The Silenced Women

by Frederick Weisel

  Cipriani pushed a spare laptop across the table. “You may as well start reading what we’ve done so far and flag those we should follow up on.”

  Eden peered at the screen. “What’re they like?”

  “Mostly local. People think it’s someone they know. A few sound worthwhile. But we’re also getting the usual weird shit. Guy in LA thinks it’s that actress from the soaps who went missing a year ago. A Seattle psychic told us to check for a rosette tattoo on the left shoulder.”

  Eden read the logs. Two callers knew someone with the same physical description. One caller said he’d seen a woman matching the victim’s description in the park the day before. A website reply asked for a photo.

  The tip line phone rang. Eden looked at the others.

  Cipriani nodded toward the phone. “You want to take it?”

  “How do I answer?”

  “Just say Santa Rosa Police. Put it on speaker.”

  Eden clicked on a blank log form on her laptop and picked up the phone. Before she could speak, a woman’s voice said, “Is this the call-in line for the girl in the park?”

  “Yes, ma’am. This is the Santa Rosa Police Department. What information do you have?”

  “Are you really with the police? You sound like a young girl.”

  Across the table Cipriani snorted.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m a police officer. What information do you have?”

  “I live in the Redwood Apartments on the western edge of the park. The young woman who lives across my courtyard might be the dead girl. I haven’t seen her since Monday.”

  “What’s your name, ma’am?”

  “Why do you need my name?”

  “We’re keeping a record of everyone who calls.”

  “You’re not going to publish it or anything, are you?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Could I be anonymous?”

  “If you wish.”

  “Okay. Just put me down as anonymous.”

  Cipriani and Pace shared a look across the table.

  “What’s the young woman’s name?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never spoken to her.”

  Eden stared at the blank form on the laptop. Her mind raced. “Have you knocked on her door?”

  “No, I wouldn’t want to… Something funny might be going on inside there.”

  “Is her car still there?”

  “How would I know which car is hers?”

  “Is there an apartment manager we could call to get the name and number of the young woman?” At this, Cipriani flashed Eden a thumbs-up sign.

  “You’re not going to tell him I called, are you?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  The caller gave Eden the manager’s name and phone number.

  “If this girl’s the one in the park, is there a reward for my calling in?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I guess, with all the budget cuts, everything’s on the cheap now, isn’t it?”

  Before Eden could speak, the line went dead. She glanced across the table and met Cipriani’s eyes.

  “You get all kinds.” Cipriani puffed out her cheeks and exhaled. “I took calls for a homicide tip line in Fresno before I came here.”

  As she typed in the log form, Eden wondered about the two officers at the table. She hadn’t spent much time around street cops. Their size and posture were intimidating. But she was curious about something. “What was it like two years ago when the other girls were killed? Were either of you here?”

  Cipriani shook her head. “Not me. Transferred in last year.”

  Pace looked at Eden without speaking.

  “Bob has issues,” Cipriani said.

  Pace shrugged. “I don’t want to say something that gets misinterpreted and ends up with my commanding officer.”

  “You, misinterpreted?” Cipriani made a face of mock surprise. “Future Officer-of-the-Year Bob Pace? How could that happen?”

  “I won’t repeat what you say,” Eden said.

  Pace sat silent for a moment. Then he said, “All right. It was fucked. No other word for it. Fucked and fucked. Two murders in daylight, and they can’t get the guy. Really? What would you call it? It was fucked.”

  Cipriani leaned toward Eden. “I’m not sure you understood all that technical lingo, but if I understand Bob, I think what he’s trying to say is that it was fucked.”

  Eden smiled and turned to Pace. “I was told the DA didn’t believe he had sufficient evidence.”

  Pace shrugged. “What I heard…somebody screwed up. I don’t know if it was you guys or somebody else.”

  “If Bob was involved, he’d have caught the guy.” Cipriani raised a fist. “Nailed the bastard by his cojones. Wouldn’t you, Bob?”

  “I don’t see how I could have done worse. I mean, no offense, but it’s not like you Violent Crime guys—sorry, and gals—aren’t paid enough. You’re not on shifts. Your cars are paid for. You’re not doing domestic calls on Saturday night, keeping the assholes from beating each other’s brains out, drunks puking on your shoes.”

  “Not to mention the bad stuff,” Cipriani said.

  “And I’m not saying this myself. But I’ve heard other offices say your boss, Lieutenant Mahler, is a bit of a head case. Hasn’t been right since the murders.”

  Cipriani’s face reddened. “Gee, Bob. Why don’t you tell us what you really think?”

  “I just said that’s not me. It’s what I heard.”

  “A head case?” Eden asked. It was odd to hear what other officers thought of her boss.

  Pace pulled his laptop back in front of him. “I’ve already said too much.” Then he looked back at Eden. “You have kids? It’s different if you have kids. A murder like this makes you worry about them. I have two girls, and believe me, you can’t help thinking it could be them. Anyway, you asked me, I told you. I’m not the only one, either. Talk to other uniforms. They’ll tell you. It was fucked.”

