CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“You remember what happened to poor little Tiffany Sleight, don’t you?”
Chloe sat cross-legged on her bed in her pink-striped cotton pajamas, her laptop balanced on her knees. It was nine o’clock; the kids had finally settled down and given in to sleep; there’d been no more disturbing calls to her landline. All was quiet.
Except for the threatening voice that continued whispering in her ear.
“You remember what happened to poor little Tiffany Sleight, don’t you?”
In fact, Chloe was only vaguely aware of what had happened to the young woman, other than that her body had recently been discovered in a landfill outside the city. She’d avoided delving into the gory details, knowing they would only upset her. There was only so much unpleasantness she could deal with at a time, and she’d decided to concentrate on those things over which she had at least a semblance of control.
“Don’t do it,” she whispered now, her hands hovering over the keyboard. Yet, even as she was saying the words, her fingers were already zeroing in on the letters, pressing T-I-F-F-A-N-Y S-L-E-I-G-H-T into the search box, and watching as the screen filled with photographs and articles about the slain woman.
She was a pretty girl, Chloe thought, studying a close-up of the young woman’s face, her shy smile presaging no hint of the horrifying fate awaiting her. Long brown hair, a pleasant if narrow face, almond-shaped eyes, a slight overbite. Twenty-eight years old and a graduate of Boston University, she’d worked as an executive assistant at Google, whose head office was located mere blocks away, in Kendall Square. Had they ever crossed paths? Chloe wondered, bringing the screen closer to her eyes, staring at the young woman’s face until it degenerated into a series of black-and-white pixels.
Tiffany had recently broken up with her boyfriend, the various articles confirmed, and had a reputation as a loner. “She was really quiet,” one coworker confided, declining to give her name. “She kept to herself most of the time.” Her coworkers had reported her missing when she’d failed to show up for work. “She was meeting some guy for drinks,” another colleague offered, which seemed to be all anyone knew. Tiffany had volunteered nothing about the man she was meeting and no one had asked. Police had questioned her former boyfriend, but he had an airtight alibi for the night she disappeared and was not considered a suspect. No one had reported seeing her the night she vanished. Her body had been discovered purely by accident when a hungry dog went foraging through a landfill for food.
Chloe closed her laptop, not wanting to read the details of how Tiffany died, then opening it again when curiosity got the better of her.
She read that despite the decomposition, there was still enough left of Tiffany Sleight to determine she’d been raped and tortured before being strangled and repeatedly stabbed. Both her neck and wrists bore telltale ligature marks, and signs of petechial hemorrhaging behind her eyes revealed she’d been rendered unconscious, then revived, several times before being mercifully finished off.
How awful those final hours, Chloe thought. How terrified that poor girl must have been!
What kind of man was capable of such monstrous behavior?
There were rumors of a possible serial killer, but so far, police were playing down such conjecture. Should she call them? she wondered, glancing toward the phone beside her bed.
And say what exactly?
That she’d been the victim of an obscene phone call, that the caller had known her name, that he’d alluded to Tiffany Sleight, that he could well be the monster they were looking for?
She pictured them trying to keep a straight face.Do you have any idea how many women get calls like that every day?she heard them ask. Then,Didn’t you phone the station just last week to erroneously report your husband had kidnapped your children?No, she couldn’t call them, she decided, knowing they would likely dismiss her as a hysteric, the female equivalent of “the boy who cried wolf.”
She closed her laptop and grabbed her remote from the night table, flipping on the TV. After an hour of the mind-numbing antics of assorted Kardashians, she felt her anxiety start to lessen. What she needed now was a large bowl of strawberry ice cream.
She turned off the TV and climbed out of bed, tiptoeing down the stairs and into the kitchen. Flipping on the light, she grabbed a large spoon from the cutlery drawer and opened the freezer, eating the ice cream directly from the carton.
The phone rang.
Chloe’s body went as cold as the ice cream slithering down her throat.Don’t answer it,she told herself, her hand already reaching for the receiver.Please let it be Paige calling to report on her evening,she pleaded silently. “Hello?”
“Enjoying your ice cream?” the voice asked.
Chloe’s head spun toward the window at the back of the house as her hand shot toward the light switch on the wall, throwing the room into darkness. She fell to her knees, her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming.
“Oh, Chloe. Why’d you go and do that?” the voice said in her ear.
“I’m calling the police,” she said, her heart beating wildly.
“The police can’t help you, Chloe.”
The line went dead.
Chloe immediately called nine-one-one. To hell with whether they dismissed her as hysterical. Someone was watching the house. She was in danger.
Two officers arrived ten minutes later, Chloe opening the door before they could knock, the details of every call pouring from her mouth before they’d stepped inside. They did a quick search of the grounds, but found nothing. They asked if she was married and she told them that she and her husband had recently separated, and no, they weren’t on the best of terms. They asked if she thought he could be behind the calls, and she said she honestly didn’t know. They asked if she thought he was dangerous and she said she didn’t know that either. “Did your husband know Tiffany Sleight?” they asked.
My God.Did he?