Silent Kills Page 17

  He ducked to get through the door leading to the living room, with its French Impressionist still-life paintings and British hunting prints. Fiona Campbell was not one for putting up family photos—even before Laura’s death, Lee hardly ever saw pictures of friends or family scattered around the house. There were a few prints of Kylie stuck to the refrigerator with magnets, but that was about it.

  His mother put on the kettle and carefully arranged a dozen ginger cookies on a blue willow china plate. She liked things just so, and had exquisite taste. No estate sale within a hundred miles was safe from her. Her instinct was remarkable—she would zero in on the best bargains on the best items, and then talk the seller down from that price. She always got what she wanted.

  “Now then, how are you?” she said once they had settled onto the front porch with their tea. “You look thin.”

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “Are you eating?”

  “Yes, Mom, I’m eating.”

  It was a little dance between them, a ritual that had remained unchanged over the years. She would say he was looking thin, and he would respond that he was fine. Out in the yard, Kylie was struggling with the Hula-hoop.

  “Less movement, Kylie!” his mother called to her. “Don’t wiggle your hips so much!”

  His niece rolled her eyes and tossed the Hula-hoop aside, running to play instead on the swing under the broad oak tree.

  “The other night when you called,” he said, “I had the feeling something was on your mind.”

  His mother looked out over the sloping lawn leading down to the springhouse. Watercress grew wild along the stream bank, and Laura had loved to pick it for salads when she was Kylie’s age.

  “I’m a bit worried about Kylie.”

  He translated in his head: She was very worried.

  “Why?”

  “She’s been talking about ... Laura.”

  “Anything in particular?”

  “She’s been asking when she’s coming back.”

  She lowered her voice, even though Kylie had disappeared around the corner of the carriage house, in pursuit of the neighbor’s surly white Persian, Sayeed. Kylie loved cats.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “The truth—that I don’t know,” she said, her voice caught between a whisper and a sob. Lee knew she hated talking about Laura’s disappearance. She would prefer the subject remain closed until the day she returned (a day his mother seemed certain would arrive).

  “Do you want me to talk to her?”

  She grasped his arm, an uncharacteristic gesture. Her fingers were strong, desperate. “Don’t tell her your sister is dead! Can you promise me that?”

  “Look, Mom—” he began. The argument between them was always the same. She thought Laura would return someday, while he was certain she was long dead. He understood her need for hope, but he was tired of her refusal to face what he saw as an obvious truth.

  They were interrupted by the arrival of Stan Palog-gia, Fiona’s next-door neighbor and boyfriend—at least in his own mind. She insisted she was too old to have one, but Lee knew she was just trying to keep him at arm’s length. She had stopped trusting men the day her husband walked out.

  But Stan was safe enough. A short, thickset Italian, he was as unlike the tall, elegant Duncan Campbell as anyone could be. Stan was the son of a butcher and proud of it, and could do anything with his hands. And he was hopelessly in love with Fiona.

  “Hello there!” he bellowed from across the lawn. “Looks like I’m just in time for tea!”

  “You are!” Lee called out, though Stan struck him as more of a coffee drinker.

  Stan bounded across the lawn. With his bandy, bowlegged gait, he moved like a sailor. He hopped onto the porch without recourse to the stone steps and grasped Lee’s hand, enclosing it in both of his. His handshake was as warm and energetic as he was, the palms rough and callused, the hands of a working man.

  “How ya doin’, Lee?” he said, kissing Fiona on the cheek.

  “Fine,” said Lee. “And yourself?”

  “No point in complaining—no one would listen anyway,” he answered cheerfully, helping himself to tea. Stan recycled bons mots like library books. Every once in a while a new cliché made it into his collection of stock phrases, becoming worn and dog-eared over time. Lee had heard this particular one well over a dozen times.

  Stan held up his teacup and winked at Lee. “Got anything stronger?” he asked Fiona.

  She frowned and looked at her watch. “Isn’t it a little early?”

