Free Silent Kills by C.E. Lawrence Page B

remembered the world outside, the people around him, with a vague memory of being one of them, but it was only an impression, a residue. Now, as he walked briskly past the food cart vendors on lower Broadway, his illness itself felt like a memory.
    That’s what Dr. Williams called it: an illness. He remembered the relief he felt when he heard those words, and how they alleviated his guilt. It went so against the grain of his Waspy upbringing, where coddling oneself was looked down upon. Even when he was truly incapacitated, he couldn’t silence the inner voice snarling, “For God’s sake, snap out of it!”
    But there was no “snapping out of it,” only painful months of therapy, medication, and finally, hospitalization. “Crawling out of it” would have been a more apt description of the process of recovery—a process he wasn’t finished with yet.
    He arrived at the familiar grey stone building next to the hole-in-the-wall taco joint and got in the elevator, with its aroma of plywood and Play-Doh. He had never figured out why it smelled like that—perhaps there was a preschool somewhere in the building. The elevator was empty when he got on, but just before the doors closed a worried-looking woman carrying a Channel 13 tote bag slid in. She pressed the button for the fourth floor and stood huddled in the far corner as the ancient elevator lumbered to its destination. He and Dr. Williams had joked over the years about how slow the elevator was, but now, standing here, he felt the woman’s distress seep into his bones. The building was full of doctors’ offices, and she was no doubt a patient, perhaps awaiting an unwelcome diagnosis.
    He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. She was thin and dark—the kind of deep bronze color you get from a tanning salon. She wore flat sandals with thin gold straps and a pair of lime-green linen trousers under a loose white cotton shirt. He wondered if her leanness was purposeful or the result of chemotherapy. She had that drawn look around her mouth he had seen in AIDS and cancer patients. He tried to avoid looking directly at her, and was relieved when she got off one floor before him. She slipped out into the hall, trailing unhappiness behind her like the tail of a comet.
    Lee took a deep breath and exhaled, releasing the anxiety he had absorbed from her. It had always been like this for him. Even as a child he had been unusually attuned to other people’s moods. He tended to absorb other people’s emotional states, whether he wanted to or not. He was also good at reading people—their desires, their strengths, their weaknesses, their needs.
    Over the years, he had honed his talent into a craft. First as a psychiatrist and then later as a criminal profiler, he used his innate skill to master his profession. He was always learning, refining his knowledge of human nature. For instance, he had noticed over the years that people’s faces tended to congeal into characteristic expressions that mirror their inner lives—a kind of reverse portrait of Dorian Gray. A sour, bad-tempered man will develop deeply furrowed frown lines and a downturned mouth, features that become more heavily etched into faces as people age. Similarly, a cheerful, kindly woman may go about with a habitual smile on her face.
    But he also knew that a very angry woman might wear a smile as a cover-up for her unacknowledged, socially unacceptable anger. And yet the strain would show somewhere, in a tightening of the eyes, a certain tenseness in the shoulders, bitten nails. When Lee was really “clicking,” he was unaware of reading any specific signs at all—it was more as if he had a direct view of the other person’s soul, an instinctive grasp of the core of that person. On a good day, he saw past the temporary mood of a person, into deeper aspects of their being—whether they were a person of good or ill will.
    He could be fooled by photographs, and sometimes by phone conversations, but rarely