Silent Screams - C. E. Lawrence [84]
It was the second time Lee had been there in a week, and he still couldn’t bear the smell of formaldehyde seeping into the halls from behind the closed and bolted metal doors lining the corridor. His head ached, and his ribs hurt with every breath, but he clenched his jaw and tried to keep his face impassive. After reporting the attack on him to the Chinatown precinct commander, he had fallen asleep, slept eleven hours, and woke up feeling like hell. But he had insisted on being here today, and here he was.
“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Chuck told Mrs. Stavros. She looked at her husband and pressed her trembling lips together.
“She’ll get through it,” Mr. Stavros replied. “Let’s get this over with.” His accent was as flat as the Maine coastline. He glided over his r’s like a seagull swooping over the frigid coastal waters of New England.
As they entered the room with the wall-to-wall compartment containing all the unidentified corpses, they found a young technician waiting for them. He was Asian, with thick black hair and a delicate pair of wire-rimmed glasses. Lee was reminded of the sweet-faced Asian girl who had helped him the night before. He didn’t even know her name. The technician nodded at Chuck and Lee, waiting as the little group assembled themselves in the room.
Mrs. Stavros made a gurgling sound that was like a stifled sob. Lee glanced at Chuck, who looked embarrassed and miserable. Chuck had never been relaxed in social situations where the rules of conduct were not clearly spelled out. As a policeman, he had entered a society full of rules, regulations, and prescribed behavior. In college, it had been Lee’s job to smooth over social situations with a joke or a witty remark—he had been the charmer, while Chuck was the serious one.
The Stavroses stood still as stone, their faces rigid and swollen with unshed tears, as the medical technician pulled out the tray with their daughter’s body. Once again Lee was struck by the spotless, shining metal and the pristine whiteness of the sheet covering Pamela’s body. Chuck nodded, and the technician lifted the sheet, exposing the girl’s face. It was untouched, white as chalk, but dark purple strangulation marks were visible on her neck.
Mrs. Stavros gasped and buried her face in the crook of her husband’s thick arm. Chuck gave another brief nod to the attendant, who replaced the sheet and slipped the body back into the freezer unit. Mr. Stavros hid his wife’s face from the terrible sight.
“It’s her,” he said brusquely, as if he was angry with Chuck for bringing him here. Lee had seen this displaced anger before, and he felt sorry for his friend. These people were so filled with grief and rage, and they vented their frustration on the only person available: Chuck Morton. Lee knew it was hard on his friend. As precinct captain, Chuck was used to giving orders and being obeyed, but to Pamela’s parents he was simply the bearer of bad news.
The four of them walked in silence back through the hallways toward the building entrance. Lee knew that the Stavroses’ anger would make it harder for him to do his job. They would resist his questions, and maybe even refuse to answer them. As they entered the lobby of the building, he decided to take a stab at a pretty obvious sales tactic.
“Would you mind answering a few questions that will help us catch your daughter’s killer?” he said, leading them to a row of scuffed yellow plastic chairs in the corner of the room.
Mr. Stavros turned around to face him. “Catch him? Catch him? I’ll help you fillet, boil or fry him,” he said, spitting the words out. “Better yet, you lead me to him, and just leave the rest to me, huh?”
Theodore Stavros was a big man, solid as a slab of granite, and Lee felt the physical threat as Stavros hovered over him, his small blue eyes shot through with burst blood vessels and rage. He had an abrupt realization: Ted Stavros was an alcoholic. He wondered that he hadn’t noticed it before—the ruddy cheeks, the