“Is there anyone you’ve seen at the club who you might suspect of doing something like this?”
Francois stopped fidgeting and looked Butts straight in the eye. “I have thought of nothing else for two days,” he said, “and I swear to God if I even suspected any of them, they wouldn’t be alive right now.” The level of commitment in his voice was chilling.
“That’s no way to handle justice,” Lee said. “You can’t take the law into your own hands.”
“Yeah, right,” Francois retorted with disgust. “You wouldn’t say that if you had lost your only sister.”
“He has,” Butts said angrily.
Francois’s face fell and he flushed. “Oh, Jesus, I forgot. I read about it in that article about you, but I just—oh, God, I’m sorry.”
“Never mind,” said Lee. “I know how you feel, but you have to let us deal with whoever did this. I need you to promise me that.”
Francois’s grip tightened on the strap of his satchel, and his jaw worked, clenching and unclenching.
“I need your promise,” Lee repeated.
Francois shook himself as a dog might shake water from his coat. “Okay—I promise.”
“Good.”
“It’s not like I know every one of them, anyway,” he muttered. “People come and go all the time in that crowd.”
“Yeah,” Butts said. “We’re tryin’ to track down everyone who was there that night.”
Detective Rodriguez had already done quite a lot of that work, using credit card receipts to track down the club patrons, though a few people had paid for their drinks with cash.
“Problem is, almost no one remembers seeing her, and those who may have seen her didn’t get a good look at the guy she was talkin’ with. Forget about a needle in a haystack—we ain’t even got a haystack.”
“Is there anything else?” Francois asked, clearly anxious to leave.
“Naw,” Butts said. “Detective Rodriguez already asked you if your sister had any enemies, that kinda thing.”
“But you can’t think this is the work of someone who knew her,” Francois said, his fingers twitching as he fidgeted with the strap of his leather satchel.
“We don’t know,” Lee said. “But at this point it’s a mistake to assume anything about the perpetrator.”
“ ‘At this point?’ ” Francois said. “What’s that supposed to mean? At what ‘point’ will it be acceptable—when someone else dies?”
“We don’t want that to happen any more than you do,” Butts said, trying to placate him, but the boy was off and running.
“Look,” he said. “You ask me to promise not to do anything on my own, and then you talk to me about not making assumptions! Well, let me tell you something, man. This guy is just getting started. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out.”
“I agree with you,” Lee said.
“So why don’t you go after him?”
“That’s exactly what we plan to do,” said Butts. “So now if you’ll excuse us, we’ll get on with doin’ our job.”
Francois leapt from his chair as though it were electrified. He headed for the door, but before he could open it, Lee stopped him.
“Just one more question.”
Francois turned and looked at him warily. “What?”
“What was Tesla right about?”
“Oh, you mean this,” the boy said, pointing to the button on his satchel.
“Yes. What does it mean?”
“Nikola Tesla invented electricity, not Edison—but Edison got all the credit and became famous.”
“Really?” Butts said. “Why was that?”
Francois shrugged irritably.
“The usual crap—politics. Not what you know but who you know, that kind of thing. Tesla was a genius, but Edison was better at self-promotion. Tesla worked for him, for Christ’s sake, but Edison never acknowledged his work. Then later, Edison electrocuted animals in public to show that Tesla’s AC current was dangerous. What a jerk.”
“How ’bout that,” Butts mused. “I never knew that.”
“So what was he right about?”
“Alternating current. It was better than what Edison proposed, direct current, but Edison didn’t understand that because he wasn’t the mathematician Tesla was. So he fought Tesla every step of the way. He may not have had science behind him, but he had public opinion, and that’s what mattered.”
“Yeah,” Butts sighed. “Isn’t that so often the case?”
What mattered now, of course, was catching a predator, and young Francois Nugent had put his finger on one hard truth about this case: This killer was just getting started.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Oh sure,” Kathy Azarian said, “I know what steampunk is.”
She was seated cross-legged on Lee’s living room sofa in his East Village apartment eating a Bosc pear, her feet neatly tucked under her like a cat. He didn’t understand how women could be so flexible. His mother said their joints were more pliable so their hips could expand during birth—but this brought to mind the disturbing image of a rattlesnake dislocating its jaws to swallow its prey whole.
He sat in the red leather armchair opposite Kathy. “God, I’m really out of the loop.”
“Yes, you are, darling—but it’s part of your charm.” She pronounced it “dahling,” ironically, in her half-joking way.
“You really know what steampunk is?”
“Sure,” she said, biting off another pale yellow chunk of pear and slurping it down. “Some of my colleagues are into it. I have a pathologist friend who has a closet full of Victorian goth stuff.”
Kathy Azarian was a forensic anthropologist, and though he had yet to meet any of her colleagues, they sounded like an odd bunch. But then, so were his, come to think of it.
She wiped off the juice dripping down her chin. That was another thing about her he couldn’t understand: she was always eating, and yet she somehow remained slim. She was only about five foot four; he couldn’t imagine where all that food went. He even once caught himself wondering if she was bulimic.
