Silent Screams - C. E. Lawrence [16]
In spite of Nelson’s reputation for remoteness, his interest in Lee had been immediate and fatherly. Lee thought maybe it was because he was a good ten years older than the average John Jay student, or perhaps it was their similar Celtic heritage. Nelson treated Lee with a kindness he did not display to the other students. In fact, he didn’t seem to regard the human race as worthy of the kind of affection he usually reserved for his Irish setter, Rex. Nelson doted on the animal and spoiled him as extravagantly as any Upper East Side lapdog.
Nelson’s interest in Lee’s career continued after he left John Jay to join the NYPD as its only criminal profiler, an appointment Nelson helped make possible. The bar crawling continued, as did the late-night discussions of German composers, French philosophers, and Celtic poets.
Now, however, Nelson did not appear at all pleased with his prize student.
“I thought you had more sense than that, I really did,” he said as he lit the cigarette he had dug out of the recesses of his desk.
Lee couldn’t help noticing that Nelson’s hands were trembling. Taking a deep drag from the cigarette, Nelson absently twisted the wedding ring on his left hand. His wife had been dead for nearly three months now, but he continued to wear the ring. Lee wondered why. To keep potential mates away? Out of loyalty and devotion to her memory? Nelson rarely discussed Karen, but her picture hung in the living room of his spacious apartment, showing her fresh faced and smiling from the stern of a sailing yacht, her short brown curls blowing in the wind—with no hint of the cancer that was to gnaw stealthily away at her in the years to come.
The wind seemed to leave Nelson’s sails. He blew out a puff of smoke and sat down behind his desk, linking his hands behind his neck.
“All right, lad,” he said. “What is so compelling about this case that it can’t wait?”
Lee was used to Nelson’s abrupt mood changes.
“I just have a feeling I can help here, that I—well, there’s something about this killer that I can feel, that I understand.”
Nelson leaned forward and studied the younger man.
“I don’t know that that’s necessarily a good thing.”
“Yes, I know. I realize the danger of—”
“Of compromising your objectivity.”
Now it was Lee’s turn to be angry.
“This whole notion of objectivity is a fantasy, you know.”
Nelson looked startled, but Lee continued.
“There is no such thing! It’s a comforting fiction created by people who don’t want to get too close to things that go bump in the night.”
Nelson took another drag from his cigarette. “If you’re suggesting that it’s relative, I would agree with you.”
“No, what I’m suggesting is that it doesn’t exist at all. The whole idea is some outdated Age of Reason notion, some classical model that went out with powdered wigs and knee breeches—only we just haven’t realized it yet. It’s an impossible ideal.”
Nelson grunted and stubbed his cigarette out on the floor. “Impossible or not, as a criminal investigator you owe it to your victims—and to yourself—to be as objective as possible. Otherwise your conclusions become clouded by emotion.”
Lee felt his shoulders go rigid as he looked at Nelson. “What are you saying?”
Nelson held his gaze. “I think you know.”
Lee didn’t reply, and the silence between them lay thick as the layers of books and manuscripts stuffed everywhere in the cluttered office. He glanced at the brass busts of Beethoven and Bach on Nelson’s desk. Beethoven’s face was tragic: the tightly compressed lips and broad nose, the stormy, tortured eyes under a mane of wild hair; the stubborn chin, jutting out defensively against the world, as if bracing himself for what Fate was to throw at him…the picture of determination, the triumph of human will in adversity. How different from the bourgeois contentment of Bach, with his big nose and face ringed by a wig of riotous Baroque curls. Nelson had a particular fondness for Beethoven. He had read Lee excerpts from the Heiligenstadt Testament, Beethoven