Walk Into Silence

by Susan McBride

  Because you have so much more to lose, Jo thought.

  “Kevin, don’t do this,” Alana whispered.

  “It’s okay.” He took his wife’s hand, clung to it. “Good night, Detectives. I do believe we’re finished here.”

  Jo didn’t protest. She was disgusted by Kevin Harrison’s martyr act—and an act was all it was. She didn’t bother to button her peacoat as she walked toward the door. But she only heard one set of footsteps: hers.

  She realized Hank hadn’t moved.

  “Monday night, Dr. Harrison,” she heard her partner ask for the third time. “Please, don’t make this more difficult than it has to be. Just tell us where you were, and we’ll be done with it. Easy as pie, right?”

  Jo turned, watching Kevin Harrison.

  “I was at Presbyterian Hospital performing an emergency cholecystectomy,” he said. “That’s a gallbladder removal, for you laymen. I ended up repairing an abdominal hernia before I closed, so it took nearly two hours. We started right around five o’clock. I stayed at Presby for another hour, monitoring my patient and doing some paperwork. Alana had been showing houses all afternoon, so after I got home and changed, we had dinner with her father at Bistro 31 in Highland Park Village at nine o’clock. We weren’t back until midnight. Isn’t that right, hon?”

  “That’s right,” Alana said flatly. Her gaze never left her husband’s face.

  “I wasn’t anywhere near Jenny on Monday evening, or any other evening.”

  His wife stood beside him, clinging on to his hand.

  “Now, I’ve answered your questions,” he said, “so please, go.”

  “If we need anything else, we’ll be in touch, sir.” Hank got up and shrugged into his coat. Then he followed Jo to the front door, and they ventured back out into air so cold that it knocked the breath from her lungs.

  She saw Hank exhale, creating a cloud of fog as he muttered, “Son of a bitch.”

  Which she thought summed things up rather neatly.

  I left the library early. I’ve been sleeping so badly and I had a terrible headache, so I told Sally I needed to go home. I parked in front rather than in the garage, and I found the door unlocked. I thought maybe I’d forgotten. Patrick has me convinced that I’m not thinking straight these days, what with Finn’s anniversary so close. He’s right. I am preoccupied.

  But when I entered the house, I smelled that vague scent again, like stale cigarette smoke. I knew who it belonged to, and I was sure she was still here.

  I found her sitting in my yellow room. She was on the futon, a photo album in her lap.

  “What are you doing home, Jenny?” she asked, like I was the one out of place.

  “What do you want?” I said.

  Instead of answering, she made a sad face and glanced down at Finn’s photographs.

  “Don’t you miss him?” she asked. “Don’t you wish you could hold him again?”

  “Yes,” I said, because it was true. “More than anything.”

  “Patrick said you can’t have children, and he’s always wanted kids.”

  “That’s none of your business.” I stood in the doorway, so angry I shook.

  “If you could have anything, Jennifer, what would it be?” She closed the photo album and held it against her chest, hugging it. “I think I know. You’d want to be with your baby.”

  “Get out,” I told her, but she shook her head, like she was in charge, not me.

  “Let’s you and I have a girl-to-girl talk, sugar,” she drawled softly, but her eyes looked harder than flint. “If you’re gonna really live your life, you have to stop being maudlin. You’re killing Patrick, you know. This room full of the boy’s things—it has to go.”

  He must have told her. How else could she know? Had he asked her to do this?

  “Go to hell,” I said, and she looked like I’d slapped her.

  She put the photo album down and came toward me. “Someone should shake you,” she said. “Really shake you hard.”

  K had already tried that. He’d shaken me so hard, I thought my neck would snap. I wanted to tell her that it didn’t work.

  “Give me back the spare key,” I said, holding out my hand. I didn’t care what she told Patrick.

  She frowned and fished in the pocket of her sweater, dropping it into my palm.

  “Don’t blame anyone but yourself for losing him,” she said before she sidestepped me and walked out.

