Silent Stalker Read online

  Highest Praise for C. E. Lawrence

  “C. E. Lawrence is a multitalented New Yorker—writer,

  performer, poet, composer, and prize-winning

  playwright. . . first class, high-quality.”

  —Lee Child (in his introduction to the

  anthology Vengeance)

  Silent Kills

  “A dark and atmospheric thriller that takes an

  unflinching look at the primal urges—and disturbing

  fears—we all share. Sharp, distinct detail and

  an unnerving plot.”

  —Steven James

  “A startlingly suspenseful novel—an unforgettable

  and deep portrait of the mind of a killer. Don’t

  miss this extraordinary page-turner—Lawrence is

  a first rate storyteller.”

  —Cody McFadyen

  “A sophisticated thriller with robust, fascinating

  characters. . . an intense psychological ride . . .

  a great story.”

  —J.T. Ellison

  “C. E. Lawrence has an incredible gift for setting and

  description. Her three-dimensional characters leave

  you turning pages long after you should have gone to

  bed and just maybe you’ll sleep with the lights on.”

  —Books, Looks, and Takes

  “Rousing, tense, scary, exciting. . . a must-read.”

  —Tracy Reader Dad Book Reviews

  Silent Victim

  “C. E. Lawrence’s writing is so compulsively

  readable, you won’t just tear through the pages,

  you’ll scream through them.”

  —Chris Grabenstein

  “Lawrence pushes plot and character boundaries to

  put an entirely new twist on the whole concept of the

  serial killer. . . . Lawrence provides surprises and

  bumps in the night and day, even while assembling a

  cast of characters who are by turns odd, quirky and

  memorable. I simply cannot wait for her next book. . . .

  Lawrence’s ability to create flawed and memorable

  characters and to take a familiar plot in unexpected

  directions has me hooked.”

  —Bookreporter.com

  “This vivid, chilling serial killer thriller will have

  readers jumping at every sound. Although serial

  killer thrillers glut the market, C. E. Lawrence’s

  flawed champion makes for a strong tale.”

  —Harriet Klausner

  “Silent Victim is a very good, complex, thriller . . .

  and a very interesting look into the mind of an

  insane person.”

  —Tracy Reader Dad Book Reviews

  Silent Screams

  “Criminally compelling, Silent Screams nails you to

  your seat with a fascinating NYPD profiler who’s

  hurled into the case of his lifetime. This journey

  into violence and the soul is unforgettable.”

  —Gayle Lynds

  “Pulse-racing, compelling, first rate. Lawrence knows

  how to build and hold suspense with the best of

  them. . . a wild ride down a dark road.”

  —John Lutz

  “C. E. Lawrence has achieved a rare level of

  authenticity, not only in character development but

  also in the realistic use of behavioral science. If you

  want to read a serial-killer thriller that’s solidly based

  on frightening reality, this is the one.”

  —Louis B. Schlesinger, PhD, Professor of Forensic

  Psychology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

  “C. E. Lawrence delivers finely honed suspense,

  with unique twists, and accurately captures the

  logic and intuition of a profiler under pressure.”

  —Katherine Ramsland

  “Silent Screams is a wickedly brilliant, carefully wrought

  thriller where the roles of hunter and hunted are

  skillfully blurred . . . an escalating torrent of

  murder you won’t soon forget.”

  —Gregg McCrary

  “Silent Screams beckons C. E. Lawrence to become a

  repeat offender in the thriller genre.”

  —Marina Staji, PhD, DABFT, President of American

  Board of Forensic Toxicology

  “A dark, intriguing thriller. . . Lawrence assembles

  a quirky group of detectives and experts, all strong

  characters who can support future books in the series.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  ALSO BY C. E. LAWRENCE*

  Silent Screams

  Silent Victim

  Silent Kills

  Silent Slaughter

  *featuring NYPD profiler Lee Campbell

  SILENT STALKER

  C.E. LAWRENCE

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Highest Praise for C. E. Lawrence

  ALSO BY C. E. LAWRENCE*

  Title Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Teaser chapter

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  For Kegan and Kylie

  Two of the coolest kids I know

  CHAPTER ONE

  The girl was too pretty not to know it. She was, Carver thought, the kind of girl whose whole life was defined by her prettiness. It trailed after her like the tail of a comet. She smelled faintly of strawberry blossoms, delicate, pink and white, like her skin. Her laugh, too, lingered in the room afterwards, soft and lovely, like the gentle tinkling of bells. It didn’t seem fair that someone like her had been endowed with so much—but then, Carver knew life wasn’t fair.

  He was about to even the score. He knew where she went, when she went there, and who she went with. Most important, he knew when she would be alone. Carver was patient—oh, so patient. It was one of his most useful virtues.

