C. Lawrence - Silent Screams

Lee Campbell stood looking at the naked body draped over the altar of the church. The girl's delicate white skin was pale as the cold marble floor beneath his feet, in stark contrast to the vivid red wounds slashed across her torso and the purple bruising around her neck.

"Come on, Marie, talk to me," he whispered. He bent down over her, looking for petechial hemorrhaging in or around the eyes, but could find none. The lack of patterned abrasions meant there had been no ligature. "So he used his hands," he murmured. Some strangulation victims had no sign of injuries at all, so he was grateful for the bruising around her neck-pronounced enough to suggest that this, and not the slash wounds, was the cause of death. He thought about what her last moments were like: eleven pounds of pressure for ten seconds could cause unconsciousness, and thirty pounds of pressure, for four or five minutes, would result in death.

He observed the blue creeping into her lips, the porcelain smoothness of her dead cheeks. At least he left her face alone. He had always found it odd that strangulation victims sometimes looked strangely peaceful, with all of life's pain, suffering, and uncertainty behind them now. Lee felt a stab of envy in his stomach, and a warning sounded in his head. He could not allow himself to linger over such thoughts. He closed the door of his mind to the desire to be where this dead girl was now, to be done with the mad dance of life and its many trials.

But, of course, there had been nothing peaceful about her death. His eyes fell on the jagged letters carved into her naked torso: Our father who art in heaven. The O encircled her left breast like a red halo, the blood droplets symmetrical on her pale flesh. For some reason, he was reminded of a red and white hula hoop his sister had as a child. The writing was uneven and slanted downward-a job done in haste, he concluded, by a killer who was not yet comfortable with this part of his work.

The blood had dried and was caked in little mountainous crusts of crimson on her pale skin. The word "Heaven" was cut into her abdomen, just over the light dusting of dark pubic hair on her pelvis. There was little excess blood around the altar, and no signs of struggle, suggesting that she was killed elsewhere.

"What happened to you?" Lee whispered. "Who did this to you?" Even at a whisper, his voice echoed and fluttered, ghostlike, through the tall stone columns of the chapel's interior. Lee had never been on the Bronx campus of Fordham University before, and he was surprised by the size of the campus chapel. But then, Fordham was a Catholic school-in fact, the college seminary was just across the quad.

Lee studied the dead girl's face, waiting for the eyes to flutter open, and realized with a start that she resembled his sister-the same curly dark hair and white skin. He had often imagined seeing Laura like this, wondering what he would do or say, but her body had never been found. And so that encounter hung in suspended animation, waiting for him in some near or distant future. He looked down at Marie, cold and unmoving upon the altar, not a line creasing her smooth cheeks, her youth a rebuke to the person who had squeezed the life from her body. Lee was relatively new to such intimacy with the dead, and it held a fascination he knew was not entirely healthy.

But Leonard Butts, the Bronx detective assigned to this case, had no such fascination, nor was he of a sentimental turn of mind.

"Okay, Doc," he said, approaching Lee. "You 'bout done there? ME's here, and we'd like to get the vic downtown ASAP."

Butts indicated several men unloading a stretcher from a van outside the chapel. Lee could see the words MEDICAL EXAMINER in large yellow letters emblazoned on the backs of their dark blue jackets as they brought in the stretcher, its wheels clacking on the stone floor. A couple of members of the forensics team glanced up briefly, then went on with their work-dusting, photographing, inspecting. They worked with swift, practiced gestures, moving smoothly through the crime scene, gathering evidence. A thin young Asian woman snapped photographs of Marie from every angle, her face set in a stoic, businesslike expression.

Looking around, Lee felt that he was the only one out of place here-he alone had nothing to contribute, nothing to offer toward the solving of this terrible crime, this trespass against society and decency. He wondered if his friend Chuck Morton, commander of the Bronx Major Case Unit, had made a mistake in calling him out to this crime scene in the predawn hours. After two years as the NYPD's only full-time criminal profiler, Lee still had doubts about whether he was up to the job.

"Well, Doc, whaddya think?" Detective Butts's Bronx accent bit through the solemn atmosphere of the chapel.

Lee glanced up at Detective Butts, who had an unlit cigar dangling from his mouth. He had told the man twice that he had a PhD in psychology, and was not a medical doctor, yet Butts still insisted on calling him Doc. With his beard stubble and unkempt hair, the detective looked like the kind of man you might see lurking around an off-track betting parlor. Lee couldn't blame him for the beard stubble; after all, it was 6 A.M., and he could feel the scratchiness on his own chin. But he suspected that even with a shave and a haircut Butts would still look disreputable.

Instead of the handsome, regular features of a stereotypical Irish cop, the detective had a decidedly uneven face, with flaccid jowls, a bulbous lower lip, small eyes, and a complexion like an unkempt gravel road. There was no discernible change in the thickness where his skull began and his neck ended; his neck rose in an unbroken line up to the top of his head, crosshatched tanned skin fading into gray hair stubble. Lee was reminded of the mesas he had seen in Arizona. To top it off, Butts was short and thick-Elmer Fudd in a trench coat. Lee thought the unlit cigar was a bit much, as though Butts was deliberately trying to look cartoonish.

"Well, whaddya think?" Butts repeated. "Boyfriend did it?"

"No," Lee replied. "I don't think so."

"Strangulation is typical of domestic violence cases, y'know," said Butts, his small eyes narrowing even more in the dim light of the chapel. When Lee didn't respond, he added, "You know what percentage of murder victims know their killer?"

"Eighty percent," Lee replied, bending down over Marie again.

"Yeah," Butts said, sounding surprised that he knew the answer.

Lee straightened up and stretched his cramped back muscles. At just under six foot two, he was half a foot taller than the stubby detective. He ran a hand through his own curly black hair, which was getting shaggy in the back.

Butts frowned and deepened his bite on the cigar. "So who do you think did it?"

Lee stepped aside as the men from the medical examiner's office loaded the body onto the stretcher. All around him, the forensics team members continued with their work; silent and efficient, they were the opposite of this stubby detective with his battered cigar and bad skin.

Lee looked down at his hands, feeling their uselessness. "I don't know," he answered.

Butts made a sound between a grunt and a sigh. "Humph. Okay, Doc-well, when you get some ideas, let me know."

"Oh, I have some ideas," Lee replied. "I just don't know what they add up to yet."

Butts moved the cigar to the other side of his mouth. "Yeah? Well, let's have 'em."

"It's too early yet to draw a lot of conclusions, but I don't think the attacker knew his victim."

"Really?" Butt's voice conveyed his disapproval and disdain.

"This was not a personal crime-this was a ritualistic murder."

Butts cocked his head, letting the cigar dangle from his thick lips. "How do you figure that?"