Speak No Evil

by Allison Brennan

  She looked each of them in the eye in turn, then focused her steely-eyed gaze on the weakest link, Abby.

  “Okay, girls, let me explain something to you. Angie was raped. Then she was suffocated in a garbage bag. Murdered. She’s dead, and if you don’t spill this secret right now, I’m taking you all to jail. You can spend the night in a cold cell and maybe then you’ll try to help, not hinder, our investigation.”

  Kayla jumped up. “We have rights, too!”

  “Sit down, Kayla,” Carina said. “I can and will arrest you for obstruction of justice. You will be taken into court tomorrow and the judge will make you tell or you’ll be in contempt of court.”

  Abby interjected, “No one can know.”

  “If it goes to court, it will damn well be public information,” Carina said. “You tell me now, and I promise I will do everything in my power to keep the information private.” Carina hoped she could. If it was material to the prosecution, all bets were off. She didn’t like to deceive the girls, but finding Angie’s killer was more important.

  Abby and Jodi looked at each other. Abby burst into tears. Carina rubbed her forehead. She was getting a headache.

  Jodi spoke. “Angie, um, she sort of had a double life kind of thing.”

  Double life kind of thing? Carina and Will exchanged glances.

  “Angie dated a lot of guys,” Jodi continued. “Some not really publicly. But she journaled about it.”

  “Journaled? Did she keep the journal at her house? In her purse?” Two officers had been to Angie’s house to search her personal effects, but her purse was missing.

  Jodi bit her lip. “No, an online journal. You know, MyJournal dotcom. But,” she continued quickly, “she was anonymous. No one knew about it. I mean, no one would even think that she did the things she wrote about. She’s really sweet.”

  “You mean she made them up?”

  Jodi shook her head profusely. “Oh no, it’s all true. Well, most of it. I mean, I doubt she ever lied, but I guess she could have sort of exaggerated.”

  “Anonymous. How did you know?”

  Abby glanced down sheepishly. “One day she borrowed my computer and after she left I looked at the Web page history because I needed something. There it was. I read the entries and knew it was Angie because she talked about us, but not our real names. Only our first initials. I asked her about it, and she told us everything, swore us to secrecy. It’s, um, sort of a sex diary. Her profile was ‘A for Anonymous.’ ”

  “Anonymous online,” Will said, his voice flat. “Where everyone in the world can read it.”

  “But no one knew it was her!” Abby exclaimed.

  “You’re positive she told no one else? What about one of her ex-boyfriends?”

  “Oh no, especially not them,” Jodi said. “They would have been pissed off. She detailed some of their, um, sexual failings.” The three girls giggled, then abruptly stopped as the magnitude of the situation hit them.

  Carina lost it. Even after being a cop for eleven years, she’d never be so cavalier about murder.

  “Give me the Web page. And I’m putting you all on notice, right now. If my partner or I have any other questions, you will answer them. Got it?”

  They sobered completely during Carina’s lecture, and Jodi and Abby in particular looked guilty over their behavior. As Abby scribbled something on notebook paper, Jodi said, “I didn’t mean to be disrespectful. I loved Angie, like a sister. I guess…I can’t believe she’s gone.”

  Carina forgave the girls their behavior. They were eighteen and facing the brutal death of a friend. It was going to hit them hard over the next day or two, and grief would set in.

  Abby handed Carina the paper: Journalme. iloverealmen.com.

  “Two more questions. Do you know Steve Thomas?”

  They all nodded.

  “Why did Angie get a restraining order against him?”

  It was Kayla who spoke up. “He threatened her.”

  “How?”

  “He told her she’d be killed.”

  “He threatened to kill her?”

  Pause. “Not exactly.”

  “What exactly?”

  “He said she was being stupid and would get herself killed if she didn’t watch her back. But he was so mean about it, and Steve isn’t normally a mean guy, so we all figured he was jealous about Doug, and when guys get jealous they do stupid things. So Angie got scared and got the restraining order.”

