Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [23]
He sat down and dove into a Bach partita. No scales, no warm-up to get him in the mood—just Bach, straight up, no chaser. The sound washed over him, as primal and powerful as the first time he heard it. The notes twisted and danced on the page, in his fingers, on the keyboard. As he played, he experienced the piano as the percussion instrument it was—a great, resounding drum with eighty-eight voices, made up of tones and half-tones, a glorious creation of wood and metal and ivory, all melded together by engineering genius.
As he dug his fingers in deeper, pounding the keys in an ecstasy of fury and release, he was enveloped by a feeling of profound gratitude. He was able to participate in the grand dance of music, communing with great composers—a gift shared by even the lowliest of musicians. It wasn’t about ego, or showing off—there was a purity about this that existed nowhere else in his life.
It was only when he stopped that he felt the tears sliding down his face.
Afterward, he sat in the green stuffed armchair by the window and thought about Ana Watkins. What he didn’t tell Chuck or Butts—what he had never told anyone—was that he had very nearly fallen for her. He had to admit, she was good—she pushed every button he had with such dexterity it left him breathless. She played the hapless victim, tossed aside by the men around her, a fragile waif orphaned by the storms of an unfortunate life. She drew out his need to protect and shield women, a need instilled in him by his mother long before his father walked out. His father’s desertion only intensified his determination to make up for the sins of all men, brutish and uncaring creatures. His mother had already decided, without realizing it consciously, that Lee’s job—indeed, his duty—was to make up for the transgressions of thoughtless scoundrels like Duncan Campbell.
And so when Ana Watkins leaned into him, her thin body trembling with terror and desire, he met her halfway, pulled toward her with an inexorable magnetic force. Even as he felt himself falling into the sinkhole of self-disgust, he was helpless to stop, spinning like a top when he tried to pull back against the centrifugal force of their mutual desire. They shared a fervent and fumbling embrace in a rain-darkened alley one Friday night, soaked and sweating under a burned-out streetlamp. He managed to pull away after a prolonged and very wet kiss, but he felt himself weakening even as his forehead burned with shame and his ears rang with the sound of self-condemnation.
Fortunately for him, fate—or luck, or chance, or whatever it was—intervened before he betrayed his ethics and his profession. Ana came down with a serious case of bronchitis, and an elderly aunt swooped down from New England to nurse her back to health, breaking the forward momentum of their passion. Left standing alone, he took a shaky step backward before regaining his footing and his self-respect. When Ana recovered, he insisted on meeting only at the clinic in Flemington, and only on days when his accountant was sitting in the outside office.
Faced with this new reality, Ana discontinued her sessions and slunk away. He considered himself lucky that she didn’t report his conduct to the state licensing board. Perhaps she had enough of a conscience to realize that would be less than honorable, since she had instigated the whole thing. He had not heard from her until she called two days ago.
And now she was dead. The only thing he could do for her now was to find her killer.
The walk to Dr. Williams’s office on East Twelfth Street was less than fifteen minutes on average—he was there in less than ten. There was no one else in the waiting room when he arrived, and he sat listening to the murmur of voices coming from the rooms around him. Dr. Williams’s office was on the fifth floor of a medical building and shared