Hello, Darkness

by Sandra Brown

  How like her so-called best friend, Melissa thought, to steal the limelight on her first night back from Europe. The evening had turned into a real drag, and she was in a sour mood. Having heard enough about Janey to last a lifetime, Melissa decided to go home and submit to jet lag.

  But when she spotted the older guy, she changed her mind.

  She had seen him before. Her memory wasn’t 100 percent reliable, but she was almost positive that Janey had been with him at least once. As galling as it was to admit, he probably would choose Janey over her if Janey was here. Which she wasn’t.

  So Melissa sauntered over to where he stood leaning against the driver’s door of his car, observing. “You going or coming?”

  He looked her up and down, then formed a slow grin. “Right now, neither.”

  She slapped his arm playfully. “I think you took my meaning wrong.”

  “You didn’t intend the double entendre?”

  She wasn’t sure what that was, so she shrugged and gave him her most beguiling smile. “Maybe.”

  He was nice looking. Around thirty-five, she’d guess. A little old and geeky, but so what? At least he would be impressed by her travels.

  “I just got back from France.”

  “How was it?”

  “Frenchy.”

  He smiled in appreciation of her wit.

  “It was a total blast. I didn’t know what the hell they were saying, but I liked listening to them talk. I saw this guy drinking wine with breakfast. Parents give it to their kids, can you believe that? And people sunbathe nude on public beaches.”

  “Did you?”

  She grinned slyly. “What do you think?”

  He reached out and brushed her arm. “Mosquito.”

  “They’re vicious tonight. Maybe we should get in your car.”

  He ushered her to the passenger door and opened it for her, then went around and got in on the driver’s side. He started the motor and turned on the air conditioner.

  “Hmm, this is much better,” she said, wiggling against the cool leather upholstery. “Nice car,” she said, taking in the interior. Glancing into the backseat, she asked, “What’s that?”

  “A plastic trash bag.”

  “Duh! I know that. What’s in it?”

  “Want to see?” He reached between the seats and picked up the bag, then set it in her lap.

  “It’s not dirty laundry, is it?” she asked, and he laughed.

  Melissa undid the twist tie and peered inside, then took out a magazine. The title and cover couldn’t have been more explicit, but she feigned nonchalance. “In France, you can buy fetish mags like this on every street corner. Nobody thinks anything about it. Can I look?”

  “Be my guest.”

  By the time she’d gone through the magazine, his fingers were strumming the inside of her thigh. He lowered his head to nuzzle her breast. “What’s this?”

  “My souvenir from France.” She raised her top and proudly showed him her nipple ring. “I met this guy on the beach who knew this dentist who does body piercing on the side.”

  He began to laugh.

  “What’s funny?”

  He flicked the silver ring with the tip of his finger. “Inside joke.”

  • • •

  There were seven calls from Liz on Dean’s home telephone voice mail. He listened to all seven.

  “I can’t imagine why you haven’t called me,” the last message began. “I’ve gone beyond angry, Dean. I’m scared. Has something happened to you or Gavin? If you get this message, please call. If I don’t hear from you within an hour, I’m going to start calling the Austin hospitals.”

  The message had been left at 3:20 A.M. There was a similar one on his cell phone voice mail. The last thing he wanted was to talk to Liz. No, the last thing he wanted was to have her start calling the hospitals.

  He dialed her cell phone, which she answered on the first ring. “I’m okay,” he said immediately. “No one’s in the hospital, and you have every right to be mad as hell. Let fly.”

  “Dean, what is going on?”

  He slumped into a chair at his kitchen table and plowed his fingers through his hair. “Work. We’ve got a crisis situation.”

  “I haven’t heard any news about—”

  “Not a national crisis. Not a plane crash, standoff, mass murder, nothing like that. But it’s a tricky case. I got involved early this morning . . . yesterday morning, rather. I was consulted as soon as I got to my office, and I’ve been on it all day. I just got home and I’m beat. None of which is an excuse for not returning your calls.”

