The Silenced Women

by Frederick Weisel

  Truro broke the silence. “How’s the new girl, Eden Somers?”

  “All right. Little young. Seems spooked.”

  “Spooked?”

  “You know, frightened.”

  “Of what?”

  Mahler shrugged.

  “There’s so much in the world today to be frightened of, isn’t there? Maybe she’s afraid of you, Eddie. You’ve got a pretty stern demeanor.” Truro smiled at his own remark. “Well, she impressed the heck out of me when I interviewed her. Smart, well spoken. Bit unusual, though, for you to recommend someone outside the department, wasn’t it?”

  “Not unprecedented. I thought we might get a fresh perspective.”

  “Her FBI work was in serial killings. You see a need for that on your team? We average fewer than five homicides a year.”

  “Apparently, she knows how to analyze a crime. I think we can use that.”

  “You’re not being cagey with me, are you, Eddie? Some hidden agenda?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You wonder why someone leaves a position like that to come to a small city police department?”

  “Could be a lot of reasons. What’s important is she might be able to help us.”

  Truro peered at Mahler. “Speaking of backgrounds, I saw in your file you graduated from Princeton, joined the Army Rangers. Came back home to become a police officer?”

  “Yes, sir. A long time ago.”

  “Princeton’s a fine school.”

  “I believe so.”

  “You find this work fulfilling?”

  “It has its rewards.”

  Truro frowned and considered the empty surface of his desk. Mahler wondered if he was supposed to leave.

  Truro looked up again. “I remember what I was going to tell you. Last month, when you were out to our house, you mentioned the de Young Museum down in the city. Sunday, Jen and I saw the Goya exhibit there. Francisco Goya. Know who I’m talking about? Eighteenth-century Spanish painter?”

  “I’ve seen his paintings.”

  “I had, too. But not close up. One painting caught our attention. ‘Corral de locos.’ Yard with Lunatics, I think is how it translates. Dark cell with mentally ill patients. In the foreground, two male patients wrestling each other.”

  Mahler nodded. Where the hell was this going?

  “Anyway, we’re in front of this painting, and Jen starts talking about the light. Apparently, you can understand what eighteenth-century artists were trying to represent if you pay attention to the quality of the light on the canvas.”

  Truro leaned back in his chair. “It’s funny. I’ve been going to art museums for twenty years. I never know what I’m supposed to see. Heck, it’s that way in life, isn’t it? We look at something and don’t know what we’re seeing. But on Sunday, Jen says this one thing, and, boom, I get it. In this Goya painting, the light looks cold and hard, and it illuminates just part of the cell’s inhabitants. The point of the painting is the quality of light.” Truro shook his head and smiled.

  Mahler felt he should say something. Should he say, What the fuck does the quality of light have to do with the dead woman in the park or the killer who’s going to do it again in three days? He rose from his chair. “Guess I’ll have to see the exhibit.”

  Truro beat a little tattoo with his fingertips on the edge of the desk. “Okay, Eddie. Feel free to reassign a couple of officers to help you out. I’ll schedule the press conference for three. Let’s do this thing.”

  While Mahler watched, the chief stood and, as if he had forgotten Mahler, turned back to look out the window, his silhouette framed in the pale October sky.

  Chapter Five

  (i)

  (TUESDAY, 1:15 P.M.)

  Coyle stared at the grainy digital images on his laptop. The recording came from a tree-mounted surveillance camera at Spring Lake Park’s Violetti Gate. It showed the paved entrance to the park, a canopy of trees above the road, and one side of a ticket booth. A streetlamp made a cone of light over the booth and spread long shadows to its edge. Visible at the top of the screen was the tubular-steel gate that blocked access at night.

  Coyle quickly mastered the software controls to accelerate or slow the recording, freeze a frame, or print a still image. The recording ran from 8:00 p.m. Monday to 6:00 a.m. Tuesday. With a motion-sensitive camera, the captured scenes were not continuous but a jumpy series of film clips whenever the sensor was tripped. A timer ran across the bottom of the screen.

