Silent Slaughter

by C. E. Lawrence

  Brian O’Reilly lived in a five-story brownstone just off Katonah Avenue in Woodlawn, a predominantly Irish neighborhood in the North Bronx. Unlike the South Bronx, this part of the borough was almost entirely white, mostly lower middle class. His street was just around the corner from the Emerald Isle Bakery and Murphy’s Pub. When Lee rang the buzzer, O’Reilly appeared at the door almost immediately, as though he had been watching through the lace curtains in the front room.

  “Come on in, then,” he said, after glancing both ways up and down the street. What he might be looking for Lee had no idea—maybe years of being a cop had left him with an instinct for surveillance.

  Brian Seamus Timothy O’Reilly’s thick body sagged with years of defeat. In the years since Lee had seen him, he seemed to have aged decades. His skin had the ruddy sheen of a heavy drinker, and his square Irish face wore a permanently stunned expression, as if he had never gotten over the things he had seen in his years as a cop. Even his voice was sad. His tone was soft, every sentence descending in volume and pitch, as if sliding down a slope of hopelessness. If he wore his philosophy of life emblazoned on a T-shirt, Lee thought, the front would read, WHY BOTHER? The message on the back would be, IT’S NO USE ANYWAY.

  He shuffled down the front hall into the kitchen, flicking on the fluorescent light over the sink.

  “Have a seat,” he told Lee, indicating a cane-backed chair at a white enamel table. Surprisingly, the house appeared to be in good repair, not in the derelict condition Lee would have expected in the home of a drunk. The curtains on the windows were cheerful and freshly washed, and the floor had been recently swept. He concluded that someone was looking after O’Reilly—a son, perhaps, or a daughter.

  “Want a drink?” O’Reilly asked, reaching for a bottle of Jameson on the counter.

  The last thing Lee wanted right now was a drink. But if he was to get anything at all out of the man, perhaps the best strategy was to play the role of drinking buddy. Then maybe he could slip his questions in without spooking the retired detective.

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  O’Reilly grabbed a couple of tumblers with one hefty hand and poured them both generous double shots. He slung his doughy body into one of the cane chairs and plunked the glasses down on the table. He slid one of the tumblers toward Lee, then knocked back his drink in one gulp. Wiping his mouth with his sleeve, he leaned back and closed his eyes.

  “That’s better,” he said. “Now, what can I do for you? Has there been a break in your sister’s case?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Lee said, sipping his own drink. This was harder than he’d thought it would be. He could feel the pain of the man across from him. It was palpable, like the scorching blast from a furnace.

  O’Reilly squinted at him through bloodshot eyes. “You know, I just about killed myself on that case.”

  “I remember.”

  “I put in eighteen-hour days. Couldn’t sleep, stopped eating.”

  “I know, I just—”

  O’Reilly leaned forward, his elbows on the table. His meaty forearms were blotched, the skin mottled dark red.

  “You ever get a case that gets under your skin?” O’Reilly said. “That just won’t let go, no matter how hard you try to convince yourself you’ve done all you can?” He got up and lurched over to the counter, grabbed the bottle of whiskey and filled his glass.

  Lee stood up. “Look, I don’t want to . . . maybe it’s better if I leave—”

  “Sit down,” his host commanded. “Now that you’re here, we’re gonna talk about it, so we are.” He poured himself more whiskey but left it on the table. Resting his fingers on the lip of the tumbler, he stared down at the tawny liquid as if it held the answers to the questions that tormented him.

  “So,” he said, “you want to know if there’s anything I can tell you about your sister’s disappearance.”

  “But first I want to see if you can help me with something.”

  The detective straightened up in his chair. “What’s that?”

  Lee told him about the mysterious caller, omitting no detail. O’Reilly listened carefully and appeared to sober up as Lee talked. The detective’s long-honed investigative instincts seemed to be taking over—his expression became sharper, more focused.

  “You got a recording of this asshole?” he asked when Lee had finished.

  “As a matter of fact, I do.” He pulled the tape recorder out of his jacket pocket, placed it on the table, and pressed the Play button. The familiar metallic voice snaked out of the machine, its flat quality emphasized by the recorder’s tinny speaker.

  “Why, hello. I hope you haven’t forgotten about me. I certainly haven’t forgotten about you.” Then the brief, loathsome chuckle, which made Lee dig his fingernails into his palms.

  O’Reilly listened intently, hunched over the table, his body motionless. When it finished, he said, “Play it again.”

  Lee rewound the tape and pressed the Play button, and again the reptilian voice filled the room. He couldn’t help noticing the involuntary clenching of his fists, the rage churning in his stomach.

  “Okay,” the detective said when it was over.

  “You have any idea who this might be?”

  O’Reilly leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, his expression unreadable. “Don’t get excited,” he said, “but I might know something that could help. But first, how about another round?”

  This time, Lee didn’t hesitate. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Make mine a double.”

  O’Reilly smiled for the first time since he had arrived. “That’s more like it. We’ll make a goddamn cop outta you yet.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Edmund sat at his desk preparing his notes for the next day’s class. He loved writing his lectures—if only he didn’t have to actually deal with students. People were so messy, so unpredictable. He sought refuge in numbers and the music of Bach, both of which were pure and beautiful, instead of complicated and ugly, like life.

