Total Silence

by T. J. MacGregor

  “The same.”

  She laughed, but it was a biting, caustic sound. “Oh, c’mon. All those gorgeous women passing through.”

  “More men than women.”

  “So now you’re gay? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Curry rolled his eyes. For such a bright woman, his sister could be dense at times. “That’s a statement about statistics, not about my sexuality.”

  “Maybe I should come down there for a visit.”

  “You’d find a job in a heartbeat. Doctors are in short supply.”

  “A job’s not really the issue, though, not for the Currys.” Silence. The past ticked between them. “Why is that, do you think?” he said.

  “The easy answer is because we have trust funds. The deeper answer is tough to find.”

  “Childhood stuff? We were ignored? We were pampered? We had to live up to a legend? We had a few tragedies? We never went to church?”

  She laughed and this time it sounded genuine. “Church? What the hell does church have to do with anything?”

  “Church is the wrong word. We never had a spiritual focus.”

  “Dean seemed to.”

  Yes, he did, but his spiritual focus had been so far out there that Curry had never understood what the hell Dean had believed—Buddhism, paganism, Spiritualism, Taoism, New Age-ism.. . he had studied all the isms. And even now, Curry couldn’t say for sure what this pastiche of spiritual searching had amounted to. “Dean was too young to know what the fuck he believed.”

  “And what do you believe, Keith?”

  That my head aches, that I want to get off the phone, that maybe you haven’t cracked up yet and I’m just paranoid. Or maybe you’ve cracked big time and you cover it well. “I believe in right now,” he said. “What about you?”

  “An eye for an eye, that’s what I believe.”

  Uh-huh. Yeah. Great. What the hell did that mean? Was it evidence that she’d cracked? “So, how’s Dad?”

  The abrupt change in the conversation seemed to throw her. It was a moment before she replied. “About the same.”

  “Is there anything I can do for him? Audiobooks? A new TV? Music?”

  The silence at the other end was thick enough to choke a giant. “He has everything he needs, Keith. He’s well taken care of.”

  “For five grand a month, he should have naked women dancing in his apartment every night. He should have a fully equipped lab, a voice-activated computer, caretakers at his beck and call.”

  “I don’t see you up here looking for alternatives.” She sounded defensive now. Tight-lipped. Anal. “I don’t see you making nursing-home visits.”

  “Hey, I’ve told you before, Allie, I’d be glad to bring him down here. He’d like it here.”

  “Yeah, right. He’s in diapers, for Chrissake. Most of the time he can’t feed himself. He couldn’t live on a fucking boat.”

  “He’s mobile, he loves the water, he loves to fish. He’d do fine.”

  “You’re dreaming, Keith. You don’t know the first thing about Alzheimer’s. He cries all the time, he—”

  “Of course he cries. I’d cry if I were living in an institution. I’d be on happy pills for depression. Jesus, Allie, medical science doesn’t have all the answers.”

  The line bristled now with hostility, resentment, none of it new. “Look, a visit from you once in a while would do him wonders.”

  “He doesn’t remember me, what’s the point?”

  When she spoke again, her voice could hurl the Sahara into the next Ice Age. “Let’s not go there.”

  “Yeah, let’s not,” he snapped, and pressed the disconnect button.

  It’s not my business.

  The instant the line went dead, he reached for the fat splifE lit it, and smoked the entire thing.

  Chapter 7

  The Stevens property covered twenty-five acres of rolling, snow-covered hills, most of it heavily wooded. To Sheppard, it seemed like a forest primeval, filled with dense shadows, unseen perils, and secrets hidden for centuries. The terrain was so utterly alien to what he was accustomed to that he doubted if he would recognize a lead even if it reared up and bit him on the nose.

  He, Annie, King, and half a dozen local cops searched the woods for hours. They traipsed through the trees on foot, following the barking hounds, fanning out like a small army on the march. By the first hour, his feet had turned to blocks of ice. By the second hour, he knew it was hopeless. If Mira had escaped on foot, she was beyond his ability to help her. By the third hour, every instinct he possessed screamed that whoever had killed Jerry, Ramona, and the two farmhands had taken Mira—not on a whim, not randomly, but that the person had come specifically for her.

