Silent Screams - C. E. Lawrence [52]
He shook his head to try to erase the voices in his head, but it was no use. He was tired, so tired…. Spread out on the table in front of him was a small collection of silver and gold crosses on their delicate chains. He selected one with a tiny diamond in its center and smiled. His mother would like this one.
Chapter Twenty-three
The sad-eyed priest beckoned to him from the other side of a long, winding river. Lee longed to cross the river and be with the priest, but the current was strong and he was afraid of being sucked downstream. The priest opened his arms and smiled, and just as Lee was about to jump into the water—
The phone rang. Lee pulled himself out of the world of his dream, threw off the covers, and grabbed the receiver, glad to be rid of the image of the sad-eyed priest, relieved to be in his own bedroom.
“Hello?”
“It’s me.” It was Chuck. “We got a hit on the girl in Queens. Some kids came forward to say they thought they knew her. They’re at the station now.”
“Be right there.”
At the station, Lee followed Chuck and Butts down the hall to Interrogation Room Three, still rubbing sleep from his eyes, a cup of coffee in his hand.
Through the one-way glass he could see them: three East Village types, two boys and a girl. They were young, and probably even younger than Jane Doe Number Five. Two of them, the girl and one of the boys, were gothed up to the max—black leather, purple spiked hair, bloodred lipstick, their skin pierced with enough hardware to set off metal detectors in any airport. Lee counted five rings in the boy’s nose alone.
The third kid was less outrageously dressed. Slim and small-boned, he wore a simple buckskin jacket over blue jeans and no makeup, and sported a single nose ring. His hair was brown and combed straight back, rather than spiked up into points like the other boy’s hair, which resembled the crown on the Statue of Liberty. He looked more nervous than his companions, too, glancing at the door every few seconds, as if he expected it to open and disgorge a monster into the room.
The other boy was larger, solidly built but soft, with bits of baby fat poking out between his leather vest and metal-studded black leather pants. Judging by his pale eyebrows and lashes, Lee figured that his hair was probably naturally blond, but it was hard to tell what was hidden under all that purple dye.
His forearms showed evidence of recent wounds—not needle tracks, Lee thought, but the small slashes left after “cutting”—a process where kids would nick themselves with sharp knives, sometimes a dozen or more cuts at a time. It was fashionable among the goth crowd right now, but it reeked of despair, a desperate attempt to numb feelings more painful than physical discomfort.
He looked at the girl to see if she too was a cutter, but her arms were covered by the sleeves of her lacy black sweater. She was tall, with dyed jet-black hair. Her lipstick was the color of dried blood, and her mouth turned downward at the corners in a habitual pout. Her eyes were ringed with black eyeliner, so that she resembled a surly raccoon. Under all the makeup, Lee imagined she was probably quite pretty. She wore a hard expression, and both boys looked as though they took orders from her. The smaller boy had a sharp, intelligent face, whereas the bigger one looked to be the muscle of the organization. Beauty, brains, and brawn, he thought, watching them. There was usually a leader and followers in groups like this, and the girl was clearly the leader.
The girl was staring at a photo of Jane Doe Number Five. Pushing it away from her to the other end of the table, she frowned at her companions.
“Look, you’re good with kids,” Chuck said to Lee. “Why don’t you handle this one?”
“Okay.” Lee looked to see if Butts was feeling any resentment, but if he was, he wasn’t showing it.
He and Butts and Chuck entered the room together, Lee moving