Whisper in the Dark (A Thriller)

by Robert Gregory Browne

  Had he heard it before?

  He thought about Bobby Fremont again and wondered if he had somehow smuggled a phone into the hospital. Reaching for the land line, he started dialing the security desk—

  —then his cell phone rang again.

  Hanging up, he grabbed it and checked caller ID. Nothing.

  Feeling a renewed flutter, he paused a moment, then clicked it on.

  “You’re persistent, I’ll give you that much. What do you want?”

  “To apologize, Doctor. Calling you a pornographer was out of line, no matter how accurate the term might be.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much of an apology.”

  “The best I can do, I’m afraid.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Tolan said, softening his voice now, controlling his anger. He could see there was no way out of this. “Why don’t you come in here to the hospital and we’ll talk.”

  Another laugh. “I’m not a big fan of psychotherapy.”

  “Few people are. But something’s obviously bothering you and acting out is never the solution.”

  “Thanks for the two-bit analysis, Doctor, but let’s try to keep this as uncomplicated as possible. Just answer my question.”

  Tolan was at a loss. Wasn’t sure what the caller was referring to. Then it hit him. “About the computer?”

  “You are listening after all.”

  Tolan sighed. “Then, yes, I do have one. A laptop, sitting right here in front of me.”

  “Are you connected to the Internet?”

  “Yes.” Where was this going?

  “Open your favorite search engine and do a search on the name Han van Meegeren.”

  Tolan frowned. “Who?”

  “Han van Meegeren,” the caller said, then spelled it out for him. “Go ahead, I’ll wait.”

  He thought about hanging up again, but curiosity had gotten ahold of him, and he hesitated only a moment before flipping open his laptop. Hitting a button to take it out of hibernation, he waited for his wireless card to find the connection, then called up his Google screen, typed in the name, and jabbed the return button.

  The screen blossomed with the familiar blue typeface listing dozens of websites.

  Scanning the site summaries, he saw that the main theme of each centered around the subject of art forgery. Apparently van Meegeren was an infamous practitioner of the craft.

  “As you can see,” the caller said, “good old Han was quite the faker. If you get a chance to explore further, you’ll find that the Dutch authorities once arrested him for collaborating with the Nazis. They traced a painting in Hermann Göring’s collection to him and threatened to charge him with treason.”

  “How unfortunate,” Tolan said, thinking again of the sleep he needed. “What does this have to do with me?”

  “Patience,” the caller said. “Your bedside manner is severely lacking.”

  “It’s been a bad morning. Get to the point, if you have one.”

  “Oh, I have one. One I’m sure you’ll find quite interesting. But back to van Meegeren for a moment. The painting in question was a work supposedly done by Johannes Vermeer in the 1600s, but it turned out that van Meegeren himself had painted it. He was a forger, not a traitor.”

  “That seems to be the general theme here, but again—what does it have to do with me?”

  “I think you already know, Doctor, but let’s move on to another website, shall we?”

  This was getting ridiculous. He’d let it go on far too long.

  As if sensing his hesitation, the caller said: “Don’t worry, we’re almost done. Just indulge me this one last time. If this next website doesn’t satisfy your curiosity, feel free to hang up on me again.”

  He was toying with Tolan, but the hook was securely in place now. Tolan waited for him to give him the website address, then typed it in.

  “Keep in mind,” the caller said, “that this is a one-time-only URL. I’m running it on an anonymous server that can’t be traced back to me.”

  This gave Tolan pause. “Where are you sending me?”

  “The simple press of a key will tell you.”

  True enough, he thought, and hit the enter key. A moment later, what filled the page made him rise out of his chair involuntarily and back away from the computer. He dropped his phone to the desk as if it were contaminated.

  “Dr. Tolan?”

  He stared at the screen.

  Photographs. A dozen or more. But nothing like the photos of Abby he had just been looking through.

