The Scream Catcher Read online

  “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 the 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.

  “In the beginning,” he explains, “we assumed Lennox might be experiencing a Disassociative 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 was 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 concurrently 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 change 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 are 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 Barter and who killed in the gravel pit is in possession of the same M.O. and signature as Lennox. He’s been I.D.’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 thickly 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, make not 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. Stewart,” MacSweeny says. “I’ve asked some of our operatives in the area to scour the cemeteries, see what they can come up with.”

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

  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 Barter, 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, I.D. 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 says. “You wouldn’t lie just to make up a good yarn.”

  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 lung full 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?”

  “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 Barter cover story.”

  For a split second Jude thinks that now might be the time to tell his father about the email 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 had 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.”

  “You questioned its security yourself.”

  “Yeah, I did. But at the time, P.J. seemed to have no doubt about its effectiveness as a monitoring device.”

  “Now what are you trying to get at? That this kid gave P.J. the key to the bracelet?”

  Mack shakes his head.

  “Course not,” he says. “If he did something like that he’d certainly tell me about it.”

  Almost on cue, both men peer back into the dark alley.

  But inside Jude’s head a flash of something—a bare-chested Lennox removing the monitoring device from his ankle, hanging it on a bare wall. He closes his eyes tight, shakes his head as though to shake the image loose from his brain.

  “So far no alarm has sounded,” he points out. “He’s still in there with the thing on his ankle.”

  “So far,” Mack says.

  The two are quiet for another minute.

  But inside the walls of Jude’s skull he’s seeing that same ankle bracelet hanging on a wall. The image is accompanied by an orchestra of strings and pounding tympanis. Strings pluck, snare drums crack, symbols crash, horns blare. Jude senses that as the day wears on and nightfall descends, the orchestra will gradually work its way towards major crescendo, and the demon inside him will be the conductor.

  A rumbling thunder emerges from out beyond the village in the direction of the lake. Black storm clouds moving down from the north and up from the south. Later this afternoon they will converge to make one hell of a storm.

  “So what are we going to do about Blanchfield?” Jude swallows.

  The old Captain smokes, tosses the still smoldering butt out the window.

  “It’s early in the game,” he exhales. “This is just the start. But I will tell you this. Come tomorrow morning, if Judge Mann does not allow an indictment, I’m going to find a reason and a way to bust Lennox even if I have to tie him down, put a gun in his hand, point it at my own head.”

  Jude senses that his father is not finished.

  “Then what are you gonna do?”

  “Then I’m going to look into Blanchfield, see exactly what it is she’s hiding, and why it’s worth risking the safety of my son and his family.”

  Mack drives Jude home in near complete silence.

  Jude has never seen his father so worried. Instead of looking at the old Captain, Jude concentrates on the thick black clouds that now block out the late day sun as it sets over Lake George. Moments later, as he gets out of the Jeep in front of his log home, Mack waves his son back to the open driver’s side window.

  “Promise me something,” he says.

  “Anything.”

  “Tonight, no matter what happens, you don’t leave this house. You have Ray and the lake patrol to monitor the grounds. You’re three-sided by water and one-sided by forest. The access road is protected by Fuentes. No one can get to you. Not without great effort. I’ll be spending the night at the Village Precinct, just in case.”

  “Just in case what, Mack?”

  Overhead, lightning flashes. Thunder follows.

  The hairs on the back of Jude’s neck stand at attention when the thunder blasts.

  “I’d rather not think about it,” Mack says before pulling out of the drive.

  Lake George Village

  Thursday, 6:00 P.M.

  Lennox stares out a basement window covered with iron bars. Not to keep him in but to keep intruders out. Ice-blue eyes focus on black and blue clouds settling over the lake’s north end. The clouds carry an electrical storm from out of the east. A powerful lightening and thunder-filled event.

  He’s spent the day in the mountain wilderness, digging, planting, hauling. He and T-Bred, a full day on a forest and snake-infested mountain. Now a deep hunger has set in.

  In his hands, a little plastic bowl.

  Colorful characters from the cartoon Scooby Doo Where Are You? are printed on the bowl. There is Shaggy, Daphne and the rest of the intrepid gang, including the loveable detective hound, Scooby Doo. The characters are running away from a ghost who in cartoon reality is
a bad guy with a white bed sheet draped over him.

  The bowl is filled to the brim with Captain Crunch cereal and one-percent milk. He carefully dips the aluminum spoon into the bowl, brings the cereal to his mouth. He chews the cold milk-soaked cereal while peering through the window bars at the black clouds and the lightning flashes they generate. It’s been storming off and on all late afternoon and evening. But now as the dusk approaches, Lennox feels that the worst is yet to come. It makes him feel good to know that the worst is yet to come.

  The violent weather: he cannot control it.

  But on the eve of his Preliminary Hearing its presence is a like a gift from God. It will aid him in the work which will begin as soon as the sun goes down.

  Laid out on the concrete floor behind the computer table are the items lifted from his extensive personal cache that he will require for playing a new kill game: one dozen one-hundred pound bags of untagged ammonium-nitrate fertilizer, a one gallon jug of stable nitroglycerin main charge, an electronic motion-sensitive timer/fuse; a remote detonator.

  There are spools of color-coded electrical wire and rolls upon rolls of duct tape. There’s an SA-200 high-powered pepper-ball launcher, a case of multi-colored pepper-balls, a brand new .22 cal Berretta and screw on sound suppressor, a USNV-14B military specified intensifier tube night vision scope and attached digital night viewing camera device with portable modem capability. There are two sat phones, one digital picture cell phone, a computer-generated topo map, a compass and several yellow pin markers lifted from the Municipal Golf Course.

  The collection also includes foot long Maglite flashlights, batteries of all sizes, water bottles, Slim Jims beef snacks, anti-bacterial ointments, field dressings, two-dozen five gallon capacity fire-extinguishers, one slightly used Ford E-250 commercial cargo extend-van parked inside a secured garage just outside the apartment’s alleyway entrance, and of course, his precious iPhone.