Silent Victim (14 page)

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.

“The important question is not what did we do wrong,” he said, “but what can we learn from this? Because there’s always something to be learned. Perhaps the greater the mistake, the more there is to be learned from it. Sometimes we are blinded because as human beings we don’t allow ourselves to think the unthinkable. It is perhaps a failure of imagination, but it is even more a failure of courage. To face our darkest fear and fantasies is not easy, and it is not for everyone. But as members of the law enforcement community, it is the job we have chosen.”

A chubby white kid in the third row raised a hand.

“Do you think the terrorists were psychopaths?”

Lee thought about it for a moment.

“No,” he said. “I think they were misguided fanatics, but I don’t think they entirely lacked the capacity for empathy.”

“What about your current case?”

“I can’t really comment on an ongoing investigation.” Lee looked at Tom Mariella, sitting in the back row. He gave a tiny nod, and Lee continued. “Okay, one more question.”

The thin physics major with the round glasses raised his hand.

“Yes?”

“Can we avoid—” He paused, flustered, his face reddening from the neck upward. “Yes?” Lee said.

“Can we avoid another attack like the one on September eleventh?”

Lee looked up, aware that they were all waiting for his answer. The room was dead quiet. He could hear the faint whoosh of traffic out on Tenth Avenue. In the back of the room, someone coughed.

“I think we can,” he said, “if we can allow ourselves to think the unthinkable.”

And as he said the words, he realized they applied not just to the tragic events of last September, but to this case as well.
Think the unthinkable.
Certainly the killer he was chasing was doing just that—and now Lee had to do the same.

Hush, little baby, don’t you cry Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby And if that lullaby goes dry, Mama’s gonna bring you a nice big eye

The song had been running through Caleb’s head for days now—he wasn’t sure why. He didn’t know whether his mother sang it to him or not. Maybe she did, but he didn’t trust any memories of that time. He tried not to think about her, because when he did, he saw her face on that last day. As he shook his head to rid himself of the image, another song popped into his head.

Down in the valley, the valley so low Hang your head over, hear the wind blow

He had been down in the valley that day, rummaging among the weeds and willows at the riverbank, spending all day outside so he wouldn’t have to come home to his pa. Just the two of them in the house now, and his pa was almost always in an evil mood. Caleb tried to make himself inconspicuous, and he was pretty good at it, but sometimes his father had a few drinks and was feeling chatty. He hated it when Pa was feeling chatty, because then he would sit Caleb down at the kitchen table and lecture him on women and their evil ways, about how you could never trust them and they were all just a bunch of she-devils who would betray you the minute your back was turned.

Caleb would nod and pretend to listen, but it was the same thing over and over, and it made his head ache. He tried instead to hear the chirping of the frogs in the pond outside, or the soft scuttling of the mice upstairs in the attic—anything to drown out his father’s voice. Perhaps his father was right that women really were wicked and evil, but he didn’t want to hear about it night after night.

So that day he was down by the river playing with his pet frog, whom he had named Bogie, because the frog made a noise that sounded like “BO-gie.” He was watching the frog swim over to a lily pad in the rushes, hoping he would climb up and eat some mosquitoes with his big gray tongue. Caleb loved watching that long tongue dart in and out of Bogie’s mouth—he imagined what it must feel like to have a tongue like that, and be able to catch your dinner by swiping it from the air. It was nearly dusk, and a dense cloud of mosquitoes was swarming around the pond. Bogie had a great dinner ahead of him.

He knelt down to watch as Bogie struggled to get onto the lily pad, placing one splayed, padded foot on it and heaving up his fat green body. Caleb noticed something in the rushes softly bobbing up and down in the little ripples created by Bogie’s swimming. It was gray and lumpy and looked like an old dress someone had thrown out. He rolled up his trousers and waded out to it, the water soft and warm on his bare legs, the river mud squishy under his feet. He reached down and tugged at it, but to his surprise, there was something inside the dress—something heavy and spongy and bloated.

His brain couldn’t come up with the word or even the image of what might be inside a dress floating in the river, as if his mind rebelled against the thought itself. Odd as it was, it didn’t occur to him until the moment he rolled it over and saw the dead, fish-white eyes of his mother staring up at him. Her face was hideously gray and swollen, as though someone had pumped air into it.

He stumbled backward in the shallow water, splashing violently in his attempt to get away from the horror he had just uncovered. Startled, Bogie leapt from his perch on the lily pad and dove down through the water to hide among the weeds along the shoreline.

