The Silenced Women

by Frederick Weisel

  At his desk, he stared again at the alphabetical list of names on the motor vehicles website. Something flashed across his memory. The parking sticker on the bumper. He looked again at the surveillance photo. The parking sticker read “San Francisco Residential Parking Permit.” The motor vehicles database did not list addresses. Finding the San Francisco owners among the remaining fifty-four names would require fifty-four separate searches. He looked at the list again. The first owner was a male named Banerjee, Victor.

  Coyle leaned back in his chair. It’s a start, he thought.

  (ii)

  (WEDNESDAY, 1:40 A.M.)

  The furniture in the living room of the San Francisco condominium had been cleared to the walls. Victor and Russell bounced on the balls of their feet in front of each other. They both wore large boxing mitts. Victor shot his right leg high and kicked at Russell’s head. Russell blocked the kick, swiveled round, and clipped Victor’s neck with an elbow.

  “Who’s better at this…thing?” Thackrey sat at the kitchen counter with a highball glass of wine.

  “Muay Thai,” Russell said. “It’s not about winning. It’s about staying fit.”

  Russell hit Victor with two quick punches. Victor rotated his hip and used his left shin to kick Russell.

  Thackrey winced. “Anything’s legal?”

  “The art of eight limbs.” Victor bounced a few steps away from Russell. “Fists, elbows, knees, and feet. Most effective of the mixed martial arts.” Victor jumped forward and kicked Russell with his right knee. Russell punched at Victor’s head. They broke and backpedaled away from each other.

  Russell danced toward Thackrey. “Your turn. We’ll teach you.”

  Thackrey raised his hands. “No, thanks. I don’t believe in violence.”

  Victor snorted. “Your ex-girlfriends would be surprised to hear that.”

  Thackrey glared at Victor. “Let’s just get back to work.”

  Victor and Russell pulled off their mitts and shoved the sofa and chairs back into place.

  Thackrey lay on the sofa, with the glass of wine resting on his chest. “The first time I met Elise, we hit it off.”

  “At a party, wasn’t it?” Russell sat cross-legged on the floor with a notebook computer propped against his knees.

  “No. Starbucks. She was painting a picture on an iPad.”

  “If you’d ordered a takeout, we wouldn’t be here today.” Victor stood at the kitchen counter, leaning into a laptop.

  “A couple of tables were between us,” Thackrey said. “I couldn’t see much of her, just the tablet’s screen. But even at a distance, it was amazing. She wasn’t making the picture in a linear, additive way, with elements drawn one by one. The painting looked like it was exploding outward, with animals and faces and pennant-like things all tumbling on top of each other. It was like Chagall on steroids.”

  “Speaking of your girl…” Russell rapidly worked the keyboard. “I’m into her office computer. I found her work files and emails. You want me to erase it all?”

  “No. Just delete the work she did for me. It’ll be under a file with my name.”

  “And the emails?”

  “Just mine.”

  “Consider it done,” Russell said.

  Thackrey sat up, leaning on an elbow, and drank some of the wine. “In one corner of the screen, a palette kind of thing held a wheel of colors and tints. She touched it with a finger and used her fingertip like a brush. And she worked at this twitchy, high speed, her finger zooming back and forth across the screen.”

  “You saw all this from a couple of tables away?” Victor asked. He had an earbud in one ear, with his phone dialed to the Velvet Underground and loud enough for the others to hear.

  “Yeah. Couldn’t take my eyes off her screen. I was staring. I think it made the people at the next table uncomfortable, because they left. After that, it was easier to see.”

  “If you’re interested, I’m inside the Santa Rosa Police website,” Victor said. “The city firewall was crap, but Violent Crime has its own firewall, and whoever made it has some intelligence.”

  “Her face, or at least as much as I could see, had this blank expression,” Thackrey said. “It was as if she was just observing what was happening. Then she must’ve felt me watching, because she turned around. She looked for a second and went back to the tablet and worked on the images coming out of the screen. A minute later she looked back, and this time she smiled and shook her head, as if she knew I’d be staring at her.”