  Stupid things? Carina had a few stupid things she’d like to point out to the girls, but she refrained. “Tell me about Doug Masterson.”

  Abby said, “He’s hot. And he treats Angie like a princess. At least he used to.” She glanced at Jodi.

  “Were they still seeing each other?” Carina asked.

  “Angie thought he had another girlfriend and planned to confront him, but I don’t know if she talked to him or not,” Jodi said.

  “I don’t think she cared all that much, though,” Abby said. “I think she was looking seriously at someone else.”

  “Someone else? Who?”

  “I don’t know, she never told me. It was just a feeling I had. I mean, I’ve known her forever. I just sensed it.”

  Over twelve hours on-duty had taken its toll. Carina was exhausted. But they had one more stop to make: the patrol watching Thomas’s apartment radioed that he’d just arrived home.

  Will drove and she called the e-crimes unit. Patrick, her little brother, was on-call. Though he was only eleven months younger than Carina, she’d always thought of him as her “little” brother. He was a late bloomer, and her five-foot-eight-inch frame had towered over him until he turned eighteen. In three years he’d grown seven inches and now topped six feet.

  He’d always be her little brother, though.

  “Hey, Patrick, can you check out an online journaling website for me?”

  “Shoot.” She gave him the information. He whistled softly. “Haven for perverts.”

  “Sex offenders?”

  “I’d bet half the people who hit the MyJournal pages are sex offenders or would-be sex offenders. The other half are naive teenagers and college kids who have no idea who’s watching them.”

  Carina quickly filled him in on her case. “I’ll call the mother and tell her someone will be by to pick up the vic’s computer.”

  “I’ll send someone out,” Patrick said.

  “While you’re at it, put Steven Thomas on your list, too.” She gave him Thomas’s address. “I’m going to ask nicely that he hand over his computer. Otherwise, we’ll get a warrant. Between the restraining order and not coming clean about his whereabouts Friday night, I think we can get it tonight.”

  “I’ll be waiting for your call. In the meantime, I’ll check out—holy shit.”

  “What?”

  “You haven’t checked out the victim’s journal yet, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Anonymous, sure. But I’d bet my pension that every perv out there was trying to discover her identity. And believe me, it’s not as hard as people think.”

  SIX

  STEVEN THOMAS DIDN’T LOOK like a killer, but most criminals didn’t have “murderer” tattooed across their forehead.

  Carina and Will wanted to postpone bringing Thomas formally to the station. Right now, he appeared willing to cooperate. With an easy rapport, they might just give him enough rope to hang himself.

  The three of them sat in Thomas’s tidy apartment. Had he glued Angie’s mouth shut to prevent her from making noise? Kept her here in his bedroom? Hoped to make her see the error of her ways in dating the drug dealer Doug Masterson? Maybe things got out of hand. Maybe she said something that made him angry and that’s when he glued her mouth and gagged her. Raped her out of anger and frustration. Rage. Maybe he didn’t mean to. Then afterward, he knew he had to kill her.

  Murder by suffocation was a step removed, almost impersonal. Most crimes of passion were violent, hands-on affairs done in the heat of the mome
nt. Lots of evidence, blood. Strangulation, stabbings, shootings. Quick and effective. But Angie’s killer had imprisoned and tortured her, then put her in a garbage bag and let her die on her own. Watched her die as opposed to actively participating in it. If Carina was correct, he’d laid on top of her while she died in the garbage bag. Just one more strange detail in a long list of oddities surrounding this case.

  Why hadn’t Dillon returned her call yet? Carina was confident he’d have additional insight. Getting into the mind of a killer was his specialty.

  “Why did you lie to us about what time you were at the Sand Shack?” she asked Thomas.

  “I didn’t really lie,” he said. “I really did go there at ten when she got off to talk to her.” He paused. “I just didn’t mention that I came back.”

  “Why?”

  “It didn’t seem important.”

