The Silenced Women

by Frederick Weisel

  Coyle nodded. “You okay, Eddie?” When Mahler didn’t reply, Coyle started typing on his phone. “The other thing is, the earlier victims weren’t wrapped in a blanket like this one.”

  Mahler looked up the hill to the spectators behind the yellow caution tape, who were holding up phones. “You know what else is different from two years ago? We didn’t have as much social media crap as we do now. By the time we get back to our cars, the photos from those phones are going to be on Instagram and Snapchat.”

  He turned back to the crime-scene crew, kneeling beside the body on the bench. “Once people see the pictures of this crime scene, all they’ll care about is we found a dead woman in the park, and it could happen again in the next seventy-two hours.”

  Chapter Two

  (TUESDAY, 8:05 A.M.)

  “Numbers don’t lie. I looked it up. Eighty-eight percent of Hispanic pitchers in the majors are right-handed.” Frames talked fast, as he always did with a new theory—this time fueled with an espresso shot and two Red Bulls. “With Anglos, that number’s only, like, seventy. I mean, your culture has that Catholic thing, which—let’s be honest—is all about conformity. Who knows how many naturally left-handed kids your religion turns into righties? Then you’ve got the younger players coming up from the Caribbean and all that voodoo about left-handedness being bad luck. The Spanish word for ‘left’ is sinistra, isn’t it, like sinister?”

  “The Spanish for ‘left’ is izquierdo.” Rivas pronounced the last word carefully, aware the correction would piss off Frames. But he also knew from experience facts were no match for one of Frames’s theories. “‘Left-handed’ is zurdo. Sinistra is Italian.”

  Rivas was at the wheel of an unmarked Crown Victoria driving through Roseland. It was still early, and the streets were quiet. The car ahead was a red Explorer that held Mike Daley and three officers from Gang Crimes. He and Frames were part of a joint operation to arrest a Sureño dealer named Arturo Peña, suspected in the murder of a rival dealer three days earlier.

  Frames turned in his seat. “You sure? No offense, bro, but being a native speaker doesn’t make you an expert on the whole Spanish language. Maybe your mother, or whoever, taught you the wrong word and never had a chance to correct it.”

  Rivas let that one go and kept his attention on Daley’s car.

  It was a working-class neighborhood of closely spaced, one-story houses built in the fifties. Rivas knew the euphemisms from the city reports—ethnically diverse, high density—and he was familiar with the trouble hidden by those words. The graffiti on the highway abutments and sides of empty stores marked the territory for the VSL, the Varrio Sureño Locos. The Sureños meant drug sales, street crime, and drive-bys.

  Rivas had grown up here forty years earlier and had ridden the streets on a BMX bicycle as a boy. What he saw every time he drove through were the first homes, the front yards of six-by-ten mown grass, and the daily, hard-won battles to keep them paid for.

  “Hispanic guys always throw cut fastballs. Now don’t tell me that’s not true.” Frames was into it, pedal to the metal. “Case in point: my man Mariano Rivera. His out pitch was always a cutter, thrown with an off-center, four-seam grip, pushing the middle finger as the ball’s released. He could do it because you guys have unusually long second and third fingers. Weird hands, period. Who’s that guy pitched for the Marlins, Antonio Alfonseca? Guy had six fingers on each fucking hand.”

  Rivas saw Daley, half a block ahead, and slowed down. They’d been tipped to the address the night before by an informant named Arlen Waters, a meth dealer facing ten years on his second strike. Waters put Peña at the house with his girlfriend and her two children, Peña’s cousin, and an uncle. The plan was to park out of sight and go in on foot. Daley and his guys would go in the front, Rivas and Frames in the back.

  “A cutter drops as it reaches the plate,” Frames said. “You know this, man. So hitters are forced to settle for ground balls. Half the time, you get a cutter on the inside corner, it shatters the bat.”

  Rivas smiled and nodded. “What you’re saying is, Hispanics are involved in a conspiracy to break bats?” His favorite part of Frames’s rants was spoiling the endings.

  “Come on, Rivvie.” Frames sighed. “Why’re you always being sarcastic when I’m trying to have a serious conversation? You know it messes with our rapport. What I’m telling you is, you’re up to bat against some hot-shit Hispanic reliever, the odds are he’s right-handed and throwing a cutter. And you should be able to hit it, because knowing what’s coming is half the battle.”