  Victor stopped typing. A new window opened on his screen. “Oh, come on, you little fuck,” he said to the screen. “You’re driving me crazy. Maybe we need to listen to some Clash.” He tapped his phone.

  “The thing is,” Thackrey said, “in the beginning, I was staring at the picture, not her, but I ended up looking at her. When she caught me, I asked what she was going to call the picture, and she gave me this look. She said, ‘What makes you think everything has a title?’”

  “And that sort of crap was attractive to you?” Russell asked.

  “For the first time that night, I saw the way her face changed. Ever notice how the same person can look different? With Elise, if you looked at her once, her face had that dumbbell prettiness, like a cheerleader at a big midwestern college on a Saturday afternoon, where you knew it was the best she would ever look. But if you looked again, her face had this other thing going on. Leaner, grown up, in a way you would never be smart enough to understand. Something French maybe. A little Jeanne Moreau. Isabelle Huppert.”

  “Exactly how many whites had you taken that night?” Russell asked.

  “That’s just it,” Thackrey said. “I wasn’t high.”

  Victor typed for a moment and watched the screen. “Password required,” he said out loud.

  “Why don’t you try listening to your boy Coyle’s music instead of your own?” Russell winked. “Go on Facebook. Get his tunes.”

  Victor stared at him. Opening Facebook, he found Coyle’s page. “Top band is Kings of Leon.”

  “Try ‘Taper Jean Girl,’” Russell said. “Maybe the password’s there.”

  Victor typed a line on his keyboard. Then a second and a third. “Okay, genius, let’s try ‘Sex on Fire.’” He tapped his phone and typed again. He stared at the screen and waited.

  “After she worked on the painting some more,” Thackrey said, “she put down the tablet and looked at me. She said, ‘You don’t have to talk about the art, you know. It actually makes you seem ordinary.’ She said I reminded her of her father, who she said was a poet. She asked if I had any Ecstasy or Oxy. I offered her a few base, but she said she wanted something that would cause more trouble. It was like whatever play I had wasn’t enough. She didn’t need me or anyone else.”

  “We’re getting closer, you and I, aren’t we?” Victor said to his screen.

  Russell came to the kitchen counter and stood behind him. He picked up Victor’s phone. “Here, try ‘Use Somebody.’”

  Victor listened to the music. He typed in a word. Then a second, a third, a fourth.

  “It was all there the first time,” Thackrey said. “Everything that was to come—the art spilling out of her like a lunatic savant, the daddy thing, the step ahead of me, the crazy risks, the part of her always wanting to leave. She said, ‘You seem like someone who’s used to getting his way. Why don’t you tell me one thing a guy’s never said to me before? I’ll give you three chances.’ Then she smiled, and right there, if I’d only seen it, was all the misery we were going to make for each other.”

  Suddenly Victor’s screen changed. The lines of white type on a black screen gave way to a website. Across the top were the words “Violent Crime Investigations.” Russell laughed. “I don’t fucking believe it.”

  Victor read the screen for a moment. “Hey, Ben,” he called across the room. “Good news�
��I hacked into the VCI website and I’m planting the keystroke logger. Bad news—they got a video of my car entering the park, and they’re running a database search on it right now. Russ and I need to get on a plane this morning. Remember our agreement. We help you with this, and we leave.”

  Thackrey drank the rest of his wine and lay down on his back. “Calm down. One more thing to clean up first. Then you can leave.”

  Chapter Eleven

  (i)

  (WEDNESDAY, 2:30 A.M.)

  Mahler parked on the road’s gravel shoulder. Above him lay the earthen dam that marked the northern perimeter of Spring Lake Park. The parking spot, in the shadows of an oak grove, would not be visible to Officer Hadley’s patrol along the top of the dam. After chewing out the young guard a day earlier, Mahler didn’t want to see the kid again.

  Mahler lifted himself over a four-foot chain-link fence and climbed the steep hill to the rim of the dam. He stood for a moment on this high ground. Below him lay the valley and the lake, black and smooth in the new-moon darkness. Even without light, Mahler could see where he was headed, the footpath that descended into the trees.

