Silent Victim (30 page)

The house was dark and quiet when Charlotte pushed open the front door and crept into the foyer. The rain had stopped, but she could hear the slow, steady drip of water from the eaves, residue of the evening’s downpour. She removed her cloak and hung it from the bentwood coatrack in the hall, then unlaced her soft leather ankle boots, which were wet and muddy. Martin hated finding stains on the lush Oriental carpets. It wasn’t a long walk from the bus stop, but in the dark she couldn’t avoid the puddles lying in wait for her among the cracks in the sidewalks. She propped her boots on the bottom of the rack and tiptoed along the side of the long maroon runner rug leading from the foyer through the front hall. She shivered a little as she dug her bare toes into the deep, plush wool—it felt so good after sitting on the bus for two hours in damp clothes.

She tiptoed up the stairs and toward her room at the end of the long, narrow hall, silent as a cat, sliding her feet along the carpet to avoid tripping in the dark. She crept along the edge of the carpet, avoiding the center, where she knew the floorboards creaked underfoot. This was not the first time she had snuck home at night, hoping to avoid waking her brother. She had to pass his room in order to get to hers, so it was important to be extra quiet.

As she tiptoed down the hallway, she ran her hand along the wall for balance, tracing the familiar pattern of the textured wallpaper with her fingers. As she approached her brother’s bedroom, her fingers touched something wet and sticky. It was too dark to see what it was; it felt like someone had spilled pudding on the wall. She made a mental note to wipe it off in the morning—Martin had no doubt spilled it himself, but would hold her responsible and expect her to clean it up.

The house was eerily silent, she thought as she passed her brother’s room. She noticed the door was ajar, which struck her as odd. A shaft of moonlight sliced through the crack in the door, the long, pale blade of light falling across her path. Normally Martin kept it closed at night—maybe he had left it open because she was working late at the hospital. That is what she planned to tell him to explain why she was out so late tonight. With the practice of one used to deceiving, she had her story ready: one of her patients had gone into labor. It was a difficult birth, and she had stayed at the woman’s side half the night. Of course, he could easily check up on her—he had done so before—so she would have to coach her colleagues to cover for her. But that shouldn’t prove too difficult; they had done it in the past. Most of the women she worked with thought Martin was a tyrant and a cad, and couldn’t understand why she let her brother boss her around so much.

But they didn’t understand—no one did, really. He had a power over her she could not explain, deeper than blood, shared history, or even sex. There was something preternatural about it, a bond that she had tried hard to break, but never with success. He was her Mesmer, her Rasputin, her Houdini.

When she reached her bedroom she slipped inside and closed the door quietly behind her. She lit an oil lamp—Martin made concessions to the modern world, but electricity was not one of them—and went to her dressing table. Sitting in front of the graceful beveled mirror, she leaned over and felt underneath the table for what she knew was hiding there. Her fingers closed on the familiar object; carefully she withdrew the ornately carved wooden box, placing it in front of her. Her hands trembled a little as she opened it and took out the amber-colored bottle. She shook it gently to disperse the reddish-brown liquid inside, then used the attached eyedropper to measure out a small amount, which she placed on her tongue. The droplets sparkled like gold in the warm light of the gas lamp. One, two, three drops—her body began to relax the moment she tasted the familiar bitterness. She felt the liquid slide down the back of her throat and let her head fall back. A thin sigh of pleasure escaped her lean body.

She studied the label on the bottle for a moment before putting it away. The handmade lettering was old fashioned and carefully wrought; she was proud of her work. Too bad she could not share it with Martin. Her job at the hospital gave her access to the raw materials; the rest of the work was hers. After a few hours of pouring through herbalist texts and chemists’ textbooks for measurements and formulas, the rest was not hard.

She put the bottle back in its hiding place and opened a window—the room suddenly felt unbearably stuffy—then lay down on her four-poster canopy bed. The laudanum went to work quickly—the alcohol in the homemade tincture made certain of that. Her head began to fill with a pleasant cotton-wool sensation, and she stared up at the ceiling, studying the water stain that always reminded her of a unicorn…. Her mind relaxed more and more as she slid further from consciousness, wrapped in the welcoming arms of a drug-induced sleep. She floated through opium-flavored dreams in which she danced in a grand ballroom with that handsome Dr. Campbell while her brother watched from the sidelines, his face purple with fury.

She jerked into consciousness abruptly, her skin tingling, shivering from the cool evening air. She wasn’t sure what had awakened her—was it an unfamiliar sound or smell, or the curtains billowing out in the sudden gust of wind blowing in through the open window? Whatever it was, she was certain something had changed in the atmosphere of the room—something was different.

