Scream Catcher (40 page)

Still seated in the boat’s bow only a couple of feet from his father, Jude’s reaction to the tattered lakefront cabin cannot be described as casual. After all, this is his first trip here since the Burns murder-suicide. That said, the place has an almost stun-gun effect on his heart and head while it seems to reach out for him, grab him by the throat, pull him into its invisible tractor beam.

He can’t help but wonder what made Mack decide to bring him back to this place. After all this time, what is it Jude has to prove?

It seems obvious that the old Captain has to have some idea about what Jude is thinking. They’ve been together for way too many years for Mack not to know. Still, he maintains his strange silence while reversing the engine for one quick pulse, then pulling the boat into the nearest of the two available slips.

When the boat is idle, Mack hops up onto the dock with all the agility of a man with two good arms and shoulders, ties down the craft’s stern and bow to the wood polls located on opposite ends of the slip.

Peering down at Jude from above, the old Captain’s smile grows even wider.

“Coming Jude?”

“Do I have a choice?”

It’s a clumsy maneuver to say the least, but Jude manages to lift himself over the side of the boat, set his rear end onto the dock. From there he swings his one good hand and one broken leg over and onto the dock’s warped plank floor. Grabbing hold of only one of the two aluminum crutches he carries with him, Jude relies on his upper body strength to pull himself back up into a standing position. It’s then the ex-cop swallows a deep breath of the pine-tinged air and at the same time, takes his first real good look at the abandoned cabin.

Although his shoulder has to be hurting him, Mack is quick to offer up a helping hand on the walk up the short incline, across the overgrown grass and the bare rocky ground above it, to the empty cabin.

While they walk Jude finds it impossible to hold his silence any longer.

“You just couldn’t resist it could you, Mack?” he says, a bit under his breath. “What lesson is it I’m supposed to be learning now?”

“You need to put a permanent lid on the past, kid,” the old Captain comments while allowing Jude’s weight to bear upon his good shoulder. “I couldn’t think of a better place for it to happen.”

From only a few feet away Jude stares at the weathered brown wood doors and the sun-warped rooftop shingles. He gazes into a picture window that must have offered the Burns family a stunning panoramic view of Dome Mountain and the lake beyond it, but that now has a fist-sized hole in it from a tragic exchange of gunfire that after all these years, still rings loud in Jude’s ears. There is the overgrown lawn and the sun-bleached yellow plastic L.G.P.D. crime scene tape that remains wrapped around a partially collapsed front porch. The ribbon serves as yet another reminder of the multiple deaths that occurred here. It’s all very surreal standing there only a few feet away from its wall, with the wind on his back and the sun in his face. But Jude swears, if he breathes in hard enough he can almost smell the blood that soaked the cabin’s wood plank floors.

Time reverses for Jude Parish. In his mind he sees himself as he must have looked on that sunny spring afternoon when his world changed forever. He sees himself laying down his service weapon, approaching the log cabin’s front door with hands raised high, the T-shirted Burns allowing him entrance into his besieged home only to aim the barrel of a shotgun in his face. In his present mind Jude once more pictures a trembling mother and daughter huddled in a far corner of the small living room, the massive, bearded Burns making his way lumberingly but somehow nimbly back over to them, shifting his aim from Jude to the heads of his loved ones. In his brain Jude can still hear the unmistakable
chick-chick
when the crazy bastard cocked the slide-action pump. Burns was going to blast his wife and child back to God and that’s all there was to it, because they had promised him something. They had promised him something and never delivered and to this day Jude can’t imagine just what that something might have been.

* * *

The wind blows steady and gentle off Lake George.

Up above a pair of nesting robins become suddenly startled by the men’s presence and fly off in the direction of the woods and the lake road. His vision of the Burns family having once more retreated to the back spaces of his brain, Jude turns away from the cabin, faces his father.

“Let the resolution begin, Mack,” Jude says.