  He stared out the office window at the stark landscape of the campus in winter. The buildings lay silent, their sharp right angles in muted tones of white and gray. Winter was his favorite season. He enjoyed its purity; it was, he thought, the season most like mathematics. If only people could be like numbers—malleable, distant, perfect. He understood that language intuitively. But people were different—always behaving in illogical ways, driven by passions and desires and needs. Numbers needed nothing—they just were. They had always been there and always would be, long after human civilizations had annihilated one another with their petty greed and unruly passions.

  Edmund smoothed the paper on his immaculate, orderly desk and sighed with pleasure. The sight of columns of figures had always had a calming effect on him. Black on white, squiggles of ink that held the secrets of the universe. Mathematicians had an understanding of the world no one else possessed; he knew that, and it made him feel superior.

  As he studied his lecture notes, his hand crept unconsciously to the long, thin scar that snaked from his forehead to his chin, his fingers tracing the raised line of skin. When people were rude enough to ask about it, he told a different story each time. He once told one drunken young graduate student at a faculty cocktail party that it was a dueling scar he’d received defending the honor of the Duchess of Schleswig-Holstein. He had no idea whether Schleswig-Holstein had a duchess or not, but it sounded like the kind of place one might engage in a duel. The graduate student was getting his doctorate in psychology, so Edmund figured he wasn’t very bright. Sure enough, the idiot bought the story entirely—Edmund overheard him repeating later it to a group of people at the party.

  Another time he told an old lady in line behind him at the grocery store that he was a Croatian who had been tortured by a guard in a Serbian concentration camp. That shut the old biddy up quickly enough; she avoided eye contact with him after that. He didn’t plan his stories; they just came out when people intruded on what he considered to be
a private matter. For him, lying was as natural as breathing. He lied not because he had to but because he could. It gave him power over other people. Besides math and Bach, that was the only thing that made life worth living.

  As to how he really got his scar—well, that was a scene he had buried deep in the underside of his brain. It was so many years ago, and yet it could burst into consciousness at any moment—a look, a sound, an angle of the light. Or a smell . . . how he remembered that smell! Couldn’t forget it, even if he tried. And he had tried. God, how he had tried. The odor of his own burning flesh . . . even now it sickened him, made his stomach heave and push at his esophagus as though it wanted to jump out of his body. And his father had laughed at him for vomiting that day—mocked and belittled Edmund, in his Devon accent, thick as clotted cream. You’re lucky I didn’t cut your little pecker off! You disgusting little bugger! If I ever catch you doing that again, you’d better watch out!

  His fingers traced the raised edges of the scar. He did watch out after that—his father never did catch him doing that thing again. Oh, he did it plenty of times, but never when his old man was around. His father was stupid; Edmund had nothing but contempt for him. His mother was the brains in the family—he had inherited her mind, her gift for logic, her work ethic. He’d adored her and would have done anything for her. So when she left his father for another man, abandoning him and his sister, he never forgave her. He hardened his heart, chipping away at his love for her until there was nothing left, like a sculpture that had been whittled away to nothing.

  His sister accepted their mother’s invitations to visit, but not Edmund. He knew his father was a nobody, a lout and a bully, but he was damned if he was going to see his mother in the arms of another man. It was around that time he started exposing himself to the girls in school. First the younger girls and then the ones in his class—until finally a teacher caught him in the act. And then it was off to boarding school, which he rather enjoyed—at least it got him away from his father.

  But his urge to do dark things persisted. It grew over time, like an evil vine, until it threatened to choke all that was light and good about him. He set fire to his roommate’s bed over an argument, bullied the younger children and tied firecrackers to the tails of cats. He stole whatever he could get away with and lied whenever possible, just because he could.

  But then he discovered mathematics, and his world changed. Here was something he was good at—really good at, “scary good,” as his sister said. He was graduated a year early, finessing his S levels. Accepted by King’s College at Cambridge at the age of seventeen, he had his doctorate by the time he was twenty-three. Everyone called him a genius. A “success story,” an example of what hard work and talent combined could do. He had “turned his life around.”

  But the darkness inside him remained, and his fantasies continued to grow. Always a part of him, they began to take on a life of their own. The higher he rose in academic circles, the more they demanded attention. They wouldn’t let him alone. Putting an ocean between him and his homeland hadn’t changed a thing.

  As much as he lived for mathematics, he could feel the dark urges in his soul pulling him down into their undertow. Psychopath. That’s what those idiot psychologists called him. But they were the lowest rung on the food chain. The social sciences were for idiots—he only had respect for real science. And behind science—and music, his beloved Bach—lay mathematics.

  Edmund looked at his watch, the hands at a perfect 180-degree angle. It was six o’clock. He looked out the window at the pallid waning moon, low in the darkening sky. A smiled played at the corner of his mouth as he thought about the careful preparations he had made. It was time to go hunting again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Brian O’Reilly was the only person Lee had ever met who seemed to get more focused the more he drank. He was already several rounds ahead of Lee, but his voice was sharp and clear, his hands steady.