  “What kind of case?”

  “Missing girl. Egotistical suspect. He’s called and told us what he plans to do to her unless we can locate her before his deadline.” He didn’t have the energy to tell her more than that. Besides, the details would have included Paris. Liz didn’t know about Paris, and this wasn’t the time to try to explain a situation of that complexity.

  “I’m sorry you had such a hellish day.”

  “Jesus, Liz, I’m the one who’s sorry.”

  He had much to be sorry for. Sorry for pretending to return her love, and pretending so well that she believed he did. Sorry for not telling her to remain in Houston as she should have done. Sorry for wishing that her trip to Chicago would last longer than a few days.

  Lamely he asked, “How did the meetings with the Swedes go?”

  “Danes. They accepted my proposal.”

  “Good. Not surprising, though.”

  “How’s Gavin?”

  “He’s all right.”

  “No more arguments?”

  “We’ve avoided bloodshed.”

  “You sound exhausted. So I’m going to hang up and let you get some rest.”

  “Again, about today—”

  “It doesn’t matter, Dean.”

  “The hell it doesn’t. I caused you a lot of unnecessary worry. It matters.”

  He was angry with her for not being angrier with him. It would have eased his conscience if she’d been royally pissed off. He didn’t want her to be understanding. He didn’t want to be let off the hook gently. He wanted her to be mad as hell.

  But a full-fledged fight would have required energy he didn’t have, so he let it drop with a feeble, “Well, anyway, I apologize.”

  “Accepted. Now go to bed. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “I promise. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  He took a long drink straight from the bottle of water in the fridge, then moved through the dark house, toward the bedrooms. There was no light beneath Gavin’s door, not even the glow of his computer monitor. He paused to look in.

  Gavin was asleep. Wearing only his underwear, he was lying on his back, long limbs flung wide, covers kicked away. He was almost as long as the bed. He was breathing through his mouth, as he’d done since he was a baby. He looked very young and innocent. At sixteen, he was on the borderline between boy and man. But asleep, he seemed much more like a child than a grown-up.

  Dean realized, as he stood looking down at his son, that the painful twinge he felt deep inside his chest was love. He hadn’t loved Gavin’s mother, nor she him, really. But both had loved Gavin. From the day they knew he’d been conceived, they had channeled the love they should have had for each other into the person they had created.

  Obviously they had failed to communicate the depth of that love to Gavin. He still didn’t believe that correction was for his protection and that discipline wasn’t a pleasant pastime for them, but a demonstration of how important he was to them.

  Damn it, Dean had wanted to be a good parent. He’d wanted to get it right. He hadn’t wanted his son to doubt for one moment of his life that he was loved. But somewhere along the way he must have tripped up, done something wrong, omitted doing something he should have. Now his son held him in contempt and made no secret of it.

  Feeling the weight of his failure, Dean backed away from Gavin’s bed and quietly closed
the door behind him.

  The master bedroom was a large room with a high cove ceiling, wide windows, and a fireplace. It deserved better decorating than what he’d done, which amounted to nothing more than basic furnishings and a bedspread. When he’d moved in, he’d told Liz he was saving the decorating for her to do after they married. But he’d been lying to her as well as to himself. He’d never even invited her to spend the night in this bed.

  He plugged his cell phone battery charger into a wall socket in the bathroom so it would be handy in case of a call, then stripped and got into the shower and let the hot water pound into him while he mentally reviewed everything that had taken place after Valentino’s call.

  The race to the pay telephone had been a wasted effort for all concerned—for the cops in the three squad cars who had converged on it, for Sergeant Robert Curtis, who had arrived as neatly dressed as he was during daylight hours, and for Paris and him.

  They had arrived shortly after it was confirmed that Valentino was no longer anywhere in the vicinity of the pay phone from which his call had originated. The Wal-Mart store had been closed for hours. The parking lot was a vast desert of concrete. There were no witnesses except for a stray cat who had helped himself to the remnants of a hot dog someone had tossed toward a trash bin, but missed.