  Each one featured a brutally dismembered body. A killer’s knife had carved its way through flesh and bone, severing limbs, mutilating them, leaving pools of coagulating blood. The parts had then been rearranged in a kind of sick mosaic. A cubist nightmare.

  Tolan wondered if these were crime scene photos that the caller had somehow managed to pilfer from an evidence locker. Such a find might trigger a fantasy and fuel the building of this website. Yet, despite the subject matter, there was an artistic quality to the photographs, a sense of form and composition that no crime scene photographer was likely to bother with. Or care about.

  “Dr. Tolan?”

  Choking back a wad of bile, he picked up the phone. His hand was shaking. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “This is my abstract collection. Quite remarkable, don’t you think? Notice the way I used texture to enhance the line, and the subtle contrast of bone against flesh.”

  Tolan glanced at his land line. Was there a way to conference this call and somehow get Blackburn involved? He didn’t think so.

  Staring at the computer screen, he sat down again, then quickly jabbed Ctrl+P, sending the pages to his printer. When he did contact Blackburn, he wanted evidence to show him.

  “Dr. Tolan?”

  The printer whirred behind him and he felt his whole body tighten, as if he’d been caught doing something unseemly. He swallowed, nearly choking on his response. “What?”

  “One last question: Do you know what’s missing from this collection?”

  “Other than your sanity?”

  Another soft laugh. “Nice. I’ll have to remember that one.” The caller paused. “I worked very hard to achieve this level of perfection, Doctor. Many artists simply rely on luck and instinct to create their work, but this collection took careful planning and execution. Gacy, Gein, BTK, Dahmer—they were all amateurs. Paint-by-number wannabes, every one of them. But I ask you again: Do you know what’s missing?”

  “I have no earthly idea,” Tolan told him, but the moment he said it, it hit him like a brick to the side of the head, and he wondered why he hadn’t put it together the instant he’d seen these photos.

  Vincent.

  He was talking to Vincent.

  A wave of nausea swept over him with such ferocity that he immediately leaned toward his waste basket, struggling to keep from throwing up. He hovered over it, not realizing that he’d put the phone down again until he heard the tinny voice on the line.

  “Doctor?” A pause. “Dr. Tolan?”

  Tolan waited for the nausea to ease up, then righted himself and picked up the phone. “You fucking monster.”

  “I take it you now understand what I’m talking about. But for the sake of clarity, I’ll spell it out for you.”

  “Shut up,” Tolan said.

  “If you click the link at the bottom of the page—”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “—you’ll see it for yourself. What I consider one of the most egregious cases of forgery I’ve ever encountered.”

  “If you don’t shut up, I’ll—”

  “What?” the caller said. “What will you do, Doctor? Turn me into the police? Call my mother and have her spank me? Just click the link. You know you want to.”

  What he wanted to do was throw his phone against the wall, but for some unfathomable reason he didn’t. The caller was right.

  Despite his rage, and the nausea continuing to crawl through his stomach, he grabbed the mo
use, scrolled down to the bottom of the page and saw the underlined blue link waiting for him:

  Abby Tolan

  “I went to a lot of trouble to procure the photos behind that link, Doctor. Had to hack straight into the OCPD crime scene database to get them. But whether or not you click it is unimportant to me. The work is substandard. Crude.” He paused as if taking a moment to calm his own anger. “Your dear departed wife isn’t in the collection above for one simple reason: She was never part of it.”

  Tolan just stared at the link, unable to respond, his finger frozen above the mouse.

  “She’s a forgery. A fake. A vile pornographer’s talentless approximation of my work. And I don’t like that, Doctor. I don’t appreciate being credited for such obvious hackery—if you’ll excuse the pun.”

  “What are you trying to tell me, you sick son of a bitch?”

  “The police got it wrong. The police, the papers, everyone. I didn’t kill your wife. But I think you know that, don’t you? You and Han van Meegeren have something in common.” Another pause. Tolan could almost feel the rage transmitted through the line. “And when I get you alone,” the caller finally said, “you’ll find out what true artistry is.”

  Then the line clicked.

