The Silenced Women

by Frederick Weisel

  Inside the meeting room, Holland and Rivas took seats at a polished oak table. The cheery musical notes sounded from another TV screen on the wall, and the curly-haired woman appeared again. “Ms. Palmer and Mr. Keegan will join you shortly.” The screen went blank.

  Holland drank his coffee and looked around the room. “You suppose they can hear us?”

  Rivas shrugged. “How can they? We’re in Nebraska.”

  A minute later, a man in a flannel shirt and cargo pants led an attractive woman into the conference room. “Josh Keegan,” the man said, “VP for Operations, and this is April Palmer, in-house counsel.” He put business cards in front of the detectives while the two of them sat on the opposite side of the table. Keegan’s short, black hair was moussed into peaks like cake frosting. Palmer sat stiffly in a trim, dark suit.

  Rivas saw Keegan take in Holland’s wool cap.

  “Sorry for the delay,” Keegan said. “Major launch coming up. All-hands teleconference in”—he consulted his cell phone—“exactly twelve minutes.”

  Rivas took a folder from his lap and laid it on the table. “We’ll make it quick.”

  Keegan nodded, reading something on his phone.

  “We’re investigating the murder of Elise Durand last Monday night in Santa Rosa.”

  “What’s that have to do with us?” Keegan still looked at his phone.

  For an instant Holland imagined grabbing Keegan’s phone and snapping it in half. “We believe two individuals associated with this company were involved in the homicide.”

  Keegan looked up, smiling. “Really? I’m sorry, officers, but this is a sixty-million-dollar startup. We’re building a new tool for search engines, and our first major launch is in three weeks. The people out there are working twenty-four seven and don’t have time to—”

  Rivas removed from his folder a piece of paper bearing the company’s logo. He slid it across the table. “Elise Durand, our victim, designed this.”

  Keegan glanced at the logo. “I’m not involved with marketing collateral. I work mostly with the teams writing code. You’d have to speak with—”

  Holland leaned forward. “Let’s keep it simple. We just need to locate the two men.”

  “Who are they? We have many employees from the North Bay.”

  Rivas took out the photo of the three men in Spring Lake Park. “We’re trying to identify these men. We believe two of them are Benjamin Thackrey and Victor Banerjee. The third is an Asian male.”

  Keegan whistled. “Benjamin Thackrey?”

  “You know him?” Rivas asked.

  “Obviously. Guy’s a legend. But Ben Thackrey wouldn’t be involved in this.”

  Rivas suddenly saw how out of place the black-and-white homicide photos were on the table of this brightly lit conference room. What did the couple across from him, or the people in the workspace beyond, know about murder? Their lives and their busyness were based on the illusion that they weren’t inches away from a stranger reaching out and taking their life.

  Keegan pulled the photo close. His face paled. “It’s a little difficult to see anything in this picture.”

  “So you don’t recognize them?”

  “I didn’t say that. What’s that…thing?”

  “That thing is the body of Elise Durand,” Rivas said.

  Keegan shoved the photo to Palmer. He held up his hands. “Look, guys. I don’t mean to sound uncooperative. But in the digital age, privacy is the new frontier. And this company has a commitment to preserving the privacy of employees and customers. It’s right here in our original mission statement.” Keegan ran a finger across his phone screen and held it toward Holland. “Third bullet. Commitment to ensuring the privacy of personnel and users.”

  Palmer straightened in her chair. “I think what Josh is saying is, this company requires a subpoena before revealing any information about its principals, staff, or investors.”

  Holland smiled. “A subpoena?” He gathered the photo and the logo and put them back in Rivas’s folder.

  “That’s correct. It’s standard administrative procedure in circumstances such as this. You’ll find the same thing at other companies.”

  “Standard administrative procedure?” Holland gestured outside the conference room. “Lot of people working here.” He pulled his phone from his pocket. “Here’s the other way we do this. I go to a chat room at the Chronicle or Wired and say two individuals at DivingBell are under suspicion as accomplices in the murder of a young woman whose body was found dumped in a park in Santa Rosa.”