  “Hey, I’m with you, partner,” Rivas said. “You need to make an instructional video: Improve Your Batting Average with Racial Awareness.”

  Frames shook his head in frustration. “You don’t even try, man. You know that?”

  Daley pulled to the sidewalk three houses down, and Rivas parked behind him. The street was empty. For a moment, they sat looking at the house three lots ahead. The windows were dark.

  Rivas’s phone buzzed. He dug it out of his pocket and read a text. “It’s Coyle. We’ve got a homicide in Spring Lake Park. Eddie wants us back as soon as we’re done.”

  Daley appeared at Rivas’s car door. “Driveway’s on the left. Let’s keep them in the house.”

  Rivas climbed out of the car and joined Frames on the sidewalk. They wore Kevlar vests, with POLICE stenciled across the front and back. Rivas unsnapped his Sig Sauer from its holster. Frames already held a Glock in his right hand. They jogged quickly behind Daley’s team. When they reached the property, Rivas and Frames ran past the place and turned down a cracked concrete driveway to the rear of the building.

  The drive led to a detached one-car garage. Between the garage and the house lay a small patch of dead Bermuda grass. The back entrance to the house was an aluminum screen door, its bottom screen flopped open with a large, frayed tear. Rivas and Frames positioned themselves on either side of the concrete steps beneath the door and waited.

  A minute later, they heard Daley and his officers go through the front door, shouting orders. From inside came the sound of a dog barking. Then a large black-and-tan Doberman flew through the broken screen, past Rivas, and hit Frames in the chest. The impact slammed him backward onto the ground. Turning toward his partner, Rivas reached on his belt for his OC, the pepper spray. The screen door banged open again, and before Rivas could react, a man leaped over the steps straight at him. The collision dropped Rivas to his knees, and he smelled the man’s sweat as he ran by.

  An angry Rottweiler raced out of the house, barking and snarling. Rivas shot OC into the dog’s face. Then he scrambled to Frames, who was lying on his back, holding on to the Doberman’s collar with both hands. The dog lunged again and again, digging its paws into Frames’s torso. Rivas shoved the OC canister in front of the animal’s head and sprayed. The Doberman pranced wildly, whining in agony and rubbing its nose in the grass.

  Rivas pulled slowly to his feet. He felt his body’s early morning stiffness and the accumulated weariness of a hundred suspects wrestled to the ground. He looked behind him at the garage. The man who had knocked him over was gone.

  Frames jumped up and watched the two dogs paw frantically at their faces. “Man, I hate dogs.”

  Rivas pointed for Frames to take the right side of the garage while he ran left. He followed a concrete sidewalk as wide as his shoulders between the garage and a broken fence. Overhead, a grape arbor supported a tangle of thick vines and yellow and brown leaves and cut visibility to a few feet.

  Holding his Sig, Rivas moved slowly in the dim light, stopping every few steps to listen. Behind the garage sat a low wooden shed and, between them, a passage covered with a panel of sheet metal.

  At the back of the shed, the walkway dead-ended at a seven-foot-high concrete block wall. The smooth face of the wall was impossible to mount. The alley offered no way out. Rivas’s mind went back over the pat
h. Where’d this asshole go? He turned around to see Peña pushing aside the sheet metal to stand twenty feet away in the center of the sidewalk, leveling his gun at Rivas’s head.

  Tall and thickly built, Peña wore a ragged tank top and boxer shorts. His shaved head stood on a neck and shoulders covered in prison tattoos—black spirals curling up to the base of his cheeks like swollen angry snakes climbing out of his shirt.

  The two men looked at each other across the dim corridor. Rivas’s gun was in his right hand, beside his hip. Peña’s was at head level, pointed straight ahead.

  “There’s a shitload more cops back in the house,” Rivas said.

  “Bésame el culo,” Peña said. His voice was low and toneless. The hand with the gun stayed dead still.

  Rivas stared at the large figure before him, at the blank face and the empty gaze of his eyes. He weighed the odds of moving out of the line of fire and raising his own gun. What part of a second would it take Peña to squeeze the trigger? The Sig Sauer in his hand suddenly felt heavy.

