Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [56]
A pretty girl with caramel-colored skin in the back raised her hand.
“Are there any steps being taken in the class curriculum to make sure this doesn’t happen again?”
“Since I’m not part of the administration of this school, I can’t answer that question. I know there were support groups set up to help people deal with it.”
“Did you attend one?” another student asked.
“No, I didn’t.” “Why not?”
The real answer was too complicated, and too revealing: he had suffered a complete nervous breakdown, and was hospitalized at St. Vincent’s for nearly a month.
“I was … laid up for a while. Also, I see someone privately.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Someone shouted from the back of the hall, “What happened to your hand?”
Lee looked for the speaker, but couldn’t see who it was. “I had an accident.”
There was a longer silence, as if the students sensed a line had been crossed, prying into what was personal for him.
“The important question is not what did we do wrong,” he said, “but what can we learn from this? Because there’s always something to be learned. Perhaps the greater the mistake, the more there is to be learned from it. Sometimes we are blinded because as human beings we don’t allow ourselves to think the unthinkable. It is perhaps a failure of imagination, but it is even more a failure of courage. To face our darkest fear and fantasies is not easy, and it is not for everyone. But as members of the law enforcement community, it is the job we have chosen.”
A chubby white kid in the third row raised a hand.
“Do you think the terrorists were psychopaths?”
Lee thought about it for a moment.
“No,” he said. “I think they were misguided fanatics, but I don’t think they entirely lacked the capacity for empathy.”
“What about your current case?”
“I can’t really comment on an ongoing investigation.” Lee looked at Tom Mariella, sitting in the back row. He gave a tiny nod, and Lee continued. “Okay, one more question.”
The thin physics major with the round glasses raised his hand.
“Yes?”
“Can we avoid—” He paused, flustered, his face reddening from the neck upward. “Yes?” Lee said.
“Can we avoid another attack like the one on September eleventh?”
Lee looked up, aware that they were all waiting for his answer. The room was dead quiet. He could hear the faint whoosh of traffic out on Tenth Avenue. In the back of the room, someone coughed.
“I think we can,” he said, “if we can allow ourselves to think the unthinkable.”
And as he said the words, he realized they applied not just to the tragic events of last September, but to this case as well. Think the unthinkable. Certainly the killer he was chasing was doing just that—and now Lee had to do the same.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Hush, little baby, don’t you cry Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby And if that lullaby goes dry, Mama’s gonna bring you a nice big eye
The song had been running through Caleb’s head for days now—he wasn’t sure why. He didn’t know whether his mother sang it to him or not. Maybe she did, but he didn’t trust any memories of that time. He tried not to think about her, because when he did, he saw her face on that last day. As he shook his head to rid himself of the image, another song popped into his head.
Down in the valley, the valley so low Hang your head over, hear the wind blow
He had been down in the valley that day, rummaging among the weeds and willows at the riverbank, spending all day outside so he wouldn’t have to come home to his pa. Just the two of them in the house now, and his pa was almost always in an evil mood. Caleb tried to make himself inconspicuous, and he was pretty good at it, but sometimes his father had a few drinks and was feeling chatty. He hated it when Pa was feeling chatty, because then he would sit Caleb down at the kitchen table and lecture him on women and their evil ways, about how you could never trust them and they were all just a bunch of she-devils who would betray you the minute your back was turned.
Caleb would nod and pretend to listen, but it was the same thing over and