Caleb heard a shrill, high-pitched sound. He realized it was his own voice, and that he was screaming. He scrambled back up the bank and plopped down amid the skunk cabbage and tree roots, panting heavily, river water running down his forehead and into his eyes. He wiped the water out of his eyes and put his head between his legs in an attempt to catch his breath.

He had developed a selective memory, and had buried deep within his psyche any recollection of the trip to the river with his father the week before—hidden it so well from his conscious brain that after his initial shock at seeing his mother’s corpse, he felt puzzlement. It was only after sitting in the skunk cabbage along the riverbank, shivering in his wet clothes, that he remembered accompanying his father down to the river on that dark night.

It is a peculiarity of the mind, which seeks to protect itself from knowledge too terrible, that it was only at this moment Caleb linked the two events, realizing that what he had done the week before was to help his father dispose of his mother’s body. It was only now he allowed himself the awareness that—in all probability—his father had murdered his mother.

Back in the river, Bogie the bullfrog settled himself on his lily pad and shot his swift, sticky tongue into the air, plucking an unsuspecting mosquito from the thick cloud of insects hovering above the water in the gentle evening air. But the boy on the shore did not notice. He was bent over in the tall weeds, crying and retching into the broad leaves of the skunk cabbage lining the river bank.

After the lecture, Lee took the A train to the Bronx. The young desk sergeant nodded to him as he entered the Bronx Major Case Unit station house. An older policeman standing nearby with a clipboard made a joke, and the young sergeant laughed. Lee continued through the lobby, trying not to think they might be laughing at him. There was a bonhomie and camaraderie in the police force he had never really been part of. For one thing, he was a civilian, and had not attended the police academy. Plenty of other civilians worked for the NYPD, but his position as the only full-time profiler was unique. And then there was his educational and cultural background. Few New York City cops came from the kind of milieu he did, and fewer still had attended Princeton.

When he opened the door to Chuck’s office, he was surprised to see Susan Morton sitting in the chair behind the desk.

“Hello, Lee,” she said, smiling. “Long time, no see.” She raised a finger to her mouth and smoothed away an imaginary smudge from her perfectly applied lipstick, then rose from the chair and swayed toward him, insinuation in the swing of her perfect hips. She moved with the sinuous grace of a large and dangerous jungle animal—a panther, perhaps. She was wearing a peach-colored Chanel suit, charcoal stockings, and black high heels. She looked like she was dressed for a board meeting.

“Where have you been keeping yourself?” she said, moving inappropriately close, looking up at him. Her eyes were oddly round—big and green and almost perfectly circular. Instead of finding this attractive, Lee now found it off-putting. He was reminded of the sad, big-eyed children in velvet paintings you might see in a tacky motel room.

“I’m working on a case with Chuck,” he replied, careful to avoid eye contact with her.

“Yes, I heard about that,” she purred. “What a terrible thing.” From her tone of voice, she might have been talking about a bottle of overpriced wine or a stain on an expensive dress. “And you hurt yourself,” she said, looking at his bandaged forearm.

“Yes,” Lee said, moving carefully to the other side of the desk, putting it between the two of them. “I had an accident.”

“Poor thing,” she said. “Someone needs to kiss it and make it better.”

“I was supposed to meet Chuck here—any idea where he is?”

She ran a finger slowly over the wooden desktop. It was suggestive, sexual, and Lee avoided the impression that he was watching her, though he couldn’t entirely avoid it. She perched on the desk, her slim legs dangling back and forth. She was very lean—maybe even thinner than in college. Back then she had struggled with bulimia, and he imagined her weighing herself daily, measuring each gram of fat she ingested.

“I don’t know where he is—they told me to wait in here,” she said.

Lee glanced at his watch without registering what he saw. It was just something to do other than look at her. “It’s good to see you,” she said.

“Yes,” he answered, pretending to search for something in his pockets.

“Do you ever think about the old times we had together?” she asked, sounding wistful. “I guess.”

She twirled a strand of fat black pearls around her finger. He had no doubt they were real.

“Me too. Sometimes I think about them a lot.”

Lee’s hand closed around his cell phone in his pocket, and his heart gave a little leap—he saw his escape route.

“Excuse me,” he said, heading for the door, “I have to make a phone call.”

Sliding off the side of the desk, she blocked his way. “Why can’t you make it in here?”

“I don’t get good reception in here.”

“Use Chuck’s phone—I’m sure he won’t mind.”

He held his ground and looked down at her. “It’s private.”

Her face hardened. “Fine—have it your way,” she snapped, stepping aside.

But as he reached for the doorknob, the door opened to reveal Chuck standing there.

