Scream Catcher Read online

  “Your lineup is set to go, Captain Mack,” he says, mustached face deadpan, machine-like. “Are we to proceed?”

  What Jude already knows as a former dick: hidden behind the long white curtain is a long pane of thick translucent safety glass. Protected behind the window is a separate room that houses a lineup of seven men, all of them standing shoulder to shoulder. The ages of the men in this particular lineup will be anywhere from twenty to thirty-five. They will all be of large to extra-large frame, excellent health.

  His heart beats so rapidly, it’s nearly impossible to ingest a deep breath. Behind his eyeballs, quick flashes of brilliant light. It makes him think.

  Maybe Mack was right. Maybe I should have visited the emergency room after that bullet grazed my skull.

  Jude squeezes his fists, tries to calm himself down, curb the onset of anxiety.

  Mack cocks his head in the direction of the window. He reminds his son of the obvious: that if he can pick out the suspect in the lineup, then back it up by making a second positive ID in a court of law, the State will get a second shot at prosecuting a serial thrill killer.

  The old Captain sets a heavy hand on his son’s sweat-shirted shoulder.

  “So what’s it going to be, Jude? You up to the task?”

  The newly carpeted floor feels like it’s about to be pulled out from under the ex-cop.

  But then here’s his chance to do something good, a chance to make up for his ineffectiveness at the morning’s kill scene.

  Jude gives the nod to open the curtain.

  Mack barks, “Now you’re cooking with Wesson.”

  Turning to the wall mirror, Lino raises his right hand, makes a thumbs up.

  The lights in the room are automatically dimmed at the very same moment the curtain slides open revealing a small, not-to-distant platform that holds seven men. One of them a kind of real-life, real-time comic book villain—with a head full of blond dreadlocks, a crooked sneer and a black dragon tattooed to his right forearm.

  11

  L.G.P.D. South Pearl Street Precinct

  Tuesday, 10:31 A.M.

  The closing curtains automatically trigger the bright overhead lights.

  Mack glances at his watch, picks up the telephone extension. When he says “Round up the Jeep,” Jude knows his father has to be talking to his driver (“Long Legs”).

  Jude is happy about the directive, happy that his revisit to the L.G.P.D. precinct is coming to an end. He’s beginning to feel cooped up. Beyond cooped up.

  Claustrophobic.

  He feels like all eyes inside the precinct have been focused on his backside since his arrival. Or maybe he’s just being paranoid. But then his tighter than tight sternum is speaking to him. It’s saying, Get me the hell out of here!

  “Where you heading, Mack?”

  “Medical Examiner. You wait for me here, catch some rest. Maybe grab a bite to eat.”

  Jude can’t help but feel the needle prick of disappointment. But then he knows that in Mack’s mind it makes sense for him to take a breather while the old Captain makes the short road trip down to Glens Falls. After all, between the two-way drive and the meeting with the M.E. he’ll eat up the better part of an hour. Time enough to allow Jude the chance to catch a nap.

  But Jude is not tired …

  Scratch that … He’s tired all right. But at the same time so wired he could not possibly sleep. And the last thing he wants right now besides sleep is food. Every time he thinks of food he pictures the two quick blasts from a sound-suppressed automatic, the way the victim’s head violently jerked forward, chin against chest. He sees the frail body fall limply forward, rubber-like, splashing into a puddle of rainwater. He hears the screams.

  There’s something else he sees too: He sees himself dropping to the pavement at the precise moment he should have been stopping the killer before he got away.

  Jude knows that if Mack were to leave him alone for an hour, he would be reduced to pacing the interview room—heart aflutter so to speak. Minutes would go by like days.

  But there’s another reason Jude does not want to be left alone—or left behind, to be more accurate. He watched a man die today. He knows neither the victim’s name, age nor what he looked like up close. He has no idea if the man lived alone or had a family. Jude knows nothing about him. Not even the color of his eyes.

  Jude’s played the part of the puppet long enough.