  A twentysomething hipster from the county IT department had delivered the recording. The kid wore black-framed Buddy Holly glasses, skinny jeans, and a T-shirt that said “Roadkill Diner.” His short hair was moussed into a hard ridgeline that ran down the center of his head like a tiny mountain range.

  “You okay with this?” Mountain Head asked as he handed Coyle the flash drive.

  “Yeah, I’m good.” Coyle decided he didn’t need to prove his geek credentials to some stoner with spots on his face. At thirty-five, did he already look out of date? What constituted a generation in geekdom? Should he share with Mountain Head his theory that the way each person uses technology is like a signature? Not now. This guy was working too hard at looking bored.

  “You watch it?” Coyle asked.

  The kid shook his head. “I watched a feed a year ago when someone was breaking into the snack bar. The thing mostly picks up animals, which is kind of cool and creepy at the same time. Once in a while, you see teenagers sneaking into the park to play hide the salami. Some of them even wave at the camera.”

  In the beginning, Coyle watched the recording, not certain what he was seeing. The digital capture had no audio track, just a silent, dimly lit picture. The timer’s numbers flickered: 20:32.34, 20:42.07, 20:56.13. Gradually, he figured out the camera’s motion sensor could detect the movement of very small animals. He ran the software on fast-forward.

  At 2:10:23, something appeared. Coyle slowed the recording. A raccoon walked out of the underbrush on the right side of the screen. It stood for a moment in the center of the drive, smelled the air, and walked slowly offstage. Six minutes later, the raccoon returned with something in its mouth. Or, at least it looked like the same raccoon.

  Coyle sat up and rolled his neck. He thought of Adrienne. An hour earlier he had texted to say he wouldn’t be coming home tonight. She just wrote back “kay.” Although they had been living together for a year, he still didn’t know what she was thinking. Lately he thought their sex was better than before, but they didn’t talk about it. Was it normal not to talk about it?

  He never knew what was normal. In his job, he was around a lot that wasn’t normal. And he had no one to ask. The guys in the unit only talked about work. When he told Frames his girlfriend’s name, Frames did an imitation of Sylvester Stallone from the first Rocky movie, screaming Adrienne’s name from the boxing ring.

  Coyle clicked to fast-forward again, and the nearly identical images skittered by—ticket booth in a pool of light, ticket booth in a pool of light. Suddenly something darker. He stopped the tape. 4:02:16. A figure in a hooded sweatshirt stood next to the tubular-steel gate, facing away from the camera. The figure bent over the structure, working at something on the chain lock. “Hidy-ho, motherfucker,” Coyle said out loud.

  At 4:06:10, the hooded figure released the chain and swung the gate away from the drive. Coyle reversed the tape and played it again. This time he could see the person had a tool, probably a screwdriver, to dismantle the lock. The figure, who was short and appeared to be a man, walked out of the picture back toward the entrance. Coyle enlarged the best image and printed a picture. He made a note on a legal pad to check the lock for prints.

  He picked up his phone to call Adrienne. But before he hit speed dial, he stopped. If she was in a meeting, what message would he leave? Say he missed her? Whenever he said things like that, she looked embarr
assed. Should he remind her to cook the chicken they bought yesterday, or did that sound like they were married?

  He couldn’t talk about the case. Besides, she would think it weird he was sitting in a dark room spying on someone. He had spent so much of his life not knowing what to say. “Use your words, Martin,” his mother had told him when he was little and couldn’t speak. What he really wanted to tell Adrienne was he missed hearing her voice. Or did that make him a stalker? Coyle put down his phone and looked back at his laptop.

  Maybe the problem with Adrienne was he came across as too techie. Is that how everyone saw him? Why did Eddie always assign him the tech stuff? He was as good as the others in the field. Six months ago, he had run down and cuffed a parole violator. Rivas couldn’t have made that run. But now the new members of the team, Frames and Eden, were being assigned interrogations ahead of him.

