Silent Kills Page 19

  He lifted his own glass. “Better and better—you?”

  She raised hers in response and smiled. “Not bad.”

  “Off duty until tonight?”

  “Yup. The place won’t heat up for hours yet.”

  “I know—that’s why I like to come here early.”

  She smiled again. “I hear you. You’ve seen one bridesmaid party, you’ve seen them all.”

  He took a swig and let the liquid linger on his tongue, savoring the sweetness of rum and tropical fruit juices. It was one of the things that made his work bearable. On the one hand, it felt ridiculous to be sipping Hawaiian cocktails when a family was grieving the loss of a daughter. On the other hand, he couldn’t do their grieving for them; all he could do was help find her killer.

  He looked around the bar. The only people there besides Malaya and himself were a pair of hipsters dressed in black. The shorter one had a reddish crew cut and sported a snappy pair of dark-rimmed glasses with rectangular frames, a typical look for trendy Williamsburg artistes these days. The taller one had legs like a stork, so tightly wrapped in black leather that Lee imagined him peeling off his pants at night like masking tape. They were both drinking Red Stripe, a good Jamaican beer that had recently become popular in the neighborhood. He figured them both for film students or photographers, maybe even painters. They both carried oversized portfolios, expensive-looking leather ones, like the kind painters used to exhibit their work to prospective buyers and gallery owners.

  Laura had loved photography. She didn’t fancy herself as a professional, but Lee thought her pictures were very good. She was even building a darkroom in her basement right before she disappeared. He took a long swallow of Hibiscus Heaven. Why the product of fermented fruit would help tame the hurts of the heart was still a mystery to him, but he had learned to live in the mystery, as Rilke would say.

  There was a sweet, sharp sadness when he thought about Laura. Sometimes it was a twinge of half-forgotten pain, and other times it was as vivid and deep as the day he found out she was missing. He used it to spur him onward in his work. Whenever he felt unable to push forward on a case, he thought about her, and scraped the scab off his psychic wound so that it would bleed and sting and remind him of his mission, the thing he had dedicated his life to.

  His cell phone rang, and he fished it out of his pocket. The caller ID read simply BUTTS. He flipped open the phone.

  “Hi—what’s up?”

  “Heya, Doc, I think we got another one.”

  “Another victim?”

  “Looks that way. We got a body in Midtown that might be connected to our guy. Woman works at a blood bank. Staff volunteer showed up and found her about an hour ago.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  He got the address from Butts, slapped a twenty on the bar, and left. The sudden brightness of the sun blinded him, and he reeled backward, regretting his second cocktail. Giving up all thoughts of the evening he had imagined, spent with Kathy, he loped toward First Avenue, his arm flung skyward in search of a taxi.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  “Her name’s Joselin Rosario, and she was the director of the blood bank,” Butts said. “The scene’s already been photographed and processed for evidence. The only remaining task is to remove the body,” he added with a glance at a couple of crime scene techs from the ME’s office standing by with a stretcher waiting to take the victim away.

  Lee looked down at her. It was a pathetic sight. Joselin Rosario was an attractive, middle-aged Latina who had obviously taken good care of herself. Her thick black hair was pulled back in a tidy bun, which was curiously intact, as was the rest of her clothing. Her perfectly manicured nails showed no sign of breakage, and there wasn’t a mark on her smooth, café au lait skin. The lack of defensive wounds meant she either knew her killer or was taken off guard by a blitzkrieg attack. Either way, there was no time to fight back—which meant less chance of finding forensic evidence on her body. She lay on her back on one of the plastic-coated lounge chairs used for blood donation, the needle still in her arm. Her dark complexion notwithstanding, her pallor was unusually pale. However, the bag in which her blood had been collected was gone.

  “Looks like she made a donation herself—but not a voluntary one,” Butts remarked grimly.

  The sound of muffled weeping came from the next room.

  “That’s the lady who found her,” Butts said with a quick nod in her direction. “Henrietta Walmette. She was a volunteer here. When she showed up this morning the door was open and she found Ms. Rosario lyin’ here like this. She called 911, and luckily for us the detective they called in had the good sense to see there might be a connection between this and the guy we’re lookin’ for.”