  “The manager says that he had to escort you from the premises because of the restraining order.”

  “I told you I followed Angie.” He ran a hand through his short-cropped dark blond hair. “I was worried about her. I told you that,” he repeated.

  “You followed her when she left the club,” Will said.

  “Yes, yes, I told you that!” Thomas jumped off the couch and both Carina and Will had their hands on the butts of their firearms. She didn’t need to draw, Thomas simply paced. Agitated. Out of guilt? Remorse? Fear?

  “Where?”

  “I told you. I followed her home. I wanted to make sure she was safe.”

  A tiny tickle about Angie’s mother hearing her late Friday night disturbed Carina. She asked, “Okay, so she got home safe. What time?”

  “Nearly one in the morning.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I left.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You left, but no one has seen Angie alive since.”

  “That’s why I went to the police on Saturday. But the cop wouldn’t do anything about it!”

  “We still don’t understand why you came in on Saturday—less than twenty-four hours after you allegedly watched Angie walk safely into her house when you weren’t supposed to be anywhere near her.”

  “Because Angie posts to her journal every single day. Two, three times. She never went online Saturday. I was worried, so I went by her house. Her grandmother said she wasn’t there.”

  “You knew about her online journal.”

  Thomas had no comment.

  “Mr. Thomas, we can get a warrant to seize your computer and ISP records. It would benefit you to tell us the truth.”

  He leaned against the counter that separated the living area from the kitchen. “Yes, I knew about her journal. That’s the real reason she got the restraining order,” he admitted.

  “Why?”

  “She was afraid I’d be mad at her. Look, have you seen it? She’s calling attention to herself. I found out about it by accident. She was posting something at the college library and I walked up behind her. She flipped out, first scared and then angry. That’s what we’d been fighting about when that little bitch Kayla convinced her I was a threat. I wasn’t a threat to Angie. I care about her. A lot. I never wanted anything bad to happen to her, but she was playing with fire. First Doug, then the journal.”

  “Was there anything embarrassing about your relationship with her in the journal?”

  He paused, averted his eyes. “I don’t know. I didn’t read everything.”

  Lying again. Now Carina really wanted to read the journal.

  “Would you object to a crime technician searching your apartment and borrowing your computer?”

  “I’m a suspect.” He said it flatly.

  Carina was treading on dangerous territory. She couldn’t admit he was a suspect without Mirandizing him. She didn’t want to go there, not yet. They wanted his cooperation first.

  Then she’d nail him to the wall.

  “All we want is to verify your story,” Will said. “If you’re not lying to us, we have no reason to suspect you. Do we?”

  “Fine. Whatever you want. I didn’t kill Angie. You should be out there doing your job, finding Angie’s killer, not wasting time with me.”

  He stared at Angie’s picture, his fingers caressing the screen. So beautiful…

  Like all beautiful girls, she knew how to play the game, made all the right noises. But in the end, she was like all of them, nothing but a liar.

  Angie was beautiful, but she was a fucking liar and she deserved everything she’d gotten. Everything.

  He missed her. She’d been nice to him, sometimes. But other times she had shown her true self, just like every whore out there.

  He could still hear his mother.

  “My poor baby.”

  He was far from a baby, but he could never contradict his mother.

  Her speech had always been the same. “I know how hard it is for young men these days. Girls showing their tits to everyone, getting you all hard and aching and there’s nothing you can do. They do it on purpose, you know. To get you to do something stupid. They spread their legs and tell you to fuck them. Then they start crying and scream rape. Don’t fall into their trap. Don’t listen to their lies.”

  “I don’t, Mama,” he always said. “I don’t even look.”

  “Don’t lie to me. Men look. All of ’em want to fuck every bitch that crosses their path. Isn’t that why your daddy got into so much trouble? The whores. He was weak. He fell under their spell. Like those women of myth. What are they called?”

  “The Sirens.”