  14

  IF SOLOMON HAD a flaw—and he’d be the first to admit he had more than a few—it was his inability to let something go.

  All through breakfast he sat across from a grizzled old Vietnam vet named Red, only half listening to the old fool, his mind rolling back over the morning’s events.

  “So there I am,” Red was saying, “sitting in the middle of a bathhouse in Patpong, this sexy thing standing buck naked in front of me, soaping herself up for one of them special Thai massages?”

  “Uh-huh,” Solomon murmured.

  “And get this: I’m just getting my clothes off, Mr. Johnson standing at full attention, and this cute little Betty frowns, shakes her head, says, ‘No go. Too big.’ You believe that? Like riding my dick is the most heinous crime anybody ever asked her to contemplate.”

  This, of course, was only an approximation of what Red had really said, a story Solomon had heard at least a dozen times since he met the man, Red usually half in the bag when he told it. Solomon wasn’t sure if Red was expecting some kind of response, but he just nodded and threw him another “uh-huh” as if he was actually listening.

  What he was really doing was thinking about Myra. Beginning to have doubts about what he’d seen, thinking he may have let sixty-eight years’ worth of backwater superstition cloud his judgment. After all, the lighting in that ambulance wasn’t all that great, right? Maybe he’d been mistaken and it was Myra after all. His Myra. All that dirt and blood on her face. Maybe he’d been done in by a trick of the eyes.

  He sure hoped so.

  “Tell me something,” he said, interrupting his table mate’s running monologue.

  Red didn’t seem to mind. He’d been talking with his mouth full and took a quick swallow. “Yeah?”

  “Somebody goes Section Eight on the street, gets picked up by the cops, where do they take ’em?”

  Red frowned, took another bite. “How long you lived here, you don’t know that?”

  “I wouldn’t be askin’ if I did.”

  Solomon had seen the cops grab quite a few crazies off the street, had heard the usual bullshit about where they might be headed, but didn’t really pay much attention. Wasn’t his business.

  Red looked at him a moment as if trying to decide if he was for real. Then he said, “You got two choices; the psych ward at County or, if they’re full up, they ship you up top the hill.”

  “Up top what hill?”

  “Pepper Mountain, my man. Headcase Hotel. Up on the mesa? Half the squatters down at the riverbed have checked in at one time or another. It’s like a goddamn five-star compared to County.”

  Headcase Hotel.

  Solomon remembered hearing the name, something about folks trying to get themselves locked up there on purpose, just so they could get a hot bath and a decent meal. But he’d never been curious enough to fill in the blanks. Had never known it was located up on Pepper Mountain Mesa, just above Baycliff, a little oceanside community about five miles northwest of the city. All he knew about the area was that a bunch of rich folks had beach houses there.

  He wondered if you could see those houses from atop the mesa, and found himself smiling at the thought of all those loonies looking down on Bayside Drive. It undoubtedly made a few of the blue bloods squirm.

  He wondered, too, about Myra. Wondered which one of the nut houses they took her to. He was convinced now that he’d overreacted this morning when he shoulda kept his cool. He’d been nervous was all, that big cop and people in their pj’s staring at him as he climbed into the back of that ambulance. Maybe he shoulda just followed Clarence’s lead and stayed the hell away from it.

  Too late now.

  Drums or no drums, he knew he had to take action. Either to help a friend, or—if his old eyes hadn’t been seeing things after all—to warn the poor sonofabitch who got in her way.

  Only problem was, where had they taken her? County or HH? It was a coin toss. And there were no guarantees he’d be able to track her down even if he knew.

  But in his time on this planet, one thing Solomon had learned—and learned the hard way—was that you can’t win the game if you don’t bother to roll the bones. And he was just superstitious enough to think that, one way or another, The Rhythm would set him on the right path.

  So all through the rest of breakfast he formulated a plan. Not much of one, but he didn’t have all that much to work with.

