The Weight of Silence

by Gregg Olsen

  His eyes glimmer. I stare deeper inside, searching them to see if somehow what I said has found a spot that is making sense of it.

  No real reaction. Instead, my dad turns back to the TV.

  Before my frustration turns into self-pity, a nurse’s aide comes into the room with a plate of still-warm chocolate chip cookies.

  I smell sweet notes of vanilla mixed with the chocolate, and I think of Dad’s long shift at the mill making vanillin and how I couldn’t wait to breathe him in when he walked through the back door.

  “Anyone want a cookie?” the nurse’s aide says, in a sweet, lilting voice.

  I’m afraid my dad and the horny guy watching the infomercial will choke on a cookie, but I don’t say anything. I just nod.

  The girl is new. In every way. She’s barely twenty, with ringlets of chestnut hair that I can tell is the heart of her daily routine. Every lock is in place, but only casually so. It takes a lot of work to look as though you haven’t done a thing.

  She smiles in my direction.

  “You must be Stacy,” she says, handing cookies to the TV watchers. I take one of the silver-coated plastic trays as well. “Your father talks about you all the time. Says that you’re kind of a big deal. Super proud of you.”

  I nod, but say nothing. Of course my dad brags about Stacy.

  “I’m Sasha Clayton,” she goes on. “I’m new here and I don’t have to tell you, this place is kind of sad, but when I hear things about people like you, well, it kind of lifts my spirits. Your dad and a few others help me to know that these folks are still listening, still thinking, even when they don’t always show it.”

  I don’t correct Sasha and say that I’m Nicole. There’s really no point in such a disclosure. I eat a cookie while the woman on the TV screen has her third food orgasm. Gambling ruined my life. Food could have brought a similar rush, and I could be four hundred pounds right now. Or dead from a heart attack. Everybody I know has something a little bit wrong with them. Sometimes you just don’t see it. Pain and problems can be concealed with a smile. I know this in my bones.

  Sasha smiles in my direction as she wheels out the other old man, whose erection, surprisingly, is lifting his pajama bottoms like a pitched tent.

  “Bye, Stacy. Nice meeting you.”

  “Bye, Tasha,” I say, deliberately messing up her name.

  I admit it. Sometimes I’m just not very nice. But I’m working on it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Wednesday, August 23

  The Tech Department at the Aberdeen Police Department isn’t the largest or most current in the world. It’s a far cry from what I’d had access to in Bellevue before my fall from grace. On the plus side, we have Angelina Marco, a brilliant high-tech sleuth. Seattle PD and the Washington State Patrol have tried to recruit her, but each time she’s stayed put. As smart as she is, she just isn’t ambitious like that. One time she told me that she preferred computers to people and that she was used to everyone here in Aberdeen.

  “I’m fine where I am,” she told me one time. “I just don’t want to start over and smile and suck up and act interested in new people. I’m not into people.”

  Angelina is barely five feet tall. Her hair is a bluish black, and she favors sweatpants over any other attire. She’s trim, but her slouchy clothing suggests that she just can’t be bothered with things like fashion.

  “In the lab or the break room,” she told me once, “I fit in just fine.” When she dresses for court, she looks like a different person—a person she doesn’t necessarily want to be.

  Carter, looking like he is catching a cold or maybe hungover, comes with me to meet Angelina in the conference room next to her office. On the wall above the old library table is a flat-screen that displays the contents of the MacBook we picked up from the Tomlinson residence.

  “The Dell really was dead,” she says. “I sent it out to WSP because there’s a guy there who can work miracles when they’re needed.”

  “Can’t you just reboot it?” Carter asks as he slides into the seat next to mine. “That usually fixes all tech problems.”

  Angelina smiles. “Actually,” she says, “that does work now and then. But this one’s given up the ghost. If there’s anything on it that’s retrievable, we’ll get it. Not that you’ll need it.”

  She seems pleased.

  “You found something else,” I say.

