Free Scream Catcher by Vincent Zandri

outstretched, pointing to the busy Main Street and the mobs of colorful people that occupy it. “Just look at that crowd. You don’t even have to try and lose yourself inside it.”
    “But if Lennox was cleared prior to a Grand Jury hearing, you might have kept tabs on him regardless. You could have gotten the FBI or Interpol to monitor his phone calls.”
    Uncomfortable silence ensues while a sweet breeze blows off the lake, through Jude’s now dry sweats. The prodigal son can’t help but feel like he’s stomping on his father’s Achilles heel. The silence; the old Captain’s obvious frustration … It tells Jude there’s something else to the backstory of Hector Lennox.
    “Lennox beat a murder rap,” Mack speaks up. “Beat the rap and it was something I had to accept as the Chief of Detectives. If I could have, I would have arrested him for jaywalking. But not only was he invisible and probably long gone from Lake George, I was issued strict orders from Prosecutor Blanchfield to avoid harassing him. He’ll fuck up again , I was told. When he does, we’ll pounce on him like a fox on a rabbit .” Nibbling the lower lip. “And then along comes an obit published in a Paris newspaper claiming the death of Hector Lennox, an American, originating from West Hollywood, U.S.A. Iraqi War Vet, computer wiz, video game designer.”
    … Don’t forget scream catcher …
    Jude, shaking his head.
    “That body he left in Sweeney’s parking lot this morning,” he says. “Is that the fuck up the Prosecutor’s been waiting for? Another human life?”
    But of course Mack can’t answer that.
    No way he can answer it.
    In a way Jude can’t blame his father; can’t help but commiserate with his frustration. Because who is Jude to begin questioning his father’s methods?
    As a former cop, Jude knows that if Mack is speaking the truth—that his hands were essentially tied in the matter of Hector “the Black Dragon” Lennox due to what sounded like an overly cautious county prosecutor, then there wasn’t a damn thing Mack could have done about it. Only seventy percent of homicide arrests result in an indictment. Jude supposes that Lennox’s original case and the riverside murder that followed falls in with the unsolved and/or un-prosecuted thirty-percent.
    Until now that is.
    Mack heads for the revolving courthouse door.
    “We gotta go.”
    Jude, an ex-cop turned eyewitness for the prosecution, fights back a surge of acid that shoots up from his stomach, settles in the back of his throat like red hot charcoal. He’s about to put himself on the line by testifying against a suspected serial killer. He can’t imagine that Mack would steer him wrong, put him in danger. Jude can’t imagine that once faced with an indictment for a second time, Lennox would get off again. This time the prosecution will have both an eyewitness and the proper forensics to back up their cause.
    Or so one can only hope.
    The way Jude sees it, Mack wants the creep so badly he can taste it.
    Jude peers back up at the mountain, at the sharp peak that stabs its way through the wispy white clouds.
    “Now, Jude,” Mack presses.
    Like he’s been doing since he was a boy, Jude follows his father’s lead.
    This time into a courthouse.

14
     
    Warren County Courthouse
    Tuesday, 1:15 P.M.
     
    The man Jude Parish knows as Hector “the Black Dragon” Lennox, but who now IDs himself as house painter Christian Jordan, stands before the Judge’s bench. He’s tall, bulky, blond, clad not in the orange jumper of the Warren County lockup, but allowed to sport the clothes already on his back—white basketball sneakers, baggy Carhardt pants hanging low on narrow hips, too-tight T-shirt bearing the likeness of Jesus Christ. Clothing that for some judges might be considered a mockery of their court.
    But not for the Honorable Judge Gerry Mann.
    The old gaunt-faced, bespectacled, north-county adjudicator sits back behind his bench, relaxed in a leather,