Page 21 of So Silent

Faith’s brow furrowed. “What? Don’t be mad at you?”

“Don’t be mad, but I need you to wake up now. Turk? Help me wake her up.”

***

A rough, wet tongue dragged across her face, and she stirred.

“Don’t be mad at me,” Michael said. She opened her eyes and looked at him groggily. “I gave you fifty-seven minutes, but it was because I was organizing some things, not because I was trying to be nice to you.”

“Fifty-seven minutes…” She repeated. She sat up and frowned at him. “Is that a joke?”

“Yes,” he said. “It’s actually been four and a half hours.”

“Four and a…” she looked at her phone. It was nearly three in the morning. She sighed and rubbed her temples. “Okay. I guess I really was tired. Go ahead and sleep. Maybe fresh eyes on what you did will be a help.”

“Fingers crossed,” Michael said. “All I did so far was make a list of potential victims by looking up similar studies to the one Maria and Rebecca attended. It’s surprisingly hard to convince people to breach privacy contracts. Maybe you’ll have an easier time than I did.”

“Hope springs eternal.”

Michael lay down to rest, and Faith got to work. She didn’t feel like she had very fresh eyes. How had she believed she wouldn’t sleep? She felt sluggish now, in need of far more sleep than she got. When Michael’s notes continued to swim in her vision after twenty minutes, she gave up and started coffee.

Turk fell into step beside her. Faith smiled at him and scratched behind his ear briefly before starting the coffee The hotel had one of those third-sized pots and coffee that came in a sealed filter-pouch that reminded her of a tea bag. She used one of the complimentary bottles of water to fill the reservoir and pressed the button. The pot hissed and sputtered angrily almost immediately before settling down. Air in the tubes, she thought.

Turk tensed at the sound and growled a low, quiet growl. Faith frowned at him curiously. There was no real threat, though, so why would Turk react like that?

After a moment, the flow equalized, and the hissing stopped. Turk calmed and released a sigh of relief. Ah. It was the sound that was irritating. How would those have sounded to Faith, though, if she had hearing like their victims? Would the sounds have disgusted her? Would they have made her sick to her stomach? Angry? Sad? Frightened? What about Turk’s growls? She thought of the looks on the faces of the students at Gregory Tate’s lab. There wasn’t much in the way of emotion. Only pain.

“Damn it all,” she whispered.

There was a conclusion struggling to get from somewhere deep in the back of her mind to the front. She focused on what she knew, trying to tease the idea into the light. There was no coaxing it closer at the moment, though. Not while she was this tired. She had to let it sit.

But what if she didn’t have time to let it sit? Remember. I will break you.

Damn it, West had nothing to do with this situation. They were chasing a different criminal, not the fucking Copycat Killer. And he was in jail. He couldn't break anything except his own wrist, trying to pull out of his shackles.

The coffee finished with another series of hisses and pops. Turk bared his teeth at the pot but didn’t growl this time.

Faith poured her coffee, then walked over to examine Michael’s notes.

As he’d warned her, he hadn’t made much headway. She sighed in irritation, but she couldn’t blame Michael. Lack of progress shouldn’t have surprised her. Actually, it didn’t surprise her. It irritated her. There should have been some kind of pattern, something to allow them to come up with an actual investigative path. Right now, they were just directionless, and that wasn’t doing anyone any good.

Except there was a pattern. The victims had excellent hearing and were probably lured by a high-frequency sound such as that produced by a dog whistle. They were both members of the same study, and while she wasn’t sure if it mattered yet, they were both part of the music industry. She remembered reading a quote from a police detective once that said that in fiction, detectives dealt with a paucity of clues, but in real life, detectives dealt with a glut of clues and the difficulty was determining which clues meant something and which clues were pointless.

Faith had dealt with cases that provided a glut of clues and cases that provided a paucity. The truth, then, was somewhere in the middle.

Right now, the truth was somewhere in the ether, and she hated that.

Turk sensed her irritation and rested his head over her thigh. She reached down and scratched softly behind his ear. “This case sucks,” she said softly, “and the problem is there’s a lot we know, but one crucial something we don’t know.”

Turk whined contentedly, and Faith continued to think out loud. “Or maybe we know what we need to know and just don’t recognize it. We need a next step. We’re going to start spinning our wheels, and in a case like this, we can’t afford to do that.”

She’d promised Hector that she would stop this asshole before he hurt anyone else. She knew it was a foolish promise to make when she made it, but she still made it. She still wanted to believe it was true, even though she had never in her life solved a case without seeing more victims suffer first.

But God, it would be nice for that to happen just one time.

Her phone rang, and when she saw the number, her heart sank. She answered and prayed this wasn’t what she thought it was.

It was.

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