  “And the cat’s not talking,” Curtis said wryly as he summed up the situation for them.

  He and Paris had joined the detective in his car to conduct a postmortem on the aborted effort to catch Valentino. Paris climbed in the back. He sat in the passenger seat. “I made a cassette recording as the call came in,” he told Curtis.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  He played the tape once, then rewound it and they listened to it a second time. When it ended, Curtis remarked, “He doesn’t seem to know we’re after him.”

  “Which could work in our favor,” Dean said.

  “Only until tomorrow when it shows up in the newspaper.” Curtis turned to Paris. “What does he mean when he says you didn’t heed him the last time?”

  “Just as I told him, I have no idea.”

  “You don’t recall a previous warning?”

  “If I had ever received a call like this, I would have reported it to the police.”

  “Which is what she did last night.” Dean didn’t like the way the detective was looking at Paris. “What are you getting at?”

  “Nothing. Just thinking.”

  “Then do us the courtesy of thinking out loud.”

  Curtis turned to him and seemed ready to take issue with his tone of voice, then must have remembered that Dean outranked him. “I was just thinking about Paris.”

  “Specifically?”

  “How she’s gone out of her way to remain anonymous. Which, frankly, I don’t get,” he said, turning back to her. “Other people in your field are extroverts. Publicity hounds. Their pictures are on billboards. They make personal appearances, stuff like that.”

  “I’m not like the wild and crazy drive-time jocks. My program isn’t hyper like theirs. The music is different, and so am I. I’m the disembodied voice in the dark. I’m the sounding board when no one else will listen. If my listeners knew what I looked like, it would compromise the confidentiality I share with them. It’s often easier for people to talk to a stranger than to a trusted friend.”

  “It’s certainly easier for Valentino,” he remarked. “If he is a stranger to you.”

  “He may be now, but he doesn’t want to remain a stranger,” Dean said. Paris and Curtis were sharp enough to know he was referring to Valentino’s suggestion that he and Paris would soon be lovers.

  Curtis, however, was still following his original train of thought. “You know,” he said, “some of those phone sex people are very ordinary looking. Fat, ugly, a far cry from what their voices suggest about them.”

  Dean knew this wasn’t a random observation. “Okay, you’ve tossed out the bait. I’ll bite.”

  “Instead of lounging on a bed of satin sheets in skimpy lingerie, like they want their callers to fantasize, they’re actually in sweats and sneakers, working out of their untidy kitchens. It’s all about imagination.” He turned to address Paris. “Folks hear your voice and conjure up a mental image of you. I did it myself.”

  “And?”

  “I wasn’t even close. I envisioned you dark haired and dark eyed. A fortune-teller type.”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint.”

  “I didn’t say you disappointed me. You’re just not as exotic looking as your voice indicates.” He shifted more comfortably in his seat so he wouldn’t have to crane his neck to talk to her. “All this is to say that some people may have formed an unwholesome image of you. Valentino appears to be one of those people.”

  “Paris can’t be responsible for a listener’s imagination,” Dean said. “Especially if he suffers from mental, emotional, or sexual problems.”

  “Yeah, you said that before.” More or less dismissing Dean’s comment as irrelevant, the detective continued to address Paris. “Is there a personal reason you want to remain anonymous?”

  “Absolutely. To protect my privacy. When you’re a television personality, you’re always in the public eye, even when you’re not on the air. I didn’t like that aspect of my work. My life was an open book. Everything I said or did was subject to criticism, or speculation, or judgment from people who didn’t know anything about me.

  “Radio enables me to stay in the business but out of the spotlight. It allows me to go anywhere without being recognized and scrutinized and to keep my private life just that.”

  Curtis’s harrumph implied that he knew he wasn’t hearing the whole story but was willing to let it go for now. “How long did you say you keep the recordings of your phone calls?”

