The Silenced Women

by Frederick Weisel

  “What happened to Woodhouse?” Eden asked.

  “Got old. Retired.”

  Rivas picked up the top binder and held it toward Eden. “Michelle Foss. First one killed in the park. Riding her bike on the trail near the water tanks. We believe she reached the steepest part of the trail and stopped to catch her breath. The killer came from behind, pulled her into the brush, and strangled her. She took the same trail three times a week and rested at the same place. Our theory is the killer saw her and noticed the pattern.”

  “How was she killed?” Eden wrote notes in a steno pad. “Was there a weapon?”

  “None was ever found. ME thought it was a thick, smooth cord. No fibers or cuts.”

  “And you never got anything when you looked at Partridge?”

  “No marks on his hands. He might have worn gloves.”

  Mahler only half-listened to the other two. Rivas’s voice ran in slow motion, as if his well-known memory of local homicides was filled to capacity, burdening his speech under the weight of too much history. Mahler remembered he had meant to talk to Rivas about Peña’s pulling a gun. Had something spooked the man?

  Rivas pointed to the next binder. The woman in this photo had a thin face and long, brown hair pulled into a ponytail. “Susan Hart. She was a runner. Set some county records in the high school quarter-mile. Had just joined the junior college team. She was running on Fisherman’s Trail on the west side of the lake. Same method of strangulation. Body found in a heavily wooded section of the trail over by the boat launch.”

  Eden wrote in her notebook. “You think she stopped like the first victim, and the killer was watching her, too?”

  “Could be. Or maybe he just got lucky. That trail isn’t used much.”

  Mahler grew impatient with these questions. Would they identify a killer? What he needed were new questions.

  Eden turned a page of the file. “Who made these notes in the margin?”

  Rivas smiled. “Tom. He was old-school. Never stopped asking questions.”

  Mahler watched as Rivas put the Hart binder aside. Since her murder, the dead girl had visited Mahler once a week, telling him stories of middle-distance running in the bubbly, fresh voice of a twenty-year-old still new to her death. He saw her now jogging on Fisherman’s Trail, through the winter-bare trees, back toward the boat launch, on the stretch of muddy trail she never reached. With each stride, her ponytail bounced back and forth. The way her hair moved was not in the file. For a moment, he thought of telling Eden about it.

  Rivas picked up the next binder. “Irwin Carlton Partridge. Thirty-seven at the time of the last killings, forty now. In and out of the system since he was a teenager. Started out with theft, vandalism. Arrested for assault in his twenties and put on probation. Then attempted rape. Another attempted rape. No charges filed. Finally did eighteen months in Mule Creek for assault. Beat up his girlfriend, broke her eye socket.”

  “What was the weapon?” Eden asked, writing.

  Rivas frowned. “A bottle.”

  Mahler felt himself suffocating. At this rate, it would take them hours to finish talking. None of this accumulation of detail would work. He and Woodhouse had gone over the same ground a thousand times, each new scrap holding promise until it didn’t. Had he really expected this untainted young woman to bring new magic to the case, to reach into the old file and discover the error, the slipup the killer had left behind two years earlier? The migraine, which lay momentarily quelled in the back of his head like a waiting wild beast, left him feeling for its onset, sensitive to every sound. Beside him, Eden’s pen slowly scratched across the page.

  “The assault on the girlfriend—the broken eye socket—was that local?” Eden asked.

  Mahler’s hands squeezed into fists.

  “No,” Rivas said. “Vallejo, where he grew up. He moved here in—”

  “STOP WRITING,” Mahler shouted.

  Eden jumped and dropped her pen.

  Mahler faced her, his voice still loud. “You don’t need to take notes. This isn’t a class.”

  “Yes, sir. I didn’t know the…practice.” Eden’s face flushed. She looked down at the table.

  “I’m sorry I raised my voice.” Mahler spoke quietly. “But your job here is to listen. You shouldn’t have any trouble remembering this.”