  Crouched in the darkened hallway of the tenement building, Carver glanced at his wristwatch. Eleven-twenty-five. She would arrive any minute. Rehearsal ended at eleven, and she would have stopped by the deli to pick up something on the way home—a salad, yogurt, or something equally healthy. Like all actresses, she was vain, always watching her figure.

  Carver shifted his weight from one leg to the other, ignoring the Rice Krispies crackle in his knees. He bent over and stretched his back, touching his toes. He took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, using his training to control his body’s autonomic responses. He was more nervous than he had expected. Not scared exactly—more like excited, like on Christmas morning.

  The bare fluorescent bulb hanging from the ceiling blinked and quivered, casting its sickly yellow glow over the dilapidated foyer, with its thick layers of peeling paint and drafty doorways. Carver smiled. These Hell’s Kitchen tenements were filled with struggling actors who streamed into New York from their mundane lives in the hinterlands, hoping some of the city’s glamour and glitz would rub off on them. Most of them gave up after a few years of drudgery waiting tables or stints as tour guides, trudgi
ng through Midtown followed by packs of Swedish tourists. Still others became high-end prostitutes, living off the generosity of Japanese businessmen looking for a night of fun.

  The aroma of frying onions and garlic floated down from the third-story landing. Someone upstairs was making dinner—maybe the old biddy he had followed into the building, after fumbling in his pocket for imaginary keys. He had helped her with her grocery cart, and the look she gave him was so grateful. It was pathetic that a woman like her should have to lug a heavy cart up flights of rickety stairs. It was disgusting what people were willing to put up with in this town. Assailed by a fresh wave of cooking smells, Carver’s stomach rumbled in response. He tensed his already taut muscles in an attempt to squelch the sound. He would not allow anything to betray him, much less his own body. His command over his own flesh was unflinching and rigid. He loathed self-indulgence of any kind, and regarded daily bodily needs as a hindrance to his own darker agenda.

  He heard the metallic clunk of the dead bolt on the front door. She’s here. Carver held his breath and waited for the sound of the door to close behind her. When she was inside the tiny foyer, he stepped from the shadows into the light, a broad grin on his face.

  Her brief smile of recognition was replaced almost instantly by the expression he had fantasized about for so long: pure animal terror. It flooded his body like a drug, filling him with a delicious tingling sensation. He was upon her before she had a chance to cry out.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The sound of the ringing phone blended with Lee Campbell’s dream. It took him a moment to realize the harsh bleating came not from the woman in his dream, but from the parallel world of reality. He shook off the fog of sleep, dragging his unwilling brain back into consciousness. Flinging off the thick winter quilt, he grabbed for the phone, knocking the headset onto the floor, where it landed with a clatter.

  “Damn! ” he muttered, swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Dropping to his knees, he groped under the bedside table for the receiver. Sitting on the hardwood floor, he put the headset to his ear.

  “What is it?” he grunted as he craned his neck to see the clock on the nightstand. It was 5:20 AM. “Christ,” he muttered. “This better be worth it.”

  “I guess it depends on whether you call the murder of a young woman worth it or not.” The voice on the other end of the line sounded as irritated as he was. Even at this hour, there was no mistaking the borough-accented growl of Detective Leonard Butts.

  “Hello, Butts,” he said.

  “Well, Doc? Is it worth it, or are you goin’ back to bed?”

  “Tell me where to meet you.”

  “Forty-seventh and Ninth Avenue.”

  “That’s not your precinct.”

  “I’ll explain later.”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Make it ten.”

  He sighed and hung up the phone. The image from his dream swirled in his head. His sister Laura stood before him in a long white nightgown, arms outstretched, her eyes pleading. It had been over six years since her disappearance, but he was still plagued with the same repetitive dream. The location varied, but she was always there, her sad eyes burrowing into his soul, begging him to rescue her.

  He shook off the mood of depression threatening to settle over him, pulled on a flannel shirt and jeans, and grabbed his coat. A sharp gust of February wind hit him as he descended the steps of his building, and he pulled up his coat collar, cursing himself for neglecting to put on a hat. There were no cabs on East Seventh Street, so he loped west toward Third Avenue, where the Cooper Union Building loomed stolid and silent in the thin predawn light. Taxis were thick on the avenue, on the cusp of a shift change, and soon he was in the backseat of a yellow cab barreling uptown.

  Famously known as the city that never sleeps, there were about three hours out of twenty-four when New York managed a brief catnap. In the middle of the night, just before street vendors began wheeling their carts up the avenues of Midtown, and the Chinatown bakeries flicked on their lights in the predawn gloom, there was a stillness about New York that Lee savored. Looking out the cab window now, he saw that aura of calm dissipating as the city stretched itself, awakening from its brief slumber to prepare for another workday.

