Scream Catcher

by Vincent Zandri

  26

  Office of the Warren County Prosecutor

  Thursday, 9:00 A.M.

  It’s early the next morning and P.J. Blanchfield has called for a videoconference strategy session with the FBI Profiler. Jude, Mack, Blanchfield and Lino surround a portable conference table that’s been set in the middle of the office floor, not far from the hoop star’s trophy cabinet. All eyes are concentrated on the far end of the table and the flat-screened monitor that’s been set up there along with an octagonal speaker system. Placed before them on the table are small cameras that will be transmitting their individual faces to the FBI Washington Bureau while semi-retired Profiling Agent Terrence MacSweeny beams his famous mug to them.

  For a time they sit in tense quiet, Jude staring out the crescent-shaped window behind P.J.’s desk at the top of Tongue Mountain. Mack is seated to his right, index finger tapping the table. Across from him sits Lino, as always dressed in black, on occasion smoothing out his mustache with forefinger and thumb. Beside him sits Blanchfield, the stunning prosecutor dressed in white blouse and black skirt. She nervously peers at her wristwatch before looking up.

  “Any moment now,” she says.

  The phone rings as if on cue.

  Answering it herself, P.J. sets the receiver back down in its cradle. She then fingers Enter on the keyboard. The key command produces an image that shoots up on the large flat-screened monitor.

  MacSweeney is live and up close, salt and pepper hair cropped short, just like it was when Jude briefly met him a couple of years back. The suited sixty-something man is blue eyed, clean shaven, as if still touting the rules and regs of the full-time G-man.

  Without delay, Blanchfield makes the introductions, most of which aren’t necessary since both Mack and P.J. briefly worked with the profiler during Lennox’s first arrest. By the time he gets to Jude, the agent smiles, asks how Cop Job is faring in the literary marketplace.

  “Dead in the water,” Jude admits, remembering the quarterly statement he has yet to receive from his agent. “You seem to be hanging in there, though.”

  “People love serial killers,” MacSweeney says. “Which is why we’re here.”

  P.J. jumps in with a summary of where they are in the case just twenty-four hours prior to a Prelim Hearing in which they must present convincing evidence to back up Lennox’s second arrest for Murder One. Failing that, Judge Mann is sure to dismiss the proceedings until more rock solid proof becomes available. She goes over the kill scene reenactment of the previous morning. In an almost disappointing tone, she reveals that her eyewitness’s account will most likely be challenged due not only to a lack of illumination surrounding the rear area of Sweeney’s Gym, but also due to Jude’s having been knocked unconscious, not to mention a history of blackouts when placed under great strain or duress.

  “How is forensics shaping up?” asks a smiling MacSweeny from the monitor. To Jude it’s as if his optimistic manner is intended to dismiss the prosecutor’s doubts.

  “Still waiting on tox and ballistics,” Mack interjects. “As far as a gun is concerned we do not have one. Lennox’s getaway vehicle has been pulled out of the river however, and has been impounded. Problem is, the interior is covered in silt and muck. If we get anything from it at all it’ll be a miracle.”

  “Registration and V.I.N.?”

  “No available registration; the V.I.N. number’s been ground off the windshield.”

  “Have it stripped and scraped,” the Profiler insists. “If Lennox is alive—and I presume he is—his DNA will be inside it.”

  “Already on it,” Lino jumps in.

  “Mr. Parish,” MacSweeney says, “how do you feel about your testimony? Do you feel that the man you picked out in the lineup is indeed Hector Lennox?”

  It’s about as basic a question as Jude can face. But he’ll be damned if he knows how to answer it. He decides to take the easy way out: by revealing the dismal truth.

  “At this point I’m not sure.”

  “But you did see a man running out of the gravel pit. And you did see a man with long hair chasing him before recording his screams and then shooting him dead. There’s no mistaking that fact, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Okay. That means someone had to have killed our convenience store owner and more than likely it was the same man now released on conditional bail. It also means I will have to do a convincing job of proving to the court that both the M.O and Signature of the man now in house custody is not Christian Jordan, but in fact the real Hector Lennox.”