  Mack the puppeteer has led him by the strings, told him what to do, how to do it. At the same time Jude senses an overprotectiveness—the father still watching out for the son, even in adulthood. But perhaps if he could find out just a little bit more about the man who screamed on demand and who kneeled idly while taking two shots to the head outside that gravel pit, then he might afford himself just a hint of control. He would know what he’s fighting for.

  Mack is putting his jacket back on when Jude stands, heads for the interview room door.

  “Where do you think you’re going, kid?”

  “This is my case, remember?”

  The old Captain cracks a crooked grin.

  “Just like old times,” he says.

  “Let’s hope not,” Jude says.

  * * *

  Glens Falls Medical Center

  Tuesday, 11:03 A.M.

  Father and son stand inside the basement level, open double-doorway that accesses the Glens Falls Medical Center autopsy room. Jude’s head is reeling, not only from the .22 caliber bullet that grazed his scalp, but also from the pungent, systemic odor of formaldehyde and alcohol. If you want to stand inside the brightly illuminated, white-tiled room, you just can’t avoid it.

  The body of the shooting victim is laid out on the first of three identical, side-by-side stainless steel tables. From where Jude stands he can clearly make out the blood and water seeping off the body where it collects drip by audible drip inside a steel vat positioned beneath the table’s drain. Almost thoughtfully, the thin man’s sex has been covered up with a green sheet, the ends of which hang over either side of the narrow slab.

  The M.E. has his back to Jude.

  He’s a short man, pudgy, dressed from head to toe in green surgical scrubs, with a translucent visor that fits around his head and is pulled down over his eyes like a welder’s shield. As father and son enter, the M.E. is standing over the mannequin-still body in his green-slippered feet, contemplating it like Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. In his right hand he grips the table-mounted water spigot that he’s only just used to wash the body down. In his right hand, he holds an old fashioned Microcassette tape recorder. Sensing the presence of another, he about-faces, thumbs Stop on the recorder, drops it into his baggy pant’s pocket.

  Mack takes a step further inside the white-tiled room.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Walter.”

  “You’re late,” the M.E. points out while pushing up the face shield, then peeling off the Latex gloves, discarding them into a blue medical waste bin at his feet.

  “You know my son, Jude,” Mack interjects by way of introduction.

  Jude and the M.E. shake hands almost cordially.

  But when Dr. Walter Fleming pulls his hand away, Jude can’t help but sense the cold, almost slimy residue that now coats his own palm. The residue gives him a bad case of the creeps.

  Jude dries his palm off on his sweatpants. But only when the doc isn’t looking.

  As if on cue, all three men shift their focus onto the body.

  “Massive head trauma and hemorrhage is the cause of death,” Fleming speaks up. “Manner of death came about by two .22 caliber slugs to the brainpan, probably to ensure no exit wounds and to minimize spatter. It’s all spelled out in my initial report. Naturally you’ll have to wait a minimum of seventy-two hours for tox and ballistics, that is anybody pays attention to ballistics any more. In any case my friends, we not only have a homicide, we have a carefully scripted assassination.”

  The M.E. moves only his lower lip when he speaks. His words, although
precisely rendered, carry with them a slight lisp that has the effect of making each syllable reverberate a little bit longer than nature intended. Or so Jude can’t help but notice.

  Positioning himself directly over the body, Mack gives it a cursory, personal examination. From toe to skull.

  “Do we have an ID on the deceased?”

  Fleming emphatically nods.

  “Fifty-year-old male. Last name Manion, first name Andrew. Owned and operated a convenience store in downtown Glens Falls. No family to speak of, no one thus far having shown up to claim the body.”

  Jude is standing just a couple of feet back from the two men. His gaze is locked onto Manion’s face—onto pale/yellow skin, sunken eyes, scraggily gray hair that has flopped over onto the skull’s left side, exposing a bald scalp that now bears the thin red/purple line of where the M.E.’s razor saw cut and removed the cranial cap to allow for brain extraction.

  “If no one has come forward to claim the body,” he poses, “how’d you figure out an ID?”

  Fleming shoots Mack a look.

