The Longest Silence

by Debra Webb

  She pushed the painful thoughts away and stared out the window at one of the ugliest parts of humanity’s past. The screams and wails of patients echoed through her soul. One of the freshmen had read aloud newspaper articles about the old asylum when they toured the place the second time. The notes from the patient files they had found were right. Children were often kept in cages among the adults. Experimental treatments were the norm.

  What sort of desperation did it take to prompt a person to bring a loved one to a place like this and leave him or her? As if you have the right to judge. Hell, she didn’t even trust herself to take care of a cat much less another human. The neighbor at the last place where she lived had offered her a kitten from the unexpected litter her cat had dropped on her. Jo had insisted she traveled too much for a pet. Funny how the lies came so easy after so many years.

  She ordered her brain to stay on track. Focus on those fourteen days. If she was held here surely something would feel more deeply familiar. She powered the window down and inhaled the scents of the place. Listened to the sounds.

  She remembered the crunch of leaves under their feet as they ran through the woods after they escaped. They’d done what they had to do; the other girl hadn’t made it. It was just the two of them.

  They’d done what they had to do.

  Jo closed her eyes and silently repeated the words, then she opened them again and stared forward. Bile churned in her stomach. She tried to swallow, to keep the bitterness at bay.

  She cleared her throat. “Tell me, Agent LeDoux, is a victim still a victim even when she does whatever it takes to survive?”

  He slowed for an intersection at a maze of buildings. Thankfully the security vehicle had turned onto another street. Tony scrutinized her for a moment. “Did you do what you had to do, Joanna?”

  “It’s a hypothetical question.” She looked away from him, stared forward. “I think a friend of mine did.”

  “Victims do what they have to do to survive,” he agreed. “The survival instinct is strong in most people, unless it has been drummed out by previous bumps in the road.”

  “Like drugs or hard luck?”

  “That can do it, yes. Abusive parents or spouses can do it, too.”

  They rode in silence for half a minute before he said more. Maybe he was considering whether or not he was driving around with a person who’d done something really bad.

  “With some people, their will to survive isn’t as strong because they have much less to live for. Maybe they’ve suffered tragic loss. I have a friend, a homicide detective. She lives in Montgomery, Alabama. A serial killer murdered her husband and was responsible for the deaths of her little boy, her partner and a dear friend. She was one of those people who decided she didn’t have anything worth surviving for.”

  Jo understood that feeling so damned well. “Did she die?”

  He shook his head. “No. She survived so she could find the killer and make sure he paid for what he’d done.”

  “Did she?”

  Tony braked for another stop. He nodded. “She did. She picked up the pieces and now she’s married again.”

  “She’s happy?”

  “She is.”

  Jo didn’t see how that was possible. “With those kinds of scars to her psyche I don’t see how she could put it behind her and ever be normal.”

  “What’s normal?”

  She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. Go on living life as if nothing happened.”

  “You’d have to ask her about that.” He focused on driving.

  Jo studied his profile again. “You have a few scars of your own.”

  “I spent a lot of years profiling killers. Yeah. I have a few.”

  Maybe more than a few. “You tell me your secrets. I’ve told you mine.”

  His jaw tightened. Ah, so he was good at telling others how to do it but he couldn’t do it himself.

  “What a hypocrite.” She stared out the window once more.

  The high fences with their concertina wire tops made her insides tighten. She remembered the buildings that later had been turned to small prisons. At some point in the past half century or so treatment for the mentally ill had changed and so the need for places like this one had waned. Some parts of the property had been repurposed, so to speak. Eventually, even those new purposes became obsolete and were abandoned. The side roads that went off into the woods made her shudder. She hated this place.

  “I was very good at my job.”

  His voice startled her. She’d thought he wasn’t going to answer.

  “So good that the idea of defeat was unthinkable. I made a decision to do whatever necessary to make sure I never failed. There was this one serial killer who remained elusive after years of tracking him. I wanted him so badly I could taste it.”

  She waited for him to go on, the sound of his voice making her relax. Or maybe it was the idea that he was admitting his flaws that made her feel more at ease.

  “He dropped a body in Montgomery so I rushed there and I met Detective Bobbie Gentry. When I looked at her I was stunned. She was the perfect example of all that this killer craved in a victim.”

  Jo watched his throat work in an effort to swallow. His fingers tightened on the steering wheel.

  “I used her to bait him. And he came back. He murdered her husband, took her...the things he did to her...”

  He drew in a deep breath. “Unimaginable torture. He raped her over and over for weeks. Beat her so badly. Broke her leg and carved up her body. Starved her to the point that she was so weak she could hardly walk. But somehow she got away. Despite the broken bones she walked for miles through the freezing cold.”

  Another of those long lapses of silence.

  “But she made it,” Jo offered, foolishly needing to hear a happy ending.

  “She did, but I did that to her. All I cared about was my career. I lost my marriage and eventually my career because I lost sight of what really mattered. When I realized what I had done, I made it my life’s goal to do whatever necessary to make it right.”

