The Silenced Women

by Frederick Weisel

  She picked up her mug. The tea was cold. One page further in the Foss file, a handwritten note said, “three and a half.” Eden read the text beside it, describing the bruise patterning around Michelle Foss’s neck, which suggested the way the cord had been wrapped. The close-up photo of the young woman’s neck showed dark lines wound three and a half times. Eden raised her hands and moved them as if she were looping a cord. She looked around the room. Bent over their laptops, Coyle and Frames had not noticed her. She moved her hands again, winding them three and a half times. It was a difficult, awkward movement. Why three and a half? Why not three or two? Someone had done it purposefully. What did it mean?

  Eden looked at the four other victim photos. On MaryEllen Reese’s neck, the marks were crisscrossed, as if the cord had been wrapped front to back. The marks on Amanda Smith’s neck had a different spiral shape, as if the wrapping had begun on the side. Susan Hart’s and Beth Hunter’s bruises were a mirror image of Michelle Foss’s—three and a half times around.

  She paged through the rest of the reports on Michelle Foss without finding any more handwritten notes. She stacked the folders and reopened her laptop. On her spreadsheet, she added notes on the cord width and bruise pattern and used yellow highlighting to mark the consistencies.

  Staring at the spreadsheet, she wondered if the similarities were a coincidence. How many possible widths of cord are there? How many ways of wrapping a cord?

  Eden suddenly remembered Woodhouse had also reviewed the Hart case. She went back through the file slowly, page by page. The first time through, she didn’t see any notes. When she looked a second time, she saw a single word on the backside of the medical examiner’s report. Small, cursive letters in the same handwriting: “cnt” or “cvt.” Cunt? Probably not. Crude language is only found in investigation reports when it’s critical to a case, such as provocation for an argument. Also, such words are unlikely because police reports become official records and are subpoenable and discoverable by counsel. Container? Converter?

  She flipped the page and reread the report. The text described other identifying marks found on Susan Hart’s body. Scrape on left side of face, presumably made when the victim fell face-forward to the ground. Broken skin on fingertips as the victim clawed at the cord. Bruise on her lower back where assailant braced his knee to tighten the cord. Near the bottom of the page, a single entry: “Two-centimeter cut near base of spine, made with sharp-bladed instrument.” The handwritten word was “cut.”

  Eden found the photo of Susan Hart’s back. The cut was difficult to see, and Eden might have missed it if she were not searching for it. The pencil-thin line had darkened in the hours and days after death. How would such a wound occur? Had the assailant threatened her with a knife or cut her from behind when he approached? If that were true, the wound would contain clothing fibers noted in the medical examination, which it didn’t, according to the forensic report. Besides, both the assailant’s hands would need to be free to use the cord.

  She remembered Kinsella talking about Robert Keppel, who interviewed Ted Bundy and wrote a book on what he called “signature killers.” These killers leave behind a distinctive mark or object that goes beyond what is necessary to commit the crime. Keppel called them “psychological calling cards,” or signatures, and noted they were sometimes left after the murder was committed.

  Eden checked the medical examiner’s reports for the other women. None contained mention of a similar cut. Getting up from her desk, she went to the supply closet, where she remembered seeing a magnifying glass. She returned to her desk, picked up the victim files and laptop, and walked down the hallway to the interview room.

  Closing the door, she set to work on the table. She found photos of the backs of each of the victims and laid them side by side. With the magnifying glass, she searched the spot just below the base of the spine in each photo. No marks appeared in the photos of MaryEllen Reese and Amanda Smith. But on Michelle Foss and Beth Hunter, a line was visible. Eden measured the lines and found each to be exactly two centimeters. Opening her laptop, she added the information to the spreadsheet.

  She studied her spreadsheet. What had she learned? At a time when Partridge was living in Vallejo, one of the victims there had been killed in the same way as both victims two years ago in Santa Rosa’s Spring Lake Park and had the same distinctive signature. The latest Jane Doe victim was killed in a different way, maybe by a different killer.

  Eden carefully replaced the photos in their respective binders, stacked them neatly, and closed her laptop. In the hallway, a world away, a phone rang. Sitting alone in the interview room, she noticed her hands shaking; she folded one hand over the other to steady them. She thought: Maybe I don’t have to resign. Then: Did I just find the quality of light?

  Chapter Thirteen

  (i)

  (WEDNESDAY, 8:15 A.M.)

  In his dream, Rivas gripped the steering wheel of a speeding car. The road rushed forward, oncoming cars swerving across the centerline, roadside tree limbs scraping the trim off the doors. Was he moving toward something, or was it coming at him? All the while, an old woman sang “Rock-a-Bye Baby”—with new words about the death of a policeman named Rivas.

  He woke in the parking lot of the county’s adult detention facility, his face bathed in sweat. For a moment he forgot where he was. He blinked and checked the time on his cell. Thirty minutes had passed since he closed his eyes. Above the hills on the eastern side of the valley, the sky had lightened. The early morning sun spread across the parking lot, climbing the jail’s brick walls and dark eyelet windows.