  “Yes, sir,” Eden whispered. She fumbled with the steno pad, her hands shaking.

  At Mahler’s outburst, Rivas had backed away. “Eddie, can we at least talk about whether we should go back to these cases right now?”

  “You want to talk?”

  Rivas took a deep breath. “I just want to be sure this is the right thing. We didn’t discuss it in the briefing with Martin and the others.”

  “You want to take a vote?” Mahler watched the detective shift back and forth. Rivas was a follower, unused to speaking up. Maybe the encounter with Peña had shaken something loose.

  “No, Eddie. Listen, we’ve got some good stuff on this latest victim. The car and the guy on the surveillance camera. The things from the canvass. We’ve got a shot—it’s different from the last time. But we all have to work it. There’s not time for these other cases.”

  “So you know the latest one wasn’t Partridge? You decided that?”

  “No, of course not. But shouldn’t we wait for the evidence to take us to Partridge and then come back to these cases?”

  “I’m not waiting for anything. I’m going after the son of a bitch.”

  “That’s just it. It’s not you. It’s us, the whole team.” Rivas weighed his words. “Does the chief know we’re doing this?”

  Mahler smiled. “Is that what this is about? I guess you’ve got a choice, Daniel. You can do what I tell you, or you can talk to Truro. Go ahead. Talk to Truro. Tell him you think I’m screwing this up. Maybe he’ll offer you my job.”

  “Eddie—”

  His anger spilling out, Mahler felt the words racing ahead. “He likes you, thinks you’re the salt of the earth. You be the lead investigator. Bump in salary, another week’s vacation. I’ll retire and go home and read that shelf of books I’ve been staring at for twenty years.”

  “Eddie, for God’s sake—I just wanted to talk about this.”

  “Does it sound like I want to talk?” Mahler bit off the words.

  Rivas glanced at Eden. “All right, Eddie, you want to do this? Okay, then tell me. When did you really decide to work these old cases? You hired Detective Somers two weeks ago. She’s a specialist in serial killings. You knew before this latest homicide you were going to go back to these old cases, didn’t you? That’s why she’s here. Isn’t it?”

  Mahler studied Rivas. “You want to make decisions for this team, apply for the job. But if you want to work for me, do what I tell you or get the fuck out.”

  The men faced each other. Mahler stood still until Rivas slowly turned away and went back to the table of binders. Mahler felt the silence in the room. In seven years of working together, he had never spoken to Rivas that way. Something new had happened, something that had overtaken Mahler before he could stop it.

  At the table, Rivas looked at the binders without speaking. Then he addressed Eden in a quiet voice. “Partridge didn’t move to Santa Rosa until 2006. Lived with his stepmother for a while and then got his own place. He came to the department’s attention once. A domestic dispute with his latest girlfriend. She declined to testify.”

  Eden instinctively looked at her notepad and remembered her pen was somewhere on the floor. “Martin said you had evidence connecting Partridge to the Foss and Hart cases?” Her voice was hesitant. Behind her, she was aware of Mahler moving away from them and standing by the door.

  “Yeah. A female cyclist saw a man matching Partridge’s description on the trail to the water tanks thirty minutes before Foss was strangled. In the Hart case, we had two things. A dark Nissan li
ke Partridge’s was seen parked on Newanga Avenue at the time of the murder. And we had a muddy shoe print, matching his shoes, on the back calf of the victim.”

  “Any evidence of him coming into or leaving the park on the days of the murders?”

  Rivas shook his head. “No. We looked at that. The gate guards didn’t remember him, and the surveillance camera had nothing. But the park borders are fairly porous.”

  “And you questioned him?”

  “Yeah. Eddie and Tom mostly. Tom’s one of the best interrogators I’ve ever known. Went at him for two days.”

  “So in the end he was never charged? The shoe print wasn’t enough?”

