Silence

by Thomas Perry

  But Paul took care of Darren by himself. He waited for Darren to go out on one of his tours with a couple of women who had used the names Ray-Lee and Kay-Lee in their last few films. All actresses in adult cinema liked to do girl-on-girl scenes because they were so much easier, less dangerous and strenuous than regular sex. These two had temporarily captured the imaginations of the segment of the audience who liked to watch that sort of thing.

  Paul flew to New York, drove to Philadelphia, and waited for Darren and the women to reach town. He took a room in the hotel where they would be staying, then waited until a morning when the women left the room beside Darren’s to go to the hotel’s spa. He stood outside Darren’s door holding a grocery bag and knocked. When Darren opened the door, he pushed his way in and closed the door. Paul’s bag held a .32 revolver with a plastic one-quart water bottle taped over the barrel to suppress the sound. Paul fired once into Darren’s chest, then stood over him and fired into his head. He walked out with the gun still inside the bag, and closed the door. If anyone heard the noises, they did not interpret them as shots. The women found Darren two hours later, when Paul was already in the airport waiting for his plane home.

  Sylvie was awakened abruptly that morning by a ringing doorbell, and opened the door to a pair of police officers. Since this was only four hours after Darren had been killed, the visit ended forever any suspicion that she’d had any direct role in his death: No flight from the East Coast could have brought her home that quickly.

  Even so, when Paul paid his respects before the funeral, he told her that they must not call, write letters, or meet each other again for three months because police often kept family members of murder victims under surveillance. Ninety-one days later, they met, apparently by chance, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago. They returned to Los Angeles on different days, Sylvie started going to the dance class again, and Sylvie and Paul had a period of simulated courtship.

  Sylvie watched Paul driving the streets of Las Vegas, and felt a light-headed tingle of excitement about him. There was nothing in the world as erotic as being with a man who had killed her husband to take her. The breathless feeling was still there after fifteen years. But as she watched, she could see his face was changing, taking on a new expression. “What is it?”

  “Look.”

  She looked ahead. As she did, the big red-striped shape of a Southwest Airlines jet glided over them and onto a distant runway. “Is he at the airport?”

  “His car is at the airport. I think he turned it in.”

  “Then how are we going to find out where he went?”

  PAUL WALKED CAREFULLY along the side of Ann Delatorre’s house in the darkness, keeping his shoes from making any noise. There were no security-company signs on the lawn, no stickers, and no keypads visible through the windows, and he wasn’t surprised. People on the run didn’t want any conversations with the police officers who responded to false alarms, or even minor burglaries. They wanted everything quiet and undisturbed. He liked that. What he didn’t like was that many of them made up for it by arming themselves.

  Paul peered around the corner of the house and saw Sylvie waiting outside the back door. In the darkness behind the house he could just see that her right hand was down at the side of her body, and he knew she was holding the pistol beside her thigh, where it would not be seen if a light came on. She had screwed the silencers on the threaded muzzles of the two .38 revolvers. Paul liked to use the lower-caliber, low-velocity cartridges for jobs like this. If Ann Delatorre could be intimidated by a gun, a .38 with a silencer on it would scare her as much as a .44 magnum, and if she couldn’t, then it would be big enough to kill her.

  Sylvie gave Paul a silent wave, and Paul moved back toward the front of the house. He was searching for the room where Ann Delatorre slept. He had looked in at two dark bedrooms, and seen only the smooth, tight bedspreads and undented pillows on the beds. At last he found what he had been looking for. The third bedroom had its blinds closed, but he was able to put his eye to the corner and make out the shape of a sleeping person on the bed.

  He stood still for a few seconds and listened. The night was quiet out here in the suburbs. He knew that Route 215 swung through Henderson, but it was too distant for him to hear the cars. He went around the house to a spare bedroom where the door was closed. Any incidental sounds he made getting in would be less likely to reach Ann Delatorre’s ears from there.

  Paul used a glass cutter to etch a small half-circle in the windowpane just at the latch. He ran a strip of duct tape across the semicircle, then put on his leather gloves and pounded it once with his hand. There was only a dull thump and a click as the semicircle of glass was punched inward and held by the tape. He peeled back the tape carefully and brought the small piece of glass with it, then reached inside, unlocked the latch, and slid the window open six inches.

  He put his head to the opening and listened. When he heard nothing but the hum of the air conditioner, he lifted the window all the way, and climbed inside. Then he crouched on the floor for a few seconds, letting his eyes adjust to the deeper darkness. Paul had killed several people at night while they were asleep in their beds, and he had come to enjoy it. He moved quietly to the door, stood still for a few seconds, then turned the knob and pulled the door inward.

  The sudden bang made him jump in alarm, and the muzzle-flash blinded him. He had leaped to the side instinctively, so he was behind the wall again, and he squatted there. He heard footsteps dash out of the bedroom across the hall, already past him and around the corner before he was able to get his gun out of his jacket.

  Paul leaned around the doorway and fired, but he knew that the shot was at least a whole second late. It was just a way to fight his paralysis and do something. He ran down the hallway, knowing that if she were waiting to shoot him, the place she would aim was at the corner. He ran past it into another doorway and aimed up the next hall. All he saw was an open door, and the night beyond.

  She had made it outside. He dashed to the back door and heard Sylvie’s voice rasp, “Drop it at your feet. Now turn around and go back inside.”

  The woman’s shape appeared in the doorway, and then Paul could see Sylvie’s taller silhouette. She stepped in and closed the door, and Paul turned on the light.

  The woman was black. She was barefoot, wearing a pair of gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt that said UNLV. Paul stared at her. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Ann Delatorre.”

  “Where is Wendy Harper?”

  “Who’s Wendy Harper?”

  Paul lunged forward and punched her in the ribs with his free hand. He suspected that he had broken a couple of them, because when she tried to straighten, the pain overpowered her for a moment.

  Paul grasped a handful of her hair and shook her, then wrenched it to the side so her head hit the wall. “You know her. Say it.”

  “I know her.”

  He held her hair and jerked her head up so she had to look at him. “If you tell us where she is, I’ll give you ten thousand dollars. You can get on a plane and take a vacation, then come back and nobody will know how we found out. You’ll never see us again.”

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  Paul swung her head against the wall again, harder this time. It hit, then she slid and collapsed onto the floor. He waited a few seconds until she seemed to regain consciousness, then kicked her.

  Sylvie began to worry. The woman on the floor was getting hurt, maybe incapacitated, but she didn’t seem to be afraid. Sylvie whispered, “Don’t kill her, or she can’t tell us.”

  He said, “Miss Delatorre. Can you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then think for a minute. I want something small and simple. I’ll pay you money for it. If you don’t tell me, I’ll inflict suffering. Don’t answer now, automatically. Just listen and think.” He turned to Sylvie. “Go to the kitchen and bring me back a butcher knife.”

  Sylvie walked into t
he kitchen. She didn’t want to turn on another light, but she didn’t see any knives on the counter, so she’d have to look in some drawers. She heard a growling cry—not of pain, but anger and hatred. She pivoted and ran back to the hallway.

  When she emerged from the kitchen she was horrified. It was the woman who was making the noise. Somehow she had tripped Paul and now she was on him, scratching and biting. He was using his left hand to hold her off, and his right forearm to protect his face, but he couldn’t get a grip on her, and she kept reaching for the gun, and when he pulled it away, she would go for his eyes.

  Sylvie rushed forward and poked her gun against the woman’s head. “Stop it! Stop!” she shouted, but the woman whirled suddenly, her eyes alive, almost joyful as she snatched at Sylvie’s gun.

  Sylvie fired into her head. The woman’s body fell where it was, straddling Paul in the narrow corridor, while he lay on his back. He pushed at her body, then rolled and kicked himself free of it. “Shit,” he said. He stood up with difficulty. “This is a fucking disaster.”

  Sylvie stared at him, the horror undiminished since the instant when she had heard that growl. Paul was wet with the dead woman’s blood. Her blood had spattered the hallway, even a few drops on the ceiling, but the wound had emptied onto Paul’s chest and neck, so his clothes were soaked. He had three long red scratches on his left cheek, where the woman’s nails had raked him, and a nail mark under his right eye. He pulled his shirt away from his chest and opened it a couple of buttons, then looked at the skin beneath.

  “Oh, God, she bit you!”

  “Yeah. Bit, scratched, tried to get my eyes.”

  “She was crazy.”

  “Yeah. I just looked away from her for a second when you went toward the kitchen. She was waiting for it, I guess.” He looked down at the body. “I sure wish you hadn’t killed her.”

  “What?”

  “That was what she wanted, not what I wanted. Sylvie, you knew we needed her alive to answer questions.”

  “What could I do? She was hurting you.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s over. No use in arguing.”

  “But what did you want me to do?”

  “You could have shot her anywhere, but not in the head. She would have been in pain and too weak to cause trouble. We could have kept her alive and made her talk.”

  Sylvie walked into the kitchen.

  “Wait. Where are you going?”

  “I don’t want to think of you as an asshole. I’m going to give you a chance to stop being one.”

  “Sylvie, this isn’t the time. We need to do some searching. Find some rubber gloves and get started while I get her out of the way.”

  “What do you want me to look for?”

  “Anything that would tell us where Wendy Harper is—a stub from a plane ticket, an address book, a letter. Use your imagination.”

  Sylvie fought her sense of injustice. She had saved his life, and now he was blaming her for losing what the woman knew. She opened the cabinet below the sink, found a box of disposable rubber gloves, and put a pair on. She searched drawers and cabinets, leaving them open so she wouldn’t look in the same place twice.

  She passed by the entrance to the hallway and looked at Paul without letting him see her. He was cleaning up—wrapping the body in a blanket. She kept moving. Let him do it by himself. She had tried to do something nice for him by killing her, and he had not appreciated it. Let him think about that for a while.

  Sylvie moved through the house, opening drawers and cabinets, feeling her way through stacks of folded linens, moving cans and bottles aside to see if something was hidden behind them. She found a drawer where old bills were kept, but none of them seemed to contain any information that she could use. She found a sheet of names and addresses printed out beside the computer in one of the spare rooms, but then another sheet below it, and another, a whole stack of dozens of pages. They seemed to be mailing lists of customers for some kind of business.

  Sylvie woke up the computer and tried to sign on, but the password had not been stored. She had started typing passwords like “Ann” and “Ann’s computer” and “Open sesame” when she saw the purse. It was a reddish brown Coach shoulder bag with a small silver clasp, and Sylvie’s first thought was that she liked it, but she pushed that thought out of her mind and picked it up.

  She looked inside, and found an address book. She didn’t have much hope it would say “Wendy Harper,” but it might contain the computer password or something else she could use. She searched through every page, but found nothing that she could identify as useful. She found Ann Delatorre’s cell phone, turned it on and began to scroll through the stored phone numbers, then the recently called numbers. They were all local.

  She looked inside the wallet. There were a few credit cards, a library card, a couple of business cards from companies around Las Vegas. The driver’s license looked real, but it didn’t say Ann Delatorre. It said L. Ann Delatorre. She found no passwords or out-of-town addresses, but in the back of the wallet, she found something that made her draw in her breath suddenly. It was a printed card that had come with the wallet. It said, “If found, please call” and in a woman’s handwriting it gave a telephone number and the word “Reward.”

  Sylvie looked at the number on the desk telephone. That was a 702 number. She checked Ann Delatorre’s cell phone. The little screen showed a 702 number, too.

  She understood Ann Delatorre, without knowing her at all. She had been a woman who had been absolutely resolved to protect Wendy Harper. She would never have written down her phone number for herself. She had memorized it a long time ago and would remember it forever. She had known that she wouldn’t lose her wallet. But she had also known that someday she might be killed. There would be police, or at least someone who found her body and would go through her purse. They would call the number. And on the other end, Wendy Harper would learn that Ann Delatorre was dead. “Paul?” she called. “I’m pretty sure I found the phone number. It’s a 415. Isn’t that San Francisco?”

  16

  IT WAS PROBABLY the last flight of the night—certainly the last flight to San Francisco. The long-distance number Ann Delatorre had called was in the 415 area code, so now Jack Till was in an airplane looking out the small plastic window at the lighted maintenance area beside the flight line. The ten minutes or so while he waited for the seats beside him to fill always guaranteed a low level of suspense. The seats on Southwest were not assigned, so anybody could sit anywhere, and night flights usually had a few empty seats.

  Till watched attractive women walking up the aisle clutching their purses and oversized carry-ons, their big, liquid eyes narrowing in pure self-interest as they hunted for the seat they considered the best. He was sometimes amused in a cold way when he saw what they chose. They did not often choose to sit beside Jack Till.

  Till was tall but thin, and didn’t have the sort of frame with elbows and shoulders that encroached on a neighbor’s space. He always wore a good sport coat and crisply pressed shirt when he was working, and travel was work. He knew he wasn’t ugly. But he supposed he looked like what he was: a retired cop whose face showed some wear.

  He watched the next woman’s eyes zigzag from one side of the aisle to the other, reading faces. They passed over his quickly, not quite afraid of him, at least not in an airplane, but not comfortable near him, either. He supposed it was because after all of those years protecting people like her, he had picked up the look of the people he’d been protecting them from. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t interested in company.

  His mother would have been offended on his behalf, but his mother had been a difficult woman who was offended regularly. She married his father in an act of speculation, like buying a piece of land cheap on the guess that any chunk of the planet might have something valuable on it. Ray Till had already been drafted for the war when she met him, and she might easily have been a young widow. But he returned from Europe a couple of years later a captain, with
three battlefield promotions and a silver star. He was a quiet man with blue eyes that had beneath them an underlying toughness, and maybe the toughness had been what had attracted her. He became an electrician and wired whole developments in the San Fernando Valley during the building boom, when vast orange and lemon groves were cut down and incinerated in bonfires to make room for the new houses.

  Till’s parents became mildly prosperous, but there were some times when Helen Till was unkindly reminded that her husband wasn’t a doctor or a lawyer. Even a minor executive in the movie business held a higher social standing than an electrical contractor, no matter how many men he sent out in trucks each day to wire people’s swimming-pool heaters and electronic-gate openers.

  When Jack decided to go to the police academy, his parents did not understand, because he had never given them the reason. They never exactly accepted his decision, but they became used to it. Helen and Ray both lived long enough to see their only son make Detective Sergeant, when no likely scenario involved anybody shooting at him. But his mother had strong opinions on every aspect of his life.

  When Jack brought a girl named Karen home from college to meet his parents for the first time, his mother greeted her warmly and then retired a distance, pretending to be arranging places on the table, but really to observe Karen while she talked to Ray and Jack. No, there was someone else present, too. Who was it? Aunt Nancy, his mother’s younger sister.

  Jack remembered seeing them talking in the kitchen, and then he saw his mother give one of her shrugs. Helen Till was not a woman who spent much time in a state of uncertainty. When she shrugged, it never meant “I don’t know.” It always meant “I can’t imagine why everybody doesn’t know.”

  Later, Jack left with Karen. He spoke with his mother the next day, when he came by to thank her for the elaborate dinner. He said, “Well? What did you think of Karen?”