The Weight of Silence (Nicole Foster Thriller Book 2)

by Gregg Olsen

  “Didn’t you?” I ask.

  Carter stands there and smiles. Despite the whisper of cigarette smoke that clings to him, he’s attractive in that way that is hard to describe. Nothing about his face is spectacular. His eyes. His smile. His nose. All of it is average. Symmetrical but ordinary. And yet, taken as a whole, his averageness adds up to very good-looking. A little wear and tear on his face, lines etching into his skin, makes him handsome.

  I give him a smile back. “We need a warrant for the Tomlinsons’ phones and computers.”

  “Already in the works.”

  I smile again.

  “Now that we know what we’re looking for,” I say, “I want to see if that email blast to Luke was received.”

  “And opened,” he says.

  “Yep. If he got it Tuesday morning, don’t you think it would jog his memory on whether or not he left his daughter in the car?” I ask.

  “You think?” Carter says.

  “There’s no doubt.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Wednesday, August 16

  It is late morning and time to circle back to the scene of the crime. We’re a small department, so I cover this without Carter, who returns to his office to work the case from there. The initial reports from responding officers indicated that Jordan Conway had been among the first to converge on Luke Tomlinson’s Subaru when he stopped and called for help. I find her behind the counter at the Wendy’s adjacent to the Starbucks.

  Jordan is in her midtwenties, with alert green eyes and silver-streaked blond hair that she wears neatly clipped back, away from the burgers and fries that she bags up for customers, though her name tag says she’s the manager in training. Her pleasant face immediately shows concern when I tell her who I am and why I’m here.

  “We need to talk,” I say.

  “Oh,” she says, shoving a tray toward an awaiting customer. “I don’t know if I can. I’m off soon then I have to get home.”

  “Just a follow-up,” I tell her. “You’re not in trouble.”

  Her eyes land on mine. “I get off in five minutes,” she says.

  “Fine,” I tell her. “I’ll wait in the dining room.”

  She gives me a quick nod, and I order a coffee and take it to a table in the back of the restaurant. The place is busy with moms doing their best to contain children who swarm the space, dropping fries and spilling drinks. Laughing. Crying. Whining. I know being a detective is very hard work, but I don’t think there is anything more difficult than dealing with customers at a fast-food franchise on a busy street. People come in, order, mess up the place, and leave without so much as busing a tray back to the front of the restaurant next to the big “Thank You” sign over the trash receptacles.

  The coffee is terrible, but I drink it anyway.

  Jordan comes over right away. She’s no longer wearing her Wendy’s uniform but is dressed in jeans and a lightweight pink sweater. She’s transformed herself from a counter person to a more sophisticated-appearing woman. It seems to me that she could find a better paying job than Wendy’s, but I have no idea what led her to this vocation.

  Jordan tells me when she notices my surprise.

  “My dad owns this place,” she explains as she slides into the seat across from me. “We have one in Olympia and Long Beach too. I’m taking business classes.” She looks over at a particularly unruly little boy and gives me a shrug. “Someday this will be mine. Lucky me, right?”

  I smile. I like her right away.

  “Jordan,” I say, pretending to enjoy the coffee, “you were there when Ally Tomlinson was found.”

  “Right,” she says. “I mean, I never thought I’d ever see anything like that in my life. Working here, you see a lot, let me tell you that. Probably the only weirder place to work is the public library. My roommate, Charlotte, works there. People are very strange.”

  I didn’t know that about the library. I tell myself that the next time I’m there with Emma I’ll be more wary.

  “Tell me what happened in front of the Starbucks,” I say as I half turn my head in the direction of the parking lot.

  She thinks a minute. “Right. Okay. I was coming out of Starbucks and I heard this yelling. It was Luke Tomlinson. I mean, I didn’t know his name at the time but I do now. Anyway, I saw him pull in off the road, into the lot, and brake suddenly. Like something big was happening inside the car. He opened the door and started yelling about his little girl.”

  “What were his words?” I ask.