  He jogged down the paved trail. For the first hundred yards, he would be vulnerable to the park’s patrol. But the sound of their truck could be heard across the valley, in enough time for him to duck into the brush.

  Reaching a meadow, he found the route called Fisherman’s Trail. It forked through the trees along the lake and led to the boat dock and the lower parking lot.

  The path was muddy after several days of rain. Mahler walked slowly, picking through the mud and the dark, uneven surfaces. Several times he slipped but kept his balance. Suddenly, where the trail turned sharply, his left foot caught on something, and he fell forward into the darkness.

  His arms, extended to break his fall, sank to the elbows in cold mud. He landed in a shallow, marshy edge of the lake. He pulled out one arm and tried to raise himself. But before he could stand, his feet slid out from under him again. This time his face went into the water and his mouth filled with foul, slimy muck. He spit it out and, bracing himself above the surface, pushed backward in a squat. His shoes, under water, found a solid base. Rising cautiously, he climbed back toward the trail. With the back of his hands, he wiped the mud from his face and walked along the footpath, shoes sloshing with every step.

  He felt like an idiot. Why did he keep returning? If it was to punish himself, as the department therapist said, he’d certainly managed to do that tonight. But that explanation never felt true to Mahler—more like something the therapist formulated so she could close out their sessions. But he also couldn’t kid himself that these journeys to the park were related to any ongoing homicide investigation. No clues awaited him here.

  After a hundred yards, he found the place. The trail opened to a clearing, with a large, flat rock on one side. Two years ago, the second victim, Susan Hart, had been murdered here. The evidence indicated she stopped and, with music in her earbuds, had not heard the killer’s approach.

  Mahler eased onto the rock, stuffing his hands in his jeans pockets to ward off the cold. He visualized the victim’s body, facedown, at the base of the rock. Susan Hart’s right arm was stretched out, the left under her chest. The awkward, unprotected, face-forward landing of an unconscious person. Tank top, running shorts, sweatshirt, ankle socks, sneakers. A bruise on the left side of her face where it struck the ground. A small, tight pattern of loose soil and dry leaves made by the feet of the girl and her attacker in the last seconds of her life. One of the techs said it looked like a dancer’s box-step diagram.

  As Mahler pictured the victim, Susan Hart’s now-familiar voice sounded in his ear. “Ever figure out what song I was listening to when I was killed?” the dead girl asked.

  “No,” Mahler said. “Your phone kept playing after you died. You had something like four hundred songs.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “Kenny Loggins. ‘Footloose.’”

  She laughed. “Good song but old-school. No—Katy Perry. ‘Waking Up in Vegas.’ All-time favorite running song. Perfect for middle distance—sixteen hundred meters. You know I won leagues my senior year? At the junior college, I took four-tenths off my best time. You ever run, Eddie?”

  “Little in high school. Cross-country.”

  “Figures. Cross-country runners are brooders. No time for brooding in the sixteen hundred. Three and a half times around the track. Basically a prolonged sprint. Difficult, mentally.”

  “I thought all races were mental.”

  “Each distance is a different thought process.” Susan Hart’s voice sounded mature. At twenty, she was the youngest of the park victims. But the voice in Mahler’s ear was that of a mature woman. “In the sixteen hundred, most runners slow down at the first split. I did the opposite—went for the lead after the four hundred. My father said I was like a car with an extra gear for overdrive.”

  “Your coach said you had one of the strongest kicks he’d ever seen.”

  “It made me fast but also got me in trouble. After I won a few races, I stopped eating because I thought it would make me lighter. That’s when I got anorexia.”

  “Yeah, I know. My sister was a runner and developed anorexia. She…died.”

  Susan Hart waited to see if Mahler would say more. Then she said, “A bunch of us girl runners have health issues. Lack of consecutive menstrual periods, for one. And there’s a certain body type. Small breasts.”

  “I don’t feel comfortable talking about this.”

  “Oh, come off it, Mister Detective. You saw my breasts. Anyway, I outgrew the issues. I’m healthy. Or, at least I was.”