  Stan grinned. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

  She sighed and got up from her cedar Adirondack chair, one of her recent estate-sale prizes. “I’ll see what I can find.”

  Stan winked at Lee again. “She’ll find something, don’t you worry.” He leaned back in his chair and sighed with contentment, locking his hands behind his head. His forearms were furry, thick with dense black hair. Fiona pretended not to hear him. She stalked into the house, banging the screen door behind her.

  When she was gone Stan dropped his pose and leaned forward. “She’s worried about your niece, you know,” he said in a low voice.

  “I know,” Lee answered. “Is she overreacting, do you think?”

  Stan swatted a mosquito trapped in the thick forest of hair on his arm and flicked it onto the stone porch. “Hard to say. Could be, I guess, but that’s not Fiona, is it?”

  “Not really.”

  Stan was right. Fiona Campbell subscribed to the school of Scottish stoicism. If something hurts, ignore it as long as you possibly can, on the chance it might go away. That attitude had helped to land Lee in the mental ward of St. Vincent’s Hospital, but old habits are hard to break, and he was more like his mother than he cared to admit.

  “So you really think your sister’s dead?” Stan asked.

  The bluntness of the question took him off guard. It seemed inappropriately intimate—but then, that was Stan. He didn’t finesse, and he never sidestepped the hard ones.

  “Yes, I do,” said Lee.

  “How come?”

  “The odds against her being alive are—”

  “Forget the odds,” Stan said. “What does your gut tell you?”

  “That she’s dead. And my training—and everything I know about her and about the nature of—”

  “Serial killers?” Stand said. “That’s what you do, right? You study these sickos, the dregs of humanity, and you catch ’em.”

  “That’s one of the things I do. My job entails other—”

  “Yeah, yeah—I know,” Stan interrupted. “You don’t spend every hour of every day doin’ that, just like my dad didn’t spend every minute cuttin’ up meat in his shop—but that’s what people think of when they think of butchers. And that’s what people think of when they think of criminal profilers.”

  “Your point?”

  “My point is that your brain works in a certain direction. You seen these guys in action, and you know how they operate, so you think one of ’em got Laura. It’s only natural for a guy who does what you do, right?”

  “Whether or not it was a serial offender, the chances of her being alive—”

  Stan waved his hairy arms in the air. “What I’m talkin’ about is possibilities. See, that’s what your mom holds on to. The possibility that you could be wrong.”

  “I understand that, but at some point you have to be realistic—”

  “Who says? Is there a rule book about how you’re supposed to handle the disappearance of someone you love? Some kinda etiquette of proper behavior? ’Cause I’m thinkin’ there isn’t, you know?”

  “It’s just that logically—”

  “Yeah, yeah—I know what you’re gonna say. If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras, right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “But you’re losin’ sight of one important fact.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Sometimes you hear hoofbeats, and wh
en you look up, you don’t see horses—you see zebras.”

  From inside the house came the sound of a phone ringing, and shortly afterwards Fiona appeared at the door with the phone in one hand and a beer in the other. She gave Stan the beer and handed the phone to Lee.

  “It’s for you. Some woman with a German accent.”

  Lee took the phone from her, vaguely wondering how Krieger had gotten this number, but his mind was far away. He was thinking about zebras.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  The drive back to the city that afternoon was surprisingly quick, and he didn’t have to look very long for parking. He managed to pull into a spot on Fifty-eighth Street just as a black SUV with Jersey plates was leaving—a real stroke of luck in the city, where you could easily hunt for over an hour before giving up and forking over your life savings to a parking lot.

  As they walked toward the restaurant, Kylie danced in little circles on the sidewalk, chanting, “Jekyll and Hyde, Hydee Hodee Hyde!”