  Losing him? Hadn’t I already lost him?

  Unless Finn wasn’t the “him” she meant.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  An hour’s drive through city traffic, and they were back at the station.

  Jo barely had time to dump her coat at her desk before she and Hank were called into Captain Morris’s office.

  “I heard from the ME, and it looks like we’ve got ourselves a homicide,” Cap said without preamble.

  “Yes, sir,” Hank replied and proceeded to dig out his notes from the postmortem. All he left out was the part about him getting sick.

  Then it was Jo’s turn to share everything Emma Slater had told her. Like Hank, she omitted one thing: the file on Finn Harrison that Adam had snagged for her, because she wasn’t sure how—or if—it fit into the case.

  “Something on your mind, Larsen?” the captain asked.

  “It’s about our interview with Dr. Harrison, Jenny Dielman’s ex-husband.” She cleared her throat, careful where she was stepping. “He’s a hunter, sir, and a good one, according to his wife. He’s been handling guns since he was a kid.”

  “You think he’s familiar with the quarry?”

  “I’d bet he is.” She suddenly wished she’d paid more attention to the locations in the photographs plastering the walls of Harrison’s den. But could they place him at the scene? “He’s got an alibi for the night Jenny disappeared. He says he was doing emergency gallbladder surgery until seven on Monday evening, and he stuck around the hospital until eight or so. After that, he met his wife and her father at Bistro 31 for a late dinner. He practically dared us to check it out.”

  “Do it,” Cap said. “What about Patrick Dielman? You check his alibi yet?”

  Jo still had Dielman’s parking card in her pocket. “Yes, sir, and it looks like he was at his office in Dallas until almost seven on Monday evening. The parking security card has him leaving at six fifty.”

  “So that’s where we stand?” Cap said.

  Jo nodded, and Hank grunted his assent.

  They started to rise from their chairs when their boss said, “One last thing, and we’ll call it a night.” He shuffled papers on his desk. “We’ve received over a hundred calls on the tip line already, and I think we might have a live one. A woman said she saw Jennifer Dielman in the Warehouse Club parking lot on Monday at dusk. I’ll send a unit to her house tomorrow morning to bring her in. All right then.” He patted his desk. “Go home. Get some rest.”

  But Jo wasn’t ready to leave the station.

  She went straight to her desk and checked her messages. She had a voice mail from Patrick Dielman, telling her the morgue had released Jenny’s body for burial and the memorial service would take place the next day at one o’clock at the nondenominational Grace Church, a half mile east of the Dielmans’ subdivision.

  Jenny’s sister was next, noting she’d be flying in from Iowa in the morning and would be staying at the Hampton Inn at the highway exit into Plainfield.

  Jo played the messages twice, jotting down times and locations. She wanted to be at Jenny’s service and not just for professional reasons. She felt like she owed it to Jenny.

  She got on her computer and Googled the number for the Hampton Inn in Plainfield. Then she phoned and left a message at the front desk for Kim to find when she checked in.

  Maybe the contents of the shoe box Jenny had sent her sister would help them figure this out, though she wasn’t sure how.

  Before she got back to work, she called Adam to say she’d be very late getting home and suggested th
ey get together another night.

  “Call if you need me,” he said. “I don’t care how late it is.”

  “I will,” she told him, even though she had a feeling she’d be out like a light as soon as she crawled into bed.

  With that out of the way, she slid Jenny’s appointment book from the evidence bag and found the page with the phone number and the question mark. She checked it out with the reverse directory. It was exactly as Emma had noted: a pay phone in the Presbyterian Hospital lobby.

  Presbyterian Hospital.

  That was where Kevin Harrison practiced surgery.

  Was there a connection? Or did she just want there to be?

  Jo stared at the calendar in the appointment book, at the date that Jenny had circled and marked Finn. The anniversary of his death.

  Was Jenny the paranoid, irrational woman that Kevin Harrison and Lisa Barton wanted them to believe? Or just the poor soul whose broken heart Patrick Dielman had apparently failed to patch? Had Jenny gotten herself into something she couldn’t get out of? Had she pushed the wrong buttons without knowing exactly what she was doing?