“Sorry I kept you waiting,” he said, brushing past Lee and into the room. “Oh—hello there,” he said, seeing Susan.

“Hello yourself,” she said, in her best Lauren Bacall voice.

“What brings you to the belly of the beast?” Chuck said, rifling through the papers on his desk, looking for something.

“Oh, does it have to be something in particular? Maybe I just miss my adorable, handsome husband,” she replied, with a sidelong glance at Lee.

But Chuck continued his search, clearly preoccupied.

She watched him for a few moments, her face darkening, and then she said, “I can see you’re busy. I don’t want to interrupt you,” in a voice that clearly indicated that was exactly what she wanted to do. “I can tell this isn’t a good time.”

But Chuck wasn’t reading her signals. “Yeah—sorry about that,” he said distractedly. “I’ll see you tonight, okay?”

She stood there, hands at her sides, her thin body twitching with irritation—if she were a cat, Lee thought, she’d be flicking her tail. She was used to getting what she wanted, especially with men, and it must gall her no end to strike out twice in just a few minutes. She looked at Lee, displeasure that he saw her annoyance and knew what it was about showing on her perfectly painted face.

“Didn’t you have a phone call to make?” she said, trying to sound solicitous, but it came out as a kind of snarl.

“It can wait,” Lee replied cheerfully. Maybe he was enjoying her defeat a little too much, but he didn’t care.

She examined her French-manicured nails. Then, seeing she had lost, she picked up her tiny red designer clutch bag and swished toward the door. “Fine,” she said to Chuck in a tight voice. “See you tonight.”

“Okay,” Chuck mumbled, too involved in his search to notice her mood. Lee figured there would be hell to pay somewhere along the line—maybe for Chuck, maybe for him—but it was worth it to him to win even this small victory.

“You had something you wanted to show me?” Lee said after she had gone.

“Yeah,” Chuck said, “some papers. I was sure I left them right here.”

Lee had the unpleasant thought that Susan might have moved them, or even taken them, but he didn’t suppose even she would do something like that. Chuck pressed a button on this intercom and said loudly, “Ruggles, can you come in here?”

The door opened to admit the sergeant, who stood meekly awaiting orders.

“Ruggles, did you see those papers I brought in earlier today?” Chuck asked.

Ruggles went over to the corner of the room, picked up a soft leather briefcase leaning against the wall, opened it, and pulled out a handful of papers.

“Is this what you’re looking for, sir?” he asked. “I saw you stuff them in there before you were called away.”

“Ah—well done!” Chuck crowed, taking them. “What would I do without you, Ruggles?”

“I expect you’d get along just fine, sir,” Ruggles said modestly. “Will that be all, then?”

“Yes—thanks very much,” Chuck said, and Ruggles disappeared as quietly as he had come.

“Amazing man,” Chuck said, looking after him. “He’s always there when you need him—sort of spooky, really.”

“Like Judith Anderson in
Rebecca
—whenever Joan Fontaine looks up, she’s standing there, but we never see her enter the room.”

Morton smiled. “Well, Ruggles isn’t
that
creepy, I hope.”

“No,” said Lee. “What was it you were going to show me?”

“This,” Chuck replied, thrusting the papers at him.

It was an arrest record of one George Favreau, a Peeping Tom who had finally been caught stealing women’s underwear from laundry lines.

“Could this be our guy?” Chuck asked.

Lee studied the arrest report. Favreau’s escapades read more like a Ben Stiller comedy than the exploits of a serial killer.

According to his file, George Lamont Favreau was a

Peeping Tom who liked to steal women’s underwear from laundry lines in his suburban Jersey neighborhood. He had the misfortune to be caught when a sprinkler system had gone off, frightening him so much that he tripped on it and sprained his ankle. The occupants of the house had spotted him writhing on their lawn and called the police. The man of the house held a .45 to his head while the police were on their way, frightening poor Favreau so much that he peed in his pants. To add to his humiliation, several pairs of women’s panties were found tucked into his coat pockets, still damp from the laundry line. He was then linked to a series of underwear thefts when a search warrant revealed the missing items neatly folded in the bottom of his dresser drawer.

Lee handed the report back to Chuck. “It wouldn’t hurt to interview him, I guess.”

“But you don’t think it’s him.”

“Not really.”

Chuck looked disappointed. There was another knock on the door.

“Yes?” he said.

Sergeant Ruggles poked his head in.

“Detectives Butts and Krieger have just arrived, sir.”

“Send them in,” Morton said.

Chuck and Lee exchanged a look. He wasn’t sure what Chuck was thinking, but Lee was thinking that at least they hadn’t killed each other in the lobby.