She sat up, her head swimming in a blur of opium. The drug dragged at her body as she rose from the bed; the air itself seemed encased in a blue haze. She was not frightened or even startled when the door to her bedroom opened and the tall, slim figure in white entered the room. In her drug-induced fog, she was unable to make out the face, even though she squinted hard at it. She realized all at once that it was a spirit. So her brother’s prophecies had come to pass, and she was at long last able to communicate with the dead! She had long chided herself for being unable to sense, as he did, that they were both the embodiment of long-departed souls. He alone seemed to have access to the “world beyond the veil,” as he called it. But now, she thought joyfully, the veil was at last lifting for her! She too would know the mysteries that, until now, she had sensed only vaguely.

She approached the shape lurking deep in the shadows of her room, her arms outstretched as if to embrace it. The figure shrank back, and she was afraid it would leave. She tried to speak to it, to call it back, but the laudanum had thickened her tongue, and her attempt at speech came out as a guttural grunt.

The sound of her voice seemed to startle the spirit, and he—she could see clearly now it was a man—gave a little gasp.

She tried to tell him not to be afraid, but it came out as, “Doan bay fried.”

Now he was standing less than a yard away, and she reached out a hand to him. To her surprise, the spirit grabbed her wrist, and she was startled to find that, for a ghost, his grip was very firm indeed, the fingers quite strong. His skin was surprisingly warm. She wasn’t sure what she expected, but not this.

She tried to wrest her hand free, but, with one quick pull, her visitor drew her body close to his, wrapping his long arms around her. She had an impulse to surrender, to swoon in the firmness of his embrace, but another, more primal impulse took over, and she resisted, trying to wrench free. But the laudanum had turned her muscles to rubber, and her effort was pathetically ineffective. It was like struggling in a hangman’s noose—any attempt to free herself only served to tighten his grip.

She fought against the effect of the drug, but it was no use. Her head was hopelessly fuzzy, and she only vaguely felt the sharp prick in her arm. She twisted around to see what had caused it, and was surprised to see her captor holding a syringe in his free hand. She tried to figure out what possible use a ghost could have with a syringe, but her sight was already beginning to dim as he lifted her up and carried her from the room.

As soon as Charlotte left, Lee could feel the cloud of depression, which he had been staving off by sheer willpower, begin to descend. It blanketed him from above, but also blossomed within, like an evil vine whose tendrils crept into his brain, his heart, his soul. He looked out the window. A steady rain was falling over the city, sending its soothing sound into the nooks and crannies of the jumbled hodgepodge of low buildings that is the East Village. Normally, Lee would have found it calming, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Kathy.

Thinking about Kathy led to thoughts about his sister, which led to thoughts about the three thousand souls whose bodies had been reduced to rubble, ashes, and bone fragments on the southern tip of the island he called home. The sense of loss compounded upon itself, and he didn’t know whether to feel anger or sadness at the whole terrible waste. He tried to push these thoughts from his weakening brain, but it was like pushing a stone uphill, a Sisyphean task.

There was only one thing that could help right now: strenuous exercise. If he went for a run, it might give him enough endorphins at least for the time being. He went to the bedroom closet, extracted his running shoes from under a bag of laundry, pulled on a pair of sweatpants, and threw on a plastic Windbreaker. In spite of the rain, he headed down the steps, determined to run until he was worn out.

He ran west, through the darkened streets of the West Village, to the embankment along the Hudson. The river was stormy, the waves slapping against the wooden piers jutting out into its murky water, as he jogged north along the embankment. He was the only one foolish enough to be out on a night like this, but he liked the solitude, the darkness, and the rain stinging his face, hard as little diamond bullets. The abundance of physical sensations stimulated his brain so much that it couldn’t hold on to the feeling of depression, and he could feel it releasing from his body like water circling a drain.

He ran harder, pounding his feet against the pavement, sending water splashing in all directions—the weeks of rain had created puddles that didn’t have time to drain before the next downpour. As he ran, odd phrases ran through his brain.
Past lives, past lives….
Ahead of him the
Intrepid
loomed, silent and imposing in its permanent mooring, its great gray bulkhead dark against the night sky. The aircraft carrier was now a military museum, and drew scores of tourists all year round.
Too bad it couldn’t protect us when terror and death rained down from the sky.

He turned and headed back south, toward the hole in the earth that once was the pair of proud towers anchoring the bottom of the island.
Past lives, past lives….
He felt a visceral sense of the souls who had perished when those towers came crashing down. On nights like this it was almost as though they were there with him, keeping him company as he hurtled through the storm, squinting against the hard little pellets of rain.

