Hello, Darkness

by Sandra Brown

  It was a grim surmise. During their reflective silence, Ms. Lester returned with the original tape and the requested duplication. Dean played it again. “Something really bothers me,” he said when it ended. “He refers to ‘girls,’ not women.”

  “Diminishing a female’s status,” Curtis remarked.

  “In his estimation, it does. That gives us a clue into this guy’s mind-set. His basic dislike and mistrust of women comes through loud and clear. If I had to profile him based on no more than this conversation, I’d categorize him as an anger-retaliator rapist.”

  Apparently Curtis was acquainted with the clinical term. “He’s angry with women in general over real or perceived injustices.”

  “Yes. Possibly a result of sexual abuse, even incest. A dangerous motivation,” Dean said. “Sex is his method of punishment. That usually translates to violent rape. If he wants to make his victim bleed, as he told Paris, then he’ll have no qualms about killing her.” His lips formed a grim line, which expressed the apprehension that all were feeling. “Another thing, the only other Valentino I ever heard of was Rudolph.”

  “The silent-film star,” Paris said.

  “Right. And his best-known film was The Sheik.”

  “In which he kidnaps and seduces, rather forcibly, a young woman.” She knew the movie. She and Jack had seen it at a classic-film festival. “Do you think that’s why he’s using that name?”

  “It could be a coincidence, but I’m not prepared to dismiss it as such.” He thought about it only a second longer. “In fact, Curtis, I’m not prepared to dismiss any of this. My recommendation is that you take him at his word.”

  The detective agreed with a somber nod. “Unfortunately, I agree.”

  “I’d like to work with you on the case.”

  “I welcome your input. We’ll take Valentino’s threat seriously until it proves to be a hoax.”

  “Or proves to be real,” Paris added softly.

  chapter 7

  Judge Kemp granted the defense attorney’s request for a thirty-minute recess to consult with his client, hopefully to urge him to accept a plea bargain that would end the trial and free up the judge’s afternoon.

  He used the half hour to retire to chambers and clip hairs from his nostrils with a tiny pair of silver scissors. He used a mirror with a magnifying power of five times actual size. Nevertheless, it was a delicate procedure. The sudden ringing of his cell phone almost cost him a punctured septum.

  A bit irritably, he answered his wife’s call.

  “Janey’s not in her room,” she stated without preamble. “She hasn’t been there all night.”

  “You told me she was in when we got home.”

  “I thought she was because I could hear the radio through her door. It was still on this morning. I thought that was odd, because you know what a late riser she is, but I figured she was sleeping through it.

  “I knocked on her door around ten. I wanted to take her to that new tearoom for lunch. That would be something we could do together. And it’s a lovely little place, really. Bea and I were there last week and they have an exceptional gazpacho.”

  “Marian, I’m in recess.”

  Reigned in, she continued. “She didn’t answer my knock. At quarter to eleven, I decided to go in and wake her. Her room was empty and the bed hadn’t been slept in. Her car isn’t in the garage and none of the help has seen her.”

  “Maybe she got up early, made her bed, and left the house.”

  “And maybe the sky will fall this afternoon.”

  She was right. It was an absurd assumption. Janey had never made a bed in her life. Her refusal to do so was one of the reasons she’d been sent home from summer camp the one and only time they had ignored her protests and insisted she go.

  “When did you last see her?”

  “Yesterday afternoon,” Marian replied. “She’d been lying out by the pool for hours. I persuaded her to come indoors. She’s going to ruin her skin. She refuses to wear sunscreen. I’ve tried to tell her, but of course she won’t listen. She says sunscreen is the stupidest thing she’s ever heard of because it defeats the purpose.

  “And, Baird, I really think you should say something to her about sunbathing topless. I realize it’s her own backyard, but there are always workmen around here doing one project or another, and I refuse to allow them a free peep show. It’s bad enough she wears a thong, which, if you ask me, looks not only distasteful and unladylike, but terribly uncomfortable.”

