Silent Neighbor

by Blake Pierce

  It was her mother’s diary.

  At first, Chloe was too confused to react any certain way. But then a variety of possibilities began to dawn on her. None of them were particularly good.

  “Danielle…how did you get that?”

  Danielle swept her arm around the room as her head tilted down to the floor. “This was me,” she said. “All of it. I did it. The break-in, trashing the place, stealing the journal.”

  Chloe instantly made herself get off of the couch. For a blinding moment, she had felt so angry and betrayed that she thought she might literally reach out and slap her sister hard across the face.

  “And why did you do that?”

  “Because I needed the journal. I needed to see…I needed to remember everything he had done.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “I don’t know. Chloe…you know now. You know the kind of man he was when you had your little blinders on and you’re not doing anything!”

  “Danielle…we could have just talked about this. You didn’t have to do all of this!”

  “I know. I figured if I trashed the place enough, you’d think it was him.”

  “Well, at least you succeeded in that…”

  “Chloe, how can you be so passive? How can you not care?”

  “Is that what you think? You think I don’t care? Danielle, I’m sitting so tightly on it because we have to approach this just right. What the hell did you think I’d do? Just walk up and put a bullet in his head?”

  “That would be better than doing nothing.”

  Frustration and rage flared through her as she paced back and forth, looking to Danielle with an emotion she wasn’t even sure there was a name for.

  “Tell me, Danielle. What is it that you would like to do?”

  “You’re the federal agent. Don’t you have an in? Can’t we get him locked up?”

  “It’s not quite that easy. We have to think about the way the system works. Double jeopardy won’t allow him to be convicted of the same crime twice. The most that would come out of that would be putting him through the headache of court. Nothing more.” She paused here and then wheeled on Danielle, as if starting the conversation afresh. “All that aside…what in God’s name did you think you’d accomplish by breaking into my apartment? My neighbor heard you. If she’s called the police a little earlier than she had, you could have gotten into some huge trouble. Don’t you ever think about things like that?”

  This seemed to bring Danielle around a bit. She finally managed to look up, locking eyes with her sister.

  “I had to have it. It made it real for me…made me know for sure that I didn’t just imagine it all—that I wasn’t just imagining that Dad was such a bastard.”

  “We could have just talked about it…”

  Chloe walked back to the couch and sat down. She was still enraged, but she could see the pain in Danielle’s eyes. She could see traces of the little girl she had once been, a little girl who had witnessed the sort of monster their father truly had been—the sort of monster he very possibly still was.

  “No, we couldn’t. Chloe…are you sure you’re not just delaying it? I tried asking you how you were feeling the other day and you made it pretty clear you didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “Because I don’t know what to talk about! I don’t know what to do with it. I want to act on this…I truly do. But it has to be done right. The system…well, it sucks. There are so many loopholes and red tape…one misstep and he remains free.”

  “So what have you been doing?”

  “I’ve been working a case, Danielle. I do still have a job. And you know what? Yes, I was glad to get the case. I was glad to have something to take my mind off of Dad and that damned journal. It was a great distraction from everything I’ve learned about him, from this horrible reality I have to face.”

  Danielle nodded. Chloe hoped she was understanding the one big unspoken comment that Chloe really didn’t want to put words to—the fact that it had taken her so long to come to terms with the sort of man their father was. Neither of them wanted to speak out loud just how much Chloe had been wounded by all of this.

  “So what do we do?” Danielle asked.

  Chloe slumped against the couch. If she weren’t so tired and if Danielle wasn’t already so emotionally spent, this would have been a great night to kill a bottle of wine with her sister.

  “This case I’m on is getting a little out of hand,” Chloe said. “I can’t give you details, obviously. But I have to finish it up. You let me finish this case and then you and I will work on this together. I’ll open up—I’ll talk to you and share what I know about how we could and could not effectively take it on. And when the time is right, we’ll take it to the authorities.”

  “How long will that take?” Danielle asked.

  “I don’t know. This case could be wrapped tomorrow, or it could take another week or so. Maybe more. I just don’t know. You need to be patient, Danielle. If we want him to get what he deserves, we have to do it the absolute right way.”

  “You’re right,” she said. “I know you are but I hate that fact that he’s free. What stops him from just jumping to some other location?”

  “I’ve thought of that, too. But he moved to DC for a reason. He wanted to be near us. At first I thought it was for sentimental reasons but now I think it’s because he felt that we might pose some sort of threat.”

  “You think he knows that we know?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Danielle got to her feet and looked around at the mess, still clutching the journal. “Keep this. I’m still embarrassed that I did this to you. Here…let me clean up.”

  “Absolutely…but wait a day or so. It’s clear that you’ve been dealing with this all day. You look drained, sis.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I don’t want you cleaning…not yet, anyway, but you’re welcome to stay here tonight if you want.”

  Danielle thought about it for a moment before finally shaking her head. “No, I’m going to get back home. I just needed to see you. I had to get this all off my chest—had to confess to breaking into your place. I figured the entire time you’d think it was Dad and something about that started to feel sort of dirty, you know?”

