and you don’t trust the cops your brother worked with. What’s our next step?”

She bit her lip. “I think Brian’s death reaches into something deeper within the NYPD, and I’m afraid to find out what it is. I won’t lie to you—I’m scared. It’s funny,” she said, “but I was actually hoping I was wrong and that it was a suicide after all. How sick is that?”

“It’s not sick at all,” he said as a couple of young children in snowsuits pushed past their table, almost spilling Gemma’s hot chocolate.

She grabbed it and scowled at them. “Watch where you’re going, kids.”

The boy shot her a nervous look before dashing off to join his sister.

She shook her head. “If my dad had caught us running around like that in public, we’d have had hell to pay.”

“You know, you don’t have to pursue this any further,” Lee said. “You can let it drop.”

“I’m a
journalist
, for Christ’s sake! And it’s my brother we’re talking about.” She took a sip of chocolate. “I wonder who your Deep Throat is.”

“You didn’t recognize him at all?”

“No, but I haven’t been around cops much since Brian retired.”

“Do you have any idea about what Des Maguire might have done that got him killed?”

She intertwined her fingers as if in prayer, putting her hands to her mouth. He had seen the gesture before; it was something she did when she was thinking hard about something.

“I remember overhearing part of a conversation with Des once,” she said, “when they thought I was upstairs. Des was saying something like ‘The boys in Ulster are counting on us,’ and Brian was trying to talk him out of something.”

Lee frowned. “ ‘The boys in Ulster?’ I don’t think they were talking about upstate New York.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Did Brian have ties to the IRA?”

“Not that I ever knew about. He always claimed he disapproved of terrorism for any reason.”

“What about Des?”

“He was very outspoken about his opposition to what he called the British occupation of Northern Ireland.”

“Could he have been gunrunning?”

She swept a hand over her forehead, displacing a lock of auburn hair. “You think that’s what it was?”

“It’s the best guess I have so far.”

She took a gulp of chocolate and wiped her mouth. “I can bring it to my editor and see if—oh, damn!” she cried as another group of kids darted by, jostling her arm. Chocolate cascaded onto her ski parka—brown splashed on white, the color of dried blood. “I
told
you to calm down!” she shouted at the children, then collapsed in tears.

Lee laid a hand on her wrist. “You know,” he said, “I think we should talk about something else for a while.”

“S-so what about your case?” Gemma said, blowing her nose loudly. “Any progress?”

“I can’t really talk about it, except to say we all keep hoping he’ll make a mistake before—”

“Before he takes another victim?”

“Yeah. You know,” he said, “I meant we should talk about something—”

“Lighter?” she said, drying her nose.

“Yeah,” he said. Their eyes met, and they burst into convulsive, uncontrolled laughter. Several of the mothers at the next table looked at them anxiously. That made them laugh harder. It wasn’t really laughter; it was release of tension, and they were powerless to stop it. Their diaphragms convulsed so hard, it hurt, and tears spurted into their eyes.

After a few minutes, it slowed down, and Gemma said, “Where were we?”—which made it start all over again. People nearby looked at them quizzically, the way people do in public when others seem to be having more fun than they ought to be having.

Finally they were played out and sat for a moment catching their breath.

“Wow,” she said, drying her eyes, “that was intense.”

“Yeah. Feel better?”

“Yes, I do.” She finished what was left of her chocolate and shoved her laptop into a case at her feet. Without looking at him, she said, “Want to come to my place?”

The question took him off guard, but there was only one answer.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.”

C
HAPTER
S
IXTY-EIGHT

D
ebbie Collins finished her lunch of vegan lentil soup in the campus dining hall and adjusted the straps on her backpack before heading off to meet with her math professor. She was nervous because she hadn’t been doing well in class lately, and she had arranged to meet with him privately to discuss how she might do better. Math had never been her strong suit—she was a philosophy major, with a minor in Russian literature. Completely useless choice, her mother had told her, but her father supported her decision to study whatever she wanted.

She had always been Daddy’s girl, she thought as she stepped out of John Jay Hall and headed across the quadrangle. He understood her love of learning for its own sake. There would be time later to think about earning money, he said—college was the time for exploration and intellectual curiosity.
There’s nothing like this in Iowa
, she thought as she passed Butler Library, with the names of great philosophers emblazoned on its marble façade: Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle. The sight of its perfectly symmetrical classical columns always made her breathe easier.

But the butterflies in her stomach fluttered harder as she entered the Mathematics Building. Her shoes clicked too loudly as she walked down the hall leading to her professor’s office, echoing down the corridor.
Why am I so anxious?
Her fingers crept up to twist a stray strand of hair around her ear, a nervous habit. It wasn’t as if her professor was unkind or rude; he was actually quite gracious, even to undergrads. His manners were impeccable—courtly, even. Yes, that was it—he was
courtly
. That word fit him perfectly. And he was strangely compelling—attractive, even, in an offbeat way. Debbie had always gone for the oddballs and loners and, like a lot of impressionable girls from the Midwest, arrived at Columbia already primed to have a crush on a professor.