A wayward strand of hair fell over her eyes as she bent over for another bite, and Lee’s stomach pitched and rolled like a schooner in a stormy sea. Her wavy dark hair was looser than his tightly curled black locks, but otherwise, they were physical opposites. Lee was tall and pale and blue-eyed, whereas Kathy’s Armenian an-cestr y gave her skin a lustrous copper sheen even in winter, and her eyes appeared to be kohl-lined even when she was wearing not a scrap of makeup.
“Okay,” he said, leaning back in the overstuffed red armchair—his favorite, it was beginning to look a bit shabby, the leather frayed and faded on the armrests. “So tell me about the steampunk scene.”
“I’ll ask Josh to tell me about it and get back to you.”
“Your colleague?”
“Yeah. He even goes to a club in Philly—knows all the bands that play there and everything.”
“Thanks.” A thread of jealousy flitted through his head, but he turned and took a deep breath.
Kathy finished the pear and tossed the core in the trash can next to the heavy antique rolltop desk.
“What time is the concert tonight?” she said.
“Eight o’clock.”
A silence fell between them as the sun snaked across East Seventh Street in its westward journey toward the Hudson River. The concert was a performance of the Brahms Requiem at Carnegie Hall, and Kathy had left work early to take the train in from Philadelphia so they could attend it together. Neither of them wanted to spend this evening alone, and he was glad they were doing this together. It was hard to believe a year had passed—his emotions were still raw, and he could only imagine how much worse it must be for the families and friends of those who had perished.
“I guess we’d better get going,” she said, breaking the silence draped over the room like a shroud.
“Yeah,” he said, glad for the excuse to move. He wasn’t exactly looking forward to th
e event; he imagined he was not alone in wishing this day would be over.
Everyone in New York—even those who had deplored the towers as architectural eyesores—took the attack personally. There was a feeling in the city that the terrorists had not bombed America—they had attacked New York. The devastation and its aftermath was felt keenly, personally, in a city that did not identify itself with the rest of America. New York was a place with its own rules, its own code of behavior, even its own way of ordering coffee. In many ways, New York City was as foreign from the rest of the country as Singapore or Bangkok. The rest of the country was attaching oversized American flags to their SUVs and gorging on Freedom Fries, but New Yorkers were still stunned, in a kind of emotional holding pattern.
“What is it about anniversaries?” Kathy said. “It’s so odd. I’ve been feeling so sad all day. What’s this need we seem to have to commemorate things, even bad things?”
“I guess it’s part of the healing process,” he said, grabbing a light jacket from the Victorian bentwood coatrack in the hall.
“They’re going to recite the names of every victim tonight at the Ground Zero ceremony,” Kathy said as they walked down the two flights to the street.
“I know,” he said. There were events and ceremonies all over the city, but they had chosen the Brahms Requiem; Lee couldn’t imagine better company than Brahms at a time like this.
They emerged into the gathering twilight of Seventh Street and walked toward the Astor Place subway. The crowd at McSorley’s had already morphed from the afternoon collection of locals to the rowdier evening crowd of bridge-and-tunnel ruffians—or maybe the locals had decided to observe the anniversary by pouring even more copious amounts of McSorley’s Ale down their throats. Lee heard the sound of raucous singing coming from the back room, half a dozen drunken voices slamming together like bricks, attempting harmony in a heavily sloshed version of an old traditional Scottish tune.
And we’ll all go together to pluck wild mountain thyme
All around the crystal fountain
Will you go, lassie, go?
The familiar lyrics sung by such bravely wavering voices brought unexpected tears to his eyes. It was a song he remembered his father singing to his mother, before Duncan Campbell closed the door behind him the final time, leaving his family for good. Lee had long ago closed his heart to feeling anything toward his father except rage, so the surge of feeling was both surprising and unwelcome. He cleared his throat and wiped his face with his sleeve—but he couldn’t hide anything from Kathy.
“You okay?” she said as they approached Third Avenue, the Cooper Union building looming in front of them in stolid nineteenth-century splendor. A redbrick fortress of art and architecture, its full-tuition scholarships to every single student were a testament to Peter Cooper’s proclamation that higher education should be “as free as air and water.”
“I’m fine,” he said, tucking her arm into his as they crossed Third Avenue. But of course that wasn’t really true. In New York City tonight, no one was fine.
CHAPTER SIX
The bed was so big and white, and his sister’s body was so small. Davey approached on tiptoe, afraid any sound he made would wake her, or make her sicker. The voice of his mother behind him urged him on. He could smell her rose petal perfume.
“Go ahead, Davey. It’s all right. Go up to her—you won’t hurt her.”
He wanted to turn and run from the room, but everyone was watching. The rest of the family had gathered in the bedroom, in chairs along the wall or standing around the heavy oak canopy bed. They were all in black, like great stooping crows—their long yellow faces didn’t even look human. They gazed down at his sister Edwina, her tiny body swallowed in a sea of pillows, swathed in blankets and bandages.
Davey turned to look at his mother, whose face was swollen from crying. Her lips were puffy and her nose was a mottled red color, reminding him of a boiled lobster he had seen once in a restaurant.
“Go on, Davey,” she said. “Go kiss your sister.”
