Silent Screams - C. E. Lawrence [19]
“How would he get her to stay still, though?” Butts asked.
“There were no signs of ligature around her wrists or ankles, right?” Lee asked.
“No,” Rilke answered. “But she might have been too weak to struggle by that time.”
“Any idea what he used?” Butts asked.
“Nothing fancy. An ordinary kitchen paring knife would do the job. Something with a pretty short blade—probably a couple of inches at most.”
“Could it have been a scalpel?”
“The wounds are too jagged for that—even in unskilled hands, a scalpel would do a neater job.”
“Too bad we can’t use handwriting analysis on this,” Butts remarked.
“No, I doubt there would be a correlation,” Lee agreed, “although there might be something about the way he forms certain letters…”
“It’s not much of a sample to go on,” Dr. Rilke pointed out.
None of them wanted to say what they were all thinking: the last thing they wanted was to have a larger sample, because that would mean having another victim.
“No prints at all?” Lee asked.
“No,” said Rilke. “We superglued the body—nothing. He must have worn gloves.”
“Supergluing” meant using cyanoacrylate (superglue) to develop latent prints that might not otherwise be visible.
“We gotta get going,” Butts said, looking at his watch. “The parents in Jersey are expecting us.”
“Okay, thank you,” Lee said to Gretchen, who smiled grimly.
“Good luck.”
“Thanks,” he replied, thinking, We’ll need it.
Forty minutes later Lee and Butts were seated next to each other on the DeCamp bus to Nutley, New Jersey. As the bus rumbled out of the Lincoln Tunnel and onto the corkscrew stretch of highway leading up the hill past the town of Weehawken, Lee turned to look across the river at Manhattan. The mid-morning sun lingered low in the eastern horizon, lurking behind the buildings, its furtive rays refracted by the glass skyscrapers of Midtown. The river appeared perfectly still and opaque under the hazy gray February sky.
Marie Kelleher’s parents had already come into the city once to identify their daughter’s body, and Chuck Morton, trying to spare them further grief and stress, had dispatched Lee and Butts out to the couple’s house in Nutley to interview them.
Lee leaned back in his seat and stretched his legs out under the empty seat in front of him. The DeCamp bus was expensive, but it was comfortable and quiet. It wasn’t crowded at this hour; they were traveling in the opposite direction of the commuters headed into the city. The few people scattered around the bus were reading, staring out the window, or napping. Talking on cell phones was forbidden, according to the sign behind the driver. Thick block letters warned that passengers who disobeyed could be ejected from the bus.
“Good old-fashioned detective work—that’s what solves crimes,” Butts remarked as he opened the magazine in his lap and leafed through it. “Yep,” he murmured, “that’s what it’s all about: knockin’ on doors, gathering evidence.”
Lee gazed out the window as the gray granite cliffs of Weehawken whizzed by. He’d heard this line before, many times, not just from beat cops and guys like Butts, but also at John Jay. The culture of law enforcement had little patience for what most cops considered the “touchy-feely” aspect of crime solving. Most cops were not comfortable around profilers, any more than they were comfortable around psychiatrists.
“It’s not that I think it doesn’t figure into the equation,” Butts said, staring down at a print ad promising whiter teeth. The woman in the picture grinned up at them, her parted lips displaying a row of broad, perfectly even teeth that gleamed like ivory dominoes. “But it’s really all about evidence in the end, you know? Cold, hard evidence—that’s what catches criminals.”
Lee didn’t reply. They had no evidence so far: no hair, no fibers, no DNA—nothing. He didn’t feel optimistic about getting any, either. This killer would only get better at covering his tracks as time went on.
Detective Butts was leafing through the magazine, his bulbous