Still, he made her uneasy. He was so tall and thin, and that scar on his face . . . it was hard not to look at it and wonder how he’d gotten it. Sometimes she found herself imagining what had happened to him—a duel with a Romanian count, or a scuffle with a Hungarian duke. Her scenarios were always romantic and rather overwrought, a product of being nineteen and fresh from a farm in Iowa. Her imagination had always been what her mother called “overactive,” but her father said it just meant she was smarter than most people.

Smart or not, Debbie found that her hand shook as she raised it to knock on her professor’s door. To her surprise, before she could rap the door with her knuckles, it opened abruptly. There, standing before her, was her professor, with that quizzical half tilt of his head she often noticed in class.

“Right on time, Miss Collins,” he said. “Won’t you come in?”

He stepped aside and made a courtly gesture for her to enter.
Yes, he is courtly,
she thought as she entered the office. But it didn’t quiet the pounding of her heart or the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. When the door closed behind her, it rang in her ears like the slamming of the door to a crypt.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTY-NINE

M
aybe going home with Gemma O’Reilly Hancock wasn’t the wisest thing to do under the circumstances, but Lee was drawn toward her like a moon caught in the gravitational field of its mother planet. There was just something about her.

They started on the couch and ended up in the bedroom in a tangle of blankets and pillows—she was a self-confessed “pillow freak.”

Sex with Gemma was like diving into a dark, warm pool of water. His body tingled, twinged and tightened, and his breathing became deeper. His stomach unloosened its knots; even his forehead released its tension. He wanted to know every inch of her, inside and out. He feasted on her subtle flavors and scents, the faint aroma of raspberries behind her left ear (but curiously, not the right ear, which smelled more of lemons). Her kiss was spicy, like cloves or cinnamon, and as for her other lips . . . he could lose himself there, sinking into the pleasure of tasting her center.

Gemma was a fierce, hungry lover whose boyish athleticism inevitably brought up thoughts of Kathy—but he pushed them away by reminding himself that, after all, she had broken up with him. He couldn’t sit around pining away for her, for God’s sake—not when someone like Gemma practically threw herself at him.

Afterward, she brought him tea, and they watched her new kitten play around the bedroom. The animal’s youth and innocence felt so foreign to him. For the kitten, everything was a mystery, potential danger or possible plaything. A cubbyhole in the desk was a tower from which to spy and pounce on anything that moved below; the laundry basket was a secret hiding place, the dust ruffle on the bed a constant source of amusement.

Gemma laughed her dry, throaty chortle as the cat poked her head all the way inside one of her slippers.

“Wouldn’t it be great to live as a kitten for just one day—to have that kind of one-track enjoyment of the moment?” she said as the kitten struggled to free itself of the slipper.

“But we wouldn’t be able to appreciate it, because we’d have the mind of a cat.”

The kitten pulled its head out of the slipper and sat on its haunches in the middle of the carpet, looking confused. They both laughed.

“I guess you’re right,” she said. “Do we ever really appreciate what we have?”

He gave her a squeeze. “I do right now, that’s for sure.”

“Mmm,” she said, snuggling against him, her cinnamon-scented hair tickling his neck. “What are you driven by in your line of work? The need to confront evil where it lives? Fascination with it?”

“I suppose. And the question of why some people turn out to be psychopaths and others don’t.”

“Their ability to dehumanize other people always stuns me,” she said, twisting a lock of his hair around her fingers.

“You might be surprised how many people have really disturbing fantasies. But for the serial offender, it’s that crucial moment when he
acts
on them. That’s when he leaves the human race behind and sinks into the seventh circle of hell.”

“We all take refuge in illusion sometimes, don’t we?” Gemma said. “I mean, women lie about their weight, men lie about their height, and everyone lies about their age.”

“That’s true. And we convince ourselves our illusions are true.”

“I think some illusion is necessary. I like science fiction, for God’s sake!”

“Not many people can take reality twenty-four hours a day,” Lee said. “But most of us don’t create an entire fantasy world of our own.”

“Right.”

“Well, for this guy the real world isn’t as real to him as the fantasies in his head. He lives more fully inside his fantasies than he does in reality.”

“Sounds like any number of science fiction geeks I’ve known.”

“Except that
they
generally know the difference between fantasy and reality—and, in any case, their fantasies don’t usually center on rape and murder.”

She bit his ear. “Do you feel guilty because you’re normal?”

He smiled. “You flatter me.”

“What do you mean?”

He raised himself up on one elbow. “How normal do you really think I am?”

“Well, you’re not a psychopath.”

“No.”

She cocked her head to one side, studying his face. “So?”

“Life is unfair,” he replied, setting his teacup on the bedside table. The kitten immediately attempted to leap onto the table—failing, it tumbled onto its back.

Gemma laughed and lifted the kitten onto the bed. “Does anyone really change? Or are we all pretty much formed by the time we’re adolescents?”

He finished the last sip of cold tea. “I think people can change, but it’s a long, painful process. Not this guy, though—he’s a full-fledged psychopath.”

“That’s too bad—for him and his victims,” she said, stroking the kitten.

“Yeah,” he said. “It is.”

The kitten sunk its tiny sharp claws into her hand, biting it.

“Ow!” she said, pulling her hand away.

“See?” he said. “Nature’s a bitch.”

“Come kiss it and make it better,” she said.

She didn’t have to ask twice.