  Rivas turned to Holland. The detective gave away nothing in his expression.

  Keegan’s phone rang again. He angrily jabbed at it. He stood and faced Holland. “You can’t come in here and bully us into giving you private information.”

  Palmer touched Keegan’s arm. “Josh, I think we might consider a different course of action.”

  At that moment Monica knocked on the conference-room door and pointed to her watch.

  “I’ve got to do this telecon,” Keegan said.

  Palmer interrupted him. “My thought is, in the present circumstances, our fiduciary responsibilities take precedence over the privacy issues. It’s in the best interest of this company to submit to legal authority and identify the individuals and their addresses. We can file an objection ex post facto and cite the exigency of the request.”

  Keegan pulled his arm away from Palmer. “Whatever,” he said. “The launch slips, and this building’ll be empty in two days.” He pushed past her to leave the room.

  Palmer tapped her computer tablet and turned it to face Rivas and Holland. “The individuals in question are not principals or employees of this company, but they were among the original angel investors. Their names are Victor Banerjee and Russell Tao. That’s their address. We have no information for Mr. Thackrey.”

  Rivas wrote the address in his notebook, and the two men stood to leave.

  “What will it do?” Holland asked.

  Palmer held the conference-room door open. “What will what do?”

  “Your product. What will it do?”

  Palmer smiled. “What they all do. Change the world.”

  (ii)

  (FRIDAY, 10:10 A.M.)

  When Gina Cipriani appeared in the doorway of the VCI room, Eden looked around her for help, but for the moment, she had the place to herself. “If you’re here to make a disciplinary report to my supervisor, Lieutenant Mahler’s not here.”

  “We need to talk.” Cipriani spoke quietly.

  Holding up a finger, Eden led the way to the interview room and closed the door. They sat to face each other across the table.

  Cipriani shook her head. “I hated girls like you in high school.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Good grades. Pretty girls who got dates.”

  Eden smiled. “Wow. That last part was definitely not me.”

  “The only way I get along as a cop is to be as hard and tough as the guys. Even then they don’t respect me. They look at me and figure I’m butch.”

  “Law enforcement doesn’t attract the most sensitive men.”

  Cipriani shrugged. “Anyway, I’m not here to talk about that. I came here to tell you about Fresno. I never really caught on at the PD there. The department had a few women before me but not many. Command tolerated us but didn’t offer any support. I was fair game for the guys in the field. Practical jokes, sexual threats. At first I thought it was initiation stuff, but it went on and on.”

  “Did you file a complaint?” Eden asked.

  “For what? A female officer before me filed a complaint and got a load of shit. I went along and kept my head down. But when the thing happened with the Avelos case, it was the last straw.”

  “What exactly happened?”

  “Sandoval sent you th
e transcript from the tip line?”

  “I read it, but why don’t you tell me.” Eden took out a notepad and pen and leaned forward.

  Cipriani stared at the tabletop. “After the Avelos girl was found, the department opened a homicide tip line. On the second night, I’m working the phone. After midnight I get this call. Female. Young. She’s crying, out of breath. It’s somewhere outside, traffic in the background. And the girl’s…scared. That’s the thing that stuck in my head, even weeks later. How scared she was. That’s what you don’t get in the transcript.”

  “Go over what the girl said.”

  “She said the night of the Avelos murder, her boyfriend comes home and starts acting weird. He’s excited, can’t sit still. She asks him what’s wrong, and he says to shut the fuck up. She tries to say something, and he lets loose. He gets her facedown on the bed and tears off her blouse. Then he takes out a knife and cuts her. Once, at the base of the spine.”