  It was almost midnight when Jo finally left the station. She was dragging, and there was no point in pushing herself further.

  Hank had brought her the box from Mama’s house before he’d taken off an hour earlier. Jo hauled it out to the Mustang and shoved it in the trunk before she belted herself in and turned the ignition.

  She drove home on autopilot, ignoring the throb of her aching shoulder and the knot in her neck. She focused on the road beyond her headlamps but saw something else: the fragile smile of a woman who had lost everything.

  What am I missing?

  The locket and Jenny’s coat hadn’t turned up yet. Had her killer taken them, or had Jenny left them behind at a secondary crime scene? If that was the case, Jo would bet they’d been disposed of already.

  Still, she felt in her bones that she wasn’t seeing something, not the way she should. Her brain was too fuzzy to think straight at this hour. The only thing she wanted to do was crawl into bed and close her eyes.

  It felt like forever before she pulled into a parking spot at her condo building. She cut the lights, dragged herself from the car, and slammed the door. Not another soul was in sight as she crossed the grassy front lawn to her porch.

  The quiet of midnight seemed to magnify each sound: the click of the dead bolt as she unlocked it, the clank of her keys dropping onto the hall table, the swish of her coat coming off her shoulders, and the shuffle of her footsteps to the kitchen. She needed a Coke before she hit the sack, knowing the caffeine would do little to keep her up.

  She was so freaking tired.

  Jo drank the soda while standing at the sink, her reflection thrown back at her in the dark of the window. She looked like a train wreck. Felt like one, too.

  After she tossed the empty can, she started toward the bedroom and remembered the box from Mama’s house sitting in her Mustang. She could leave it there all night, and it wouldn’t bother her a bit. Except that it was personal paperwork, Ronnie had said, probably with birth dates and Social Security numbers for Mama and maybe her, too.

  She didn’t bother putting her coat back on. Just headed out into the dark with her keys and popped the trunk. The box wasn’t bulky—white cardboard from the office supply store with a lid that Ronnie had loosely taped down—so Jo tucked it against a hip to carry it. The thing banged against her mailbox as she stood on the welcome mat, and Jo groaned.

  Another thing she’d almost forgotten.

  Get the mail, she told herself, then straight to bed.

  She opened the door and crossed the threshold enough to set down the box. Then she leaned back out to push open the lid of her mailbox and reach inside. Her fingertips jammed into something sticky and warm, like smashed grapes, and then her nose caught the smell.

  She held her breath and drew her hand out, lifting it toward the halo of yellow from the porch light. A dark stain smeared her fingers and palm. She knew what it was, could almost taste it: blood.

  Swallowing hard, she peered into the metal box, hung on the railing, seeing only the sheen of black, the glint of a glassy eye beneath the porch lamp.

  Ernie, she thought instinctively, though he was too big to fit in the mailbox, if he were all in one piece.

  She backed away, bumped into the door behind her, bile rising in her throat.

  No, she thought. Please, God, no.

  The night fanned around her, silent and lurking, full of shadows.

  He could still be out there, whoever stuffed the tiny carcass in her mailbox, whoever wanted to scare her. And she was alone.

  She stumbled past the threshold and shut the door, threw the locks, and hustled into the kitchen. She grabbed the landline, punching in numbers drunkenly, until she got it right and heard Adam’s foggy-sounding voice on the other end.

  “I’m sorry for waking you up,” she said, running over the words. Her voice seemed to belong to a stranger, so vulnerable and distant.

  “Jo? What is it?”

  “Somebody’s been here. They left something—” She tried to stay calm as she explained, but it was impossible to keep from shaking. “I need you, please.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  She made one more call; then she hung up, stared at her bloodied hand, and waited.

  Yesterday in the middle of the afternoon, I got another call, the one that sounded like Finn’s voice, and I was begging whoever it was to leave me alone when Patrick came home unexpectedly from work.