  But why?

  Every investigation always started there, with a motive. If you could figure out the motive, you could usually get a lead on the perp. But what could possibly constitute a motive for nabbing Mira? Her disappearance didn’t qualify as a kidnapping. There had been no ransom requests, no notes left at the scene. Besides, she wasn’t rich. But if you Googled her name, dozens of links came up, many of them related to her bookstore and author events and the rest related to her work as a psychic. He supposed it was possible that some nutcase grabbed her because he wanted winning Lotto numbers or the name of the next hot stock or commodity, but that struck Sheppard as a real stretch.

  The other possibility was much darker and something he didn’t really want to contemplate—revenge, toward him. For the last twenty years, he had worked in some facet of law or law enforcement—as an attorney, a homicide detective with the Broward County Sheriffs Office, and two stints with the bureau. He had investigated hundreds of cases and worked alongside other cops and agents on hundreds of others. It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine that somewhere along the line he had pissed off a perp or a perp’s family and that person now intended to make him pay for whatever he’d done. Payback definitely qualified as a motive.

  A new wave of despair washed through him. Out of all these hundreds of cases, how the hell could he possibly narrow this down to a single case, within a time frame that would make a difference?

  “Shep?”

  He glanced down at Annie, who had fallen into step next to him, with Ricki, the Stevenses’ retriever, close at her side. It looked as if the dog was staying here with them for the time being because Ricki had refused to leave with Tess’s aunt, who had picked her up much earlier this morning. She had taken away the other two dogs and the helpers who had accompanied her would be moving the horses, goats, chickens, and cats by this evening.

  “You tired?” he asked.

  “I’m fed up,” she said quietly. “Mom isn’t here. We’re wasting our time. We need to be doing something different to find her.” She pulled off the knit cap she wore and her beautiful black hair sprang free. “We need a plan.”

  “I’m open to suggestions.”

  “Hey, you’re the cop.”

  She sounded like her mother now. “But you’re the psychic.”

  Tears welled in her eyes and she blinked them back and looked quickly down at the ground. She might sound like her mother, he thought, but she was a fourteen-year-old kid scared out ofher wits.

  “Yeah, right. I’m the daughter of a psychic, there’s a difference.”

  “That’s not what your mom says.”

  “You know what else she says, Shep? That ifyou’re too close to something, you can’t see it. That’s how it is for us right now. For you as a cop, for me as the daughter ofa psychic. Maybe Nadine will be able to pick up something.” She paused and cocked her head, listening to the barks of the hounds echoing throughout the woods. “And I’m not going back with her. I’m staying here with you.”

  “Not a good idea, Annie.”

  She stopped and glared at him, a hand on her hip, her voice sharp, defensive. “Why the hell not?” Her breath was visible in the cold air. ‘1 can help, you know. She’s my mom. I’m connected to her. All that time when I was in—in ... that ro
om, back in...”

  Back in 1968, he thought, and wondered why she couldn’t say it.

  “…back a long time ago, I could feel her, I knew she was close by.”

  Sheppard felt her terror, her uncertainty, her helplessness. These emotions were his own as well. “I’d be constantly worried about you,” he said. “I’d be trying to concentrate on the investigation, but I’d be worried about where you were and how—”

  “What bullshit!” she exclaimed. “You’re talking like I’m eight years old and that I’d be running around outside, making snowballs and getting into trouble. You think I’d be in the way.”

  “That’s not true, Annie.”

  But even as he said it, he knew that it was true, that she’d hit it exactly. It showed in his face and he knew that she saw it. A sob exploded from her and she slapped her hands over her mouth and stumbled away from him, back through the woods, Ricki trotting along after her.

  What’s Annie going to think about our being engaged? Sheppard had asked Mira the night he’d given her the ring.

  She’ll be ecstatic.

  And she had been.