  “It’s okay, Walter,” the old Captain says. “Jude bore witness to this man’s murder. He’s agreed to testify.”

  The doctor turns to Jude, eyes the former cop curiously up and down and up again. Like his handshake, the glare gives Jude the creeps, like the M.E. is sizing him up for a casket.

  “One of the orderlies recognized our victim right away,” Fleming states after a beat. “Used to buy his coffee in Manion’s grocery store every morning before starting his shift.” Now cocking his head. “Up until three weeks ago, that is, when the store suddenly closed and never reopened.”

  “Three weeks,” Jude says as if the amount of time carries with it a special significance. And it does.

  “You want to know what I think?” Fleming poses.

  “That’s why we’re here,” Mack says.

  “I believe your man—if he is indeed the reincarnation of Hector Lennox—abducted Mr. Manion, confined him, starved him.” Stepping closer to the body, the M.E. inhales, holds out his right arm as if he’s about to begin a presentation. “Notice, if you will gentlemen, the brittle hair, the swollen joints and weak musculature.” Circling the table. “Notice the bloated stomach and abdomen indicating severe constipation. Notice the yellowish, dry skin; the frail fingernails. If I had to make my most educated guess, I would say this man was verging on anemic. It could be the effects of alcoholism, but initial tests on extracted body fluids produced low potassium, magnesium and sodium levels. I won’t know for sure until Tox comes back with a full evaluation, but I would bet dollars to jelly donuts that his electrolytes were sky high. And my God, you only have to breathe on him to make him bruise.”

  Jude too comes closer to the prone body and what he sees makes him cringe. The skin is covered in black, blue and purple welts, some of them the size of coasters.

  “Those welts,” Jude says. “They also the result of starvation?”

  Fleming slips on a new pair of rubber gloves. He presses his fingers onto a particularly large welt that protrudes from the skin on Manion’s lower neck, causing it to blanch, even in death.

  “Excellent question,” he says turning not to Jude, but to his father.

  For the ex-cop, it doesn’t take a whole lot of figuring out that Mack and Fleming have seen this kind of thing before.

  “Pepper-balls,” Mack nods. “Pepper-balls and .22 caliber slugs. Just like the first two victims, matching Lennox’s M.O. pretty much to the bone. In my opinion anyway.”

  Jude peers at Mack, then back at the M.E.

  “I don’t follow.”

  Mack says, “One of Lennox’s favorite activities as the Black Dragon is to strip his victims bare, then chase them down for a couple of hours with a pepper-ball launcher.”

  You have to be a sick puppy to torture anyone or anything great or small, Jude thinks. You have to be doubly sick if you get creative about it.

  “Pepper-balls exploding against bare skin would cause severe bruising,” Fleming adds. “Naturally it’s not enough to kill anyone—that is, you avoid the face, especially the eyes. But I imagine the pain this poor soul endured before he died was severe and traumatic.”

  Mack turns to his adoptive son.

  “You didn’t happen to notice if Lennox was carrying an object about the size and length of a shotgun?” he asks. “From the right distance, a pepper-ball launcher would look a hell of a lot like a rifle or shotgun.”

  Jude explains that aside from a flashlight and a pistol, he didn’t notice anything like that. Although he did see that Lennox might have had something strapped to his back and shoulders. Something Jude took for a holster or a pouch of some kind.

  Mack nods.

  “He might keep the launcher strapped to his back.”

  Moving away from the table, Jude takes a step back. In his heart and in his mind he has to wonder what kind of animal Hector Lennox really is. For the first time that morning, the sour scent of doubt fills his head. He wonders if he’s doing the right thing by testifying.

  What happens if Lennox gets off?

  Will he come after me?

  Will he harm my family—my wife, my son, my daughter to be?

  Will he make us scream for him?

  In his mind Jude can’t help but the feel the pepper-balls slapping against his own bare skin. He can only pray the sensation is not prophetic. But then he thinks of the dead man lying on the table. He knows that if he backs out now, chances are that Lennox will be released from police custody. The beast will strike again.

