Walk Into Silence

by Susan McBride

  That boy? Jo winced.

  Hank leaned forward. “You didn’t have much in common with Mrs. Dielman, did you, ma’am?”

  Lisa stared at the ceiling for a moment. “Strangely enough, we did have something in common, but it wasn’t anything either of us talked about, except once . . .”

  “What was that?” Jo asked.

  “Late in October, I saw her planting bulbs out front, so I went over. I asked about Thanksgiving and whether she and Pat would be spending time with family. I was curious ’cause I never saw anyone visit.” Her brow wrinkled. “Jenny said she had a sister in Iowa, so I asked if that’s where she grew up and if her folks were still alive, that kind of thing. I didn’t expect her to say much, but she told me her parents were dead. She didn’t seem any too sad about it.” Lisa’s laugh sounded harsh. “I told her I didn’t even know my daddy. My mama was a junkie.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jo said, understanding. Rotten childhoods were her specialty.

  Lisa’s chin jerked up. “Oh, no, don’t feel sorry for me, Detective. I ended up with an aunt who worked her butt off scrubbing rich people’s toilets. She kept me clean and fed and taught me early on that life wasn’t fair.”

  Her bluntness took Jo aback; Hank, too, if his silence was any indication.

  “It’s funny,” Lisa went on, “how my crappy start made me tougher, while Jenny’s seemed to chew her up. You grow a backbone when you’re the kid eating free lunches, stuck in after-school programs. I learned that fear can be a great motivator.” She sat up straighter. “I might have screwed up a time or two, but I made it to college on scholarships. I even survived sorority rush. I never gave in. I don’t think anyone ever taught Jenny that. It’s too bad, too, ’cause it might’ve made a difference.”

  Jo shifted in her seat. She wasn’t sure what to make of Lisa Barton’s revelation. Was she playing the sympathy card for a reason? Or was she just being brutally honest? It was hard to gauge.

  Lisa grasped her knees and the cuffs of her sweater rode up.

  Jo found herself staring at the white scars below the knuckles. She was about to ask if the woman had been in an accident. But Lisa caught her staring and quickly crossed her arms, tucking her hands away.

  “Is there anything else you’d like to know?” she said, pointedly adding, “About Jenny.”

  Yeah, Jo had a million questions.

  “Were you aware that she kept a journal?”

  Lisa’s eyes widened. She was genuinely surprised. “No, I had no idea. Has Pat seen it?”

  Hank glanced at Jo. “We’re still lookin’ for it, ma’am,” he said.

  “Ah, so maybe it doesn’t exist,” Lisa remarked with a toss of her head. “I told ya, Detectives, she lived in a world all her own. I wasn’t ever sure what to believe.”

  “Can you be more specific?” Jo said, wanting an example, not just an opinion.

  The woman screwed her mouth into a moue of disapproval. “She kept herself tucked away from reality as much as she could, doing her library work and staying home. She didn’t venture out much except to grocery shop. Patrick said the past month she started hanging out a lot in that room she keeps with her son’s stuff. I got the feeling she liked to wallow in self-pity. When she lost her house key and I handed over the spare Pat had given me, she made a strange comment.”

  “Strange?” Jo repeated.

  “She said she wasn’t crazy, that it was all a plan so no one would believe her, something like that.” Lisa sighed. “When I tried to get her to explain, she just turned tail and ran.”

  “You think Jenny was paranoid?”

  “Hell, yes, she was paranoid.”

  “Was Jenny afraid of her husband?” Jo asked, point-blank.

  “No.” The pale fingers curled into fists. “Patrick would never have hurt her. He’s the one who bought her that little gun. If anyone scared that poor woman, it was her ex-husband, the one she wanted to see rot in hell.”

  That little gun.

  “Did she show you the handgun?” Jo asked.

  “Patrick told me he’d bought it,” Lisa sighed. “Who on earth would’ve thought she’d go and use it on herself?”

  Jo stiffened. The remark was so close to what Kevin Harrison had said: that whatever had happened to Jenny, she’d brought on herself.

