From a Whisper to a Scream

by Charles de Lint

  This couldn’t be all there was, she’d realized then. There had to be something more. All she needed was a chance to find it. Coming back to Newford had seemed the perfect opportunity to start with a clean slate. Nobody knew her here.

  At least she’d thought nobody did.

  She didn’t expect him to still be alive. She hadn’t realized that it was his voice she heard in her head, calling her back. The same voice that whispered on the wind outside the window of her squat right now.

  It was a hollow, midnight voice, carried on a night wind, a voice that only she could hear. The same voice that had told her what would happen to her if she ever told anyone about the little games they played in her room late at night. But it was colder now, and harsher. It was a voice like ice, and it cut a chill through her courage every time it spoke.

  Coming back to Newford had been a mistake—maybe the biggest she’d ever made. But she couldn’t leave either. It was too late for that. No matter where she fled, he’d just follow her, and sooner or later he’d catch her and they’d be right back where it had all begun, except this time he’d really kill her.

  But he’d do it slowly, not as he was killing these other girls.

  That’s what the midnight voice promised her in its cold, harsh whisper: a slow, lingering death.

  It was only a matter of time.

  She huddled in the corner of her squat, the blanket from her bedroll wrapped around her. She shivered, though the night wasn’t cold. Somewhere in the building she could hear a boom box howling out some heavy metal. It sounded like Ozzie. There were voices down the hall in one of the other rooms—a quiet murmur, loud enough for her to hear that it was a conversation, but too low for her to make out what it was about. In the foyer downstairs, there was a sudden flurry of shouts, or maybe laughter.

  She was surrounded by people, but she might as well have been alone in the building. In the city. On the planet.

  She might as well have been dead.

  But that was what he wanted, and she wasn’t going to give him that pleasure. She’d come back to Newford looking for a new start, to find a haven for herself in a world grown too cold, to understand what people meant when they talked about happiness, how they could speak of it as something that didn’t come out of a bottle or from taking some drug.

  Now all she wanted to do was survive.

  A footstep sounded in the hall outside her door, and she drew herself into a tighter ball, pressing into the corner, where she huddled as though the wall could swallow her up and hide her. Someone stepped inside, but it wasn’t the bulk of her father that loomed in the doorway.

  “Chelsea?” the newcomer asked. “You in there, girl?”

  She let out a ragged breath. It was only Jammin’—a guy she’d met yesterday afternoon down by the concession stands that stood in a cluster where the boardwalk met the Pier. He was a reed-thin black man with the most soulful eyes she’d ever seen. Though his family was originally from Africa, two generations back, he had a Rastaman’s dreadlocks and played in a reggae band that also incorporated African soukous and highlife elements in their music. Hanging around with Rastas had given his speech a lilting cadence.

  She’d been attracted to the infectious rhythms of the band’s impromptu concert on the end of the Pier and had helped Jammin’ haul away his gear when the cops came by to break things up. He’d ended up being an easy guy to be with, and they’d spent most of the afternoon just hanging out on the beach. Jammin’ wanted her to come to the club where his band was playing that night. She’d put him off, but didn’t tell him why.

  What was she supposed to say? That her father went around killing people on Friday night, and she had to hide because the only person he really wanted to kill was her?

  Not likely.

  She could never hide anyway. Every Friday night found her in the Zone, trying to spot him before he saw her. What she’d do when she found him, she didn’t know. She carried a switchblade in her back pocket. She supposed she’d try to kill him. But he was the one that did the killing … .

  Jammin’ was peering into her corner. “That be you, Chelsea?” he asked.

  She shifted her position and let her blanket fall from her shoulders. Still hugging her knees, she nodded, but then realized he couldn’t see the motion.

  “Yeah,” she said. “What’s doing?”

  “Come by to check you out, girl,” he said. He crossed the room and slouched down against the wall beside her. “You don’t be looking so good last time I see you.”

  “I guess I just get moody. How’d you find me?”

  “I asked around.”

