The Silenced Women

by Frederick Weisel

  “The department has counselors. We can get you help.”

  “I don’t know what this work is, how far to go. I can’t help opening the door and looking in. I’m like Elise—the way she couldn’t stop asking Thackrey about Reggie. After I read the Arizona report, all I could think of was the dirt in that girl’s mouth.”

  Mahler saw Eden waiting for an answer. “Someone as arrogant as Thackrey thinks all cops are the same,” he said. “If the chief lets me keep my job, I need different kinds of people on my team. I need a guy like Danny Rivas, who can see two gangbangers and tell which one’s got a nine-millimeter behind his back. Or, someone like Frames, who does the right thing in a split second. Someone like Coyle, who can find stuff in a database. And someone like you—”

  “Who can’t stop doing research? Why’d you recommend me to the chief, anyway? You knew I flamed out at the agency. The only thing on my résumé was a failure.”

  “No,” Mahler said, “the failure was the agency’s for not backing you up. What you did was to get inside the victims better than anyone else. That’s why I wanted you here. Remember, with every homicide, all we’ve got at the start is the victim.”

  “You want me to keep working for you?”

  “I don’t know what kind of a cop you’ll be, Eden,” Mahler said, looking into her eyes. “A murder investigation is about looking at what’s there. You’re good at that, one of the best I’ve worked with. But cases are also about everything that’s left out—all the things we don’t know, all the questions we have. It takes time to see how to live in that world. You need to learn your craft. Hang around guys like Rivas. Have a beer with Tom Woodhouse, and let him bend your ear about the cases he worked.”

  “And you?”

  “Me? I’m not that old.”

  “What about the terrible things we see?”

  “Part of the job. You have to find your own way with it. Listen to the victims. They’ll tell you how far to open the door.”

  Eden looked at Mahler to see if he was serious. “The victims talk to you?”

  Mahler shrugged. “Did I say that?”

  Read on for a sneak peek at the next Violent Crime Investigations Team mystery!

  Chapter One

  (i)

  (WEDNESDAY, 8:32 A.M.)

  Annie never saw Paul drive away, her husband getting smaller and smaller until he was a speck on the horizon. Instead, all of him, every unlucky molecule, suddenly vanished, like those characters on Star Trek dematerialized by the transporter.

  The ingredients, the essence, of Paul Behrens departed—his sad face, that daily uniform of Oxford shirt and khaki trousers, the sound of his Nikes on the kitchen floor, the stale paper smell he carried around with him the last few years, which was like putting your nose close to the pages of an old book. Just like that, those things no longer existed where Annie was. Here, then there. Although it was not a there she could actually name.

  The way he left shouldn’t have mattered, at least not more than the fact of his leaving. But somehow it did. It seemed aimed at her, like something she wasn’t smart enough to get.

  Annie could picture it. Paul full of his English teacher thing, using a literary reference to explain his departure. It would take five minutes because there would be a book or play she’d never read, and he’d have to tell her about it—like she was a slow student. He’d start by saying something about the cat in Alice, and Lewis Carroll’s writing style, and she’d stop listening after the first twenty seconds.

  That, of course, became a problem later when the police had questions. For more than a year, Annie had been in the habit of not listening to Paul. She was a kind of expert at it. Her superpower was envisioning him across the kitchen table or on the other side of the family room, hearing the sound of his voice with its puking sincerity, all of it locked in her head, without being able to tell you anything specific he said.

  The first thing Annie did remember about the day Paul left was that moment when she was lying on the sofa in the family room and heard her phone ping. She was covered in an afghan, still wearing her nurse’s scrubs from the previous day’s three-to-eleven shift. With the blinds closed, it was impossible to tell the time. The house was quiet and dark. Paul had already left for his job. Jesse and Claire were off to school.

  Her head was pounding, her mouth dry. Did she drink a whole bottle of Zinfandel before she fell asleep?