He couldn’t understand why he had to kiss his sister. Edwina appeared to be asleep, and what if she woke up just as Davey got there? What if she started to cry, or worse, made the terrible moaning sound that she had been emitting for days—a weak, tormented groaning that Davey could hear in his own bedroom? It came right through the walls. He stacked pillows over his head to drown it out at night, but not even a pile of pillows could keep Davey from hearing the terrible bleating sound. Sometimes it made his heart hurt for his sister, and sometimes he hated his sister—hated her for making his mother cry, for keeping everyone up at night, and for making Davey feel so sorry for her.
Mostly, though, he hated how the family’s life had changed. Everything was different now. Everyone walked softly and spoke in low voices; it was all about Edwina’s illness, and Davey felt like a ghost, unseen and unheard. When he talked, his mother would pretend to listen, but he knew her mind was on Edwina and how she was feeling today. His father didn’t even pretend to listen. He had barely spoken to Davey these past weeks, when Edwina took a turn for the worse. That’s what his Aunt Sarah called it—“a turn for the worse”—though he had no idea what that meant.
He tiptoed around the house and heard snippets of conversation about his sister. He tried to make sense of the words and phrases: “blood disorder,” “clotting factor,” “faulty genes,” and so on. He memorized what he heard, even if he didn’t understand it; he was a bright boy, though no one seemed to know or care. Eventually, he came to understand that there was something wrong with his sister’s blood, that it ran in the family, and that this terrible affliction could skip a generation. If he had children, for example, they too could sicken and die young. Davey developed a fear that the rest of his family would also become ill—and that it was only a matter of time before he himself sickened and died.
And even though he was only a child, he knew Edwina was dying. Though Davey was only seven, he saw the unnatural paleness of his sister’s skin, all the roses gone from her cheeks, and the gradual weakening after one of her “attacks.” She wasn’t allowed to run, to play, to fall on the ground and roll in the grass like other children. After a while, she wasn’t allowed to do anything. And then she was too weak to want to.
Edwina was only five, but she was dying. And the thought filled Davey with mortal terror and unbearable sadness.
Just as he approached his sister’s bed, he had a warm, wet feeling in his pants, then a thin tickling sensation down the inside of his leg. He heard his Aunt Sarah gasp.
“Oh, lord, the boy’s wet himself!”
Overcome by shame and humiliation, Davey turned and fled the room.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“You want to get something to eat?” Kathy said. “I’m starving.”
They were wandering down Broadway after the concert, approaching the lights of Times Square, its wanton neon casually splashed against the canvas of sky, as if someone had tossed a can of paint heavenward. The air was warm and inviting, a perfect night for strolling about aimlessly.
“You’re always hungry,” Lee said as they passed a souvenir shop, its polished plate-glass windows stuffed with trinkets for tourists: tiny green replicas of the Statue of Liberty, baseball caps proclaiming I LOVE NY, postcards of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings. He wondered if they still sold postcards of the World Trade Center.
The concert at Carnegie Hall had been an emotional experience. There was audible sobbing in the audience during the quieter parts, and Lee himself had teared up during the haunting chorus “Wie Lieblich Sind Deine Wohnungen.” He was exhausted and drained and wanted to go home. He looked at Kathy, who had not cried during the concert, though at one point she had grabbed his hand and pressed hard, her strong fingers digging into his palm. He had never known a woman with such powerful hands.
“I am not always hungry,” she said. “It’s just that you’re hardly ever hungry.”
“I could use a drink,” he said.
“There’s McHale’s,” she said as they passed his old hangout on the corner of Forty-sixth Street. The sign’s red neon light cast a warm glow into the foggy night air.
“Not tonight,” he said.
They stood on the triangular island at the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, underneath the half-price-tickets booth. Under the Giuliani administration the porn shops and peep shows had been replaced by the far creepier presence of Walt Disney Co. and billboards with naked Calvin Klein children—but the tickets booth remained an enduring icon of Times Square. The enormous red letters were beginning to fade, but you could still read them from three blocks away: TKTS.
Lee had stood in line there more times than he could remember, shivering or sweating in all kinds of weather alongside tourists from Holland, Belgium, Portugal, and Singapore—people gathered at this great crossroads from just about anywhere you could think of. Sharing the wait with strangers was part of the experience, part of the fun—you never knew who you would meet, what street buskers would be working the crowd, or what flyer for some remote off-Broadway show would be pressed into your hand by an aspiring actor. This was the best of what it was to live in New York, and thinking about it brought new tears to Lee’s eyes.
Most of the shows were just getting out. People walked arm in arm on their way to after-theater drinks and dinner, cabs careened down the avenues in an impatient sea of yellow, but the usual festivity was missing. It felt different tonight—and yet there was a sense of camaraderie, as there had been at the concert, as there had been in the city ever since that terrible day. He looked at Kathy, her face shiny and eager in the glare of Times Square. He wondered if being from Philadelphia instead of New York made a difference—maybe she felt the sorrow less than he did. He banished the thought as ungenerous; perhaps she was just glad to be with him.
“I know,” she said. “Let’s go to Sardi’s.”
“Okay.”
Silent Kills Page 3