The Scream Catcher Read online

  Lennox and his student, T-Bred, will wait for the cover of deep night to load the van. He does not want to risk being spotted. Other than the weather, he believes himself in control of all situations.

  He makes a check on his student now sleeping the sleep of the forcibly sedated on the couch set at the far side of the room.

  Just as expected. The student is still out for the count.

  But Lennox won’t wake him just yet. T-Bred worked hard up on that mountain all morning and afternoon preparing the field of play. In a matter of one hour, the student will be participating in his first kill game. He will require every ounce of his strength, every inch of his resolve in order to perform the one task assigned him. So, rather than wake the young turk, Lennox chooses to let the boy sleep. Bending at the waist, the beast brings his face to the student’s face. He inhales, breathes in the boy’s scent. Before raising himself back up, he kisses the boy gently on the cheek.

  It is a simple act of love that his own father would have found impossible.

  Assembly Point Peninsula

  Thursday, 6:30 P.M.

  A storm-filtered dusk is approaching fast when Rosie comes around the north corner of the log home, sneaks up on Jude just a little too quietly from behind. When she taps him on the left shoulder, he turns fast, thrusting the two-pronged grill fork at her like a dagger.

  “Jesus H., Rosie.”

  His wife of little more than one year stands wide-eyed and startled in her own right, long brown hair blowing in, what up until twenty minutes ago, was a storm-driven wind that blew up the sloped property from the lake.

  Tan-faced and brown-eyed, Rosie is feeling far better now that she’s been allowed the mild muscle relaxant on top of spending quality time in bed. While taking good care of herself, Jude also knows she is trying her best to keep him from jumping over sanity’s edge.

  “Breathe,” she insists while setting a bottle of Bud onto the Sunbeam gas grill’s attached utility tray. “We have Ray Fuentes to protector us, remember? And don’t forget the local Coast Guard.” Rosie nods in the direction of the lake and the Boston Whaler anchored off the dock in the far distance, the large letters L.G.P.D. printed on its starboard and port sides.

  Jude lowers the fork, takes the cold beer in his left hand, inhales long and slow. His mind focused on the breathing exercise, he takes an even longer time to exhale. Turning back to Rosie, he wraps his arm around her waist, holds her tight, embraces her wide forehead with pursed lips. Upon releasing her, he steals a drink of beer. Out the corner of his eye, he spots Jack walking through a vegetable garden planted on the opposite side of the lawn near the northeast tree line. Scruffy, blue-jeaned kid is holding one of those three dollar, quick-assembly balsa wood gliders between the thumb and index fingers on his right hand. When the boy launches it into the air, it catches the storm driven wind and flies a wide arcing curve all the way across the expanse of the back lawn, before nose-diving onto the cement patio.

  Without giving it a thought, Jude sets down the grill fork. He bends over, picks up the damaged plane, does his best to straighten out the now bent wing. Like his boy before him, he holds the thin fuselage between index finger and thumb, raises it up over his shoulder, prepares for take-off.

  “Make it fly, dad,” Jack shouts, round cheeks red with excitement.

  Legs shoulder-width apart, chin up, Jude cocks his arm back and lets her fly.

  The feather-light plane shoots immediately into a nosedive until somehow pulling itself out, regaining precious altitude. When the plane comes to a soft landing on the grass, Jack chases after it.

  Setting the beer bottle down onto the grill shelf, Jude looks up at an evening sky that hovers over the lake like Armageddon itself. Another thick patch of storm clouds moving in fast from out of the north. Thick, low-riding, purple and black clouds. Part of the same system no doubt that’s slated to slam the six million acre Adirondack Park all night.

  Towards the back outer edge of the clouds, he can see the flashes of intermittent lightning and what appeared to be vertical streams of heavy rain fall that strafes the lake, turning its blue-green surface to gray-black. The clouds and the incoming storm not only means that the Lake George P.D. patrol boat stationed off the tip of the peninsula is about to get hammered, it also means Jude has maybe two minutes at most to finish up the steaks before the picnic will have to be moved indoors.

