Silent Kills (7 page)

Authors: C.E. Lawrence

BOOK: Silent Kills

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The morning sun slanted in through the single tall window in Chuck Morton’s office, bathing the room in a soft golden glow. It was a warm, gentle September morning, but the splendor of the day seemed lost on Detective Leonard Butts, who yawned and rubbed his eyes.

Elena Krieger raised one plucked eyebrow and regarded him critically, arms crossed. “Having trouble sleeping, Detective?”

“Naw,” he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “I sleep like a baby. I just stayed up late last night doin’ some research on this steampunk scene.”

“And what did you find?”

“I’ll tell you one thing. They are into some weird sh—uh, stuff,” he said, with a glance at Krieger.

Lee smiled. Her presence had cleaned up Butts’s language radically. In fact, they all stood a little straighter and spoke more crisply around her. Something about her made men feel like boys: naughty, confused—and horny. His relationship with Kathy was still in the first flushes of infatuation, but it was impossible to ignore Krieger’s physical presence. Not just because of her beauty, but her peculiar combination of androgyny and sexuality was intoxicating, and at times, distracting.

When Sergeant Ruggles entered Morton’s office, it was painfully obvious he just wanted to be near Krieger. He bustled around the filling cabinets, pretending to fetch documents, but Lee saw the flush creeping up the back of his thick neck as he leafed through the rows of folders and reports. Ruggles was smitten the worst, he thought. Around Krieger he became a stammering idiot, a schoolboy in love. It was embarrassing to watch.

“Anything we can help you with, Sergeant?” Butts asked, settling himself down with his coffee.

“No, thank you, sir—I’ve got what I came for,” Ruggles replied, waving a manila folder at him.

“Hey, Ruggles, is it true you played in a steampunk band?” Butts said.

“I’m afraid so, sir,” Ruggles replied, blushing crimson.

“Hey, don’t be ashamed of it,” Butts laughed. “My kid is dyin’ to have a garage band. The only problem is we got no garage.”

“Yes, sir—I understand, sir.”

“You guys ever practice in a garage?”

“It was more of a—a warehouse, I think you’d say.”

Butts scratched his chin. “No kiddin’. Maybe I should tell my kid to find a warehouse in Jersey.”

Ruggles coughed and looked around as if he was going to say something else, then backed out of the room, still clutching the folder in his sweaty hand. “Sorry for the interruption,” he said. “Carry on.”

When he had gone, Butts looked at Lee and rolled his eyes. Seeing him, Krieger frowned. “What? Am I missing something?” she demanded.

Butts burst out laughing. “You’re missin’ just about everything.”

She turned to Lee. “What’s so funny?”

He was saved from having to respond by the entrance of Chuck, who looked frazzled and furious.

“What’s the matter?” Lee said.

Chuck slammed a newspaper down onto the desk. “Christ,” he muttered, “I don’t know where this came from, but when I find out, there’s going to be hell to pay!”

Lee looked at the front-page story. The headline was splashed across the page:

Van Cortlandt Vampire Strikes—Girl Drained of Blood, Left in Park

He looked at Chuck, whose normally pale skin was reddening by the second.

“Someone leaked the case details.”

“Crap,” said Butts, reading the headline. “Who the hell would do that?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” Chuck answered, with a glance at Elena Krieger.

She snorted in disgust. “You don’t seriously think I would do anything like that?”

“Right now I don’t have any suspects,” Chuck replied steadily, “but when I find out who leaked this, heads are going to roll.”

“Well, don’t look at me,” she snapped.

Lee looked around the room. There were very few people outside the four of them in this office who knew the details of the case—that is, until now.

“As long as I’m a suspect, may I ask why this is such a disaster?” said Krieger. “My specialty is linguistics, so I need to learn more about investigation technique.”

“First of all, we don’t want to create a panic,” Chuck said, pouring himself a cup of coffee. “Things have been bad enough in the past year.”

There was no need to spell it out; they all knew what he meant.

“And we don’t wanna encourage copycats,” Butts remarked. “Some bozo who’s killed his girlfriend after a domestic dispute might get the bright idea to drain all her blood, throwin’ us a red herring to take the heat off himself.”

“And we’re trying to avoid false confessions, as well as make it easier to trap the real killer if we’re lucky enough to pull him in for questioning,” Lee pointed out.