  Is this my story?

  The question rose in him before he could stop it, just as it had again and again since he turned fifty a year ago. He saw time, which moved like the air, and his own history suddenly racing toward him out of the future.

  In his mind, he heard his grandmother, Maria-Elena, telling his story. The old woman lived in his house when Rivas was a boy. Small, uneducated, always bent over a floor mop or dishpan, she was the cuentista, the storyteller. He followed her from room to room while she cleaned, and listened to her tales of the Moreno family, his mother’s lineage. Cameos of long-dead relatives she’d learned from the women before her. Arcadio Moreno, the ganadero killed by his favorite horse. The songbird, Maria Isabel Moreno, who bewitched three men in the same family. Eduardo Moreno, the tallest son of Rafael, who went north to Texas and was killed by a train.

  Now Rivas heard his own story in the old woman’s dark, slow voice. Daniel Rivas, she said. The policeman, stabbed one night while arresting a seventeen-year-old Sureño. Or, killed by an unknown assailant in a passing car. Or, shot under a grape arbor by a drug dealer named Peña.

  Is this my story?

  Peña’s skin was olive-brown, almost black under the eyes. In the placidity and defiance of the man’s expression, Rivas saw something sad and timeless, like the shadow of an ancient campesino lost in a new land. How far had he been hollowed out by the gangs, the years in prison? Was it possible to calculate what was left inside a man’s soul? Had this criminal been sent here by the legends to kill him?

  He thought of Teresa. “Vuélvete,” she told him every morning in the dark before he left. “Come back.”

  Grandmother, is this my story?

  Behind Peña, Rivas noticed a slight, soundless change in the shadows under the arbor. It happened so quickly that Rivas doubted what he had seen. Then he saw it again—the darkness silently moved. Rivas tried to keep his eyes on Peña’s.

  The third time, Rivas caught a glimpse of Frames’s face in the dark walkway space, twenty-five feet behind Peña. He was moving forward, without a sound, gun held in two hands, pointed at the back of Peña’s head.

  Although Frames had not made a sound, Rivas could see Peña sensed something, a change that must have flickered for an instant in Rivas’s eyes. Peña still did not move.

  Then Frames said, “Drop the weapon. Suelte el arma.”

  Rivas was surprised at the power of his partner’s voice. It seemed to come from a different source than the prattle a few minutes earlier in the car.

  Frames’s command had no visible effect on Peña. The dealer continued to hold Rivas in the sights of his gun and to grip the gun steadily. He blinked once, slowly like a prehistoric reptile.

  “Suelte el arma,” Frames shouted again.

  For a few long seconds, they all stood unmoving, a silent tableau. Then Peña’s gaze narrowed at Rivas, and he raised his chin. His lips pursed in a kiss. Keeping his eyes on Rivas, he slowly bent his right arm and brought the gun to his shoulder.

  Frames reached out and grabbed Peña’s gun without moving the Glock he still held at the back of the man’s head.

  This isn’t it, Rivas thought. Death will come another way.

  He stepped forward to Peña and shoved him against the garage wall. Holstering his gun, he cuffed Peña’s wrists. As he worked the cuffs, Rivas noticed for the first time his partner’s shoeless feet and his ridiculous socks—sky blue with yellow soccer balls.

  “Why’d you come back here?” Rivas asked. His hands started to shake.

  “It was quiet,” Frames said. “Quiet’s never a good thing, right?”

  Chapter Three

  (TUESDAY, 8:45 A.M.)

  Thackrey had been awake for three days—or was it four? He couldn’t remember.

  With just the Adderall, it was easier to tell. Thirty milligrams of extended release in the morning, another sixty in the afternoon. But once he switched to doing stacks of Ritalin and Provigil and mixing in the new crank, the hours and days blurred together. He wiped a wooden coffee stirrer on his sleeve and poked it into the plastic bag on his lap. Balancing a tiny pile of powder on the end, he snorted it and felt a sharp sting in the back of his sinuses.

  The Mercedes sat parked at a twenty-four-hour Quik Mart in Santa Rosa—Thackrey in the front seat, Russ and Vic in the back. The store’s morning customers looked like admins and techs going to work at Brookside, the medical building across the street. He and the boys had started out drinking coffee to get their hands warm, but now they were bored and were playing rounds of Phone Invader.

