Silent Victim

by C. E. Lawrence

  “I’ll tell you the whole story, if you really insist on it.”

  “Okay.”

  Lee told him the whole episode of the visit to John Jay—and the sudden attack of rage that caused him to punch a hole through the glass top of the door.

  Chuck listened warily, as if looking to catch him out in a lie, but when he was finished, said, “Okay. Well, maybe that’s a healthier reaction than depression. Are you going to be okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Yeah—right.” They both had to smile at that. It had become a little dance between them over the years: Chuck asking if Lee was okay when he obviously wasn’t, and Lee responding that he was fine. Another inheritance of his stoic Celtic upbringing: to admit weakness was itself a sign of weakness.

  “What did you tell the people at John Jay to explain their broken door?” Chuck asked.

  “I just said that I slipped on some water in the hall and fell against it.”

  Chuck snorted. “And they believed you?”

  “I guess so.”

  Morton rolled his eyes. “A place full of cops and forensic experts and you get away with a lie like that.”

  “I offered to pay for it, insisted actually, told them to take it out of my lecture pay, but they refused.”

  “Lecture pay?”

  “Oh, yeah. They, uh, asked me if I could come talk about—you know.” He didn’t want to say the words, as if they would scorch the air and burn his skin if released into the atmosphere.

  “Are you up to that?”

  “Well, I wasn’t sure until yesterday, but yes, I think I am.”

  Chuck heaved a deep, disbelieving sigh and put his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “If you say so.”

  “I got another call about the red dress.”

  “You want us to put a trace on your phone?”

  “I don’t know if it’ll do any good, but you can try. He could be calling from anywhere—last time it was a public pay phone. This time I tried star sixty-nine, but the number was blocked.”

  “Okay, I’ll see what I can do.” Chuck put a hand on Lee’s shoulder. “I hate to say it, but you’re not looking all that good lately.”

  It was true that the return of the depression had caused the usual problems with his appetite. His sleep had been erratic since Ana’s death, and gaunt circles had formed under his eyes.

  “Yeah,” Lee said. “I’ll be all right once I get some rest.” “I don’t know,” Chuck said. “Maybe you should—” “What?” Lee said, suddenly angry. “Give up my profession? Give up the search for my sister’s killer?”

  “God, Lee, I don’t—”

  “And what about this killer? Christ, Chuck, three people are dead already.” “I’m just saying—”

  “If I walk away from this, it’ll be worse—a lot worse. At least I’m doing something—”

  “You know, Lee, sometimes you just have to walk away.”

  “Don’t say that, Chuck—don’t ever say that to me!”

  He was surprised at the vehemence in his own voice. So was Chuck, by the look of it. He stared at Lee, then turned away and plucked a piece of paper from the pile on his desk.

  “Fine,” he said tersely. “Have a look at this.”

  It appeared to be a copy of a page from a diary. The feathery scrawl was elaborate, showy.

  Must confront him, It read. The words were underlined twice. Take courage—it’s the only way.

  He looked at Chuck. “Ana’s writing—from her diary?”

  “It was in a secret drawer hidden in her bureau. The guys who processed her house the first time didn’t find it, but the Jersey cop they posted to watch over the place got bored and started rooting around and discovered it.”

  Lee had an image of Trooper Anderson wandering through Ana’s rambling farmhouse, sniffing around for clues.

  “Okay,” he said. “Where’s the rest of it?”

  “They’re processing it for prints,” Chuck said. “This was the last entry.”

  “This could be about almost anyone,” Lee remarked.

  “Maybe it refers to her abuser.”

  “If she really was abused.”

  “You think she lied about that?”

  “Or was persuaded, or recovered false memories—anything’s possible.”

  “Christ,” Chuck said. “So that whole thing could be a red herring?”

  “Yep. There are plenty of cases of patients ‘recovering memories’ of things that never happened—especially if the therapist eggs them on. It’s like false confessions—people will say just about anything if you push them hard enough.”

  “Great,” Chuck said. “So that’s a possible false lead?”

  “I’m afraid so. Unless we find something else more specific, I don’t see what good it does us.” He put the photocopy back on the desk. “When is everyone else getting here?”

  “Any minute now—you’re early.”

  Lee frowned. “I thought the meeting was at two.”

  “Two-thirty.”

  “Whatever.” He sank down in one of the captain’s chairs, carefully laying his injured hand on the armrest. He could feel it throbbing with each pulse of his heart.

  There was a knock on the door. Chuck was standing next to it, and he flung the door open to admit Elena Krieger, who brushed past him as though she were visiting royalty. She glared at Lee.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “I just got here,” he lied.

  She narrowed her small blue eyes and looked around for a place to sit down. She was wearing tight gray slacks and a white knit shirt with a V neck. She threw herself into the nearest chair, brandishing her cleavage. Lee tried not to stare as her breasts competed with each other to push through the top of her shirt.

