The Temptation of Silence

by V. J. Chambers

  She climbed up to the very top and knocked on the door.

  There was no answer.

  She knocked again. “Starla Fox?”

  The door opened. There was a woman there, and she had long, brown hair. Was she the woman from the picture? It was difficult to tell. This woman had her head hunched down and she was wearing baggy flannel pajamas. She squinted at Dawson. “I think you have the wrong apartment.”

  “You didn’t post a listing on Craigslist as Starla Fox?”

  “No,” said the woman. “That’s not my name.”

  “You should know, you wouldn’t be in trouble if you did,” said Dawson. “We’re here for your safety, not to arrest you for prostitution.”

  The woman lifted her head, her expression shocked and a little horrified. “I’m not a prostitute.”

  “All right, well, even if you were, it’s not about that. There’s a serial killer out there, targeting women, and we have reason to believe he’s coming here.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said the woman. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Oh,” said Dawson, belatedly pulling out her badge. “I’m Detective Haysle Dawson. I have a card here somewhere—”

  “I’m going back to bed,” said the woman. “You have the wrong house.” She started to shut the door.

  Dawson’s foot shot out and wedged the door open. She got out her phone and dialed Starla Fox’s number. But there was nothing. The phone wasn’t ringing.

  The woman in the apartment was struggling with the door, her expression frustrated, and Dawson was almost entirely sure that she was the woman from the photo. The woman gritted her teeth. “You can’t come into my house unless you’ve got a warrant or something, right?”

  “Is he in there with you?” said Dawson. “Has he threatened you?”

  “No,” said the woman.

  Dawson lowered her voice to a very low whisper. “You can blink twice if he can hear us.”

  “There’s no one in here!” the woman roared.

  Dawson removed her foot from the door.

  The woman slammed the door.

  Dawson knelt down and slid her card under the door. “Call me anytime if you need me. If he does get in touch with you, we only want to catch him, all right?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “What the hell, Dawson?” said Liam. “I’ve tried to call you five times.”

  “And I was busy,” came Dawson’s voice over the phone.

  “Did you find her?”

  “I think so,” said Dawson. “But… I don’t know… maybe we’re wrong, because she claimed no one was there, and I gave her the option of letting us know in a way that wouldn’t tip him off, if—for instance—he was hiding in the apartment. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t her. I couldn’t tell. She looked like the picture, but—”

  “Are you kidding me? Couldn’t you force your way in and look around?”

  “No,” said Dawson. “Listen, you said that you left her that message, right? So, maybe she got it, and then she canceled on Slater, or maybe she simply decided not to show up.”

  “You could have gotten a warrant.”

  “Not that fast, Liam,” she said. “We’ve got people watching the apartment. If Slater shows up there, or if she leaves, we will tail her.”

  “So, how long would it take to get a warrant?”

  “It has to be drafted and then we need a judge, and I don’t know anyone I want to get out of bed, so—

  “All right, never mind,” said Liam. “Give me the address.”

  “No, I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?” said Liam. “Let me go talk to her. Maybe if it’s someone who’s not a cop—”

  “There’s nothing here. I think Slater did it to fuck with you, and that’s all. Besides, aren’t you babysitting your stepdaughter? You can’t leave the house and go anywhere right now.”

  “No, I guess not,” he admitted in defeat.

  “I think the bigger worry is how easily he was able to get to you,” said Dawson. “We’ve obviously got to get more people out there watching your ex-wife’s house.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s true.”

  “So, I’m going to focus on fixing that,” said Dawson. “And you should get some rest.”

  They hung up, but Liam did not get some rest. Instead, he dug into the Google image search until he found it on a social media post and discovered that the woman in question was not named Starla Fox but was instead named Madeleine Brix.

  He googled her name and went on an hours-long search through various documents and websites until he found the jackpot. It was a list of residents names in an apartment building across town. The list was probably not even meant to be indexed by the web searches, but someone had screwed up and not put it in a password protected area on the landlord’s website. This was meant to be a resource for people who worked for the company who rented the apartments.

  Anyway, he had her address.

  And by that time, the sun would be up in an hour.

  Liam brewed some coffee and paced in the kitchen until it was time to wake Madison up for school.

  She showered and dressed, and he drank more coffee. She got herself cereal for breakfast, yawning as she shoveled it into her mouth. She was quiet, and he was glad of it, because he didn’t have much to say.

  Eventually, Madison’s bus came and picked her up.

  He walked out to make sure she got on board safe and sound.

  Then he got in his car and drove out of the apartment complex.

  Madeleine Brix lived on the top floor of the building. He climbed the steps all the way up there and knocked on her door.

  Moments passed.

  She opened the door and looked him over. “What?”

  “I’m not a cop,” he said. “I’m the guy who left a message for you last night about the serial killer.”

  “Look,” said Madeleine Brix, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I don’t appreciate being harassed.”