  The detective in question was standing across the room drinking coffee and speaking to a couple of uniforms—rookies, by the look of it. Their skin had the remarkable smoothness of the very young, unmarred by care or experience.

  “Come on,” Butts said, “I’ll introduce you.” He pulled Lee over to the group of cops. “This here is my colleague, Dr. Lee Campbell. This is Detective Grumman, the primary on this case.”

  Grumman was a wiry little rat-faced man with quick, jerky movements. If he hadn’t known the man was a detective, Lee would have taken him for a bookie or small-time hood.

  “Thanks so much for calling us in before moving the body,” Lee said, shaking his hand, which was surprisingly soft, almost feminine. Grumman didn’t look like a metrosexual, but you never knew these days. Lots of guys you wouldn’t suspect used hand lotion, waxed their chest hair, and plucked their eyebrows.

  Grumman shrugged. “It fit your guy’s MO. I been reading about it, and I thought you guys should be called in.” His voice was pure Queens, the vowels as flat and broad as the lanes on the Long Island Expressway.

  “We really appreciate it,” Butts said.

  “So was I right—is this your guy?” Grumman asked. “Or could it be some kind of copycat?”

  “No, this is him,” Lee answered. “There’s not much doubt about that.”

  “You want to talk to the lady who found the body?”

  “Sure,” Butts said.

  Henrietta Walmette was seated on a chair next to an impressive-looking machine Lee figured was used to separate blood platelets or some such thing. She clutched a Styrofoam cup of tea in her hands and was rocking back and forth, a glazed look in her eyes—though figuring out her exact expression was difficult, due to the pound or so of makeup she had plastered onto her face. Tears had carved black crevices of mascara down her cheeks, so that she looked like an aging clown from a Fellini film.

  “Ms. Walmette?” Lee said.

  The woman turned her tear-stained face to him. “Mrs. Henrietta Walmette,” she said, pronouncing it “Wallamettah.” Her accent was pure magnolias and peach trees, and he was reminded uncomfortably of Susan Morton. “You can call me Henrietta, honey,” she added, with just a suggestion of flirtation. “Oh my God, I must look a fright,” she said sadly, fishing around in her large white purse for a mirror. Flustered, she dropped a lipstick and a small pocket mirror on the floor. One of the young uniforms bent to pick it up for her.

  Butts nudged Lee. Henrietta Walmette wasn’t the first woman to be flustered by the sight of his handsome face, and Butts liked to tease him about it.

  “Okay, uh, Henrietta,” he said. “I’m Lee Campbell and this is Detective Leonard Butts. Mind if we ask you a few questions?”

  “I told the other detective everything I know,” she said, wiping the smudged mascara from her face. “I want to be helpful—really I do.”

  “We know you do, ma’am,” Butts replied. “And we appreciate that. But my partner here is—well, a different kind of cop and he might have some specific kinda questions for you. That is, if it’s okay with you.”

  Finished with her ablutions, she turned her face up to Lee and gave a brave smile. “Of course—whatever you need, I’ll be glad to cooperate.”

&n
bsp; “Thank you,” he said. “Did you notice anything unusual about Ms. Rosario’s behavior lately?”

  “Not really, but the other detective already asked me that.”

  “Okay,” Lee said. “Did she have any new friends that you know of?”

  Henrietta Walmette tugged on one of the heavy gold earring dangling from her pendulous earlobes. “No. She was devoted to her family, you know—they meant everything to her.” A fat tear seeped down her right cheek, winding through the thick layer of makeup. “I can’t stand to think of her poor husband. She loved him so much—he’ll be just devastated without her, I’m sure.”

  “I’m very sorry to put you through this,” Lee continued. “Just one more question and then we’ll let you go. Were there any changes at the workplace recently?”

