Silent Victim (18 page)

As he drove through the gently sloping farm fields, Lee thought about each victim, and what they had in common. On the surface, they had very little in common, but there was some thread connecting them. There had to be—there always was. Once you saw the pattern, and how the pieces connected, you had a clearer insight into the killer’s personality.

But this murderer might as well be a ghost. He was hiding his pattern, his victimology, so well … but what if the lack of a pattern was
in itself
a pattern? What if they could somehow connect the seeming randomness of the crimes to a particular type of person?

As he pulled into the driveway of his mother’s house, Lee saw purple and white balloons festooned on the lamppost at the end of the drive. He smiled—purple was Kylie’s new favorite color. She had given up pink as “too girlie” a few months ago. As he pulled up onto the patch of lawn that served as a parking space, the front door of the house was flung open and his niece came rushing out, trailed by two other little girls.

“Uncle Leeeee!” she cried as he opened the car door, throwing herself at him.

Her two friends followed suit. “Uncle Leeee!” they yelled gleefully, wrapping their arms around his legs. He pretended not to notice and tried to walk, a girl clinging to each leg, as Kylie peeled off and hopped up and down alongside him.

“You look so funny!” she hooted as he pretended to be unaware of the clinging girls, struggling to move his legs forward. After a couple of minutes of this, all three of the children dissolved into laughter, and the two hanging onto him were forced to let go.

“You’re
funny!”
the smaller one said. She was a pixie with olive skin and straight jet black hair cut short with long bangs over large dark eyes.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” Lee asked Kylie as they all headed toward the house.

“This is Angelica,” said Kylie, stroking the pixie’s shiny black hair, “and this is Meredith.”

Meredith was not a pretty child—much taller than Angelica and Kylie, she was very pale with bushy red hair, deep-set blue eyes, and a long, serious face. “Hello,” she said, studying Lee as though he were a laboratory specimen or object d’art. “You’re the criminal profiler, right?

Lee thought Meredith was entirely too precocious for her age.

“I’m in law enforcement, that’s right.”

Meredith walked backward so she could look up at him, as Kylie and Angelica skipped hand in hand alongside them, humming.

“I’ve read about the kind of work you do. It’s very interesting,” Meredith said, trying to skip backward. It was an awkward gait, and she was an ungainly child. “Is that how you hurt your arm?”

“Kind of.”

“I think I want to do what you do when I grow up.”

Lee smiled. “Well, you’re young—there’s plenty of time to change your mind.”

Meredith shook her head. “No, I’m very focused—I know that’s what I want to do.” She looked at him, her face serious. “I have a very high IQ, you know.”

“Well, that’s great,” he said as they reached the house.

“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Kylie said, taking Meredith by the hand and pulling her down the grassy slope toward the springhouse. “She thinks she’s all that.”

“No, I don’t,” said Meredith, “I just—” But at that moment Kylie threw herself onto the ground and began rolling down the grassy hillside. Angelica quickly followed suit, giggling all the way. Meredith stood for a moment with her hands at her sides, then said, “Oh, what the heck,” and rolled down after them.

Watching them, Lee remembered all the times he and Laura had rolled down that same hill—or, in winter, sledded down it and across the frozen stream at the bottom. He looked at his mother’s house: there were a good number of old stone houses in this river valley, and some of them had connections to the Revolutionary War, but his mother’s house practically oozed history. The massive gray river stones were bulky and uneven and looked as if they had been hewn from the sides of mountains by giants. When Lee was a child he thought they were the most wonderful thing he had ever seen.

The sound of giggling bubbled up from the bottom of the hill, where the three girls lay on their backs, breathless and laughing, their hair and clothes covered with grass and bits of twigs. The lazy August sun fell on the girls’ hair—blond, black, and red—and Lee was reminded of seeing a herd of horses in a field when he was a child, and how pleasing he found the different-colored manes.

Looking at them, it was hard once again to imagine anything was wrong in the world, or ever would be.

He heard the familiar sound of the front screen door slamming and turned his head toward the house. For one painful instant, he expected his sister to be coming out onto the stone porch to wave at him. He had to blink to clear his eyes when he realized that it was, of course, his mother.

“Hi,” she called, shielding her eyes from the sun. “Where’s the birthday girl?”

