The Silenced Women

by Frederick Weisel

  Leaning close, Eden pointed to the top edge of the endpaper. “The paper’s been cut and repasted.”

  Bailey went to the desk and returned with a camera, a knife, and a pair of tweezers. She took photos of the endpaper from three different angles. Working carefully, she inserted the knife blade into the endpaper, ran it along the top edge, and peeled back the paper. With the tweezers, she reached inside and pulled out a single sheet of folded stationery. Inside were several handwritten lines. Bailey slipped the stationery into an evidence bag, pressed the seal, and spread the document flat for the others to read.

  Someday, my love, you’ll take into the air my quiet breath. And once your hands have finished their business around my neck, wrap me in something warm and carry me then, my lost angel, to the water and lay me down, to sink and fade to the next world.

  Mahler looked up at Bailey. “Is this the victim’s handwriting?”

  Bailey shrugged. “I’m not an expert. But it’s like the other handwriting.”

  Mahler turned to Rivas. “Tell Martin to look on the hard drives for any reference to someone named Thackrey. I want you and Eden to call the victim’s employer, what’s-his-name, Craig Lerner, and the others—Christopher Bennett, the roommates, Jessica Alvarez. All of them. See if any of them knows this name.”

  Eden stepped back from the evidence table. “We can’t talk to Bennett. He’s got a lawyer.”

  “Okay. For Chrissakes, talk to the lawyer.”

  Rivas held up his hands. “Come on, Eddie, it’s after midnight. A lot of these people—”

  “So what? What is it with you two? This is a homicide. You want to wait for permission? Wake them up. Wake them all up. I want an answer in thirty minutes.”

  When Bailey had retreated to her desk and the others had left the room, Mahler picked up the evidence bag with the handwritten note. He read the lines through and saw again the victim lying on the park bench, her lips parted as if she were about to speak.

  (ii)

  (THURSDAY, 12:10 A.M.)

  A noise came from the back of the car as Frames shifted into fifth. He turned down the Dave Matthews. Clutch slipping? Too far back. Universal joint? Does a Dodge Charger even have a universal joint?

  Alone in the fast lane, running at seventy, Frames backed off the accelerator. He didn’t want to get rung up on the empty freeway by a highway patrol unit looking to make its daily numbers. He felt the release of getting out of the office, on his own time, moving fast. He figured fifteen minutes to reach his apartment in Rohnert Park, another twenty to take a shower and microwave a chicken potpie. Back in the VCI room by one thirty at the latest.

  The noise again. A deep grinding from higher in the car’s back end, not the undercarriage. He accelerated to see if speed changed the sound. It stopped but immediately returned, this time two different grindings, both much louder, echoing off the car’s interior.

  Heart pounding, Frames looked ahead. No exit for a couple miles. He needed to pull over and call for a tow. He downshifted to fourth.

  Suddenly a powerful scratching came from behind the rear seat. Fuck, was someone in the trunk? His skin turned to ice. He tried to twist around enough to look toward the noise, but the space was dark. He pulled out his Glock. “Hey, who’s back there?”

  Grinding and scratching blended, faster and louder. He checked the road, then turned around again. The rear seat, which was not far away in the Charger, shook violently. “Police officer,” he shouted. “I’m a police officer.”

  Just get the fuck off the highway. In the passenger-side mirror, headlights hovered a quarter mile back. Reaching for the shifter, he remembered the Glock in his hand. He put the gun on the passenger seat and downshifted to third, swinging the car into the middle lane. At fifty in third, the rpms roared. He picked up the Glock, hand trembling.

  In the rearview, he saw the back seat bend forward, rocking wildly.

  Where was his phone? Left front jeans pocket. He’d never get it out!

  This time, as he turned around, the head of a large animal burst over the rear seat—a thick, square face, mouth open and growling.

  Frames flung himself away from the animal, his left hand wrenching the steering wheel. The Charger lurched as the car behind came up fast and blared its horn. He glanced over his shoulder at the road and swerved into his own lane as the other car flashed by.

