Silent Neighbor

by Blake Pierce

  Undaunted, she’d gotten into her car with the diary and now here she was—slowly walking up her father’s steps. She was almost made uneasy by how calm she felt. She’d expected to feel frightened or nervous or…or something. But there was nothing. If anything, there was a feeling of why haven’t I already done this?

  She approached his door and knocked on it without much thought. She stepped back and waited. She did feel a slight pang of nervousness when she heard the lock being released, but it was fleeting. When the door was opened and she saw her father standing in front of her, it did not rattle her the way she had been expecting.

  Aiden Fine, on the other hand, did look rattled. His eyes went wide for a moment and she thought he might actually slam the door in her face. But after a moment had passed, he tried on a smile and took a step back.

  “Danielle…hello, dear.”

  “Hey, Dad,” she said. “Do you…well, do you have a second?”

  “Of course,” he said. But his tone indicated that he wasn’t so sure about this. Still, he stepped back further to allow her inside. “Is everything okay?” he asked as she stepped past him and he closed the door.

  “No. Things aren’t okay.”

  “Can I help with something?” he asked.

  Danielle did not answer right away. Instead, she let him lead her into his place. He opted for the kitchen, which was the first room the small entryway led into. He leaned against the counter, clearly nervous, as she stepped in. He opened his mouth to say something else but then saw what his daughter was holding in her hands.

  “Where’d you get that?” he asked. His tone was not an accusing one, but one of absolute fear.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” she said. “Have you read it?”

  “Some of it,” he said. He was slowly beginning to calm down. She could see him thinking, trying to decide which was the best approach to take here.

  As for Danielle, she moved just slightly to the left. She stepped deeper into the kitchen in front of his stove. She found it peculiar in a way that he had salt and pepper shakers, a tea kettle, a little utensil rack next to the stove. Who the hell did he think he was, trying to be normal?

  “You want to try explaining yourself?” she asked. “Not that you have to. I always knew you were an abusive piece of shit. The adultery stuff was new, though—the stuff Chloe and I discovered about you recently.”

  “Your mother was dramatic,” he said. “I know she wrote about how she feared I might kill her. How I—”

  “I’m not Chloe, Dad. I never had blinders on, so you can cut that nonsense right now. I just want to hear you say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “You know what I want to hear. I want you to tell me the truth.” That said, she tossed the diary on the counter. Her father looked at it as if someone had thrown a grenade at him. But slowly, he reached for it.

  “Need a refresher, do you?” Danielle asked.

  “Danielle, you have to give me a chance—”

  “No…no I don’t.”

  “None of what is in here is how it sounds. You have to believe me.”

  Danielle said nothing. Slowly, she leaned away from the counter, very aware of the space behind her—of the stove and all of the things sitting out on it. She watched as her father took the diary in his hands and that’s when she moved.

  She moved quickly. She reached behind her, grabbed the tea kettle, and swung around in a vicious arc. Her father saw what was coming, but far too late. His face went rigid in the last moment, knowing what was coming. Danielle wasn’t sure what amused her more: the look of knowing there was pain coming, or the absolute and utter shock in his eyes.

  The kettle slammed into the side of his head and made a sound that was almost like something out of a cartoon. Aiden stumbled back into the counter and by the time he had his senses about him, Danielle swung the kettle again. This time, the sound it made as it connected with his cheek was not cartoonish at all. There was a cracking noise that seemed to vibrate within the kettle.

  The shot dropped Aiden Fine to his knees. He fought for balance but then fell over, his eyes in a dreamlike haze. He grasped for Danielle’s leg to get up, letting out a moan of pain.

  Danielle looked him in the eyes. She smiled and then raised the kettle again. This time, she brought it down hard against the back of his head. The bong sound it made was like some sweet percussion that rattled her hand.

  Aiden’s grip on her leg was released at once as he dropped facedown to his kitchen floor. As carefree as you please, Danielle tossed the tea kettle across the kitchen, where it bounced into the living room.