Lee pointed to the bottom of the hill, where the girls had gotten up and were brushing the grass from their clothes, still laughing. He didn’t want to disturb the sweetness of the moment, so he turned and joined his mother on the front porch.

Fiona Campbell greeted her only son with a quick, firm kiss on the cheek, then held him at arm’s length, grasping his shoulders with her long, strong hands.

“So glad you could make it,” she said. “It means a lot to Kylie.” She would never say it meant something to her, too—that was not her style. “What on earth did you do to your arm?” she said, frowning.

“I ran into a door.”

She raised a single eyebrow, but didn’t say anything more about it. That was typical of her—the less said about unpleasantries, the better.

His mother was tall and straight, as lean as the day she was married to Lee’s father. Her salt-and-pepper hair was cut in a businesslike sweep of bangs, short in the back, just reaching the nape of her neck. Her cheekbones were high, her eyes a clear, piercing blue, and she walked with the unyielding step of a woman who has never known a moment’s self-doubt.

Loss was the touchstone of his family’s life, and his mother was both ridiculous and rather heroic in her refusal to bow down to it—indeed, to recognize its existence. The straightness of her spine, the clearness of her gaze in the face of disaster were both vexing and full of an odd grandeur, like a Greek tragic heroine.

Lee turned to see George Callahan emerge from the house. He was Kylie’s father, and Lee believed that a kinder, more patient man had never walked the earth.

“Hi, George,” he said, extending his left hand.

“Hey there, fella,” George replied, grasping Lee’s hand in his enormous paw, holding a beer in the other. George was big and blond and bluff, with a touching awkwardness around other people. When there was work to be done, he was your man—hardworking, honest, reliable—but in social situations he always seemed to be struggling to overcome his natural shyness. Big and broad-shouldered, he never really looked at home at the kind of cocktail parties Lee’s parents had favored. He was much more comfortable in front of a grill, flipping steaks, spatula in one hand and beer in the other. He was wearing blue jeans and a freshly ironed white shirt on his generous frame, and wore his straight sandy hair slicked back. His square face was shiny and pink, as though he had spent the day in the sun.

“What’d chya do, get in a fight?” George asked, indicating Lee’s injured arm.

“Yeah—but you should see the other guy.”

George laughed. “Yeah, I’ll bet!” He jerked a thumb in the direction of the kitchen. “Can I get you a beer?”

“Sure.”

“Comin’ right up,” George said happily, lumbering back into the house. He loved waiting on people—it was talking to them that presented problems.

“So it’ll just be the three of us and the three girls,” Lee’s mother said, sitting in one of the chaise longues on the porch. “Kylie will have another birthday party at school on Monday with all her classmates. George has already taken the morning off to bake cupcakes.”

“He’s a great dad,” Lee said.

“Yes, he is,” she replied.

A silence hung heavy in the air between them. What neither of them were saying, but Lee was sure they were both thinking, was how much they missed Laura and how they wished she were here now to see her daughter turn seven.

George reemerged from the house just as Kylie and her friends came up from the bottom of the hill. Kylie and Meredith walked side by side, carrying an enormous watermelon between them, as Angelica skipped along behind.

“Look what we found in the springhouse!” Kylie exclaimed.

“That’s for after dinner,” Fiona said sternly. “For dessert.”

“But we have birthday cake for dessert,” Kylie pointed out. “Why can’t we have the watermelon now?”

Fiona started to answer, but George Callahan stepped in. “It’s your birthday, right?” he said to his daughter.

“Right!” she said, grinning.

Angelica wiped some grass from her forehead and looked at them all wide-eyed. Meredith crossed her arms and did her best to regard the adults with an ironic gaze, but she just looked as though she had indigestion.

“Then I think you should have the watermelon whenever you want it,” he said, with a challenging look at Fiona, who shook her head.

“George Callahan, you’re going to spoil her,” she said.

“Then she’ll be spoiled. But it’s her birthday and I say she should have the watermelon when she wants it.”

“Yea!” the girls cried. They hopped up and down, chanting, “Wa-ter-me-lon! Wa-ter-me-lon!”

The three adults couldn’t help laughing at the sight, though Fiona still shook her head, clicking her tongue in disapproval. Such things as watermelon on demand didn’t exist in her world—but then, in her world, her only daughter was alive somewhere, not an undiscovered corpse slowly rotting in some lonely and abandoned corner of the world.

