Mahler understood the thing in his line of sight to be a hallucination brought on by his migraine, and he knew from experience that this thing, this scotoma, would last a minute or two. He could not see past the dancing aura to the woman’s face, but he sensed Knolls watching him.
As he looked down, the aura tracked his field of vision. He reached with his right hand through the blind space for the pencil and picked it up, grateful for the reality of touch. He squeezed the pencil tight.
“We tried to talk to her, but all she wanted was to be with her friends, not us. Chloe had friends. It wasn’t like that girl didn’t have friends.”
The aura faded. The dead space slowly filled with the woman’s face, her eyes searching him. The tiny, sparkling stars flashed and disappeared.
“She started going out at night. Coming home at three and four in the morning. Wouldn’t say where she’d been. She said it wasn’t any of our business. Whose business was it? That’s what I want to know.”
Mahler’s pain slowly subsided, and he watched his vision restore itself.
Knolls leaned forward. “Are you listening to me?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry your family is going through…this.”
“Do you think another girl will be killed like last time?”
“We’re doing everything we can to find whoever killed this young woman.” Mahler could not tell whether Knolls heard him. She continued staring at him, as if she expected something more.
“You have children?” she asked.
“No…I don’t.”
“You’ve no right to judge me then, do you?” Her face reddened.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. I’ll bet when a girl’s killed like this, the first thing you think is, this wouldn’t happen if it wasn’t for the parents. You wouldn’t have this terrible work if people weren’t so careless and stupid. People like us get what we deserve, isn’t that right?”
“Mrs. Knolls, please,” Mahler said. “I’m sorry your daughter’s missing. I’m afraid I can’t do anything at this time.”
“You can’t do anything at this time? What is this, some kind of a joke?”
“There’s a procedure—”
“I’ll bet there is.”
“Have you filed a Missing Person Report for your daughter?”
“Yeah, yeah. What difference does it make? You’ll find her when she’s dead.”
Mahler took a business card from his shirt pocket and wrote on the back. Feeling the intensity of being so close to the woman’s unguarded rage, he watched his hand make an unfamiliar scrawl. “This is the direct line for Dennis Beech. He’s the officer in charge of missing person investigations. I’ll call him right now and tell him to expect your call.”
Knolls dropped the card in her purse without looking at it. She pushed back her chair and stood. “You cops. You sit here and you don’t say anything. And we’re supposed to be grateful. But I’ve heard about the way you look at these girls’ bodies when you find them. What you do is dirty and shameful.” She swung her purse strap over her shoulder and walked out of the interview room without waiting for Mahler.
(ii)
(TUESDAY, 11:37 P.M.)
“We’re being tested, you and me,” Frames said. “Like right now. This is a test.”
“What do you mean, tested?” Eden asked.
“We’re the new kids. They rotate in new detectives every few years. Try them out. Some make it, some don’t. And they give them tests. That’s how law enforcement works. It’s not what you know—it’s about proving yourself, not fucking up.”
They sat in the front seat of a Crown Victoria parked below the overnight campground in Spring Lake Park, hoping to find the homeless man who told the campers he had seen a body. The canopy of oaks made the world so dark they could see no more than twenty yards in any direction. For the past hour, they’d taken turns standing outside the car to listen for a man walking up through the trees. But now, for a few minutes, they’d agreed to sit inside to get warm. The only sound coming in the half-open windows was a deep chorus of frogs from the lake’s marshy edge.
“I think we’ve just got different jobs to do.” Eden poured herself a cup of chamomile tea from a thermos. There was something uncomfortably intimate about sitting next to Frames in the dark car—he in the driver’s seat, she in the passenger’s. In her two weeks on this job, they’d been alone together only once, in the break room, for a few awkward minutes. Maybe this was part of the test—being alone with another officer. “Lieutenant Mahler spreads the work around, tries to match the job with our talents.”
“Talents? So you and I have what? A talent for sitting outside in the fucking cold?”
“Maybe not, but we’re a team. We each do our part.” She was surprised at the assuredness in her voice. She found herself talking just to fill the silence.
“Well, I’ll bet two members of this team couldn’t be more different than you and me. Where’d you go to college anyway? Harvard?”
“Mount Holyoke. An all-women’s college in Massachusetts.”
“All-women’s, no kidding? Didn’t know they still have those.”
“I majored in clinical psychology. Sophomore year, I took a course in criminal psychology and kind of got hooked.”
“Mind of the criminal, right? I got some of that in the courses I took.”
“Senior year, we had to do a thesis on a real case. I wrote mine on the Highway 60 murders. The case is sort of famous. Serial killer on this highway that runs from Virginia to Arizona. Nine girls, all of them—” Eden looked out of the car. Why was she talking so much? She hated talking about the case. It never came out right—like something anyone should be interested in.
Frames waited to see if she would say anything else. “Rivvie says you were in the FBI?”
“Yeah. I did that special agent course at Quantico. Then I got hired as an analyst with this thing called the Behavioral Analysis Unit. We worked with local law enforcement to analyze evidence.” Did it sound like she was bragging? Would Frames think she was bragging?