  She takes a breath to think. “Exact words? Not sure. It happened so fast. He was yelling that he needed help. You know, ‘Help me! Somebody, help me! My little girl can’t breathe!’”

  “What was his demeanor like, Jordan?” I ask.

  “At first, totally freaked out,” she says, her confidence building. “He was yelling at the top of his lungs. You couldn’t not hear him. That loud. It sent chills down my spine. I dropped my Frappuccino and hurried right over to see if I could help. I knew something terrible had happened. He was panicking. I mean, literally panicking. He said he didn’t know how to do CPR. I told him I did, and we struggled to get her out of the car seat. It was weird, because he was struggling so much. Like he was so scared and out of it that he couldn’t undo the straps. I took over. I have a nephew. It’s tricky but not that tricky.”

  “You did CPR?” I ask. “Because he didn’t know how?”

  Jordan’s mouth is a straight line, her eyes fixed on mine. She takes another deep breath and starts firing more of her story at me. “Right. We have to take CPR training because of the restaurant. Kind of required in case someone chokes or whatever. Anyway, I’m certified.”

  “That’s good,” I say, mostly because I believe it, but also because the young woman needs to take a breath. She’s that intense.

  “Right,” she says, sucking in some much-needed air. “It’s very important.”

  A mother starts to move her children to another table.

  “Then what happened?” I ask.

  Jordan waits a moment for the woman to get settled. “All hell broke loose,” she says, dropping her voice a little. “People came from all over the strip mall, trying to help. One lady was screaming that the baby was dead, but I kept going until the paramedics came. I was taught that you keep going because you might be doing some good, but with a baby, well . . . it’s kind of hard to tell.”

  I know that Jordan Conway gave it her all on that hot, sticky blacktop. She was not a quitter.

  “What was Luke doing?” I ask.

  Jordan hesitates. She studies my eyes to measure what I’m thinking as if she’s about to say something that warrants a little introspection. Finally she goes for it.

  “I’ve seen enough TV to know that it’s very important to remember that not everyone handles a stressful moment in the same way,” she says. “Not everyone acts the way you’d want them to.”

  She’s right about that, of course. She’s thoughtful. She’s the kind of witness that can help either side of a case.

  “I’m interested in what you saw,” I say. “Tell me.”

  Jordan takes a napkin from the dispenser and works on coagulated ketchup spatter that’s found its way into the seam between the wall and the slightly worn tabletop.

  Someday all of this will be hers.

  “I told my roommate about it,” Jordan says. “I didn’t even think I would mention it to anyone ever again, but it just seemed kind of strange. Kind of inappropriate.”

  My heartbeat speeds up. “Inappropriate how? In what way?”

  She stops cleaning and wads up the now-bloody-looking napkin. “Feels inappropriate for me to talk about his inappropriateness.”

  This is the world we live in, I think.

  “It’s fine,” I say. “I need to know, Jordan. What happened? It could be important or it could be completely nothing. Don’t worry about it. You’re reporting your observation. You’re not making a judgment.”

  And, yes, I understand: everything is
a judgment.

  She’d been so confident a moment ago, but I see her sink a little in her chair.

  “Go on,” I encourage her.

  Jordan runs her hand over the clean table. “It makes me feel a little stupid,” she says, looking away. “Like you think that I think that I’m all that, but, really, I know I’m not.”

  “What?” I press her. “What happened?”

  “He kept staring at me,” she finally says.

  “At you?” I ask.

  She looks at me. “At my top,” she finally says. “I swear to God, that’s what I thought at the time. I thought it was so weird, because his kid was basically dying, but he was checking me out. Really. I’m not even joking.”

  “No,” I say. “I expect you’re not.”

  She keeps her gaze directly on me. “You know what it’s like,” she tells me, as if I do. “Guys come up to the counter to order, and I feel like telling them, ‘The menu is above me, not here.’”

