The Silenced Women

by Frederick Weisel

  “Twenty seconds,” Trish said.

  She started to walk away. Then she turned to face Mahler. “You know what, Eddie? Don’t come back. I mean it. I don’t want you in my lab anymore. You have any other questions, don’t come in here. Send one of your team.”

  Then she said, “And one more thing, go fuck yourself.”

  Later that day, in his office, Mahler had pressed the stopwatch function on his phone and watched the numbers tick off twenty seconds. He forced himself to watch to the end.

  He did it again and again. The numbers slowly climbing: 13, 14, 15—What did she think in twenty seconds? Enough time for: Who’s doing this thing? Why me? I’m just a girl! Please, please stop. The seconds clicking on: 16, 17, 18—At the end: I’m alone. I’m scared.

  Now, at the place on the trail where the murderer had left Susan Hart, Mahler was suddenly aware of the darkness around him. He looked at the starless sky and heard the quiet stillness of the night. The chill air blew through him. Then, as the space closed in, he thought of the answer to his own question—what the dead want, what this girl wants, is to breathe.

  (ii)

  (WEDNESDAY, 4:13 A.M.)

  “What was that word the homeless guy said?” Coyle was typing and looking at the screen of his laptop.

  Eden looked at Frames. “It sounded like ‘fi-dee-lay’ or ‘fi-dee-la.’”

  Frames nodded. “He said it again in the car. I thought he was saying fiddle-de-dee or something. Guy’s a nutcase.”

  “Do we know who he is?” Mahler’s voice was louder than he intended.

  The others had not heard him enter. They turned to him, and he felt them taking in his change of clothes.

  “Donald Michael Lee, the man with three first names,” Frames read from his laptop. “No fixed address—big surprise. Five arrests in the past six months: intoxicated in public, threatening behavior, intoxicated in public, intoxicated in public, and the ever-popular intoxicated in public. He’s been on his own since 2007. Lives in the park. Has a tarp set up in the hills above the campground.”

  “Any weapons on him?”

  “Not that I could tell. But he’s wearing, like, twenty-seven sweaters and carrying a trash bag filled with all kinds of shit.”

  “What’d he say about the victim?”

  Eden looked at her notebook. “He said, ‘I saw the mummy lady.’ He repeated it over and over.”

  “Did he see how she got there?” Mahler asked.

  “He said he saw three men. They took the body out of a car trunk and carried it to the bench. He called them ‘little men.’”

  “Little men?”

  “It sounded like that. It’s not easy to understand what he says. He’s missing a lot of teeth. We asked him to describe who he saw, and he just kept saying he saw the mummy lady and the little men.”

  “Where’s he now?”

  Frames rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Social Services. We drove him over this morning. You’re going to have to hose out the back seat of that car or buy a new one. The guy smells like a barnyard.”

  “In Cantonese, the expression fai-dee-la means ‘hurry up.’” Coyle read from his laptop.

  “What the hell’s Cantonese?” Frames asked.

  “It’s a Chinese dialect.” Coyle looked up. “I watch Chinese movies sometimes, and I’ve heard the word ‘la’ before. It means hurry. I put fai-dee-la into an online translation site, and it says ‘hurry up.’”

  “So you think a homeless guy in Santa Rosa, California, happens to speak Chinese?”

  “I don’t know. We don’t know much about the guy. But why’s he say that one word?”

  “Maybe it’s what he heard,” Eden said. “Maybe one of the men carrying the body said it. It would make sense, right? Whoever it was, they were in a hurry.”

  Frames snorted. “How many people speak Cantonese?”

  Coyle looked on his screen again. “It’s the official language of Hong Kong and Macau. Seventy million worldwide.”

  “Well, that narrows it down.”

  “I checked Partridge’s statement.” Rivas opened his notepad. “The bartender at the Tap Room said Partridge came in around nine thirty, stayed until ten forty-five. Came in alone, didn’t talk to anyone. Left alone.”

  Frames pointed to the photo of the car on the whiteboard. “But if he’s inside that Mercedes at four a.m., that still gives him lots of time to meet up with the victim somewhere else and end up in the park with the hooded guy.”