  Cipriani looked at Eden. “I wasn’t here two years ago, so I can’t speak to it. But this time, right now…you talk to people out there; they’re scared. We better figure this out and find the guy before it happens again.”

  (ii)

  (TUESDAY, 5:12 P.M.)

  Mahler leaned his back against the wall of the VCI room. He had spent the past hour in his office replaying his answers at the press conference. Checking his phone, he saw that the website of the Press Democrat, the local paper, already had a story on his walking out. The investigation was barely under way, and in the absence of any news, he was again becoming the story. “Do we know who our Jane Doe is?” he asked.

  “No,” Eden said. “Forty-three calls and hits on the website so far. We logged them all and are doing callbacks or sending units out to a few of them. We can expect more calls when the description comes out in tomorrow’s paper.”

  Mahler nodded. Homicide investigations without an initial victim identification were not uncommon. Bodies were discovered without wallets or purses. Their identity had to come from the world noticing the space they left behind—a family member not arriving home, an empty office chair. This, Mahler knew, took time—time they didn’t have in this case. “I want her identity tomorrow morning. Get through all the callbacks tonight. If they sound promising, have them come in and look at photos.”

  He approached the detectives’ desks. “What else do we know?”

  Coyle scrolled through a document on his laptop. “Trish sent over the initial report from the field techs. Looks like evidence of strangulation. Bruising on the neck.”

  “Was it a cord?” Rivas asked.

  “No. Hands, probably, from the front. But Trish said she won’t know for sure until after an autopsy.”

  “What about the head wound?” Rivas asked.

  Coyle read on his s
creen. “Cut on the occipital artery on the left side of the skull. Five centimeters long. Trish thinks strangulation was the cause of death, but the cut was concurrent. But she’s not willing to say definitively yet.”

  “So someone strangled and cut her at the same time? How’s that happen?”

  “Does anything make sense? By the way, Trish puts time of death at about eleven Monday night. Which means, if the car on the surveillance tape at four in the morning is connected to this, the killer had about five hours to get to the park.”

  “Which doesn’t tell us much,” Rivas said. “He might’ve spent five hours trying to decide what to do and ten minutes driving there.”

  Listening to this back-and-forth, Mahler thought of the elusiveness of usable information in a murder investigation.

  Rivas handed a printout to Mahler. “MUPS, the Missing Persons Database, has fourteen females. None matches our victim’s physical characteristics.”

  “How far’d you go?”

  “North Bay. You want me to include San Francisco?”

  “May as well, until we start getting something from the call-ins.”

  Coyle stepped up to the whiteboard, where he had taped the black-and-white printouts from the park’s surveillance camera. One showed a man in a hooded jacket, the other a car’s trunk and bumper. “This guy appeared at the Violetti Gate about four and removed the chain across the roadway. Which took some planning. We had our guys go back up there and go over the lock and chain. No prints, but there’s evidence he was somehow able to dismantle the padlock.”

  “It’s not Partridge,” Rivas said. “He’s taller.”

  “Can we estimate height and weight from the video?” Mahler asked.

  “I’ll try. It’s not a great film.”

  Coyle pointed to the car photo. “Vintage Mercedes. Plate’s not visible. I’m working on narrowing down the year, and then I’ll try to match it with the California state DMV database.”

  “What kind of car does Partridge drive?” Frames asked.

  Rivas shrugged. “Two years ago, a Nissan 240Z.”

  “We should look at his friends’ cars,” Coyle said.

  “Does a guy like that have friends?” Frames asked.

  “Martin, check names of associates in Partridge’s file,” Mahler said. “While you’re at it, you might look at probation reports to the court for sentencing, and you can pull reports of stolen cars.”

  “The security camera footage from the two residences in the Violetti neighborhood was a bust,” Frames said. He held up a plastic evidence bag. “Also, we sent a canine team back to the trees where the dog walker said she was pulled. They found this scarf. Obviously, we don’t know if it belonged to the victim.”

  Eden took the plastic bag from Frames. “Color matches her outfit. And it’s got a label we can check.”

  Rivas laid his hand on a pile of folders in front of him. “Eddie, I started pulling files, like you said, of guys we picked up the last couple years for physical assault. I’ve got six. You remember Robert Temple? He’s out again.”

  Mahler took the folders. “Okay. I’ll go through them.” He stared at the photo of the victim on the whiteboard.

  “By the way,” Rivas said, “Peña’s lawyer emailed me. Apparently Peña wants to see me. Tomorrow morning, first thing.”

  “Be careful with that. Let one of the ADAs know you’re going.”

  Mahler took down the photo of the victim’s body from the whiteboard. “There’s something odd about this. This morning Daniel asked why she was left in the park. But it’s more than that. She was killed somewhere else and left here. Normally, if you laid a body on a bench, you’d put it on its back, right? Or, maybe facedown.”

  Mahler held the photo toward the others. “Look at this. She’s lying on her side.”

  Coyle shook his head. “What’re you saying?”

  “She was arranged,” Eden said.

  Mahler looked at her. “Yes. It was intentional.”

  “I don’t get it,” Frames said. “What’s it accomplish?”