  “Okay,” she said to Chuck, as if he were the servant and she the master. “What have we got?”

  His reply was interrupted by the sound of wheezing. The door was flung open, and Detective Butts stumbled into the room, panting heavily.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Goddamn traffic on the GW Bridge.

  Am I late?”

  “Nope,” Chuck said. “Right on time.”

  Krieger raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips, as though Butts were the carrier of an incurable disease and she was determined not inhale the deadly spores.

  “Okay,” Butts said, pulling a chair up and sitting. His eyes fell on Lee’s bandaged hand. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “I put my hand through a glass partition in a door.”

  Butts shook his head. “This is the price you pay for breaking and entering in your spare time.”

  Krieger appeared to take his remark seriously. Her mouth fell open, and she turned to Chuck.

  “He’s kidding,” Morton said.

  Butts pulled a crumpled brown paper bag from his pocket and thrust it toward the others. It was smeared with splotches of grease. “Rugelach, anyone? My wife’s sister made it. Leftover from the funeral.”

  Krieger scowled and crossed her arms. “Can we get back to business, please?”

  Chuck held up the page with the diary entry. Before he could say anything, Krieger snatched it from him.

  “This is from her diary?” she asked, studying it.

  “Right,” Chuck answered, with a glance at Butts, who didn’t look at all put out by Krieger’s behavior. It occurred to Lee that he might be deliberately ignoring her.

  Krieger held up the diary entry. “So this could be referring to her killer.”

  “Unless she made up the whole thing,” Lee remarked.

  Krieger stared at him. “Why would she do that?”

  Lee explained his history with Ana, and her narcissistic personality.

  “She’d do that, then?” Butts asked.

  “I think we can’t discount that possibility. She might have even set it up so that her boyfriend would discover the diary.”

  “What about the warning note? You believe that is also fake?” Krieger asked.r />
  “Well, it did come from the magazines in her house,” Lee pointed out.

  “But the boyfriend definitely could have done that,” Butts said. “We need to have him in for a little chat.”

  “I think that’s a good idea,” Chuck agreed.

  “Think about it, though,” Lee said. “If he did create the warning note, then why doesn’t he get rid of the magazines once Ana is dead? Why leave them in the house for us to find?”

  “Criminals can be incredibly stupid,” Krieger remarked.

  “He didn’t strike me as stupid—quite the opposite,” Lee countered. “Did you think he was stupid?” he asked Butts.

  “No,” Butts admitted. “He’s a sharp guy. And he seemed real shaken. Unless he’s a terrific actor, the guy was definitely hit hard by her death. I still say we should bring him in, though. If for nothin’ else, maybe he’s thought of something that might help us find the real UNSUB.”

  “Agreed,” Chuck said. “At this point, he’s the one closest to the victim, so we can’t eliminate him yet, and, in any case, he could prove useful.”

  “So you say this Ana Watkins was so desperate for attention that she faked being stalked?” Krieger asked.

  “That’s what I’m beginning to believe,” Lee answered. “Isn’t that an odd coincidence that she was actually being stalked?”

  “I’m not sure she was,” Lee said. “I don’t really know yet. But I can see her faking the whole thing to get attention.” “From who?” Butts asked. “You?”

  “Yep,” said Chuck.

  Lee flushed and held his throbbing arm to his side.

  “So she was that into you?” Butts asked.

  “I’m sure she was getting attention from other people, too,” Lee said. “Her boyfriend, probably coworkers—if she did invent the whole thing, you can bet she let everyone know about it.” Then he thought about her face that night. “She really was scared—whether or not she had invented parts of it, there was no doubt she thought her life was in danger.”

  “You know,” Krieger said, “this UNSUB needs attention, too. He isn’t just punishing his victims—his crimes are also a ploy to be noticed.”

  Lee looked at her, surprised by her insight. For all her pooh-poohing the idea of profiling, he thought, she had good instincts.

  “That’s exactly right,” he agreed. “This is someone who feels he can’t attract attention unless he behaves in ways increasingly outside societal norms.”

  “Or, to put it another way,” Chuck said, “he’s displaying all the attributes of a sociopath. Right?”

  “Exactly. There’s another possibility, too. The diary entry could refer to her therapist. Maybe she was going to confront him about something.”

  “Or even her boss at the Swan,” Butts suggested.

  “Right,” Lee agreed.

  Krieger studied the note. “She wasn’t faking it,” she declared. “Her fear was real.”

  “How can you tell?” asked Chuck.

  “If she was faking it, she would have been more elaborate. When people lie, they add unnecessary details—”

  “You’re right!” Butts cried, spewing rugelach crumbs into the air. “That’s one ‘a the ways you can tell if a perp is lying: too many details!”

  Krieger gave a dignified sniff and turned to Chuck and Lee. “As I was saying, this note is too brief to be a ruse—it is succinct and to the point. She really is talking to herself, not to some imaginary audience. Look at the wording: ‘Must confront him.’ She doesn’t say ‘I must confront him'—no, she leaves off the subject of the sentence altogether, because she already knows who the subject of the sentence is.”

