Keep Quiet (30 page)

“You were the last person to see Voloshin alive, and the photos you took are proof that you were in his apartment last night. Now that you sent them to me, and even if you delete them from your phone, we can’t delete them from the email server.” Jake could see her withdrawing, recoiling as it dawned on her. “Your picture is in the newspaper from time to time, so one of the tenants could have recognized you. Or even if you hadn’t been seen, a security camera or even a traffic-light camera could’ve taken your picture. If the police come to question you, you’re done for, and so are we all.”

Pam’s lips parted, but she still didn’t speak.

“Honey, are you okay?” Jake asked gently, reaching for her arm, but she jerked it away, dropping her sunglasses and iPhone. They both bent down to retrieve the items, but she reached them first and snatched them up from the gravel and dirt, then held them to her chest in an oddly protective way.

“Jake. That’s not possible, what you’re saying.” Pam frowned, shaking her head and backing away, her voice softer. “That’s impossible. Nobody would think that of me. The police would never think that.”

“They could, honey. They came to my office today because I called Voloshin this morning, telling him the transfer would be late. His murder hadn’t hit the news by then, but it probably has now—”

“That’s why the police came to you? What did you tell them?”

“I told them that Voloshin came to me as a prospective client but that I didn’t sign him. I did the best I could, but I couldn’t really explain why he sought me out at the basketball game.” Jake could see she was getting more upset, backing away from him and shaking her head. “If they get his phone records, the police will see that I was the last person to talk to him last night, but I think I explained that. They didn’t ask me if I had an alibi, but they still could. And you, what’s your alibi?” Jake didn’t ask because she was so distraught, but what he wanted to ask was,
Is Dr. Dave your alibi?

“Oh no. Oh no.” Pam closed her eyes, still clutching her phone and sunglasses. “I put myself on the hook, didn’t I? I went over there. I argued with him, loudly. I didn’t try to hide. I didn’t wear sunglasses or anything. Anyone could have seen me. Anyone could’ve heard us arguing. Anyone could’ve seen my car or my license plate. I didn’t know someone would
kill
him. Who would
kill
him—”

“Honey, don’t worry. We’ll figure this out, together.” Jake took a step toward her.

“No, leave me alone, I have to go.” Pam turned away, hurrying toward her car.

“Pam, please!” Jake hustled after her and caught her arm, but she wrenched it back, tears filling her eyes.

“Don’t touch me! Leave me alone! I hate you! You ruined everything, everything, everything!”

“Pam, no—”

“Stay away from me! Stay away from our house!” Pam reached her car and flung open the door. “I’m going home tonight, not you! You won’t live there, ever again! It’s over, Jake!
We’re over!
”

Chapter Thirty-seven

Jake sped away from the quarry, as if his guts had been kicked out of him. He turned onto Concordia Boulevard, its four lanes of traffic beginning to congest with the coming noontime rush, and he steered the car toward home. He wasn’t going back to the office and he wanted to look at the pictures from Voloshin’s apartment, then figure out if he could delete them from his email server.

We’re over!

Jake tried to put Pam’s voice out of his mind, but couldn’t. He looked through the windshield at the traffic light, but all he saw was her tears. His fingers curled around the plastic steering wheel, but all he could feel was the warmth of her hand under his palm. He had taken that touch for granted. He was trying to wrap his mind around the fact that she had cheated on him, but now it was beginning to sink in that she could really be in love with Dave, and that he had lost his wife forever.

A horn blared behind him, and Jake came out of his reverie, checking the rearview mirror. A massive construction truck was flashing its lights for him to move out of the fast lane. He hit the gas, powered through a yellow light, and reached for his phone, pressing the buttons on-the-fly to call the office.

“Hey, how are you doing?” Amy picked up instantly.

“I’m fine, thanks. Amy, I’m not going to be back to the office for a couple of hours. Can you deal?”

“Totally.” Amy paused. “But what’s going on? You seem so—”

“I thought I’d work at home. I got nothing done this morning and I don’t need any more interruptions.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“Hold the fort and I’ll give you a call as soon as I know what my schedule is. Take care.”