  Lee thought about the phone call from Krieger earlier. His cell didn’t work well in that part of Jersey, but he had no idea how Krieger got Fiona’s number—or how she knew he was there. It was intrusive of her to call him there, but her enthusiasm was touching. She was clearly making an effort to be a team player—though mostly what she did over the phone was complain about working with Butts. A match made in hell, those two, he thought.

  He glanced at his watch. It was almost 6 P.M. Lines started forming on the sidewalk outside by 5:30 P.M. most days, and when the doors opened at six, visitors were ushered in by one of the dozen or so costumed actors employed by the restaurant. Kylie loved talking with them, as did a lot of other kids who came to the place.

  The restaurant’s version of “scary” was jaunty and innocuous, like a horror house ride at Disneyland. The actors who roamed the place in character were mostly young, eager, and good at interacting with the customers.

  They turned the corner onto Sixth Avenue and joined the line already forming on the sidewalk. The front of the club was a garish hodgepodge of architectural styles, including a faux Greek Ionian column, a gigantic Egyptian-looking death mask, topped off by a grinning skeleton head carved in marble. It looked as though it had been designed by a bipolar architect with a severe case of ADD.

  As they stood on the street, Lee checked out the other patrons. There was the usual assortment of tourists with Michelin Guides poking out of oversized handbags. (New Yorkers did not carry handbags—knapsacks, briefcases, shoulder bags, tiny purses, satchels—but never handbags.) Out-of-towners were easy to spot—their haircuts were shorter, their cheeks were like ripe apples, and they wore expressions of innocence and trust on their wide, freckled faces. Their bodies were softer, rounder, lacking the gym-chiseled hardness of many New Yorkers.

  The women wore either no makeup at all or too much, with blue or green eye shadow—colors not seen on New York women since the 1970s. Their hair looked as if it had been done at home or in a mall, not some trendy, pricey studio salon on Fifth Avenue.

  A blond family with four fat, pink-faced children stood huddled together, their pale heads bent over a map of the city. Their faces sang with the goodness and contentment that comes from years of living in the irony-free zone of the American midlands. These were not city people. When they opened their mouths, out shot that Midwestern twang, flat as the miles of cornfields in Iowa.

  “Where do you want to go tomorrow?” the father asked, his voice hovering like light aircraft in a jet stream of optimism and faith in the goodness of his fellow man.

  These were people who clapped on the downbeat.

  Chuck had been one of these people when he arrived at Princeton freshman year from Ohio. With his bright blond hair and blue eyes, he had an aura of innocence, but he had gradually changed. Just moving east had begun the transformation, which had been completed by the time he graduated from the New York Police Academy, on a fast track to become precinct commander before moving to his present position as captain of the Bronx Major Crimes Unit.

  Lee tried not to think about his friend right now, because thinking about him meant thinking about Susan. He turned to his niece.

  “Which floor do you want to be on?”

  There was seating on all four floors of the restaurant, each one with its own gothic theme.

  “The Laboratory!” she cried, hopping up and down. The oldest boy in the blond family looked at her, awe in his blue eyes.

  The heavy gold door to the restaurant swung open, and a tall, cadaverous man in a red satin cape stepped into the street, squinting in the light. He was heavily made up, with dark circles around his kohl-lined eyes and a thin trickle of red that ran from the corner of his mouth.

  “Would you please walk this way?” he intoned in a heavy Transylvanian accent. The children of the Midwestern blond family stared at him, their eyes as big as walnuts.

  They followed behind the vampire into the dimly lit interior of the club, the heavy wooden door closing behind them with a thud. He led them down a darkened corridor, his red satin cape trailing behind him, catching the light from the gaslit wall sconces, casting off a faint scent of hibiscus. The glass-sided elevator was broken, as it had been last time Lee visited the restaurant. The elevator was a great favorite of most children, and Kylie was no exception. Her face crumpled into a pout when she saw the OUT OF ORDER sign, but she brightened when they reached the third-floor dining room, The Laboratory, as it was called. Some people got off at the Grand Salon on the first floor, still others at the Library. When they reached the third floor, only Lee and Kylie and the fat blond family were left.