  This time she stopped herself from going off on a tangent. “Anyway, yesterday I coaxed her to come inside during the hottest part of the day. I reminded her that we were going to the awards dinner and that she was restricted to the house. She flounced upstairs without speaking to me, slammed her door, and locked it. Apparently, she left last night sometime after we did, and she hasn’t been home since.”

  He hadn’t noticed that Janey’s car was missing because he’d left his out front overnight, not parked in the garage. The next time he grounded Janey he would remember to confiscate her car keys. Not that that would stop her from sneaking out of the house and meeting up with those wild friends of hers, whose influence was doubtless the cause of her misbehavior.

  “Did you call her cell phone?”

  “I get her voice mail. I’ve left repeated messages.”

  “Have you checked with her friends?”

  “Several of them, but none claims to have seen her last night. Of course, they could be lying to cover for her.”

  “What about that tart, that Melissa she’s been spending so much time with?”

  “She’s in Europe with her parents.”

  His secretary knocked softly, then poked her head in and told him that everyone was back in the courtroom.

  “Listen, Marian, I’m sure she’s just punishing us for punishing her. She wants to give you a scare, and she’s succeeding. She’ll turn up. It’s not as if this is the first time she’s stayed out all night.”

  The last time Janey had failed to come home, she’d come close to being booked into the Travis County jail for public lewdness. She and a group of friends had availed themselves of a hotel’s outdoor hot tub. Guests had complained of noise. When hotel security officers checked on the nature of the disturbance, they discovered a bubbling cauldron of young people in varying degrees of drunkenness and nakedness, engaging in all manner of sexual activity.

  His daughter was among the drunkest. She was definitely the most naked, according to the Austin policeman who had personally fished her out of the water and separated her from the young man with whom she was coupled.

  He had wrapped her in a blanket before transporting her home rather than to jail. He’d done it as a favor to the judge, not out of kindness toward the girl who had hurled invectives at him when he delivered her to her parents’ doorstep.

  The officer had been thanked with a hundred-dollar bill, which had tacitly bought his promise to exclude Janey’s name from the incident report.

  “Thank God the media didn’t get wind of that story,” Marian said now, reading the judge’s mind. “Can you imagine the damage your reputation would have suffered?” She sniffed delicately and asked, “What are you going to do, Baird?” Thereby effectually dumping the problem into his lap.

  “I’m in court all day. I haven’t got time to deal with Janey.”

  “Well, you can’t expect me to drive all over Austin looking for her. I’d feel like a dogcatcher. Besides, you’re the one with the contacts.”

  As well as the hundred-dollar bills, he thought sourly. Over the last few years, he’d liberally doled out C-notes to ensure that his daughter’s shenanigans remained a private matter.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he grumbled. “But when she does reappear—as I’m certain she will—don’t forget to page me. I’ll have my pager on vibrate if I’m in court. Punch in three threes. Then I’ll know she’s at home and won’t waste anyone’s time looking for her.”

  “Thank you, dea
r. I knew I could depend on you to handle this.”

  • • •

  Curtis invited Dean to join him for lunch and he accepted, but not naively. He figured the detective was after background information on Paris. He could hardly blame Curtis for being curious, especially after the charged atmosphere they’d created in his office this morning.

  He wouldn’t give him anything, nothing that Curtis couldn’t learn for himself by reading a published bio, but it would be interesting to watch the detective in action.

  They were on their way down the steps in front of the building when Curtis was hailed from behind. The young uniformed cop who had called after him had just emerged from the glass doors. He offered a breathless apology.

  “I hate to hold you up, Sergeant Curtis.”

  “We’re only going to lunch. Do you know Dr. Malloy?”

  “Only by reputation. I’m a little late welcoming you to the Austin PD. Eddie Griggs.” He extended his hand. “A pleasure, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Dean said as they shook hands. “You two take your time, I’ll wait over here in the shade.”

  “I don’t think Sergeant Curtis will mind you hearing this, seeing as how you’re working with him on that Paris Gibson call. That’s what this is about. Well, sorta. Indirectly.”