  “How exactly will you do that, Agent MacSweeney?” P.J. asks. Jude notices that the tone of her voice is verging on sarcastic. It’s as if she’s asking the expert … the man who has literally written the book on the subject … to prove himself in front of everyone.

  The monitor shows MacSweeney crossing his arms.

  “I don’t want to tell you how to run your investigation, Captain Mack, Prosecutor Blanchfield,” he says. “But assuming that forensics produces little workable evidence you are going to have to establish probable cause that in fact this surgically reconstructed man is not only the return of Lennox, but that he plans on continuing with his kill game spree as his alter ego the Black Dragon. In the end it might take a full confession.”

  “So what do we do?” P.J. interjects, not without a laugh. “Hold him down, tickle him till he pees his pants?”

  MacSweeney lets loose with a fake courtesy laugh.

  “Strategically speaking you have to educate the court. That will be my job as the profiler. I will describe the monster that is Hector Lennox, but I will do so in a most complimentary way. I will use terms like ‘sophisticated,’ ‘ingenious,’ and ‘stealthy.’ I will describe in detail his signature and his M.O. and the differences between them, including his obsession with collecting his victims’ screams. By the time I’m through I’ll have propped him up so far that he’ll want nothing more than to admit to being the brilliant mastermind he’s always thought of himself.”

  “But will it guarantee an indictment?” Blanchfield asks, facial expression shifting from cynical to cautious.

  “A profiler’s behavioral testimony can never be used as evidence. But what it can do is push a Judge towards issuing an indictment. At the very least it could persuade the old man to revoke bail, have the suspect remanded to county jail pending a full FBI investigation.”

  “The case would be out of our hands at that point,” Mack surmises.

  “Correct Captain,” MacSweeney says. “You’ll then make up the supporting cast.”

  Another pause ensues during which Jude finds his eyes attracted to the framed headline hanging on the wall above the trophy case: “Blanchfield Steals County Prosecutor!”

  “What about this M.O. and signature stuff?” Lino speaks up from beneath a thick mustache. “Can you enlighten us, Agent MacSweeney? So we’re all on the same page.”

  The profiler smiles like the stage is all his. And it is.

  “In the beginning,” he explains, “we assumed Lennox might be in possession of a Dissociative Condition, meaning that because of the mental and physical abuse he suffered as a child he developed a defense mechanism for dealing with the pain. He formed a split in his psyche. On one side was Hector. On the other, the ever-emerging Black Dragon.

  “The video games he relentlessly played as a child locked inside his lonely windowless room allowed him to role play, fantasize and escape. Mostly they afforded him a means of controlling his hatred towards his father. On the video screen appeared a computer image which the young Hector made dead with the joystick trigger. In the boy’s subconscious mind that image bore the likeness of his abusive father.”

  Mack raises his hand like a school kid.

  “But how will this convince the Judge that the accused is really Lennox?”

  “Lennox will want to be exposed eventually,” MacSweeney explains. “I believe he wanted to be arrested. When he discovered that the still alive eyewitness w
as a former cop, chills must have run up and down his spine. Here was his chance for a high profile kill game. The arrest would provide him not only with a prologue to his new script, it would afford him a substantial challenge—a situation he has no choice but to get himself free of, just like the plot of a real video game. It also makes everyone present at this meeting a player in a new kill game. At least potentially.”

  “Then it’s quite possible the situation has become more dangerous since the suspect’s arrest and conditional release,” Mack says. “It’s even more possible that a new kill game has started concurrent with his arrest.”

  “If that is the case,” Lino adds, “what the hell can we expect now?”

  “That’s the big question isn’t it?” MacSweeny answers. “Lennox’s M.O. is a learned behavior. It can never change. He chases a victim around a designated space and catches his screams before killing him. That’s a fact that will never be altered so long as he’s free and able to operate. The person he kills represents his father. He keeps chasing and killing Daddy Lennox over and over again. He keeps making his Daddy scream.