  He grabbed the phone from me, barking into the receiver, “Who is this? What did you say to my wife?”

  But by then, they’d hung up.

  He turned to me. “What’s going on, Jen?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, because it was the truth. I had started to shiver. “Someone’s messing with me. I’m not crazy. It’s real.”

  “Okay.” He pulled me near and held me tight. I think he knew I was afraid.

  Patrick left the house this morning “on an errand,” he said. He was gone for several hours and when he returned, he handed me a small bag. “This is for you,” he said. “It’ll keep you safer than new locks.”

  My gift was swaddled in newsprint, which I hesitantly unwrapped.

  “For all the times I’m not with you,” he explained as I stared at the thing in my hands. “Put it in your car when you’re out, all right? Don’t be afraid to use it.”

  My God.

  It was a gun.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  FRIDAY

  Jo awakened to the whir of a Weedwacker, an angry buzz in her ears, and she struggled to open her eyes. The high-pitched hum receded as she raised herself up from the couch, swung her legs over the edge, and touched bare feet to the floor. Sunlight slipped through slanted blinds as she gave a gentle stretch and winced. Every muscle and joint ached at once, though her psyche felt banged up the most.

  “Hey, how’re you feeling?”

  She looked toward the voice and saw Adam seated across the coffee table in an armchair. He didn’t appear to have slept at all, or much more than she had, anyway. He set his glasses on his nose, and she wished he hadn’t, figuring she’d look much better blurry.

  “I’m all right.” She didn’t feel fully conscious. Hadn’t she fallen asleep just moments before? What time was it anyway? She squinted gamely at the mantel clock but couldn’t get a fix on the slender black hands.

  Was it seven or eight?

  She had to think hard to recall the day.

  Friday, she remembered. Jenny’s funeral was at one. Her sister was flying in this morning.

  “Jo?” Adam got up and came over, settling beside her. He stroked her hair, following the curve of her neck and sliding down her arm.

  She sighed and leaned into him, resting her cheek on his shoulder. She wished she could stay like this forever, knowing how fast such moments disappeared.

  “You should take it easy today after last ni
ght—” he started, but she shook her head, and he didn’t finish.

  It was fresh enough in her mind. Nothing needed repeating.

  She’d found an eviscerated crow in her mailbox—not a cat, and thankfully not Ernie. The worst part of it was that whoever had delivered the dead bird—whoever wanted her scared—knew where she lived.

  She closed her eyes, willing herself to relax as Adam rubbed her shoulders. She forced herself not to think of how shaken she’d been when Hank had shown up on her doorstep and then a squad car with sirens had appeared, until the whole damn condo complex had known something was up and that she was in the thick of it.

  She wondered, too, if the bearer of her “gift” had been out there in the shadows, gloating and watching it all play out.

  “Someone’s trying to warn you off,” her partner had said, as if she couldn’t figure that out herself. “He’s messing with you.”

  Yeah, but who? And why?

  She wasn’t the only one working the Dielman case.

  “Maybe this freak has been keeping tabs on you,” Hank went on. “Could be he thinks you’ve got something that’ll blow this thing wide. You find anything you haven’t told me about?”

  Anything I haven’t told you about?

  She had a copy of Finn Harrison’s file from the Presbyterian ER, but Hank knew about that. If she had anything that made their killer nervous, she wasn’t sure what it was.

  When Hank and the boys in blue had departed, they’d taken the whole mailbox off the railing, butchered bird and all, and bagged it as evidence. But Jo doubted they’d find anything besides her prints and those belonging to her mail carrier. Whoever had done this—whoever had killed Jenny—was too smart to leave a trail.

  Of course, none of the neighbors had seen squat. The condos were deserted during the day, all the singletons off to work.

  “I don’t think you should be alone,” Adam said, his breath ruffling her hair. “At least, not until this case is closed. I’ve got a bag in my trunk, so I’ll hang here until I’m sure you’re safe.”