  She found her purse on the floor and dug out her phone. 8:32. Her brain immediately did the math: six hours’ sleep. On the home screen, she saw a text message from Jennifer Steeley, the principal at Brookwood Middle School:

  Paul didn’t come in. Not answering cell. Called sub. He OK?

  Oh, Christ. He’s home after all.

  Annie threw off the afghan and walked through the kitchen to go upstairs. On the table were the remains of the kids’ breakfast—cereal boxes and dirty bowls—and beside them her empty bottle. That last bit was a classic passive-aggressive message from Paul: I’m not going to hide it for you.

  Going up the stairs, she felt through her cotton scrubs that her panties were missing. Her fogged brain drew a blank. Then she remembered the night before, leaving them on the back seat of the car. Shit. Had Paul seen them?

  At the top of the stairs, Annie noticed the open door to the master bedroom and braced for a confrontation with Paul. But the room was empty. The bed on his side was mussed, pajamas thrown on the bedspread.

  Annie headed back downstairs and opened the door to the garage. Paul’s silver Elantra was gone. On the rear seat of her own Camry, she found her panties and stuffed them in her pocket.

  Back in the kitchen, Annie rooted through a cabinet for a bottle of Advil. She washed down two tablets with a full glass of Sauvignon Blanc, poured another half glass, and sat at the table.

  The empty Zinfandel bottle stared back at her across the table. The label was an artsy painting of a vineyard. $9.95, screw cap. Annie remembered the clerk in the supermarket wine department. Thirtyish, kind of cute, with that unshaved, not-quite-a-beard thing guys were doing these days. She smiled, found herself flirting, asking about the tannin-to-alcohol balance, or some shit she’d read online. He looked into her eyes and wasn’t fooled. He reached to the lower shelves for one of the “value bottles.”

  Annie dialed Paul’s cell. It rang three times before his voicemail clicked in. There was her husband’s deep, earnest voice. “Hi. This is Paul. Sorry I missed your call. Leave me a message and—” She clicked off.

  She found the number for Jennifer Steeley on her phone and tapped it. The time was 8:45. Busiest time of day for a principal.

  Steeley picked up on the second ring, talking over the noise of a crowded hallway. “Hey, Annie. Thanks for calling back.”

  “Yeah. Got your message. Sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay. We found a sub. Remember Penny Freese? Taught seventh-grade history before her first kid?”

  “Good. Good. Glad it worked out.”

  “Part of the job. Is Paul okay?”

  “I’m sure he’s fine.” Annie took a deep breath and tried to think how to start. “He’s—The thing is, I’m working second shift these days and get home late. Sometimes we don’t see each other for days. I didn’t talk to him before he left this morning.” What business was it of this woman that she and Paul weren’t sleeping together?

  “No problem, Annie. Really.” Steeley’s voice sounded impatient to end the call. “If he could just let me know how long he’ll be gone and where he left his lesson book.”

  The buzz from the Sauvignon Blanc kicked in after she hung up. Annie refilled her glass and took it to the living room. She opened the curtains to look out on the backyard.

  If Paul isn’t at work, where the fuck is he? She thought of her father-in-law, recovering from chemo and staying with Paul’s sister.

  She clicked on the
number. “Hey, Beth. It’s Annie. This too early?”

  “Yeah, right. No, honey. We’ve been up since four.”

  “Sorry to bother you, but is Paul there? We missed each other this morning, and he didn’t show up at school. Just trying to track him down.”

  “Nope, not here. My experience is—and you probably know this, too—the guy’s driving somewhere. Mister Careful never picks up while he’s driving, even on Bluetooth. Try again in a few minutes. Tell the jerk to come by tonight for dinner. Dad wants a word. I’m making burgers.”

  Annie hung up and tried Paul’s number again. This time she heard the phone’s ringtone coming across the room, from her husband’s briefcase lying beside the recliner. She crouched next to it and clicked open the latches. Paul’s phone lay atop a pile of student assignments. She turned it off and stared at it. He never went anywhere without his phone.