  At Jo’s silence, Lisa turned to Hank. “Well, y’all must be thinking it was suicide, right?”

  Hank stayed mum, which gave Jo the chance to ask, “Why would you say that? I don’t recall suggesting Mrs. Dielman’s gunshot wound was self-inflicted.”

  Lisa blushed. “Patrick said you were looking for a suicide note, so I just assumed . . .”

  Patrick apparently couldn’t keep his trap shut.

  “Do you believe Jenny Dielman killed herself?” Jo asked.

  “Are you serious? Didn’t Pat show you the room?”

  She said the room like someone would say the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot, as though it were some living, breathing, horrifying thing.

  “Yes,” Jo said, “we saw it.”

  “Well, then, you got a pretty clear picture of Jenny’s mental state. When Patrick showed it to me, he begged me to convince Jenny to give away the boy’s things. I tried, of course, but she wouldn’t do it.” Lisa shook her head. “She told me to go to hell.”

  Jo wasn’t surprised.

  “Could we wrap this up?” Lisa asked, pushing up a sweater cuff to check her watch. “Patrick’s probably wondering where I am.”

  “Just a few more questions, ma’am.” Even if Hank thought Jo was beating a dead horse, she didn’t believe it. “You saw Jenny pulling her Nissan out of her driveway as you were entering yours, a little after five on Monday night, is that correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you stop your cars? Roll down the windows to chitchat?”

  “Chitchat with Jenny?” Lisa Barton laughed. “For Pete’s sake, Detective, it wasn’t even forty degrees. I had the heat blasting.”

  “Did she wave?” Jo asked. “Could you tell if she wore gloves?”

  Plucked eyebrows arched. “Gloves?” Her mouth tightened. “Is that important?”

  “Everything’s important,” Jo said. Jenny hadn’t been wearing gloves in the security footage from the Warehouse Club, but maybe she’d worn them to drive and had taken them off before she’d gone into the store. If not, the fresh imprints of grain leather from the steering wheel belonged to someone else.

  “I can’t remember those kind of details,” Lisa said. “I saw her so briefly. I’m sorry.”

  “Did you go anywhere afterward?”

  “After what?”

  “After you came home,” Jo clarified.

  “No, I pulled my car into the garage and didn’t leave again until I went to work in the morning.”

  “Was anyone with you? Did you take any phone calls? We can check your phone records if you’re not sure . . .”

  “Oh, wait.” Lisa perked up. “I did hear from Patrick around seven thirty. He was wondering if I’d seen Jenny. He was worried because she should’ve been home by then. He called a bit later to ask if I’d stay at his house while he went over to the Warehouse Club to look for her. So yes, I did leave for a while. I was over there for about an hour, sitting by the phone.”

  “And when he returned?”

  “He was pretty upset that he couldn’t find her. I told him to call the police if he thought something had happened. He was checking with Plainfield Memorial Hospital when I left.” She looked at her watch again. “I really need to go over . . .”

  “Okay, we’ll stop for now.” Jo stood to button her coat. Hank gathered up his trench from the arm of the sofa, shrugging it on. “But I might have more questions for you.”

  Lisa Barton hustled them toward the foyer. “Please, holler when y’all have news about my broken window, although I guess it wasn’t Jenny, was it?”

  Jo thought that was a pretty good guess.

  Hank nudged her, and they walke
d out to the car.

  They’d barely pulled out of the driveway and into the street when Jo saw Lisa Barton scurrying across the yard to Patrick Dielman’s front door. She wasn’t wearing a coat but kept her long sweater wrapped snugly around her until she rang the bell and disappeared indoors.

  “Stop the car.”

  Hank hit the brakes. The idling engine sounded like a bad cough. “What’s wrong?” he asked with an exasperated edge to his voice.

  Jo tried to put a finger on it. “She’s not telling the truth, Hank, at least not all of it. Something’s off with her.”

  “What?”

  “The thing about passing Jenny’s car, for one thing.”

  “How so?”