  “Exactly! Sexpots, luring men. Sirens.” She seemed proud of him somehow, in a way he never understood. “You’re a smart one, aren’t you? Smart enough to stay away from the Sirens. If only your father had listened to me.”

  He ached. He wanted to talk to his father so bad. Dad would understand. The feelings. The darkness.

  His father had been a great man. Great but weak, Mama said.

  “Don’t you be a weak man. Don’t give in to those harlots. They only want to torment you with their titties and their twats. Don’t touch or they’ll cry rape so fast you’ll be in prison before you know it. Sluts, all of them.”

  He would never be weak.

  And when he touched them, they would never cry rape.

  Angie would never say another word.

  He locked the door, slid the deadbolt. Closed all the curtains. Double checked the doors and windows and curtains. Better safe. And then, only when he was certain no one could walk in, he brought the box of tapes to his bedroom. Shut and locked that door, too.

  The tapes had been his father’s. He’d seen his father with them before, though he’d not known what was on them until after his father disappeared. Left without a good-bye. He’d only been a kid then, and he’d had a lot of time to think about it.

  The Sirens.

  They’d lured him away, made him desert his family, his sons.

  He used to sit in his daddy’s closet just to smell him. Remember him and wish for something…more. He never knew exactly what, but he knew if his dad would come back everything would be different, better. Over time the Dad scent faded. Then they moved, and everything about his father was gone. He’d grown up and the memories became fuzzy, so he thought hard, trying to bring them back. He wasn’t certain all his memories were true, but they comforted him, so he kept them close.

  The tapes had been in his daddy’s closet. Five of them in a shoe box, far in the corner, buried under boxes his mother had packed when his father hadn’t returned.

  Each tape was fifteen to twenty minutes long. Dark and fuzzy, old, colorless. But he knew what was going on. He knew what the faceless man in the picture was doing.

  Head buzzing, he turned off all the lights except the desk lamp, which cast long shadows across his immaculate room. Took off all his clothes. He was hard with anticipation, his penis quivering. He stared at himself, picturing how he’d looked in the mirror at the head of
his bed when he slid into Angie’s body.

  He’d come immediately, the excitement overtaking him.

  The second time he’d forced himself in her he couldn’t come. Angry, he didn’t know why. But it wasn’t the same. So he took a beer bottle and shoved it up her cunt. Her body arched; her vocal cords strained in her neck. He watched her neck, enthralled, the faint scream deep in her chest turning him on like fucking her hadn’t.

  He came.

  Licking his lips, sweating, he slid the tape into the VCR.

  The woman was naked on a bare dirty mattress. Because the film was black and white, he didn’t know if the stains were dirt, urine, or blood. Her hands tied to the headboard. Tears on her face. Her mouth opened.

  He heard no scream because the tape was soundless, but he saw her body jerk, fighting the restraints, her throat tense, revealing the bones in her slender neck.

  A man came partially into view, his face obscured by the shadows. He might have been thirty, a little older. He wore a dark T-shirt, no pants. His penis stood out in front of him. He fucked her. His hands went around her neck.

  Fixated on the tape, he pulled at his own penis harder. Harder, to the point of pain, and still he couldn’t climax. It used to be so easy, but after having Angie all to himself, after watching her die, reality was so much better than the old, worn tape.

  Next time he’d fuck her with his hands on her neck. Maybe then it would last longer. He’d already bought the plastic wrap, a thin layer of protection.

  He reached over to the computer and started a slide show he’d made with his digital camera and downloaded onto his hard drive. Pictures of Angie on his bed. No sound necessary because her face of fear was all he needed. Her eyes. Her body straining. The vocal cords on her neck stretched taut.

  Just like the tape.

  But his masterpiece was better, much better, than the cheap, grainy, black-and-white film—everything he wanted to see in vivid color. The fear, the blood, the sweat on her face. Each still shot gave him what he needed. The slide show he’d created went faster and faster until the best part, when his back was in view, and his dick stuck out, and he slid the condom on and fucked her. Just like the movie. At last, he came.