  Beneath the student assignments lay her husband’s lesson plan. How could he teach the day’s classes without his plan? Under the lesson plan was a sealed manila envelope with no address. She felt something inside the envelope and tore it open. Out fell a thin, multicolored friendship bracelet—the kind teenage girls tie around their wrists. Attached to one end of the bracelet was a tiny plastic red heart. She shook the envelope, but it was empty. No note, no letter.

  Annie dug deeper through the briefcase, not knowing what she was looking for. At the bottom, she found a photo. As she picked it up, she froze. She held it away from her body like an object arrived from another world. Without thinking, she crushed the photo, squeezing so hard her fingernails cut her palm. Then she shoved it into the pocket of the scrubs and pushed down until her fingers felt the silk of the panties crumpled at the bottom.

  (ii)

  (WEDNESDAY, 8:45 A.M.)

  “No one’s good at surveillance,” retired homicide cop Tommy Woodhouse once told Frames. “It’s like saying you’re good at putting your pants on. You’re there to see something. The tricky part comes when that something isn’t what you thought it would be.”

  Frames sat alone in the front seat of an unmarked Malibu. He was on temporary part-time loan from Violent Crime to the Narcotic Investigations Team. His car was parked in a residential section of Roseland, on the opposite side of the street and a few doors from a lime-green stucco rented by Lucia Cervantes. The narcotics team wanted surveillance on Cervantes, known to be the girlfriend of a street dealer named Jorge Lopez. A week ago, Lopez was identified as the supplier for a thirty-eight-year-old user who suffered a fatal overdose. After the OD, Lopez disappeared. One of the team’s snitches said Lopez might show up to visit Cervantes.

  In four days, Frames had seen Cervantes three times—twice when she emerged to drive to Safeway for groceries, and once when she watered the dying roses along the front fence. She was a small woman with straight, black hair who wore, on all three occasions, tight-fitting spandex workout suits. Watering the flowers, Cervantes stood in one spot for five minutes, smoking a cigarette and aiming the spray at the top of the plants. Halfway into it, Frames fought the urge to climb out of his car, walk down the street, and tell her what his grandmother had drummed into his head: water the plant base, not the blossoms.

  On this latest shift, Frames passed the time by making a mental list of everything that hadn’t changed since he arrived: no one in or out of the house, no lights on, window shades unmoved, no sound from inside the house, roses dead as the day before.

  “What do you suppose she does all day?” a voice asked in his ear. Wiggins.

  The other half of the surveillance team—Wiggins and Buckley—sat in a Ford parked across from Cervantes’s driveway. Connected by wireless mikes, the three men had begun the surveillance observing a strict no-chatter policy. Wiggins ended the policy on the first day.

  “TV,” Buckley said. “Most people watch TV.”

  “All day? How do you watch TV all day?”

  “Look on the roof. She’s got the Dish. 190 channels. Other night, I turned mine on, and there was a soccer game from Albania.”

  “So you’re saying she’s inside there right now watching Albanian soccer?”

  Buckley sighed. “No. That was an example. Are you familiar with normal conversation?”

  “You know what I’d like right now?” Wiggins asked.

  “Really? We’re going to do this again?”

  “One of those ham croissants from that place downtown. Don’t tell me you couldn’t eat one right now?”

  “Sure,” Buckley said. “We’ll have it delivered to the car. What could go wrong?”

  “How about, you, Steve-O? You hungry?”

  “No,” Frames said. “And remember how I asked you not to call me that?”

  For Frames, the most frustrating part of working with Wiggins was not that he talked incessantly but that he had beaten Frames to it. Frames was known in Violent Crime as the talker. It was his signature. But here Wiggins had been first off the mark and grabbed the play. Now, with the earpiece, it was like Wiggins had gotten inside Frames’s brain. Or, had become his brain.

  “Okay. De-tec-tive Frames, tell me this. What’s the longest surveillance you’ve been on?”

  “This one,” Frames said. He wanted to say any surveillance with you would seem longer.

  “Really? I had one last year that was ten days. How about you, Buckminster?”

  “2012. A whole month.”