  “Come on, I know you’re Starla Fox. Your freaking picture is on that website, and I recognize you. So, let’s not play games here. I’m not a cop. You have nothing to fear from me.”

  “No one called me last night except you,” she said. “No one sent me a message on Craigslist. No one sent a message to my email address. And what the fuck? You think I wouldn’t recognize the damned serial killer if he tried to pick me up? His photo’s been plastered everywhere, especially since he escaped. I’m not a fucking idiot.” She slammed the door in his face.

  Liam furrowed his brow.

  He stared at the closed door.

  Sighing, he started down the steps.

  As he made it to the third floor, above him, hanging on the over-lip of the roof over the steps, was a faded poster.

  No means no, it said. Date rape is a crime.

  He blinked at it, stopping short.

  Then he licked his lips and continued down the steps. When he got in his car, he drove to the police station and asked for Dawson.

  * * *

  Dawson was running into roadblocks authorizing more of a police presence guarding Belinda and Madison. She was exhausted. She’d been pulled out of bed by Liam’s call and was now functioning on about three hours of sleep. Right then, she was waiting on a call back from someone in another department, and she had decided to google “all-seeing eye” for the heck of it.

  What she got was a bunch of stuff about Buddhism and the dollar bill, because apparently the pyramid with the eye on top was some weird Masonic symbol or something. She didn’t know, because she hadn’t read too deeply into it.

  She’d adjusted her search to say “all-seeing eye success.”

  Then she got a bunch of search results about some seeing eye dog school, and the technique that had success amongst the animals.

  But at the bottom of the second page, she found something different. It was a self-help website. Was this the same self-help group that Annie Gibbons had been pa
rt of?

  The site was hawking a self-help course that cost $300, payable in easy installments if one so chose to do it that way. It promised that, with the skills learned from the course, the money spent was a paltry investment. After taking this course, a person would become successful and wealthy beyond their wildest dreams.

  It was obvious crap.

  The phone on her desk rang.

  Oh, thank goodness. Someone from that department was finally calling her back.

  “Dawson,” she answered.

  “This is Jennings at the front desk. Liam Emerson is here to see you.”

  She made a face. He was probably frothing at the mouth about the dead-end sex worker who hadn’t actually been contacted by Slater. “I’ll come get him. Tell him to hang tight.”

  “Will do.”

  She hung up the phone and got out of her chair. She stretched. Her back was sore. Rolling her head on her shoulders, she yawned. She really needed to go home and get some sleep. Either that, or she needed more coffee.

  She left her cubicle and wound her way through the station until she came to the front desk area, where Liam was waiting.

  “What’s up?” she asked him.

  “I think I have some things to tell you about Destiny Worth’s death,” he said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Wendy MacDonald thrust both of her hands into the air. “That’s it. My patience is at a breaking point.”

  The kitchen floor was spattered with syrup and bits of sodden pancake, because her six-year-old Theo had thrown the plate—thankfully plastic—when she tried to get him to take it to the table.

  She didn’t know what was going on with her son.

  He never used to be like this.

  It had started slowly, she thought. A little bit of a push-back here or there when she asked him to do his chores or to finish his homework. It was normal for kids to want to test boundaries, or so she’d always believed, and so she had enforced those boundaries.

  Reasonably, she thought, with consequences like time-outs and a loss of privileges. If he misbehaved, he lost time playing video games or watching YouTube videos.

  But the more that she enforced the boundaries, the more Theo pushed. He got worse and worse. He got angry with her. He struck out when he didn’t like what she said. If she told him that he had to go to time-out, he hit her. She increased the time-out time, every time that he hit, until Theo was supposed to be sitting on a chair for fifteen minutes, and—of course—he couldn’t stay seated for that long.

  It became a physical thing, her struggling against her little son to keep him in the chair. He was getting too strong for her to be able to keep that up.

  Within months, their house was a war zone.

  He was angry, and she was too.

  Every day, she woke up, and she swore that today she would keep her cool.

  And every day, she reached a breaking point.

  To be reaching the breaking point at breakfast, well, that didn’t bode well for the day to come. She looked over the food on the floor, and she felt like screaming. She felt like taking Theo by the shoulders and screaming at him.

  That had happened before, but she had sworn she would never allow it to happen again.

  No, she’d stayed up late, after Theo had gone to bed (bedtime was now an epic battle that took hours, and she was convinced that his mood and defiance was badly influenced by his lack of sleep), googling techniques to control her anger.

  Now, she took several deep breaths.

  Theo was pointing at the pancakes. “You need to clean up this mess.”

  “No, Theo, you made the mess. You have to clean it up.”

  “I don’t want to,” said Theo, lifting his chin and folding his arms over his chest.

  She took another deep breath. She counted backwards from ten. She could feel the anger inside her, and it was like a live thing. It was red, and it was squirming, and it wanted out.