Jake turned left off of Concordia Boulevard, got home in no time, and hit the house running, letting the door slam closed behind him. Moose waddled out of the kitchen, his fluffy tail wagging slowly.

“Hey buddy,” Jake called to the dog, then hurried up the stairs, taking them two at a time, his tie flying. He reached the second-floor landing, slid out of his jacket, and hurried into his home office, where he tossed his jacket onto the couch, plopped down in his desk chair, and hit the mouse to power up his computer.

He opened his email, watched his incoming pile onto the screen, and scanned the countless client emails for Pam’s name. Moose trundled into the office, panting from the effort of going up the stairs, in his characteristic
huh-huh-huh.
The golden lumbered over to the desk, and Jake palmed his big head before the dog could start his nudging routine.

Jake found Pam’s email, scrolled to the attachments, and clicked
OPEN
. There was a list of ten photos and he opened the first one. The photo must have been taken from the door to the apartment, and it showed scenes of a tiny galley kitchen next to a small living room, with an old black futon and a wooden coffee table. There was no other furniture in the room, nor were there any books or newspapers. Two windows on the far wall had broken blinds and between them, oddly, was a poster series of tennis player Anna Kornikova.

Jake opened the next few photos, scenes of Voloshin’s apartment, messy and nondescript. The following few photos were of a massive black monitor affixed to the wall and surrounded by a floor-to-ceiling entertainment center, also in black, with plastic video games shoved every which way in its crammed shelves. There was a photo of large black speakers and consoles that lined the top shelf, mixed with an array of weird pornographic figurines.

Jake shuddered. He opened the next photo, which was of a black laminate desk cluttered with Red Bull cans, cellophane Tastykake wrappers, and bags with multicolored Skittles strewn amid a dark tangle of joysticks, headsets with microphones, controllers, wires, a mouse, and a large silver laptop.

Jake eyed the laptop, wondering if it had contained the pictures of him and Ryan on Pike Road. Either way, he assumed the killer had taken the laptop. The right edge of the photograph showed a doorjamb that must have led to a bedroom, but that wasn’t what caught Jake’s eye. What he noticed was the brownish cork edge of a bulletin board on the wall, which must’ve been the one that Pam mentioned.

Jake clicked open the next photograph and sat back in his seat, trying to absorb the shock. It showed the bulletin board full of curling photos of Kathleen, which looked like they had been printed from the computer; Kathleen at work, company picnics, and softball games, hitting the ball, eating a chili hot dog, or smiling with her arm around her mother, who sported an identical grin. Jake cringed at one of the mother-daughter photos, in which both Kathleen and her mother were wearing matching bunny ears.

“I’m so sorry,” he heard himself say, realizing he said it aloud only because Moose nudged his leg. Jake could never begin to imagine the depths of that mother’s pain at losing her daughter, and he knew he could never forgive himself for his responsibility for Kathleen’s death. Everything that had happened since the hit-and-run followed as inevitably as one domino knocking down another, except that the dominoes were the people he loved the most in the world and the mess was their life as a family.

Jake told himself to get a grip. He scanned the photos again to see if he’d missed anything, but he hadn’t. It only confirmed that Voloshin had a crush on Kathleen and that both mother and daughter trusted him as a friend, or they never would’ve posed for the pictures.

Jake clicked on the last attachment and opened the photo. It showed the left-hand side of the bulletin board, and oddly, it was different from the right-hand side. The pictures were darker, printouts of photos taken at night, and they showed Kathleen running alone or with the track team down Pike Road. In the background was the corporate center and the road that came off of Pike, Dolomite Road. A few of them had thumbtacks in the corner and photos underneath, as if they were a series. One of the photos was taken at twilight in the summertime, with the girls running back toward the school in sweaty Chasers singlets and skimpy shorts, a sight that must’ve given Voloshin quite a thrill.

Jake noticed two photos on the far right, mostly hidden under the others. They had also been taken at nightfall, but there were no runners in the foreground; one had a woman with a ponytail getting into the passenger side of a dark car parked along the brush on Dolomite Road, its back bumper facing out. The second photo showed two figures sitting in the same car, the driver taller than the woman with the ponytail, more the height of a man. Their heads bent together as if they were kissing, indistinct silhouettes in the front seat.