“Like profiling?”
“Sometimes. I worked on a bunch of things.”
“And you left that to come here?”
“Yeah. It was—I don’t know, I guess I wanted to try something else, in the field.” Her voice dropped off. She wondered if Frames was buying this answer. “How about you?”
“Me? I’m a jarhead, Marine. But I always wanted to be a cop. When I got out of the service, I took my degree at the junior college. Did four years on patrol.”
Frames would be better at this job than her. Better at sitting in this dark car, knowing what to say. He’d pass the test. “Did you like it?”
“It was okay. It’s not what you think. Mostly you have to know how to talk to people, defuse a situation. I had the skill set. Work under command, familiar with firearms.”
“That’s what I mean.” Eden tried to regain her voice. “Lieutenant Mahler put together the team, recognizing our different backgrounds.”
Frames checked the time on his cell. He leaned back and yawned. “You think he’s losing it? Mahler, I mean.”
She wasn’t sure what to say. Could she trust Frames? “Losing it?”
“Going after Partridge, instead of focusing on this latest murder?”
“I think he’s trying to look at every possible thing to see if they might be related.”
“What I heard is, the last time, two years ago, he choked. Waited on evidence, and it led to the second girl’s death.”
Eden found herself wanting to defend Mahler. “We don’t know that. It’s not really—”
Suddenly something crashed onto the Crown Victoria’s hood with a force that rocked the car.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Frames yelled.
Eden threw herself backward into
the seat, dropping the cup of tea.
In front of them, a large dark thing raised itself like an animal and leaped at the windshield.
Frames braced himself on the steering wheel. “Fucking shit!”
The thing on the hood rose up. For a moment it stood over them. Then it dove off the car, vanishing into the darkness, toward the trees.
Frames pulled his gun from his holster and jerked open the car door. “Let’s go,” he whispered.
Eden had stopped breathing when the thing hit the hood. Now she gasped for breath, her lap burning from the hot tea. Holding a gun in one hand, she stepped outside. The oak grove was dense black.
Frames was gone. How was she supposed to back him up? Was she too slow? Why didn’t he wait?
She listened for Frames. Once she heard someone running. Then it was quiet. Her heart pounded. She slowed her breathing and listened. Close by, small creatures moved in the dry leaves.
She walked around the car, keeping one hand in contact with its body. She thought of going back inside for a flashlight. She thought of calling for Frames. But she did neither. She pictured the dead woman on the bench across the lake. Had her last minutes been like this? She pushed the thought away. They’re being tested, Frames said. This is a test.
As she stood beside the passenger door, facing the front of the car, she felt a change in the air behind her. It made no sound. She had a faint sense of a solid thing in the space at her back where, a moment before, the air had moved. She tried to breathe slowly and check her senses. She felt it, still there. She thought of the cord used to strangle the girls two years earlier, how it had come from behind before they knew it. Where’s Frames?
She turned.
Beside the car’s rear door stood a large black figure, a foot taller and looming over her. In the darkness, she could not see what it was, only the outline of something darker than the woods and sky. The shape looked like a man wrapped in rags, smelling of mold and rottenness. The figure had not moved since she faced it.
Eden stepped back a few feet and raised her gun. Where’s Frames?
The instincts of her firearms training kicked in: keep your shooting finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire. Her hands shook too much to feel the guard. Pointing the wobbly gun toward the thing, she said, “Police officer.” The words came out in a child’s high, thin voice.
The black thing stood still and silent. Then, from the top of the rags came a deep, growling sound. It said, “Faideela.”
Chapter Ten
(i)
(WEDNESDAY, 1:17 A.M.)
Coyle sat upright in his chair and massaged his neck. He was alone in the dark Violent Crime room, the only light coming from the two laptop monitors in front of him. By now, he had been sitting in the same spot for twelve hours, with just a break at six for an Arby’s melt. Tired as he was, he also felt inside a zone of concentration. For the past hour, his earbud had been playing a mix of Irish rock—Thin Lizzy and, after that, the Boomtown Rats—and he had been eating jalapeño-flavored trail mix that had orange-powdered his fingers and the keyboards.
He read the paragraph on the Mercedes website for the third time. It described how the so-called “Ponton” sedan, like the one in the Spring Lake Park surveillance film, had been manufactured from 1953 to 1962. Year to year, the main differences were in engine size, not body design.
Coyle had loaded a photo of the car from the surveillance video on a second laptop, and now he panned slowly across the image. The trunk shape and taillights were clearly the Ponton style, but the car might be from any of nine years. The color could be dark blue, green, or even black.
He toggled from the Mercedes website to the Department of Motor Vehicles database. More than two hundred owners of Mercedes models dated 1953 to 1962 were registered in California.
Coyle stared at the spreadsheet. Who were these people, and why did they want these dumpy-looking cars? He clicked on 1959 at random and scanned down the alphabetical list of names: Marilyn Aldrich, Kenneth Ashby, Steve Baab. One of them, he thought, is the owner of the car that drove through the Violetti Gate and deposited the body of Jane Doe.
