Page 1 of So Silent

Prologue

Perfect pitch was a curse. Nights like tonight, Rebecca wished she had been born with good old garden variety hearing. She would probably have a couple platinum records by now.

Instead, she had to struggle with knowing every single flaw in her voice, every single variation between the notes she sang and the notes she intended to sing. She had to hear every single time she fell just the tiniest bit flat, every time her breath whistled behind the high notes, every time she put just slightly too much emphasis on the soft consonants and pulled away from the melody she wanted to create.

This kind of attention to detail had been a godsend as a sound engineer. Back then, her perfect pitch was a blessing. She could take any recording and perfect it, altering pitch, tone, timbre and resonance to create flawless works of art. She wasn’t being immodest by believing that she was largely responsible for the careers of half a dozen award-winning recording artists.

But no one knew her name. Only agents, producers, mixers and the more humble few of those artists knew who she was. She could walk to the grocery store, and not one person would care that she was there.

She wanted more. She wanted to be the one who stood in front of the masses and received the adulation of the crowds. She wanted her name to be on billboards, headlining shows, interviewing with late-night hosts, co-starring in films with Bradley Cooper and Chris Hemsworth.

But she couldn’t, because every time she sang, she heard every goddamned flaw in her fucking stupid voice, and she hated it.

She took a deep breath and released it slowly. It was all right. She could fix all of these problems in the studio. Hell, she’d fixed far worse problems for artists considered to have good singing voices only because she mixed the damned sound for them.

But it was different when it was her voice, because she felt like a fraud. Why couldn’t she just sing well? She knew people who could. She had worked on an album of arias sung by a well-known opera tenor, and his voice was perfect! The only thing she’d needed to do was mute the environmental noise that got in the way. Why was he so gifted, and she—

“God!” she cried out, pressing her hands to her ears. “Ow!”

What the hell was that?

It came again, a shrieking, high-pitched scream that felt like ice picks in her ears.

“Ow, ow, ow!”

It came a third time, and she was able to locate the source of the noise. It was coming from the back of the studio. Who the hell was here, and what the hell were they messing with?

She got to her feet, a fourth shriek driving her to anger. “Damn it, I swear to God, if I find someone screwing with the theremin again, I’m going to—”

Her voice was silenced by the blade of a knife slicing her voice box in two. Her last thought was regret that she had spent her entire life afraid to share that voice with the world. Now, no one would ever hear it.

Chapter One

Remember, I will break you.

Special Agent Faith Bold stared at the shackled figure of Dr. Franklin West and replayed the last sentence he spoke to her over and over in her head.

Remember, I will break you.

“He’s been sitting like that for the past four hours,” the detective standing next to her said, a hint of admiration in his voice. “You think he’s asleep?”

“No,” she replied. “I don’t.”

Dr, West sat with his hands folded on top of the table, his shoulders back, his posture straight but relaxed. He wore a calm expression, the corners of his mouth upturned slightly in a smile.

“Gives me the creeps,” the detective confided. “It’s like I’m talking to a robot.”

“That’s common with sociopaths,” Faith said. “They have a flat affect unless they’re around the objects of their obsession or using emotion to manipulate others.”

The detective looked at her with a paternal concern that irritated the hell out of Faith, mostly because the reason for that concern was justified. "You sure you should talk to him? I mean, you're kind of the object of his obsession."

Faith’s lips thinned. Dr. West was more commonly known as the Copycat Killer, a media-shortened version of the Copycat Donkey Killer, the more prolific admirer of Jethro Trammell, the original Donkey Killer who had captured, tortured and nearly killed Faith before her partner, Michael Prince, shot him dead at the last second.

For some reason, West hadn’t fixated on Michael other than as a connection to Faith. He had decided that Faith was Trammell’s unfinished business, his one mistake, and he had taken it upon himself to rectify that mistake.

But not by killing her. No, he intended to take everything that mattered to Faith and leave her broken and defeated. And he had nearly succeeded. He had posed as Faith’s psychologist for months and used the information he gained from those sessions to kill Faith’s friend and mentor, Gordon Clark, and nearly kill her boyfriend, David Friedman. Then he had eluded capture for months, perpetrating several proxy assaults on Faith and her K9 unit, Turk.

It was during that last assault, one where he had once more overcome the two of them, that the police had finally caught him. Her neighbors had heard gunshots from her apartment and called the police. And just before they hauled West off, he had uttered those words.

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