  A silver Mazda roared into the lot, swerved toward a spot, and missed, parking two wheels over the line. A young woman emerged in black slacks and jacket, a paisley scarf knotted at her neck. She pressed a remote lock, and the car blared. Her boots clicked across the lot toward the entrance.

  Thackrey whistled. “My turn. Her name’s Leslie. She’s in Sterile Processing, and she’s just had an all-nighter with the new urology resident.”

  He handed the bag to the back seat and picked up his phone. Flipping through the screens, he found the jailbreak app the boys made for getting through the firewall of the California Motor Vehicles Department database. He tapped it open and looked across the lot to type in the Mazda plate. While the phone did its job, he licked the rest of the powder off the stirrer.

  A file opened: Stacie Singer. Thackrey sighed. “How does anyone end up with a name like that?”

  Russell leaned forward to see the screen. “Guessed the wrong name. Minus five points.” He bobbed in time with the techno in his earbuds.

  Thackrey opened Facebook and typed in the name. “Shouldn’t I get something for guessing a name ending in ‘e’?” As the search ran, Thackrey turned in his seat. “So, Victor, my faithful hadji, have we thought about how to remove the blood from the trunk liner?”

  Victor’s head rested against the window, eyes closed. “I think we need to talk about what just happened. Do you know what you’ve done, ’cause it sure seems like you don’t.”

  “No hurry, of course. But eventually steps will need to be taken. It’s a liner. Can’t it be removed?”

  Russell looked thoughtful. “Too bad we didn’t put down plastic.”

  “Do—you—know—what—you’ve—done?” asked Victor, louder this time.

  Thackrey reached behind him and tapped the phone against Victor’s knee. “Hey, man, I know exactly what we’ve done. Now let’s focus on what we do about it.”

  Victor opened his eyes. “Two options. One, I remove the liner and wash it in a large-capacity machine at a laundromat.”

  “That’s going to attract a lot of attention and be remembered later,” Russell said. “Besides, the blood’s in the fibers now.”

  “Or, two, I replace the liner with a new one. I order it online and request overnight. Have it by tomorrow
.”

  “You always were the smart one,” Thackrey said.

  “Thank you, sahib.” Victor bowed his head.

  Thackrey lowered the driver’s side window. Victor could be trusted, although trust, like many other things, would require effort and attention on Thackrey’s part. Outside, the sky was dark and leaden. Along the western horizon, coastal fog blew inland to blanket the rooftops like the folds of a shroud. “By the by, chums, as grateful as I am for your assistance tonight, you’re not done. The bell tolls three times for betrayers. You’re helping me with two more things concerning my late friend.”

  “You’re joking,” Victor said. “After the risks we just took, Russ and I are packing up and getting out.”

  “Before you skulk away, you’re going to help me clean up this mess. Otherwise, I call the locals about a certain vintage Mercedes in the park tonight. We used your car, didn’t we?”

  “You’re a shit, you know that? This is your problem, not ours.”

  “You played a role, too. Without young Russell’s big mouth, we’re not here.”

  Thackrey looked back at his phone. He read out loud. “Stacie only shares some of her profile information with everyone.” He swiped a finger across the screen, scrolled to a key app, and tapped it. “Sorry, Stacie. In we go.”

  Thackrey watched the screen open. “Ouch. Someone needs new friends.”

  Russell looked over Thackrey’s shoulder. “Minus five more. She’s a business manager at Brookside.” He took out a comb and ran it carefully through his short, stiff hair.

  “I’ll make it up in the call round.” Thackrey scrolled through the profile. “In a relationship with Brian Conover. Look at the poor bastard’s ears. Interests: Pop-Tarts. Quotations: Cyndi Lauper: ‘God loves all the flowers, even the wild ones that grow on the side of the highway.’ Could anything be sadder than this?”

  The hit of Ritalin and speed scratched and burned in Thackrey’s nostrils. As the drugs found his bloodstream, he felt the popping rush he’d been waiting for. His hearing burst open: the East Asian techno pop inside Russell’s earbuds, Victor drumming his fingers on an empty coffee cup, and, outside, the sizzle of the mercury vapor lamps above the parking lot. He caught himself. “Where’s the phone with spoofing?”