Taylor Smith - Guilt By Silence

When the black, hairy thing fell out of the envelope and landed on her outstretched hand, Mariah screamed and leapt back, dropping both the envelope and the creature. Nothing happened after a few seconds, and she slipped around the walls to the broom closet, her eyes never leaving the manila envelope. Pulling out the broom, she raised it to waist level, bringing it down hard, over and over. Then, cautiously, she used the handle to slide the envelope off the remains of what lay underneath. She expected a sticky mess, but the paper slid easily away from the black, hairy whorl.

It wasn’t a tarantula. It wasn’t a spider at all. It was hair—a few curls of familiar black hair flecked with gray. It was David’s hair, she was certain. She picked up the envelope to examine it more carefully. Inside were several stiff sheets of paper, which she withdrew. They were 8½-by-11-inch photographs of a man and a woman, naked, on a bed, in various positions of lovemaking. It was her husband, David, and Elsa.

Mariah fought down nausea, pushing away the pain and anger. Why had she been sent the envelope? Why now? It was a game of terror they were playing with her, teasing, threatening. But who? And what did they want her to do? Or not do, she suddenly thought. What are the rules here? How do I know how to play along if I don’t know the rules or the object of the game?

“Sharp characterization and a tightly focused time frame…give this intrigue a spellbinding tone of immediacy.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Best of Enemies

COMMON PASSIONS

THE BEST OF ENEMIES

RANDOM ACTS

Book from TAYLOR SMITH

THE INNOCENTS CLUB

CIA analyst Mariah Bolt sets off a time bomb when she unearths a lost manuscript from her famous novelist father. Before long, her father’s former lover turns up dead, and Mariah and her daughter become pawns in a deadly game of international intrigue.

www.mirabooks.co.uk

This book is dedicated with love to Richard,

who endures and encourages, and to Kate and Anna,

to whom the future belongs.

“Secret guilt by silence is betrayed.”

—John Dryden, All for Love

Although this work of fiction is meant to entertain, its writing was made a good deal easier by the many people who read part or all of the manuscript to verify the scientific facts it contains, and/or who answered my endless questions on their particular areas of expertise. It goes without saying that I owe to them the accuracy of the facts contained herein, while any errors that might stubbornly remain are no one’s fault but my own.

I would particularly like to thank: Jaye Orr, for checking my medical facts; Harv Pulford, for the computer stuff; Larry Butler of the Los Angeles Fire Department, for so much useful information on collision fires; Dan Young of the Orange County Fire Department, for the inspiration of gasoline explosions and tungsten pins; Marsha MacWillie, crime scene analyst with the Garden Grove Police Department, who let me hang around and watch her do what she does so well; J. L. Ragle, former Deputy Coroner of Orange County, and the host of forensic experts he brought to his seminars; Peter Ernest of the CIA Office of Public Relations, who kindly answered my questions on CIA career paths and the Agency’s priorities in a post-Cold War world; my writing friends, including Margaret Gerard, Roy Langsdon and Marjorie Leusebrink et al. at the UCI advanced fiction workshop, who read and advised; Elaine Shean, who proofread the manuscript and provided moral support and occasional baby-sitting services to get me through this; Pat Teal, agent and morale booster; and finally, my friend “C”—my inside source in the nuclear regulatory field, who verified the nuclear facts but asked, only half-jokingly, if I couldn’t please make the regulators’ lives easier by adding a footnote saying, “But really, folks, this could never happen here.” Well, I hope it couldn’t. With people of C’s dedication in the field, we could yet luck out.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Epilogue

Mariah circled the block three times. There were plenty of open spaces in the parking lot, but she wasn’t ready to face him yet. Shouldn’t this get easier at some point? she wondered. She should have begun adjusting by now. So why couldn’t she accept that this was the way things had to be?

Just once more around, she promised herself, passing the entrance. One more time, and then she would do it again—go in and pretend. Pretend that nothing had really changed—that they were still a family. That they could cope. Pretend that his being in here was just a minor inconvenience. Pretend that it didn’t matter that he would never hold her in his arms or make love to her again. Pretend that Lindsay didn’t miss his stupid jokes or his hockey lessons or the giggling conspiracies the two of them used to mount whenever Mariah tried to reprimand them about junk food and the rules about bedtime.

David was in there waiting, she knew—he had nothing to do but wait for her and Lindsay.

It was ten months since the accident in Vienna; six since she had brought him back home to Virginia. In the first weeks they were back, friends and family had come to visit wearing carefully crafted, upbeat smiles that never wavered. But their eyes, when they saw him, were shocked and frightened, even though Mariah had tried to prepare them for the devastating changes the accident had wrought. They would pat his arm bravely at first, but then Mariah would see them subtly withdraw, their fingers recoiling from his atrophied muscles and the bone-thinness of the flesh under his shirt. After that, they almost never touched him again, except perhaps for a quick squeeze of his gnarled hand as they left.

They would ramble on one-sidedly to him about things David probably wouldn’t have cared about even if he could have responded—and they knew it. But what else did you say to a genius whose mind, or what was left of it, was revealed only through an occasional flicker in his dark eyes?

The visitors would glance anxiously at Mariah, wondering whether David knew who they were and what they were talking about, but even she had no way of knowing for sure what registered with him and what didn’t. Sometimes he seemed to be taking in everything, his eyes reflecting something like amusement or interest, or narrowing, as if he was pondering some problem. But other times, he seemed lost in an inner world that she couldn’t reach. The eyes would fix momentarily on a face, then drift away, distracted by a curtain blowing at a window or a speck of dust dancing in a sunbeam.

These days, very few people came to see him anymore.

Finally pulling into a parking space, Mariah tilted the rearview mirror and gave her sandy hair a poke or two to fluff it up a little. The cut was soft but short—practical, hair for a woman with no time to fuss. She wore almost no makeup, except for a little mascara to darken her fair lashes. She ran her fingers absently under her eyes to erase the end-of-day smudges that turned her gray eyes smoky. Then she paused. The eyes watching her from the mirror were critical, asking her for the thousandth time if she couldn’t have arranged things differently. She had posed the same question every day since it became clear that David wasn’t going to recover from his injuries.