  Rivas stared at the building’s looming facade. On any given day, he could recognize more than half the men inside, shuffling the corridors in their baggy cotton jumpsuits. He knew in perfect detail their crimes, victims, and arrest records. The department’s memory, Eddie called him. But Rivas also knew them like a man knows the members of his extended family—their girlfriends, ex-wives, and children. It was the special gift his grandmother, Maria-Elena, had taught him.

  For the past year, Rivas heard her voice two or three times a week when he closed his eyes. The singsong voice recounting the deaths of relatives—and more and more his own dying. How was it possible for memory to foretell the future, and to be remembered before he died?

  Near the end of Maria-Elena’s life, her stories mixed reality with illusion. She had once begun each tale with its date, solemnly announced, the only legacy of a poor family. But, in her old age, the dates changed—across days, then years, and later centuries—so that memory and prophecy contended in the same story. It was as if the decades piled one on another in the old woman’s mind until history, the weakest of the arts, could no longer bear all she remembered. Something more supple, like magic, took its place and let her loose to follow the flights of the ghosts who crowded her dreams.

  As he looked at the lockup, Rivas felt the weight of memory as it must have burdened Maria-Elena in the end. Week by week, the space around him filled with more history: interrogations, arraignments, sentencings. A body facedown on a bedroom floor. Kids watching from a doorway. Third generation of a family cuffed in the back seat. Women together on a bench outside the courtroom. New nicknames, tattoos, and cheap guns to remember. Each name and date added to others before them, links in a chain that bound Rivas to the criminal justice system no less than it trapped the men inside the jail.

  Rivas sat up and wiped perspiration from his forehead. He had come to meet with the drug dealer Arturo Peña and his lawyer. Climbing out of the car, Rivas walked stiffly across the lot to the jail entrance. Inside, he turned over his handgun and went through the security gate. A guard escorted him to the visitor area. The place had a smell Rivas never got used to—the mustiness of steel and concrete and the stink of men crowded together.

  The accommodation for visitors to the lockup consisted of six dark booths in a narrow hallway. Each had two chairs, a countert
op, and a window with a speaker-box facing the common room of the general population. In the third visitors’ booth, Rivas found Peña’s public defender, Maricela Hernandez. Rivas had known the lawyer for five years—from when she passed the bar and began taking cases.

  Hernandez wore a tan suit and balanced a briefcase on her lap. When she saw Rivas, she smiled. “Buenos días, Daniel. How’s Teresa?”

  Rivas shrugged. “High blood pressure. But I guess everyone with teenagers has high blood pressure.”

  Hernandez squeezed his hand. “Better to have girls, Daniel. Boys are trouble.”

  Rivas sat in the second chair and smiled back. “Too late now.” He looked into the commons room. “What’re we here for?”

  Thirty feet away, Peña hunched over a table in the common room, his chest and upper arms stretching the fabric of his jail clothes.

  “I don’t know.” Hernandez motioned for Peña to come to the window. “Arturo asked to speak with you.”

  Peña moved with the disinterest of a tiger at the zoo, only his eyes sharp and focused. He took his place across from them, arms folded across his chest.

  “Arturo, qué quieres?” Hernandez bent toward the speaker. “What do you want?”

  Peña lowered his head at Rivas. “You’re late, pendejo.”

  “I’m here now. What do you want?” Rivas said.

  Hernandez leaned on the counter in front of the glass. “Don’t mess with us.”

  Peña’s eyes didn’t leave Rivas. “You got lucky yesterday, viejo.”

  “Arresting you?” Rivas said.

  “No, I let you live.”

  Hernandez hugged the briefcase against her chest. “What do you want, Arturo? The charges so far are drug possession, possession of an unregistered firearm, resisting arrest, and threatening a police officer.” She turned to Rivas. “And I understand the DA will file additional charges?”

  Rivas nodded. “First-degree murder. Filed later today or tomorrow.”

  “You understand this, Arturo?” Hernandez asked.

  Peña ignored her. “El Viejo and I are talking.”

  “Arturo, you asked to see Sergeant Rivas.” The lawyer sighed with exasperation. “What do you want? Do you have something to say?”

  Peña unfolded his arms and spoke quietly. “The girl’s body you found. I know something about this.”

  “What girl?” Rivas asked, sensing a trick.

  “The one you found in the park.”

  Rivas looked at Hernandez, who shrugged. He leaned closer to the divider. “What’re you talking about? This something to do with the Sureños?”

  “No. But I know how she got there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I saw her.”

  Rivas took a deep breath. “You waste our time, we can add charges. You understand? Your lawyer can tell you.”

  Peña waved a hand dismissively. “I saw this girl before you found her. She was alive and with three boys—a whitey, an Asian, and a brown one. If this is worth something to you, we can talk about my cousin you arrested yesterday.”

  “How do you know it was the girl in the park? We don’t have an identity. We haven’t issued a photo. It wasn’t even in the newspaper until today.”

  “I tell you something. In her ear, she has a star, is that right?”

  Rivas fell back in his seat.

  Peña smiled. “Now you’re interested, aren’t you, viejo? And I know because this one, the girl I saw, she looked like she knew she was going to die.”