  But she wasn’t now.

  He stood there beneath a thicket of pines, hands jammed in the pockets of his jacket, and watched her receding figure in the shadows, against the backdrop of snow and barren trees. Christ, he’d just made a mess of things.

  “That looked unpleasant,” remarked Kyle King as he strode toward Sheppard.

  “I blew it.”

  “Easy to do with a teenager. I’ve got two of them. A boy and a girl. She’ll get over it.”

  “She doesn’t want to go back to Tango with her great-grandmother.”

  “You can’t blame her for that. Her father’s dead, her mother is missing. . . .” He shrugged. “In her shoes, I wouldn’t budge.”

  “She’ll be in the way.”

  “I doubt it. I think she’ll do whatever you ask her to do. Right now, you’re the closest thing she has to a dad. What time does the flight get in?”

  “Around three.”

  With both Nadine and John Gutierrez on it. Goot would be bringing case files; Nadine, he was sure, would bring anger—at him.

  “Then that gives us about four hours. I just got word that the coroner arrived. Let’s see what he can tell us.”

  “The autopsies are finished?”

  “They were given priority, Shep. The Stevenses were well liked in Buncombe County. They were involved in the community. Every summer they hosted a fund raising drive for the shelters in town—for the homeless, for battered women. Those two workers who were killed? They were here on a work-study program of some kind that the Stevenses had organized in conjunction with a local junior college.”

  Sheppard wasn’t surprised by any of this. Jerry had been an idealist when they’d met more than twenty years ago and he apparently had held on to his ideals. So why, in Mira’s scheme of things, would two people who were such forces of good in their community choose to die like this?

  We choose it all Shep. The circumstances into which we’re born, our parents, even the way we die....

  But in his view of things, life—like death—was a wild card. Shit happened. Tragedies and triumphs were equally random. If free will existed, then it did so in very small doses. Today I’ll fill my car with gas at $2.87 a gallon. I’m going for a swim. I’ll have a tuna fish sandwich for lunch. Much of the time, life seemed to be one grand hurricane of indifference. If you got in the way, you were blown away. Jerry and Ramona had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  He and King walked toward the house in silence, Sheppard blowing into his bare hands and wishing he were back on Tango Key, where the temperature was probably a solid eighty degrees, with a blistering wind blowing out of the east. King broke the silence first.”Is there anything in Mira’s life that would lend itself to a kidnapping?”

  “No.”

  “How about in your own life, Shep?”

  “In what sense?”

  “A vendetta. Revenge. Someone just itching to get even.”

  Sheppard laughed. It had a cutting bite to it, that laugh, but at least the emotion that engendered it was genuine. “C’mon, you’ve been in this business long enough to know the answer to that.”

  King paused on the rear porch of the house. “Is there any particular investigation or arrest that springs to mind?”

  “No, nothing. Nothing that stands out. But we’re talking twenty years here. And that would mean the killer had been watching us, that he’d followed us up here from Florida,

  that he saw me leave with the kids.”

  “It would imply that he was watching from somewhere close by.”

  “There’re plenty of places out there where he could hide.” Sheppard opened his arms wide, the gesture taking in the entire twenty-five acres of woods and hills.

  King ran his hand over his buzz cut. “Twenty-two years ago, I was a beat cop in Chapel Hill. We got a call that a big narcotics deal was going down in a warehouse outside of town. We were there, ready. There was a kid, sixteen maybe seventeen years old. He had a sawed-off shotgun and he pointed it at me. I can still see his face, Shep, the wild panic in his eyes. He was shouting, jabbing at the air with that shotgun, and adrenaline was pumping through me and I—I blew him away. Afterward, we discovered that the shotgun wasn’t even loaded. The press had a field day and the kid’s father promised that he would get me even if it took the rest of his life. I still look over my shoulder.”

  “There’s nothing like that.”

  “Have you ever put away the wrong guy?”

  “Probably. But again, no one particular case comes to mind.”