  She points to her breasts. They are substantial, but not in the way that should invite that kind of intrusive scrutiny. The truth is I really don’t know what it’s like. I never had much of a chest. Stacy, on the other hand, is better endowed—and yet she had implants too.

  I suddenly flash to the time when Stacy told me that I was lucky to be average, because no one was jealous of average people.

  “I envy you so much, Nicole,” she told me after she married Cy. “You will always be you. I have to be the ideal.”

  It was a dig. Stacy was always a good digger.

  “I see,” I say to Jordan. “So that’s what he did? When you were trying to resuscitate Ally?”

  “Right,” she continues. “And after. Like, every time that I looked at him I swear to God his eyes were there and not on anything else. It was really messed up. I know I’m right. Even though I’ve told myself a thousand times since that I must have been mistaken, because, you know, the adrenaline was really flowing.”

  Jordan stops and takes another napkin from the stainless steel dispenser. I think she’s going to start cleaning again; instead, she catches a tear just as it forms at the corner of her eye.

  “Sorry,” she says. “But I really wanted to save that baby. I didn’t know her but she was just so little. She smelled terrible. I thought it was a dirty diaper at first, but now I know better. I don’t know what you think, Detective Foster, but if you ask me, I don’t think that for one minute he cared about her. Not really. His kid was dying and all he was thinking about was playing with some strange chick’s tits. Sorry. That’s how I feel.”

  Jordan Conway gets up and says she needs to get back to work. I watch her depart. I know that her shift is over, but I don’t say anything. Inside, I feel so sorry for her. She was traumatized by what Luke did that afternoon. For the rest of her life, she’ll think of Ally.

  Just like me.

  Just as I’m about to stand, Jordan returns.

  “I want you to put that fucker away for the rest of his life,” she says, her eyes no longer sad but glowering in a kind of controlled rage that I wouldn’t have expected from her. “No punishment is too good. Put him in a sauna and turn up the heat. He should feel what Ally felt. That’s what you should do. That’s exactly what I’d do.”

  She doesn’t wait for a response.

  “Thanks, Jordan,” I say, not really knowing how to respond to that. I’m all about due process. Sure, I have fantasies about what could—or should—be done to a child molester, for instance. Everyone does. But true justice is built on facts, not a vengeful and misguided social media beatdown. Or a fantasy in which a perpetrator is put in his or her place with methods that mimic what they’d done to the child.

  As I get in my car, I immediately crack the window and turn on the AC. I should have parked in the shade and risked the oozing pitch of the spruce tree that shaded the space two car lengths away. My phone pings, and it’s a text from Carter.

  Let’s see how things were yesterday with Luke at work. Meet me at the office.

  I put my car in gear and drive in the direction of the Aberdeen Police Department. As the heat escapes, I think of Ally.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Wednesday, August 16

  On the way to WinCo, Carter and I discuss the latest on the case. Luke Tomlinson’s arraignment was scheduled for the afternoon, and we now knew that the prosecutor’s office was looking at multiple charges, including second-degree murder, child endangerment, child abuse, and assaulting a police officer. A search warrant had been issued for Ally’s father’s laptop, work computer, phone, and any other electronics he owned or used on a regular basis.

  “Mia’s phone too?” I ask Carter, as we pull into the grocery store’s busy parking lot.

  “Yep. Hers too.”

  “Good.”

  “Autopsy tomorrow morning too.”

  “Lots going on,” I say.

  The offices at WinCo are on the second floor in the back of the building. I’ve shopped there before, but I had no idea that it was a regional hub for the grocery chain. Luke’s assistant district manager, Darren Huff, leads us to an employee conference room. Huff has little to add, even though Luke had boasted that he was the “assistant” to the assistant.

  “Nice kid,” he says. “Good worker. Sometimes a little distracted, but that’s par for the course around here with this age group. Always on their phones. Watching Netflix at their desks. God knows what else they do when I’m not around. In any case, I’m in shock. I can’t imagine how the hell Luke could forget that his kid was in the car. These kids today just aren’t wired right. It has to be that. Internet’s ruining an entire generation.”