  “You’re kidding. Department had the budget for that? Hey, Frames, somebody said you were a jarhead. Anything this boring in the Corps?”

  Frames debated not answering, but he knew Wiggins wouldn’t give up. A few weeks earlier, Frames had seen an anonymous list on Twitter. Five most irritating SRPD officers. Wiggins was number three. Frames had never met numbers one and two, but he was impressed two officers were more irritating than Wiggins.

  “Guard duty. Fallujah. First Battalion, Third Marines.” Frames remembered the adrenalized mindset of Iraq. “Stood all night in a doorway of the house where guys in the platoon were sleeping. Had to be on your toes. Local paramilitary came out after dark.”

  “Nothing like guys coming to kill you to keep your eyes open, right?”

  In an instant, Frames felt the M16 in his hands and smelled the decaying bodies in the desert night air. “That’s just it,” he said. “There were always lots of sounds—dogs barking, gunfire on the perimeter—but not much to see. From where I stood, the only light came from a window a block away.” He saw the little square of light again at the end of a dark street.

  “I couldn’t look inside, obviously, but I kept myself awake imagining the family living where that light was. Father, mother, couple kids. Going about their normal life in the middle of a war zone. Every day you had bodies in the street, helicopters just over the housetops, bombs going off. But this little family went on with life. I made up this whole thing. The father drove a taxi. He met his wife when they were teenagers. The boy was the oldest, just starting to read. The little girl was afraid of the gear the American soldiers wore.”

  “At night, the father told a story before the kids fell asleep. The story was always about a beautiful flying woman. She was, the father said, as beautiful as their mother, and she flew through the air and rescued the people of the city. Every night was a new story of rescue.”

  When Frames finished, the mikes were silent. “That’s what I imagined anyway,” he said.

  “That’s what you thought of?” Wiggins said after a few seconds. “In fucking Iraq? You are one weird dude, Steve-O.”

  “Hey, Wiggins.” Frames let his head fall back on the top of the seat. “Do you think if I came down there and pounded your ass, there’s any chance you’d stop calling me that?”

  “Wait a second, boys.” Buckley suddenly serious. “We’ve got somebody on the move. One. Two of them. Running fast.”

  Frames sat up and peered down the street. He
couldn’t see anything. “Where?”

  “Back of the driveway.” Buckley spoke quickly. “It’s Cervantes. And somebody else. Male. Six feet. See them?”

  Frames stared ahead. A hedge blocked his view. “What’re they doing?”

  “Looks like Cervantes is trying to get away from the guy.” Wiggins this time. “Wait. The guy’s got something in his hands. Poles.”

  “Poles?”

  “Or, sticks. Let me get the scope.”

  Frames still couldn’t see anyone. He heard Wiggins’s scope bang against the window glass.

  “Oh, shit. They’re swords.”

  “Wait. What?” Frames yelled. “Did you say swords?”

  “Yeah. You know, like a pirate.”

  “You see them, Frames?” Buckley breathless. “They’re fucking behind us, on your side, turning into the street.”

  Frames leaned close to the windshield. He could see Cervantes now racing toward him down the sidewalk. Bathrobe open, hair flying, face wild with fear. Behind her a man with a sword swinging in each hand.

  Frames pulled the Glock from its holster. He let Cervantes run past. Then, opening the car door, he leveled the gun at the approaching figure. “STOP. Police.”

  The figure kept coming. He was close enough now that Frames could see the guy’s shaved head, bare chest, and heavily tattooed upper arms.

  “STOP,” Frames shouted again.

  With the man nearly in front of him, Frames fired a shot and saw it hit the man but not slow his approach.

  “Frames, Frames.” Wiggins yelling in his ear.

  Buckley on the radio: “David 12. Shots fired. 418 Greenwood Avenue. Code three medical.”

  The man lunged with the right-handed sword over the top of the car door. Frames shielded himself with the door and fell backward inside the car. Thrown across the driver’s seat and console, Frames fired again and missed. The attacker thrust the sword through the doorway. The blade sliced into Frames’s calf like a hot poker.