Silent Kills Read online

  “Hi there, Mr. Palatine. I’m Detective Leonard Butts and this is my colleague, Dr. Lee Campbell. We hope you don’t mind if we ask you a few questions.”

  Palatine surprised them both by yanking the stocking cap from his head and executing a low, sweeping bow, wielding his cap it as though it were the feathered hat of an eighteenth-century fop.

  “Welcome!” he boomed out in a clear voice, his entire affect abruptly transformed. It was startling to see the change come over him. The jerky movements of a drug-addicted paranoid schizophrenic were replaced by the smooth, graceful gestures of a courtier. He grinned, displaying broad, tobacco-stained teeth. “The king awaits his personal physician. His Majesty has many things to discuss with you.”

  “We really came to talk with you,” Butts began, but Lee put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Can you take us to him?” he said.

  “But of course!” Palatine replied. “Right this way!” He took a few steps away from them and then turned. When he saw they were standing still, his face clouded and he gave three quick claps. “Come along, now! His Royal Highness doesn’t like to be kept waiting, you know!”

  “Sorry,” Lee said. He took a few steps in the direction Palatine indicated, pulling a reluctant Butts along with him.

  Palatine pranced to the other side of the room, then stopped and stood with his back to them. Spinning around, he bellowed, “Well? What is it? I don’t have all day, you know!”

  Butts looked at Lee, who said, “Greetings, Your Majesty.”

  The detective rolled his eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake—”

  Lee pinched him.

  “Ow!” Butts yelped.

  “Your Majesty, please give us leave to speak.”

  Palatine regarded them coldly, as if appraising their worthiness. Then, in an infinitely world-weary voice, he said, “You may speak.”

  “There is a large rock near your palace,” Lee began.

  “Ah, yes!” Palatine interrupted. “I often go there with courtiers and my consort.”

  “Is this guy for real?” Butts whispered.

  Palatine’s eyes wandered up and to the right, indicating he was accessing a memory. The trouble was that with a schizophrenic you couldn’t know if the memory was real or a figment of his racing imagination and scrambled brain.

  “I was out with my posse—uh, my ... retinue,” he said, searching for the word. The people at the Upper West Side shelter where he sometimes stayed had told Lee that he was a brilliant chess player—when he was taking his meds—and claimed to have a genius-level IQ.

  Palatine paused, his face working. Lee noted that he obsessively stroked the tips of his fingers with his thumbs—a jerky, involuntary movement. He had seen other mental patients with similar mannerisms. People on anti-psychotics suffered from a constellation of drug-induced tics, which was one reason they often neglected to take their meds. Sometimes it was hard to tell which tics were side effects of medication and which were caused by the disease.

  “And what did you and your—retinue—see there?” Butts asked. He wasn’t exactly in the spirit of the game, Lee thought, but at least he was playing along.

  “Well, that’s the strange thing,” Palatine replied. “We, uh ...” He stopped abruptly and twitched all over, as if under attack by a swarm of unseen insects. His fingers clawed at his face, his jagged fingernails scratching new cuts in his already ravaged skin.

  “Doorble mabula hodie acurata,” he muttered, his speech deteriorating into psychotic babble. His head jerked and his eyes searched wildly in all directions, as if he was looking for intruders—classic paranoid behavior. Something had snapped. Maybe it was the stress of the memory itself—stumbling upon a murder victim couldn’t be easy for someone whose grip on reality was already tenuous. Lee and Butts watched helplessly as Palatine twitched and jerked and mumbled to himself. He seemed to have forgotten they existed.

  Touching mentally ill patients was never recommended—and certainly not psychotics—but Lee had a sudden impulse to restrain the man’s demented behavior. Taking three rapid steps forward, he grasped Palatine’s wrists and held his arms firmly at his sides. In a low voice he said, “Stop it, Anthony. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  Palatine resisted at first, and tried to pull his arms away. His wiry strength was surprising, but Lee was prepared. He held firm, tightening his grip on Palatine’s wrists while speaking calmly to him. “It’s okay, Anthony—you can let go now. No one’s going to hurt you. You’re safe here.”

