Silent Screams - C. E. Lawrence [18]
He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Nelson standing behind him. Was it Lee’s imagination, or were his blue eyes moist? It was hard to tell with the light coming from behind him.
“I can see that nothing I say is going to stop you. So let me just say this: be careful, Lee.”
“I will.”
“Good. Now go out and get that son of a bitch.”
Lee looked down at the street again. Somewhere, in the throng of people, with a face that could blend into any crowd, a pair of footsteps clicked along the sidewalk next to a hundred others, footsteps belonging to a murderer with only one thing on his mind: his next victim. Lee silently vowed to do whatever he could—at whatever cost—to get between that killer and his goal.
Chapter Seven
“You know,” Detective Butts remarked, “all this hocus-pocus stuff doesn’t solve crimes. Shoe leather does.”
“Right,” Lee answered. He had heard it all before, and was tired of defending himself to cops. He wasn’t an official member of the police force—he had not attended the academy, and carried only an ID card identifying him as a civilian consultant to the NYPD. He was keenly aware of the separation between him and the gun-toting members of the police force. People like him were not necessarily included in the tight, exclusive circle of the Brotherhood of Blue.
It was the next morning, and they were standing in front of an examination room at the medical examiner’s office, waiting for the pathologist who had done Marie Kelleher’s autopsy. She entered hurriedly, apologizing for her lateness. Gretchen Rilke was a rather glamorous-looking woman, blue-eyed and pink-cheeked, with thick, dyed blond hair and a suggestive lilt of Alpine hills in her accent.
“I was in a conference call that went late,” she said, pushing a strand of implausibly yellow hair from her eyes. With one hand she pulled the body from the morgue freezer compartment, the oversized drawer sliding smoothly on its metal rollers. With the other hand she pulled back the sheet covering Marie’s body just enough to expose her neck. In spite of the bluish tinge to her pale skin, it was still hard to think of her as dead.
“You see the bruises?” Gretchen asked.
Lee looked at the thick collar of purple discoloration that ringed Marie’s neck. It appeared darker now, which could be a result of the harsh fluorescent lighting—but he knew that bruises could deepen or even appear after death. Now, under the bright lights, he could see several separate bands of bruising.
“I see,” he said.
“This indicates that he repositioned his fingers, probably several times.”
“So he didn’t kill her all at once?” Butts asked.
The pathologist shook her head. “No. There’s no crushed cartilage, and no serious damage to the larynx.”
“So,” Lee said, “that means he applies minimum force—enough to make her lose consciousness. And then he waits until she comes to and starts all over again.”
“That scenario would be consistent with the physical evidence,” Dr. Rilke agreed.
“Shit,” Butts muttered. “This is one sick bastard.”
“Okay,” Lee said, almost to himself. “He’s not in a hurry. This means that he’s comfortable where he is—that he’s not worried about getting caught. He’s killing them somewhere other than the church. And no sign of sexual assault?”
“Right,” Dr. Rilke answered.
“And no sign of a struggle?”
“Her fingernails aren’t even broken, so she didn’t have time to fight back. There are no defensive knife wounds, so I’m guessing he took that out after she was already subdued.”
Lee gulped in some air, avoiding breathing through his nose. “So the carving was postmortem?”
“That would be consistent with the amount of bleeding—or lack of it,” she replied. “On the other hand…”
“What?” Lee said, his stomach twisting around itself. He swallowed hard. He hated visiting the morgue.
“Well, he didn’t carve that deeply, so it’s just possible it was done while she was still alive.”
Lee felt