Silent Victim Read Online Free PDF Page A

case you’re working on?” he asked.
    Butts licked his lips and took another sip of beer. “It’s very weird, you know, Doc—very weird.” “How so? Who’s the victim?” Butts leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Well, that’s the thing. There’s more than one.” “Yeah? Tell me more.”
    “Okay, but if they decide to call you in on this one, you didn’t hear this from me.”
    “Really? You think they might call me in?”
    “Who knows? Alls I know is that we’re not even sure yet these are homicides.”
    “Is Chuck Morton involved yet?”
    “Well, if we decide that these guys are vics and not suicides, he will be.”
    Besides being the head of Bronx Major Case Unit in the Bronx, where Butts was a homicide detective, Chuck Morton was also Lee’s college roommate and best friend—and was largely responsible for his appointment as the only criminal profiler in the NYPD.
    Lee took a long swallow of beer. It was very fizzy and a little sweet—it tasted yellow, like honey.
    “Okay,” he said, leaning forward, “tell me the whole thing from the beginning.”

C HAPTER F OUR
    By the time Kathy showed up at the restaurant, Butts and Lee were well into their second round, hunched over the table deep in conversation, their heads almost touching. When he saw her, Lee leapt up from his chair and rushed over to her, his handsome face flushed with happiness. How different he was from the thin, pale, and worried-looking man Kathy had met five months ago. Though he still suffered from occasional bouts of depression, he was much more relaxed than he had been when they met. Of course, he told her it was because of her presence in his life, and as much as Kathy wanted to believe this, she suspected there were other factors as well.
    “Hi! We were beginning to worry about you,” he said, kissing her on the lips and putting his arm around her shoulders. She was much shorter than he was, so he had to bend down a little. Kathy was self-conscious about her height, but Lee Campbell made her feel good about the way she looked—one of the many reasons she loved him. She was dark-haired and small, and he claimed to prefer compact brunettes over the American stereotype of beauty—tall, leggy blondes. She didn’t even need to believe him to feel grateful—it was enough that he said it. She was a successful scientist, brilliant and respected in her field, and a member of an old aristocratic Philadelphian family, but she was still a woman, with all the insecurities about her appearance of most American women, bombarded daily by impossible images of airbrushed physical perfection.
    “What took you so long?” asked Detective Butts.
    “Oh, you know, the whole rush-hour train thing,” she said, slipping into the booth across from the homely detective. Kathy liked the plainspoken Butts—his lack of pretension was refreshing. Her father moved in elite circles in Philadelphia, and sometimes Kathy found his friends irritating, with their expensive wines and trendy restaurants—or at least as trendy as Philadelphia could claim to have. She enjoyed mentioning her frequent trips to New York, knowing that inside most Philadelphians is an envious would-be New Yorker.
    Impulsively, she gave Butts a kiss on his pockmarked cheek, and his already florid face turned a deep cherry red.
    “Let’s get you a beer,” he said, looking around for the waiter, though she suspected it was so she wouldn’t notice his embarrassment. “You got a lot of catchin’ up to do.”
    “What’s everyone drinking?” she asked.
    “There’s a special on this Belgian brew,” he said, signaling to the waiter for another round. “It’s really not bad.”
    “Sounds good,” Kathy said, looking around the room, which was beginning to fill up. Friday night was prime time for the East Village, but it didn’t begin to really heat up until around ten. She and Lee always tried to be indoors by then, away from the roaming mobs of drunken bridge-and-tunnel