  Cipriani looked up at Eden. “The medical examiner told us about the cut on Avelos’s body, but that information wasn’t public. No one outside the department knew. So I hear this girl talking about the same kind of cut, and I think, shit. I ask her to repeat it so I’m sure. And she says it again. The way she says, it’s at the bottom of her back.”

  “But according to the transcript, she doesn’t give you her name or the boyfriend’s name, right?” Eden wrote quickly on the pad.

  “No. She’s obviously scared. Scared of him, of what he’ll do. So all I can think is, keep the caller talking, calm her down, develop trust. But she starts crying again. I’m asking for the location, saying we can have a unit there. I ask the boyfriend’s name, but she says the guy’s going to kill her. I ask her name. I ask that three times. But she doesn’t answer. That’s all she says.”

  “Yeah, I saw that,” Eden said. “Then she hangs up?”

  “There’s some ambient sound. Something, I don’t know…cars going by. After that she hangs up. The whole thing is seventy-three seconds. I remember because we went over and over it. We couldn’t trace the call.”

  “So you didn’t get any names?” Eden tapped her pen on the table.

  “No, and that’s just it. It’s the whole point of our job, right? After the call, I get funny looks from other officers. Turns out, the investigating detectives figure it’s my fault I didn’t get the names. If the guy kills again, or the girl on the phone turns up dead, it’s on me.”

  Eden leaned back. “So when I come to you yesterday, you figure I’m blaming you for the girls here in Santa Rosa.”

  “Something like that.”

  “You realize I’m not, right? Anyway, the girls in Santa Rosa were killed before Avelos.”

  “Yeah. I get that.”

  “But tell me, is there anything else you remember about the call? What was the girl’s voice like?”

  “She had that Okie accent some people in Fresno have, but nothing unusual. Believe me, I went over that transcript a hundred times. No unusual words or expressions. No details. No…nothing.”

  Eden nodded. “I didn’t see anything either.”

  Cipriani raised her hands in futility. “I don’t even know why I’m telling you this. No matter what I do, it’s going to come back on me all over again, in this friggin’ department.”

  “No, it won’t. I won’t let it.”

  Cipriani hunched over the table. “You can’t promise that. Why would you even say it?”

  Eden met her eyes. “You’re right. I’m sorry. So why did you tell me?”

  “Last night, I’m home alone, thinking about what you said. How you got under my fucking skin.”

  Eden forced a smile.

  “Sorry,” Cipriani said. “It’s true. Anyway, I go through the call again in my mind, and I remember something I must have blocked from my memory. At the very end of the call. I’m asking the girl questions and waiting to hear her voice, and she doesn’t say anything. So I stop talking for a few seconds and wait. But there’s another sound, after the traffic sounds. Another voice—not the girl’s. It was too faint for the transcriptionist to hear, and I forgot it because the voice wasn’t the girl.”

  “What was it?”

  “A man’s voice. Or, at least at the time I thought it was a man. Maybe it didn’t happen at all and I imagined it. I don’t know.”

  “Wait. It was a man?” Eden moved forward, on the front of her chair.

  “Yeah. A man.”

  “Could you recognize anything about the voice?”

  “That’s just it. He only says one word. It was a name: Laura.”

  “Laura?”

  “Yeah. Someone said it. Laura. Or maybe Lauren. I mean, who the fuck cares, right? It’s just a first name. We don’t have anything else.” Cipriani spread her hands on the tabletop and stared at them.

  “Could it have been Lorin? With an ‘o’?”

  “How the Jesus fuck do I know? I just said I could barely hear it. What difference does it make?”

  Eden reached across the table and grabbed one of Cipriani’s hands. “You on shift?”

  Cipriani looked down where Eden was holding her hand. “No. I’m off ’til Sunday. Why?”

  “I want you to meet Lorin.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  (i)

  (FRIDAY, 10:20 A.M.)

  “Where are you now?” Russell’s voice came out of Thackrey’s phone.