  In his head he finds himself wishing somehow the cooking could go on for another thirteen or so hours, until the appointed hour of the hearing in county court and just maybe the recall of the Lennox’s conditional bail. In the process of cooking, Jude has found a way to occupy himself, keep his ever-thinking mind distracted.

  But now the cooking has come to an end.

  Coming from the direction of the Lake George road and the woods beyond it, a flash of lightning followed seconds later by a blast of thunder. Two storms approaching from different directions. Not a good situation.

  Jude sees a terrible collision of storm crashing against storm. He sees lightning, hail, and a heavy wind blowing off the surface of the lake.

  A cool, almost peaceful, wind precedes the two storms.

  It sweeps its way around the house like a ghost around a headstone. Jude can’t help but notice how the cold gusts affect Rosie’s long brown hair, causing it to drift back away from the left side of her face, exposing her tanned neck.

  Flame and plumes of gray smoke shoot skywards from the grill, followed by another too-close burst of lightning and thunder. This one coming directly off the lake.

  That’s when Rosie calls out for Jack, tells the boy to, “Come inside. Quick.”

  She starts up the concrete patio on her way to the rear kitchen door.

  “At least part of our final day turned out nice,” she comments, outstretched hand opening the screen door for a hungry little boy who charges on into the kitchen.

  Our final day . . .

  Laid out on the grill, not three steaks, but the three faces of Hector Lennox—longhaired Hector running in pursuit from out of the gravel pit; short-haired, ear-ringed Hector in the ViCAP mug shot; the pouting innocent Christian Barter/Lennox standing before Judge Mann.

  Jude stabs at the steaks with the grill fork, yanks them off the grill, slaps them down onto the metal platter. Closing the lid, he kills the flame.

  Lake George Village Precinct

  Thursday, 6:35P.M.

  The county Evidence Room is located between the Department Communications Center and Archival Storage Room of the L.G.P.D. precinct basement. The single windowless room is brightly lit by a single ceiling-mounted fluorescent fixture. Floor-to-ceiling metal shelves line the walls. The shelves are filled with boxed tagged-and-bagged evidence that, for the most part, is collecting dust and spider webs.

  As he unlocks the padlock to the Evidence Room’s metal door, Captain Jimmy Mack steps inside, makes his way across the floor not to one of the many metal shelves, but instead to a table set up against a far wall near the fire extinguisher. There sits a single white Banker’s box that, thanks to the overtime teamwork of both Medical Examiner Fleming and the Glens Falls CSI, contain a dozen plastic jars filled with physical evidence. In a show of prosecutorial force, there will be blood matching both the victim’s and the killer’s DNA There will be hair samples belonging to the killer (several long blond ones), plus one pair of black gloves discovered inside the recovered Lexus Sedan that, despite the dunking in the Hudson River, still contain trace gun powder residue.

  The physical evidence put together with Jude Parish’s eyewitness account and Agent Terry MacSweeny’s video-conferenced “profiling” testimony will provide enough ammunition to revoke the killer’s bail. The evidence, taken along with the supporting testimonies, will be enough to put Lennox behind bars where he will await the convening of a Grand Jury down in Albany and, along with it, mandatory DNA testing.

  Stepping up to the designated box, Mack, as the eyewitness’s father, is convinced he’s done every
thing in his power to secure an indictment against Lennox. Maybe Blanchfield still has her doubts about the validity of Jude’s testimony, but the old Captain is certain that come this time tomorrow, the beast will be locked down, his son no longer vulnerable.

  Exhaling a breath, Mack reaches for the covered box, grabs hold of its handles, raises it up. But something is terribly wrong.

  The box is too light.

  Cold panic fills him.

  Peeling off the lid, he peers inside only to see an empty space.

  “Holy mother of God,” he spits before sprinting for the open door.

  Lake George Village

  Thursday, 7:13 P.M.

