Whisper in the Dark (A Thriller) (28 page)

Dr. Michael Tolan was Vincent Van Gogh.

But before Blackburn could fully process the magnitude of this sudden revelation, he noticed something else in the box. Reaching a hand under the hacksaw, he pulled out a large plastic Ziplock bag and held it up, shining his flashlight beam at it.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Kat said, her face going pale.

Inside the bag, strung on a piece of nylon fishing line, was a necklace of severed ears, all but one of them as cracked and withered as old orange peels.

That one, however, stood out like a teenager in an octogenarian chorus line.

It was a new addition to the collection. A fresh souvenir.

Pink and raw and bloody.

And it was the sight of that ear—or more precisely, the earlobe—that sent the skittering of tiny feet along Blackburn’s spine.

“No,” he said quietly. “Not this.”

“What?” Kat asked. “What’s wrong?”

Blackburn suddenly felt sick to his stomach, the slop he’d eaten for lunch defying gravity and doing a barrel roll up his esophagus.

His whole body began to shake.

This can’t be true. Please tell me it isn’t true.

But it was. He knew it was. Knew it with unwavering certainty.

Because fastened to that fresh pink earlobe—

—was a tiny red ruby.

A tiny red ruby he’d seen just a few short hours ago.

A gift from a loving father. A birthstone.

Sue Carmody’s birthstone.

50

T
OLAN WAS IN
a daze.

“I was there, Michael. I saw it all.”

It was one thing to believe you might be a monster and another thing altogether to have it confirmed so matter-of-factly. Yet here Lisa sat, telling him what he’d dreaded hearing for a year now.

“You remember those photos Abby took of me on my birthday?”

“Yes,” he said.

“She called me a couple weeks later, told me to come by the gallery and pick them up. I showed up after work, but when I went inside, I heard you two in back, arguing. I should’ve left right there and then, but I didn’t. I couldn’t help myself. I peeked around the corner and saw you waving that box at her.”

“The condoms . . .”

She nodded.

“What was I saying?”

Lisa paused a moment. Swallowed. This was obviously difficult for her. “You called her a whore . . . Then she slapped you.”

Tolan thought about that slap, but was unable to penetrate the darkness that stretched beyond it.

“Keep going,” he said.

“You just stood there, as if you couldn’t believe she’d done that, your face a blank. Then you seemed to disappear into yourself, while someone else took over.”

“Someone else,” Tolan repeated.

Just like his mother.

She’d called it the changing of the guard. And it was usually followed by an attack on his father. A flurry of fists against his chest.

She’d be screaming at him and Tolan would run to the closet and hide, finding comfort in the darkness. But no matter how hard he pressed his hands against his ears, he couldn’t shut out the sound of his mother’s voice. Just as he couldn’t now shut out the truth.

“What happened next?” he asked, not sure he wanted to hear this.

Lisa’s gaze shifted to a spot outside her window, unable to look at him as she summoned up the memory.

“There was a knife on Abby’s work table. She’d been eating apples or something. One minute you were standing there and . . . and the next you suddenly grabbed it and started stabbing her. She didn’t even see it coming.”

The coldness that had enveloped Lisa earlier was long gone. A tear rolled down her cheek.

“When you were done, you just dropped into a chair and stared at the wall. At one of her photographs. The one you have hanging over your bed now.”

“And you saw the whole thing?”

She nodded. “I was in shock. It happened so fast, and I just stood there, frozen. There you were, covered in blood, Abby dead at your feet.” More tears filled her eyes. “It was Anna Marie all over again.”

Anna Marie?

So it was true. He was responsible for her death too.

Jesus, he thought. Will it ever end?

“You don’t remember that night, do you? The night Anna Marie died.”

He didn’t know what he remembered at this point.

“Clive and Kruger and the others were all out partying, but I stayed back because I wasn’t feeling well, and you said you needed to go to the library.”

No, Tolan thought. He hadn’t gone to the library. He’d stayed home to study. He was almost sure of it.

“Then about eleven o’clock, you came home in a panic, babbling on about calling the police. You had a gun wrapped up in your sweater.”

