Authors: C.E. Lawrence
Silent Kills (26 page)
CHAPTER SIXTY
Davey gazed lovingly at the girl spread out on the bed in front of him. Desire, pity, and elation competed in his overheated brain. His fantasy was nearly complete. With this one he was going to do it right, as he had dreamed of doing it so many times. His laboratory was complete, and his long-imagined perfect union would occur.
He watched as her face flickered into consciousness, her eyelids fluttering and then opening. Her eyes were blue, like Edwina’s—yes, good, good, he thought; so much the better. He needed to re-create the experience as closely as possible. He waited for the dullness to leave her eyes, waited for the effect of the drugs to wear off, waited for her to realize where she was and what was in store for her. The others he had controlled with too much medication, but this time he was going to do it right. He was going to lie next to her and feel her life’s blood pulsing from her body as it flowed into his. He would watch her face as the life drained from it, as he had watched his sister’s face over those many weeks and months.
But he would not do with her the things he did with his sister—he would not do them with any girl, ever again. In his darkest hours he believed that’s why Edwina had to die—because of their sin. They were just children, and hadn’t known any better, but perhaps deep down they realized it was wrong. And yet they couldn’t help themselves. They had only each other, in the big drafty house, their bedrooms next to each other in the long upstairs hallway. Davey recalled tiptoeing to his sister’s room at night, remembered the loud ticking of the grandfather clock at the end of the hall, his father’s snores vibrating the air, sharp as a buzz saw. Excitement stirred in his loins as he looked down at his captive. She had just fainted, but she would be coming round soon, he thought.
He went over to the CD player and pushed the play button again. The song continued where it had been interrupted.
Don’t be afraid, my love—open up your arms
Welcome death’s embrace, and save me with your charms
Salvation will be mine—I stand upon your door
Science will ensure we’ll be together forevermore
She stirred and murmured, trying to focus on her surroundings. He bent down over her and took her face in his hands. There it was, what he was looking for—the look of torment, of suffering, of pain and confusion. It spread slowly at first, until he could see it overtake her. Her eyes flared wide open in terror, and her lips struggled to form words, but she was still too drowsy from the medication to speak.
He straightened up and gazed down at her, trying to savor the feeling. How could she know how incredibly sexy she was at this moment, her features contorted in fear and uncertainty? A thin vein stood out on her left temple, sweat popped from her forehead, and her eyes pleaded with him—pleaded for mercy, for release, for an end to her suffering. But there had been no end for his sister, no mercy, and there would be none for her. If God could not see to be merciful, he would not either.
He checked the equipment to see that all was ready—the tubes, the needles, everything in place. Satisfied, he gave her an injection to subdue her once again. When her eyelids had closed once more, he inserted a needle into her arm, and another into his own. Then he lay down on the bed next to her and waited.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Anthony Palatine stood gazing down at the body of the girl stretched out in front of him. He wasn’t sure what he should do, so he sat down next to her and scratched the back of his neck. He hadn’t had a bath for a week or two, and was feeling itchy. He didn’t like to think what might be living on the benches he slept on in Riverside Park. He reached down and touched the girl’s ankle to try to wake her up, but she didn’t move. He was pretty sure she was dead. She had been lying all pale and still like that for several minutes now. Anthony knew that sometimes the things he saw and the voices he heard weren’t real. After all, as he liked to say, he wasn’t stupid—just crazy. But he had remembered to take his meds today, and he was feeling lucid enough to assess the situation.
He looked across the Hudson at New Jersey, so quiet and calm in the early-morning stillness. It was just before sunrise, and a soft pink light had fallen on the buildings across the river, turning the windows of the office high-rises into rose-colored mirrors, opaque and mysterious as the dawn. He tried to concentrate on what to do next. If he reported it to the police, they might suspect him of killing her. After all, he was mentally ill, he knew, and though he had never been violent, he did suffer from paranoia. When he was on his meds he realized that the voices in his head were the result of his sick brain, but when he stopped taking his pills he couldn’t remember those lucid moments at all.
He forced himself to focus on the problem at hand. What if the girl wasn’t dead—what if she was still alive and needed his help? It could be hours before anyone else discovered her. Not that many people climbed up onto the top of this rock, and you couldn’t see her from the footpaths below, not with her lying down like that. He was regretting climbing up here to watch the sunrise, as he had done so many times before. He was afraid to touch her, but he remembered something he had seen in a movie once.
Rooting through the shopping cart containing his belongings, he dug out his knapsack, his “overnight bag,” as he called it. There, in the front pocket, he found what he was looking for, a small broken shard from a pocket mirror. Carefully extracting it from the knapsack, he knelt beside her, held it up to her mouth and waited. When nothing happened—no clouding of the glass, not even a wisp of air from her slightly open mouth, he slid the mirror back inside the knapsack pocket.
There was no question about it—she was dead. He sighed and started down toward Riverside Drive, pulling his cart along behind him. Up on Poe Rock, a grey squirrel hopped toward the still form stretched out on the cold slab of Manhattan schist. Flicking its luxuriant tail, the squirrel sat up on its hind legs before edging a bit closer, hoping for a handout. Sniffing the air, the animal abruptly turned and darted away. What the squirrel had sensed in the soft summer breeze was the smell of death.
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
As Lee had predicted, it didn’t take long for the other shoe to drop.
He awoke Saturday to messages on both his home answering machine and his cell phone. He went to the kitchen for a glass of water and pressed the play button on his answering machine. The message, when he listened to it, made him wince. It was from Chuck, his voice tight with rage and betrayal.
“We need you to come in ASAP. There’s been another victim. When you get this, call my office and my sergeant will explain.”