  Looking at the glass of watery orange juice in front of him, he gulped it down, then got up to ask for another. They were pretty generous with the liquid around here and he figured he’d better start loading up the ammunition.

  Forty minutes later, Solomon St. Fort took a long arcing piss onto the hood of an Ocean City Police cruiser, shouting, “Make it stop, Mama! Please make it stop!” and hoped that after they finished beating on him, they’d take him exactly where he needed to go.

  15

  BLACKBURN KNEW HE was about to lose his case. Had known it the moment he saw that winking smiley-face emoticon burned into Janovic’s lower lip. The return of Vincent Van Gogh was not the kind of thing the department left to a single Special Victims investigator. Or a squad room full of them, for that matter.

  The return of Vincent Van Gogh required the reassembly of the task force, and once that happened—which was bound to be any moment now—Blackburn would be lucky if he was asked to go for coffee.

  He had half-heartedly tried to convince Mats to keep the revelation under wraps for a while. But Mats wasn’t about to commit career suicide for Blackburn. Why should he? Mats was a company man, and Blackburn was fairly certain he’d already made the call, igniting a chain reaction that had quickly reached the residents of the fourth floor. It was only a matter of time before Blackburn got the official word.

  Down here on Earth, the Special Victims squad room was nearly as quiet as the morgue.

  Half the squad was either out on calls or late coming in, and Jenny, the support clerk, had been on maternity leave for at least a month. Blackburn figured they’d get around to replacing her about the time they found him a new partner.

  A bulging black plastic bag was waiting for him on his desk top. He eyed it dubiously, then turned to Fred De Mello, who sat slumped at a nearby desk, staring at a computer screen, looking in dire need of either a cup of coffee or colonic hydrotherapy. Blackburn wasn’t sure which.

  De Mello was a twenty-year veteran who had long ago decided he’d chosen the wrong career path. His skills in the field, even on a good day, were just a hair above lack-luster. But he could work the computer databases and phone like nobody Blackburn had ever seen. He was the go-to guy when it came to working up a victim profile. Which was why Blackburn had dragged him out of bed and tossed him the baton on Janovic.


  Blackburn gestured to the bag. “Any idea where this came from?”

  De Mello glanced forlornly toward a corner of the squad room, where a fresh pot of coffee was brewing. “Paramedic brought it in. Said he found it on the floor of his rig.”

  “And I should care why?”

  “He thought some old derelict might’ve dropped it while you were all wrestling around with your Jane Doe.” De Mello paused, assessing Blackburn with what passed for a wry smile. “Didn’t know you were into group gropes.”

  If anyone else had made this comment, Blackburn would have replied with a pithy little zinger of his own, but trading quips with De Mello was about as much fun as shoveling cement. The man’s sense of humor was as flat as hammered cow shit.

  Besides, Blackburn wasn’t in the best of moods right now. He needed a cigarette in the worst way. Ignoring the comment, he said, “You making any progress on my victim?”

  “Getting there.”

  “Crime techs tell me they found a Palm Pilot.” Normally, Blackburn himself would have given the apartment a thorough search, but he’d been distracted by Psycho Bitch.

  Not that it mattered. He wasn’t one of those bullshit touchy-feely television detectives who had to walk through a crime scene trying to channel the killer. All that counted was the evidence, and the techs were more than capable of collecting it.

  The initial interviews of Janovic’s neighbors, conducted by the first responders, had been a bust. None of them really knew or paid much attention to the guy, some just referring to him as the “fag in 5C”—a rumor about his lifestyle that had been circulated courtesy of the apartment complex manager. None of them had been awake at the time of the murder, none of them heard or saw anything unusual and, possibly worst of all, none of them had a clue who any of Janovic’s friends were.

  He kept to himself, they said. And so did they.

  This attitude had always slayed Blackburn. As a kid, he’d known his neighbors three houses up on either side. They’d all get together on weekends, hanging out like one big happy family. Nowadays, you take one look at your neighbor and you’re likely to get a shotgun waved in your face. It just wasn’t right.