  Angelina picks up the mouse. “A treasure trove,” she says, “that we almost missed because it was buried in an encrypted Dropbox account. Pretty disgusting too.”

  Carter and I are all ears. She tells us that there had been some effort to conceal some content from prying eyes.

  “People forget that there’s a pathway to everything. You can delete your search history easy enough, but really all that does is make you think you’ve deleted it. If you know where to look, you can find just about every click that was ever made on any device. Same thing about encryption. Not all that hard to get in, when you know where to look.”

  “Treasure trove,” I repeat.

  Angelina nods. “Yeah. Let me show you.” She indicates what she says is a hidden folder.

  It’s a series of photos that flail at us. It’s a pornographic jack-in-the-box. Selfies. Nude ones. Some images are a close-up of Mr. Magnum, both flaccid and erect.

  Carter shifts uncomfortably in his chair. I imagine that it’s awkward sitting with two women and looking at another man’s private anatomy.

  “Not sure how useful all these photos will be,” Angelina says, “but it might have some bearing here.”

  “Jesus,” Carter says, “why do guys do this?”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” I say.

  “Compulsion,” Angelina says as she puts up more photos one at a time. “Can’t keep it in their pants, off their phones, in the locker room. Guys are weird like that.” She looks over at Carter.

  “Some are,” he says.

  “Was Luke sending these out to people?” I ask. “Or were they just for home use?”

  Angelina stares at her report. “Nope. He didn’t send them by email. Not that I could find. He might have used his phone. In fact, I’m pretty sure that he took all these with his phone. Images were backed up on the cloud, which is how they ended up here on the Mac.”

  “He’s a scumbag,” Carter says, with the kind of conviction that makes the statement seem completely definitive.

  “No argument from me there,” I say. “What else have you got?”

  Angelina turns back to the screen. “Let’s finish the photos first,” she says. “I like saving the best for last. Cherry on the sundae is coming up next.”

  Angelina really does hate people. She’s stringing us along a little. Her passive-aggressive way of having a good time, I think. That’s fine. She’s good at what she does.

  She shows a series of photographs of Ally next.

  “There are about a dozen of these,” she says.

  “Weird that there are so few,” I say. “Most parents take more than ten thousand photographs in the first year of their baby’s life.”

  “And we do nothing with them,” Carter says. “A lot of effort for something that never sees the light of day.”

  I don’t say anything, just nod quickly. The pictures of Ally show her with her mother and father, mostly. A few have her posed alone. The one that touches my heart the most is the photo taken of her next to that big pink WinCo cake for her first birthday. Her smile matches the cake. She’s a beautiful little girl. Everyone says that about anyone who has died under tragic circumstances. In this case it’s true. Anyone would have wanted Ally. Loved her. Made sure that she got through school. First date. Danced at her wedding. All of the things that we long to do with the little ones we love.

  Before we get to the cherry on the sundae, Angelina gives a quick review of the contents of both Tomlinsons’ email accounts.

  “These two aren’t heavy emailers,” she says. “Most of Luke’s were spam from porn sites
and women looking to hook up. I mean, probably not real women. Just the kind of Internet come-on that plagues guys who click on porn. Out of his emails there were a few from his friends and family, but nothing illuminating. I printed those out for you here.”

  She taps the top of a black binder.

  “What about Mia?” Carter asks.

  “About the same,” Angelina says. “Not the porn part. She exchanged information with a nursing study friend, but nothing of importance. My guess is that they use text messaging more than email to communicate. Most younger people do now.”

  I look at Carter. He smiles. He knows I’m teasing him a little about his lack of texting prowess.

  “What about their phones?” I ask. “Can you recover their texts?”

  Angelina nods. “We can,” she says. “I mean, I can’t, but the prosecutor’s office is already on it. The information we need is stored on the phone company’s servers, and it will take some time to get that content. We’ll likely get it, but not immediately. Phone companies are the worst. They scream ‘privacy’ all the time, yet cheat ratepayers whenever possible. I hate my service provider.”