Jake didn’t get it. He moved the mouse and clicked on the photo to enlarge it, but couldn’t see the people in the car, whose backs were to him. He squinted at the license plate, which was a Pennsylvania plate, and he could make out only the first three letters, HKE, and none of the digits. A red plastic thumbtack in the corner of the photo suggested, as before, that it was one of the series, but it got Jake wondering.

Who were the people in the photo?

He thought about it, and tried to reason it out. This was a bulletin board about Kathleen, so if Kathleen wasn’t one of the people in the car, that would be the only photo
not
of her. So did it mean that Kathleen was meeting a man in a car? Jake enlarged the photo on the screen, trying to read the rest of the license plate, but he couldn’t. He scrutinized the silhouette of the man, but couldn’t see anything other than he was in the driver’s seat and seemed to be of average height and build.

Jake squinted at the car, which looked long enough to be a four-door sedan of some type, and it was navy blue or black because it blended with the background. He enlarged it further, and after a few clicks, was able to read some chrome lettering on the upper left side of its trunk—535.

It was a BMW.

Jake thought about deleting the photos, but hesitated. He was already planning his next move.

Chapter Thirty-eight

Jake turned left onto Pike Road, approaching it from the opposite direction than he had the night of the hit-and-run, when Ryan was driving. There was no car on the street, which ran single lanes in both directions, and no police, runners, or dog-walkers were in sight. His dashboard clock read 1:30, so he was assuming that most of the employees at the corporate center had already gone back to work, and there were no students out yet because school was still in session.

Jake decreased his speed short of the blind curve ahead, with its makeshift memorial. The flowers, candles, and sympathy cards sat in a forlorn pile by the side of the road, and he felt a familiar tightness in his chest at the sight, but he pressed his emotions away. It was strange and risky to return to the scene of the crime, but he wanted to see if he could figure out what Voloshin had been up to, as well as the identity of the people in the BMW sedan.

Jake braked, getting the lay of the land. The blind curve was probably five hundred feet up ahead, then Pike Road jogged to the right, then the left and continued straight. Dolomite Road ran perpendicular to Pike Road, about a hundred feet down from the blind curve, and from where he sat, he could see the corner of Dolomite and Pike Roads. He couldn’t see beyond that, farther down on Dolomite Road, because he was at too oblique an angle.

He picked up his iPhone from the passenger seat, scrolled to the camera roll, and retrieved the photo of the sedan from the bulletin board, which he’d enlarged before he left the house. The picture was too dark and unfocused to reveal anything going on inside the sedan, but it did show the sedan’s location and orientation on Dolomite Road, which was all Jake needed.

He drew an imaginary line from the back of the sedan, across Pike Road, and into the brush on the left side of the road, working on the assumption that its trajectory would point to Voloshin’s location when he took the photo. The only thing on the left side of the road was overgrowth and trees, but he had a theory to test and there was only one way to find out if he was right.

Jake took one last quick look around, turned off the engine, slid the keys out of the ignition, and got out of the car. He reached the undergrowth in four feet, then started making his way through the brush, using his arms to shove aside branches and tangled vines. He worked as quickly as possible because he didn’t want to draw any attention to himself. He began to sweat, wishing he’d brought pruning shears.

Jake powered steadily forward, walking a straight line by orienting himself by one of the apartment buildings in the distance, a sandstone low-rise that he kept ahead of him, like the North Star. Twigs snapped under his shoes, and nettles clung to his pants. He consulted the iPhone picture and the sandstone apartments as he kept moving through a grove of evergreens that had grown together in natural tangle.

He passed one tree and behind it found a large area where the grass had been flattened, but it was a large circle, made by resting deer. He kept going, sensing that if he didn’t find anything soon, he’d missed his guess. He fought his way around ivy that clung to one of the evergreens, and suddenly came upon another flat area, but this one had clearly been man-made. Tree limbs had been pruned back, and sucker vines had been cut. The undergrowth had been flattened but the area wasn’t a large circle like deer made. He stood in the middle of the flat area, turned around with his back to the sandstone building, and faced Dolomite Road.