  She leaned down to check his pulse and when she was certain he was still alive and breathing, she quickly searched his house. It took her about five minutes to find everything she needed. Packed away in the back of the bedroom closet, she found a large quilt, still in its plastic wrapping and likely never used. He’d apparently purchased it on sale, waiting for colder temperatures to use it. She carried it into the kitchen and spread it out. She then rolled her father onto it. When she did, he muttered something under his breath that made her aware that maybe he wasn’t as knocked out as she had thought. She quickly did her best to fold the quilt over him, realizing how stupid of an idea it was. But, because it was the only one she had, she stuck with it.

  She found duct tape in a junk drawer on the right side of the kitchen. When she started wrapping it around the blanket, doing her best to cover as much of his body as possible, he stirred again. She used the tea kettle once more, again blasting him on the back of the head. For a moment, she feared this blow had killed him, but rested easy when she saw the subtle rise and fall of his chest beneath the quilt.

  She finished wrapping the tape around the quilt and saw how obvious the shape beneath the quilt was. Fortunately, it was night outside. And her car was only two spaces away from his front door.

  She walked to the door and opened it. There was a single person on the little concrete strip along the front of the townhouses—a woman walking her golden retriever. She watched and waited until the woman was gone and then saw her chance. She grabbed her keys from her pocket and used the remote to pop the trunk open. She then went to the quilt and started to pull it along the floor. Fortunately, the quilt made it much easier than she had expected to pull the body.

  At the door, she had to wait for a couple to cross the parking lot and get into their car. Once they were pulling out, Danielle worked fast. She pulled the quilted body through the doorway and onto the porch. She took some care to not strike her father’s head on the steps as she went down to the sidewalk, but not much.

  There was a moment when she thought she would be caught—when a man came out of a townhouse just on the other side of the row. He turned to the right instantly, his back to them, as he headed for his car. His parked car was less than twenty-five yards away from where Danielle dragged her father’s body in the quilt, but the darkness and the other parked cars blocked her perfectly. Besides, the man was in far too much of a hurry to even look her way.

  Still, Danielle waited until he was out to keep moving. With that spike of fear in her heart, she moved faster. If anyone did happen to see her, it would be apparent that she was up to no good. But she put all of her energy and strength in dragging the quilt to the trunk of her car, dragging it so hard that the strand of duct tape around the legs started to come undone.

  When she had the wrapped shape of her father by her trunk, she propped it up into a sitting position. Her shoulders were already sore, but she managed to find one more burst of strength to finish the job. Once again, as she wrapped her arms around his chest, she heard him groaning from under the quilt.

  This did not make her afraid; if anything, it just pissed her off. She lifted as well as she could trying to use her legs for the bulk of her strength, and managed to wrestle him into the trunk. As she shifted his legs, bending them so he’d fit, a car swung into the parking lot, its headlights pointed in her direction. Instea
d of freezing, she went on with positioning the body, as if she was doing nothing more than loading up an old quilt.

  He grumbled incoherently one more time. Danielle wished she still had the tea kettle. She slammed the trunk shut just as the car that had just pulled in coasted into a parking spot several spaces down. The driver was talking on his cell phone, totally oblivious to anything Danielle was doing.

  Danielle slid in behind the wheel and pulled out of the lot, not quite sure where she was headed next. All she knew was that she had done more in the past ten minutes than she and Chloe together had done ever since their miserable father had been released from jail.

  Danielle would handle this herself. She was sure Chloe would blow a gasket over how she had chosen to approach things, but Danielle honestly didn’t care. She’d stopped caring about a lot of things over the last week or so and her sorry excuse for a father was one of them. Slowly, how her sister felt about her was closing in as a close second.

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  The company Mark Fairchild worked for was called Edgebrook Financial. As Chloe expected, the building was mostly dark when she and Rhodes walked through the front doors and into the lobby at 9:35. The only person in the lobby was a bored-looking security guard sitting behind the front desk. When he saw Chloe and Rhodes enter, he stood up and offered a smile.