Past lives, past lives …
that was all they had now, these people, their lives past, gone in an instant, victims of crazed religious fanatics. He thought about what Kathy had said about her job. The effects of the tragedy were still rippling outward, like a stone thrown in a pond. He wondered where it would all stop. He hadn’t realized until she told him how hard her job was, how emotionally taxing. On the one hand, he felt bad for her, and on the other, he resented her for using it as an excuse to pull away from him.

He thought about Martin Perkins as he ran: Was he a crazed religious fanatic? It was hard to tell. Certainly he was eccentric, but was he dangerous? Lee might not have the answer to that until it was too late. He thought about what Charlotte had revealed to him tonight. It was odd, but in some ways the news didn’t surprise him at all. Martin Perkins was so odd that it would be strange if he didn’t have some behavioral skeletons in his closet. He didn’t envy poor Charlotte. He wasn’t sure if incest between consenting adults was a crime in New Jersey or not, but it certainly was creepy.

He arrived back at his apartment soaking wet, his hand throbbing, the bandages on his arm beginning to peel off in sodden strands—but not depressed. In fact, he felt an almost giddy sense of possibilities. He knew it was just the chemicals firing in his brain, but the relief was so great he felt like crying. Kathy had broken up with him, the killer was still at large, and Krieger was still missing, but somehow the future unfurled itself before him like a flag, rippling through his endorphin-drenched brain.

He looked at the phone machine on the desk, which was blinking, its amber light winking at him like an evil red eye. He peeled off his Windbreaker; crossing the room in four steps, he pressed the button.

The flat, dry voice sent a chill through the entire room.

“I was wondering when you would start tapping this phone line. Fat lot of good it will do you. So let’s keep it short: What about the red dress?”

Lee stood staring at the machine as it whirred into rewind, completely unaware of the steady dripping of his wet clothing onto the expensive Persian carpet his mother had given him.

When he reported the call into the wiretapping switchboard, the answer was predictable: It came from a pay phone somewhere deep in Queens.

“You want us to send a car over?” the bored-sounding woman at the switchboard asked. There was a faint scratching sound in the background, as if she were filing her nails.

“No, thanks—he’ll be long gone,” Lee answered, and hung up.

He threw himself on the couch without removing his sopping clothes and stared at the ceiling, running possibilities through his mind. Finally, disgusted with the whole situation, he got up and took a shower. Afterward, he felt clean but not cleansed; the sound of that voice on his answering machine made him feel soiled. He wandered into the bathroom, broke a Xanax in two, and swallowed half. Then, just to be sure, he gulped down the other half as well.

He lay back down on the couch, a pillow over his head, as a welcome drowsiness settled over his limbs. He surrendered gladly, sinking into a deep slumber. He slipped through a series of dreams, shifting imagery of places and people he knew, until he found himself in a deep pool of water. He was in the middle of a mountain lake, treading water, the bottom far beneath him, the water itself crystalline and clear, the sun sparkling off its surface. He didn’t know how he had gotten there, but decided to swim back to the shore. As he got closer, he saw a woman lying facedown, half in and half out of the water. He swam faster, and when he reached her, he turned her over, and saw that it was Ana Watkins. She was warm, but she didn’t appear to be breathing, so he began giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. As he did, her body began to dissolve in his arms, and he was holding a rotting corpse.

He awoke with a start to the sound of loud knocking. Leaping from the couch, he made his way to the front door, but before he got there, he heard a deep voice.

“It’s me—Diesel!”

He opened the door to find Diesel standing in the hallway, draped in a dark oilcloth poncho, like a great black bird. Next to him stood Detective Butts, looking like a drowned walrus. His wet hair was plastered to his head so that his large ears protruded even more alarmingly; his bulbous nose dripped onto the straw doormat.

Lee stared at the unlikely pair. “What you doing here?”

“You gonna let us in or what?” Butts demanded.

He let them in and gave them towels to dry off. Outside, he could tell it was morning, which meant he had slept through the night, though the day was so dark he had no idea what time it was.

“What time is it?” he asked Butts.

“It’s after ten,” Butts replied, briskly toweling off what was left of his hair.

“So what’s going on?”

In response, Butts handed him his cell phone. The text message read
pls help,
and the call was from Lee’s cell number.

“I called back, but it bounced straight to voice mail,” Butts said. “Then I called your number here and got a busy signal, so I called Diesel. He couldn’t reach you either, so I got in the car and drove over.”

“And picked me up on the way,” Diesel added.

Lee groaned. He had forgotten to call Butts to tell him about giving his cell phone to Charlotte. He quickly explained the situation, then used Butts’s cell to call his own. Again it bounced straight to his voice mail.

