Walk Into Silence

by Susan McBride

  If Patrick Dielman hadn’t gone to the media, Jo was sure the department would have. Jenny had been missing for more than thirty-six hours at this point. Where was she?

  Had she been the one who’d bashed in Lisa Barton’s window last night? If so, where had she gone? And why would she hide?

  Jo was big on gut feelings, and something about this whole mess didn’t jibe.

  She shut off the TV and finished dressing. She clipped her cell to her jeans and slipped on the leather harness for her .38. The revolver was hers—all officers on the Plainfield force owned the weapons they carried—and this one barely met the criteria for allowable firearms. But it fit her hand like a glove. Besides, in her two years here, she hadn’t been forced to use it, so it seemed more a symbol than anything else.

  She zipped up an insulated nylon jacket, drawing on the hood to protect herself against the chill. Then she scooped up her bag with the DVD from the Warehouse Club stashed inside and was on her way to the station house. About a block away, her cell went off.

  She dialed back Dispatch.

  “What’s up, Susie?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Around the corner.” She could see the flag fluttering from the pole above the station’s roofline.

  “A couple morning hikers found an abandoned vehicle at the quarry, off the old farm route.”

  “What vehicle are we talking about?”

  “A red Nissan 240SX with plates that match those of Jennifer Dielman. We’ve already got a couple cars on location and a crime scene van from the county on the way.”

  Jo’s mouth went dry.

  They’d found Jenny’s car.

  “Detective Phelps is waiting on you at the station.”

  “I’m pulling into the parking lot now.”

  Jo hung up and covered the last block quickly, driving around the back of the building to find an open space.

  Abandoned.

  The old limestone quarry stretched over a hundred acres. That was a lot of territory to cover, a lot of places for someone to hide, or for someone to hide a body.

  If Jenny wasn’t in her car, where was she?

  Hank’s Ford bumped over the gravel road, jostling the car so roughly that Jo was afraid she’d smack her head on the roof. She braced her hands against the dash and still her teeth clacked together every time they bounced through a pothole.

  Last night’s rain hadn’t helped matters any. The unpaved path would have been bad enough without the water to soften up the sloppy mix of dirt and gravel. It also was narrow, pretty much impossible for another car to pass without one vehicle having to drive onto the sloping shoulder.

  The Ford hit a crater, sending a spray of brown into the air, splattering the windshield, shaking Jo’s innards.

  “Hey!”

  “I’m doing the best I can,” Hank muttered in his defense.

  No wonder the quarry was abandoned—it was literally a pain in the ass to reach.

  She gazed out the window around them.

  There were scrubby pines far taller than those in the well-trafficked areas of town, thickly mixed with underbrush on either side of the rutted road that had once been used to haul tons of limestone to the now-defunct railroad depot. They’d already bypassed what seemed like the last vestiges of civilization: oversized realty signs at turnoffs that advertised lots for sale or touted developments set to go up in the next year or two, PRICED IN THE LOW 400,000S! Like that was a bargain for living out in the middle of nowhere.

  “The city bought the property a while back but hasn’t done much except parcel off pieces to developers,” Hank said out of the blue. “Give it a few years, and this’ll be as busy as Main Street.”

  She glanced at her watch and groaned at the amount of time that had passed since they’d left the station. “Are we almost there?” she asked.

  Hank grinned. “You sound like my kids.”

  “It feels like we’re nearly to Sherman.” They hit another hole and took a jolt that banged her shoulder into the door. “C’mon, watch it, would you?”

  “How about I push the little lever that makes the wings pop out? Then we can fly the rest of the way there.”

  “Smart ass,” Jo said and turned back to the window.

  Land ahoy.

  She made out a chain-link fence farther up the road. As they neared, she could read a weather-beaten sign fastened to the metal railing: PRIVATE PROPERTY OF ROSE STONE COMPANY. TRESPASSERS KEEP OUT.