  “Can I help you ladies?” he asked.

  They both pulled their IDs at the same times and it was Rhodes who ran through the introductions. “Rhodes and Fine, FBI,” she said. “We’re doing some follow-up work on a case that involves an employee of Edgebrook. We’re coordinating with local PD if you have any questions.”

  The guard looked at the badges and nodded his approval. “What floor?” he asked.

  It was information they had gleaned from the police reports, from the primary search of Mark’s office. “Fourth floor,” Chloe said.

  “Got it. Elevators are down the hall. The fourth floor is totally empty tonight, so I’ll shut the security system off. Don’t want that thing bugging out for no reason.”

  “Thanks,” Chloe said as she and Rhodes stepped away from the front desk and headed down the hallway toward the elevators.

  On the fourth floor, they found the primary hallway dark and quiet. The hallway was illuminated by soft fluorescent lights and a single overhead that sat over what looked like a small receptionist’s area. At the end of the hall was a large office, the door closed. The large glass pane in the door read Mark Fairchild. Chloe used the key Nolan had given them and they stepped into Mark’s office without a problem.

  Chloe flipped up the light switch on the wall alongside the door. The light revealed an office that was almost as large as Chloe’s entire apartment. There was an enormous desk against the left wall, pushed almost to the back of the room. A small conference table sat in the center of the room with flat-screen TVs mounted on the wall to both sides.

  “Any idea what we might be looking for?” Rhodes asked.

  “No. Anything that looks like it doesn’t belong. Hell, I’d be fine with Post-its with vague notes written on them.”

  The hard part of it was that Mark Fairchild seemed to keep a very clean office. Chloe figured this was the type of company that had a cleaning crew come in at least once a week to keep things looking tidy. As she approached his large desk, she noted that there wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere in sight. All of his equipment—his monitor, keyboard, mouse, and pen holder, were all stainless steel or white.

  She sat down behind the desk and looked around. There was an enormous whiteboard on the wall next to the desk. There were what seemed like hundreds of names, dates, locations, and assorted notes. While she looked around the desk, Rhodes took a picture of the whiteboard to catalogue the names and numbers.

  Chloe opened up the top drawer on the desk. It was neatly organized, like everything else in the office. Pens, paperclips, a few USB sticks, and other assorted odds and ends. The right side of the desk contained three drawers along its support. She opened the first one and found only blank printer paper. She checked the second drawer and found assorted file folders, each one with a date on the top right; the most recent was from two years ago. The bottom drawer was empty. It was the largest of the drawers but looked to not have held anything in quite a while.

  She closed it but then stopped. She thought she’d seen something just as she’d closed it. She opened the drawer back up and looked into the bottom. There was a crease running along the bottom of the drawer, situated a little less than halfway back. It looked as if someone had cut a thin grove into the bottom.

  “What is it?” Rhodes asked, coming over to look.

  “A fake drawer, I think.” She reached down and felt the groove. It was definitely part of the drawer’s design. And when she pressed against the back end of the bottom, she felt it shift a bit. She then applied pressure to the other side of the drawer’s bottom and heard a click. Still holding the smaller portion down, she wiggled her fingers into the groove and tried raising it, but nothing happened. She then tried sliding the smaller portion, and that worked. The false bottom slid back, feeding into another hidden compartment of the larger bottom drawer.

  This revealed a space that was about six inches deep. Inside of it was a single USB drive, a cell phone, and what looked to be at first glance about a dozen bundles of one-hundred-dollar bills.

  “Whoa,” Rhodes said. “Jackpot, huh?”

  Chloe nodded, thumbing through the stacks. There were actually sixteen stacks in all, each one containing fifty bills: eighty thousand dollars. But it wasn’t the money that Chloe was truly interested in. Instead, she removed the USB and the phone. The phone was a burner, the sort you could buy with prepaid minutes at any convenience or drug store.

  “Doesn’t seem like the kind of phone a millionaire would keep around, does it?” Chloe asked.