  “Third Floor, Laboratory,” Count Veracula said, ushering them past the bar into the dining room.

  “What’s on the top floor?” the blond boy asked.

  The vampire put his face close to the boy’s and laughed maniacally. “You don’t want to know!”

  At first the child looked as if he were about to cry, but he mastered his fear and gave a brave little chuckle.

  “It’s the Attic,” the count continued, “where they put bad little boys!”

  “Well, that wouldn’t be you, would it now, Earl?” his father said, laying a protective hand on his son’s shoulder. His hand was plump and soft, with dimpled knuckles. Earl shook his head vigorously, never taking his eyes off the count.

  “That’s gooood to hear,” Count Veracula purred. “Because you don’t want to be put up there—do you?” he said, turning to Kylie.

  “No!” she responded forcefully, crossing her arms and jutting her chin out defiantly. The gesture was so much like Laura that Lee’s stomach went a little hollow.

  Kylie was generally good-natured and high spirited, but she could plunge into a deep fit of pouting if you crossed her. Lee never knew what might set her off. One thing he knew—she was looking forward to escaping Fiona’s rigid dietary laws. Though Kylie’s father was much more lenient, her grandmother objected to anything she considered “junk food”—and her definition of what constituted junk food was pretty strict.

  She believed it could rot a child’s stomach, and insisted on preparing “good, fresh, hearty fare” for her only granddaughter. They rarely ate in restaurants, a function of Fiona’s frugality as much as her views on nutrition. Lee admired his mother’s values as well as her discipline, but wished she was a bit more flexible—in that and in many other things.

  “Well, then, I’ll leave you all to it,” the count said once both groups were seated at the long red banquette along the wall. He leaned over and murmured to the youngest girl in the blond family, “Stay away from the fricassee of squirrel.” And with that, he slid away toward the front of the restaurant.

  The girl looked up at her mother. “Do they really serve squirrel here?”

  “No, Janette, I’m sure they don’t,” she responded, but her tone suggested she wasn’t quite sure.

  “Uncle Lee,” Kylie said, “was my mother killed by cereal?”

  He stared at her, not s
ure he had heard correctly. “What?”

  “Billy Romano at school said she was killed by cereal.”

  He realized what she meant. It would have been funny if it weren’t so tragic: “serial killer” sounded like “cereal killer” to young ears.

  “No, honey—he was using another word, but the truth is that we don’t know who killed her.”

  Her lower lip quivered as she played with her napkin, wrapping it around her wrist. “But she’s dead, right?”

  That was a sticky question. In all likelihood, Laura Campbell was dead, but there was still that tiny speck of hope that she wasn’t, a pinpoint of light in an otherwise dark and dreary tunnel. It was that pinpoint Lee’s mother clung to, as if she would someday get her daughter back if she wished for it hard enough. Lee preferred to turn his back on hope before it could turn its back on him. He had given up early and publicly, certain that Laura was a murder victim, most likely of a serial killer. This was based in part on the fact that everyone who knew her—even casually—had been eliminated as a suspect for one reason or another. That left a stranger as the killer, and since she had no money, rape was the most likely motive, all of which pointed to a serial killer, or at least one in the making.

  However, the complete lack of clues or forensic evidence of any kind left the police dangling at the end of a long, twisted rope. Eventually, the case had gone cold, and the light at the heart of the family flickered dimmer and dimmer as the years went by.

  Lee looked at his niece, who was still a little girl, but beginning to shed the softness of childhood the way a duck sheds its excess feathers in the spring.

  “The truth is that we don’t really know for sure, but I think so, yes.”

  “Then why did Grandmother say she was still alive?”

  Lee rubbed his forehead, which was beginning to throb. Kylie should never have been put in the middle of the disagreement between him and his mother, and yet here she was, asking this heartbreaking question. He glanced at the Midwestern family and saw the oldest boy casting longing looks at Kylie.