“My car’s outside,” Butts said.

“Let’s go.”

“I’m coming with you,” Diesel said. “That’s not—” Butts began, but Diesel interrupted. “I’m coming
with you.”
The detective looked at Lee, who shrugged. “The more the merrier,” Butts said, opening the apartment door.

Within ten minutes they were barreling down Varick Street, and within twenty had cleared the Holland Tunnel. Butts’s car was a massive blue Ford, a rattling old gas guzzler the size of a small boat.

They used Butts’s phone to call the Jersey police in Lambertville, the nearest station to Stockton. A patrol car was dispatched to the Perkins place. Repeated calls to Lee’s cell had gone straight to voice mail—it was possible the battery had run down. He wished he had thought to give Charlotte the phone charger. Numerous calls to Perkins’s office number were picked up by his voice mail recording.

“Nice wheels,” Lee remarked as they swung onto Route 78. He was doing his best to keep his mind off what they might find when they reached Stockton.

“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” Butts muttered, gnawing on a thumbnail. He always seemed to have something in his mouth—cigars, doughnuts, candy. Failing that, his finger would do. “I wanted to get a smaller car, but the wife was attached to old Blue Bertha, so we kept it. Now I’ve gotten kinda attached, you know?”

“Doesn’t it eat up gas?” Diesel asked from the backseat.

“Not as much as you’d think,” Butts said. “It does okay on the highway. The trick is to keep it tuned up and all. One of my sons works for a mechanic, so we get a family rate.”

“Hey,” Lee said suddenly. “Why did both of you show up at my place?” He craned his neck to look at Diesel in the backseat. He was so enormous that even in this roomy old car he looked cramped. “Have you added law enforcement to your other gigs?”

“No—I was on my way to see you when I ran into Detective Butts.”

“What for?”

“I just thought you might need my help.”

This wasn’t the first time Diesel had turned up at an opportune moment—he seemed to have a nose for trouble.

“One thing surprises me,” Butts remarked as they reached the turnoff for Route 202 South. “I wouldn’t think that—uh, Charlotte—would know how to do a text message, y’know?”

“That’s true,” Lee said. “She did tell me she used a cell phone at the hospital where she works. She must have learned how to do it there.”

“What do you think the chances are Krieger’s still alive?” Butts asked as he steered the big car onto the exit ramp.

“Based on how quickly he’s killed the others, not very good,” Lee said grimly.

At that moment Butts’s own cell phone rang. It was the patrol cop calling from the Perkins house to report that he was sitting in his car outside the place, but it all was quiet inside the house. There had been no answer when he knocked on the door, and no sign of life in the house. There was a car parked outside, however, and when he ran a check on the plates it came up as belonging to Martin Perkins.

Lee didn’t know if that was good news or bad, but he asked the officer if he could possibly wait until they arrived to go in, and he said he would try.

Butts didn’t need any help finding the way to Stockton—they’d traveled it enough times by now. As they zigzagged down the winding road that led to the town’s main street, Lee’s stomach twisted with anticipation. He had zoomed down this road so many times on his bike, flying along with the wind rushing in his ears—and now he was driving down it in search of a murderer.

The big car rattled down the modest main street, past Errico’s Market, the gas station and liquor store, and the little clump of restaurants around the Stockton Inn. The rain had stopped, and the street was quiet. A couple of kids were playing Hula-hoop on their front lawn, and a young mother was pushing her baby in a stroller on the way to the grocery store. The sun had come out, and the street was bathed in a golden glow. It looked as though nothing could ever be wrong on such a street on such a summer’s day. The air of normalcy wasn’t convincing. Though he hoped he was wrong, Lee had a bad feeling as they approached the Perkins place.

The police cruiser sat in front of the house. A couple of small boys had stopped by on their bikes to talk to the officer behind the wheel. As soon as he saw Butts pull up, he got out of the car and strode over to greet them. To Lee’s surprise, it was Officer Lars Anderson, the young cop they had met at Ana Watkins’s house.

“Hi there,” he said. “I heard it was you two and volunteered to come on over. You think we have probable cause to go in?”

Lee showed him the text message on Butts’s cell phone and explained that, in all likelihood, it came from Charlotte Perkins.

“That’s good enough for me,” Anderson replied, and led the way up the steps to the front porch. He paused and glanced at Diesel, then back at Butts.

“Undercover,” Butts said in a confidential tone, and the trooper nodded.

A round of knocking also brought no response, so Anderson whipped a towel out of his car’s trunk, wrapped it around his arm, and broke the bottom pane of glass on the door with one deft punch.

“Looks like you’ve done that a few times before,” Butts remarked as he reached around to unlatch the lock from the inside.

