Silent Screams - C. E. Lawrence [135]
The Queens neighborhood had the smell of defeat. The houses were depressing little boxes with peeling paint, crumbling bricks, and cheap aluminum siding, stained and battered with age, overlooking cramped lots with rocky lawns—if you could call them that—of crabgrass and overgrown weeds. The occasional lawn ornament—mostly plaster dwarfs and religious figures—only reinforced the aura of hopelessness.
The same attitude of resignation was stamped upon the faces and slumped shoulders of the residents, who shuffled along the ill-kempt sidewalks, heads down, eyes focused on the cracked slabs of concrete, probably to keep from tripping and breaking their necks.
“This is it,” Butts said, pointing to a little white house crammed between its equally undistinguished neighbors. Like many of the other properties, it was surrounded by an ugly chain-ink fence. Number 121 was a little neater than some of the others. The walk was swept, and a small concrete pond was adorned with a white plaster Virgin Mary, perched next to a statue of a fawn drinking from the pond.
The front gate on the chain-link fence creaked when they opened it, and their footsteps clicked loudly on the concrete path leading up to the house. When they reached the front door, Lee lifted his hand to knock, but saw that the door was cracked open. He pushed on it, and it swung forward on well-oiled hinges but then stopped, as though something was blocking it. There were no lights on inside the house, and no sign of life within its whitewashed stucco walls.
“Mrs. Hughes?” he called out through the opening.
No response.
He called louder.
“Mrs. Hughes? Are you there?” He rapped the door sharply with his knuckles. He was burning to burst into the house, but they had no search warrant, and the last thing they needed was to have the whole case thrown out of court.
“I don’t think anyone’s in there,” Butts said, shifting his weight back and forth on his feet. He, too, looked impatient and anxious.
“The door is open,” Lee said, “do you think we should—”
But at that moment he realized what was blocking the door. As his eyes adjusted to the dim interior, he could make out a pair of woman’s shoes—still attached to their owner. She lay partially out of sight, in the small front foyer, but even in the darkened room, Lee could see her feet, her legs, and—was that blood?
He turned to Butts. “We’re going in. Cover me.”
“I don’t think we should—” Butts began, but that was all he managed to get out.
Lee didn’t wait for Butts to pull his gun. He pushed against the door with his shoulder, and it gave.
What he saw made him catch his breath.
The dead woman in front of him was nude, just like the rest of the Slasher’s victims. But there was no neat positioning of the body with the arms spread out evenly from her shoulders. Instead, she lay splayed out on the floor, her hands flung above her head, a jagged scar where her throat had been cut. A dark rivulet of dried blood snaked crookedly from her throat across the white linoleum floor.
“Jesus,” Butts said softly, behind him, looking around the room. Blood spatter was everywhere—on the floor, the walls, the furniture, even the ceiling.
The victim was slight of build—like her son, Lee thought—and, unlike the other victims, she was middle-aged, but slim and trim, what was once called “well-preserved.”
On her chest had been carved the words, Deliver us From Evil.
He was looking at a textbook example of overkill. In addition to slashing her throat and carving on her chest, the killer had ripped her clothes from her body, and they lay in tatters around her. Her limbs were splayed out in every direction. It’s possible she had fallen like that, but Lee thought it more likely that the killer was making a point by leaving her this way. He had staged every other crime scene, and would probably have staged this one—unless he was falling apart completely