Silent Victim (25 page)

Lee Campbell awoke drenched in sweat, his injured arm throbbing.

Fumbling for the bottle of water he kept on the bedside table, he tried to shake himself out of the dream’s spell. He took a long drink and shivered. The room was cool, but the chill in his body was deeper. In his dream, he had
known
the killer’s mind, imagined that he
was
him. That was all he could remember—but the feeling of being that deranged, obsessed person was still strong—so strong, in fact, that he would have trouble shaking it off.

He looked at the clock next to the bed. The red numbers read 3:00
A.M.
The dead hour.

He tried to conjure up an image of the killer’s face, but couldn’t. In the dream, he had
been
the killer, felt his rage—but had never seen his face. Trying to shake the dream from his mind, he summoned all his willpower, threw off the blankets, and heaved himself out of bed.

He felt the evil fist of depression tightening its grip on him. All he wanted to do was burrow under the covers until it passed—or until night fell again, wrapping its comforting blanket of darkness around the city. The knowledge that he must get up in a few hours and face the day only made things worse, adding anxiety to the already unbearable bleakness in his soul. It was as if all the color and sweetness had been sucked out of him while he slept. Kathy was across town at Arlene’s, and he didn’t want to obsess about whether she would call him.

He rose from bed and tiptoed to the window. He looked through the back window of his apartment at the little garden below. The window faced uptown, and he thought of Kathy, sleeping peacefully (or was she?) a mile or so north of him. All around him, the city slept. A lyric from Puccini’s
Turandot
scrolled through his mind:
Nessun dorma. No one sleeps tonight.

There would be no more sleep for him tonight.

“What do you mean she’s ‘disappeared'?” Chuck Morton bellowed at his sergeant, who stood clinging to the knob of his office door as if it were a life raft. It was Monday morning, and he had arrived at the station house to find Ruggles waiting for him, white-faced and terrified.

“I haven’t been able to reach her, sir,” Ruggles replied. “I’ve left messages on her cell phone and her landline, but there’s no response. And that’s just not like her, sir—she usually calls back within half an hour or so.”

Morton reached out and wrapped his hand around the glass butterfly paperweight on his desk, squeezing it until his knuckles turned white.

“What are you suggesting, Sergeant? That she’s gone AWOL? That she’s fled the country?”

“No, sir. I—I’m terribly afraid something’s happened to her.” Ruggles’s ruddy complexion deepened; he looked frightened. His pale blue eyes were wide, and beads of sweat prickled on his forehead.

“Huh!” Chuck snorted. “Things don’t ‘happen’ to Elena Krieger—not from what I hear.”

“I just can’t think of any other explanation, sir. It’s not like her to—”

“You already said that,” Chuck snapped. He knew he was being harsh on his sergeant, but he found the man’s devotion to Krieger irritating. The woman was trouble. He had known that when she was forced on him, and now she was proving it. “Look,” he said, his voice softer. “Let’s not panic until we know more, all right? Keep trying to reach her, and let me know when you—”

The phone on his desk bleated. He grabbed the receiver.

“Morton here.”

As Ruggles watched, his captain’s expression changed from irritated to concerned to grim. He didn’t say much, but Ruggles knew from his face that it was bad news—very bad news.

“Thanks for letting me know,” Morton said, replacing the receiver. He looked away, then back at his sergeant. When Ruggles saw his captain’s expression, he felt his stomach slide down to his shoes.

When Morton spoke, the words hit Ruggles like a bullet to the heart.

“They found Krieger’s purse.”

There was no need to elaborate—the phrase had a shattering clarity. Ruggles felt his knees go weak.

“Where?”

Morton looked down at his shoes. “In the Village.” “He got to her, didn’t he?”

Again, there was no need to explain—they both knew who “he” was.

“I don’t know, Sergeant.” Morton sounded angry—weary but angry.

Suddenly Ruggles felt his vision narrowing, and the sight of his commander was replaced by a swiftly descending blackness.

“Excuse me, sir,” Sergeant Ruggles said stiffly, and fled the room without looking back.

At ten o’clock, Lee’s phone rang. It was Kathy, and she sounded terrible.

“Can you meet me? I need to see you.” “Where are you?”

“The Life Café. How ironic,” she added with a laugh that turned into a sob.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here.” “I’ll be right there,” he said.

Kathy was sitting at a table in the corner when Lee arrived, staring out the window. Her eyes were swollen and puffy, rimmed with red, and her face wore an expression Lee had never seen on her before: she looked forlorn. When she saw him she looked up and smiled, but it was a mournful smile, and her mouth trembled at the edges.