  “Let’s all get in the shade,” Curtis suggested.

  They moved closer to the building to take advantage of the sliver of shadow it cast on the blazing sidewalk. Traffic whizzed past on nearby Interstate 35, but the rookie made himself heard.

  “You issued a heads-up memo?” he said to Curtis. “About missing persons reports?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, sir . . . Judge Baird Kemp?”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s got a daughter. High school age. Wild as a March hare. Every now and then she gets a little too wild and crosses the line. She’s real well known by cops on patrol after midnight.”

  He glanced around, checking to see if anyone entering or exiting the building was within hearing distance. “The judge is real generous to any officer who takes her home, keeps her out of jail and her name out of print.”

  “I get the picture,” the detective said.

  “So today,” Griggs continued, “the judge called in a special request to some of his friends on the force. Seems that Janey—that’s her name—didn’t come home last night. Everyone’s been asked to be on the lookout, and if she’s spotted, the judge would be very appreciative to the officer who brought her home.”

  Dean hadn’t yet met the judge, but he knew him by name. One of his first duties in Austin had been to try to talk a prisoner into helping the police apprehend his partner in crime, who, by comparison, was the more evil of the two and was still at large.

  The prisoner had refused to cooperate. “I’m not giving them shit, man.”

  “Them,” as opposed to “you,” because Dean had placed himself on the prisoner’s side, becoming his friend, sympathizer, and confidant. The good cop.

  “My trial was rigged! Fuckin’ rigged,” the prisoner ranted. “You hear what I’m saying, man? That judge swayed the jury. Smug motherfucker.”

  His regard for his trial judge didn’t differ from that of most convicted criminals. They rarely had a kind word for the robed individual who, with a final bang of the gavel, sealed their bleak futures.

  Eventually Dean got information from the prisoner that resulted in his partner’s arrest, but the man had maintained his low opinion of Judge Kemp, and, based on what Griggs had just told them, Dean thought it might have been justified.

  Curtis said, “In this county alone, there could be a hundred teenagers who didn’t come home last night, and whose current whereabouts are unknown to their parents. And that would be a conservative estimate.”

  Dean was thinking of his own teenager, who had alarmed his mother on more than one occasion by not returning home until well into the next day. “I agree. It’s too soon to jump to conclusions about one unaccounted-for girl, especially if she makes a habit of staying out.”

  “Judge Kemp would shit a brick if his ‘special request’ became an all-points bulletin,” Curtis remarked, his distaste showing. “All the same, thanks for telling us about this, Griggs. Good follow-up and good hustle. How come you came in so early today?”

  “Putting in overtime, sir. Besides, I hoped I could, you know, help Paris Gibson. She was pretty shook up last night.”

  “I’m sure she will appreciate your diligence.”

  Curtis’s statement was made tongue in cheek. Apparently, he’d noticed the same thing Dean had—the kid was smitten with Paris.

  “Let’s give Miss Janey Kemp a few more hours to sober up and find her way home before we link her to Ms. Gibson’s caller,” Curtis said.

  “Yes, sir.” The young policeman’s manner was so militarily correct, Dean almost expected him to salute. “Have a good lunch, sir. Dr. Malloy.”

  Curtis continued down the sidewalk, but Dean hung back, sensing that Griggs still had something on his mind. If it concerned Paris, he wanted to know what it was. “Excuse me, Griggs? If something’s nagging at you, we’d like to hear it.”

  It was clear the rookie didn’t want to step on the toes of a detective with rank or an officer with an alphabet soup of degrees behind his name and a Dr. in front of it. All the same, he seemed relieved that Dean had invited him to speak his mind.

  “It’s just that this girl goes looking for trouble, sir.” He lowered his voice to a confidential pitch. “One of our undercover narcs at the high school? He says she’s great looking and knows it. A . . . a real babe. Says she’s made moves on him that almost made him forget he was a badge.” Griggs’s ears had turned red. Even his scalp was blushing through his buzz haircut.