  Coyle hit forward on the recording software. A car appeared, driving through the entrance and out of sight. What was that? He reversed the tape and ran it again. The car was an older model sedan. Too dark to see the color. No license on the front. The driver was nothing but a shadow. Coyle stopped the tape at 4:09:50 and printed an image. He made a note to see if the image could be improved to reveal more of the driver or the car.

  He now ran the tape slowly. Fourteen minutes later, at 4:23:14, the car came back into view, driving out the same way it had come in. Coyle reversed to replay the tape several times. The angle of the streetlamp made it impossible to see the license plate. But on the trunk he could see a three-pointed star emblem distinctive of a Mercedes, and the round taillights of an older model. Late fifties, he guessed. He printed an image of the departing car.

  The hooded figure reappeared, replaced the chain and lock, and walked out of sight. It was 4:29:27.

  (ii)

  (TUESDAY, 1:27 P.M.)

  Thackrey stood on the open balcony, looking over the waist-high glass wall. Thirty-seven stories off the ground, the air was cold and blew open his shirt until it flapped like a sail. To the north, he saw San Francisco’s Financial District, Chinatown, and the Transamerica Pyramid. To the east, the two spans of the Oakland Bay Bridge appeared out of the fog. The view straight down was the Embarcadero waterfront, with toy cars weaving in and out of traffic on Beale and Fremont.

  The view filled him with a sense of mastery. It was his city—his streets, restaurants, clubs. He had made his fortune here, succeeded beyond the dreams of the creatures scrabbling on the ground below.

  “What’s the name of this place?” he called inside.

  Victor sat on a leather sofa. “Empyrean Towers. All the units sold out before the building was even finished.”

  “And they let two gay wogs move in?”

  “They welcomed us.” Russell opened a bottle of wine at the kitchen counter. “In the new millennium, the Chinese are on top.”

  “And without my Indian brothers, you’d still be using eight-bit microprocessors,” Victor said. “You’re the face of the past, white boy.”

  “How much you pay?” Thackrey joined the others inside.

  “One point seven.” Russell handed Thackrey a glass of zinfandel.

  “Lot of money.”

  Russell used his fingers to count off. “Two bedrooms, twenty-four hundred square feet, Viking appliances, Poggenpohl cabinets.”

  Thackrey tasted the wine. “You sound like a drag-queen real estate agent.”

  “And now we lose it because of you,” Victor said.

  Thackrey watched Victor across the room on the sofa. He wondered if Victor would turn out to be a problem. “Don’t get bitchy. You only ever had it because of me, because I let you buy shares of BluFish.”

  “We’re leaving, Ben. Flying out of the country, right after we do this thing for you.”

  “Where to?”

  “None of your business.”

  Thackrey walked slowly around the living room. “This where you practice your martial arts, Vic-tor?”

  “It’s Muay Thai,” Victor said. “Thai boxing. Useful for breaking bones. Want me to show you?”

  “Another time.” Thackrey slipped off his shoes and flexed his toes into the thick carpet pile. “The apartment came like this?”

  Russell picked up his phone and tapped an icon. “We made a few upgrades.” Across the room, a sixty-inch TV came on, with nine separate windows. “For security, we put a webcam in each room. We can monitor what’s going on throughout the apartment from our phones. Even if we’re downtown on Market Street or up at your place in Sonoma County.” He waved at himself in the middle window of the bottom row.

  “I don’t know whether to be impressed at your technical skills or just creeped out.” Thackrey sat beside Victor on the sofa and smiled genially at him. From a pill bottle, he poured different colored tablets on the coffee table and picked out half a dozen oblong pink pills. Raising his glass, he swallowed the pills with a mouthful of wine.

  Victor leaned close to the table and studied the pills. “Provigil?”

  “Yeah, mostly.”

  “Was that two thousand milligrams? Isn’t that, like, ten times recommended? You have anything else in your stack to slow it down?”