  Rivas looked behind him at Mahler until their eyes met. “No.”

  “And after that, no more killings happened?”

  “No. We worked both cases as long as we could. Tom especially. DA encouraged us to look beyond Partridge—to boyfriends of the two girls, family members, park regulars, locals with previous assault records. In the end we looked at two guys in particular. Both had priors and lived in town. One looked promising, and then he didn’t. Tom spent months on them. I think it’s what burned him out in the end.”

  “So what now?”

  Across the room, Mahler felt his breath return and gritted his teeth against the headache. He walked slowly back to the table. “One idea is, the guy had some experience before this. The killings were quick and neat. In daylight. No witnesses. No evidence left behind.”

  “Which brings us to these three victims.” Rivas picked up the last binders. “The first one is a local case. MaryEllen Reese, killed a year before the park killings. Her body was found along Santa Rosa Creek near Highway 12. The other two are similar unsolved cases from Vallejo, during the time Partridge lived there: Beth Hunter and Amanda Smith. I just pulled them off ViCAP. As far as I know, Tom didn’t look at these.”

  “But why’d Partridge stop after two? Studies show a serial killer doesn’t stop until he’s caught.”

  Mahler lifted the stack of binders and laid them in Eden’s arms. “It’s not always like the research. We don’t know why our killer did anything. Your job is to find evidence that tells us who killed these young women.” He turned to walk out the door.

  Eden struggled to balance the binders. “I guess I don’t know what I’m looking for.”

  Mahler paused in the doorway. “Look at the quality of light.”

  (ii)

  (TUESDAY, 3:00 P.M.)

  The city council amphitheater consisted of rows of steep, stadium-style seating looking down at a stage with speakers’ table and microphones. Mahler sat at the table with Mayor Ransom and Chief Truro. A dozen reporters faced them in the stadium seats. The mayor suggested they wait a few minutes, to see if any more members of the media would arrive.

  The dulled migraine lingered behind Mahler’s eyes. His nerves were still frayed from shouting at Eden and the run-in with Rivas. But impatient as he was with the pace of the two murder investigations—the latest Jane Doe and the earlier park victims—for the first time in his career, he could not see the path forward.

  He looked out on the reporters—fewer and less professional than in years past. He recognized only three of them. Still, they made Mahler wary. Following the Hart murder, several news organizations had reported innuendos about his own culpability. Also, he had little to allay public fears, and the less the press and the public knew about his investigation, the better.

  Mayor Ransom finally stood. She was a tall woman, with old-fashioned big hair and a speaking style that put special emphasis on the obvious. She started by saying that the press conference’s purpose was to keep the public informed of the police investigation. The city and police department were committed to making themselves available to the press in the coming days. Mahler watched a reporter in the front row drawing what looked like large loops on his pad.

  Truro went next. In his Class A dress uniform, the chief spoke with a stiff military bearing. He gave an outline of the investigation, several times glancing at Mahler for confirmation. He noted the steps taken to ensure the public’s safety: coordination with the county for increased park patrols, enforcement of the park admission hours, and temporary suspension of overnight camping. At the end, he introduced Mahler and handed him the microphone.

  Mahler ignored the microphone. “I don’t have a statement. If you have questions, I’ll try to answer them.”

  A reporter at one of the alternative weeklies spoke up. “When do you expect to identify the victim?”

  “We’ve received dozens of leads, and we’re hoping one will result in identification in the next few days.”

  A tall man on the aisle who Mahler recognized as a San Francisco TV reporter raised his hand. “Do you know how the victim died?”

  “We haven’t established cause of death yet.”

  “Can you say if she was murdered?”

  “The medical examination is not complete.”

  “Was she killed in the park?” someone shouted.

  “We don’t know that.”

  For a few minutes, questions were called out so quickly from around the room that Mahler lost track of the questioners.

  “Is it possible this was a suicide?”

  “That hasn’t been ruled out.”