  Palatine’s body went slack. He gazed into Lee’s eyes, as if all the answers to his life’s questions lay there. Then he said, “Lying on the top of the granite, bruised by life, everything at last behind her. Blessed be the dead, for they suffer no more.”

  “What did you see, Anthony?” Lee asked.

  “I saw him bring the sacrificial virgin. Pure as virtue, white as death.”

  “Did you get a good look at him?”

  Palatine averted his face and shook his head rapidly. “Under the cloak of darkness he came, and under it he left.”

  “Was he tall, short, young, old? Could you see anything?”

  “Tall. He was tall and thin, like a crane, an egret, a waterbird.”

  “Did you get a good look at his face?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Anything else? Hair color, race, anything?”

  “Dark hair, white skin. Very pale skin, reflected in the moonlight.” He paused, his eyes narrowed in concentration. “She was white, too, lily white ... lily of the valley.” He began to sing in a tremulous tenor. “Down in the valley, the valley so low, hang your head over, hear the wind blow.”

  Lee looked back at Butts, who was wagging his head and rolling his eyes so vigorously he resembled a bobble-head doll. There was a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” Lee called out.

  The door opened and Russell Kim strode into the room. An energetic young Korean American, Kim was one of the best pathologists in the medical examiner’s office. Not only was he a thorough and careful scientist, but he had an imaginative flair that was unusual in his field. Kim’s approach to his work made him stand out from run-of-the-mill laboratory workers. He often took initiatives that were above and beyond his job description. He was more invested in the outcome of crime solving than the average “lab rat,” which made him popular with cops, if not so much with his fellow workers, among whom he had a reputation for grandstanding. He also had a reputation for being a bit of a ladies’ man, which wasn’t hard to believe, with his broad shoulders, athletic grace, and shiny black hair.

  Lee liked Russell Kim, and was grateful for any help they could get at this point.

  “Hey there, Kim—what you got for us there?” Butts said, glancing at the manila file folder in the pathologist’s hand.

  “Get this,” Kim said, handing him the folder, but Anthony Palatine let out a string of expletives that would make a sailor blush.

  “What is that goddamn gook doing here?” he screamed, trembling with anger, his twitches and tics even more pronounced.

  Lee looked at him, stunned, then back at Kim. “I am so sorry,” he said to the pathologist. “Mr. Palatine is not—”

  Kim shrugged. “Whatever. The guy’s crazy—even I can see that.” Which made Butts burst out laughing, which made Palatine curse even harder.

  “Get him out of here!” he screeched. “Get that goddamn slant-eyed—”

  Kim looked at him. “Have a bad experience in Vietnam, did you? You look about the right age. But I’m Korean—that was a whole other war, remember?” He shrugged again. “But us gooks all look the same to you, I guess.” This comment made Butts laugh harder, which made Palatine even angrier.

  “Let’s let Mr. Palatine cool down a little,” Lee suggested. He went out to the hall and beckoned to the uniformed officer guarding the conference room. “Would you mind asking Mr. Palatine if you can get him something to eat or drink?”

  The young cop nodded and
entered the room as Butts and Kim left it to join Lee in the hall.

  “So what you got there?” Butts asked Kim.

  Kim couldn’t help smiling. Lee knew he enjoyed the chase, and sometimes wondered why he wasn’t a cop. “It could be a coincidence, but get this,” Kim said. “All the victims have the same blood type. They’re all O Negative, which is the universal donor. Is that interesting or what?”

  “Very,” Lee mused. “Very interesting.”

  “What do you think it means?” asked Butts.

  “I’m not sure, but I think Dr. Kim here has given us another missing piece of the puzzle.”

  Kim beamed, his dark eyes shining with excitement, pride written all over his face.

  “If all the dead girls are all the same blood type, then I wonder if he used the blood bank to locate some of his victims,” Lee mused.

  “Exactly,” Butts agreed.