  People.

  Service provider.

  Angelina hates a lot of things.

  “I read the initial interviews conducted with Mia by the responding officer and the two of you. I know she indicated that Luke had done some research on hot cars and children.”

  “Mia did too,” I say. “Said they were both worried about it.”

  “Right,” Angelina says. “So, yes, there were several searches in the days before Ally’s death.”

  “How many?” Carter asks.

  “Too many,” Angelina deadpans, “for idle curiosity, if you ask me. Anyway, you know they did that. And by the way, there were fourteen such searches to be exact.” She has our attention, but she pauses anyway. “There’s one that I think you should see.”

  “News articles?” I ask. “We’ve seen them.”

  “No,” Angelina says. “A video. It was under a search string other than ‘hot-car death.’”

  “What was it?” Carter asks.

  She looks at him and then me. “‘Does a baby dying in a heated car make any noise?’”

  Carter pushes back from the table. His face morphs from disgust to rage, yet he stays silent. We’ve both imagined the depravity of people like Luke. We see them in our jobs. We read about them in psychological case studies. Even on TV. We know the darkest acts perpetrated by another, and we are seldom surprised.

  But now. Now we are.

  “A YouTube video by a Plano detective recounted what he understood happened to the human body, a child’s body, at those kinds of temperatures. That was watched multiple times.”

  She goes to the video and it plays quietly. I don’t need to hear the words. Dr. Beakman told me how Ally had suffered in that Subaru.

  “We can’t tell which one of them accessed the video?” Carter asks.

  “No,” Angelina says. “Not really. I looked at the time of day and, judging by what Nicole told me about the Tomlinsons’ work schedules, I’d say that Luke was likely the primary researcher. His log-on was used a lot more than Mia’s. And mornings were a favorite time for what he was up to.”

  I think of Ally just then. She was sitting in her high chair, drinking milk from a sippy cup while her dad was hunched over his laptop, plotting to torture and kill her.

  “Don’t you want the cherry?” Angelina asks.

  Her remark catches me off guard. “There’s more?”

  She nods. “Yeah. And it’s a whopper.” She clicks on a link in the history tab, and a bulletin board–style page comes into view.

  “What’s this?” Carter asks.

  “It appears to be Luke’s favorite Internet destination. His handle is Big Guy.”

  “Of course it is,” I say.

  The site is simple. It looks like Reddit or one of those old fan sites that used to be popular in the days before Facebook. Its threads are collapsible, the number of responses indicated with each. The newest posted on top, descending downward on the page to those topics that have cooled over time.

  The site is called Kidzzz.

  “What is this?” Carter asks. “Some kind of perv site?”

  “Perverted, yes,” Angelina says, “but not in that disgusting sexual-abuse way. This site is for parents who wish they never had any children. That having kids has ruined their lives. It’s the biggest bunch of whiners and complainers that I’ve ever seen anywhere.”

  “Like wanting to hurt their kids?” he asks.

  “Not that,” she says. “At least, I didn’t take any of the comments that way. Mostly parents just longing for the days when they didn’t have to haul their bratty progeny off to soccer and stuff like that. That it was hard to deal with a kid with colic at 2:00 a.m. Or that the kid’s college education had cost them their retirement. It seems to span the whole gamut of parenthood. The ugly and the mundane. I’ll tell you one thing, no one on this site is bragging about their kids and how much they love them.”

  She scrolls down to Big Guy’s most recent post on a thread called “I don’t get any anymore.”

  “Nice title,” I say.

  Angelina looks at me as she clicks on his message.

  Before it was born I got tons of pussy. I got it from my wife every which way I wanted it. I’m talking dirty, fun shit. I get hard just thinking about it. Now look at me. I’m changing diapers. It wants to be fed. My old lady’s too wrapped up in her career to give a shit about either one of us. Should have gotten her an abortion when she begged me. Stupid me. Catholicism sucks.