  The animal wedged itself through the seat top and broke forward. Its rumbling snarl filled the car. Frames frantically shielded his face. In the dark, he couldn’t see what the thing was.

  He looked at the road, then back at the animal. It was closer now. He could just make out a dog’s short, black muzzle. The body was compact and muscled, under a smooth coat. Some kind of bulldog or mastiff. The animal’s claws tore at the seat’s steel frame and foam stuffing. The dog growled again, then let out a short, explosive bark. It stretched toward Frames.

  Could he shoot it? The angle was bad, and in an enclosed car, the bullet could bounce around.

  All at once, the dog burst forward. Its jaws grabbed Frames’s right forearm, teeth digging into flesh. Jerking in pain, he squeezed the trigger on the Glock and fired a bullet that blasted out the passenger window. He heard himself screaming, “Fuck! Shit. Fuck. Shit.”

  With the animal’s head six inches from his face, Frames could see its eyes were frantic and wild. The animal was shaking. Something was wrong with it. The body smelled of wet fur and urine.

  The dog lunged forward again, aiming for the dashboard. Its front paws ripped across the console, jamming the shifter into second. The tachometer redlined as the engine let loose a deafening squeal. Frames braked to cut the speed and tried to pull his arm free to reach the gear knob, but the dog’s teeth sank further into his forearm and locked tight.

  He felt the slipperiness of the blood under his shirtsleeve. Past the dog, his right hand still gripped the gun, his fingers unable to let go. The wind whistled through the open passenger window.

  He looked at the road. Two lanes to reach the shoulder. In the passenger-side mirror, the high, bright headlights of an eighteen-wheeler rushed toward him. He accelerated to get ahead of it. The car now at eighty in second gear, the engine shrieked like a giant metal wire stretched tighter and tighter.

  Frames pulled into the next lane. The truck’s air horn blasted, its tires skidding. The Charger flooded with the truck’s lights, and as he looked back into the blinding glare, Frames saw another animal leap from behind the rear seat. The second dog, a twin of the first, tangled with the hind legs of its mate, and they growled and kicked at each other.

  Frames looked ahead and pulled the car right to race along the paved shoulder, out of the truck’s lights. The truck roared past, its horn shrieking, and buffeted the Charger in a giant wash of air.

  The second dog fought to get around the first and pull free of the seat frame.

  Then Frames thought of it: the pepper spray, the OC, left over from the Peña raid. Rivas had given it to him, and he’d put it…where? On the floor of his own car. Driver or passenger side? He lifted one knee to brace the steering wheel and reached with his left hand under the seat. First nothing—then he felt it. He raised the small canister of pepper spray and held it against the steering wheel. His fingers found its trigger.

  The effort turned the car. The passenger-side wheels fell over the pavement edge, forcing the car to straddle asphalt and gravel. He braked, but the car shook as half of it raced across the rough ground at sixty miles an hour. Without looking back, he swung his left arm over his right and shot the OC behind him, just as the second dog broke free. The spray hit the animal in the face. It leaped back onto the first dog, throwing both dogs onto the car’s passenger side. Their weight flung the car farther off the shoulder. Frames felt the rear tires now digging through dirt and grass.

  He grabbed the wheel again, heard something crack, and saw a signpos
t, sheared off by the bumper, sail over the roof. He aimed the OC at the dog crushing his arm. The jet squirted into the animal’s eyes. The dog yelped, jerking back its head and releasing Frames’s arm.

  The OC seared Frames’s arm wound and burned his eyes. The car dipped, weightless for an instant, and plunged down a grass embankment. Rough ground flew at him through his blurred vision. The car shuddered like it was coming apart. He pumped the brakes as the car hurtled down, then rocketed up the bank’s other side. Too late, he saw the chain-link fence. Jamming the brakes, he hit the fence, and just before he lost consciousness, he watched the windshield spray toward him and felt the airbag explode into his chest.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  (i)

  (THURSDAY, 2:45 A.M.)

  Mahler sat alone in the ER waiting room, his head tipped against the top of a sofa. The hospital corridor was quiet, the ceiling lights dimmed. A TV screen mounted on the opposite wall soundlessly played cable news—a suicide bomber in Pakistan, cars aflame, people running in the street. He closed his eyes.