  “Was any evidence recovered at the crime scene?”

  “I can’t comment.”

  “Some of the weblog photos show the victim was wrapped in a blanket. Do you know why?”

  “No comment.”

  “Is there any connection to the family who donated the bench?”

  “Probably not, but it’s part of our investigation.”

  “Is there any significance in the location of the body?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “When was the body discovered?”

  “About six this morning.”

  “Who discovered it?”

  “A member of the public who entered the park and contacted the police.”

  “How did the body get there if the park is closed after dark?”

  “The exact method is unknown, but it’s possible to enter the park even when the gates are closed.”

  “Was more than one person involved?”

  “That’s under investigation.”

  “Do the circumstances match any other cases?”

  “Obviously we’re looking at that.”

  “Eddie,” a voice called out, “are there similarities with the killings two years ago?” Mahler recognized Rob Christie, a veteran local crime reporter.

  “It’s too early for us to say, Rob. We’re still collecting evidence.”

  “Is the same individual you questioned two years ago a suspect this time?”

  “We cannot release any information about a suspect at this time.”

  “Has anyone been questioned in connection with the case?”

  “No comment.”

  “Chief Truro, is it safe to use the park?” a woman in the back asked.

  “Yes,” the chief said. “With the measures we’ve initiated, we believe the park is safe.”

  “What’s your position on the Violence Against Women protest set for tomorrow night in Courthouse Square?” the same woman asked.

  “We support the public’s right to freedom of speech.”

  “Lieutenant Mahler, do you feel a special urgency to find the suspect this time?” asked a reporter on the far aisle. The voice was new, and Mahler took a moment to locate the questioner. Dressed in a dark suit with an open-collar shirt, the reporter slumped in his seat, his long legs draped over the seat in front of him.

  “My team and I feel the same urgency to identify the suspect in every case.”

  “Can you assure the public you won’t make the same mistakes as two years ago?”

  A sudden silence fell ov
er the chamber. Mahler saw every audience member look up. He faced the reporter. “I’m not aware of any mistakes made two years ago by my team or the department.”

  “Really? So the second homicide wasn’t caused by delays in your investigation?”

  Mahler waited a beat. “I think we’re done.” He pushed back his chair and stood.

  Chief Truro whispered, “Where’re you going?”

  Mahler walked around the council table and up the steep stairs at the edge of the amphitheater. Passing the reporter who asked the last question, Mahler slowed to meet his eyes before continuing up the stairs.

  The room was quiet. Mahler felt the reporters watching his back. As he reached the top of the council chambers, the theater erupted, and three or four reporters called out questions at once. Mahler turned to look down at Truro, standing with his arms above his head, as the noise flooded toward him.

  Chapter Eight

  (i)

  (TUESDAY, 4:08 P.M.)

  “We started without you,” the female officer announced as Eden walked into the conference room on the second floor of police headquarters. The woman, who introduced herself as Gina Cipriani, was broad-shouldered and had the erect bearing of many of the uniformed employees Eden had met.

  Across the table, a large man with a smoothly shaven head sat peering into a laptop screen. “That imposing figure over there,” Cipriani said, “is future Officer-of-the-Year Bob Pace. He’s my partner, in the professional sense only, thank God.”

  Pace waved at Eden without looking away from his screen.

  Joining them, Eden felt small and underdressed. She wondered how much the uniformed officers knew about her. Did they know she was from the FBI? Would they care she was assigned to detectives from outside the department?

  “You’re VCI, right?” Cipriani asked. She smiled. “Just how new are you?”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Well, welcome to the SRPD, Eden Somers. You’re fortunate this afternoon to be working alongside two of this department’s elite crime-stoppers.” She gestured toward the telephone in the center of the table. “That’s the public tip line for the homicide in the park. I’m transcribing the voicemails, and handsome Bob is hunting-and-pecking his way through the web replies. We’re transferring the information to standardized forms and posting them to the department database.”