  “I get it. I just…well, I wish you and I were better at this sort of thing.”

  Danielle laughed as she headed for the door. “You’re telling me.” She took one final look around the apartment and frowned. “I really am sorry. Don’t clean another thing. I’ll come by tomorrow and do it.”

  “Sounds good. Goodnight, Danielle.”

  Danielle gave a tired little nod and slipped out the door.

  Chloe sat down on the couch again and realized that in the drama, Danielle had ended up leaving with the journal. It made Chloe very uneasy, as if her sister had left with a loaded gun rather than a diary.

  Chloe looked around the apartment, at the mess her sister—not her father—had made, and this time it was her turn to cry.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The sudden twist in her personal life had resulted in poor sleep. Chloe’s mind had been far too bogged down with trying to figure out how she could have been so blinded by her sudden distrust of their father. It was odd to think how just five months ago, she would never have suspected her father at all—and, as such, may have suspected Danielle right away.

  Things seemed to be changing far too fast and it all started with her father. Or, more precisely, it started with her past feelings of adoration and love for her father. Even when they had been turned into feelings of anger and distrust, he was still clouding her judgment.

  And then there was Danielle. The fact that she had actually broken into her apartment reminded Chloe far too much of the young woman her sister had once been: not subject to laws, a little on the dark side, no regard for the feelings of others.

  Her mind felt like it had been set on fire, making it hard to sleep. She rested fitfully, managing about four hours of b
roken sleep. But when her eyes opened at 5:10, she knew she was done with sleep. There was just too much on her mind. She thought of her father and how he’d had her so fooled, how she had been so loyal and obedient to him. He’d played his part well, managing to fool her even though Danielle had always seen through him while their mother had taken on the brunt of his abuse.

  It was just me, she thought. I was the only one that never saw it.

  It was the first time the weight of this realization truly came down on her like a load of bricks. Perhaps that’s why it suddenly triggered something in her head, something that temporarily cleared the fog of poor sleep.

  She felt played—like she’d had the wool pulled over her eyes. She’d thought her father had been a good man, maybe a bit flawed by a few vices, but nothing like the revelations she’d come across as of late.

  Almost idly, she thought of Mark Fairchild. He had a fairly airtight alibi, but not one that they had really thrown against the wall to see if it would stick. Even deep down in her guts, Chloe did not think he was guilty in any way. But, well, as the sleepless night had taught her, she sometimes failed to see the absolute evil in people if they hid it well enough.

  She got out of bed, put on some coffee, and sat down at the kitchen table with the case notes. She looked over the little bit of information they had on Mark Fairchild and her instinct remained the same. She didn’t see where he could have done it. There were at least five people that accounted for his whereabouts when his wife had been killed, as well as a receipt from a Panera Bread drive-through he went through just an hour and a half before she was killed.

  But what if we dug deeper? she wondered. These people were rich beyond measure. If you really wanted to unravel any secrets they were keeping, it would likely be buried under a lot of money.

  Chloe started making several notes, jotting them down on the margins of the printout they had on the Mark Fairchild interrogations. In the back of her mind, she was still tormented by questions and emotions concerning what Danielle had done, but she managed to push them away for the time being.

  For now, she had to devote her full attention to the case—if not to bring a woman’s murderer to justice, then for her own sanity.

  ***

  Back in Falls Church, as Chloe and Rhodes started to truly dive deep into the personal lives of the Fairchilds, there seemed to be more and more evidence that there was no way Mark Fairchild had been in any way involved in the murder of his wife. Every single thing the police had asked for, he had willingly given. This included the alarm system codes, credit card information, bank statements, and full access to their computers and other electronic devices.

  As it happened, this was incredibly helpful for what Chloe had planned as a start to their day. Nolan had everything she needed to dive deeper into the Fairchilds’ finances already printed out and accurately organized. By 8:00 that morning, Chloe, Rhodes, and Nolan were sitting around the small conference room table in the back of the station, poring over the pages upon pages of financial records Nolan had printed out. There were a few that had not been printed that Nolan was able to access through banking websites and the log-in information Mark Fairchild had willingly given them.

  The first thing that came to Chloe’s attention was that there was an account set to the side, apart from savings and a 401k, that had been poured into for the last five years. To Chloe, it looked like nothing more than a secondary savings account—though, admittedly, she was not a banker and, in fact, she was easily annoyed with too much math and anything to do with numbers.

  “Deputy Nolan, what do you know about this account?” she asked, circling the header indicating the account on one of the printouts. Nolan scooped the paper up, scanned it, and nodded.

  “This is the retirement account he was telling us about.”

  Chloe looked at it again. “Any idea when Mark was planning to retire?”

  “Next year. He’s in the process of setting it all up right now. I hate to say it, but with his wife dying like this, when you add the life insurance to that account…it’s going to be more than enough to retire on.”