  Maybe the warning had seemed fierce once, but the paint-peeled letters and cockeyed angle of the sign hardly intimidated now. The gates stood wide open, one side so badly bent it looked ready to fall off the hinges. A battered realty sign dangled. Someone had taken potshots at it with a paint gun, and it bore more than a fleeting resemblance to a Jackson Pollock painting.

  Discarded trash had accumulated at the base of the fence. Soda cans, beer bottles, fast-food bags, and wrappers littered the ground and clung to the wire mesh, evidence of years of neglect, of how long the place had been forgotten by anyone who’d given a rat’s ass.

  Visible furrows in the soggy gravel road made her glance ahead. She spotted the cars parked farther in.

  Hank slowed to a near crawl as they entered the grounds. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” he said, and Jo squinted, trying to see who’d made it already.

  There were two blue-and-whites, the colors faded against the gray. She didn’t see the van from the county crime lab, but she could pick out a mud-splotched Jeep Cherokee on the other side of the squad cars. Beyond that appeared to be a rocky hillside, unnatural in the middle of nowhere: massive tons of residue dug from the quarry below.

  “So it’s a hundred acres, right?” she said, straining against the straps of the seat belt to look around her.

  “A hundred twenty,” Hank corrected.

  “Swell.”

  How would they ever find Jenny if she—or what remained of her—was somewhere on the property? They’d have to call in the K-9 units, maybe even volunteers.

  Immediately on the other side of the fence, she saw decrepit sheds and trailers with windows boarded up or missing altogether. Truck parts were scattered, bringing to mind dinosaur bones partially submerged in the earth after millions of years. Even without the post-storm gloom, it would have looked spooky, like a ghost town.

  Jo wondered if Jenny had felt the same prickle of apprehension as she’d driven through the gates, the same sense of dread. Then again, she’d probably been in no position to see anything at all. Mostly likely, she’d been tied up, knocked out, or already dead.

  As Hank coaxed the Ford over the ruts toward the other vehicles, Jo stared out the window at the mess the rain had made of the ground. Potholes had become puddles, and gravel had turned to slop.

  Would they be able to find any sort of physical trail? A set of tread marks? Footprints? Or had it all been obliterated in Mother Nature’s spit bath?

  She gently bumped her head against the glass.

  Damn, damn, damn.

  As soon as Hank stopped the car, she got out.

  The cold quickly seeped through her lined nylon jacket. She tugged the zipper up beneath her chin and locked her bag with the copy of the Warehouse Club security footage in the trunk. Then she started toward the blue-and-whites, toward the officers in dark jackets and caps and a young couple huddled together, wearing what looked like standard REI gear and backpacks.

  With every step, her boots sank into mush. It felt like slogging through oatmeal. The ground sucked on her shoe, then released it, returning to its gooey consistency without leaving an impression. She shoved her hands into her pockets, raking her eyes over the mess beneath her feet and cursing.

  Hank caught up with her, passing her a pair of latex gloves. She reluctantly pulled them on, wishing they were warm and fuzzy, not thin and slick. They stuck to her skin and sealed in the chill despite the powdery residue that coated her fingers, increasing her discomfort.

  Hank frowned as he rol
led a pair onto his big hands.

  Jo cut between the squad cars and approached a familiar face that peered out from beneath a ball cap. She nodded at Officer Charlotte Ramsey.

  “What’d you see when you arrived?” she asked.

  “We were careful, Detectives,” Ramsey assured them. “We didn’t want to screw up any potential tracks, so we parked outside the gate and came on foot and recorded the scene before we brought the cars in. But the pair in the Jeep had been here awhile. They saw the Nissan when they arrived and thought it didn’t feel right, but went about their hike first. The Nissan was still there when they got back, so they poked around and found a woman’s purse and a shopping bag on the backseat. The keys were in the ignition. They popped the trunk, and it was empty. Then they called 911.”

  Keys in the ignition.

  Purse and shopping bag.

  Empty trunk.

  Jo flashed on something Dr. Patil had said: “The human mind is a tricky piece of machinery. It’s hard to anticipate what anyone might do from one day to the next, even the most rational human being, but especially those under severe psychological stress. I didn’t sense that Jenny was ready to give up, not . . .”