  Lennox stands naked before the cracked mirror inside the half-bathroom, stares long and hard into his blue-eyed face. He smiles at himself; takes great pleasure in his body. The white-tiled room is lit by an exposed overhead light bulb. Bathed in the harsh light, he observes not only the face, but every nook and cranny of his muscle-carved torso.

  He grips a pair of sharpened sheers in his right hand.

  He begins to cut away at the dreadlocks, severing them from their roots just above the scalp. Over the past nineteen months the hair has become so long and thick it falls away from his head not as tiny weightless bundles, but as heavy clumps. The clumps make a kind of thud when they hit the peeling, asbestos floor-covering.

  It’s a long, tedious process.

  But with each clip of the sheers, Hector “the Black Dragon” Lennox feels that much lighter, that much more energized.

  When the cutting is finished, the beast runs an electric clipper over his scalp. He then takes one last look at himself in the mirror. Raising up his arms, he strikes a double biceps pose. He gawks at mountainous biceps, at tight forearms with veins popping through fat deprived skin, at deep triceps, at protruding pectorals, at rippling abs.

  Not an ounce of extra body fat. Nor a single visible hair.

  From this point on, Hector Lennox is dead.

  Long live the Black Dragon.

  Lightning strikes the village street only yards away from the anonymous basement studio apartment. The thunder is immediate. Not a low rolling rumble that echoes off the rocky cliff-sides of Tongue Mountain. More like a series of airbursts from incoming cruise missiles. A wonderful, feel-it-deep-inside-your-chest concussion noise he remembers fondly from the war.

  But this is not the time for sentimental recollections.

  It is time for the crucial second item to be tended to.

  Black Dragon sits himself down at the portable fold-out table. He stares at the LCD monitor. He breathes as the green-lettered phrase rains endlessly down on the monitor’s face.

  :grub net set to activate . . .

  :grub net set to activate . . .

  :grub net set to activate . . .

  He is tempted to sit at his desk forever, just staring at the hypnotic snowfall of green pixels. But then Black Dragon knows that now is the time for action.

  Extending his index finger, he punches Enter.

  Scream for me . . .

  Rising up from the table, he unzips his black leather pouch, pulls the C.O.2 charged injector, loads the syringe with the liquid amphetamine. Standing over the couch, he bends down, pokes the needle of the automatic injector into the forearm of his student, squeezes the trigger.

  The student is jarred awake.

  “Where am I?” Thoroughbred barks. He’s opening and closing his eyes as if having trouble focusing inside the dark apartment. And he is.

  “Time to shave your head,” Black Dragon says.

  T-Bred, confused, groggy, dizzy.

  “I don’t want to . . . shave my head,” he slurs.

  “But you do,” insists Black Dragon. “You must be just like me.”

  Assembly Point Peninsula

  Thursday, 7:30 P.M.

  Jude is seated at the head of the kitchen table when he does something entirely out of character. He reaches out, takes hold of Rosie’s left hand and Jack’s right.

  “Let’s try something new.”

  Rosie locks onto Jude’s face, throws him her pretend frosty facade.

  She says, “You’ve got to be kidding. You want to pray.”

  Jude glances down at the plate of food. At the neatly arranged steak, corn-on-the-cob, and green salad. Although the others have already started on theirs, he finds himself feeling the sudden need to offer up some words of thanks before digging in. Or perhaps, in all his anxiety, he simply isn’t hungry and doesn’t want to admit it.

  “Bear with me,” he insists. Then, recalling a prayer he learned during his first ever Christmas dinner with Mack at what had been the old Captain’s childhood foster home, Jude recites, “Dear God, may you be at our table and in our hearts. Amen.”

  “Amen,” Rosie mumbles.

  “Amen,” Jack tentatively repeats.

  The boy adds, “Rosie, is dad sick or something? Is that why we’re praying?”

  Clearing her throat Rosie cuts a small piece of steak, pops it into her mouth. It’s the first solid food Jude has seen her consume in twenty-four hours. Raising up her head, she issues a devilish grin.