“That’s why I keep a towel in the trunk,” Anderson replied. “You never know when it’ll come in handy.”

They followed him into the front hall, which was dark and deserted.

“Anybody home?” Anderson called out, but was met with silence.

They walked through to the living room, where everything looked to be in order. The piano keys gleamed ivory white in the morning sun. There was no sign of life in the first-floor parlor, the kitchen, or the butler’s pantry to the side of the kitchen. On the other side of the kitchen was an office that evidently served as a consulting room as well. It contained a couch and several armchairs, as well as a desk and built-in bookcase.

When they had secured the first floor, they proceeded upstairs. The two small bedrooms in what must have originally been the servants’ wing were clear, but as they approached the master bedroom, they saw the blood. There were crimson fingerprints on the wall, as well as high-velocity splatter in all directions; some blood had even landed on the windowsill on the other side of the corridor. It was clear that someone had been viciously attacked in this hallway. The four of them stopped walking, and Officer Anderson put a finger to his lips. There was no need for silence, though; it was clear from the heavy stillness of the air that the violence had occurred hours ago. A trail of blood led into the master bedroom, apparently ending behind the slightly open door.

Lee’s heart beat wildly as Anderson and Butts drew their revolvers. Butts waved to Anderson to indicate that he should continue down the hall to make sure the far bedroom was clear. The young cop nodded and crept down the hall, holding his gun stiffly in front of him.

Moments later, he emerged from the room and called, “All clear.”

Holding his revolver in both hand, Butts pushed open the door to the master bedroom with his foot.

“Stay here,” he called over his shoulder as he went in. There was no need—Lee had no desire to enter what was obviously a crime scene. Through the open door, he and Diesel could see into the room—and Lee felt a shiver of relief when he saw the dead body on the floor. The sight that greeted them, disturbing as it was, was not Charlotte Perkins. His relief was followed by shame and disgust—shame at having been relieved, and disgust at what lay before them. Though his worst fears had not been realized, the murder scene was not a pretty sight.

Martin Perkins lay on his back, arms and legs akimbo, his head smashed in by what looked to be a series of blows from a heavy blunt object. Though his face was bloody and disfigured, his eyes had not been removed, and there was no sign of a suicide note. There were, however, signs of frenetic rage and overkill. The expensive-looking carpet he was lying on had soaked up a tremendous amount of blood—no doubt the blood loss alone would have been enough to kill him. It was hard to tell how many times he had been hit, but it was clear that the amount of force used was far in excess of what was needed.

Vines, twigs, and leaves had been piled on top of his body, some arranged in such a way that they looked as if they were growing out of his mouth and ears.

“Okay, Doc,” Butts said, looking at Lee. “What’s with all the foliage? What does it mean?”

All at once, Lee realized saw the connection.

“He’s the Green Man,” he said. “His killer is mocking the whole idea of it, by turning Perkins into one after killing him.”

“Oh, yeah,” Butts said, bending down to examine the body. “I think you’re right.”

What Lee wasn’t prepared for was the smell. The odor of blood—so much blood—was unlike anything he had experienced. It seemed to penetrate a part of his brain, causing an aversion, a deep-seated feeling of distress that he thought must be genetic, ancestral. Ancient hominids, coming across this terrible and terrifying smell, must have taken flight immediately, knowing instinctively that death lurked around the corner. But he couldn’t flee, much as he wanted to. He continued to stare at the body until he heard Officer Anderson come up behind him.

“Jesus,” Anderson said softly, and Lee realized this was his first murder scene. He looked at Butts for help, and the burly detective took charge at once. He beckoned them all to stay out of the room; putting his gun back in its holster, he proceeded to investigate the crime scene.

Butts was in his element. Lee watched with admiration as the detective examined the body without touching anything, then managed to move around the room without transferring any of the blood to his shoes or in any other way compromising the evidence.

After a few minutes he joined the rest of them in the hall.

“No sign of the murder weapon,” he said, “though from the shape of the blows I’d say it was somethin’ long and narrow—a cane, or a thick stick of some kind. No sign of defensive wounds—looks like he wasn’t expecting this attack. You got CSIs on duty around here?” he asked Anderson.

“Uh, in Trenton—that’s the nearest city,” the young officer replied, obviously shaken.

“Then I suggest you call it in ASAP,” Butts said. Looking down at Perkins, he shook his head. “Whoever did this wasn’t looking to make a statement,” he said. “He just wanted Perkins dead.”

Looking at the body sprawled on the floor in front of them, Lee had to agree. If ever he had seen a rage-driven homicide, this was it. Whoever had killed Martin Perkins was now spinning dangerously out of control.