Silent Kills (6 page)
Authors: C.E. Lawrence
CHAPTER TWELVE
It took all four of them to calm down Mr. and Mrs. Nugent, but they were finally able to persuade the parents that everything was being done to find their daughter’s killer. Meanwhile, Francois sat slumped in his chair, arms crossed, staring out the window at a pair of pigeons eyeing each other as they strutted in circles on top of the air conditioner. He had already ID’d his sister’s body, but Mrs. Nugent insisted on seeing her daughter.
When Chuck Morton explained to her that an autopsy had been performed, she clenched her jaw and nodded curtly.
“I understand.”
“It’s routine in any homicide by unknown means,” he said.
“But why won’t you tell us how she died?” she asked in a voice so hollow and heartbroken that Lee had to look away.
“I already told them we weren’t releasing that information to the public,” Butts told Chuck. He turned back to Mrs. Nugent. “Did your daughter take any sedatives that you know of?”
She looked at her husband, who folded her in his arms. “Of course not!” he said angrily, his handsome face reddening under the tan.
“If she did, would you know about it?” Butts persisted.
“Of course we would!” he retorted, spit flying from his mouth. A tiny droplet hit Butts in the forehead, but he ignored it.
“Is that how she died?” Mrs. Nugent pleaded, her blue eyes wild with grief. “Was it an overdose?”
“I tell you what,” Detective Krieger said. “Why don’t I take you both down to the morgue so you can spend some time with your daughter?”
Lee looked at her, impressed. Elena Krieger was known for being temperamental—to put it mildly—but here she was handling the grief-stricken family with the tact of a professional grief counselor.
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Nugent. Leaning on her husband’s arm, she headed for the door.
Mr. Nugent turned to their son. “Francois, are you coming?”
Francois stared at the floor. “I’d rather not. I already—saw her.” His voice was almost a whisper.
“You can’t just stay here,” his father said impatiently.
Francois picked at something on the arm of his chair with his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t want to go home alone.”
“Well, you can’t just take up their time,” Mr. Nugent insisted, waving a hand at the Lee and the two detectives.
“Sure he can—at least for a while,” said Chuck. Poking his head into the hall, he called out, “Sergeant Ruggles!”
The ruddy-faced sergeant hurried in from the precinct lobby. “Yes, sir?”
“Would you show this young man around the precinct, please?” Chuck said, indicating Francois, who rose from his chair hopefully at the sight of Ruggles.
“Certainly, sir. Anything in particular, sir?”
“Whatever you want—just keep him occupied, will you? That is, if it won’t interfere with your duties.”
“No problem at all, sir—happy to do it,” Ruggles replied. “Now then,” he said to Francois, “why don’t we just see if we can find some handcuffs that might fit you?”
Francois smiled for the first time since Lee had met him.
“We’ll call you on your cell phone when we’re done,” his mother called after him as he followed Sergeant Ruggles into the lobby.
“Now then,” Elena Krieger said to the Nugents, “shall we go?”
Mr. and Mrs. Nugent followed meekly after her, leaving Chuck and Lee alone in the office. Chuck sat down at his desk with and rubbed his forehead.
“I hate that part of the job.”
“Yeah,” Lee agreed. “I think everyone does.”
“Right,” said Chuck. “You’d have to be a real bastard to enjoy it.” He picked up a folder containing crime scene photos and let them fall back onto the desk, then leaned back in his chair, stretching his long, trim body. He looked even leaner than he had been when they were roommates at Princeton. Chuck loved to eat, but if he gained an ounce, Lee had no doubt Susan would have him on a regimen of broccoli and beans. “What have we got here, Lee?” he said. “What kind of guy does this?”
“I guess it’s stating the obvious to say he’s deeply disturbed.”
“What’s his motive? Is it sexual?”
“That’s an element, certainly—but it’s more complicated than that.”
Chuck ran his fingers lightly over the glass butterfly paperweight on his desk. The insect’s golden wings, trapped in its glass prison, reflected pale in the early September light. “Isn’t it always?”
“But this time it’s really odd. There’s a disconnect between the bizarre nature of the crime and his level of organization.”
“What do you mean?”
Lee sat across from Chuck and leaned his elbows on the front of the desk. Outside the window, the male pigeon puffed up his grey and white feathers and arched his neck for the benefit of the female, but she remained unimpressed, pecking indolently at a crust of bread on the windowsill.
“To actually drain the blood from someone’s body is such an extreme act, the kind of thing you might expect from a full-fledged psychotic.”
“But—?”
“Psychotics don’t tend to be organized. The very nature of their condition makes it hard for them to function on a day-to-day level—let alone in extreme situations.”
“In other words, what makes him tick should prevent him from ticking quite so smoothly.”
