Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [74]
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
As he drove through the gently sloping farm fields, Lee thought about each victim, and what they had in common. On the surface, they had very little in common, but there was some thread connecting them. There had to be—there always was. Once you saw the pattern, and how the pieces connected, you had a clearer insight into the killer’s personality.
But this murderer might as well be a ghost. He was hiding his pattern, his victimology, so well … but what if the lack of a pattern was in itself a pattern? What if they could somehow connect the seeming randomness of the crimes to a particular type of person?
As he pulled into the driveway of his mother’s house, Lee saw purple and white balloons festooned on the lamppost at the end of the drive. He smiled—purple was Kylie’s new favorite color. She had given up pink as “too girlie” a few months ago. As he pulled up onto the patch of lawn that served as a parking space, the front door of the house was flung open and his niece came rushing out, trailed by two other little girls.
“Uncle Leeeee!” she cried as he opened the car door, throwing herself at him.
Her two friends followed suit. “Uncle Leeee!” they yelled gleefully, wrapping their arms around his legs. He pretended not to notice and tried to walk, a girl clinging to each leg, as Kylie peeled off and hopped up and down alongside him.
“You look so funny!” she hooted as he pretended to be unaware of the clinging girls, struggling to move his legs forward. After a couple of minutes of this, all three of the children dissolved into laughter, and the two hanging onto him were forced to let go.
“You’re funny!” the smaller one said. She was a pixie with olive skin and straight jet black hair cut short with long bangs over large dark eyes.
“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” Lee asked Kylie as they all headed toward the house.
“This is Angelica,” said Kylie, stroking the pixie’s shiny black hair, “and this is Meredith.”
Meredith was not a pretty child—much taller than Angelica and Kylie, she was very pale with bushy red hair, deep-set blue eyes, and a long, serious face. “Hello,” she said, studying Lee as though he were a laboratory specimen or object d’art. “You’re the criminal profiler, right?
Lee thought Meredith was entirely too precocious for her age.
“I’m in law enforcement, that’s right.”
Meredith walked backward so she could look up at him, as Kylie and Angelica skipped hand in hand alongside them, humming.
“I’ve read about the kind of work you do. It’s very interesting,” Meredith said, trying to skip backward. It was an awkward gait, and she was an ungainly child. “Is that how you hurt your arm?”
“Kind of.”
“I think I want to do what you do when I grow up.”
Lee smiled. “Well, you’re young—there’s plenty of time to change your mind.”
Meredith shook her head. “No, I’m very focused—I know that’s what I want to do.” She looked at him, her face serious. “I have a very high IQ, you know.”
“Well, that’s great,” he said as they reached the house.
“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Kylie said, taking Meredith by the hand and pulling her down the grassy slope toward the springhouse. “She thinks she’s all that.”
“No, I don’t,” said Meredith, “I just—” But at that moment Kylie threw herself onto the ground and began rolling down the grassy hillside. Angelica quickly followed suit, giggling all the way. Meredith stood for a moment with her hands at her sides, then said, “Oh, what the heck,” and rolled down after them.
Watching them, Lee remembered all the times he and Laura had rolled down that same hill—or, in winter, sledded down it and across the frozen stream at the bottom. He looked at his mother’s house: there were a good number of old stone houses in this river valley, and some of them had connections to the Revolutionary War, but his mother’s house practically oozed history.