  “Well, let me think,” she said. “I only volunteer one day a week, you see, and I—oh, yes, wait a minute! I noticed a very quiet young man I’d never seen before last week when I came in. He pretty much kept to himself, though, and I—”

  “Did Ms. Rosario introduce you to him?”

  “Why, yes, she did tell me his name, but I ... forgive me, but my memory isn’t quite what it used to be in my younger days,” she said, looking down. The mountain of makeup on her face made it hard to tell if she was blushing.

  “Do you think you might be able to remember?” Butts said.

  “I started with a D, I think ... Donny, Danny, something like that.”

  “Did you get a last name?” Lee asked.

  She shook her head. “No, I’m afraid we were rather busy that day—I barely spoke to him at all. I handle the front room, you know, and he was working in the back the whole time.”

  “Thank you, Ms.—uh, Henrietta, you’ve been very helpful,” Lee said.

  “Anything I can do to help—really anything,” she replied.

  “Thank you so much,” he repeated, shaking the hand she offered. She clutched his hand a little too tightly, and was reluctant to let go when he pulled away.

  When they rejoined Detective Grumman, who had been listening in on their conversation, he shook his head. “No record of anyone new working at this location. ’Course, someone could have gone through the employee files and taken the documents, but we have a call into the other blood centers to see if there’s a record of someone being assigned here in the past few weeks. So if he came here through official channels, we’ll find out.”

  “He could have known the vic some other way,” Butts pointed out.

  “But he showed up before the place was open, and she must have let him in,” Lee said. “Unless he had a key.”

  “Yeah, but it was raining hard out,” Butts argued. “He coulda looked pathetic, and so she lets him in.”

  Detective Grumman crossed his arms. “Lady workin’ at a blood bank is bound to be the sympathetic type, don’t ya think?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Butts said. “Still, how does he subdue her so he can ...”

  He didn’t need to say it; they were all thinking the same thing. How does someone render another person so helpless that he is able to drain virtually all of the blood from her body?

  Grumman signaled to the people from the ME’s office, and they began to load poor Joselin onto a stretcher. One of the rookie cops stepped forward and pointed at her.

  “Look—there, on the side of her neck!” He was a smooth-faced young African American.

  “What is it, Marshall?” Grumman growled.

  “There!” Officer Marshall leaned over and pointed to two tiny red marks that had been hidden by her hair. When the ME people moved the body, her hair had fallen to the side, revealing them.

  “Mary, Mother of God, will you look at that?” Grumman said. “If those aren’t Taser marks, I’ll eat my hat.” The fact that he wasn’t wearing a hat didn’t lessen the force of his observation. Sure enough, there on the upper part of her neck were tiny wounds that looked exactly like the burns of a Taser, commonly known as a stun gun.

  Butts snorted with disgust. “Damn things should be illegal.”

  “Well, at least we know how he subdued her,” Grumman remarked.

  “If there’s anything else, it’s bound to turn up at the autopsy,” Grumman said. “Good work, Marshall. Keep me posted, will you?” he asked Butts.

  “Sure. Thanks for bringing us in on this,” Butts replied.

  Lee left the two detectives at the crime scene and headed home. He needed to be alone to think about this latest development. He took the M15 bus down Second Avenue, watching through the soot-stained window as clouds gathered in an increasingly sullen sky.

  When he got off the bus and turned the corner onto his street, the heavens opened as the sky shook with another thunderstorm. He ran the last half block, dashed up the front steps two at a time, and ducked inside just in time to avoid getting soaked. He stood in the front vestibule shaking the water from his damp clothes before climbing the two flights to his apartment.

  The rain drummed down with such force that it drowned out all other sounds. Gone were the usual street noises—the footsteps of pedestrians, the whoosh of passing cars, the rumble of buses as they lumbered up Third Avenue, the squealing brakes of garbage trucks. Gone too were the noises within the building—the creak of floorboards or the footsteps of the tenants who lived above him, the rapid patter of paws as their kitten scuttered across the floor after a toy, the low murmur of a radio or television set from next door. Sealed in a cocoon by the pummeling raindrops, Lee felt an odd sense of invulnerability—of safety. The interior of his apartment felt like a place apart, a little self-contained universe where he was protected from the perils of the outside world.