  “But his signature can be found in the many different and increasingly complex game scenarios he sets up for the kill. These things are subject to change. They are the tanning factory, the river, the gravel pit behind Sweeney’s Boxing Gym. It is his having set himself up to be arrested.

  “So what can we expect?

  “If he is allowed to walk, he will choose a new gaming location. Because in his subconscious mind his father is alive again and it’s time to die again. Just a like a video kill game in which people die violently in one game but then return alive the next. And as for his next victim? Your guess is as good as mine. I would wager the mortgage that the victim or victims is sitting inside this cyber room right now.”

  The demon inside Jude pokes and tugs at his stomach. He believes his father recognizes the dread he feels. Because that’s when the old Captain paints his own face with one of his famous fake smiles before returning his attention back to Blanchfield.

  “Maybe the crime scene reenactment wasn’t a total loss after all, P.J.,” Mack offers. “We’ve already established that the man who calls himself Christian Jordan and who killed in the gravel pit is in possession of the same M.O. and signature as Lennox. He’s been ID’d by Jude as the man who killed Andy Manion yesterday morning. Those two things alone will spark a reasonable suspicion in the mind of Judge Mann. It should in the very least get the fucker remanded back to county … pardon my French.”

  “I’m glad you think so, Captain,” Blanchfield says, stone-faced. “But that still leaves us with our original problem: a highly unreliable witness.”

  “I’m not sure I see the problem here, P.J.,” MacSweeney insists. “You have all the ammunition at your disposal to make a believer out of Judge Mann. Because the only alternative will be to release Lennox. And if that happens he will kill again. I tell you this: he’s playing a kill game right now in the sanctity of his own home; his own mind. No surveillance bracelet is going to keep him from playing. Because once a man like Lennox engages in a real-life, real-time kill game and finds that he likes it, he develops a taste for it—an obsession to challenge himself with more complex games. The arrest and subsequent remand to his home under GPS supervision will have provided him with just such a unique challenge. Not to mention one further significant fact.”

  “What fact is that?” Mack begs.

  “Your son Jude is alive. Jude witnessed the murder behind Sweeney’s Gym. Lennox will want to finish the job he attempted behind the gym but failed at. He will want to catch Jude’s screams.”

  Silence follows.

  For Jude it is a thick quiet. Palpable, like hot humid air.

  He begins to feel like he is drowning in it.

  If this were a normal face-to-face meeting, he might use the opportunity to visit the men’s room, splash cold water on a numb face. But being on camera makes him want to sit in place, not make a single move.

  After a time, Lino raises his hand.

  Smoothing out his black mustache, he says, “Has anyone contacted French authorities about exhuming a grave marked with Lennox’s name?”

  “Good question, Lt. Lino,” MacSweeny says. “I’ve asked some of our operatives in the area to scour the cemeteries, see what they can come up with. Thus far their efforts have yielded nothing.”

  With that, the Profiler asks Blanchfield if she will be needing anything else for now.

  She shakes her head, runs her hands through straight blond hair. Her face resembles a roadmap of doubt. MacSweeney, a world renowned FBI Profiler, is trying to aid the case and yet Jude gets the feeling that Blanchfield still isn’t the least bit confident that the prosecution’s case against Lennox will stand up in court. In any case, all she asks of the agent is that he be available for the courtroom video in the morning.

  Of course he will be.

  He also insists that with any luck, he’ll be sending up a team of investigative agents as early as tomorrow afternoon, no matter the outcome of the Prelim Hearing.

  That decided, the prosecution team extends each of their individual goodbyes to the expert profiler as his face disappears from the monitor.

  27

  Lake George Village

  Thursday, 10:35 A.M.

  Leaving the building, Jude assumes Mack will drive him straight home where the former cop will spend his last night before the Prelim getting his head together.

  If such a thing is possible.