  “There’s no evidence in Partridge’s file of his ever using an accomplice.” Mahler shook his head. “We’re just guessing.” He turned to Rivas. “I read the files you gave me on local guys with similar assaults. None stood out, but let’s keep them for when we know more.”

  “Autopsy results on Jane Doe.” Coyle looked again at his screen. “Had a full meal before she died: lamb, maitake mushrooms, Yellow Finn potatoes, and green beans.”

  “What kind of food is that?” Frames looked over Coyle’s shoulder at the screen.

  “Expensive,” Mahler said.

  “She also had a fair amount of wine.” Coyle continued reading. “Blood alcohol was point-o-eight. Traces of OxyContin in her respiratory tract, and she also tested for quetiapine, whatever that is.”

  “Treatment for bipolar.” Everyone looked at Frames, and he shrugged. “I got a nephew on the stuff.”

  “Might explain the old cut marks,” Eden said.

  Mahler paced in front of the whiteboard. “Any evidence this was an overdose?”

  “No, the level was consistent with a small dosage.” Coyle bent close to his screen. “Trish says the wine on top of the quetiapine and Oxy wasn’t a great idea, but it’s not what killed her. Something else, too. She had soap on her face.”

  “She washed her face after dinner,” Eden said.

  “Trish said it looks like someone washed her face. The makeup was reapplied, but by someone who wasn’t very good at it.”

  Frames grimaced. “Okay, that’s just creepy.”

  “And just to make things more confusing…” Coyle paused for dramatic effect, “a gunshot residue test on the victim’s right hand shows she fired a gun recently.”

  “Now you’re just making things up,” Frames said.

  Coyle shook his head. “No, I’m serious. On the plus side, we know the Mercedes is from San Francisco. We’re collecting information on each registered owner.”

  “Have the uniforms help you with that.” Mahler turned to Eden. “Where are we on the identity of Jane Doe?”

  “Cipriani and Pace did all the follow-up last night.” Eden looked at her laptop. “Two callers came in and looked at a photo, but neither identified the victim. We got a guy coming in this morning. Craig Lerner. Runs a local ad agency called Lerner and Meier. He says the description sounds like his graphic artist. She didn’t show up for work Tuesday. He’s coming in at nine. Do you want me to talk to him?”

  “Let Steve do it. Get going on the homicide case files Daniel gave you.”

  While the others worked at their desks, Mahler turned to the whiteboard. Someone had written across the top “72 Hours = Thursday 11 p.m. 43 Hours Before Next Victim.” He looked at the photo of Jane Doe, her eyes closed, a perfect stillness in her face.

  Chapter Twelve

  (WEDNESDAY, 4:54 A.M.)

  Eden sat at her desk with Mahler’s stack of homicide binders. An arm’s length away on either side, Coyle worked on a laptop and Frames talked on his phone. Years of studying in dormitories had taught Eden to block out noise. She’d been awake more than twenty-four hours, and the experience of working around the clock reminded her of finals week at Mount Holyoke College, except in this case she had spent the night in a park and pointed a gun at a crazy homeless man.

  The stack included seven cases: the chief suspect (Irwin Partridge), the late
st Jane Doe victim, the two girls killed earlier in Santa Rosa’s Spring Lake Park (Michelle Foss and Susan Hart), a victim killed in a different Santa Rosa location (MaryEllen Reese), and two victims killed in Vallejo during the time Partridge lived there (Beth Hunter and Amanda Smith).

  Eden looked at the victim photos. In the back of her mind, she heard the voice of her thesis advisor, Professor Hiatt: Never forget the victims were real people with families, favorite foods, career plans, boyfriends. The remembered admonition brought back another memory—Hiatt’s glare across the podium whenever she suspected her lecture hall audience of inattention, her old teacher’s manner always a blend of the endearing and the threatening.