  “I can’t say for sure, but that voice sounds familiar,” the retired detective said after listening to the recording for a third time.

  “Who does it sound like?” Lee said, trying to hide his eagerness. His host was clearly an “old school” cop—haunted by his failures, coping with them by drinking heavily while maintaining his brusque, Irish-machismo attitude.

  “There was this other detective briefly assigned to the case,” O’Reilly said. “He was weird. He gave me the creeps, so I asked that he be transferred. I didn’t wanna work with him—come to think of it, no one in the squad house did.”

  “What was his name?”

  O’Reilly pursed his lips, rubbed his forehead and stared at the ceiling. Then he shook his head. “I’m tryin’ to remember. It wasn’t an Irish name, or Italian . . . it was a name I’d never heard before, I’m pretty sure. Let me think about it some more.”

  “So you think the caller might be him?”

  “He had a voice like that. Flat, you know—cold. Soulless, like there’s nobody he ever cared about or who ever cared about him.”

  “Any idea what happened to him?”

  “He left the force shortly after, I think. May have been some kind of fracas—I don’t remember. I had other things to think about.”

  “Would he still be in the personnel files?”

  “I don’t see why not. If it is him, it would explain how he knew about the red dress. That detail was never released to the public, and, far as I know, the press never got hold of it either.”

  He swallowed the last of his whiskey, and all the sharpness seemed to leave his body. He looked old and tired, the skin on his face puckered and pasty in the pale afternoon light. “You know,” he said softly, “we must have interviewed a hundred people, but we never developed a decent suspect. Couldn’t even come up with enough evidence for a grand jury.”

  “I know,” Lee said. “It’s not your fault.”

  “It’s like she just vanished—whoosh. Here one minute, gone the next. What is it those nutty Christians call it? The Rapture. It’s like that—like she was airlifted to heaven.”

  The Rapture. Yeah, right. Laura wasn’t dead—kidnapped, assaulted and killed by some psychopath—but had somehow zoomed straight up to heaven without suffering the pangs of death and dying. Trouble was, Lee didn’t believe in God, and he didn’t believe in miracles. He sometimes wished he could, especially when he saw the comfort people took from their beliefs, but it wasn’t an option for him.

  “The file on your sister is still in Records, if you want to go through it,” O’Reilly said.

  “Thanks—maybe I will.” He stood up. It was time to leave this sad man in his clean, well-appointed kitchen, with his bottle of Jameson for company. “Thanks,” he said again. “For the whiskey and the talk.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” O’Reilly said. “But I’ll ask around and see if anyone else remembers that cop’s name.”

  “Thanks.”

  He emerged from O’Reilly’s into the chilly evening air, the sun sliding behind a line of cloud cover. A couple of kids raced by on bikes, legs pumping, hair flying in the wind. The girl had pale hair the color of winter wheat, and the boy had a forest of flame-colored curls. He watched them careen around the corner onto Katonah Avenue, laughing and shouting, just as he and Laura had so many years ago. But that was a different state, bordered by a different river, and it felt like another life by now.

  He headed toward the subway, suspended in a strange mixture of hope and dread—hope that at last the mysterious caller would be identified, and dread that he might be. Lee wasn’t sure of his own reaction. He wasn’t at all certain that murder was out of the question. He didn’t trust anyone right now—least of all himself. He pulled up his collar and ducked into the subway, to be swallowed up by its vast system of tunnels like Orpheus descending into the underworld.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  When he emerged from the subway, there was a message on his cell phone from Lucille Geffers, chairman of the philosophy department at Joh
n Jay College of Criminal Justice. He knew there was a vacancy in the psychology department, and Lucille was on the search committee. After a meeting with Butts and Krieger, he took the train to the Upper West Side to meet with her.

  Lucille Geffers lived in the Ansonia Hotel, an ornate Beaux Arts structure one block north of the intersection of Broadway and Amsterdam at Seventy-second Street. Lee loved the playful attention to detail in the elaborate stone carving, the wrought-iron balconies, the looming mansard roof, its copper coating green with age. The building was as fussy and overdecorated as a wedding cake, and he thought it was perfect.

  The nattily dressed doorman informed him Lucille’s apartment was on the third floor, so instead of taking the elevator, Lee walked up the ornate winding staircase, the marble steps worn concave from decades of opera singers and musicians treading upon them. He knew about a few of the more famous tenants, like Arturo Toscanini and Enrico Caruso.

  He found Lucille listening to a late Beethoven quartet, the one with the Grand Fugue in the first movement. Her Irish setter, Rex, was by her side, wagging his feathery tail gently.

  “Come in, please,” Lucille said. She wore a blue cable-knit turtleneck, jeans and moccasins. The look suited her. So did the apartment. It had the quiet, understated charm of someone who had grown up amid privilege, education and taste. A built-in bookshelf occupied one entire wall of the spacious foyer, the carpets were old and expensive, and the French Impressionist paintings didn’t look like prints.

  “Thanks for dropping by on such short notice.”

  “No problem. Hi, Rex,” he said, stroking the dog’s silky fur. Rex responded by shoving his cold nose into Lee’s crotch.