  But instead father and son make a slight detour. Having pulled out of the new concrete parking garage behind the courthouse, Mack crosses over Main Street, careful to avoid the wall- to-wall tourists. He then makes his way onto Mohawk Street, drives for maybe a full mile until he comes to a narrow alley where he pulls off to the side, cuts the engine.

  Jude doesn’t have to say a word to know why his father stopped outside that dark alley. Because inside it, behind a rusted wall of chain-link fence, is a basement apartment rented in the name of Christian Jordan, the man they all know as Hector Lennox. It seems strange to Jude that come the next morning they will meet face to face before Judge Mann … Lennox the accused and Jude the eyewitness to a murder.

  Mack pulls a cigarette from his pocket, lights it, blows out the smoke.

  “This bother you?” he poses, opening his window all the way.

  “Since when do you bother to ask?”

  “Shit,” the old Captain says, staring sadly down at the lit smoke.

  Although it isn’t often that he sees his father like this—face tight, pensive—Jude knows that Mack has something important to say. He can also tell the old man is working up the courage to come out with it.

  After a time Mack says, “Tell me something, Jude. How is it that a former detective can witness a murder, ID the suspect in question, and be considered a highly unreliable witness?”

  “I was knocked out, remember? I’m also an admitted head case. The reading public gobbled up my story. Why shouldn’t Judge Mann?”

  “You got a good look at him,” Mack insists. “You wouldn’t lie just to make up a good yarn, even if you have become a pro writer.”

  Jude sits there for a minute, eyes peeled at the dark alley. The day is sunny, warm and beautiful. But inside that alley it’s dark and cold. It seems like a good home for the dark monster.

  “What are you getting at Mack?”

  “Between you and me,” he says, drawing in a lungful of smoke, “I don’t like what’s happening. We’ve got Lennox in our sights. Right down there in that back alley, and yet he still feels a million miles away.”

  Jude exhales, says, “He should be in county jail right now, shouldn’t he be?”

  “If I were the county prosecutor I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I wouldn’t rest until Lennox was behind bars. I wouldn’t be satisfied with just a surveillance bracelet. I would have protested Mann’s decision. Defied it publicly by going straight to the press. I would have
ordered the L.G.P.D. to park outside Lennox’s front door.”

  “But?”

  “But instead Blanchfield orders the opposite. Observe the gag order. Stay away from Lennox. We don’t want to give him a chance to scream harassment; we don’t want to risk blowing a second and last chance at nailing his ass; we don’t want to risk it by being too aggressive.” A shake of his head. “You see the look she had on her face during the MacSweeny video conference?”

  Jude nods.

  Mack says, “You ask me she had no intention of buying into a single word he said.”

  The old Captain smokes, bites down on his lower lip.

  “I know you don’t see Blanchfield as an aggressive prosecutor,” Jude says. “But are you trying to tell me it goes further than that?”

  “I’m not sure what I’m saying. But I do know this: something’s not right here, kid. I can’t exactly put my finger on it, but I can’t help but think that Blanchfield is playing this one all wrong. So far she’s put more time in trying to prove you an unreliable witness than disproving Lennox’s alibi and that phony Christian Jordan cover story.”

  For a split second Jude thinks that now might be the time to tell his father about the e-mail he received the previous morning. The one from a person going by the odd name Fox. The one that told him he wasn’t safe; to watch his back. He thinks seriously about telling Mack but something holds him back. If he has to attribute his apprehension to something, it would be Mack’s anxiety. Jude knows that if the old Captain has to put up with even one more worry, he’ll end up cuffing the entire Parish family to his wrists.

  “There’s something else that’s been gnawing at me,” Mack says after a time. “Something that under different circumstances I might not think twice about.”

  “What is it?”

  “Yesterday afternoon, a young man on my support staff came to me, casually mentioned that P.J. paid him a personal visit yesterday afternoon after we left her office. She was full of questions about the surveillance bracelet, wanted to know if it was as secure as people say.”