  Butts apparently couldn’t help himself. “That is goddamn brilliant, is what that is!”

  Krieger’s only reaction was a tiny upward curl of the left side of her mouth. “The real question that remains is who is the object of the sentence?”

  There was a hesitant tap on the door.

  “Come in,” Chuck said.

  The door opened just enough to admit Sergeant Ruggles’s head. With his clean-shaven, shiny face, he looked like an anxious schoolboy.

  “Beg pardon, sir,” he said, “but DC Connelly is on the line.”

  Chuck rolled his eyes. “I’ll take it outside. Keep going without me,” he said to the rest of them as he brushed past Ruggles, who stood in the doorway staring at Krieger. With his thick neck, bald head, and short, muscular legs, he reminded Lee of a bull terrier.

  “Is there anything else, Sergeant?” she said, returning his gaze.

  “Uh, no, there isn’t,” he replied, still staring, as if she were the Medusa and he were rooted to the spot by the sight of the writhing snakes on her head.

  Butts rescued him. “Rugelach?” he said, thrusting a crumbling fistful under the sergeant’s nose.

  “Uh, no thanks,” Ruggles said. Retreating hastily, he closed the door behind him.

  Lee thought he saw the corners of Krieger’s mouth turn up in a smile as she watched him go.

  “Now then,” she said, turning back to him and Butts, “where were we?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Lee Campbell looked out at the rows of upturned faces in the lecture hall. Most of them were thoughtful and attentive, hoping he would have answers for them—some kernel of wisdom to unlock the key to the darkest of human deeds. Not surprisingly, the room was packed. People stood along the walls, and he recognized a few professors in the rear seats. Word had gotten around that he was working on a serial-killer case. Very few details had been leaked to the press, though, and no doubt some people in the audience were hoping for some choice tidbits about the case.

  “'Behavior reflects personality.’ This statement was made by legendary FBI criminologist, one of the founders of profiling, John Douglas.” He paused to let this sink in.

  “'Behavior reflects personality.’ What does this mean? Because a person’s so-called ‘personality’ is comprised of so many things: upbringing, cultural background, religious beliefs, moral convictions—and the list goes on. So what can we take from Douglas’s assertion, and how can we apply it to an active case?”

  He took a breath. This was turning out to be even harder than he thought. It was one thing to prepare for this lecture—but now, in front of all of these people, he felt exposed and naked. His right hand throbbed, a dull ache like a steady drumbeat in the background of his mind. With his left hand, he took a drink of water from the bottle in front of him, then gripped the podium to steady himself.

  “The writer Robert McKee has said that stories happen ‘when you allow yourself to think the unthinkable.’ As many of you know, I had a recent case where there were two offenders working together. Though not unknown, it is not what we usually would expect in a case like this. There are, of course, other examples—the most notorious being Charles Ng and his partner in crime. The pattern that operated there was similar to what was operating in this case: a dominant figure who plans and controls the actions of the more submissive partner. In both the Ng case and this one, if you look closely enough, you see the patterns of not one but two personalities at work.

  “Profiling is especially useful when there is also little physical evidence—no blood, semen, DNA, hair, or even fibers—which often means a killer with both self-control and a sophisticated knowledge of crime scenes.”

  He paused and took a gulp of water, looking out across the sweep of faces. At this point in an elective lecture, you might expect a few people to have headed off for class. Since the events of 9/11 the whole city was jumpy, and this was nowhere more true than in centers of law enforcement, where there was an explosive combination of guilt, fear, and anger. He even heard rumors that enrollment had fallen off as a result. But no one had left the lecture room. In fact, a few more people had slipped into the room after he began his talk.

  “I know there’s been nearly a year of speculation about what went wrong on the morning of September 11,” he said, looking out at the full auditorium,
all eyes turned on him, the faces tense and expectant. “But there’s really no other way to say it: We missed all the warning signs. We know now they were there—we just didn’t see them. The men who did this lived and moved among us, and we blinded ourselves to the threat they posed, in part because our arrogance didn’t allow us to see just how vulnerable we were.”

  He went on to talk about how the memorandum from the FBI agent was lost in the bureaucratic shuffle until it was too late. “It’s important for all law enforcement professionals to take it upon themselves as individuals to fight the deadening effects of bureaucracy,” he continued. “It’s not a glass ceiling; it’s a concrete one. And we have to make the effort to punch through it when necessary. It’s too dangerous to do otherwise.”

  When he finished, the audience sat in silence for a few moments, the younger students wide-eyed, and then he took questions.

  Several hands shot up at once, and he pointed to a thin, serious-looking young man in the third row with thick, round glasses. He looked more like a physics major than a future policeman.

  “Did 9/11 make you question everything you learned?”

  “I guess I’d say it made me question everything I thought I knew, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”

  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.