Eventually, the gray-blazered old Captain clears his throat as if he were about to make a speech. In a way, he is. He breathes in, bites down on his lower lip, averts his eyes from his son’s. Obviously, what he’s about to tell Jude can be more easily rendered if he doesn’t have to look him in the face.

Speaking as softly as the wind, the old Captain says, “I’ve come to the conclusion that in the beginning—the very beginning—Lennox had yearned for something more than the cold plastic feel of the video game. What he
lusted
was emotion and raw, red hot passion. He craved real life; craved the experience of witnessing firsthand how a real human being would react to a real-life kill game; craved the precise emotions that might run through the veins of the first-person killer. With that in mind he began to design a game that would involve a real human being of his carefully controlled selection and that would take place at peak season inside our beautiful tourist-filled town. Inside an abandoned tanning factory to be specific.”

In Jude’s brain, a quick flashback to the first-person kill game the young boy was playing inside Wild Bill’s back on the morning of Lennox’s arraignment. A paranoid, claustrophobic game that took place inside the dark, damp basement depths of an abandoned factory. A game of real-life murder called
Project Night Fright
.

“The real-life, real-time kill game would not come easy,” Mack goes on. “Major risks were involved. Like all would-be serial killers, Lennox bore an almost uncontrollable urge to view a kill, but he also needed to hear what that death sounded like, which was why he began to collect his victims’ screams. Those screams became more important than the act of murder itself. By becoming a scream catcher, he could place the screams inside one of his video games, and relive the kill game again and again.

“He’s always known that, at base, what he was about to commit was murder, even if murder was simply a byproduct of his game of power and control. He couldn’t simply be satisfied with planning a kill game and letting it go at that. He had to plan for failure rather than fail to plan at all. This required that necessary measures be undertaken to cover his tracks should the worst happen and the law caught up with him which, in his mind, it inevitably would.

“One of the top items on his rather creative trouble-shooting list was to take advantage of the upcoming election of the new Warren County Prosecutor. In his mind, Lennox would make a series of contributions to his candidate of choice who in this case happened to be the beautiful Lake George native, P.J. Blanchfield. In short, Lennox liked her, admired her spunk, her aggressiveness, her youth, her beauty, her charm. Most of all he admired her passion, her lust for life. He also relished the fact that should she win—and how could she lose with his silent backing?—she would be the first female to run for Warren County and actually succeed.

“Now when Blanchfield received the first of what would become a series of $9,000 checks—each one of them coming from what appeared to be a different corporation attached to different overseas Swiss accounts—she had no way of knowing they were coming from video game designer Hector Lennox. All she saw instead were dollar signs. In a word, Blanchfield grew up a plastic-spoon-redneck. She was the daughter of a village tavern owner. She’d put herself through college, through law school. She had not a penny to her name, much less the money required to run a competent campaign against a three-term male incumbent. So, acting impulsively, she accepted the donation. She cashed it not through her campaign fund, but privately, and asked no questions.

“And why should she?

“There in her hands was not only enough money to wage war, it was enough for her to buy up television and radio spots to spread the word even beyond the boundaries of Warren County.

“But when more checks started arriving, she began to get suspicious. She could see that although the checks bore the marks of different companies and corporations, she listened to her intuition and began to suspect that they were originating from the same source. This meant that what had started as one large, more or less illegal contribution, had now blossomed into one giant series of illegal contributions.

“But then, she couldn’t turn back now.

“She was in too deep, really making a name for herself, causing headaches for the stodgy old incumbent and his network of old boys. Her campaign after all had snowballed into something special. Victory was at hand. What’s more, there were bills to pay; television and radio station debts to settle. There were even down payments for a waterfront condo up in Bolton and a brand spanking new fire engine red Porsche Carerra. In the end, she secured a resounding triumph, thanks to her secret financial admirer.”

Mack pauses to breathe. Or to calm himself. Jude can’t be sure which.