“Exactly. To do what he did requires an amazing amount of planning, control, and organization—and yet who else but a delusional psychotic would have the impulse in the first place?”
Chuck stared out the window at the pigeons on the ledge. “Sometimes I wonder what the hell drives anybody to do what they do.”
Outside, the male pigeon closed in on the female. Seizing her by the back of the neck with his sharp beak, he pressed her against the surface of the air conditioner and forced his body against hers. With a rapid flurry of wings and feathers, the struggle was over in a matter of seconds.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The medical examiner’s office was housed in a sterile, utterly characterless institutional structure common in the 1960s, the kind of building that sucked the very idea of grace and style from the air surrounding it. Across the street was Bellevue, now a thriving teaching hospital, with numerous modern wings cobbled onto its venerable sides. The additions jutted out in a hodgepodge of architectural styles, sprouting like mushrooms from the main building, which was an impressive, solemn redbrick structure, dour and stern as a judge. To the north, on East Thirtieth Street, was the abandoned shell of the old Bellevue Hospital, now a homeless shelter.
Lee and Butts took the creaky elevator down to the toxicology lab—appropriately enough, it was in the basement. Riding in the scuffed elevator car, Lee could only guess at the number of bloated, bloody, bruised, or beaten bodies that lay in the freezers awaiting autopsy, for their livers, spleens, or stomachs to be removed, chopped, or blended before making their way to the pathologist, geneticist, or toxicologist, to be catalogued, boxed, and bottled, their last physical presence on earth to be a few grey, foul-smelling ounces of pulpy liquid in a plastic laboratory vial. The physical signs left behind by violence always struck him as sinister and mysterious, like a trail of bread crumbs leading to a witch’s hut deep in the woods.
The workers in the toxicology lab were a curious, nerdy bunch, quiet and mysterious as snails. Greasy of hair and narrow-shouldered, they wore thick, old-fashioned glasses and mismatched, stained clothing. He and Detective Butts stood watching as they moved among the humming, whirring machinery, their grubby, unmanicured fingers deftly manipulating the dials and buttons lining rows of mass spectrometers and liquid chromatographs.
Butts approached a pasty-faced man in a plaid sweater vest.
“We’re here to see Ivana Jankovic.”
The man stared at him through thick spectacles, then pointed to a small office at the far end of the lab.
“She stepped out. You’re welcome to wait in her office.”
Lee watched as a round-shouldered gnome of a woman of indeterminate age with flat, thinning brown hair transferred a beaker to a whirring mass spectrometer, adroitly navigating the maze of machines and racks of neatly labeled specimen jars.
He imagined her spending the night within these walls, the grimy windows and faded walls as unglamorous as their inhabitants. She and her colleagues had hairless white skin, as though they had spent their entire lives underground.
Butts nudged his arm. “I’m getting tired of waiting—when did they say she’d be back?”
As if in answer to his question, Ivana Jankovic strode into the room. She was strikingly attractive, so unlike her colleagues that she seemed out of place. Her honey-brown hair was swept up in a chignon, and she wore an ankle-length brown knit sweater dress that hugged her ample curves, over long black leather boots. A yellow silk scarf circled her neck, as if flung there carelessly as an afterthought.
“Hello, I’m Dr. Jankovic,” she said, offering an exquisitely manicured hand. “What can I do for you?” Her accent was exotic—probably Eastern European.
“Detective Leonard Butts,” Butts said, shaking her hand. “This is Dr. Lee Campbell. We called earlier about the—”
“Ah, yes—the Van Cortlandt Vampire,” she said, leading them into her office. “I have the tox screen on my desk.”
“We appreciated you putting a rush on it,” Lee said as they entered the small but tidy room.
“I hope it doesn’t make us sound too callous,” she said, sitting at her desk. “But we’re all kind of amazed by it.”
Lee tried to imagine the mole-like creatures in the next room expressing emotion of any kind, but couldn’t manage it.
“We just had a few questions for you, if you don’t mind,” Butts said.
“So you’ve already seen the tox screen?”
“Yeah. We were just wondering about the level of sedatives in her system.”
She leaned back in her chair, arms folded over her rather luscious chest. “What about it?”
“Would it be enough to cause unconsciousness?”
“Oh, sure. That level of any benzodiazepine would render almost anyone unconsciousness—and she wasn’t very big, so I’d say definitely, in her case.”
“But not enough to kill her?”
“No, not enough to kill her, unless it was used in combination with something else, and the only other thing in the tox screen was a small amount of alcohol.”
“Can you tell us how it was delivered? Did she swallow it, or was it injected?” Lee asked.
“Let’s see,” she said, putting on a pair of reading glasses, which made her look sexier. “The
PM
report says there were trace amounts of alprazolam in her stomach, so I’d say she swallowed it.”
PM
report says there were trace amounts of alprazolam in her stomach, so I’d say she swallowed it.”