  Looking out the driver’s-side window, Thackrey could see leaves blowing across a wet parking lot. He was tired—finally. The police interrogation had drained the last of his energy. If he could just close his eyes, he would sleep for days. Thackrey held his phone in his fingertips. “Outside a condo in Santa Rosa. Waiting for someone.”

  “Jesus, Ben, are you buying more shit?”

  “No…it’s something else. The cops were just at my house.”

  “What? From VCI?”

  “Yeah, the one called Mahler. The boss. Something’s fucked up with that guy. He’s got this…weird thing about him.” Up close, the cop had surprised Thackrey. The guy had a dangerous raggedness that made him seem capable of something irregular.

  “What kind of weird thing?”

  “Like he’s sick. Or, he did a couple lines of coke before he came in.”

  Russell sighed. “Maybe that was the drugs in your head.”

  “No, I’m serious,” Thackrey said. “The other thing, I’m looking at him, and I’m thinking, ‘Fuck, man, I was inside your house last night.’”

  “Does he know that?”

  “Maybe. I could see he’s thinking about it. The other one was there, too. The girl.”

  “Detective Somers?”

  “Eden Somers. That girl’s playing some games.” Thackrey saw her face again, refusing to smile.

  “Are you on crank right now?”

  “I don’t remember. What difference does it make?” Over the last few hours, reality had become unreliable for Thackrey. His memory surprised him, with flashes too vivid for a dream—a woman he recognized, digging her nails into his arm, screaming like a wounded cat.

  “What’d the police ask?” Russell said, trying to keep Thackrey on a linear path.

  “Usual mangled syntax. What was your relationship with the victim? How do you have a relationship with a victim?”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I said I was involved. Anyone who came within ten feet of Elise was involved. The cops know about the drug buy Saturday night. That dipshit Peña must have talked.”

  “I think we knew that was going to happen.”

  “They asked if I have a gun,” Thackrey said. How had he remembered that? He was amazed at this single fact floating to the surface.

  “We must have left some residue on your girlfriend’s right hand. Where’s the gun, anyway?”

  “It’s not
at home, if that’s what you’re worried about. By the way, the questions weren’t all depressing. We had a few lighter moments. Mahler asked me if I own dogs. ‘Do you own dogs, Mr. Thackrey?’ The way he said it was funny.”

  “Hilarious. You didn’t laugh, right?”

  “Of course not.”

  “So you were calm?”

  “I’m always calm. But it was strange. Detective Somers was sitting on the sofa with her feet in Elise’s blood. All she had to do was to look down.”

  Hearing himself, Thackrey wondered if the part with the blood was real. It sounded real.

  “Did they ask about Vic and me?” Russell asked. “Did it sound like they ID’d us?”

  “Not a peep. Maybe you guys lucked out and you’ve got some more time.”

  “Maybe. The keystroke logger shows they’re investigating a murder in Fresno.”

  “Yeah, they asked me if I was in Fresno in 2017. It was bizarre.”

  “So nothing about DivingBell?”

  “Nada. Maybe they’re not as smart as you think. At least not all of them.” Thackrey remembered Eden asking him about Elise and Reggie. For a moment he thought of telling Russell but decided against it.

  “Did it sound like the cops know what happened to Elise?” Russell asked.

  “What did happen?” Thackrey leaned against the headrest and stared out the windshield, his mind thrown back into the terrifying story. Fragments of memory mixed themselves with the nightmares he’d been having, so it felt like picking his way through fractured glass. “I remember cooking dinner, Elise and I eating at the kitchen counter. I look at her and I can see the Oxy going off inside her head. She does that zombie thing. Barely talking. Hair hanging in her eyes. Finally she looks at me and says, ‘When I’m dead, I want you to wrap me in a blanket and put me in the water.’ Where did she get those ideas?”

  “You told us that.”

  Did he already tell them? It seemed impossible. “She wanders off. I think she’s asleep in the bedroom. I’m not feeling well. So I take all the Adderall and snort five or six lines of the new shit.”