“Some months later,” continues the old Captain, “came the first kill game and along with it, Lennox’s arrest. Sensing her first capital crime victory and the major publicity that might come with it, P.J. prepared herself for what promised to be the trial of the century, at least as far as the Adirondacks were concerned. That is, until the newly arrested Hector ‘the Black Dragon’ Lennox dropped an atom bomb on her.

“During a closed door interrogation between himself and Blanchfield, he began to recount for her some information only the prosecutor would be privy too—namely the precise amount of each campaign check received and privately cashed, plus the name of each false corporation set up for them. Lennox then calmly issued a threat to the freshman prosecutor, warning her,
You proceed with my indictment, I’ll not only reveal the size and extent of the cashed and pocketed illegal contributions, I’ll reveal that they came directly from the man you now wish to indict for murder in the first degree.

“That’s when our beautiful prosecutor proceeded to make the mistake of her young life. Instead of immediately handing over this information to the proper authorities, own up to her blunder of taking bad money, Blanchfield did exactly the opposite. All reason left her. She became overwhelmed with the prospect of a very bleak future. Instead of the world at her fingertips, it was suddenly goodbye prosecutor’s office; goodbye future senatorial candidacy; goodbye private box at the Saratoga race track; goodbye any hope she might have had for erasing her redneck past. Shit, she’d be lucky to keep herself from being prosecuted for obstruction of justice. In other words, instead of doing the right thing, Blanchfield did the wrong thing, and it was exactly what Lennox had been counting on all along.”

The wind is picking up now, cooler than before. Not far from where father and son are standing, some squirrels battle over what Jude guesses to be acorns that are hidden in the tall grass. Nature’s fury. In his head he listens carefully to the words and deeds Mack reveals to him. But in his soul, Jude’s not sure that he truly believes them. Rather, he can’t say that he doesn’t believe them exactly. It’s just that he’s having trouble conceiving of the idea that Blanchfield might not fess up to the illegal campaign contributions when given the chance. She may have cherished her public position and the power that went along with it. But she wasn’t stupid. Still, who knew what a person was capable of when filled with panic?

Mack breathes in and out, steady and controlled.

“So what happened next? Fearing Lennox would go public with what he knew, Blanchfield struck up a private deal to deep-six the State’s case, citing ‘Insufficient evidence.’ In the end, Judge Mann had no choice but to drop the indictment, dismiss the entire proceeding as a ‘No Bill.’

“So you see, kid, at the snap of a finger Blanchfield, through her ability to manipulate a simple series of events, got to keep her job and her shot at what she expected to be a brilliant political future. So long, that is, as nobody knew the truth; so long as Lennox didn’t talk about all those checks.”

Jude finds himself gripping the handle on his one aluminum crutch. He hobbles a step back, glances over his shoulder at the wide hole in the cabin’s picture window—a hole made from the stray buckshot that exploded from Burns’s Remington 1187.

“I know that you’d grown suspicious of P.J.,” he says. “But when did you become aware of the actual truth?”

“Glens Falls CSI was offered federal permission to scour through the rubble of what once upon a time was Blanchfield’s office. What they discovered was the VHS ‘close-watch’ interview tape that reveals her admitting to Lennox’s face that she cashed the illegal checks. We also discovered a blackmail note in which Lennox clearly spelled out his intention to destroy P.J.’s political future unless she dropped the indictment for the first kill game. That blackmail note was still locked inside her top desk drawer. The note, taken along with the tape, pretty much tells the whole story. The gaps that remained were easy to fill in because of a second, far more recent letter that was also discovered.”

Mack perks up, reaches inside his blazer, pulls out a crumpled No.10-sized business envelope. Without a word, he hands it over to Jude. Staring down at a plain white envelope Jude can see that much of it has been water damaged. He can also see that the envelope hasn’t been addressed to anyone at all. There’s no writing on it of any kind.

Balancing his weight upon the single crutch, Jude opens the letter, begins to read.