  The victims were girls just a few years younger than Eden. They could have been her college friends. Beth Hunter had freckles like her first-year roommate, Chrissie. Amanda Smith wore glasses like her best friend, Marie. Eden imagined herself shopping with the girls. Eden Somers and six homicide victims go to the mall.

  Eden took a deep breath. She decided to read the binders in order: crime-scene report, medical examiner’s report, lead investigator’s notes, and transcripts of interviews with relatives, friends, and “interested parties”—those who found the body or who provided the police with information.

  The cases involved three different lead investigators and two medical examiners, so the write-ups varied in level of detail, organization, and style. The effort required to track parallel information was frustrating. It wasn’t like a spreadsheet, which lined everything up and highlighted variables in red. This time, the voice playing in Eden’s mind was that of her FBI supervisor, Aaron Kinsella: Focus on the data patterns. Find the common thread.

  Eden opened a spreadsheet program on her laptop and listed the victims.

  In other columns, she listed age, height, weight, location of body, posture of body, items found at crime scene. By the time she finished the spreadsheet, an hour had passed. She thought about the way Mahler had yelled at her to stop taking notes. Was he mad at her? If she was being tested, as Frames said, would she be the one dropped from the team? What if nothing was to be found in these old cases? What did Mahler mean when he told her to look at the “quality of the light”? Was it some kind of joke he played on new hires?

  Eden went through the Irwin Partridge file chronologically. The documents captured a life through the lens of the justice system: arrest reports, indictments, pleas, and appearances before the court. After she finished, Eden paged through her notes. What did it mean? Remember your history. Professor Hiatt tapped the knuckle of her forefinger on the podium. We build cases on the discoveries of those who came before us.

  From her Advanced Forensic Psych course, Eden knew researchers used systems for classifying the personality types of serial killers. Holmes and DeBurger recognized four types: visionary, mission-oriented, hedonistic, and power/control. The evidence in the current cases seemed to indicate the killer, or killers, fit the hedonistic type—someone who killed for pleasure and regarded his victims as objects for his own enjoyment.

  According to the literature, hedonistic-type killers choose their victims selectively. Their “ideal victim type” is someone they find sexually appealing. In their text on serial murder, Holmes and Holmes wrote that Ted Bundy picked his victims based on how they walked and talked.

  Eden looked at her spreadsheet. Foss, Hart, MaryEllen Reese, and Beth Hunter were about the same age and body type.

  The next column on the spreadsheet was location. Eden remembered studies in the 1990s showed the significance of geographic location in serial murder cases. Serial killers usually prefer specific locations and rarely vary from them. Geographic profiling had even been successfully used in tracking killers. In three of the cases Eden studied—Foss, Hart, and Hunter—the victim had been killed in a public park. Jane Doe had been found, not killed, in a public park.

  Studies also showed serial killers use specific methods of killing. Fox and Levin at Northeastern found the dominant motive for the killer’s behavior is to exert control over another person’s life. To exert that control, serial killers prefer strangling or stabbing instead of a firearm. All the victims in Eden’s spreadsheet had been strangled, and all but Jane Doe had been strangled with a smooth object, probably a cord.

  Eden looked at the names of the six victims on the file folders. If she ruled out Jane Doe and Amanda Smith on the basis of ideal victim type, and MaryEllen Reese on the basis of location, that left Foss, Hart, and Hunter. But such sorting is based on academic profiling theory, which is disputed by some investigators in the field.

  Eden pushed away from her desk and followed the hallway to the restroom. At the sink, she ran cold water in her cupped hands and splashed her face. Water dripping, she stared in the mirror. Why am I here? What sort of job is this? I could quit tonight. Write a letter of resignation. Be back home in Connecticut tomorrow. Lieutenant Mahler would be relieved.

  She was hired straight into VCI detectives, without time as a uniform officer, on the strength of her work on the unsolved Highway 60 murders—first as a college thesis and then in the FBI. Chief Truro mentioned it during his interview. “You really dug into that one, didn’t you?” he said with a conspiratorial smile. By which he really meant, just how twisted are you?

  What would you know about it? Eden thought. But all she said was, “Actually, it started as an assignment.”

