C. Lawrence: Silent Screams

It was the next morning, and they were standing in front of an examination room at the medical examiner's office, waiting for the pathologist who had done Marie Kelleher's autopsy. She entered hurriedly, apologizing for her lateness. Gretchen Rilke was a rather glamorous-looking woman, blue-eyed and pink-cheeked, with thick, dyed blond hair and a suggestive lilt of Alpine hills in her accent.

"I was in a conference call that went late," she said, pushing a strand of implausibly yellow hair from her eyes. With one hand she pulled the body from the morgue freezer compartment, the oversized drawer sliding smoothly on its metal rollers. With the other hand she pulled back the sheet covering Marie's body just enough to expose her neck. In spite of the bluish tinge to her pale skin, it was still hard to think of her as dead.

"You see the bruises?" Gretchen asked.

Lee looked at the thick collar of purple discoloration that ringed Marie's neck. It appeared darker now, which could be a result of the harsh fluorescent lighting-but he knew that bruises could deepen or even appear after death. Now, under the bright lights, he could see several separate bands of bruising.

"I see," he said.

"This indicates that he repositioned his fingers, probably several times."

"So he didn't kill her all at once?" Butts asked.

The pathologist shook her head. "No. There's no crushed cartilage, and no serious damage to the larynx."

"So," Lee said, "that means he applies minimum force-enough to make her lose consciousness. And then he waits until she comes to and starts all over again."

"That scenario would be consistent with the physical evidence," Dr. Rilke agreed.

"Shit," Butts muttered. "This is one sick bastard."

"Okay," Lee said, almost to himself. "He's not in a hurry. This means that he's comfortable where he is-that he's not worried about getting caught. He's killing them somewhere other than the church. And no sign of sexual assault?"

"Right," Dr. Rilke answered.

"And no sign of a struggle?"

"Her fingernails aren't even broken, so she didn't have time to fight back. There are no defensive knife wounds, so I'm guessing he took that out after she was already subdued."

Lee gulped in some air, avoiding breathing through his nose. "So the carving was postmortem?"

"That would be consistent with the amount of bleeding-or lack of it," she replied. "On the other hand…"

"What?" Lee said, his stomach twisting around itself. He swallowed hard. He hated visiting the morgue.

"Well, he didn't carve that deeply, so it's just possible it was done while she was still alive."

Lee felt his stomach give a heave. He swallowed again and concentrated on taking deep breaths.

"How would he get her to stay still, though?" Butts asked.

"There were no signs of ligature around her wrists or ankles, right?" Lee asked.

"No," Rilke answered. "But she might have been too weak to struggle by that time."

"Any idea what he used?" Butts asked.

"Nothing fancy. An ordinary kitchen paring knife would do the job. Something with a pretty short blade-probably a couple of inches at most."

"Could it have been a scalpel?"

"The wounds are too jagged for that-even in unskilled hands, a scalpel would do a neater job."

"Too bad we can't use handwriting analysis on this," Butts remarked.

"No, I doubt there would be a correlation," Lee agreed, "although there might be something about the way he forms certain letters…"

"It's not much of a sample to go on," Dr. Rilke pointed out.

None of them wanted to say what they were all thinking: the last thing they wanted was to have a larger sample, because that would mean having another victim.

"No prints at all?" Lee asked.

"No," said Rilke. "We superglued the body-nothing. He must have worn gloves."

"Supergluing" meant using cyanoacrylate (superglue) to develop latent prints that might not otherwise be visible.

"We gotta get going," Butts said, looking at his watch. "The parents in Jersey are expecting us."

"Okay, thank you," Lee said to Gretchen, who smiled grimly.

"Good luck."

"Thanks," he replied, thinking, We'll need it.

Forty minutes later Lee and Butts were seated next to each other on the DeCamp bus to Nutley, New Jersey. As the bus rumbled out of the Lincoln Tunnel and onto the corkscrew stretch of highway leading up the hill past the town of Weehawken, Lee turned to look across the river at Manhattan. The mid-morning sun lingered low in the eastern horizon, lurking behind the buildings, its furtive rays refracted by the glass skyscrapers of Midtown. The river appeared perfectly still and opaque under the hazy gray February sky.

Marie Kelleher's parents had already come into the city once to identify their daughter's body, and Chuck Morton, trying to spare them further grief and stress, had dispatched Lee and Butts out to the couple's house in Nutley to interview them.

Lee leaned back in his seat and stretched his legs out under the empty seat in front of him. The DeCamp bus was expensive, but it was comfortable and quiet. It wasn't crowded at this hour; they were traveling in the opposite direction of the commuters headed into the city. The few people scattered around the bus were reading, staring out the window, or napping. Talking on cell phones was forbidden, according to the sign behind the driver. Thick block letters warned that passengers who disobeyed could be ejected from the bus.

"Good old-fashioned detective work-that's what solves crimes," Butts remarked as he opened the magazine in his lap and leafed through it. "Yep," he murmured, "that's what it's all about: knockin' on doors, gathering evidence."

Lee gazed out the window as the gray granite cliffs of Weehawken whizzed by. He'd heard this line before, many times, not just from beat cops and guys like Butts, but also at John Jay. The culture of law enforcement had little patience for what most cops considered the "touchy-feely" aspect of crime solving. Most cops were not comfortable around profilers, any more than they were comfortable around psychiatrists.

"It's not that I think it doesn't figure into the equation," Butts said, staring down at a print ad promising whiter teeth. The woman in the picture grinned up at them, her parted lips displaying a row of broad, perfectly even teeth that gleamed like ivory dominoes. "But it's really all about evidence in the end, you know? Cold, hard evidence-that's what catches criminals."

Lee didn't reply. They had no evidence so far: no hair, no fibers, no DNA-nothing. He didn't feel optimistic about getting any, either. This killer would only get better at covering his tracks as time went on.

Detective Butts was leafing through the magazine, his bulbous head bent low over the pages. Lee couldn't help liking the man, in spite of his bluntness-or maybe because of it. He was like a lumbering old bulldog-grumpy, moody, eccentric-and yet Lee had the feeling he was someone you could count on in a crisis.

"What did you find out about that broken lock in the church basement?" he asked.

Butts looked up from the magazine. "The maintenance staff didn't know anything about a broken lock, and no one I talked to in administration remembered making the call. But sure enough, there was one down there when they looked, so someone must have known about it."

"Hmm," Lee said. "That's interesting."

"Coincidence, you think?"

"Maybe, maybe not."

Nutley was not a long ride-about thirty minutes, with the light traffic they encountered traveling westward-and soon they were trudging from the bus stop up the hill to the modest middle-class neighborhood where the Kellehers lived. The house itself was a tidy little white clapboard structure, with green awnings over the windows and a small wooden windmill on the front lawn. Nothing looks its best this time of year, Lee thought as they walked up the narrow sidewalk to the front door. The grass in front of the house was brown and windswept, and even the little windmill looked desolate and abandoned in the dull late winter light.