  “He calls Ally an ‘it.’ What a piece of crap he is,” I say.

  Carter jumps in. “What a fucking dumb shit! And a big baby! Changing diapers? Like that’s so hard. I loved every minute of being a dad. Maybe not the diaper part so much, but, Jesus, this guy’s warped.”

  “More than warped,” I say, though I don’t think I can articulate just what more that might be. On the repellent scale of one to ten, with ten being the highest, I put Luke Tomlinson somewhere around fifteen. Maybe twenty. Now when I see his pudgy face and dull-eyed stare, it will be through eyes that have been made fully open by his callousness.

  “What about Mia?” I ask. “Did she post too?”

  Angelina shakes her head. “Not that I could tell.”

  She pushes the binder and a thumb drive in my direction.

  “That’s the highlight reel,” she says. “Most of the details and printouts that align with the case in any way are here. Some photos from a folder are proof the guy’s an idiot too. Feel free to dig in, ask questions if you need to.”

  Carter and I thank her.

  “No problem,” she says. “Just make sure the bastard never goes free, all right? He’s the crap on the bottom of anyone’s shoe. The funny thing is, I think even he knows it.”

  “How so?” I ask.

  She grins. “Maybe this is a double cherry on this shit sundae. But one of his Internet search strings was ‘How to survive in prison.’”

  “Seriously?” I ask.

  “When was that?” Carter chimes in.

  “Two days before Ally died.”

  “This gets better and better,” Carter says.

  “Or worse and worse,” I say, “depending on your POV.”

  Angelina lays her hand on her report. “In case you’re wondering, Luke learned a number of important rules that I trust would be helpful in Walla Walla. He learned never to snitch on anyone, not to get too friendly with the guards, to always take your pants off when going to the bathroom, to never argue with a guard, to cozy up with members of your own race, to never show emotion, and, let’s see . . . to pray that you’ll live long enough to get out one day.”

  “Some great tips, there,” I say, with mock admiration.

  “What’s that thing about the pants off?” Carter asks.

  Angelina nods. “Yeah, that one caught my eye too. Apparently most prisoner viole
nce takes place while inmates are in the bathroom and you should be seated no matter if you are going number one or two. Pants should be off so you can get up and run without tripping. Seriously. That’s a tip.”

  “And a great tip it is,” I say.

  “Have at it. Enjoy the photos,” Angelina says. She leaves, and Carter and I sit side by side to go through the binder. He smells different today. A new shampoo, I’m guessing. Carter isn’t the type to splash on cologne. He smells good. I don’t remark on it. I just let it pass through my mind.

  “Guy’s a total perv,” he says.

  “No argument there,” I say as we take a deeper dive into the contents of the binder. “Angelina’s done a thorough job here.”

  “She’s good,” he says. “Best one we have.”

  I smile. “She’s the only one we have.”

  Carter grins back. “Right. But say we had ten people: she’d still be pretty damn good.”

  I turn the pages to the section marked “Personal Photos.”

  And there he is. Mr. Magnum in all his glory.

  “God,” I say, “why do guys do this?”

  “I don’t,” he says.

  “I didn’t mean all guys, Carter. But why are some guys compelled to take a photograph of their junk?”

  Carter narrows his gaze in my direction. “You haven’t taken a selfie?” he asks.

  “Not of my vagina,” I say.

  “Some guys do it,” he says, “because it’s a turn-on, I guess.”

  “Taking the photo? Or sending it?”

  “Sending it, of course. They think it’s cool when they get a naked picture of a woman sent to them. And, I guess—because, like I told you, I don’t have any personal experience here—they think a woman will like receiving one.”

  “Highly doubtful,” I say, thinking of Danny Ford. “I’m speaking from experience, Carter. I had a boyfriend who took lots of photos of himself as though I wanted to see the images. I think he just wanted to show off. Probably sent them to others too.”