  Hoping to relax the younger man, Dean quipped, “I hate when that happens. One of the reasons I never worked undercover.”

  Griggs grinned as though happy to learn that Dean was just a guy after all. “Yeah, well, what I’m saying is, she might’ve placed herself in a situation where something bad could happen.”

  “Flirted with danger and got more than she bargained for?” Curtis asked.

  “Something like that, sir. From what I know of her, she does what she wants to, when she wants to, and doesn’t account to anybody. Not even to her folks. Perfect candidate to be slipped some Rohypnol. If she crossed paths with this Valentino, and he’s done what he claims, nobody would know it for a while. And that could be bad.”

  Curtis asked if anyone had looked for Janey Kemp in places where she was known to hang out.

  “Yes, sir. That’s what the judge wanted done. Covertly, of course. Couple of intelligence officers are on it as well as the regular patrolmen. But it’s summer, so the Sex Club meets outdoors more nights than not, and the meeting place changes every few nights to keep narcs and parents—”

  “Sex Club?” Dean looked over at Curtis for an explanation, but the detective shrugged. Both looked back at Griggs.

  Nervous again, the young officer shifted his weight from one polished shoe to the other. “You don’t know about the Sex Club?”

  • • •

  Paris arrived home exhausted. This was normally the time of day she was getting up. Customarily she ate breakfast when everyone else was having lunch. Today she was off her schedule. If she didn’t sleep a few hours this afternoon, she would be a zombie by sign-off time tonight.

  But after her unexpected reunion with Dean, sleep was unlikely.

  She made herself a peanut butter sandwich she didn’t really want and sat at the kitchen table, a napkin in her lap, pretending it was an actual meal. As she ate, she sorted her mail.

  When she came to the pale blue, letter-sized envelope with the familiar logo in the upper-left-hand corner, she stopped her methodic chewing. She washed down the bite of sandwich with a whole glass of milk, as though fortifying herself for the contents of the envelope.

  The three-paragraph letter was from the dir
ector of Meadowview Hospital. Politely but firmly, in language that could not be misunderstood, he requested that she retrieve the personal belongings of former patient the late Mr. Jack Donner.

  “Since you haven’t responded to my numerous attempts to reach you by telephone,” the letter read, “I can only assume that you never received those messages. Therefore, let this letter serve to notify you that Mr. Donner’s belongings will be removed from the facility if you do not collect them.”

  Her deadline to comply was tomorrow. Tomorrow. And he meant it. The date was underlined.

  While Jack was a patient at Meadowview, Paris had been on a first-name basis with everyone on staff, from the director to the custodian. This read like a letter to a stranger. He’d reached the limit of his patience with her, no doubt because she had ignored his telephone messages.

  She hadn’t been back to the private nursing facility since the day Jack died inside room 203. In the six months since then, she hadn’t had the wherewithal to return, not even to pick up his personal belongings. With very few exceptions, she’d gone to the hospital every day for seven years, but after leaving it that final day, she’d been unable to make herself return.

  Her reluctance to do so wasn’t entirely selfish. She didn’t want to dishonor Jack by remembering him lying in that hospital bed, his limbs withering even though they were exercised every day by Meadowview’s capable staff of physical therapists. He’d been no more self-sufficient than a baby, unable to speak anything except gibberish, unable to feed himself, unable to do anything except take up space and rely on dedicated health care professionals to tend to even his most personal needs.

  That was the condition in which he’d lived—existed—the last seven years of his life. He deserved better than to be remembered like that.

  She folded her arms on the table and laid her head on them. Closing her eyes, she envisioned Jack Donner as he’d been when she met him. Strong, handsome, vital, self-confident Jack . . .

  • • •

  “So you’re the new one who’s causing such a sensation.”

  He had spoken from behind her. When she faced him, her first impression was of the cockiness of his grin. Her assigned cubicle in the newsroom was barely large enough to turn around in. It was crammed with boxes that she was in the process of unpacking. Jack had pretended not to notice that he was contributing to the crowded conditions.