Silent Screams - C. E. Lawrence [51]
Lee glanced at poor Annie again, lying so still in the midst of all the activity around her, as the CSI and ME teams continued with their work. This princess was dead, and there would be no prize, no hand given in marriage to the hero who tracked down this dragon.
“I’ll just have to wait to see how they handle it, but I’d guess a task force is likely, yeah,” Chuck said.
Florette took a deep breath and put his little notebook in his pocket. “Okay. Well, I don’t have to tell you that I’d like to be on it.”
“Yeah, sure,” Chuck answered, “if I have anything to say about it.”
Florette wandered over to speak with the CSIs on the other side of the room, and Lee took the opportunity to draw Chuck aside.
“There’s something else I should tell you,” Lee said.
“What’s that?”
“I…I think someone took a shot at me tonight.”
“What?”
Lee told Chuck about the bullet that narrowly missed him, and Chuck called the commander of the Ninth Precinct to send someone over to dig out the bullet.
“We’ll do a ballistics test on it. It could give us something,” Chuck said. “And you’ll need protection.”
“Oh, come on—” said Lee.
But Chuck cut him off. “It’s not up for debate.”
“Okay,” Lee answered. “It doesn’t really fit the profile, though. I wouldn’t expect someone like this killer to be a shooter. It could be completely unrelated to the case.”
He thought about mentioning the text message on his cell phone, but he saw Detective Florette heading their way and decided to wait.
Florette walked up and stood beside them, hands in his pockets. “This guy is really sick, isn’t he?” he said to Lee.
“Yeah,” Lee replied. “He’s really sick.”
“So now we’ve definitely got a multiple on our hands,” said Chuck.
“What we have here,” Lee said, “is a serial killer.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Everywhere he went, he felt people were looking at him, judging him. There was no forgiveness, no redemption. He knew that as well as he knew every inch of his bedroom ceiling, having stared up at it all these years while lying on his bed, hoping that his mother wouldn’t call him—no, please don’t—but then she always would, asking him to kneel beside her on the hard floor, smelling the odor of floor wax and hair spray that permeated her bedroom.
But the Master understood him, and one day, he promised, he would find Samuel a girl who would embrace him and forgive him for all his wickedness. They were so young, so innocent, soft as young birds, with smooth skin and eyes as wide as the blond meadows that surrounded his boyhood home. He often thought of that house in Iowa, the rows of cornfields stretching off into the horizon, and the feel of his father’s hand in his as they headed for the barn to bring out the big green tractor.
He never really understood why his father left, except that men are evil by nature, and that they all leave sooner or later. And now there was just Queens, and the sound of trucks on the Long Island Expressway at night, and his mother’s footsteps upstairs as she wandered the house like a lost soul searching for redemption. The Lord loves you, Samuel—find your salvation in Jesus.
Rage bubbled up from deep inside him, boiling in his stomach and constricting his throat, choking him. Maybe it was as his mother had said, that if she had never had a child, his father would not have left. He imagined scenarios that might have been if he had never been born: his mother and father together, driving in the car with the wind blowing in the open windows, his mother laughing, her head thrown back—not that tight laugh he knew now, but a softer, happier sound, like the tinkling of wind chimes. One of the girls had laughed like that, a gentle, rolling sound, like the bubbling of a brook. He imagined making