  He was preaching to the choir and the sermon was one she knew all too well.

  Jo shook her head. “I can’t be like you.”

  He stopped the car and turned to her. “You are like me. You’re like Bobbie. You’re a survivor. That’s why you came back to this place. To stop the persons who did this to you and to all the others.”

  “Yeah well, that’s not really working out so far. Your niece is still missing. By now she believes no one is coming, including her super cool uncle the FBI profiler.”

  “Does it make you feel better to throw that at me?”

  She refused to look at him.

  He rolled back onto the road. “Maybe you don’t care how this turns out. You survived. You can just walk away like you did before. You don’t need anyone or anything. Is that how you feel?”

  “You don’t know me.”

  Her cell vibrated. The text was from her boss.

  You still alive?

  She almost laughed out loud. She hadn’t been alive in nearly two decades. To avoid more of her boss’s questions, she sent him a yes in response along with a happy face. That should really freak him out.

  “Tell me the part you haven’t told anyone else, Joanna. I don’t care if it was right or wrong. I only care that it might help me find my niece alive.”

  “That building.” She pointed to the upcoming one on the right. “It looks more familiar than all the others.”

  It didn’t but she was tired of his questions. He’d hit too close to home. The only reason she pointed the building out was because the gate was open. The twelve-foot fence would have kept them out otherwise. Beyond the open gate, one of the entry doors stood open, too. Seemed like a good place to change the subject.

  He pulled over and turned off the car.<
br />
  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m not sure of anything.” She opened the car door and got out.

  He rounded the hood and followed her through the gate.

  The whirr of something moving jerked her attention upward. A camera was focused on them as they approached the entry door. Old man Griffin had said there were cameras everywhere.

  Why was that?

  If there was nothing here, why all the cameras? Maybe the old man was right about the pockets of activities.

  Tony came up beside her. “Let me go in first.”

  She should be ashamed of herself for sending him on a wild-goose chase like this. He really was trying to help her. Had she grown so coldhearted that she didn’t care about him or his niece? Was Ellen’s death for nothing? “Wait.”

  He turned back to her.

  “I—”

  He held up a hand for her to give him a minute, and then he reached for his cell. “LeDoux.”

  He listened for a few seconds, glanced at her, and then listened some more.

  “I’ll be right there.”

  He shoved his phone into his pocket and she asked, “What’s going on?”

  “That was Phelps. Hailey Martin—Madelyn Houser—is dead.”

  It’s coming down to you, Jo.

  Everyone else who knew what really happened was dying.

  What’re you going to do now?

  34

  Day Six

  Eighteen years ago...

  No food today.

  Nothing.

  No sound.

  Everyone is too tired to make any noise.

  A bottle of water was left next to each of us while we slept.

  That’s something. At least we have water.

  My body is sore. I feel every scrape, every bruise as if it goes all the way to the bone. Ellen lies beside me. She is withdrawing more into herself every day.

  No-Name is... I don’t know where she is.

  I pray there will be no battles today. I feel too weak. Too tired. Too depressed.

  A flicker on the wall snaps my attention. Another. Like an old movie reel that takes a moment to reach the full frame of an image—only there are dozens.

  More flickers. Faster. Blurry images moving frantically across the wall.

  Next to me Ellen sits up.

  “What’s happening?”

  I don’t know. I’m not sure whether I answered her or if I only thought the words.

  “What the fuck?”

  No-Name is suddenly on the other side of me.

  It must be bad if she’s scared.

  Then the blurry images become clear.

  People.

  Blood.

  Lots of blood.

  So many images, as if multiple movies are playing all around us. Slasher movies. Blood and guts. Knives and axes.

  My eyes hurt looking at them.

  My brain hurts thinking about the images.

  “Don’t look,” I murmur.

  Then I close my eyes.

  35

  Doe Run Road

  4:00 p.m.

  The forensic techs were finishing up by the time Tony and Joanna arrived on the scene. She stayed in the car. Her idea, not his. As long as she didn’t disappear on him he was okay with that. He suspected she wanted to avoid Phelps. On the other hand, the past two days had been hard on her. He had a feeling she spent a lot of her quiet time reliving the horrors of eighteen years ago.

  He couldn’t afford for her to bail on him anytime soon...not until this was done. On some level he trusted her. They shared a common goal and she wanted it as badly as he did even if she didn’t admit it.

  “No forced entry,” Chief Buckley was saying as they moved through the entry hall. “We had to call animal control to come get her dog. Between the lack of forced entry and the dog I’d say whoever she was entertaining was a familiar or at least an invited guest.”

  A reasonable conclusion. Brutus had appeared more than a little protective of his master. Then again, knowing Martin’s lifestyle, maybe not. Tony kept the comment to himself. He hadn’t been asked for his opinion as of yet. The security system hadn’t been breached, which also appeared to confirm the chief’s conclusion. But then there were people who knew how to get around a security system.