  He stops and looks at Carter and me.

  “Sorry about the soapbox,” he says somewhat sheepishly. He points through the conference-room window. “These two guys are Luke’s buddies here at work. Gavin is in purchasing and Al works in distribution. I told them they aren’t in trouble.”

  As Carter and I go into the conference room, I notice Luke’s portrait in the employee-of-the-month lineups that cover the wall. In fact, he is in three of them, for three different months. Apparently, he is good at his job.

  Gavin Wilcox and Al Black are sitting at a large oak table, both doing exactly what their manager said they do whenever they can: looking at their phones. Gavin has a shaved head. Al wears his hair slicked back, retro style. Both in their midtwenties. The instant we step into the conference room to introduce ourselves, they set down their phones.

  Gavin reveals himself almost right away as the more effusive of the pair. Al, it seems, is as laid-back as his hairstyle.

  “Luke’s our bro,” Gavin says. “What they are saying on Facebook isn’t true. He’s solid.”

  I look at Al.

  “Solid, yeah,” he replies.

  “I know he’s your buddy,” Carter says. “We’re trying to piece together what happened yesterday.”

  “I don’t know anything,” Al says.

  “That might be entirely true,” I tell them. “But it is also possible that you know something but aren’t aware of its importance.”

  “This was an accident,” Gavin says. “Plain and simple. You’re not gunning for the dude, are you?”

  I shake my head. “Of course not. Even though it’s very difficult—and I get how close you are—we have to figure things out.”

  The room is silent, and Carter takes the lead.

  “Tells us about yesterday,” he asks. “How did the day begin?”

  The young men look at each other, and I wonder for a second if they’ve orchestrated some grand story to tell. Gavin speaks first. He tells us that there was nothing unusual about the day. They talked about preseason football and whether the Seahawks would make it to the Super Bowl or if their glory days were over.

  “I’m a Broncos fan myself,” Al interjects.

  “The three of us went to lunch at Jersey Mike’s at eleven forty-five,” Gavin says. He stops and looks over at Al.

  Again silenc
e.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “It’s nothing,” Al says, looking at his friend.

  Discord replaces silence. The air becomes heavy. Whatever it is that Gavin wants to tell us, Al wants no part of it.

  “A baby is dead,” I remind them.

  “Yeah, I get that,” Al says.

  “It might not be anything,” Gavin says, shifting uncomfortably in his chair. He glances at his friend and coworker.

  Al glowers and looks away.

  “What?” Carter asks. “What is it?”

  Gavin takes in a big gulp of air. He suddenly looks pale.

  “Okay,” he says, exhaling. “Fine. I know it isn’t anything. It’s just kind of weird. After lunch we stopped in at the office supply place next door to the sub shop. Luke needed printer ink cartridges.”

  “All right,” I say. “Did something happen there?”

  Gavin shakes his head. “No.” He looks at his friend, but Al is still fixated on the tabletop. He refuses to look upward. “After. When we got back here, Luke went to his car to put the cartridges away.”

  Al has been silent up to now. I shift my gaze to him, and it prods him to speak up. “We aren’t supposed to bring other retailers’ merchandise into the store. Policy.”

  “What time was that?” Carter asks.

  “About twelve thirty,” Gavin says.

  “Did you see him go to his car?” I ask.

  Gavin shakes his head. “No. Not specifically. I just know he did. That day he parked out back by the river.”

  “Is that where he always parked?” I ask.

  Gavin is mute for a second, but he finally speaks. It’s clear he’s very uncomfortable. His face is red, and a bead of sweat has collected around his temple. He kneads his fingers like putty. “No,” he says. “Never.”

  “Lot was super full,” Al says, once more playing defender.

  The second hand on the big office clock behind them sweeps halfway around its face as both young men sit in silence. They know now that Ally was in the car. She had to be. They don’t know if she was already dead or not. They know that their friend went to put something inside the sweltering vehicle. They know that any reasonable person would have noticed something.