“Right,” said Butts, heading back to the coffee maker. “If every Joe Schmoe out there knows the details of the case, we got nothin’ the public hasn’t got.”

“Control of information—what to tell the press and when—is a vital part of any investigation,” Chuck concluded. “Does that answer your question, Detective?”

“Yes, it does,” Krieger replied stiffly.

“Look,” Chuck said wearily, “I don’t know how the press got hold of this information. But once they did, it was a sure bet they were going to run with it.”

“Anything for a story, right?” Butts sighed.

Lee had a growing misgiving as to who might have leaked the story, but without proof, he couldn’t know for sure. And if he did manage to confirm his suspicion, what then? It was a devil’s bargain either way.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Let’s meet at Poe Rock,” Kathy suggested.

Lee had just returned from Chuck’s office and was settling down in his favorite armchair when she called him from downtown, where she had been working all week to help identify the remains of victims of the World Trade Center bombings.

“Any particular reason?” he asked.

“It’s romantic.”

“We could just meet at Edgar’s.”

Edgar’s was a café on West Eighty-fourth Street—which the city had officially named Edgar Allan Poe Street—at the site of his farm when he lived on the Upper West Side. Poe Rock was a massive hump of rock in Riverside Park, just to the south of Poe Street. Though its official name was Mount Tom, New Yorkers knew it as Poe Rock, because the writer had described perching upon the huge slab of bedrock to await inspiration. Of course, there was no park in those days, but Lee always imagined the countryside had its own rural charm, less orchestrated than under the hand of Frederick Law Olmsted, New York’s great landscape architect.

“Let’s meet on the rock,” she said. “Seven o’clock—don’t be late. We can watch the sunset. We’ll go to Edgar’s afterward.”

“Okay.”

He hung up the phone and leaned back in the red leather armchair with the well-worn armrests, the leather faded to a yellowed shade of russet from years of use. He supposed he should get rid of it, but he couldn’t bear to throw it out. Laura had loved this chair, and when she came over, liked to sit curled up in it, an old blanket tucked around her, balancing a cup of tea on her knee. He sometimes wondered if his initial attraction to Kathy was because she reminded him of his sister—they shared the same dark, curly hair, the same firm, pointed chin. But the more he came to know Kathy, the more he came to value her for her own sake.

She was full of curious romantic notions, but that was one of the things he liked about her—the unexpected, wacky ideas, like meeting on Poe Rock. It kept him just a little off balance. With Susan Beaumont, he was off balance most of the time—as well as on guard. If Susan did something apparently impulsive, it was for a calculated effect; any appearance of spontaneity was actually the result of careful planning. But Kathy was just the opposite. She had a free, untamed side that was refreshing and invigorating. And when they first met, a bit of invigoration was just what he needed.

And so at precisely seven o’clock he climbed up the mound of glittering schist and granite to stand next to Kathy, who awaited him with a bottle of champagne and two glasses. The air was mild, but the wind came in gusts, blowing Kathy’s black curls around her head as she bent to pour them champagne.

“What’s this in honor of?” Lee asked.

“Nothing. It’s a celebration of absolutely nothing,” she proclaimed, handing him a glass of the sparkling liquid. The bubbles danced and popped as he held it up to the fading light.

“I know—plastic isn’t too elegant, but glass is too risky. I couldn’t take the chance of breaking one out here,” Kathy said, filling her own goblet.

“I agree,” he said. “People come out here with their dogs and children all the time. Bringing glass would be irresponsible.”

She offered him cheese and crackers, and they perched on the hard, smooth stone, still warm from the afternoon sun, contemplating the mighty Hudson flowing beneath them, deep and straight and true.

On the path below, a small boy scooted along the sidewalk on his Razor, hell-bent for leather, his round face scrunched and intense. A dirty little terrier raced after him, barking maniacally and nipping at the wheels.

“You know, Edgar Allan Poe is very steampunk,” Kathy said, her mouth full of cheese and crackers. She sprayed a fine mist of crumbs as she spoke.

“Really?”

“Sure. Look at ‘The Pit and The Pendulum.’ A man is trapped in a dungeon by the Inquisition, with an infernal machine dangling over him, about to cut him to ribbons. It’s deliciously gothic, isn’t it? Scary and kind of perversely sexy.”

“Where does the punk element come in?”