  So now they had another piece of the puzzle—but that still left plenty of pieces missing.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  “What is it with these guys?” Sergeant Quinlan asked, studying the victim photos tacked up on the wall. The team was gathered in the conference room following the departure of Anthony Palatine. They had given him forty bucks and sent him up to the Upper West Side shelter in a squad car, which seemed to please him very much. He left muttering about the arrival of his carriage—he seemed to think the sergeant escorting him was his footman.

  Butts glanced at the wall of photos. “These guys? They’re plain damn evil,” he declared with a scowl, throwing himself into the nearest chair. He was looking trimmer these days, Lee noticed, but moodier than usual. Getting in shape didn’t seem to agree with him.

  “It’s tempting to think of them as evil,” Lee said. “But they may not have a choice about their behavior. They lack the ability to feel empathy.”

  “Man, that’s hard to imagine,” Quinlan remarked. “Must be pretty damn lonely.”

  “Yeah, but if you never know what you’re missing, do you feel the loss of it?” Butts said.

  “Exactly,” Lee agreed. “They think of other people as objects to be manipulated.”

  “I get that,” Butts said. “I’m just sayin’ ... never mind.”

  “Never mind what?” said Elena Krieger as she swept into the room.

  “We were just talking about the psychology of our perp,” Butts said, pulling a banana from his pocket and peeling it. “Potassium,” he said in response to a look from Krieger. “Supposed to speed the muscle recovery after a workout.”

  “You’re working out?” she said. “What’s next—plague and pestilence?”

  “Hardy har har,” Butts said through a mouthful of banana. At the sight of his open mouth filled with banana, Krieger shuddered and turned away.

  Quinlan studied the crime scene, pulling at his long chin. “Here’s what I don’t get about this guy: Why is he using such public dump sites? Is he tryin’ to get caught?”

  Butts sniffed and swallowed the rest of his banana. “These guys never want to get caught.”

  “He’s making a statement,” said Lee.

  “Yeah, but what is it?” said Quinlan.

  “I think I may have an idea,” Krieger said. Opening her expensive leather backpack, she pulled out a sheath of printed pages. “Listen to this,” she said, reading from the top page. “ ‘The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.’ Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “That’s creepy,” Butts remarked. “I know Poe was a wack job, but—”

  “How does that relate to this guy?” asked Quinlan.

  “I found it on a steampunk website,” Krieger replied.

  “And you may recall where the last body was found.”

  “Poe Rock,” said Lee.

  “You think it’s on purpose?” Quinlan suggested.

  “Think about it,” Lee said. “First Melville, now Poe—Detective Krieger is on to something.”

  Butts threw the banana peel in the direction of the trash can, missing by a yard. “Yeah, but what?” he said, trudging over to drop the peel in the can.

  “Melville, Poe, Tesla—they’re all part of his world, of the Victorian steampunk gothic fantasy,” Lee said.

  “Yeah, sure, but how does that help us find him?” asked Quinlan.

  “I have an idea,” Krieger said. “He’s not a loner, right?”

  “He may spend large amounts of time alone planning his attacks,” Lee said, “but he has social skills. Otherwise his victims would have been more wary of him.”

  “And then there’s the blood-type thing,” Butts said.

  “What blood-type thing?” asked Krieger.

  Lee explained Russell Kim’s findings.

  “Could it be a coincidence?” asked Quinlan. “I mean, do a lot of people have that blood type?”

  “Kim says it’s about forty-five percent of the white population,” said Lee.

  “Is he targeting them for their blood type?” Krieger asked.

  “Doesn’t that make sense?” Lee said. “Especially if he’s injecting their blood intravenously.”

  “That would mean you’re right about the medical expertise,” Quinlan said.

  There was a quick knock at the door. Krieger opened it to see Sergeant Ruggles standing there, looking sheepish but eager.

  “Yes, Sergeant?” she said. “What can I do for you?”

  Ruggles cleared his throat. “I thought you might need—that is, might be able to use some help.”

  Krieger leaned her long body against the doorframe. “What sort of help did you have in mind?”

  Ruggles blushed, beads of sweat spurting onto his forehead. “Well, I understand you’re looking into this world of, uh—”

  “Steampunk,” Krieger said.