  Jo peered out at the landscape between the two houses. “If Lisa’s Acura passed Jenny’s Nissan, it would mean Lisa headed into the left side of her circular drive as Jenny emerged from the right side of the Dielmans’ drive.”

  “Okay.” He shifted in his seat to look out the windshield and take in what she was describing. “That sounds about right.”

  “Pull the car around back, would you?” she told him, earning her a confused look. But he did as she asked, moving the Ford slowly down the street and then cutting the corner. She pointed toward the mouth of the alley.

  “You want to go there?”

  “Yeah.”

  The homes in Woodstream Estates all had garages at the rear, facing the alleys that ran behind. They were out of sight from the main street, which was why Lisa Barton’s statement didn’t make sense.

  When they reached the rear of the Dielman and Barton houses, Jo asked him to park, and he did. He cut the engine and slung an arm over the wheel, squinting at the brick pens situated at the bottom of each drive that held trash cans with lids.

  Jo stared, too. “Lisa said she pulled into her garage and didn’t take the car out again until the next morning. But if she’d driven into the garage, she would’ve had to enter the alley, like we just did. She wouldn’t have been on Ella Drive. She would never have seen Jenny at all.”

  “Maybe she parked in front initially and then moved the car around back later.”

  “Maybe,” Jo agreed. Or maybe Lisa Barton was a liar.

  She hesitated, shifting position enough to shove her fingers into her pocket and retrieve the balled-up latex gloves.

  Hank stared at her as she fussed with them, using her teeth to pull them back on. “You plan on going dumpster diving?”

  “Yep.”

  He clicked tongue against teeth.

  She got out of the car and went over to Lisa Barton’s bins first, removing the lids and peering down into ten gallons of plastic that held nothing but gooey residue at the bottom, a few leaves, and sticky scraps of paper.

  She checked Dielman’s cans next, the first one as empty as Lisa Barton’s. But the second was a different story.

  Jo reached into its less-than-sweet-smelling depths to pluck out a white kitchen bag, its yellow handles loosely tied. She set it on the ground and worked on the clumsy knot, opening up the bag to see what was inside.

  It took her a moment to realize what the tan fabric-covered pillow was, until she saw the name stitched in the corner. She noted a brown stain across one side, and her first thought was blood.

  She got up and replaced the lid on the trash can, taking the white plastic bag with her. Hank popped the trunk so Jo could toss the bag in.

  “What the hell is that?” he asked, as she climbed into the passenger seat, shoving the gloves back in her pocket. “Is it evidence? Or you just into stealing other people’s junk?”

  “It’s not stealing,” she reminded him as she went around to the passenger door. “When your trash hits the curb, it’s as good as public property, right?”

  He started the car, giving her a sideways look. “You gonna make me play twenty questions?”

  “No.” She started to pull on her seat belt but then paused, glancing up the alley, at the fences and tool sheds, even a silver RV. There were plenty of spots for a feline to hide. She felt a pang behind her ribs, hoping her gut was way off this time and Jenny’s cat was all right.

  “You were saying?”

  “It’s a cat bed,” she told him, “personalized for Ernie.”

  Hank scrunched up his brow. “Dielman threw it out?”

  “It looks like there’s blood on it.”

  “Whose?”

  Jo shrugged. But she meant to find out.

  “You think he threw the cat out, too?”

  “Or Ernie got away,” she said. “Maybe he went looking for Jenny.”

  Her partner snorted. “Well, if he ends up roadkill, he’ll meet her fast enough, won’t he?”

  But Jo hardly heard him. She stared at the back of the house where a woman who’d survived an unbearable loss had lived and breathed and hoped for something better, a way out of the darkness that had gripped her heart and filled her head.

  So much for answered prayers.

  I started writing down everything I could remember, all the things K said had happened that night. I wrote down what they told me at the hospital, about how Finn must have fallen, breaking his neck, scraping his arms and legs.

  No one explained why the scrapes on his arms and knees looked like the same ones that I’d kissed and sprayed with Bactine just days before. Finn was always flying about like a daredevil, always falling and crashing into something. When I cradled him, rocking his lifeless body beneath the hospital lights, I didn’t see any new cuts or bruises. I would have remembered that. Shouldn’t there have been some new marks, something more?