An alarm on the right-hand laptop suddenly beeped, and Coyle jumped at the sound. He had set the alarm to go off every thirty minutes to remind him of the time.
Coyle felt some satisfaction in his progress. A two-dimensional plot analysis of the hooded man in the video, using known heights of other objects in the surveillance film, indicated the man was about five feet, four inches. Based on the way the hooded figure disconnected the gate lock, the man also appeared to be left-handed.
The scarf that the search dog found in the park turned out not to be a woman’s—surprising to Coyle—but a brand sold in the men’s department of a chain store. The label indicated it was a Sheer Danger brand, with an Ardent Autumn design, and in stock in six Northern California outlets. Coyle had a note to check with Mahler to see if he wanted to pursue trying to get a court order to track barcode sales.
A new ME report indicated the bruising around the victim’s head wound probably came from the base of the skull under the left ear contacting a sharp surface, not from use of a weapon. Checking the regional ViCAP database, Coyle found no similar causes of death in homicides in the past three years.
The database also showed no similarly “staged homicides,” with a victim wrapped in a blanket, in seven western states for the past five years. Other staged homicides recorded in the database included males in two separate cases arranged with folded hands, a female with photos, and a female with flowers.
Coyle closed the database and saw his reflection in the empty screen. I’m a grind, he thought. Who else would be alone in a room in the middle of the night, using five-year-old computers to search crap government databases? The point was, he was good at it—the best in the department, for what that was worth. Other cops knew his reputation. “You Coyle?” they’d say before they pulled out their phones to show him a data search. It wasn’t just tech skills, it was doggedness. He always liked that word—blunt, unadorned. He remembered sitting on his bed as a child, day after day, with a Rubik’s Cube. In his time in VCI, his work had led to arrests and convictions for assault and armed robbery, even if he was never in a car chase or fired his weapon. He had no reason to be jealous of Frames and Eden, or to wish for other assignments.
He clicked on his screen and found an online regional record of stolen cars. The listing showed no 1950s-era Mercedes in the past twelve months.
Still, the car in the video was the best single piece of evidence, and Coyle needed to see if it could tell him anything else. He went back to the Mercedes website. The trunk and taillights were unchanged over the production run, but what about the rear bumper? For twenty minutes, he looked at photos of Ponton bumpers. Then he found it. From 1958 to 1960, the rear bumper’s vertical upright bars were positioned closer to the middle of the car.
Coyle switched his music to the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind” and used a finger to lick the salt out of the trail mix bag. He reopened the surveillance photos. The right side of the bumper in the photo was dented, and the left side had a parking sticker. But the bumper bars were clearly closer to the middle. He now knew the car to be a 1958, 1959, or 1960 Mercedes. Looking back at the state DMV database, he found fifty-four registered owners.
Coyle thought of narrowing the search to males. Could he assume the figure in the video was male? Or was someone with a height of five four more likely to be a female? Was it possible to imagine a woman involved in this kind of murder? Last year they had worked a case where a soft-spoken, thirty-two-year-old woman, dressed in a silk blouse, pleated skirt, and cardigan, walked into the police department lobby and confessed to beating her husband to death with a roofing hammer.
The alarm went off again.
Coyle looked at the two computer screens. A recent source of pride was his theory of programming si
gnatures. In the past year he’d noticed his programming had its own style—a kind of signature—based on the software he used and the choices he made. He liked to think his signature was edgy. Only he had no one to tell. Adrienne said, “If it’s all just coding, how can yours be different?”
With that thought, Coyle decided to do some coding. He’d promised Eddie he would create an open-case file to track progress. He reached for his phone and scrolled until he found the Kings of Leon. In a new file on the right-hand laptop, he typed in everything they knew so far about Jane Doe. He worked quickly, listing facts and probable future lines of inquiry. When he finished, he posted the file to an FTP site and programmed a firewall around it. He set up an IPtable for Linux systems, which restricted access to a single port and defined the type of traffic to accept. Then he established public and private encryption certificates. All he needed to do was to set the private key password. The Kings of Leon started on “Use Somebody.” He thought of Adrienne. He set the password.
By the time Coyle finished, another thirty minutes had gone by. He stood up and walked out of the team room. The hallway was quiet. A light was on in Eddie’s office, but no one was there. At the end of the hallway, Coyle turned into the common room, where the team members had storage lockers. He felt nauseated from the trail mix and lack of sleep. The first twenty-four hours of the investigation were nearly over, and Eddie would take it out on them if they didn’t have something soon.
Coyle opened his locker. He smelled the sleeve of his shirt and was hit with an odor of something like sour milk. He hadn’t changed since Sunday. He pulled off his shirt and threw it inside the locker. In the locker mirror, he turned his naked upper body in profile and saw his weak chest and thin arms. He flexed his right bicep, which made an almost imperceptible rise in the upper arm. He looked around the room to make sure no one had seen him. In the bottom of the locker, he found a fresh shirt like all his others—a severely wrinkled oxford with button-down collar. He put it on and, leaving it untucked, walked back to the dark team room.
The Silenced Women Page 8