“How far away’s the park where Beth Hunter was found?”
Eden ran a finger down the page. “Six miles, freeway and surface streets. Fifteen minutes in traffic.”
“So he had enough time.” Mahler nodded. He was still shaky from his meeting with Woodhouse. He forced himself to focus on Eden’s words.
“The other thing is, the rope the company uses for rigging might be a match for the width and pattern of the marks on Beth Hunter and the two girls killed later here in Santa Rosa.”
“Might be?”
“Detective Jermany got a sample and measured it. But he sent it for lab analysis to be sure.”
“Is it the kind of rope the company had in 2005? And is it the only rope they use?”
“Yes, it’s the same as in 2005. The foreman said it’s not the only one, but it’s the most commonly used. He said Partridge had access to it, and employees drove their own vehicles in and out of the yard without security.”
“Okay. So that gets us closer. Can we connect Partridge to the murder? What about the crime scene?”
“Beth Hunter’s body was found in Dan Foley Park, a sixty-acre public park in Vallejo.” Eden flipped through the pages. “It’s got a lake, community center, picnic areas, baseball and soccer fields, and a playground. Similar to our Spring Lake Park.”
“Where was the body?”
“Marshy area near the lake.” Eden pulled out a map and pointed to a spot on the lake’s perimeter. “Beth Hunter went to the park four days a week to meditate. Always at five p.m. Always took a bamboo mat and thermos of tea. Sat in the same spot, on a flat bar of land that extends into the lake, so she could face the setting sun. The gate guard was familiar with her routine. When she didn’t return as usual and he saw her car in the lot, he went looking. Found her body and called the Vallejo PD at 6:45 p.m.”
“What about physical evidence at the site?”
“Not much. The victim was strangled with a cord, like the victims in Santa Rosa. Same pattern of overlapping around the neck. Same signature cut at the base of the spine.”
Eden looked up. “By the way, I went to see Partridge’s girlfriend, Lorin Albright, like you said. On one wall of their apartment was a picture of a man in a pose for something called Kundalini. It seemed an odd choice, so I looked it up. Kundalini is an Eastern religious practice. Translates as ‘serpent’ and refers to sexual energy wrapped in three and a half coils in the sacrum bone at the base of the spine. The cords on Foss, Hart, and Hunter were wound three and a half times, and the victims had a small cut at the base of the spine.”
Mahler stared at Eden. “Wow. That’s good work, detective. Really good work. So we know Partridge has some sick thing going on with this Kundalini when he kills the girls.”
“Yeah. I mean…maybe.”
“But we still don’t have—”
“I know, any direct evidence connecting him to the murders. So…getting back to the Vallejo victim. No other marks on the body or clothes. No usable evidence on the ground near the body. The theory is, the killer came out of tree cover. Behind the victim. Plenty of tall brush to shield him from view.”
“And no witness evidence of Partridge in the park at the time of the killing?”
“No.” Eden shook her head. “If anyone saw him, they didn’t come forward. The circumstances fit the same pattern as the girls in Spring Lake Park. Beth Hunter came to the park regularly. Partridge would’ve been able to study her movements and plan his attack.”
“Any security cameras in the park?”
“The gate has a camera. The Vallejo PD checked the film, but a lot of cars are exiting the park at that time of day—games finishing, concessions closing, people going home to dinner. Partridge was driving a 1999 white Mazda pickup, according to the rigging foreman. So Jermany’s checking tapes for that vehicle.”
“What do you think of Jermany?”
“Seems conscientious. Case file’s in good shape. He was willing to help when he found out why I was interested.”
“Did he have any other ideas?”
“No, but I do.” Eden spoke now without any prompting from the paperwork. “I started wondering if Partridge might have left any DNA when he made those signature cuts. No one looked in the original examinations. We’d have to exhume the bodies.”
“Susan Hart was cremated. You’ll have to talk to the coroners here and in Vallejo about the others. It requires a court order.” Mahler pushed himself off the table to leave.
“Sir, I think I found something else.”
“In Vallejo or here?”
“Neither. In Fresno.”
“Fresno?” Mahler sighed. Where was this going?
“Wait. Just listen. I talked to former Detective Woodhouse.”
“Tom, I know.” Mahler thought of the retired detective in the car an hour earlier, swearing himself to secrecy.
“And he said we should look where Partridge has been the past three years.”
“Partridge lives here.”
“But he’s made visits outside the area.”
“To Fresno?”
“Lorin Albright told me she’s from Fresno. She said Partridge goes with her when she visits home.”
“When? Do we have dates?”
“Albright wouldn’t say. But Partridge moved to Santa Rosa in September 2006 and met Albright about that time. So I’m looking for similarities in female homicides from December 2006 to now.”
“So how many homicides are we talking about?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“Thirty-seven?” Christ, what a world.
“Yes, sir, thirty-seven.”
“Big number.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And ViCAP has no record of a similar case in Fresno?”
“No, but it might have been missed.”
“So you’re looking through thirty-seven separate cases?”