  (ii)

  (WEDNESDAY, 9:02 A.M.)

  Frames sat across the table from Craig Lerner. The thirty-something owner of Lerner and Meier Creative Marketing wore a pressed white shirt, wool blazer with upturned collar, and jeans. A fashionable two-day stubble dirtied his chin. On the table in front of him, he pressed a tall Starbucks cup with his fingertips.

  A Venti, Frames thought. Probably something fussy like an espresso shot, soy milk foam, and cinnamon. He watched Lerner trying to find a place to focus his attention. Twice Lerner glanced at the plain file lying between them, but each time he quickly looked up again. Boy’s on his best behavior. Seen enough episodes of Law & Order, he’s acting the part of the upright citizen.

  “So you told our officer the description of the victim sounded like your graphic artist?” Frames asked.

  Lerner nodded. “Same height and weight. General features. Of course, it’s hard to tell from a few sentences.”

  “And she didn’t come to work yesterday?”

  “Didn’t call, either—which isn’t like her. She usually comes in at nine, along with my admin. We’re a small company, just the four of us. My business partner, Ken Meier, and I come in at ten. We come in later because we work later.” Lerner smiled and took a sip of his drink.

  Wanting me to know he’s not a slacker. “You try to call her?”

  “My admin did. Talked to her roommates. They said she didn’t come home the night before. That last part’s none of my business, really. You can’t ask too many questions these days. That whole privacy thing.” Lerner rolled his eyes.

  Why are guys with education and money such terrible liars? What do they imagine lying looks like? “It takes a hole in your heart to lie, Stevie,” his mother used to say. In Frames’s experience, the best liars were definitely guys with holes in their hearts. Like Tyler Cates, the redneck in the next bunk during basic training in the Marines. They spent every hour together for three months, but Frames never knew when Cates was telling the truth or lying. Same dead look in his eyes.

  “She come to work on Monday?” Frames asked.

  “Yes, she did,” Lerner said. “She does our graphic design—layouts, illustrations, Photoshop stuff. On Monday we finished a print ad for a client.”

  “You remember what she was wearing?”

  Lerner’s face turned thoughtful.

  What is it with this guy? Has to turn every question into a puzzle.

  “Jeez, what was she wearing? You know how it is, you work right next to someone, and you never notice. Let’s see, I remember she came into my office once with some proofs, and she had on a silk blouse. Dark colored. I’m not sure about anything else. She’s always well dressed.”

  He’s not going to mention the short skirt. “How about jewelry?” Frames was starting to enjoy himself.

  “Jewelry? I know she doesn’t wear big rings. Says they interfere with the keyboard. But you know what? She always wears the same earrings. They’re shaped like a star, like a hollow star.”

  Frames put his hand on the file in front of him. “We have some photos here of the victim in the park. I’d like you to look at them and tell me if this is your graphic artist. Just so you know, it might be rough to see her this way.”

  Lerner swallowed. “I understand.”

  Frames slid two close-ups of the victim’s face across the table.

  “Oh, boy.” Lerner stared at the photos. He slowly shook his head. “Wow. That’s Elise. I mean, shit, it really is. What happened to her?”

  “We’re still working on that. But I need you to tell me for certain. Is this your graphic artist?”

  “Yes, it’s Elise. No question. What do you want me to do? Do I sign something?”

  No tears, Frames thought. Interesting choice. “Let’s start with her full name.”

  “Oh, sure. Elise Durand.”

  “Could you spell that?”

  Lerner spelled it out. “The first name is French for Elisabeth. I think her father was French or something.”

  “We’ll need to get any personal information you have on file for her. So we can notify the family.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Lerner’s attention locked on the photos. “Poor Elise.” Finally he pushed the pictures back to Frames.

  Lerner took a phone from a blazer pocket and
began tapping at the screen. After a moment, he handed the phone to Frames. “That’s Elise’s address and the phone number for her apartment. I’ll have my admin look up her family’s contact information. She moved here from Pennsylvania. Her mother still lives there, I think.”

  “How’d she act on Monday?” Frames wrote down the address and phone number.

  “I’m not sure what you mean. Normal, I guess. I didn’t notice anything.”

  “Did she happen to say where she was going that evening?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Was that unusual?” Frames asked.

  “Not really. We try to keep it pretty professional.”

  “Did she have a boyfriend?”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “Someone she saw regularly.”

  “You know, I think so. But we didn’t really talk about that kind of thing.” Lerner’s face reddened.

  Frames watched him. Of course you did, you lying son of a bitch.

  Lerner straightened and tried to recover himself. “You should know Elise was an unusual young woman. Very attractive, but high-strung.”

  “High-strung?”

  “Yeah. I probably shouldn’t say this now, but in some ways, I’m not surprised something happened. She had this side to her that was—I don’t know, sort of—unpredictable.”

  “In what way?”

  Lerner puffed out his cheeks and exhaled. “Oh, man. Look, I am…or was…her employer. We didn’t really socialize outside the office. So I may be talking out of school. Maybe you should talk to my admin. It’s just, it was my impression that she liked…you know, in a sexual sense, what you might call—” He searched the walls for the right word.