Bad boy! You’re a bad, bad boy, and you deserve to be punished for it. Did you really think you could humiliate me and get away with it? Well, you’re about to learn your lesson. All bad boys learn their lesson sooner or later.

Caleb turned the dial on his police scanner until he picked up the call from Patrol Unit 85. He smiled as he heard the officer’s voice—the familiar, flat intonation of a cop reporting a routine stop.

“Suspect in drunk driving apprehended, white male, being taken to Tombs for booking. His companion is also inebriated, so car is being impounded following suspect’s release.”

He leaned back in his seat, letting his head fall back onto the headrest. They would take Joe to spend the night at the Tombs, then release him in the morning. He would emerge into the bright daylight, hungover, disgusted with himself and the world, and Caleb would be waiting.

It was a wonderful summer meal, the kind Laura would have loved. George outdid himself on the grill, the salad was mixed greens and juicy tomatoes from local farms, and the sweet corn was tender and perfectly cooked. Lee’s mother had something of a corn fetish. She would set the timer for precisely one minute once the water came to a boil, standing over the pot to pluck out the ears with her tongs, her face red and sweating as the rising steam slowly enveloped her.

They sat at the oblong oak table in the tiny dining room with the burnished maple-wood paneling. They had planned to eat outside at the picnic table, but a plague of mosquitoes plummeted down like tiny dive bombers when dusk fell. They grabbed their plates and scurried inside, abandoning the bucolic splendor of the front lawn for the comfort of the small but elegant eighteenth-century dining room, with its smell of apples and ancient wood.

As a great concession to her granddaughter, Fiona had agreed to serve—
horrors
—hamburgers and French fries along with the corn and salad. In the Campbell family the birthday child always chose the menu for the birthday dinner. Fiona favored fish and chicken and vegetables. Born in

Scotland and forced to endure Scottish cuisine as a child, she had a horror of what she called “stodgy food,” but tonight Kylie would have her way. This pleased George Callahan no end, as he was the appointed chef—he loved to stand at the grill, a cold beer at his side, inhaling charcoal smoke and wielding the specially fashioned grill tools he had designed himself. It was his dream to someday have enough to invest in a small business and make outdoor grilling equipment. The one concession made to Fiona was that the meat was pure grass-fed Angus beef, ninety-seven percent lean, organic, and hormone free.

They all sat around Fiona’s long oak table, halfway through Kylie’s birthday dinner. “Great burgers, George,” Lee said, as he finished his, medium rare, dripping with caramelized onions. George had cooked each one to order, and seasoned them with a special sauce he made himself, guarding the recipe as carefully as if it were a state secret.

“Thanks,” George replied, snapping open another Rolling Rock and taking a long swig. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve, then looked sheepishly at Fiona, but fortunately for him she wasn’t watching.

The girls chatted and giggled all throughout dinner, and though Fiona shot her granddaughter looks from time to time, Kylie ignored her and continued enjoying her friends.

The subject at the moment was Ouija boards—the girls had discovered the one Lee and Laura used to play with in the upstairs guest bedroom closet. When he explained what they were for, Meredith immediately scoffed at the idea, but Kylie and Angelica were intrigued and wanted to play with the board after dinner.

“There’s no such thing as foretelling the future!” Meredith declared, spreading a liberal amount of butter on her ear of corn.

“How do you know?” said Kylie. “What if there is?”

“Well, even if there is, you wouldn’t be able to do it with a wooden board with a few letters painted on it!”

“My granny says that she can tell the future from the scratches our chickens leave in their feed on the ground,” Angelica said, her chin shiny from beef fat and butter.

“You have chickens?” Kylie said. “That’s cool!”

Angelica lowered her eyes and glanced at Fiona, who sat stiff as ever in her chair, delicately nibbling on an ear of corn. Her fastidiousness extended to her eating habits. Though she enjoyed her food, she was never one to throw herself into any activity too vigorously, as if an excess of enthusiasm was itself a character flaw.

“Why do people want to believe they can foretell the future?” Meredith grumbled. “Why can’t they just live their lives without this …
need
to believe in things that can’t be proven?”

“Speaking of the future, you sound like a future scientist,” George remarked, helping himself to more steak and salad.

Meredith set her fork down with a clank. “Yes,” she said portentously. “I intend to be a forensic specialist.”