  He gazed out the window at the grey wall of rain hurtling down from the heavens. He found himself wishing it would never stop, and that the heavy drops would halt the forward momentum of time itself. Mothers would tuck their children into bed at night knowing that killers were not lurking in dark alleys waiting to snatch their darlings away; young women would go to sleep secure in the knowledge they would not awaken with a sinister figure looming over their beds. Surely a rain such as this would erase all of the evils of the world, and wash clean all the sins of humanity.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  “I hear there’s been a leak,” Sergeant Quinlan said, lowering his bulky body into a chair. “Do you guys have an idea who it could be?”

  “Naw,” Butts said, biting off the end of a sesame energy bar. He still was eating compulsively, but at least it was healthier food. Sergeant Quinlan from the Bronx had asked to be part of the task force assigned to what had become a high-profile case. It was late Saturday morning, and the three men were meeting, along with Detective Krieger, in the conference room reserved for them at the Major Case squad house.

  “Seems to me it could even be someone in the ME’s office,” Quinlan remarked. “I mean, plenty of people had access to the lab reports, right?”

  “I guess,” Lee said.

  “But what’s in it for them?” Butts said. “Someone finds out, their job is history.”

  Krieger frowned and crossed her arms. She was wearing a khaki military-style skirt and jacket over a crisp white blouse, her red hair pulled up into a bun. The look was rather androgynous, and disturbingly sexy. “I still don’t understand what harm it’s done to the case.”

  Chuck Morton entered the room and tossed a stack of photos on the table. “There’s your answer.”

  The pictures were glossy eight-by-tens of a kid, late teens, early twenties—done up in full goth regalia, complete with black lipstick, nose rings, and other facial piercings. His makeup was smudged, however, because he had been badly beaten. He stared into the camera with a combination of surliness and sadness that was somehow familiar to Lee. He had seen that look before ... and then he remembered it was on his own father’s face, from the few remaining photos he had of Duncan Campbell.

  “What happened?” Butts asked, leafing through the photos. In other shots, you could clearly see the
boy was wearing a black silk cape with a red lining.

  Morton looked at Lee. “Your boy Francois thought it would be fun to go beat up a vampire. Got his hands on the first goth kid he could find dressed as Dracula, beat the crap out of him. Name’s Billy Tobowlski. Just a run-of-the-mill East Village goth kid on his way to a party when Nugent lures him into an alley and attacks him.”

  Krieger looked shocked. “What?”

  Lee put his head in his hands. “Chuck, he promised me—”

  “Tell that to Billy’s parents,” Morton snapped. “Had to have seventeen stitches, one for each year of his life.”

  “Francois?” Quinlan said. “Is that the boy whose sister—”

  “Yeah, that’s him,” Butts said. “I knew the kid was angry, but this is some hell of a way to act out.”

  Morton scowled down at the photos. “Maybe those rich parents of his can cover this kid’s hospital bills.”

  “Is his family going to prosecute?” Lee asked.

  “Don’t know yet. Nugent is in lockup, but I’m sure his parents are posting bond as we speak.”

  “Where is he?”

  Chuck looked at his notes. “They put him in the Tombs overnight.”

  “Christ,” Lee muttered. His right temple was beginning to throb, and the vision in his left eye was blurry. That was a bad sign. No food plus Xanax on an empty stomach was a bad combination—a migraine was on the way. He thought of asking Chuck for a couple of ibuprofen, but figured he could pick up a bottle after the meeting.

  Morton turned to Krieger. “You asked what could happen if the media got hold of the details. Well, here’s your answer.”

  She frowned. “But didn’t Francois already know how his sister died?”

  “Nope,” Chuck said. “We kept that detail from the family. We just told them she was murdered by someone who was probably a stranger. And that she wasn’t sexually molested.”

  Butts scratched his chin. “I recall the father’s behavior was kind of remote.”

  “You’re right,” said Lee. “It struck me as odd at the time.”