He wondered what the details of the new victim were. Of course, there was more to this offender than he had told Dr. Williams. There was undeniably a sexual element to these crimes—with serial offenders, that was virtually a given. But there was more to this one—he was certain of it. The trouble was, he didn’t know how that could help them find this guy. They still had no print matches, no trace, no face.
He stuffed an energy bar in his pocket and headed for the door. His phone rang again, and he let the machine pick up. When he heard Kathy’s voice start to leave a message, he turned back and picked up the phone.
“I’m here.”
“Lee?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I—I’m not sure why I’m calling. I guess I needed to hear your voice. I didn’t think you’d be there.”
“I was just leaving.” He didn’t tell her there was another victim. He didn’t feel like sharing anything with her right now, not even that.
“I just wanted to say ... well, I do care about you, you know.” He noticed she didn’t say “love.”
“Words are cheap, Kathy.”
“What, are you some kind of noir philosopher now?”
“I’m just saying—”
“Sometimes words are all we have.”
“Whatever.” He didn’t feel like arguing. He didn’t feel like picturing her with someone else, doing the things they had done together, whispering the things she had whispered to him. He thought about her face during climax, and how he never wanted to share that image with any other man—ever. He felt the desolation inside him boil into anger, and that frightened him. “Look,” he said, “I have to go. I’ll talk to you later.”
Without waiting for her response, he hung up. He knew he was punishing her, but he didn’t care. Let her suffer the consequences of her own choices—served her right. He felt like punching something—or someone. He went into the bathroom and splashed some water on his face. He needed to cool down before he went out. He didn’t much like what he saw in the mirror over the sink. His blue eyes looked sunken, his cheekbones too sharp. The parallel frown lines between his eyebrows had deepened, and his pallor was pasty. But the thing that frightened him the most was what he saw behind his eyes—pure animal rage. Enough of that, he thought, and you could go out and kill someone.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Travis “Tex” Gilbert was a good ol’ boy who liked to party. He was seldom seen on a Friday or Saturday night without a Lone Star beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. On weekends, you could count on him to show up at Lillian’s Cowgirl Ranch by nine o’clock, and not leave before two.
So when he didn’t show up on either Friday or Saturday night, Lillian Pullman, owner of the Cowgirl, wondered where he had got to. She counted on folks like Travis to keep her business running. After that terrible attack a year ago, nothing had been the same. People just weren’t in the mood to have a good time. She had to let half her staff go, but managed to stay open long enough to see her customers come crawling back. The regulars were the ones who really kept her going—her business as well as her spirits. She lost her next-door neighbor in the attack, a sweet kid who was working that morning as a waitress at Windows on the World.
Lillian liked to do her books first thing every other Sunday, before the place opened up for the late-brunch crowd. She was an early riser—odd for someone who owned a music nightclub, but that’s the way she’d always been, even when she was hitting the country-music scene hard in her college days in Austin. She might be a black woman, but she liked good ol’ boys just fine, and she liked musicians even more.
It was a little after eight o’clock when she arrived at the club. She unlocked the combination lock on the sliding steel gate and the triple dead bolts on the front door, and punched in the security code on the automatic alarm. Stepping inside, she inhaled the smell of stale beer and pretzels, and walked through the club to her small office in the back. A column of sunlight filtered through the dust clinging to the front window. She sighed—it was so hard to keep things clean in this damn city, what with all the traffic and pollution in the street. And the air was even worse since that terrible day—it was the smell of devastation. She shuddered to think what those tiny particles of dust now contained: the sad remnants of people’s lives, reduced to ashes in the conflagration.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust ...
that was what her grandmamma liked to say.
Don’t you be gettin’ too big for your britches, Lillian Lee, y’hear? We’s all goin’ to be dust someday, girl, and don’t you forget it.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust ...
that was what her grandmamma liked to say.
Don’t you be gettin’ too big for your britches, Lillian Lee, y’hear? We’s all goin’ to be dust someday, girl, and don’t you forget it.
Well, Lillian hadn’t forgotten it, but she was ambitious and smart and determined, and she left Texas quick as she could after college. Now she had her own music club in New York City, of all places. She wondered what her grandmamma would think of her now as she walked through the front room, past the popcorn machine in the corner, a few greasy kernels still lining its edges. The stage always looked a little spooky, all silent and vacant, with only a few microphone stands and empty chairs scattered around. There was something desolate about a place like this when all the music had gone. There was a feeling of hushed expectancy, as though the air itself were waiting to welcome back the crowd of merrymakers. The place looked lonely.
Lillian wasn’t musically gifted herself, but she liked providing a place for those who were. She didn’t spend a lot of time envying those whose gifts she didn’t have. She had always been a practical girl who concentrated more on getting things done than how she felt about every little damn thing. And what she had to get done today was some bookkeeping, she thought as she reached to unlock the door to her small but tidy office.
To her surprise, the door was unlocked. She swore under her breath. Someone was going to catch it—probably Jorge Ortiz, the Saturday-night line cook. He could make a mean tamale, and his secret recipe for po-zole was amazing, but he liked to sneak into the office and use the phone to call his girlfriend in San Miguel. Lillian didn’t mind the phone calls that much, but she left strict instructions for the office to be locked up after each shift. If someone broke into the restaurant, the security system would automatically alert the police, and by the time they unlocked the office, the cops would be there already. But with the office unlocked, there was a good chance someone could make off with the night’s take. Lillian used to take her cash around the corner to the bank machine at night, but not since that poor guy was shot on his way to the bank, the one who owned the Second Avenue Deli—Abe something or other. His killer had never even been arrested.
She pushed the door open and took a step into the office. The toe of her sneaker bumped up against the heel of another shoe—a cowboy boot. She looked down, and that was when she realized why the door was unlocked. She also knew that it was the least of her problems.
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