Jesus. Had he had another blackout? How often had he lost time and never even known it?

“The thing is,” Lisa continued, “you didn’t even have to do it. Anna told me the night before that she was planning to dump the law student and come back to you.”

“I don’t believe this. I don’t believe any of it.”

“Believe it, Michael. I helped you clean up. Helped you get rid of the gun. And when the police questioned all of us, I lied and said you’d been with me all night.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I told you. Because I love you. I’ve always loved you.”

“And the night Abby died?”

“The same thing. There was a lot of blood, but I put you in the shower, helped you clean up, got you into your car and on the road. I don’t think you said three words to me the whole time.”

“And what about my alibi?”

“You didn’t need one, thanks to Vincent.”

It took Tolan a moment to realize what she was saying, the weight of that realization nearly flooring him. He stared at Lisa with new eyes.

“
You?
You did that to her?”

“I had to, Michael. Don’t you see? I had to protect you. Vincent was in the papers every day for weeks. It only seemed natural to blame it all on him. To keep the police from suspecting you.”

Tolan squeezed his eyes shut now and buried his head in his hands. He was no longer interested in the truth. He just wanted to curl up like Jane Doe and die.

He’d spent his entire professional life and a good portion of his childhood dealing with people who suffered from the mildest phobias to the most severe psychosis. But until this moment, he had never fully understood or appreciated their pain.

To realize that he was one of them was like being told he had only a week to live. And Lisa, out of some misplaced sense of loyalty or twisted love, had done the unthinkable. Had done it for him.

She may have kept him from going to jail, but this moment, this pain, this realization was worse than the most hellish day in prison. Bile stung the back of his throat and he swallowed hard, trying to keep from throwing up.

“There’s something else you need to know,” she said.

Tolan opened his eyes and looked up at her, unable to even imagine what that something might be.

“What?”

“You won’t believe me, but I swear to God it’s true.”

“Tell me.”

“All those things you saw in seclusion room three? Abby’s eyes? Her face? You didn’t imagine them. They weren’t a delusion. They were real.”

She was talking crazy now. “Real?”

She nodded, then said words Tolan never thought he’d hear. Impossible words. Damaging words.

Words that inexplicably filled him with hope.

“She’s back, Michael. Abby’s back. And she’s alive.”

51

B
LACKBURN’S HANDS SHOOK
as he took out the new phone he’d picked up at the station house and quickly punched in Carmody’s number. After several rings the line switched over to voice mail.

The nausea that had been crowding his stomach intensified. He felt like he was about to do a Linda Blair all over Kat’s crisp black uniform.

Clicking off, he immediately dialed again. A different number this time.

De Mello answered on the third ring.

“Fred, are you still at the squad?”

“Yeah, I was just packing up. I’ve got a few things on the fire, but I figured I could follow them up at—”

“Drop all that and sit your ass down,” Blackburn said.

“Why? What’s up?”

“I need you to do a GPS trace on Carmody’s cell phone.”

“Carmody? But—”

“Just do it, Fred. Now.” He gave him his new number. “Call me back as soon as you locate her.”

“Is Carmody okay?”

“That’s what I want to find out.” He clicked off and turned to Kat. “Here’s what I need you to do.”

“Shoot.”

“Clean this place up, get everything back where it belongs, but leave the tackle box open on Tolan’s desktop and break one of the windows. Then I want you and Hogan to drive to the nearest pay phone and call 911.”

“Why?”

“You’re gonna report a break-in, anonymously. Give them Tolan’s address. And the minute the call comes out over the radio, you respond.”

Kat nodded, immediately understanding. This would give them probable cause to enter the premises and “discover” the evidence laying out in plain sight.

It was an old tried-and-true ruse, and Blackburn had never lost any sleep over using it.

“Where will you be?” Kat asked.

“Wherever De Mello sends me.”

F
IVE MINUTES LATER
, he was on the road and traveling, heading in the only direction he knew to go. Toward where he’d last left Carmody.

Toward Baycliff Hospital.