  Jesus, she thought. Was she that easy to find? What if her father did the same thing? The fear that had started to fade in the presence of another person began to crawl up her spine again. She shivered.

  Jammin’ caught the edge of her blanket and pulled it over her shoulders again, resting his arm around her. She snuggled gratefully against him.

  “It don’t be so cold,” he said, “so why you got the shakes? You be shooting some bad shit?”

  “I don’t do drugs.”

  Not anymore.

  Jammin’ just shook his head. “Living in a place like this, girl, you gonna catch some fever—catch it bad.”

  “I’m okay.”

  If she just ignored the icy sound of the midnight voice that was whispering outside on the wind. Jammin’s presence helped.

  “How’d the gig go?” she asked.

  “The club was full, mon—lots of brothers and sisters come to hear The Jah Men play. You should be coming, too. Feel the rhythm. Nothing like dancing to make the blues go ’way.”

  The wind called her name and she shivered again.

  “Maybe I will,” she said.

  FIVE

  At two A.M., the 12th Precinct was still in an uproar. The general duty area was crowded and noisy as various detectives and off-duty officers, brought in to handle the crowd, interviewed derelicts, hookers, pimps, and whoever else they could round up who had been on the Zone’s streets at the time of the killing. Outside the precinct building, the media had gathered like birds of prey.

  Although the case belonged to the 12th, the detectives who’d caught the first squeal were now working with Homicide Lieutenant Jacob Brewer, who’d come up from Headquarters and commandeered the precinct lieutenant’s office to talk to the investigating officers. The calm inside Lieutenant Coonan’s office was relative. Through its glass walls, Brewer and the two detectives he had with him could watch the hubbub of activity, but the noise was thankfully muffled.

  Detective Second Grade Thomas Morningstar was grateful for the break from the chaos that had started with the discovery of the Slasher’s fourth victim and showed no signs of letting up. He’d been on the street since early evening, and he was beat, but he knew it would be a long time before he saw his bed. He’d phoned his wife as soon as he got back to the precinct, but she’d already known he’d be late getting in.

  “I heard about it on the news,” Angie had told him. The sympathy in her voice helped give him his second wind.

  The shit hadn’t really hit the fan until they got an ID on the Slasher’s latest victim. Up to that point they’d thought they were working on the latest installment of some wacked-out john’s hard-on for teenage prostitutes. It hadn’t been a pretty situation, but—the cynic in Thomas had thought—the pressure that came down from the Commissioner’s office had seemed aimed more at impressing the media than at an honest desire to solve the crime. Nobody cared for the situation, and they were doing their best to track down the perp, but the push for immediate results still appeared moderate to Thomas.

  The victims were all of a kind—slim girls, ranging in age from number three, who’d been sixteen, to number one, who’d been twenty. They were all blonde, though one of them had been a dye job, and they were all hookers, working the Zone.

  Until number four.

  Leslie Wilson wasn’t a hooker, for all that she’d been dre
ssed like a tramp and cruising the Zone. No, what they had here was the daughter of Charles Wilson—Mr. Real Estate, a big wheel from the Beaches who rubbed shoulders with city council members and other political hotshots. It was his little girl, out for a night’s slumming, who’d ended up being in the wrong place at the wrong time earlier tonight.

  In Coonan’s office now, Brewer lit up a cigarette.

  “What went down tonight still doesn’t kill the psycho john theory,” he said.

  Frank Sarrantonio nodded in agreement. Sarrantonio was Thomas’s partner, a detective first grade. He was a stocky man in his early forties, who kept himself in shape through a strict regimen of weight lifting and other exercises. With his hair greased back and the cheap suits he wore, he was taken for a hood as often as a cop.

  “The Wilson girl might not’ve been a hooker,” Brewer went on, “but she sure as shit was decked out like one. There’s no way the perp could’ve known the difference.” He sighed wearily. “I just don’t get it. We had the place crawling with blues and suits. How the hell did he pull it off without anyone seeing him?”