  “Nope,” Rhodes agreed. “Makes me wonder what he uses it for.”

  “Let’s just see.”

  Chloe powered the phone up and waited for it to load. When it did, she wasted no time navigating to the contacts and scrolling through them. There were no names assigned to the numbers, which made their job harder but also threw up more red flags. There were five numbers in all, called over and over again.

  “Let me see if I can get Garcia on the phone,” Rhodes said. “Maybe he can hook us up with someone to run these numbers.”

  Chloe nodded, feeling that the involvement of the assistant director made the case feel as if it was actually getting somewhere. It took everything in her to not just go ahead and try calling the numbers; she knew that if she did, it could potentially clue Mark to the fact that he was being thoroughly investigated.

  She listened as Rhodes spoke to Garcia. She was placed on hold and then started looking elsewhere around the office—at the built-in-bookshelves, at the pretentious abstract city-scape painting on the far wall. After a few minutes, she started talking again. When she did, she placed her cell phone on speaker and set it on the edge of Mark Fairchild’s desk.

  “Kim Moxley, you’re on speaker with me and Agent Chloe Fine. Chloe will be giving you five phone numbers and we need them run down as quickly as possible.”

  “Can do,” said a confident female voice on the other end. “Any idea if any of them are international?”

  “Looks like at least one is,” Chloe said.

  “That one might take a bit longer. But I should be able to get you results for each of the other numbers within just a handful of seconds.”

  “Perfect,” Chloe said. She then recited the first number. She was pretty sure the area code was one for New York and quickly found that she was correct.

  “That one is to a man named Julio Alejos. It’s a New York number, somewhere around Buffalo.”

  “How about this one?” Chloe asked, giving the second number.

  After about ten seconds, Kim Moxley’s voice responded. “That’s a Boston number. A business called Polson and O’Neal Investments.”
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br />   Chloe typed the names down as Moxley gave them. When she had down the name of the business, she went on with the numbers. The third turned out to be an unknown number that Moxley was unable to trace. “Not to worry, though,” she said. “I’ll work on it after this call and should be able to get results within a few hours.”

  Chloe then gave the fourth and fifth numbers. The results that came back were more than enough to make her feel that there was certainly some form of foul play going on. Even if it was not directly related to the murder of Jessie Fairchild, it seemed like Mark Fairchild was certainly up to something.

  The fourth number was the international number, and Moxley, as she had warned, took a bit longer to get results. Still it took no more than thirty seconds before she was back with an answer. “What I can tell you for certain is that it’s some offshore banking company. But there are two listings here, one under UXB Banking and another under West Bore Banking. Now, I ran the fifth number while waiting for that and it looks like that one is to a place called Collins Holdings.”

  “A holdings company and an offshore bank connection,” Rhodes said.

  “Seems that way,” Moxley said. “Hopefully, I’ll have that unknown number cracked for you within a few hours.”

  “Thanks for your help,” Rhodes said. “Please keep us posted if you discover anything else.”

  She killed the call and pocketed her cell phone. “Things just started to look pretty bad for Mark Fairchild,” she said. “Even if those calls had been made from his personal phone and not a hidden cell, it would raise questions.”

  “It makes me wonder what is on this USB,” Chloe said. She fired up the monitor and placed the USB into the small port located to the side of the monitor. She was fully expecting it to be password protected but there was nothing of the sort. The file folder popped up and she was able to open it without a problem.

  There was a video file on the stick. She hovered over the thumbnail and saw that it was simply named MOVIE. It was forty-three minutes long. She opened it up and knew what it was within the first ten seconds. There was a woman on a large bed. She was totally naked with the exception of a pair of thongs that were so thin they may as well not have been there at all. There was a huge painting over an ornate headboard, giving them enough video to show that this had not been filmed in the Fairchild home. Chloe would have snapped out of the video then and there but she wanted to make sure the woman was not Jessie Fairchild. It was impossible to tell from the splayed form of the body, the legs parted and slightly raised.