  “This one’s for you, Eden,” Professor Hiatt had announced at the beginning of her senior year as she held out a large accordion folder stuffed with paper on the Highway 60 case. Later Eden wondered: What sort of case was it for a twenty-one-year-old student? Was Hiatt crazy? Or, with the pashmina wrapped loosely around her neck and the eyes that crinkled whenever she smiled, was she wearing just the sort of disguise that waited at the gates of hell?

  The case was notorious: nine women in five states, all killed the same way. Asphyxiation from dirt stuffed in the mouth. Duct tape sealing the lips, limbs bound with strips of cotton sheeting. The only suspect: a truck driver named Albert McKinley Jory. Middle-aged, large acne-scarred face, hair pulled into a ponytail. Arrested and released.

  Eden researched in a study cubicle in the dark basement stacks of Williston Hall, the campus library. But the book titles and crime-scene photos attracted the attention of other students walking past her desk. After Christmas she moved to her dormitory room, a single on the second floor of North Rockefeller Hall. She worked at night, when the other rooms on her floor were quiet.

  The trouble arrived in the final semester. First, in the dining hall, esophageal spasms choked her until she ran to the toilet to throw up. Then she heard noises in the dark, imagined fingers on the latch outside her dorm window. Once, at three in the morning, when she was in the shower at the end of the hall, a girl coming home from a party accidentally turned out the overhead bathroom light. Eden screamed until a campus safety officer arrived. During finals week, the dead women from the Highway 60 murders crawled into bed beside her, hollow-eyed from the loneliness of their deaths, dirt sucked to the back of their throats. Eden woke tangled in the covers, knees jammed to her chest, shaking.

  After graduation, Professor Hiatt pulled some strings with a former student working at the FBI. Just like that, Eden became the youngest analyst hired in the Behavioral Analysis Unit, or BAU, sitting in seminars beside gray-haired men with lifetimes of experience staring at human remains. She got used to photos on the conference room’s large-screen TV of throats cut open, and casual lunch-table conversations on blood coagulation, entry-wound angles, and why serial killers always have three names.

  She started on a murder in Baltimore, then a drive-by in Miami, and later a string of prostitute disappearances in Phoenix. At the end of her first year, Kinsella called her into his office and assigned her to a re-examination of the Highway 60 killings. “Take advantage of the BAU resources. This could be your big one, your Bundy.” Two months later, she was s
leeping with a gun. Six months after that, she was back in Kinsella’s office with her resignation, watching the shy man struggle as embarrassed disappointment spread across his face. Later she learned the FBI, which had a name for everything, called it a flameout.

  Now in the police department restroom, Eden leaned against the sink and closed her eyes. Why does this keep happening? Why do I think I can do this work? She feared the look on Mahler’s face when she quit, the exasperation over his wasted time. Just like Kinsella. But she needed to leave. She decided to finish reviewing the files and then resign.

  In the Violent Crime room, Eden made a mug of mint tea and picked up the victim binders. Start again. Look at the data. She reread the information on Michelle Foss: crime-scene report, medical examiner’s report. Then she noticed a handwritten note in the margin of the medical examiner’s report—one of the notes Rivas told her were made by the now-retired investigator Tom Woodhouse. She remembered Rivas saying Woodhouse was “old-school.”

  Eden went back to Woodhouse’s handwritten note. The mark looked like two cursive letters—“cv” or “cn.” If it was “cm,” it might mean centimeter. Eden scanned the typewritten text beside the note. The cord burns on Michelle Foss’s neck measured one centimeter wide. She opened the file on Susan Hart and found the same note: cord width, one centimeter. According to the medical examiner, the marks on MaryEllen Reese’s neck were wider and uneven, suggesting an irregular material. The reports on Beth Hunter and Amanda Smith contained no measurements. Eden searched all the desk drawers until she found a metric ruler. On the close-ups of Hunter and Smith, she measured the widths of the neck bruises. Smith’s were 1.25 centimeters, but Hunter’s were exactly one centimeter. Eden added a column to her spreadsheet: