Guilt by Silence

by Taylor Smith

  “Then you should keep an eye on her.”

  “We are.”

  “Fine.”

  Neville hesitated. “You really don’t know anything about Burton?” he asked. Pflanz had loosened his grip on Neville’s lapel, but he glared at him so severely that the deputy backed off. “Okay, okay. I just needed to be sure.”

  “Do you want some more tea, Mariah?” Chaney asked quietly.

  She shook her head slowly. “No, thanks.”

  She was huddled on the sofa in the living room, her arms wrapped around her knees, a blanket hugging her shoulders. The house was warm enough, but she couldn’t seem to stop shivering. She regretted that she had launched herself so obsessively into cleaning the place after she and Chaney had returned from the nursing home the night before—in the wee hours of the morning, really. Now there was nothing to do but wait.

  When she’d refused his offer of help, Chaney had withdrawn to the living room, leaving her alone, knowing she needed time. She had scrubbed and dusted and vacuumed until every trace of the attack and subsequent police investigation had disappeared. It had been 4:00 a.m. when she finally fell into her bed, physically and emotionally exhausted.

  But there was to be no escape from pain and self-recrimination. Sleep was denied. The last image of David was burned on her mind’s eye—his tortured body finally at ease but cold to her touch, stretched out lifelessly in a glaringly bright, tile-lined room. Mariah was sentenced to hear the nurse’s words reverberate over and over in her head: “aneurysm…bursting brought on by stress.”

  Stress, her mind shrieked accusingly, like the emotional stress of her outburst in his room that morning, when David had reached out to her for comfort and instead she had thrown Elsa’s name in his face.

  When she finally tiptoed downstairs again at eight to make some coffee, Chaney was already up, looking as if he had passed a night almost as restless as hers. She had made him tea and breakfast—the coffeepot was smashed, she remembered grimly—and she had sat with him. But they had said little. She knew he was waiting for her to make the opening. She knew she should make use of these few hours—the calm before the storm of telling Lindsay and calling David’s family and making funeral arrangements and going through the whole awful ordeal. She knew she should pull out Stephen’s diskette and get on with examining the CHAUCER file. She knew she should find out what else Paul had learned during his investigation of the attack in Vienna. But paralysis had set in—she just couldn’t bring herself to deal with anything right now.

  Mariah glanced at her watch. “I wish they’d call.”

  “Sergeant Albrecht said noon or thereabouts. He told me he’d be in touch as soon as the procedure was over.”

  She had decided to wait for the autopsy results before calling David’s family, and to leave Lindsay with Carol for the morning, as planned—let her have a little fun with the baby before her young world was shaken yet again.

  “I’m going to have to leave to pick up Lindsay soon,” Mariah said. She closed her eyes. “Oh, Paul, how am I going to tell her?”

  Chaney sat down on the couch and touched her arm lightly. She didn’t flinch; they were beyond that now. The past twenty-four hours had destroyed both the wall between them and her energy to maintain it. The quiet support he offered was the only point of relative calm in the turbulent waters raging around her.

  “It won’t be easy,” he said softly. “But in a way, maybe she’s already said goodbye to him. To part of him, anyway, the part that didn’t come back after the accident.”

  Mariah frowned and then nodded slowly. “It’s true,” she said. “We really lost him last January. But I’m afraid she’ll start blaming herself again.”

  “Blaming herself? Why?”

  “It doesn’t make sense, I know. But for a long time after the accident, she felt it was her fault because he was taking her to school when it happened.”

  “That’s an awfully heavy burden for a kid to carry.”

  “I know, and I think I finally had her talked out of it. But I understand where she’s coming from. I blamed myself for years after my father left us.”

  “You were seven years old, Mariah!”

  She shrugged. “Guilt is a precocious emotion. It develops early.”

  “Why would you think your father’s leaving was your fault?”

  She pressed her lips against her knees for a moment. “My mother worked to support him while he wrote. But she didn’t mind—she believed in him.” Mariah shook her head. “She spoiled him, but then, women always did, I think. He was good-looking and talented and they used to fall all over him. I was conscious of that even as a little kid.” The corners of her mouth lifted in a small smile. “And, of course, they’d fuss over me, too. I used to be so proud to go out with him. I remember walking along the beach, holding his hand, feeling like a fairy princess.”

  “But the fairy tale didn’t last, did it?” Chaney said quietly.

  “No. One night, my mother was working and there was a party on the beach. There was no money for baby-sitters, so he took me with him. I remember the big bonfire, people singing, laughing. I thought it was a hoot, being out so late at night, dancing in the sand. He picked me up in his arms and swung me around and we laughed and laughed. I thought he was the greatest daddy in the world.”

  She hugged her knees tighter. “And then, at one point, he said he was going for a walk and that I should stay with the people near the fire. After a while, when he didn’t come back, I got nervous. No one was paying any attention to me, and all the faces started to look scary in the firelight. So I wandered off down the beach, looking for him. No one even noticed me leave. I remember the blue light of the moon on the water, the rumble of the waves. It seemed so ominous—I got really frightened. I remember running in the sand, stumbling and crying, calling for him. I almost tripped over them in the dark.”

  “Them?”

  “Him and the woman he was with. ‘Having a rest,’ he said. He was annoyed—she was embarrassed. I remember thinking they were going to catch cold with their clothes all undone like that.”

  Chaney shook his head. “Then what happened?”

  “He took me home and put me to bed, but I woke up later when my mother came in. They were shouting at each other. ‘How am I supposed to get any work done,’ he said, ‘when I’ve always got the kid on my neck?”’

  Mariah pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “‘The kid,”’ she said bitterly, looking up at him. “Nice, huh? Anyway, next day he was gone, leaving a pregnant wife and a seven-year-old child. We never saw him again.”

  “What a creep,” Chaney breathed. He studied her face. “And you thought it was your fault?”

  She nodded. “For years, until I finally got old enough and smart enough to come to the same conclusion as you—that the guy was a first-class heel, end of story.”

  “Was that when he went to Paris?”

  “Yes. Some rich woman he had met—seduced, naturally—financed him to ‘further his art.’ At least, she financed him until she caught him cheating on her, too. Then she pulled the rug out. He was living in some dive in Montmartre when he died of hepatitis a year later.”

  “And his landlady packed away all his stuff in an attic and the writing was lost for years,” Chaney said, quoting the press stories that had come out when some college English professor had gone searching for the rumored Bolt manuscripts and discovered them in Paris. “He never knew your sister, I guess.”

  “No. Katie was born six months after he left. From there on in, about all I can remember of my childhood was sandy floors in a crummy cottage, taking Katie everywhere I went and trying to keep her quiet while my mother rested on the sofa between shifts.”

  “That must have been rough on you.”

  “I didn’t really think about it. I figured it was the price I had to pay for driving our dad away. As I got older, school and the water were the only escape I had from all that, so I threw myself into the books and com
petitive swimming. I got academic and athletic scholarships after high school and a chance to finally get away from those memories.”

  “It made you the person you are today, didn’t it?”

  She shrugged again. “I guess.”

  “I know it couldn’t have been easy, Mariah, but that little girl turned into a pretty impressive woman.” She glanced at him and then away, uncomfortable. “What happened to your sister?”

  “She died when she was twelve. I was up at Berkeley. Katie was fooling around with some kids on the Newport pier and fell off—broke her neck and drowned. I blamed myself for that, too. I thought that if I’d been there to keep an eye on her, it wouldn’t have happened. I felt so bad. I decided to quit school to stay with my mother, but she threw me out. I thought she blamed me, too. We didn’t speak for almost a year. Then she got sick—ovarian cancer. I went back to be with her at the end, and she told me that she wanted me to finish my education, be independent—make better choices than she had made. That’s why she hadn’t let me come home. She knew I’d go back to the only place I felt safe—buried in the books.”

  “Your mother sounds like a good woman.”

  “She was. She didn’t deserve the life she got.”

  Chaney was quiet as she tucked herself wearily into a corner of the sofa, pulling the blanket around her and closing her eyes, her mind’s eye watching the parade of loved ones who had been wrenched out of her life, one by one. She must have dozed off because when the telephone rang, she leaped up, startled and disoriented, eyes flashing around the room until Paul appeared and put a hand on her shoulder, and she remembered where she was. She stood rooted to the spot as the phone jangled again.

  “Do you want me to take it?” he asked.

  She looked up at him and nodded dumbly. He turned and headed for the kitchen. She followed, waiting in the doorway, watching as he picked up the receiver, listening to his half of the conversation, first with Sergeant Albrecht, then, apparently, with the pathologist. When he hung up the phone a few minutes later, he seemed stunned.

  “What? What did they say? There was something else, wasn’t there?” Chaney nodded and she blanched. “Was David murdered?”

  “No,” Chaney said, turning to face her. “It was an aneurysm. But he also had cancer—thyroid cancer. Anaplastic carcinoma, the pathologist said. They don’t have biopsy results yet, but he was absolutely certain. It had spread to the trachea. When he was lying down in bed, they figured the windpipe became blocked. It looks like he went into respiratory distress and the strain of that caused the aneurysm to burst.”

  Mariah watched him, the words sinking in slowly, remembering David wheezing when she’d visited him the day before. Then her knees buckled, and the next thing she knew, she was on the floor and Chaney was holding her up. “I thought I did it,” she whispered.

  “Did what?”

  “Killed him. Yesterday, when I saw him. I told him I knew about Elsa. I was angry and hurt. He understood what I was saying. His reaction—oh, Paul! I thought it was the stress of that that did it.”

  “No, Mariah, listen to me,” Chaney said firmly, lifting her chin. “David was very sick. The pathologist said that the kind of cancer he had spreads like wildfire and is virtually always fatal. He couldn’t have lived more than a few more months. Maybe,” he added quietly, “this was the kindest way for it to happen.”

  Mariah stared ahead, nodding but seeing nothing. Chaney pulled her shaking body closer, and they sat together in the middle of the kitchen floor, rocking slowly while she cried.

  “She’s not completely out of the woods,” Gus McCord said, “but the doctors say we can probably move her back in a few days. Her specialist in California is lining up round-the-clock nursing care so she can be at home. She’s going to need to take it easy. ’Course,” he added, grinning and shaking his head, “I may need to tie her down to accomplish that.”

  He was hyper, Dieter Pflanz noted, rambling and elated at the news that his wife was going to pull through from the heart attack. It had been a mild one, the specialists had said, a warning sign that she was going to have to slow down a little, ease up on her activities. McCord was pacing nervously across the floor of the hospital lounge, his strained features really showing his age—and then some—for the first time since the security chief had known him.

  Pflanz nodded. “That’s good, Gus. Now maybe you can slow down, too? Get some rest.”

  McCord grimaced. “Don’t you start, Dieter. I get enough of that from Nance and the boys.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re right. You’re no good to anybody if you collapse from exhaustion. Have you slept at all in the last two days?”

  “Some. I catnapped.”

  Pflanz snorted. “I’ll run you back to your room when the car gets here. The boys are on their way now from the hotel. Let them sit with Mrs. McCord for a few shifts—they’ve been cooling their heels for the past twenty-four hours. You need to quit hogging her.”

  “Since when did you add mother hen to your list of security duties, Pflanz?”

  “Since Jerry Siddon got on the plane to California this morning. He left me in charge of that department.”

  “You could go back, too, you know. There’s no point in hanging around, wasting time, when there’s nothing you can do here.”

  “I’ve got some business to take care of.”

  McCord frowned, studying the big man. “Is there a problem with New Mexico?”

  Pflanz hesitated. “Not really. A minor glitch. I’m taking care of it.”

  “I thought we already did, Dieter,” McCord said. “Is it this Chaney business again? I thought I took care of that.”

  “He’s out. He’s still snooping, but he’s neutralized. He can’t do any damage now.”

  “Then what’s the problem?” Just then, the four McCord sons came through the door of the lounge.

  “It’s no big deal, Gus,” Pflanz said quickly. “Leave it to me.”

  “It wasn’t because of the accident, Lins,” Mariah said gently. She was holding Lindsay in her arms, sitting on the bed in Carol’s guest room where she had taken her daughter to tell her about David. Lindsay was crying softly. “He was very sick. We probably would have lost him, anyway, even if the accident had never happened. They said he had a kind of cancer that’s not curable.”

  “How did he get it?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart. It’s always hard to know with cancer. It just seems to happen to people sometimes.”

  “I can’t believe he’s gone.”

  “I know. Me, neither.” Mariah stroked her daughter’s red curls. Then she had a thought and sat back a little. “Do you remember the last thing you said to Daddy, Lins?”

  “No.”

  “Think about it. What was the very last thing you said, just before you kissed him and left his room yesterday?”

  Lindsay frowned as she struggled to remember. Then the lines in her forehead softened. “I told him I loved him.”

  Mariah gathered her up in her arms again and held her tightly, kissing the top of her head. “Yes, you did, sweetheart,” she said quietly. “And you know what? So did I.”

  15

  At first he thought he’d been double-crossed.

  Rollie Burton had driven into the parking lot of the Tyson’s Corner Mall after 2:00 a.m. as the voice had directed, keeping the old Toyota back in the shadows on the edge of the lot until he saw the mall security patrol car go by. Then he pulled up alongside the big Dumpster. Leaving the engine running, Burton climbed out of the car, glanced around quickly, then looked into the Dumpster. Last time, the briefcase with the money had been sitting right on top of the pile. This time the Dumpster was only half-full, but there was no case to be seen.

  “What the hell…?” Burton cursed under his breath.

  He pulled a penlight out of his pocket and shone it in. And then he spotted it. The case had slid down the pile of trash and lay deep in one corner of the box, on the far side at the back where the D
umpster stood wedged against a wall of the building and the loading dock.

  “Great,” he mumbled.

  He stood on tiptoe and reached in as far as he could, but his arms were too short to make it. He tried to squeeze his body into a small opening between the loading dock and the big steel box, but the space was too narrow, even for his lean frame. Finally, with an exasperated sigh, he pocketed the flashlight and hiked himself up onto the lip of the Dumpster and over the edge. He scrabbled on the loose pile of cardboard and slid down onto his butt, cursing again. Working his way over to the corner, he squatted, breathing heavily through his mouth.

  He pulled the penlight out of his pocket again and opened the briefcase on his knees. Picking up one of the banded stacks of twenties, he flipped it between his fingers, starting to sniff before remembering that he couldn’t. He had packed his nose again, not wanting to risk its starting to bleed all over the place. It wouldn’t be the nice, crisp smell of new bills, anyway, he thought, dropping the stack back in the case. But these were safer. He ran his fingers lightly over the rest, then closed the lid, clicking shut first one lock, then the other.

  At the sound of a third click, he froze. His eyes rose to see the head and torso of a large figure standing beside the Dumpster, silhouetted against the parking-lot lights. Burton lifted his flashlight to the face.

  “Kill that!” the figure growled.

  A gun rose in the circle of light. It looked like a Smith and Wesson, Burton thought, the old Hush Puppy from their Vietnam days, fitted with a silencer. He lowered the flashlight and snapped it off. “You?” he said, stunned.

  “Long time no see, Rollie.” The silhouette shook its head. “You got old, but you didn’t get any smarter. Still can’t do a job without your dick getting in the way, can you?”

  “Hey! A guy’s gotta have some fun,” Burton said, his grin nervous. “Gimme a break, will you? I’ll take care of it.” He squinted at the figure. “Who is she, anyway? How come you want her taken out?” No reply. “Okay, sure—none of my business. And I never saw, never laid eyes on you. Hell! I didn’t have a clue. That voice on the phone—you guys got electronics now, I guess, hey? Real effective.”