  It was a relief to get inside the house, where it was warmer. Sheppard stripped off his jacket and held his hands close to the wood-burning stove in the corner. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t avoid looking at the chalked silhouette of Jerry’s body. His blood still stained the hardwood floor.

  “A cleaning service is coming in today to scrub down the house,” King said, noticing Sheppard’s discomfort.

  Two men came into the kitchen and King introduced them as the head of forensics, Vince Oglethorpe, and the coroner, Bruce Polsten, both of them MDs. Oglethorpe was short and plump, Polsten tall and thin, an Abbott and Costello team. The four of them settled at the wooden kitchen table, with Sheppard facing Jerry’s silhouette.

  Oglethorpe got right to the point. “We’ve got some preliminary results, Agent Sheppard, but I’m not sure how helpful any of it is going to be.”

  Sheppard had his notepad ready, his mini cassette recorder on. Although he had a good memory, he couldn’t trust his memory now because—as Annie had pointed out—he was too close to this. “Anything you can tell me could be helpful.” He needed information that would allow him to see the events as a series of sequential images, a kind of mental movie that he could slow down, speed up, or pause as needed. As Mira had pointed out a number of times, this information would feed into his left brain, then his right brain would use it to gain the larger picture of the perp’s motives.

  “It’s impossible to determine who was killed first—the workmen or the Stevenses.”

  “The Stevenses and the guy in the barn were killed first,” Sheppard said. “The man who survived long enough to talk said he heard three shots.”

  “Then the murders happened very close together, within five or ten minutes of each other,” Oglethorpe went on. “But let’s say, for the sake of speculation, that the Stevenses were first. It seems likely that Mrs. Stevens answered the front door—”

  “Why does that seem likely?”

  “Because of where she was found. She was obviously running up the stairs when she was shot in the back. We know she and her husband were waiting for you to get back from town with the girls, so perhaps she heard a car coming up the road, thought it was you, and opened the door to greet everyone.”

  “And Jerry would be in the kitchen at this time?”

  “Right,” s
aid Polsten.

  “I don’t agree,” Sheppard said. “I think Jerry answered the door and Ramona came down to see what was going on.,,

  Polsten looked uncomfortable. “Yes, well. Mr. Stevens’s stomach contents indicate that he’d snacked about five minutes before he died. An apple and some sort of bread. Mrs. Stevens hadn’t eaten for at least three hours, probably since dinner.”

  “So either Jerry or Ramona opens the door thinking it’s me and instead one or the other sees the killer.”

  “With a gun aimed at one of them. A nine millimeter,” Polsten said. “They were both killed by nine-millimeter Parabellum bullets. Mrs. Stevens took two bullets, one that punctured her left lung and another that severed her spine.”

  It was the same ammo that Sheppard’s 9mm P226 SIG Sauer used. Granted, nine millimeters were fairly common, but his antenna twitched. Coincidence or intent?

  “Whoever answered the door sees the gun,” King said, picking up the thread of the story now. “We think it was Ramona. She turns and races for the stairs and the killer shoots her. Jerry’s in the kitchen and he hears it.”

  Oglethorpe nodded. ‘We think the door between the kitchen and the living room was shut. There’s a gouge in the wall that corresponds exactly to where the knob hits when the door is open. If a full-grown man is exploding through the door and it slams against the wall, it would account for the hole in the plaster.”

  So Jerry heard Ramona shouting or heard shots and he hurled open the door and it slammed into the wall.... The movie ran in Sheppard’s head now, following the sequence of events as Oglethorpe described them.

  “He sees the intruder and throws up his hands to pat the air or to protect his face—”

  It sounded like something Jerry would do. “How do you know?”

  “In addition to the bullet through his head,” Poisten said, “a bullet grazed the outside of his right wrist. The wound was consistent with what you would find if the hands were raised. He must have had his hands slightly to the right because that bullet grazed his wrist and took out a chunk of skin but missed the rest of his body. We found it in the doorjamb. He probably stumbled back, clutching his wrist, and the intruder shot him again when he was close to the refrigerator.”