  The cab lurched to a stop at the corner of Ninth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street. Lee paid the driver and unfolded his long body from the vehicle, blowing on his hands to keep out the early morning chill as he hurried toward the building with the bright yellow crime scene tape wrapped around the front door.

  The redbrick tenement huddled next to its nearly identical neighbors in the cold winter dawn. A few scraps of dirty snow still clung to the pavement, and a couple of fat pigeons strutted nearby, pecking at a heap of bread crusts scattered on the sidewalk. An old-fashioned sign hanging in front of the bay window on the building’s eastern half contained a single word: LAUNDRY.

  Lee nodded to the uniformed officer guarding the front door, flashing his credentials. The young cop nodded back and lifted the yellow crime scene tape so he could pass underneath it. As the only full-time criminal profiler employed by the NYPD, Lee was becoming known to some of the rank and file, though not all of them approved of him. There was still prejudice in the force against methods that did not involve traditional forensics, lab results, or hard evidence.

  Detective Leonard Butts was a recent convert. After a couple of cases together, Lee had won the chubby detective’s admiration, and the two had developed a close working relationship. He found Butts at the rear of the front hallway, kneeling over the body of a young woman. Detective Butts wasn’t a good-looking man at any time of day, and the bare fluorescent bulb hanging overhead did him no favors. His pitted complexion looked sallow under its unhealthy glow, his small eyes puffy and bloodshot. He wore a gray raincoat that had seen better days, and his thinning sandy hair stood up in wisps.

  A handful of crime scene techs in blue jumpsuits were dusting for prints and examining the cramped foyer for trace evidence. The door to the apartment at the far end of the hall was open a crack, and the lined face of an aged Asian woman peered through the slit. When she saw Lee, she closed the door abruptly, and he heard the sound of a dead bolt sliding into place. The smell of pork fat and rice vinegar drifted from the apartment into the hallway.

  “The victim is Mindy Lewis,” Butts said, handing Lee a pair of latex gloves. “Struggling actress, lives upstairs, waits tables at a local restaurant.”

  Lee slipped on the gloves and looked down at Mindy. She was young, uncommonly pretty, with curly black hair, wearing a red wool coat over leggings. She lay in a congealed pool of blood, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling with an expression of astonishment. A leather knapsack lay beside her, and next to her gloved right hand was a set of keys.

  “Well?” said Butts. “Whaddya think?”

  “Blitz attack,” Lee said. “He must have been waiting for her. Any defensive wounds?”

  “Nope. I’m thinkin’ either she knew him and let him inside or he was already waiting for her, like you said. And robbery was not a motive.”

  Lee glanced at the backpack, which was securely fastened. “Right. This was no mugging.”

  “There’s more.” Butts motioned to one of the crime scene techs, a handsome young African American with wire-rimmed spectacles who appeared to be in charge. “Okorie, can I see that mask for a moment?”

  Okorie nodded and produced a plastic evidence bag containing a white theatrical mask. It was one of the standard Greek tragedy/comedy masks Lee had seen a hundred times—oddly, it was the laughing comedy mask. A shiver slid up Lee’s neck as he gazed at the empty eye sockets and grinning mouth.

  “It was on her face,” Butts said. “So you see why I called you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ever seen anything like this?”

  “Not exactly, no. Do you have COD yet?” he asked Okorie.

  “A single stab wound to the solar plexus,” he replied. “She woul
d have bled out within minutes.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s any trace of the murder weapon?” Lee said.

  “No, but it went clean through her, and was quite slender, so my best guess is a sword of some kind. We’ll know more after the autopsy.”

  “How long has she been dead?”

  “Five to six hours, judging by the amount of rigor.”

  Butts ran a hand through his meager hair. “The Chinese couple in 1-A say she often comes home late from rehearsal. ”

  Lee looked at the mask, then back down at poor Mindy. “Looks like her killer has a connection to the theatre as well.”

  “A groupie, maybe? A lovesick fan?”

  “That’s a possibility.”

  Butts stretched himself and looked at the head crime scene tech. “You gonna be a while yet, Okorie?”

  “A few more minutes, yeah,” the young man replied as he dusted the stair banister for prints.

  “I need some air,” said Butts. “Let’s step outside.”

  They pushed open the greasy front door with its decades-old layers of paint. Outside, a pale dawn was doing battle with a thick cloud cover that had settled over the West Side. The result was an eerie greenish light that seemed to have no source, as though the air had been sprinkled with phosphorus.

  “So why did you get this case?” Lee said as they descended the steps to the street.

  Butts spit on the sidewalk. Startled, a pair of pigeons took flight, flapping up to settle on a second-story window sill.