  “When I graduate from college, I’m going to marry Ron Morrow,” Susan Hart said. As usual, the dead girl waited for him, confident he would arrive.

  Here we go, Mahler thought. “The kid you were dating? The one we investigated for your murder?”

  “Yeah, that one,” Susan Hart said. “You and Tom Woodhouse were hard on him, holding up the crime-scene photos, telling him it was his fault. But you didn’t find anything, did you?”

  “No. He was scared. Seemed kind of young.”

  “Of course he’s young. That’s why I’m going to wait until we get out of college. I want him to grow up before we get together.”

  Mahler wondered at her certainty. “I waited. Look what good it did me. Divorced two years later.”

  “You were older, just not grown up. Besides, she was wrong for you, nothing in common.”

  “We knew how to do one thing really well.”

  “But it wasn’t enough, was it? Ron and I never had sex. We’ll be good at it.”

  “Do we have to talk about this?”

  Susan Hart laughed. “You started it. Come on, Eddie; you’re forty-three.”

  “In the interrogation, Ron was afraid to say anything about your relationship.” Mahler was relieved to change the subject. “Probably thought he’d look guilty.”

  “Of course he did. For months we’re dating, and he’s having all these teenage-boy fantasies about me. Then I’m dead, and he’s got two old farts, you and Tom, asking him creepy questions.”

  “But I could tell from his embarrassment he liked you.”

  “That’s because you’re the great and wonderful detective.” Susan Hart put a hand on his arm. “I used to think about Ron when I was running. You run seventy-five miles a week, you have a lot of time to think. The big thing on your mind, of course, is pain. I got tendinitis in the Achilles—hurt like crap. But the rest of the time, you think about…things.”

  “Isn’t it distracting?” Mahler asked.

  “For you, maybe. But I’m a girl. We can do two things at once. In my runs, I imagined what Ron and I will say in our wedding ceremony. I don’t want the usual stuff—some lame-ass poem by Shelley or Shakespeare that everyone’s heard a hundred times. I mean, look at those guys. Shelley eloped with a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl. Shakespeare left his wife behind in Stratford when he went to London. What do they know about marriage?”

  “My ex-wife had one of her bridesmaids recite ‘You’re My Best Friend’ by Queen.”

  “Yeah, and look how that worked out.” Susan Hart’s voice turned serious. “No, I want each of us to write an original poem. If Ron can say how he feels, he’ll know who he is. You can’t go through life being a kid, Eddie, not knowing who you are.”

  Mahler opened his eyes. He watched Coyle sit on the sofa facing him and put two coffees on the table. The men looked at each other silently.

  Massaging his right temple, Mahler wondered if he had spoken any of his dream conversation out loud and if Coyle had heard it. What would Coyle, or any member of the VCI team, make of his talking to a dead girl?

  Mahler reached for a coffee. Breaking open the plastic top, he wrapped his hands around the cup. “Steve’s okay. They gave him Percocet, so I don’t think he’s feeling anything.”

  Coyle looked up at the TV screen, where firemen sprayed water at burning cars. “You see him?”

  Mahler nodded. “Dog bite on his forearm. No stitches—they’re leaving it open to drain. Filled him with enough antibiotics to give him the runs for a week. X-rays showed cracked ribs. Bruises on his chest from the airbag. Glass cuts on his face. Could have been a hell of a lot worse.”

  “He say anything?”

  “Said he just made the last payment on the Charger.”

  Coyle opened his coffee and drank. “Car looks like it was hit by a tank. According to the tow truck driver, it was a miracle Steve came out alive.”

  “What do we know?”

  “DA’s office is taking over the investigation because it’s an assault on a law enforcement officer. Paul Eckel’s in charge, and it’s all on hurry-up. Looks like the dogs attacked Steve inside the car while he was on the freeway. According to blood tests, the dogs were injected with liquid amphetamine—speed. Must have been shot up after they were shoved in the trunk, or it was a time-release deal. Lab estimates at least a hundred milligrams. By the time Steve got in the car, the animals would have been higher than shit.”