“Well, yes. But I can sort them by ideal victim type and geographical location, like I did before. I just started and—”
Mahler sat down and gestured with one hand to silence Eden. “When your application came in, I read your thesis and that FBI report on the Highway 60 serial murders. The FBI thing—all 246 pages, and how many endnotes?”
“A lot. They require details be included as endnotes for future investigators. So I …643.”
“That’s right, 643. Another big number. I didn’t read all of those, but it was good investigative work. I understand the Missouri and Arizona state police are reopening the cases and that—”
“Sir, I don’t think—”
“You found new things: the discrepancies in the Arizona medical examinations, the suspect’s statement in that Tennessee traffic stop that no one else noticed, the girl who survived a similar attack in Texas. And just now, in this case, that whole Kundalini thing. Like I said, it’s really terrific work.”
“I just want to—”
“But right here, right now, Detective Somers, you’re not writing a paper or on a two-year FBI contract. You won’t get a grade or a bump in government pay scale. Behind this…stuff…are dead girls. Not photos in a file. Real people with families and a life. We have to make choices. If it’s like the last time, we’ve got twenty-six hours to find our killer. We need to follow evidence we already have. We don’t have time to look at thirty-seven new homicides that may or may not mean anything.”
“Lieutenant Mahler, sir, I’m trying—”
“Your best shot is to keep working with Jermany and see—”
“…to find direct evidence of—”
“Do you understand what I just—”
“STOP IT,” Eden suddenly shouted. “PLEASE…STOP.”
For a moment, they faced each other without speaking. A phone rang in another office. Mahler felt the migraine rise once more, its starting
point behind his eyes.
Eden looked down at the tabletop. “Sir, I’m sorry. Lieutenant Mahler, sir, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I raised my voice. But…you don’t listen to me.”
Mahler watched her face redden.
Eden met his eyes again. “I understand what you’re saying. I know…these girls… These girls are dead. Give me some credit. I know…that.” Her voice shook.
He saw her eyes fill and her face tighten against the emotion.
“You can write me up for disciplinary action for the way I just spoke to you. But I want you to know that…that I can…do this job.” She looked at him defiantly, even as tears rolled down her cheeks.
Mahler stood silently. Eden turned away, wiping at her face. The black thoughts came back to him—that he would never arrest Partridge, that nothing he said to the ghost of Susan Hart would make her alive.
“Do you even know what your job is?” Mahler asked. “Do you know why we’re here? No one cares that you figure this out, that you know how it happened. They don’t give points for that. What they want is for it not to happen again. Most of the time we come in after the worst is done, when it’s too late. And the people there aren’t glad to see us. The rest of the time, we’re just janitors for the dirt no one wants to know about. We catch some jerk and take him off the street. And we fail there, too. But failure in this job isn’t like any other kind. When you screw up, when you fail to keep people safe, you never forget. Whatever else you achieve, whatever distractions you find, whatever else…is in your life, it never—balances—out.”
Mahler walked to the doorway. “Do what you want, but do it fast,” he said as he left the room.
Chapter Twenty-Two
(i)
(WEDNESDAY, 11:30 P.M.)
Bailey stood in the evidence room behind a table covered in plastic evidence bags. “Obviously we’re still processing these things.”
Mahler and Rivas faced her across the table. The room was windowless and dark, lit only by a shop light over the table. Mahler looked past Bailey, to the far wall. Beside a desk piled with file folders, a figure sat alone in the dark. Leaning away from the shop light’s glare, Mahler saw it was Eden.
Bailey pulled on latex gloves and handed sets to Mahler and Rivas. “First things first. Dusting the victim’s bedroom gave us only her prints and one other set. Turned out to be a roommate’s. Nothing of interest on the sheets or in any of the clothes.”
She pointed to the tabletop. “This is everything we got warrants for. It includes everything Marty and I brought back from the victim’s apartment and that Steve and Daniel found in her cubicle. Marty still has the hard drives from the victim’s laptop and office computer.”
Bailey picked up a plastic bag with a small knife in it. “Marty found this little number taped under the victim’s desk. Pretty serious knife. Microtech UTX-70. Retails online for $250. It’s an OTF model, which means the blade comes out the front. Two-and-a-half-inch blade, powder metal steel, scalpel sharpness. Blade and handle contain traces of the victim’s blood type. Trish says the evidence of healed cuts on the victim’s ankles, feet, and forearms, apparently self-inflicted, is consistent with this kind of blade.”
Rivas took the bag from Bailey and turned it over. “What’s she afraid of? Why’s it taped under the desk?”
“Shame.” The word came from Eden, still sitting in the dark.
Rivas looked across the room and nodded.
Bailey pointed to an evidence bag filled with pill bottles. “Prescription meds, with and without prescriptions. Antipsychotics, antidepressants. Whole bunch of painkillers—OxyContin, Demerol, Vicodin, Percodan, Percocet, Valium, even some morphine.”
“Jesus, where’d she buy them?” Mahler ran his fingers over the bag.
“Honestly?” Bailey shrugged. “Any high school parking lot.”