“Well, you’ve got the mad scientist run amok. And the Inquisitors believe their captive is a renegade. Actually, the Inquisition itself was a renegade movement. I mean, in most cultures you don’t strap a guy to a table and suspend a swinging blade over him.”

Lee shuddered. That story had always given him the willies, more than any other Poe story. What a horrifying premise—being trapped with nothing to do except await your inevitable own demise. Poe’s tortured imagination must have wound down a dark road to come up with that one.

He looked at the softly fading sun in the park, lacy fingers of light stretching across grass that was only now beginning to brown. Kathy snuggled against him and ran the tips of her fingers lightly over the back of his hand, and once again he felt the primal pull of her body. They were still in that phase of their love affair where attraction is like rainwater, clear and fierce and all-encompassing. Sometimes his desire to touch her was so strong that he had to restrain himself in public. At times like this he was given to musing what a thin membrane separated him from his quarry. Somehow, this man’s desires had molded him into someone who took comfort from other people’s trials and sufferings.

“So how is it going?” Kathy said. “The investigation, I mean.”

He considered not telling her about the press leak, then decided it couldn’t do any harm; she might even have some ideas about it.

“Wow,” she said when he finished. “Do you think it was Krieger?”

“I don’t see what she would have to gain from it.”

“Especially if she’s as ambitious as everyone says she is. Who else knew about it?”

“Well, the people in the toxicology lab, and the pathologist who did the
PM
.” He thought about the elegant Ivana Jankovic and her staff of mole people. He couldn’t imagine any of them leaking information to the press. And then the thought in the back of his mind sprang to the foreground.

Kathy must have noticed the look on his face, because she nudged his arm. “What is it? Do you know who did it?”

“No,” he said, “but I have a very good suspect.”

He wished he had never had the thought. And he would have to think very hard about telling his old friend Chuck Morton that the leak might have come from his own wife.

Behind them, on Edgar Allan Poe Street, a garbage truck ground to a halt, its brakes howling like a pack of lost and lonely wolves.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Davey smelled the girl before he saw her. He sensed her presence. A woman like her trailed a bouquet of innocence, of longing and desire, sexuality and virginity, all tumbling into a heady fragrance he found irresistible. He followed her like a bird dog, tracking her scent in the air. Stepping carefully so as to not soil his new Nikes, he came around the other side of the bushes in Van Cortlandt Park, sniffing the breeze—and there she was. A slim little thing, she was power walking, her blond ponytail swinging, with that little derriere of hers poking out with every step—one,
two
, one
two
, in a foxtrot of allure. But it was the red sweatpants that sealed the deal. Red was his color. It had to be an omen.

He calculated how fast he could catch up to her without having to sprint. Plenty of runners were zipping past her. It was a sunny Saturday morning, and the park was full of people. He stepped out onto the path and jogged slowly. There was no hurry. He could stay behind her for a while if he ran slowly enough, not attracting any attention, and then ...

After about a quarter of a mile he increased his speed and sprinted past her, only to fall almost in front of her, clutching his ankle. She nearly fell on top of him, and had to jump to the side to miss tripping over him.

He rolled onto his side, holding his leg and groaning. “Oh—o-o-o-h!”

She bent down over him, sweat dripping from her forehead onto his. He managed to catch a droplet with his tongue. It tasted salty and sweet.

“Are you okay?” Her face was crinkled in concern. His stomach went hollow at the sight: she was
worried
about him. A pretty woman was worried—about
him.

He heard his mother’s voice in his head.
“Davey? Davey! Don’t make so much noise—your sister is sleeping. Davey! Try not to step so loudly on the stairs—you’ll wake up your sister.”

He shook himself back to the present. He gazed up at the girl, his eyes full of pain and gratitude. “It’s my ankle—sometimes it gives out on me. It’s an old injury—from the Gulf War,” he added. He felt a tingle of excitement in his bowels at this last bit of improvised lying. What woman could resist a wounded soldier?

“You want some help?” she asked, her eyes wide and blue as cornflowers.

“I-if you could just help me to that bench,” he said.

“Sure,” she said, offering her hand. Her skin smelled like oranges, and her hand was soft as the kiss of a flower petal.

“I’m Davey,” he said, giving her his trademark lopsided smile.

“I’m Liza,” she said.

“Nice to meet you, Liza.”

He had her—or he would have her soon enough. The rest was child’s play.