  What happened to his socks? Why wasn’t he wearing underwear? It was like he’d been redressed quickly, missing things only a mother would notice.

  Like his glasses.

  I thought I’d find them in the hospital bag or beneath the tree, crushed, the lenses broken. When I finally made it home that night, I found them on the sink, neatly folded.

  I held on to them, believing they were a sign. I wasn’t sure, at first, what they were trying to tell me. But I’ve begun to put the pieces together.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Jo called Emma Slater at the crime lab and told her she had some evidence pertaining to the Jenny Dielman case to drop off. Emma begged for half an hour’s leeway. “I’m just leaving a scene on the north side of town,” she said. “I’ve got results to share with you, so I’d like to be there when you come.”

  Hank suggested they stop for lunch at Wendy’s on Harry Hines, not far from Parkland Hospital. He ordered like a starving man. Jo wasn’t the least bit hungry.

  “You were pretty quiet this morning,” Jo said, once Hank had devoured a large order of fries and a double cheeseburger.

  “I thought I’d let you handle the questions,” he replied, wiping the grease from his fingers. “You seem to have more of them than I do.”

  “So humor me for a minute and play devil’s advocate.” She leaned forearms on the table.

  He tossed a ball of napkins on his tray. “Lay it on me.”

  Jo cleared her throat. “For starters, let’s say Jenny was abducted from the Warehouse Club lot, a random attack.”

  “Okay.” He sat back in his chair, and the plastic creaked.

  “She’s alone and carrying bags, an easy mark. He gets her from behind and overpowers her, pushes her into her car, and takes off. There aren’t working surveillance cameras in the lot, and nobody sees anything.”

  “So she’s driving?”

  “Yeah,” Jo said.

  “Is he armed?”

  “Maybe he’s got his own gun, but he finds hers in the glove compartment. He makes her drive to the quarry and has some fun with her before he takes her out.”

  Hank grunted. “We’ve got no obvious evidence of assault. She had her clothes on. You think he attacked her and then re-dressed her before he walked her down to the pit?”

  Damn. He had her there.

  Jo pondered that scenario for another few minutes. “T
he guy’s a neatnik. He watches The Discovery Channel. He knows he has to clean up after himself. He wears leather gloves to keep us from getting his prints, and he doesn’t penetrate her, so there’s no chance of leaving DNA.”

  “You said he made her drive out to the quarry,” Hank said, scratching his jaw. “So how did he get home? You figure he walked all the way back to town?”

  Jo pinched the bridge of her nose. This was giving her a headache. “He had an accomplice.”

  “Okay, an accomplice.”

  She shifted in her seat. “No, nix that. Let’s say it wasn’t random at all. She wasn’t robbed. Her cash and credit cards, her wedding ring, her shopping bag, her cell phone, everything was there, except the silver locket and her coat—”

  “She could have left both somewhere else,” he interrupted, “if she made a pit stop after shopping.”

  But where would she have stopped? There wasn’t much between the strip mall and the quarry except for construction sites and mobile realty offices.

  Jo went with her gut. “What if this was personal? What if her abductor was someone she knew? Maybe it was even planned. What if somebody wanted Jenny Dielman out of the way for good and had been waiting for an opportunity to grab her?”

  “Who?” Hank settled his hands on his belly. “Her husband? Didn’t his secretary vouch for him about working late that night?”

  She nodded. Dielman had given up his parking card, too, so Jo would know soon enough if he—and his secretary—had fudged the truth.

  “You think he’s playing us?” Hank asked. “That he and Blondie next door are really having an affair and wanted Jenny out of the picture?”

  Jo rested her chin on her fist. “They could have cooked it up together.”

  “But why make such a big production? Think about it. Both Dielman and Barton work in the medical field. They knew Jenny was taking an antidepressant. She had a prescription for sleeping pills, too. Wouldn’t it be easier if they’d doped her up and then claimed she OD’d? Especially if she’d tried it before, which I’m guessing she did.”