  To date they had made very little headway in the case, but then they had next to nothing to go on—just the bodies. Each one had died in exactly the same manner. The medical examiner laid it out for them: bruise marks around the throats of the victims showed that the perp had pulled them in close, then gone in with the knife, blade edge up, straight into the stomach, ripping up through the chest cavity. A sharp knife, the ME told them. A very sharp knife—and big.

  The perp had to be big, too, from the spread of the bruises on the victims’ throats, and strong, to hold them in their panic and wield the knife the way he did.

  So they were looking for a big, strong guy who carried a big sharp knife, and they were coming up empty whichever way they turned, though Thomas, Frank, and other officers of the 12th had clocked in hundreds of man-hours since the first victim had been found.

  The usual sexual offenders had been swept up for interrogation, with a concentration on those with a given name of Nick, Nicholas, Nicky, or any permutation thereof, because of the odd graffiti found near a couple of the crime scenes. That line of inquiry met with a complete lack of success. When the same graffiti was also discovered in parts of the city not associated with the crimes, they put that part of the investigation on a back burner.

  Mostly their time had been spent tracking down and interviewing possible witnesses, as well as the friends and associates of the victims. Finding family for the latter had been a hopeless cause until the latest victim.

  “I was two blocks from where it went down.” Frank said, “right about the time Wilkes estimates the girl died, and I didn’t hear a squawk.”

  Brewer nodded, then jerked a thumb at the chaos that had taken over the general duty area. “You know what this means?”

  Thomas knew, but he let his partner reply.

  “We start at square one and go through it all again,” Frank said.

  “You’ve got it—unless one of you hotshots can come up with something we haven’t thought of yet?”

  “Maybe we should hire Papa Jo-el to use his gris-gris to find the killer,” Frank said.

  Brewer cracked a tight smile. “Right.”

  “Actually,” Thomas broke in, “I heard an odd rumor about Papa Jo-el tonight. Word is some of Flynn’s crew seem to think that the killings might have something to do with the voodoo crowd trying to muscle in on their turf.”

  Frank nodded in agreement. “I heard that, too, from one of my snitches, but I don’t buy it.”

  “Why not?” Brewer asked.

  “What’s it getting him? If Papa wants a gang war, the fewer cops he’s got prowling through the area, the better.”

  “But it’s got to be hurting Flynn’s business,” Thomas said. “Walking through the Zone tonight, I hardly saw any of the regular traffic at all—just the diehards.”

  “Look into it,” Brewer said. “I want every angle that makes even a grain of sense covered, and then I want you to start hitting the ones that don’t make any sense.”

  Thomas and Frank rose to their feet. As they reached the door, Brewer called Thomas back.

  “Go ahead,” Brewer told Frank. “This’ll just take a minute.” He waited until the door was closed and Thomas was seated again before he continued. “Word’s come down since the Wilson girl got IDed that it’d be a good idea to have you taken from the case. I’ve got a feeling it’s coming from the Commissioner.”

  Thomas nodded. He’d seen that one coming himself as soon as the victim was IDed. When it was just a problem with hookers, O’Hannigan wouldn’t care who handled it, but with the publicity the case was going to get now, he’d want someone better able—read, nonminority—to represent the force when it came to dealing with the press.

  Ever since he’d joined the NPD, Thomas had put up with abuse from a certain segment of his fellow officers. Although he’d come to expect it, it still snuck up and surprised him. He could never get used to it. Time and again his brother would ask, “Why do you put up with this crap?” The only answer Thomas could give was that he wanted to prove them wrong.

  Brewer looked at him as though waiting for him to say something, but Thomas rarely spoke unless he had to. It wasn’t that he was uncomfortable talking to people, or even diffident; he just found that you learned more if you waited. It was a trick he’d learned from his mother. She rarely spoke, but she knew how to listen, and there was nothing that went on around her of which she wasn’t aware.

  “People like to talk,” she’d told him once. “If you wait long enough, they’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

  It was a good attitude for a policeman to have, especially when dealing with lowlifes. You just sat there, waiting, patient, and pretty soon the tension would build until they got so nervous you couldn’t shut them up. Thomas had worked hard at first to develop that attitude; now it was just a part of his natural makeup. But he didn’t carry it too far. You had to know when to drop it, because there were relationships you didn’t need tension in, like with your wife, or your partner. Or your rabbi.