“Alprazolam?” Lee said. “Isn’t that Xanax?”
“Yes, it’s the generic name for it,” Dr. Jankovic said, peering at him over her reading glasses like a stern school teacher. He felt his face redden, and instantly regretted his remark. Was it obvious to her that he knew the drug’s name because he had taken it himself?
“How’d you know that?” Butts said, but Lee glared at him.
“How long would it take to cause unconsciousness?” Lee asked.
She removed her glasses and set them on the desk. “Generally speaking, the drug reaches peak levels anywhere from one to two hours after ingestion.”
“So he spent some time with her,” Lee mused.
“What?” Butts said.
“Well, first he had to get her to take the drug, and then he was with her for at least an hour, until she passed out.”
“Yeah, right.” Butts absently scratched his chin, which was bristly by this time of day.
“Is there anything else I can help you with?” Dr. Jankovic asked, unfolding her curvaceous figure from the chair.
“No, thanks—you’ve been real helpful,” Butts said. “We appreciate it.”
“Good luck, Detectives,” she said, walking them to the door. “I really hope you catch him soon.”
“So do we,” Butts said, but they all knew that was easier said than done.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The big house was quiet—too quiet for a Saturday morning.
Davey tiptoed down the hall from his bedroom, past his sister’s room, afraid to look inside for fear of what he might see. But as he passed the room he stopped to inhale the scent of lilies in the big red vase on the hall table. The round beveled mirror over the table was directly across from the door to his sister’s bedroom, and he couldn’t help peering inside. Expecting to see the slight, wasted form in the big canopy bed, Davey was surprised to see the bed was empty. Not only was there no sign of Edwina, but the bed was made, the covers neatly pulled all the way up to the heavy oak headboard.
Davey tiptoed down the hall from his bedroom, past his sister’s room, afraid to look inside for fear of what he might see. But as he passed the room he stopped to inhale the scent of lilies in the big red vase on the hall table. The round beveled mirror over the table was directly across from the door to his sister’s bedroom, and he couldn’t help peering inside. Expecting to see the slight, wasted form in the big canopy bed, Davey was surprised to see the bed was empty. Not only was there no sign of Edwina, but the bed was made, the covers neatly pulled all the way up to the heavy oak headboard.
An arrow of fear pierced his heart. Where was Edwina? Could she be at the doctor’s office? But that didn’t make sense. Dr. Jennings always made house calls these days, wagging his stethoscope at Davey if he got too close. He didn’t like Dr. Jennings. He was old and deaf, and had great clumps of hair growing out of his ears, which Davey thought was disgusting. He vowed to himself if he ever became an old man with hair growing out of his ears, he would pluck out every single one, even if it made his ears bleed.
Standing there, he could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock at the far end of the hall, steady as a metronome, its implacable wheels and gears marking the passage of each second. Tick
tock
, tick
tock,
tick ... and then he heard another sound. It was coming from the kitchen, and was low and smooth, like running water. He took a few steps down the hall toward the stairs and stood at the top of the landing, listening, his hand gripping the smooth maple banister.
tock
, tick
tock,
tick ... and then he heard another sound. It was coming from the kitchen, and was low and smooth, like running water. He took a few steps down the hall toward the stairs and stood at the top of the landing, listening, his hand gripping the smooth maple banister.
It was the sound of weeping. Quietly and steadily, a woman was crying. It was the most mournful sound he had ever heard. Panic rose in his throat as he ventured slowly down the stairs, propelled by curiosity, but so afraid that his knees shook and he thought he might faint. He reached the first-floor foyer, the living room to his right and the kitchen to his left. There was no doubt that the sound was coming from the kitchen. He crept up to the door and stood there staring at it before opening it. When he did, his hand trembled, and sweat spurted from his palms.
There, sitting in the corner of the kitchen, was his mother. Next to her was his Aunt Rosa, his favorite aunt, her long auburn hair loose around her shoulders. His mother was weeping, and Aunt Rosa’s arms were around her, hugging her close. When the door creaked open, his aunt looked up and saw him, and the expression on her face was one he knew he would never forget. It was a combination of regret, sorrow, pity—and warning.
The message in her eyes was clear:
Don’t come in here.
He nodded and stepped back through the door into the hall, where he stood alone, trembling and sweating. He knew why his mother was crying. What he couldn’t understand was why he had been banished from her presence. But the knowledge was to stay with him forever: whatever his mother needed at this terrible time, this great tragedy in her life, it wasn’t him.
Don’t come in here.
He nodded and stepped back through the door into the hall, where he stood alone, trembling and sweating. He knew why his mother was crying. What he couldn’t understand was why he had been banished from her presence. But the knowledge was to stay with him forever: whatever his mother needed at this terrible time, this great tragedy in her life, it wasn’t him.
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