  Maybe Theo was disposed towards anger because he’d inherited it from her. Why else would she be this way, constantly fighting herself, constantly about to give in to the worse of herself if it wasn’t some defect, something genetic that plagued them both?

  “Clean it up, Mom,” said Theo.

  “I need a Mom time-out,” she snapped. She stalked out of the room and went onto the front porch of her house, slamming the door behind her.

  Theo followed, peering through the window at her.

  He was probably going to lock her out. He did that. She had taken to putting the key to the house in her pocket the moment she woke up.

  Sure enough, Theo turned the lock and barked out a laugh.

  He wants me to get angrier, she told herself. He enjoys having power over me. I have to keep calm.

  But she couldn’t.

  The anger was too big.

  She kicked the post holding up the porch with her bare foot. It hurt, and the pain was good somehow. She kicked it again. Tears were springing to her eyes.

  And then—

  She stopped, because she didn’t know why there was a car parked in front of her house.

  Before, when the neighbors across the street had lived there, once or twice, they’d had a lot of people over, like at Thanksgiving, and some people had parked in front of her house. But those neighbors had moved out months ago, and no one had moved in. And besides, the rest of the street was empty.

  There were never random cars parked on the street by the house.

  She squinted, the anger inside her draining away, replaced by curiosity.

  There was someone in the driver’s seat, and it looked like a woman.

  What if that woman’s car had broken down? What if she needed help?

  Of course, she’s just seen me kicking the porch, thought Wendy. She might be frightened of me.

  Certainly, the woman had a cell phone and had already called for help.

  But even so, she was parked right in front of Wendy’s house, and Wendy had seen her. To not go and and at least check in with the woman, to make sure she didn’t need help, it seemed wrong in some way. Wendy didn’t know what was expected of her in this situation, but she didn’t feel as though she could simply go back inside and leave this woman out here.

  But she was barefoot.

  Wendy unlocked the door and stepped inside. “Theo, I’m going to go and check on that woman in the car out front.”

  “What woman?” said Theo.

  “You stay inside,” said Wendy. “I’ll be right back.” She slipped on a pair of slippers and put on a sweatshirt over her pajamas. She hadn’t had a chance to get dressed yet.

  “What woman?” said Theo again.

  She ignored him and went back out on the porch. She half-expected him to follow her, but he simply locked the door again and sneered at her from inside.

  She walked briskly across the lawn to the car.

  As she approached, she first felt as though something was wrong, and then registered what it was.

  The woman was naked.

  She was wearing a pair of sunglasses, and she was posed in the driver’s seat, one hand seemingly tied to the steering wheel. But she wasn’t wearing any clothes.

  And that was when Wendy saw the blood, all over the back of the woman’s neck and smeared over her shoulders.

  The woman was dead.

  Wendy screamed.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Dawson’s lips parted. “You want to what?”

  “I may not have been entirely honest with you—”

  “Okay, Liam, stop.” She put up a hand, between them, firm.

  His voice died in his throat.

  She squared her shoulders. “Let’s, um, let’s go for a walk, okay?”

  “A walk,” he repeated. “It’s cold out there.”

  “A nice walk to clear our heads,” she said. “We can have a friendly chat. Nothing official or anything like that.”

  He nodded slowly, as if he understood.

  And she looked around the station to
make sure that no one had heard what she said.

  God damn this man. This was an affront to every bit of ethics she had. Even so, she took him by the arm and practically dragged him out of the station.

  Outside, the air was brisk, and she dragged him along as they walked down the sidewalk, away from the station.

  “I don’t want you to say anything that you might regret,” she said. “I don’t want you to put yourself in that position right now.”

  He swallowed. “I’m not sure what you’re saying.”

  “Well, I’m not either,” she said, glancing at him. “I’m not sure of you, Liam Emerson. I have theories about you, that maybe you’ve been working with Slater all along, that maybe this is a tag team effort somehow. Maybe you two have been doing this since the beginning, and Destiny was only your first taste.”

  “No!” He drew back, horrified. “Absolutely not.”

  “Well, he can’t have done all this alone, can he?” She gestured with one hand, encompassing the sky and the trees and the entire universe with her swinging fingers. “And you make sense.”

  “Look, Finn was out of my life after college. It wasn’t until he captured me and put me in that dog crate—”

  “I know that’s what you say,” she said. “And I even believe you. I think maybe I’m an idiot, and maybe it’s because of things that happened with us that I’m believing it, but—”

  “Are you talking about when we kissed?”

  “We are pretending that didn’t happen.”

  “You just brought it up.”

  “I don’t want to have to arrest you,” she said. “If you brought about the death of a person, even by accident, you have to realize that there are consequences.”

  He took a deep breath. “All right.”

  She stopped walking.

  He went on for three steps before stopping too. He came back to her.

  “Is it something I need to know?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Will it help me catch him?” she said. “Will it help me understand him better? Is it vital?”

  “It’s the truth,” he said. “If you need to know the truth, then—”