  “Why’re you telling me this?”

  “You wanted to know who I am. I’m a runner. Running’s all about breathing, Eddie. Knowing how to breathe. Coach taught me that. It’ll be important in your new case, too—the girl you found across the lake.”

  “You mean that quote on her leg?”

  “You’ll figure it out.”

  “Will I? I don’t see how. Nothing helps us. Look at your case. We’ve been over the evidence a hundred times.”

  “It’s all there. Believe me, it’s there.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “Let me tell you a story.” She spoke cheerfully, as if she was enjoying herself. “I once did a training run in the dark. Down in Santa Cruz. I was on a paved road at night. In the beginning, the moonlight was enough. But after a few minutes, the moon went behind the clouds. It was so dark I couldn’t see my feet.”

  “What happened?”

  “Best time ever.”

  “How’s that help? Tell me what you want me to do,” Mahler said. “What do you want?”

  “What do you think the dead want, Eddie?”

  “I don’t know. I know what the chief wants, what your father wants. But what do you want?”

  Mahler waited. An animal rustled in the trees. He shivered. She was gone.

  As usual, he knew the wrong things. The forensics filled a thick binder, listing the articles of clothing Susan Hart wore the day she was killed and the names of the bushes and trees that watched her die. He remembered the color of the victim’s bedroom walls, the nickname her mother had given her, and the salad that was her last meal.

  And trapped in his memory were the concentrated details of the last minute of her life.

  “It’s impossible to determine how long she was conscious,” the medical examiner, Trish Armstrong, had told him the day after the murder. “Besides, how could it possibly help your investigation?”

  “Just tell me,” Mahler had said.

  They stood under the lab’s bright fluorescent lights. Trish, who had just finished an examination for another case, was still in her scrubs.

  “Jesus, Eddie, where’s this coming from?”

  “Just tell me.”

&nbs
p; “Look, I get it. The whole thing with this girl, it’s awful. But we’ve been through a hundred of these things. It’s our job.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. And what difference does it make?”

  “You don’t know, or you won’t tell me?”

  “No one knows,” Trish said quietly. She leaned against a stainless-steel table and looked at Mahler. Under her eyes were dark shadows. She took a deep breath. “It’s just guessing. With ligature strangulation, you don’t know if asphyxia was caused by compression of the larynx or if strangulation compressed the carotid arteries. You also don’t know if the occlusion of the arteries was complete or incomplete. Which would affect the loss of blood flow. Which would determine time to unconsciousness. We’d have to make assumptions and—”

  “Tell me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Stop it, Eddie.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Is this about the case or you?”

  “Tell me.”

  “Tell you what, exactly?” Her voice rose, her face up close to his. “Do you want to know this girl fought to get her fingers under the cord or whatever the fuck was around her neck? Do you want me to tell you the fingertips on both hands were cut, two nails broken off? Do you want me to tell you that hanks of her hair got caught in the cord and were torn out at the roots? That, at some point, the killer put something, probably his knee, in the small of her back to get more leverage? Do you want to know that? Do you want to know that once the doer got the cord tight, it probably compressed the carotid, not the larynx? So it cut off blood flow to the brain. Carotid compression causes unconsciousness in seven to fourteen seconds. But, in this case, the victim struggled, so it probably took longer. Does that help you in some way, Eddie? Come on, I want to hear you explain it to me.”

  Mahler wanted to explain it. He even had a thought of apologizing to Trish. He wanted to say he knew it was out of line for him to ask, that after fifteen years of working together, he understood the boundaries of what they did. The weight of a loss was for someone else to measure. But he also wanted to tell Trish about all the wrong things he knew, how none of them explained what happened to the girl. He didn’t know why this victim was different from the dozens of other bodies that ended up in the ME’s room, only that he needed to know one thing that wasn’t in the files. The girl was a runner, so he thought the missing thing must be time, seconds. But he didn’t explain himself, didn’t apologize, because the words were trapped in his head, past his own understanding. Instead, he looked back mutely and waited.