  Not what? Today? Not tomorrow?

  “We’ve got no tire tracks we can use, no impressions of footwear because the ground’s too wet, and a pair of kids whose fingerprints are probably all over the vehicle?” Hank glared at Officer Ramsey, like it was her fault.

  She shrugged in apology.

  “Never happens like this on TV,” he grumbled. “They examine crime scenes without turning on the lights, and they still always find more than we do.”

  Jo tuned out his complaints and looked around, spotting Ramsey’s partner, Jorge Rameriz, carefully walking the perimeter around the Nissan. Every so often, he’d stop and take a photograph or squat to check something on the ground with a gloved hand. She recognized the two uniforms, Duncan and Arguiles, talking to the nervous-looking couple, taking notes.

  “Their names?” Jo asked.

  “The hikers?” Ramsey checked the small notebook in her jacket pocket. “Tim Burke and Cindy Chow. They’re students at UTD.”

  “They come here often?”

  “Ms. Chow said they’d heard about the quarry from some friends and wanted to check it out this morning since they didn’t have classes.”

  “They didn’t see anyone while they were walking?” Jo glanced around at the thicket of brush and pines that surrounded them, at the huge wall of rock and mud that sloped up from the enormous hole in the ground barely fifty yards away. From where they stood, she could just make out the rim.

  “Nothing but deer,” Ramsey replied.

  Where was Jenny? She could be anywhere.

  Jo sighed impatiently, wishing the evidence techs would show. She wanted to get going, to start searching for Jenny.

  “You okay, Detective?”

  “I’m dandy,” she told Ramsey, wishing her voice didn’t so openly betray her anxiety, her mounting frustration at finding the car but no victim. She headed toward where Rameriz slowly circled the Nissan with the camera. “You take a look inside?” she asked him.

  He stopped and faced her, his dark eyes sober. “We didn’t want to disturb the scene more than we had to, considering those two had already been in the car with their muddy boots.” He winced. “I did a quick visual to make sure they were correct about no one being inside the vehicle or the trunk.”

  “You see any blood? Any sign of a struggle?”

  He shook his head. “No, ma’am, nothing overt.”

  Jo pressed her lips together, hands on hips, looking over the Nissan, its deep-red hue dimmed by splotches of dust the rain had left behind. The soft, yellow earth of the quarry grounds stuck in the tire grooves. Handprints smudged the windows, though she could make out the white Warehouse Club bag in the back along with a brown purse.

  Her stomach clenched, and she exhaled slowly, hoping the techs would find something—blood, semen, hairs, clothing fibers—anything that would give them an idea of what had happened and who they were dealing with.

  “We’ll print the two hikers to rule them out, of course.”

  “Of course,” she repeated.

  She stared past the car to the spot where the wall of the quarry rose skyward like a giant anthill, and she wondered how to get to the bottom of the pit.

  The atmosphere smelled raw, chalky. She breathed it in, tasted it on her tongue. It made her want to spit. She couldn’t imagine coming here day in and day out, digging and bringing up rocks to haul away so that someone could build their house out of limestone. How did it feel to be down there? It had to be like standing in a grave.

  She heard the crunch of tires on gravel, and she turned to see the white van from the crime lab pulling in through the gates.

  Brown stained its sides, filth kicked up from the muddy, unpaved path they’d had to take. All the cars looked that way.

  Well, all the cars but the Nissan.

  There was less brown and more yellow within the tire wells and near the base of the car between the wheels, which told her it had been parked before the rain. Had the vehicle been driven directly to the quarry from the Warehouse Club, or had Jenny stopped somewhere else first? Maybe she’d picked someone up. Would she have given a ride to a hitchhiker?

  The slam of doors broke through her thoughts as two people exited the van, carrying large black cases. She recognized the woman but not the man, and she managed a smile as the former strode briskly toward her.

  “Hey, Emma,” she said, and Emma Slater nodded. “Why do I feel better at the sight of you?”