  “Yes, si—uh, ma’am. I thought I might be of some help.”

  “All right,” she said. “We need all the help we can get.”

  “I understand you visited a chat room,” Ruggles said to Lee.

  “Yes, I did.”

  Ruggles sat down at the computer and cracked his knuckles. Lee noticed the sound made Krieger wince.

  “Do you remember the name of the chat room, sir?”

  “Uh ... no. It’ll be on my browser history, though.”

  “No worries, sir; I’ll find it. What can you tell me about it?” Ruggles asked.

  “Well, everyone had steampunk-type screen names.”

  Ruggles began typing. “You as well, sir?”

  “I did create one to blend in, yeah.”

  “May I ask what it was?” Ruggles said.

  “MastCaptain,” Lee said, aware of how silly it sounded. No one laughed, though Butts rolled his eyes.

  Ruggles didn’t respond; he was too busy typing. Then he said, “Is this the same chat room, sir?”

  Lee leaned over his shoulder and looked at the screen.

  “That’s it—the Victorian Adventurer Club! How did you—”

  “Well, you see, sir, there aren’t that many as yet, so I just chose the most popular—that is, the first one to come up in a Google search.”

  “That’s logical,” Krieger commented, bending down to look over his shoulder. The men could see the dark line where her breasts met, the milky flesh pressing up through the V line of her shirt at if longing to escape the confinement of her push-up bra. Quinlan licked his chops and straightened his tie.

  “MastCaptain, you said, sir?” Ruggles asked, typing it out. “With no spaces?”

  “That’s right,” said Lee.

  Ruggles resumed his rapid typing, his pale eyes fixed on the computer monitor. “Right,” he said, “we’re in.”

  Butts frowned and pulled at his beard stubble. “I gotta say, I don’t entirely get this chat room thing. What kinda room is it? Are there people actually in a room somewhere for real?”

  “Not quite, sir,” Ruggles said. “You see, it’s rather a virtual room—that is, a pretend room that exists in cyberspace—that is, th
e Internet. When we speak of a ‘chat room,’ we really just mean a bunch of people deciding to be online together, at the same time.”

  “Sorta like a conference call,” Quinlan said. “Only bigger.”

  “Right you are, sir,” said Ruggles. “Except instead of being on the phone, everyone is sitting at home typing into their computer.”

  “Okay, I get it,” Butts said. “Now that you’ve explained it so well.”

  Krieger rubbed a smudge of lipstick from her chin. “Don’t you have children, Detective?”

  “Yeah,” said Butts. “But they’re too busy with their friends and school to explain stuff to their old man.”

  “Did you ever think of asking them?”

  “Naw. I wouldn’t bother them about it.”

  The thought occurred to Lee that Butts didn’t ask his kids because he was embarrassed about his ignorance. In spite of his slovenly appearance and execrable eating habits, the stocky detective was a porcupine when it came to asking for help. But then, Lee had noticed a lot of people in law enforcement weren’t comfortable with the appearance of vulnerability. He suspected it had to do with the type of person drawn to this line of work. “Protect and Serve” meant you were expected to project strength—a kind of automatic self-screening process for certain personality types. And even if you weren’t the strong, silent type when you entered the force, the job had a way of morphing you into that mold.

  Ruggles’s fingers flew over the keyboard as he typed responses to the other people in the chat room. There were three others present: VampyrHunter and RobotPirate007—and Steamgirl was back again.

  “She was in the chat room the other night,” Lee said.

  “Who, sir?” asked Ruggles.

  “Steamgirl.”

  “Interesting,” Ruggles mused. “I wonder if she’ll remember you.”

  “I didn’t say much.”

  “Never mind, sir—let’s see if we can bring her out a bit.” He hunched over the keyboard, lips pursed, squinting at the screen as he typed.

  MastCaptain: hi, remember me?

  Steamgirl: yeah, u r the weirdo

  RobotPirate007: welcome

  VampyrHunter: hi there. Wat kind of weirdo r u?