  Again, it made Chloe wonder if Mark had something to do with Jessie’s death. That nice chunk of change one year before he retired would certainly come in handy. But there was no evidence to support it.

  “I keep coming back to this one little detail here,” Nolan said. He was not looking at a printout, but at the laptop in front of him. Chloe and Rhodes walked over to his side of the table to look at the screen.

  “What are we looking at?” Rhodes asked.

  “Well, this column right here is their primary checking—an amount that makes me feel like I’m some commoner that’s been eating scraps off of the streets, if I’m being honest. However, when you look at this column,” he said, sliding his finger to the opposite side of the screen, “you see that a lot of it has been coming from transfers from a savings account. That’s not all that unusual until you realize that they had never done anything like this up until about six months ago. And if you look at some of their expenditures and align it with these transfers from savings without putting anything else back into savings, it makes me wonder…”

  “Was the money drying up?” Chloe asked, finishing his thought.

  “Exactly. Of course, there’s still seven hundred thousand dollars in their checking account, so I don’t know if I’d say drying up. But when you consider that there was typically an account balance of at least three million with another five in savings, which is now down to under one million…that is where the trail starts to lead.”

  “Did he ever mention anything to you about financial problems when you got all of this information from him?” Rhodes asked.

  “Nothing. How about you guys?”

  “Nothing at all,” Chloe said. “I’m looking at all of these transfers…they seem to be moved over to compensate for big expenditures. But the expenditures are either listed as simply withdrawals, other transfers, or checks that were written out. So we don’t even know where all of that money was going.”

  “I noticed that, too,” Nolan said. “And you know...I’ll be honest…I never even thought much about it. I figured people with that much money must do some stupid things with it. He was so distraught over losing his wife I didn’t even bother digging into it.”

  “That’s understandable,” Chloe said. “Given the situation, I would have probably done the exact same thing. But with no answers and the one potential break we have—Evelyn and a hair sample we’re waiting to hear results on—we have to start looking everywhere.”

  “Want me to call Mark back in?” Nolan asked.

  “I think it might be a good idea. Is he back at his home now?”

  “As of yesterday, yeah…I think he’s started arranging stuff for the funeral. He’s a little upset that things have to be delayed because of the case.”

  “See if you can get him in,” Chloe said. “The sooner the better.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be accommodating,” Nolan said. “He wants this nightmare over just as badly as we do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  The atmosphere wasn’t quite as tense this time when Chloe and Rhodes sat down with Mark Fairchild. For one thing, his brother wasn’t standing in a corner, listening in to the conversation. Also, while he was clearly still in the midst of his grieving, there seemed to be a platform of acceptance under all of Mark’s emotions now. Chloe could see it simply in the way he was able to look back and forth between them as they spoke. He was clear-headed but still very much in pain.

  “Thank you for coming back in,” Chloe said. “I hated to ask for you to come back so soon, but quite frankly, we need some help.”

  “It’s fine. Anything I can do…I’m happy to do it. But first…if I’m being honest…can you tell me everything that’s been cancelled out? I know you and the local PD were looking into several things, but what can you tell me has been ruled out?”

  “Nothing much, regrettably,” Chloe said
. “But I can tell you things that we know. For instance, there were no prints on the fox stole or the ring other than your wife’s. Along the way, we’ve also had some potential clues that have turned out to come to nothing. We do still have a few options open and if any of those turn out to be promising, we will certainly let you know.”

  He nodded, soaking all of the information in. He looked to the table, where they still had the majority of his financial records sitting out. “Can I assume the questions you have for me are related to finances?” he asked.

  “That’s correct,” Rhodes said.

  “Nothing incriminating by any means, of course,” Chloe said. “But there were enough oddities to warrant another conversation with you.”

  “Sure.” He sat back in his chair and looked a little nervous now. He had the look of a man that knew this had been coming—but maybe not quite so soon.

  Chloe and Rhodes went through all of the discoveries they had made. Both of them were very careful to not sound as if they were accusing him of anything. They spoke to him with the interest of two agents simply needing more information. It seemed to set him a bit more at ease. Chloe had seen this tactic work before; rather that feeling cornered, he felt helpful. It was a surefire way to get someone to slip up if they were, indeed, hiding something.

  When they were done showing him what led them to needing his help, he gathered up all of the papers in question and stared at them for a moment. He stacked them into a neat little pile and looked down at them introspectively.

  “I know it’s not very modern or woke or whatever the hell people would call it, but Jessie was never really aware of what was going on financially. The last time she even showed any sort of interest in where we were financially was about a year and a half ago. We had seventeen million dollars broken up between a few accounts, I had some stocks valued at over five million, and about another ten million in savings. She asked casually how we were financially one more time when we knew we had to move, but that was it. I was always the one that managed the money, balanced everything, and so on. She just…well, she spent quite a bit of it. And I don’t say that to be pissy because she didn’t keep it secret, made sure I was fine with it all. I just asked that if she wanted anything that was over a certain amount, to let me know first.”