Silent Screams - C. E. Lawrence [87]
“Could it be a copycat, maybe?” Chuck suggested.
“No,” said Lee. “I’m more convinced now than before that this is our guy’s work. If the missing necklace weren’t enough—”
“Granted, that’s a bit of a coincidence,” Chuck agreed, “but she could’ve lost it anywhere. She could have sold it, had it stolen.”
“Come on,” Lee said, sidestepping a dog walker with eight or ten different breeds in tow. “We never released that information to the press. Don’t you think that’s too much coincidence?”
The dog walker paused to let a black Labrador retriever relieve himself on a hydrant. The other dogs followed suit, eager to deposit their calling cards, in the mysterious language of dog communication.
“I don’t know,” Chuck said. “I feel like I don’t know anything anymore.”
“Think about it,” said Lee. “She was found in the crucifixion pose, just like others. The only difference was that she wasn’t in a church.”
“And she wasn’t mutilated.”
“No, because he didn’t feel comfortable where he was. He didn’t feel he had enough time. Or…”
Lee looked down the avenue. From where they stood he could see long gray plume of smoke snaking skyward from the still smoldering ruins. The odor was sharper today: the thin, acrid smell of defeat.
“Or what?” Chuck said.
“He keeps refining his signature—like the blood in the wine, which is a whole new thing. Did the DNA tests of the blood turn up anything yet?”
“It’s all hers. Not surprising, I guess.”
“The thing I don’t like about it is that he’s becoming more organized, instead of less,” Lee said. “That means that instead of falling apart, as some killers do, he’s actually gaining more control as he goes.”
“Have you seen that Willow guy again?” Chuck asked as they dodged a gaggle of schoolchildren. The students were about seven—just Kylie’s age, Lee thought. They walked hand in hand, three abreast, followed by a harried-looking teacher. The tassel on her striped Guatemalan wool hat swung back and forth as she lunged after the children, her arms full of papers and notebooks.
“Uh, no—not yet.” Lee had waited for Eddie to contact him, but so far had heard nothing from his friend.
“Did you get your statement in to Internal Affairs?”
“Yeah. I did that right after the guy showed up in your office.”
“Jeez,” Chuck said. “Doesn’t all this sort of—get to you?”
Lee looked at him. “Chuck, these days, everything gets to me, okay?”
“Okay, okay. Don’t bite my head off. I was just asking.”
“Look, here’s how it is for me: this is awful stuff, but it’s something I can do, something that I have some control over, you know what I mean? I can’t control what these guys do, but I can help catch them—and that gets me up in the morning. And for a while, that was the hardest part of the day. Still is, I guess.”
Chuck stopped walking and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Look, I know you’ve been through a lot,” he said, staring at the traffic barreling noisily up First Avenue. “I just—well, I guess I worry about you sometimes, you know? I mean, I don’t want to get weird on you or anything, but you aren’t looking all that great these days.”
“Really?” Lee said. “You think?”
This struck them both as funny for some reason, and they burst out laughing. A thin brunette in a tracksuit frowned as she approached them, as if she thought they were laughing at her. She had a tight little ass and was power walking with Heavyhands weights, and her face curled up in contempt as she passed them without breaking stride. That just made them laugh even harder. The more they tried to stop, the more impossible it was. Tears spurted from their eyes like buttons popping from a shirt, and they were forced to stop walking, totally immobilized by unrestrained, hysterical laughter. Lee leaned against a parking meter for support, and Chuck collapsed on the steps of a deli, holding his stomach. Lee’s stomach ached too, but he still couldn’t stop laughing.
Passing pedestrians looked at them, frowning, as if they disapproved of such levity so soon after the worst tragedy in the city’s history.