  “I don’t know. But someone wrapped her in a blanket and laid her on her side.”

  “It might have been done for her or for whoever found her,” Eden said.

  Frames snorted. “How’s it help her? She was already dead.”

  “It’s called ‘undoing.’ It’s where a killer tries to psychologically undo a crime, to return the victim to a normal state.”

  Mahler retaped the photo to the whiteboard and stood for a minute staring at it. “Steve and Eden,” he said without turning around, “go up to the park and see if you can talk to this homeless guy who says he saw a body.”

  “You mean like tonight?” Frames asked.

  “Afraid of the dark, Stevie?” Coyle said.

  “Hey, man, seven years ago I was taking point on night patrols in Diyala Province. What were you doing?”

  Walking across the room, Mahler saw Truro in the doorway. The chief was back in his white shirt and Dockers. “We need to talk,” Truro said.

  Truro led Mahler a few feet down the corridor from the VCI room door and out of earshot of the others. “You know, after you walked out,” Truro said, “one of the reporters asked if it was unusual for the chief investigating officer to leave in the middle of a press conference. She wanted to know if I thought you were having a nervous breakdown.”

  “The investigation’s just getting under way,” Mahler said evenly. “I think we covered everything.”

  “That’s your answer? Really?”

  “I don’t want to waste my time when I don’t have anything to say.”

  The two men faced each other.

  “You have any idea what this town’s going through?” Truro glared at Mahler. “Have you been out on the streets lately? Talked with anyone outside this office? They’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. City Council wants me to put an armed patrol around Spring Lake. The newspaper asked me to comment on a story they’re running about a barista wearing a Glock to work.”

  “We’re working this thing as fast as we can.”

  “It’s your job. For any other case, that might be okay. But this is a murdered girl at the lake, and another one may turn up in three days.”

  “My job is to find this guy. I can’t change what the public thinks.”

  “We work for the public. It’s all about them. So, okay, you don’t want to talk to reporters. But you ever disrespect me again like you did this morning, and I won’t hesitate to go after you. We clear on that?”

  Mahler looked at Truro and, without answering, walked past him back to his office.

  Chapter Nine

  (i)

  (TUESDAY, 9:23 P.M.)

  Dorothy Knolls had ruddy cheeks. Around her lips radiated the deep lines of an inveterate smoker. In her late forties, she was dressed in sweatshirt and jeans, her hair combed into a bun snatched together by a plastic claw.

  She had called the incident tip line an hour earlier, saying she might know the victim’s identity. She asked to see Mahler in person; she’d found his name in an online news article—one describing him walking out of the press conference.

  Mahler met her in the lobby of police headquarters. He led her upstairs to the second-floor offices and through the card-key lock. The hallway was quiet and dark. From the open door of the VCI room came the sound of a quiet conversation.

  In the interview room, Mahler seated Knolls across the table and pulled a notepad and pencil toward him.

  “I saw you found a dead girl at the lake,” Knolls said. “I want to make sure it’s not my Chloe.” The woman’s voice had an edge, as if used to making complaints that were unaddressed. “She ran away eight days ago. We had an argument. It wasn’t a physical thing. I didn’t hit her or anything. You probably have a record of that other time. Anyway, she walked out, and we ha
ven’t heard from her.”

  Mahler’s headache was back, a stabbing pain behind his right eye. He wished he was at home with an ice pack on his forehead.

  Knolls opened her purse and pushed through the contents. “I don’t think the dead one’s my Chloe, but I couldn’t be sure. Detective Somers said the body’s taller than my daughter.”

  She found what she was looking for and slid a small color photo toward Mahler. In the picture, Knolls stood beside a younger, heavier version of herself. The younger woman looked reluctantly yanked into the frame, her eyes glaring back at the camera. Mahler wondered what moment of special unhappiness was captured in the picture.

  “The victim’s not your daughter.” Mahler handed back the photo.

  Knolls gave no indication she’d heard Mahler. “Your kids never think bad things can happen to them.” She looked at her photo. “You can tell them, but they always know every goddamned thing.”

  “Pardon my language.” She smiled crookedly, with what seemed to Mahler like artificial demureness. She put the photo away and sat with her hands resting across the top of her purse.

  They were finished now, Mahler thought. He should stand and escort Knolls downstairs, but he knew she had more to say. Within his migraine, Mahler braced himself for the woman’s abrupt, cracking voice.

  “Two years ago, when those other girls were killed in the park, I remember thinking, why on earth were they out there alone? Why weren’t they home?”

  She seemed to consider these questions about the last mistakes of the dead. Then she said, “Chloe didn’t use to go out alone. She was a smart girl, smarter than some.”

  As Mahler listened, tiny, brilliant flashes suddenly shimmered around the woman’s head. He blinked his eyes, but the flickering lights floated in space, swarming together until they coalesced into an oval bubble in front of his eyes. Inside, it was an area of total blindness.

  Somewhere behind the glaring object that obscured his vision, he heard Knolls still talking. “Then it was like Chloe outgrew us. Whatever we said or did, it wasn’t enough.”