  “No, my husband isn’t sick. But I do think he’s growing closer to God in his old age. In a hocus-pocus kind of way.”

  The round-faced Jack chews on his steak, peers up at his father.

  “Dad’s an old timer,” he giggles. “Like Mr. McGoo.”

  Cutting into the meat, Jude makes a crooked-faced sneer.

  “Mr. McGoo not,” he snaps. “Who’s the ferocious slayer of the dark monster?”

  “You are, Jude man.”

  “And don’t you forget it.”

  Lightning creates bright daylight out of the dark sky. A burst so quick, so brilliant, it takes the entire Parish family by surprise. The thunder clap that follows seems to rattle the stone and wood home atop its concrete foundations.

  Jude observes as the faces of his wife and child go from animated to stiff and pale.

  “My God in heaven,” Rosie exclaims.

  “Now you believe,” Jude says.

  “It’s like the end of the world,” says Jack. “The night of the dark monster.”

  “It’s not the end of the world,” Jude assures the boy. Still, he finds himself turning around in his chair to get a look out the window to see if any of the trees or maybe the dock has suffered a direct lightning strike. “No dark monster ‘round here, remember?”

  “Good,” grins Jack, starting back in on his steak. “Because I was beginning to worry.”

  Turning back around to face the table, Jude picks his knife and fork back up.

  Maybe now that the big boomer is past, I can eat in peace.

  It’s exactly what he would do if the lights don’t go out.

  Assembly Point Peninsula

  Thursday, 7:32 P.M.

  The Parish home has gone dead.

  Dead means no power, no lights.

  It also means that any hope for remaining summer twilight has been dashed by the thick black storm clouds that have invaded the Adirondack skies.

  “Shall we say another prayer?” poses Rosie from the dinner table.

  “Told you,” Jack says, looking up from his plate. “The world wants to be over now.”

  Another lightning bolt strikes just short of the log house. Close enough for its electromagnetic charge to raise the hairs up on Jude’s arms and neck. In the nano-second that follows, he is able to register the wide-eyed faces of his wife and child. The resulting thunder concussion nearly blows them out of their chairs.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Rosie cries.

  “Lot’s of praying tonight,” Jack nervously giggles.

  Rising up out of his chair, Jude abandons a meal only half picked at.

  “Any idea where we’ve hidden the emergency flashlights?”

  “Good one,” answers Rosie.

  They work as a team, searching the kitchen drawers for the flashlights they are certain exist but that cannot be locat
ed.

  At least not on demand.

  “There’s always the gas lamp in my office,” Jude reminds Rosie.

  “And what exactly do we use for fuel?” she points out.

  But after another few minutes of searching the master bedroom, they manage to find not one, but two flashlights which are stored inside Rosie’s underwear drawer for safe-keeping.

  “Good of me to remember my intimate apparel.”

  Down inside the garage, Jude also discovers a portable radio they used at a cabin rental on the opposite side of the lake last year while the log home was being constructed. Besides the radio, they also uncover a big white box filled with white candles left over from their wedding reception of sixteen months prior at the Lake George Yacht Club.

  With the Jack standing inside the open door of the dark, musty smelling garage interior, Rosie flicks on one of the flashlights which is gripped in her right hand, shines it directly onto the yellow radio which is gripped in the other. Thumbing the power switch, she tunes into the first A.M. band station she can locate on the dial before handing the radio over to Jude.

  At first, he can’t be sure if it’s the signal or the lack of juice in the batteries because the reception is weak at best. So weak, he finds he must crank up the volume just to make out the faint voice.

  “. . . by all initial appearances,” states the deep-voiced broadcaster, “a power outage affecting much of the northeastern seaboard. While spokespersons for the Federal Energy Commission remain closed mouthed, it is still too early to determine if the outage can be linked to an act of sabotage or simply an over-utilized power grid that, since the 1950’s, has been continually bombarded . . .”