“What’s for-ensics?” asked Angelica.

“The study of evidence in crime scenes,” Meredith replied, popping a cherry tomato into her mouth. The juice squirted out through her teeth and hit Fiona square in the forehead.

“Less chatter and more attention to what we’re doing, please,” she said sternly.

“I think the reason people want to believe in the unproven is because we all want to be able to touch the past and the future,” George said. “We don’t want to think that this is all there is.”

Meredith snorted and rolled her eyes.

“You’re too young to understand,” George continued, “but by the time you’re our age, you will. We’re all afraid of death, and we’ve all lost someone we love. So if we can believe that maybe—just maybe—there’s something else, then we feel better.”

“Well,
I
think it’s silly!” Meredith scoffed, stuffing a piece of bread in her mouth.

Lee looked at George, taken aback by his uncharacteristically serious response. He knew that George was referring to Laura, but he was surprised that he would allude to her in front of the children—especially his daughter. But Kylie appeared to miss the reference, and was happily dipping her bread into a little pool of melted butter on her plate.

“In Scotland, some people were said to have what we called the Second Sight,” Fiona said.

Lee stared at his mother. This was the first he’d ever heard her mention anything like this.

“Really?” said Kylie, her fork stopped in midair.

Fiona’s expression didn’t change, but her tone was low and mysterious. “When I was a child there was a woman, Mary McFarland, who could see things that had yet to happen.”

“Like what?” Angelica said, leaning so far over the table she nearly upset the salad dressing.

“Gareth McKinney came to her in a dream, and the next day he was dead.”

“Wow,” said Kylie. “That’s cool.”

“How did he die?” Angelica asked. “He fell off the roof trying to mend it.” Meredith sniffed officiously. “Probably just a coincidence.”

“Then one time she told Kerry McClelland not to take the ferry to the mainland, and the next day the ferry sank.”
“Wow,”
Kylie said.

“How come you never told me any of this?” Lee asked.

Fiona leaned forward and plucked another ear of corn from the platter. “The subject never came up.”

Kylie and Angelica could hardly wait to finish dinner so they could get out the Ouija board, over Meredith’s objections.

Lee joined his mother in the kitchen, where she was busily cleaning up after dinner. Fiona was an exacting housekeeper, and often seemed so eager to begin the “tidying up” process that Lee was worried someday she would snatch a half-finished dish from under her guest’s nose.

He found her rinsing and stacking dishes—she owned a dishwasher, but a dish rarely entered it in anything less than pristine condition.

“Do you really believe those things you told the girls?” Lee asked his mother.

“I am neither a believer nor an unbeliever,” she replied, scraping corncobs into the compost bin. A fanatic gardener, she was intractable when it came to composting, believing that artificial fertilizers were the devil’s work.

“But you told them that story,” he protested. “Why did you tell them if you don’t—”

She stopped working and turned to face him. “Where are you headed with this? Because I won’t talk about—
you know what,”
she finished, her voice low.

“That’s not why I was asking,” Lee said. “But since you mention it, why
can’t
we ever talk about it? For God’s sake, she was—”

His mother abruptly dropped the compost bin onto the floor with such a loud bang that it made him jump. “Don
‘t
you say she ‘was’ anything!” she hissed, her eyes narrowed in fury. “Don’t you
dare
give up on her!”

“Oh, for God’s sake—I’m not ‘giving up’ on anything!”

he shot back. “When will
you
accept the fact that she’s gone? She’s not coming back—she’s
dead,
and all the wishing in the world isn’t going to change that!”

When he saw the look in his mother’s eyes, he immediately regretted his words. She stared at him, her face frozen in an expression of horror and reproach, then turned sharply, whipping her dish towel onto the counter like a punctuation mark, and stalked out of the room.

Lee stood there for a few moments, his head spinning with remorse and anger—anger because this was such predictable behavior on her part, and remorse because he should have known better than to bring it up—and on Kylie’s birthday, of all times.

He heard a sound behind him and turned to see his niece standing in the doorway, a stricken expression on her face.

“What’s the matter? Why are you angry at Grandmother?” she said, her chin beginning to pucker, her lower lip trembling.

“I’m not angry at her, honey,” Lee said, bending to take her in his arms.

“Is it about my mommy coming back? Will she be coming soon?”

“Maybe, honey,” he lied. “I hope so.”