As he waited for De Mello’s call, he ran the evidence through his head, still thinking that something didn’t quite fit right. What he’d found in that desk drawer was like pure gold to an investigator, but it seemed too convenient somehow. Too staged.

If Tolan was Vincent, then Blackburn’s extortion theory went right out the window. Why would Tolan need to buy Hastert’s and Janovic’s silence? Why would he need them at all?

Because if Tolan was Vincent he’d already
know
about the burn marks. He’d be the
originator
of the burn marks.

It was the same damn stumbling block as before, only from the opposite direction this time.

Someone had surely butchered Hastert and Janovic. Someone using Vincent’s mark. And every instinct Blackburn had said that the two victims were involved in a blackmail scheme. The reason for their murders.

But if Tolan wasn’t the target of that scheme, who was?

Blackburn let the events of the day tumble through his head and kept coming back to the phone calls Tolan had attributed to Vincent.

Was it possible that they weren’t phony after all? That they
hadn’t
been the product of a guilty conscience? Had Tolan been telling the truth about them all along?

Blackburn dialed his phone again, hoping to catch the squad’s resident computer tech, Billy Warren, still in his office.

No such luck.

Dialing dispatch, he asked for Billy’s home phone number, then got him on the line in three rings.

“Billy, this is Frank Blackburn.”

A pause. “Hey, Frank, what’s up?”

“Got a question for you.”

“I’m in the middle of
Jeopardy
here, man. Can it wait?”

Blackburn ignored him. “I need to know if it’s possible for somebody from the outside, some hacker, to go in and change official cell phone records.”

Billy seemed distracted. “Like how?”

“Like wiping away any trace of a specific call. Making it look like that call never happened.”

“What’s a cattle prod?”

“What?”

“Sorry, man.
Jeopardy
question.”

“Do me a fucking favor and focus,” Blackburn said.

“Yeah, yeah. You want to know if it’s possible to sanitize a cell phone record, right?”

Blackburn sighed. “Yes.”

“As long as the company’s network is accessible, then yeah, it’s possible. They try to wire in all kinds of security protections, firewalls and such, but an enterprising hacker can worm his way through all that bullshit and do just about anything he wants. How do you think we ended up with our last president?”

“And he could erase just one or two entries?”

“Sure,” Billy said. “He could add some too. Hell, he could throw in the latest Bruins-Trojans score if he wanted to.” Another pause, then, “So does that answer your question, man? I’ve got a game to get back to.”

Blackburn told him it did and hung up, thinking again about the events of the day. Tolan had said that Vincent threatened him, believing he’d been used as a scapegoat for the wife’s murder.

So was it possible that Vincent had erased those threats from the record? The use of an untraceable server for the website photos indicated at least some skill with computers.

Could Vincent be pulling a reverse whammy on Tolan?

If you looked at it that way, it all started to hang together.

Something like this:

Tolan somehow comes across the secret of the emoticon. If not through Soren or Jane Doe, then directly from Hastert, whom he may have treated at County General. Soren had said Tolan didn’t do much pro bono work, but that didn’t negate the possibility.

A few months after Abby Tolan is murdered—reportedly Vincent’s eighth victim—Hastert and his buddy Janovic put it all together and finger Tolan, threatening to expose him. Tolan gets tired of draining his bank account and does what has to be done. He kills them both, again making it look like a serial perp at work.

Vincent, in the meantime—the real Vincent—uses the anniversary of the wife’s death to get even with Tolan for stealing his thunder. Instead of simply giving credit where credit is due, why not let Tolan take the fall for
all
of the murders? Why not frame a guilty man?

The question was, how did Carmody fit in?

Was she part of the frame?

One last victim to help seal the deal?

Blackburn felt sick. He didn’t want to believe it, didn’t want to believe that the ear in that bag was Carmody’s, yet there was no denying that ruby birthstone.

But maybe he was wrong.

Please, God, let him be wrong.

Popping open the glove compartment, he sent up a small prayer that whoever drove this car last had been a smoker and had left behind his stash.