  Thackrey drank the last of the wine. “Ever hear of the white-crowned sparrow? Tiny bird. White band on the top of its head. Each fall it flies from its home in Alaska to Southern California—twenty-seven hundred miles. Flies at night. Three hundred miles at a clip. Goes from sleeping nine hours a day in its habitat to an hour and a half in migration. The rest of the time it’s awake, its little beady eyes open. No one knows how it does it. Awake for ten days.”

  “When’s the last time you slept, Ben?” Russell asked. “The stimulants in those things can build up.”

  Thackrey smiled. “Bleaching your hair again, Russ? It looks even lighter than yesterday. What’s your thing now? The only blond Asian?”

  “You used to be a good guy.” Russell looked at Thackrey. “What happened to you?”

  “I got rich. I don’t need to be good.”

  “You helped me.” Russell stood his ground. “You remember that?”

  “I kept you from shooting yourself, you drama queen.”

  “You stayed with me for three months. No one else would. What happened to that guy?”

  “Let’s not get off subject here.” Victor spoke evenly. “We’re concerned about the pills, Ben, because you and your late friend got us into this situation. It would be nice if you weren’t lost in space for the next few days.”

  “If you’ll recall, I’m not the one who caused it. Ask your buddy Russell.”

  “Really? That’s how you’re going to play this?”

  Thackrey faced Victor. “How about you just tell me why you brought me here?”

  Russell stood in front of a laptop on the kitchen counter. “An investigation’s under way by part of the Santa Rosa Police Department called Violent Crime Investigations. VCI.”

  “What do we know about them?”

  “Website says they investigate seventy-five cases a year: homicides, violent assaults, robberies.”

  “So who are they?”

  “Not much about them on the public page,” Russell said. “So we hacked through their crappy, government-issued firewall and got into the personnel files. The team is a lead investigator and four detectives.”

  Russell scrolled down the screen. “Lead guy is Lieutenant Edward Mahler. Been with the department eighteen years. Head of VCI the past twelve. Graduated from Princeton. Go Tigers. Served in the Army Rangers. Hobbies, reading and travel. Likes classical music.”

  “Let me see.” Thackrey walked across the room and peered at the laptop photo of Mahler. “Guy’s wound tighter than shit. Do we know anything about their success rate with homicide investigations?”

  “Website doesn’t have any data on clearance rates.” Russell work
ed the keyboard. “But they average about five homicides a year. Mostly gangs or domestic violence. Pretty straightforward stuff. In-house forensic techs and a county coroner. Basically, they clear most of what shows up. Except for the occasional anomaly.”

  “Anomaly?” Thackrey walked back across the room and sat next to Victor again.

  “A couple years ago, two girls were found strangled in the same park where we left your friend. An arrest was made, but no charges filed. The cases are still open. And here’s the thing. According to the online press reports, this VCI team is trying to figure out if our little business is related to the earlier cases.”

  “How confusing for them.” Thackrey winked at Victor. Provoking him was always good sport.

  Victor kicked the coffee table. “Christ, I hate it when you do that, Ben.”

  “Do what, Vic-tor?”

  “Assume everyone else is an idiot. And stop saying my name like that.”

  Thackrey sighed. “Russ tells me you’re named after a famous Indian actor—Victor Banerjee. How did I not know this until now? Would I have seen him in anything?”

  “A Passage to India. 1984. Directed by David Lean.”

  “Oh, I saw that one. So did he play Dr. Aziz or Mrs. Moore?”

  Victor shook his head. “For chrissakes, you’re like a child. You could have left her. You could have left both of them, like a normal person. You didn’t have to kill them.”

  Thackrey watched Victor’s eyes while he spoke. At some point he was going to have to shoot Victor. He turned to Russell. “What do we think the cops are working on?”

  “The blanket. It may have something they can trace.”

  “Fucking dog hair,” Victor said.

  Thackrey shrugged. “We’ll deal with it.”

  “Blood in your living room.”

  “At this point I don’t see the cops making it to my living room. But we can take care of the blood, too.”

  “The KelTec.”