  Besides, people are depending upon Jude now to do the right thing.

  Especially his old man.

  Mack makes his way into an adjoining office. As he reemerges with a yellow manila envelope in hand, his cell phone begins to ring. He answers the phone, tells whoever’s calling (Lt. Lino?) that he and his son will arrive back in Lake George in fifteen minutes.

  Hanging up, Mack nods in Jude’s direction.

  “We gotta go, kid.”

  Fleming purses his lips.

  “Have you called in the Feds yet?”

  “I’m waiting until after the arraignment and a positive ID of Lennox. That happens I won’t have a choice but to call them in.”

  “Let’s hope that this time you get your man, Captain.”

  Mack nods.

  He says, “Walter, we already have.”

  But in Jude’s head, he sees his father crossing imaginary fingers behind his back. He also knows then why the old Captain decided to make a personal visit to the M.E. He’s convinced that he has his man in custody and the faster he can collect the evidence necessary to make a proper indictment, the faster Lennox disappears from the earth.

  Mack asks Jude if he’s set to go.

  Jude nods.

  But before they leave, the ex-cop can’t help but take one last good look at Lennox’s latest victim. At Manion’s face.

  Like the man who executed him, his eyes are blue.

  12

  L.G.P.D. South Canal Street Precinct

  Tuesday, 11:50 A.M.

  Mack makes Jude wait in the wings while he confers with Lt. Lino in private.

  As though a guest in his own home, Jude watches them through the glass, mouths moving, words being exchanged, hand gestures galore. He might have belonged to this place once, but considering the morning’s events and the ineffective part he played in them, he can’t help but feel more like an outsider.

  Whispering “Fuck it” to himself, the former cop makes his presence known by invading the small square-shaped office uninvited. The first thing he sees is his father’s face lit up like a strobe-light of intensity. The old Captain isn’t just nibbling on his lower lip. He’s practically chewing on it.

  “Judge Mann is calling for an arraignment in exactly one hour.” Mack barks, patting his chest pocket for his smokes. “Wild Bill Stark is at present being subpoenaed by the prosecutor’s office to make an appearance.”

  Jude can’t
help but feel a little bit lighter inside.

  A quick arraignment can mean only one thing: an indictment against Lennox for murder is imminent.

  “Congratulations,” he offers.

  “Save it,” Lino says, flat tone hinting of annoyance. “Mann already knows that Lennox took a shot at you.”

  Jude smiling. “So what’s the problem? That should speed things along.”

  Lino throws Mack a glance like, He doesn’t get it. Then, turning back to Jude, he says, “The problem is that Mann also knows you lost consciousness at the kill scene.”

  Jude feels the roof collapse on top of him. Elated to depressed in two-point-three seconds. If he didn’t get it before, he gets it now. Cop Job: Jude’s very own testament regarding his fear, his lack of grace under pressure. What Lino is trying to say of course is that Mann considers Jude unreliable at best—a man who could very well have passed out from fear before the murder even occurred.

  As if sensing his son’s disappointment, Mack gives his son a glare that Jude immediately interprets as Let’s get the hell out of here.

  “There’s something you should see,” he says.

  13

  Wild Bill’s All Day/All Night Video Arcade

  Tuesday, 12:10 P.M.

  Moving through the gauntlet of chain-smoking teens loitering outside the glass entry, Mack leads Jude into a dimly lit game room. The old Captain shoots and scoots around the dozens of stand-alone game systems like a pro running back through high school-level linebackers. Only when he comes upon a game that occupies a space of honor in the building’s far corner does Mack stop.

  Jude swallows a lump of bitter anxiety.

  Stepping up behind his father, he’s surprised to see that a young boy is playing the game. The nine or ten year old kid’s face is glued to the big screen while he uses both hands to maneuver the game’s colorful buttons and controls. Unhindered by the adult intrusion, the boy plays on as if Mack and Jude do not exist. And Jude can only guess that for a young boy wrapped up in a fantasy cyber world, they don’t.