Silent Screams - C. E. Lawrence [13]
“Look at that!” Lee said, his voice tight with emotion. “Look at the positioning of the body! It’s exactly the same as Marie Kelleher, except this time he managed to get a little closer to his fantasy.”
“And what’s that?”
“Leaving the body in a church. There was nothing random about that. And the carving—that’s part of the fantasy too.”
Chuck leaned back in his chair. “I don’t know, Lee. It seems a little thin.”
“I’ll tell you something else. He won’t stop until he’s caught.”
“So you say we’re dealing with a serial offender here?”
“That’s right.”
Something in his voice made Morton believe him.
“Please, Chuck,” Lee said. “Please. I need to study the file on the Queens killing.”
Morton and rose from his chair. He felt stiff and old and tired. Seeing his friend like this didn’t help.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “I had to call in some favors just to get a copy of these photos. Let me run it past the guys upstairs, okay? I don’t have to tell you that detectives can get very territorial about their cases.”
“All right.”
“So,” Chuck said after a pause that threatened to swallow them both, “how’s the Frau ohne Schatten?”
The old Lee Campbell would have smiled at this. But now his friend just raised an eyebrow, his face devoid of mirth. “Oh, some things never change, you know. Brisk as ever.”
Lee had come up with the nickname for his mother after seeing the Strauss opera in college. Chuck, who had some German ancestry on his mother’s side, found it amusing, having experienced Fiona Campbell’s relentless cheerfulness firsthand. They used to joke about how she was really the original Frau ohne Schatten—woman without a shadow. But now the shadows had fallen heavily over his friend.
Campbell turned to leave, but he swayed and caught himself by grabbing the door frame.
“You okay?” Chuck asked, reaching a hand out to him.
Lee waved him off. “Fine. Just a little tired, that’s all.”
Morton didn’t believe him, but he kept silent. He recalled Lee’s Presbyterian stoicism only too well from their days on the rugby field, and still remembered the day Lee refused to leave a tournament game after breaking his nose on a tackle. Blood spurting from his nose, he insisted on finishing the game; he muttered something about “setting an example.” Chuck called it masochism, but he would never say that to his friend.
“Can I speak with the pathologist doing Marie’s autopsy?” Lee asked.
“I don’t see why not. I’ll be in touch,” he added.
“Right,” said Campbell. He paused at the door to Chuck’s office, as if he were about to say something else, but then turned, opened the door, and was gone.
Morton leaned back in his chair and ran a hand over his stiff bristle of blond hair. Then he stood, picked up his mug, and headed out of his office toward the coffee station. The mug—a gift from his daughter—proclaimed him as “World’s Greatest Dad,” but today he didn’t feel like the world’s greatest anything.
When he got to the coffee station, he saw that a few beat cops were gathered in the corner, heads lowered, talking quietly, and he heard one of them snicker. Then another one said, “Yeah—real mental, I guess.” They all laughed—until one of the conspirators saw Chuck and nudged the others with his elbow, at which point they abruptly stopped laughing. Rage gathered in Chuck’s chest, constricting his throat and making his forehead burn. He was noted for his even temper most of the time, but when he lost it, he truly lost it.
“What the hell are you looking at, Peters?” he bellowed.
Everyone in the station house stopped what they were doing and looked at him. He advanced on the group of subordinates,