  “So what happens now?” he asked Brewer, knowing this was what the lieutenant was waiting for.

  Brewer shook another cigarette free from his pack and lit up before replying. “Nothing. It’s business as usual. Who gives a fuck what color your skin is? You’re a good cop.”

  Without any false modesty, Thomas knew that. He and Frank had a higher solved-case ratio than any other detective team at the 12th, but he knew his recent upgrade to sergeant was due more to his rabbi. Brewer, than to the department’s sense of fairness. Because there were people in headquarters who did give a fuck what color your skin was.

  “You might be interested in knowing,” Brewer added, “that your lieutenant sided with me.”

  Well, he would, Thomas thought. While Lieutenant Coonan was the kind of bigot who professed to have nothing against minorities just so long as they kept to themselves, he didn’t give Thomas a hard time. The reasoning for that was simple. Coonan’s cousin had married one of Frank’s cousins, which made Frank family. And since he was Frank’s partner …

  “But the thing is,” Brewer went on, “you and Sarrantonio have got to play this one by the book to cover not only your ass, but mine as well. You’ve got to nail that sick fuck or we could all be out on foot patrol in the Tombs.”

  Thomas nodded. The threat of being demoted was an exaggeration; what Brewer was really saying was that all of their careers would come to a halt. Forget about promotions; forget about that choice transfer to Homicide. Just thinking about it made Thomas angry, so he turned his thoughts to the victim’s father, trying to make the needed connections to put the situation into perspective.

  “This Wilson guy … ?” he began.

  “Is part of the big money that put O’Hannigan where he is today,” Brewer completed. “So you see how it stands?”

  “Sure.”

  “Anything else?” B
rewer asked.

  Thomas shook his head. “I’ll get right onto this.”

  Brewer gave him one of his thin smiles. “I know you will.”

  “What’d the Loot want?” Frank asked when Thomas joined him in the general duty room.

  Frank frowned as Thomas explained what the lieutenant had told him about O’Hannigan.

  “Those fucking micks,” Frank said. “You know, when my dad used to work on the docks with them, he told me that they didn’t even think of us as being white. We were just wops and guineas to them, trying to muscle in on their jobs.” He gave Thomas a sad look. “Sound familiar?”

  Thomas nodded. He’d heard it often enough—not only directed to his own people, but to every new wave of immigrants.

  “Thing is,” Frank went on, “the guys that talk that way, it’s just that they’ve let themselves get soft. You get yourself a guy like my dad was … He comes here from the old country and he’s just burning to work hard and make good. The lazy fuckers who already have the jobs—all of a sudden they’ve got to bust their asses again, just to hang onto what they’ve got.

  “You ask me, that’s what makes this country great. You get a guy who’s willing to put in an honest day’s work, he can get somewhere and it doesn’t mean shit where he’s from or what he looks like. Anybody can’t take the heat—fuck ’em.”

  Frank hitched up his pants and gave Thomas a grin.

  “But enough with the philosophy shit—right?” he said. “We’ve got a case to break. Where do you want to start? Hauling in some old sex perps again?”

  Thomas shook his head. “I think we should have a talk with Papa Jo-el.”

  “Yeah? And if he puts some kind of voodoo juju on us?”

  “We juice him right back with a Kickaha curse.”

  Frank looked at him for a long moment. “You know, whenever you talk like that you sound almost half-serious.”

  Thomas thought of his brother John and the men John trained with in the Warrior Lodge up on the reserve. The old teachings of Kickaha shaman were taught alongside of Green Beret and Marine techniques, so that the Warriors went from sweat lodges and dream quests to learning how to break down, clean, and reassemble an assault rifle all in one day. The mystical and the practical went hand in hand, and the way John explained it, Thomas could almost believe in the supposed powers of the old shaman. And even when the metaphysical seemed improbable at best, he could still feel a kind of connection with the natural world around him.