  “Indefinitely.”

  He grimaced. “That’s a lot of phone calls.”

  “But remember, I only save the ones that I feel are worth saving.”

  “Even at that, we’re talking what? Hundreds?” She nodded. He said, “We’d use up a chunk of our remaining forty-eight hours listening to all those calls, trying to find the one Valentino referred to tonight. But if we go in by the back door—”

  “By looking at cold cases,” Dean said, seeing suddenly where Curtis was headed.

  “Right. I called a friend over there.” The cold-case unit worked out of a separate building a few miles from headquarters. “He promised to check, see if any of their cases have a similarity to Janey Kemp’s.”

  “And if so, we can check to see if Paris received a call from Valentino around that time.”

  “Don’t get too excited,” she cautioned them. “I might not have saved that call. Besides, how could I have dismissed a warning of murder?”

  “I doubt he was so blatant the first time,” Dean told her. “It’s symptomatic of serial rapists to get progressively bolder. They start out cautiously and get more daring with each offense until they’re practically courting capture.”

  Curtis agreed. “That’s been my experience.”

  “Some actually want to get caught,” Dean said. “They’re begging to be stopped.”

  “Somehow I don’t think Valentino fits into that category,” she said. “He sounds very self-assured. Arrogant.”

  Dean looked across at Curtis and could tell that the veteran detective agreed with her. Unfortunately, so did Dean.

  “On the other hand,” he said, “he could be manipulating us. Maybe you don’t remember any such call because there wasn’t one. Valentino could be trying to distract us with a red herring.”

  “Could be,” Curtis said. “I get the distinct feeling he’s laughing up his sleeve.” He asked Paris, “What do you know about Marvin Patterson?”

  “Until yesterday, only his first name.”

  “Why?” Dean asked the detective.

  “He’s split,” Curtis said. “Officers called his place to see if he was at home, told him they were on their way to talk to him. By the time they arrived, Ma
rvin Patterson was gone. Vacated in a hurry. Dirty breakfast dishes in the sink and his coffeepot still warm. That’s how fast he cleared out.”

  Paris asked, “What’s he got to hide?”

  “We’re investigating that now,” Curtis replied. “The Social Security number he put on his job application at the radio station was traced to a ninety-year-old black woman who died in a rest home several months ago.”

  “Marvin Patterson was an alias?” Dean asked.

  “I’ll let you know when we know.”

  Paris said, “Marvin, or whatever his name is, may have something to hide, but I don’t believe he could possibly be Valentino. He uses that creepy whisper, but he’s articulate. If Marvin speaks at all, it’s a mumble.”

  Dean asked her what Marvin looked like. “How old is he?”

  “Thirtyish. I’ve never really paid much attention to his looks, but I would describe him as nice looking.”

  Curtis said, “Let’s wait and see what turns up.”

  “Has anything useful been found on Janey’s computer?” Dean asked.

  “Smut. Lots of it. Written by other kids.”

  “Or predators.”

  Curtis conceded Dean’s point. “Wherever it originated it’s raw stuff, especially coming from high school kids. Rondeau printed out her email address book and is in the process of tracing the users.”

  After that, they’d parted company. Paris’s protests against having police protection were overruled. Curtis had already dispatched Griggs and Carson to her house.

  “They’re both starstruck. If they were guarding the president, they couldn’t be taking it more seriously. They’ll be parked at your curb all night.”

  Dean drove her home. “What about my car?” she asked when he refused to return her to the radio station so she could pick it up.

  “Ask one of your admirers to retrieve it in the morning.”

  She directed him to her house. It was located in a wooded, hilly area on the outskirts of downtown. The limestone house was tucked into a grove of sprawling live oaks and garnished with well-maintained landscaping. A curved walkway lined with white caladiums led up to a deep porch. Twin brass light fixtures glowed a welcome from either side of a glossy-black front door.