  “Nice to see you again, Detective Larsen.” Sharp eyes blinked from within the soft folds of skin that pleated deeply at the corners. The gray cap of Emma’s hair didn’t even budge with a gust of wind.

  Emma worked in the same place as Adam, since both the county ME’s office and the crime lab were located in one squat building on the south campus of Parkland Hospital in Dallas. If Emma Slater knew anything about Jo’s involvement with Adam, nothing in her face gave it away.

  “That the vehicle? The red two-door?”

  “Yes.”

  “No sign of the driver?” Emma had set down her case and was pulling on a smock and thick, blue latex gloves. Her cohort did the same before retrieving a camera of his own, a fancy-looking digital with a zoom lens.

  “The missing woman’s keys, purse, and shopping bag are inside the car,” Jo told her. “I’m thinking there could be blood evidence or fluids that would indicate she was assaulted inside the vehicle.”

  Emma gave a nod. “We’ll do what we can here. Then we’ll tow the car to the impound lot and finish up there. We’re pretty backed up, but I’ll try to call you with the preliminary report in a day or two.”

  “Any chance you’ve looked at that silk scarf yet?” Jo asked. Hank had done the incident report last night and made sure the evidence got to the lab. She hoped for something that would tell her whether Jenny had anything to do with Lisa Barton’s broken window.

  Emma gave a curt shake of her head. “Sorry, no.”

  Jo hadn’t expected it but felt disappointed nonetheless. “Hey, don’t let me hold you up,” she said, and left them to their business.

  Hank was talking to the hikers, who were pointing across the way, toward the trees where they’d doubtless been walking.

  Jo had something else on her mind.

  She took a stroll toward the quarry, looking for the path leading down. She approached the edge and stopped.

  Her breath lodged in her throat as she surveyed the basin at least fifty feet below. The water glowed an iridescent green. Detritus floated on its surface. If there was anything down there, she couldn’t tell from where she stood.

  She followed the rim for about half a dozen yards until she saw where the pit began to slope. She finally picked out a rather sloppy-looking trail descending into the enormous hole and started toward it.

  “Larsen!”


  She heard Hank call out, but she kept going, moving carefully as she went. Her boots found meager traction in the muck, and she skidded suddenly, grabbing hold of a hank of brush growing from the muddy wall. She stopped and steadied herself. No damage done.

  Roots protruded from the sides of the pit, sticking out between rocks, weeds, and dirt, and she clutched at them with latex-gloved fingers whenever she could, winding her way deeper into the earth.

  She descended slowly, sensing an eternity had passed before she’d even gone ten yards, and she already felt warm with perspiration. She brushed at her face with the sleeve of her jacket, the nylon sliding across her skin.

  She tried to peer down into the cavity, though her vantage point was less than perfect. A haze thickened the air, made the quarry look even more foreign, like the surface of an alien moon. She searched for colored clothing against the drab backdrop, hoping to spot something out of place. Then she reminded herself that Jenny had been wearing a dark coat and denim, dull tones that matched the landscape.

  Was Jenny even here? Or was she somewhere in the thick of pines? Could she still be alive? Could she hear them?

  Jo suddenly had such a strong sense Jenny Dielman was near that her heart slapped against her ribs. She was breathing hard, her breath loud in her ears.

  She resumed her descent, her boots ankle-deep in sludge, the bottoms of her jeans already caked with the stuff.

  “Christ, Jo, wait up!”

  She ignored him.

  “You never got the hang of the buddy system, did you?” Her partner’s voice strained through his huffs and puffs.

  She stopped, holding on to rock as she turned to glance back. “I’m waiting already.”

  Hank picked his way toward her, still quite a ways back. He was all awkward movements and curses.

  Not a bright idea, she thought as she watched him. He wasn’t in any shape to be hiking, not under these abysmal conditions, with the rain-soaked ground so treacherous.

  “Hank, don’t,” she nearly protested, but clamped her mouth shut. What was the point? He wouldn’t listen. Hey, it was his neck. It was his business if he wanted to break it.