Bailey gave Mahler a framed photograph in a plastic bag. “This was on the victim’s bedside table. On the back side is a handwritten inscription: ‘Saint-Jean-de-Côle, 1983.’ It’s a small town in the Dordogne, in southwestern France. The man in the picture is probably Sebastien Durand, the victim’s father. The Keats book, which I’ll come to in a minute, has the same inscription and a note that says, ‘votre père aimant,’ or ‘love, your father.’ You can verify that, of course, when you talk to the victim’s mother.”
Mahler pressed the plastic tight against the photograph and studied the image. “She had her father’s eyes.”
Bailey waited for Mahler to finish. “Sir, I’m not sure how the rest of this applies to your investigation, but maybe it gives you a sense of the victim.” She looked back and forth at Mahler and Rivas.
Mahler put the photograph back on the table. “Just show us.”
Bailey held up the art poster. “This was on the victim’s wall. It’s a copy of a painting by a nineteenth-century artist named John Everett Millais. It shows the character Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet lying on her back as she drowns in a river.”
Mahler leaned closer. “What’s written at the bottom?”
“‘As one incapable of her own distress.’ It’s a line from the play as Ophelia’s dying. From other evidence, the phrase matches our victim’s handwriting.”
Bailey picked up a second, poster-sized paper. “This collage appears to have been made by the victim. In the center is an enlargement of the framed photo of her father and a black-and-white drawing of the poet John Keats. The inscription, Ne m’oubliez pas, means ‘Do not forget me.’ At the bottom are two lines of poetry. I did a web search on them; they’re from poems by Frank O’Hara and Robert Lowell. I printed out copies of the full poems.”
Rivas took the collage from Bailey. “The former roommate, Alvarez, said she thought the victim’s depression was caused by her father’s abandonment. These words she’s written here…she didn’t want her father to forget her.”
Mahler looked over Rivas’s arm at the collage. “Explains the picture of Keats, too. The psychiatrist said the victim sometimes believed her father was Keats and was trying to communicate with her through his poetry.”
“Which brings me to this.” Bailey picked up a small book inside a plastic bag. “This is a collection of Keats’s poetry. It’s marked up with colored highlighters and ballpoint pens. Almost every page has highlighting and things written in the margin.”
Bailey removed the book from the bag and flipped the pages to show the others. “It’s got literally hundreds of handwritten things—comments, cross-references to other poems, and lots of questions. See—here she highlighted the line ‘awake for ever in a sweet unrest,’ and she’s written next to it: ‘What makes it sweet?’”
Mahler turned several pages. “Anything else stand out?”
“Yeah, this.” Bailey pointed to one page. “See that number written in red? In eight places throughout the book, different numbers appear.”
“Some kind of code?”
Bailey smiled and looked into the darkness at Eden. “Maybe. Eden helped me with this. Each number is next to a line of poetry about the same subject—death. See? ‘For if thou diest, my Love, I know not where to go.’ And, ‘I have been half in love with easeful Death.’ Not surprising. Keats was apparently obsessed with death.”
“Is there any pattern?”
“First we copied out the lines and put them in numerical order to see if they meant something. But they didn’t make sense—they were just random lines. We tried isolating the first letter in each line, low number to high number, high to low. Then we thought of something. Actually, it was Eden’s idea. You should tell them.”
Eden rose slowly and joined the others at the table. “I don’t know if it means anything or if it’s right. But I thought the victim was a young woman who was probably not familiar with sophisticated encryption. Maybe it’s something simple. At boarding school, we used a code where each letter in the alphabet is numbered.
A is one, B is two, and so on. We used it to write numerical messages to each other in class.”
Bailey laughed. “My friends and I did the same thing. Must be a middle-school-girl thing. Anyway, if you take the eight numbers in the order that they appear in the margins of the book and match them to the corresponding letters, you get a word: thackrey.”
Mahler looked at her. “So what’s that?”
Bailey shook her head. “We don’t know. It could be a place—there’s a small town in Canada with that name. Or a thing. A ‘thack’ is part of a roof.”
“Or a surname,” Eden said. “It sounded familiar, and then I remembered there’s this guy down in Silicon Valley named Benjamin Thackrey. He’s some kind of startup genius who’s become a celebrity. Martin would know the name. That would fit with what Jessica Alvarez told Martin about Elise dating a man who made a fortune in computers. And he could be the one Dr. Bittner described as being smarter than Elise’s other boyfriends.”
“Another thing,” Eden continued, “in several places, Elise circled the word ‘queen’ and wrote ‘murder’ in the margin. I don’t know what it means, but it might turn out to be something.”
“She’s trying to tell us something,” Mahler said. “What was that quote she wrote on her leg?”
Eden looked at him. “‘To take into the air my quiet breath.’”
“Yeah.” Mahler remembered Susan Hart telling him that breathing would be important in this case. “She knew her killer was going to strangle her. Peña said she looked like she knew she was going to die.” Mahler held up the book. “She’s trying to tell us with this.”
Mahler flipped through the pages. As he looked at the inside back cover, he said, “What’s this?” He held the book close to the hanging lamp and ran his fingertips over the endpaper. “Something’s inside.”
Bailey watched him. “I didn’t notice that.”
The Silenced Women Page 19