Silent Screams - C. E. Lawrence [12]
“You know,” Chuck said, “maybe I shouldn’t have called you in on this. Maybe it was—”
“A mistake?” Lee interrupted. “Cut it out, Chuck—it’s obvious that this case needs a profiler.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. I was just thinking that because of…” Chuck paused, not wanting to say the words. He felt like a coward.
“Christ, Chuck, you can’t second-guess every case I’m on because it might bring up memories of my sister’s disappearance.”
Five years ago, Lee Campbell’s younger sister Laura had disappeared without a trace from her Greenwich Village apartment, and everything had changed. He had never been the same since then. It was as though a dark chord had been struck in his soul and the reverberations still had not stopped. He’d had a thriving private practice as a psychologist, and Chuck was surprised when Lee called a few months after his sister’s disappearance to say he was attending John Jay College for an advanced degree in forensic psychology. Later he came to realize that the disappearance of Lee’s sister had affected his friend in ways he couldn’t quantify. Once Lee graduated, Chuck had been instrumental in getting him his present position as the only full-time profiler in the NYPD. Lately, though, he had been wondering if he had made a mistake—emotionally, his friend didn’t seem up to it.
Chuck looked out the grimy window of his office, absentmindedly fingering the butterfly paperweight on his desk.
“So no signs of sexual assault, right?” Lee muttered, still studying the photos.
“Right,” Chuck said. “The lab report just came in. But how did you—”
“I’m telling you, Chuck, the same guy who did Jane Doe also killed Marie Kelleher last night!”
Chuck looked back at him.
“You really think they’re connected?”
“Yes, I do.”
Morton shook his head. “I dunno, Lee. Seems like a stretch to me.”
Lee ran a hand through his curly black hair, something he did when he was upset. His friend’s hair was longer, too, Chuck thought—even shaggy, by his own standards. He wore his own sandy blond hair short—like the bristles of a hairbrush, his wife said. He had left her soft warm body with particular reluctance this morning. When he rose from bed, the house still so dark and quiet, Susan had flung an arm out after him and moaned a little, and he had wanted nothing more than to climb back under the covers next to her and plant kisses everywhere his lips could reach.
The crime photos Lee was studying were from an unsolved murder out in Queens a few weeks ago—Jane Doe Number Five, they called her. She was well groomed and wasn’t dressed like a hooker, and it was odd that no one had called yet to report her missing.
Outside his office, Morton could hear the morning shift of cops arriving, as the building that housed the Bronx Major Case Unit stirred with the beginning of a new workday. The aroma of fresh coffee seeped through the closed office door, making Morton’s mouth swim with saliva. He looked wistfully at the empty coffee mug on his desk, swallowed, and rubbed his stinging eyes, dry from lack of sleep.
“I just know they’re related, Chuck,” Lee was saying, his dark eyes intense in the stark fluorescent lighting. “The posing of the bodies—”
“But there was no mutilation on Jane Doe,” Chuck protested.
“No, because he didn’t feel comfortable enough—she was probably his first kill.”
“Okay, okay,” Morton answered. “I believe you. Trouble is, I don’t know who else will.”
Lee stood