  Was the person who hired Martin and Conway to do their dirty work tying up loose ends? They were the only two people Joanna remembered being close when she was abducted. Both had been seen with Tiffany. At this point they were running out of suspects and they already didn’t have a damned lead.

  As he and Buckley started up the stairs, Tony noticed Chief Phelps in the dining room with another detective. They were huddled over a laptop.

  “Ultimately,” Buckley said, “the coroner thinks Martin drowned in that big old tub. But there are marks that indicate someone’s fingers were around her throat. Someone strong enough to hold her down.”

  Forensic techs were covering every square inch of the place. Tony had seen two uniforms and another tech moving back and forth in the yard. Milledgeville PD was on top of the situation. They wanted this case solved almost as badly as Tony did.

  At the top of the stairs, Buckley gestured to the right, and then headed that way.

  “No video with her surveillance system?” The system was high-end. Tony had spotted a couple of cameras on his first visit.

  “There is video,” Buckley answered. “Chief Phelps and one of his detectives is reviewing it now.”

  So that was what they were doing in the dining room with the laptop.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Chief,” Tony said, “but how did you and Phelps end up here? This is way out of your jurisdiction. As I recall, when I mentioned that Miles Conway might have an accomplice named Hailey Martin, you two didn’t want to hear about it.”

  “Chief Phelps had been trying to catch Martin at home for a hair sample, considering she was blond and that blond hair was found in Conway’s apartment. I believe you suggested Martin as a person of interest.”

  For the good it had done, Tony mused.

  “The detectives made a couple of attempts to find her with no luck so they sort of let it go,” Buckley admitted. “But that was before the FBI called us about the hard drives found in Conway’s bathtub.”

  Now there was some news Tony hadn’t heard. Maybe his Bureau contact had gotten his hand slapped for giving Tony a heads-up now and then. “The Bureau was able to pull something from the hard drives?”

  “At first we thought they would be damaged beyond recovery but whoever put them in the tub made a mistake. He or she didn’t take the parts that counted out of the casings so they were protected to some degree. They couldn’t recover everything but they got enough to show that Martin and Conway were working together in some capacity.”

  “Meaning,” Tony pressed.

  “We have footage of Tiffany Durand, Vickie Parton and an unidentified female restrained in the back of a van. Conway was taunting them.”

  Shock sucker punched Tony. “Are you able to see the license plate of the vehicle?”

  Buckley shook his head. “We found another clip that wasn’t more than thirty or forty seconds of Conway having sex with Parton. She’s tied to a bed—looks like the one in his apartment—and she’s unconscious.”

  Son of a bitch. “What about Tiffany?”

  “We weren’t able to recover any footage of a sexual nature involving her.”

  Tony somehow managed to drag air back into his lungs. He was glad that bastard had gotten his in such a fucked-up way.

  Buckley led the way to Martin’s master suite. Like the downstairs, the rear wall of the room was all glass, the view overlooking the lake. The massive bed was front and center. Tangled sheets. Lingerie on the floor. The earthy smell of sex lin
gered in the air.

  “How does Martin tie into what Conway was doing?” Tony asked, since the man hadn’t mentioned her in relation to the video footage they’d found on the hard drives.

  “You’re gonna love this.” Buckley stepped back, allowing the gurney to be pulled from the bathroom.

  “May I?” Tony asked with a gesture to the body bag. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe Buckley and Phelps fully capable of doing their jobs, but he didn’t trust Hailey Martin—aka Madelyn Houser—not to have another identity up her sleeve.

  Buckley gestured to the gurney. “Of course. Her real name is Madelyn Houser. She has a criminal record from fifteen years ago when the college fired her for stealing from some of the students. She was a professor’s assistant. Anyway, the driver’s license in her purse lists her as Hailey Martin. I’m guessing that was her way of escaping her criminal record.”

  Joanna had mentioned some connection to a professor at the university. “The professor she worked with, was that Professor Blume?”

  “That’s the one.”

  The attendant drew back the zipper and revealed Martin’s pale, bloated face. Tony really had hoped she would lead them to Tiffany and the others. Son of a bitch. He nodded and the bag was closed once more.

  As they continued toward the en suite bath, he said to Buckley, “You were saying that I was going to love something.”

  “Martin—Houser—whoever the hell she was, walked in on Conway while he was raping Parton. That’s why the video ended abruptly. She pulled him off the girl and started screaming at him. Stuff like: I’m going to fucking kill you! and These girls are not your playthings, they’re goddamned merchandise.”

  “Merchandise.” Tony felt sick to his stomach.

  Buckley nodded. “I’m thinking human traffickers?”

  Tony stared at the massive soaking tub that had been the death of the bitch partially responsible for his niece’s kidnapping. “I’m guessing we’re looking at something far bigger than two local thugs like Martin and Conway.”

  Buckley made an agreeable sound. “We haven’t found her cell phone. Never found Conway’s. Car’s in the garage. My money’s on the same perp. This kill was cleaner than the other.”