  “And how’d they get there?”

  “Someone broke into the trunk. The dogs clawed their way from the trunk through the back seat. Crazy, right?”

  “Jesus. Who thinks of this stuff, and why take all the trouble? Steve in some kind of shit outside the job we should know about?”

  “Daniel’s checking a few personal things in our young friend’s life, but get this: Bailey sees the dogs, and the first thing she says is, the hairs look like a match for the hairs on our victim’s blanket. We haven’t had time for a lab analysis or anything, but—”

  “What’re you saying?”

  “Whoever did our park victim decides to get rid of the dogs and at the same time—”

  “Come after us.”

  They stared at each other.

  “Who the fuck is this?” Mahler asked. “Partridge?”

  “First off, we’re talking about two individuals. It would have taken a couple of strong adults to get the dogs in the trunk. And maybe someone smarter than Partridge. Eckel’s looked at the gate over at the Brookwood lot, where Steve parked his car. The doers broke through the gate with something more sophisticated than bolt cutters. Must have been a keypad reader to reproduce the numerical code. Same guys managed to remotely overheat the circuits on the parking lot’s surveillance camera, so we don’t have pictures.”

  “You’re kidding? What kind of people know how to do that? How’d they get into the car trunk?”

  “Wasn’t a crowbar. I’ve seen talk in online chat rooms about hacking keyless locks. My guess, that’s what happened here. Whoever these guys are, they’re technically skilled.”

  Mahler massaged his temple again. “Psychiatrist said the victim was around someone smart. Have we located Benjamin Thackrey?”

  “Not yet. He owns several houses in the Bay Area—Los Altos and San Francisco. I haven’t found anything local. No record of a Thackrey paying county property taxes. But I’ll keep looking.”

  “By the way, while I was poking around online, I came across a few interesting things about this guy. I’d heard of him. He was a sort of celebrity in high-tech circles. And I remembered he’d been involved in some trouble a few years ago. Thackrey was single and incredibly rich. Which made him an eligible bachelor. So he’s into the whole San Francisco party scene. At some point, that scene includes a trust-fund girl named Reggie Semple. Old San Francisco
family, but the girl’s a train wreck. Serious coke habit and a taste for bad boys. One night she gets into a cab in Pacific Heights and is never seen again. SFPD investigates. The father offers a reward, but the woman disappears, and no one’s charged with anything.”

  “And Benjamin Thackrey?”

  “Was her live-in boyfriend. But San Francisco Homicide couldn’t find any direct evidence to connect Thackrey to the disappearance. And after the Semple investigation, Thackrey kept a lower profile.”

  “We’ve got to find this guy.”

  “I’m working on it.” Coyle drank his coffee. “By the way, with Steve out, we need some help. We can’t wait around.”

  “I was thinking of bringing in Tim Frost from Gang Crimes.”

  Coyle held up one hand. “Rivas and Frost got into it a few years ago when they arrested that guy Quintero. Something about lost evidence. Still bad blood there. How about Ken Holland from Narcotics? Been around a while. You won’t have to tell him what to do. And I heard he wants to come over to us anyway.”

  “The kid who wears a stocking cap all the time?”

  “He’s good on his feet. Solid arrest record. He and Steve are buddies. Might take some of the sting out of his replacement.”

  Mahler saw the TV screen had changed to a battlefield scene from Afghanistan. “Where’re Eden and Daniel now?”

  “Office. Why? You think we need to watch our backs?”

  “Not a bad idea. I put an officer outside Frames’s room. Daniel knows what to do. One of us’ll need to watch out for Eden.”

  “You still giving her a hard time?” Coyle asked.

  In his mind’s eye, Mahler saw Eden’s face a few hours earlier, fighting back tears. “She say something to you?”

  Coyle shook his head. “I just read her notes on the Partridge stuff in Vallejo. It’s good, especially for a new kid.”

  “Yeah. It’s…promising. She’s smart enough. But she puts her head down, doesn’t see what’s around her.”

  “Who’s that sound like, Eddie?”