“What is it?” Lee said, kissing her gently on the cheek. Her skin tasted salty. “What happened?” he asked, taking a chair across from her.

Kathy sucked in a long, slow breath, and gazed across the room at the thin fingers of sunlight snaking through the maze of lace curtains.

“My roommate in Philly called my cell phone this morning. My cat died in the night.”

“Oh, no—I’m so sorry. Had he been sick?” “Not really—but he was very old.”

“How old?”

“I don’t even know—he was a rescue cat. It’s odd,” she said. “He was there, and now he’s not. It feels impossible that his consciousness could disappear so abruptly, and so—finally. I have this strange lingering feeling of his presence, as though he’s still around in some way.” She let out a deep sigh, heavy with unshed tears. “I don’t mean anything mystical about it, but there is something profound about it—almost as if he’s left an energy footprint of some kind.”

“When my grandmother died, I saw women on the street who reminded me of her for weeks afterward,” Lee said. He looked away, afraid she might ask him about his sister, but to his relief, she didn’t.

The waitress appeared, a sweet, moonfaced young thing with clanking goth jewelry and a purple streak in her short black hair. Lee ordered a coffee—the coffee at the Life Café was strong and dark and good.

“It’s weird,” Kathy said, absently wrapping her paper straw cover around her index finger like a white ring. “Ever since she called, all I can think of is him, slinking into the bedroom, or padding into the kitchen to demand food. Except that he’s not there at all.”

“Maybe there is some kind of an energy footprint—who knows?” Lee said. “There are still so many things we don’t understand yet.”

“I never thought absence itself could have such a strong … presence.”

Lee tried to push from his mind those awful days and nights of thinking about Laura, of picturing her last hours, her last moments, the recurring nightmares of seeing her dead body—but only in his dreams. He never had the chance to mourn her properly, because there was never a definitive moment when anyone could say that she was dead—though he knew in his heart that she was. In those days every young woman reminded him of his sister, and he resented them for being alive when she wasn’t.

“At least I didn’t have to make the decision to—you know,” she said.

“Oh,” he said. “I had to do that for my dog.

“What was that like?”

“It caught me off guard. I wasn’t prepared for how difficult that decision would be, even when it was inevitable. It was uncomfortable and somehow it felt
wrong
to have that kind of power over another living creature. And then I was shocked by how irrevocable it was. Afterward I had the impulse to take it all back, to reverse my decision and bring him back to life—as if that were possible.”

She smiled wanly. “I should know as well as anyone how irreversible death is, but when it’s someone—something?—so close to my heart, part of me doesn’t understand how that could be.” She looked at him with that rueful little half-smile he found so endearing. “Does that make any sense at all?”

“Of course,” he replied, saying the words she needed to hear. “Sure it does.”

“I don’t know how people do it for members of their family,” she said, shaking her head. “If it’s that hard to do for a dog, I can’t imagine—oh, God, I’m sorry,” she said, her face reddening. “I didn’t mean to—I mean, I didn’t mean to be insensitive.”

He put his hand on hers. “We’ve all suffered losses, and we all have to grapple with death at some point.”

“It’s just hard for me right now, coming on top of the work I’m doing at the site. It’s too much death—too much loss.”

“That must be so hard for you,” he said.

She bit her lower lip and stared at her coffee cup. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this work. I’m used to identifying bodies, but … so many. The enormity of it. I keep thinking it will get better, but it’s only getting worse.”

“Maybe you should talk to someone about it.”

“You mean like a professional?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m no good at that.” She stirred her cold coffee. “The other day there was a pocketbook next to one of the … victims. A little red purse, and in it there was a rabbit’s foot keychain, like the kind I had when I was a kid. I started wondering if she had children, and if one of them had given her the keychain …” She pulled air into her lungs, shuddering as she did.

Lee’s cell phone rang.

“Excuse me,” he said, rising from the table. He hated talking on his cell phone in public, especially restaurants. He saw the call was from Chuck and ducked outside to answer it.

He stood against the wall of the café, underneath the black and yellow awning. Across the street in Tompkins Square Park, some kids were playing basketball, shouting and grunting as they lunged for the ball. A couple of young mothers were pushing strollers up Avenue B, laughing as they exchanged stories. A rumpled elderly man was walking an equally disheveled looking terrier. It all looked so
normal.

He flipped open his phone. “Hello?”

“It’s me. I got some bad news,” Morton said.

“What?”

“It’s Krieger. I think he’s got her.” He ceased to hear the sounds of the basketball game across the street, to feel the breeze on his face or smell the exhaust fumes from the M8 bus as it rumbled past. His entire world narrowed to the cell phone in his hand and the voice at the other end.

“What?”

“She sent an e-mail last night that we only just saw a few minutes ago. It seems she went out without any backup—to the seediest damn tranny bar in the Village. They found her purse this morning.”

“Christ. Where was it?”

“On Sixth Avenue, Midtown.” “And no one saw him?”

“We can’t find anyone who did so far. Or if they did, they’re not talking.” “Jesus, Chuck—”

“I
know!”
Chuck said. He sounded exhausted and exasperated—and dangerously close to exploding. Chuck could be pushed beyond most people’s limits—but when he did finally blow, Lee knew from experience, you had better watch out.

He felt a tug on his sleeve and turned around to see Kathy standing there.

“I’m sorry, but I have to go,” he said to Chuck. “I’ll call you back in two minutes.”

He turned back to face her.

“What is it?” she said when she saw his expression.

“Krieger’s missing.”

Over on the basketball court, a young man missed a jump shot and cursed. “Son of a bitch!”

The words floated across the street, and Lee registered them as appropriate to his situation.

Son of a bitch,
he thought.
Son of a bitch.

Depressed as Lee Campbell had been in recent years, Chuck Morton looked even worse. His normally ruddy face was pale as a bedsheet. Lines Lee had never noticed before crisscrossed his forehead like errant railroad tracks, and his blue eyes were rimmed with red.

If Elena Krieger had fallen victim to the killer, it would be worse than a tragedy—it was nothing less than a disaster. The death of a cop in the line of duty—any cop—always received lavish amounts of media attention in New York, which could be as claustrophobic as a fishbowl when it came to the relationship between the press and the police. But Krieger—that was as bad as it got. A woman, a foreigner, and an undercover agent—and a glamorous, beautiful woman to boot—working on a high-profile case of a serial offender. It was sure to set off a media frenzy. In a city weary with the aftermath of the greatest tragedy in its long history, a story like this would serve as a welcome distraction.

All of this had occurred to Lee on his way up on the subway, and he knew that Chuck Morton realized it, too. And it was Morton who would have to answer for it all—to the media, to the police brass, and most painfully, to every cop underneath him.

The door swung open, and Butts strode into the room, banging it closed behind him. He alone seemed energized by what had happened—not glad, by any means, but at least he didn’t look depressed and defeated. In fact, he looked angry.

“Okay,” he said, without bothering to say hello, “what happened?”

Chuck gave them the short version, at least as much as he knew. Krieger had gone to the infamous Jack Hammer on Friday night, and had disappeared sometime between 2 and a.m.

“The
Jack Hammer?”
Butts exploded. “She went to the goddamn
Jack Hammer?”

“You didn’t have any luck there,” Chuck pointed out. “She evidently thought she could do better.”

Butts snorted. “For Christ’s sake! It’s a rough place, even with backup! Good God, who did she think she was—Wonder Woman?”

“Something like that, I guess,” Lee said.

“I
knew
that woman was trouble,” Butts muttered.

“That’s enough, Detective,” Chuck said wearily. “Calm down, will you?”

“Oh, sure, I’ll calm down,” Butts replied, biting viciously on the end of an unlit cigar, decapitating it. Lee hadn’t seen him indulge in his cigar habit for a while—maybe it was an indication of how stressed he was.

“The question is, what are we gonna do about it?” he continued, flinging himself into the nearest chair.

“The first thing is to get straight exactly what we’re going to tell the media,” Chuck replied.

“Yeah, that’ll be a real circus,” Butts muttered. “Can’t wait for that.”

Lee looked at Chuck. Butts had made the mistake of not reading the warning signs of his mounting rage. Morton was naturally even tempered, and could take a lot—until he blew. And when he blew, look out. Lee had seen the signs—the gradual tightening of his voice, the tension in his shoulders, the flush spreading upward from the back of his neck.

Morton exploded, crashing his fist down on the desk with such force that Butts jumped backward, letting out a little yelp.

“You know, Detective, it would be nice to just wave a wand and make it all go away!” he bellowed, his face the color of raspberry pudding. “But that’s not going to happen, so why don’t you adjust your
attitude?”

Butts stared at him, blinking rapidly, then fell back into his chair.

“Sorry,” he said. “You’re right.” He shoved the cigar back into his pocket. “What do we know?”

“We know she left the bar around two,” Chuck said, with a glance out the window, where a lone pigeon was scraping the sill with its beak in search of scraps.

“And that’s the last time she was seen?” Lee asked.

“Yeah.”

The door opened, and Sergeant Ruggles entered. As bad as Chuck Morton looked, the usually buoyant Ruggles looked even worse. He shuffled into the room like a sleepwalker and listlessly tossed some papers onto Morton’s desk. He avoided looking at any of them. If Lee had any doubt before, it was clear to him now that Ruggles was in love with Krieger. And he probably blamed Chuck Morton for her disappearance.

Chuck picked up one of the papers from his desk and thrust it at Lee. “This was sent via the NYPD website this morning.”

Lee took it and read it.

I guess I shouldn’t be poking my nose where it doesn’t belong. Bad, bad girl.

“Any chance of a trace?”

Morton shook his head. “It was sent from an Internet café in Chinatown. Paid for in cash—right, Ruggles?”

“Yes, sir,” he replied in a leaden monotone, as if all the joy had been squeezed from his vocal cords. “The Chinese man running the place spoke almost no English.”

There was a knock on the door.

“Yes?” Morton said.

When the door opened, Lee was startled to see the person who sauntered gracefully into the room, as much at home as if he owned the place.

There, standing in the office of the commander of the Bronx Major Cases Unit, was Diesel himself. As usual, he was dressed all in black, which seemed an odd choice for an August day. Yet he looked as cool and comfortable as he had last winter when Lee met him in the bar at McHale’s.

“Hello,” he said, taking them all in with a sweep of his massive head.

“Ah, yes, Mr.—” Chuck fumbled among the papers Ruggles had left on his desk.

“Just Diesel, if you don’t mind,” he answered, calm and dignified as always.

“Diesel, then. This is Detective Leonard Butts, Homicide.”

“How ya doin'?” Butts said, as Diesel gave him a polite nod.

“And Sergeant Ruggles,” Chuck said with a nod at his desk sergeant.

“How do you do?” Diesel bowed slightly, though he would have had to kneel to close the height gap between him and the diminutive sergeant.

“How d’you do, sir?” Ruggles replied, still visibly distracted. “Please excuse me, but I must get back …” He abandoned the thought midsentence, and left the room without looking at any of them.

Chuck continued the introductions. “And this is—” “Dr. Campbell and I are already acquainted,” Diesel replied.

Chuck’s eyebrows shot up, and his mouth fell open. “Really?” He looked at Lee, who nodded.

“We have—or rather, had—a mutual friend.”

“I’m very sorry about your friend’s death,” Chuck said. “I wonder if we could get to the case at hand?”

“By all means,” Diesel replied, sitting in one of the scarred captain’s chairs opposite Chuck’s desk.

Chuck picked up a memo from his desk and glanced at it. “It says here that you were the bartender at the Jack Hammer the night Detective Krieger went there.”

“That is correct.”

“And so you wanted to come here to tell us what what you saw.”

“Again, correct.”

“Wait a minute,” Butts interrupted. “How did you know she—”

Lee started to speak, but Diesel held up a hand. “I understand your concern, Detective. Her disappearance has not yet been made public.” “Yeah,” Butts said. “So how did you—” “You have sources, do you not, Detective?” “Of course.”

“Is it fair to say that some of them are not always on the straight and narrow?”

“Well, ‘course. I mean, you can’t always choose who you get information from, as long as the source is tellin’ the truth.”

Diesel gave a single nod of his majestic head.

“Let’s just say that I too have ‘sources,’ and they are not always the most savory of characters.”

Lee stared at him. Diesel was full of surprises. For one thing, Lee had no idea that he was a bartender at the Jack Hammer; Diesel had told him less than a week ago that he and Rhino were working as hospital orderlies. He decided not to mention any of this, but wait and see where the conversation led.

Butts too was looking at him, though it was more of a glare. He was looking less than enchanted by the evasive response. Lee knew the little detective hated witnesses who hid anything, and Butts was already beginning to show signs of irritation. The corner of his left eye was twitching, and he was tearing at a loose fingernail with his teeth.

“Okay, okay,” Chuck intervened. “Can you swear to us that you aren’t hiding anything that might have a bearing on solving this case?”

Diesel replied without hesitation. “On my mother’s grave, if you wish.”

Butts opened his mouth to say something, but Chuck cut him off.

“That won’t be necessary, Mr.—Diesel. Just tell us what you saw that night, if you would.”

Diesel cleared his throat and intertwined his muscular fingers, leaning forward in his chair, his powerful shoulders straining against the material of his shirt.

“It was approximately nine o’clock when Detective Krieger showed up at the bar.”

“Did you know who she was?” Chuck asked.

“No, but I knew she wasn’t a transvestite.”

Chuck frowned. “Really? How?”

“Her Adam’s apple was too small. It was possible she was a post-op transsexual, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t.” “Because—?”

“Her hands. The surgeons do remarkable things these days, but they can’t change the size of a man’s hands. She had the hands of a woman.”

Chuck leaned back on the edge of his desk and crossed his arms, his face impassive, but Lee could tell he was impressed. Lee was pretty impressed himself. Diesel’s composure and sangfroid made him an ideal witness—in fact, Lee thought, he’d make a damn good cop. He glanced at Butts, who was still frowning, chewing on his index finger as though it were his next meal.

“So you noticed her when she came in?” Chuck prompted.

Diesel smiled. “It was hard
not
to notice her. Apart from the fact that she was a good-looking woman, she was dressed to attract attention.”

He went on to describe the outfit she was wearing in such detail that Lee wondered if Diesel knew more than he was letting on.

“I also knew she was a cop,” he added.

Butts frowned. “Really? How’s that?”

“My father was in the force. When you grow up around cops, you can spot them a mile away.”

“'Zat so?” Butts said, crossing his arms. “What precinct was he?”

“The Ninth,” Diesel answered without blinking. “Back when it was rough.”

“Okay,” Chuck interrupted. “So did Detective Krieger have admirers?”

“She did.” He went on to describe the entire scene with Matt and Violet, giving every detail of the encounter, including introducing himself to Krieger.

Chuck smiled ruefully when he heard the undercover name Krieger had given herself. “Lottie … like Lotte Lenya.”

“That’s what Matt said,” Diesel replied.

“Interesting,” Lee mused. “A working-class guy who knows who Lotte Lenya is.”

“Not unusual in that world,” Diesel said. “Maybe not quite the icon Judy Garland is, but—”

“I get it,” Butts said. Finished chewing on the fingers of his right hand, he had started on the left one. “A fag hag. She was in that Bond film, wasn’t she?”

“From Russia With Love,”
Diesel replied.

“Yeah,” Butts said. “With the knives in her shoes! I remember that scene where she—”

“Okay,” Chuck said impatiently. “Can we get on with it?’

“So you said both Matt and Violet are regulars?” Lee asked. “How long have they been coming there?”

“I’ve only been there a month,” Diesel admitted. “I have a day job,” he said to Chuck, “but I’m moonlighting for some extra cash.”

“Okay,” Chuck said. “So they’ve both been coming there for at least a month, then?’

“Actually, Violet only showed up a couple of weeks ago. Never saw her there before that.”

“Okay, what we’d like to do is get a list of the credit card receipts, so—”

Diesel shook his head. “It’s a cash-only business. It’s just too crazy in there to be dealing with credit card machines and receipts. Sorry,” he added, seeing the disappointment on Chuck’s face.

“I think we should go there this weekend,” Lee said.

Butts stared at him.

“Chances are a lot of the same people will be there, and we can interview as many as possible.”

“He’s right,” Chuck said. “We wanted to try to keep a lot of the details out of the media, but—”

“Good luck with that,” Diesel remarked dryly.

“Yeah, I know,” Chuck agreed. “But as far as the Jack Hammer is concerned, the fewer of the patrons who make the connection that she was there working the case, the better.”

“But some of them are sure to see her picture in the paper.”

“I don’t see how we can avoid that. But we won’t tell the media she was there working undercover. That should buy us some time to conduct a few interviews.”

“As soon as you start questioning people, some of them are bound to put two and two together.”

“But until then, the fewer people who know, the better.”

Diesel scratched behind his right ear, the one with the tiny gold earring.

“It’s not like he doesn’t know you’re after him.”

“Yeah,” Butts said, “but the less he knows about what we know, the better.”

“And what
do
you know?” Diesel asked.

“I’m afraid that’s classified,” Butts shot back with satisfaction.

Diesel shrugged. “I’m just trying to help, Detective.” Butts didn’t say anything, but as far as Lee was concerned, they could use all the help they could get.