The Whisper Man

Pete wakes up and is relieved to see that although he broke the seal on his bottle of alcohol, he didn’t drink any. At work, the relief fades as he must reckon with Neil Spencer’s discovery and the altered mood in the department because of the boy’s death. At the morning briefing, Lyons reviews the details of the case, and Amanda Beck gives a speech, saying that they’ll find the killer before he can claim another victim.

In the morning, Tom reckons with his inability to get the police to take his encounter seriously and chalks it up to his lack of connection with his son. He worries that he’s becoming like his father. During the walk to school, Jake asks Tom about Neil, and they talk about his disappearance and Owen’s hostile words to Jake about him being next. Jake seems unaffected by the events of the previous night, which troubles Tom, but suddenly wants affection and reassurance from his father before going in to school.

Tom runs into Karen again at the school entrance, and he tells her about Jake’s misbehavior in school and his talking to an imaginary friend—notably, he recalls his own imaginary friend, Mister Night. He also tells her about the rhyme Jake was citing; Karen says it rings a bell as a children’s rhyme, and Jake says that it couldn’t have been local to Featherbank since Jake knew it before they arrived. When the conversation turns toward Tom’s difficulty since his wife passed, Karen insists that he’s being too hard on himself.

On the way home, Tom thinks through his fear for Jake after the previous night, and he recalls what he wrote in the letter to his wife. When he gets home, he deletes what he wrote and replaces it with “I feel like I’m failing our son and I don’t know what to do” (131). He wants to protect Jake, so he looks up Dominic Barnett, the previous resident of his home. He discovers an article about Barnett, which reveals that he was murdered violently and that his body was found in the woods. Barnett was known to the police (likely for illegal dealings), and they never identified his killer. Incensed, Tom leaves to go talk to Mrs. Shearing, the previous owner of the house, who rented it to Barnett.

Amanda Beck looks through CCTV footage as Pete works next to her. His outward calm surprises her, but she knows he must be struggling too, and she longs to know his secret to handling the worst parts of the job. The CCTV footage reveals little, and she stands up to talk to Pete.

Pete is cross-referencing visitors to the prison to see if anyone may have passed a message to Carter. They come across Norman Collins, a man who was questioned during the original Carter investigation due to his intense interest in the case. Collins has been visiting Victor Tyler, a known friend of Carter’s. (Carter was Tyler’s best man at his prison wedding.) Amanda sends Pete to check out Collins while she speaks to an officer who brought her the police report Tom made. She’s upset that the reporting officers didn’t take Tom seriously, and she grabs officer John Dyson to come with her to investigate.

Tom arrives at Mrs. Shearing’s house. When he says he’s there to ask about a previous tenant, she’s flustered but invites him in. Tom asks her about the house, and she reveals that she went to Jake’s school as a girl and lived in the home until her parents died, which is when she started renting it out. He asks if she had a brother, referring to the man’s claim that he grew up in the house, and she denies it. She reveals that her friends were a little afraid of the house growing up because of its look.

The conversation turns to previous tenants, and Mrs. Shearing says she had bad luck and was happy that the house finally went to someone nice. Tom brings up Barnett, and she admits that she suspected he was up to no good but was unable to do anything due to privacy restrictions between property owners and tenants. She mentions the tenant before Barnett as well, but the conversation moves on before she elaborates.

She mentions that others made offers on the house, but she chose Tom and Jake because the two of them seemed like the right people. Tom presses her, and she says that one person was particularly persistent in a way she didn’t like (and that he reminded her of her difficult tenants, which didn’t help); she tells Tom that his name is Norman Collins.

Tom goes home and contemplates what he’s learned. He remembers that Collins was interested in the garage and goes to investigate. He works through all the boxes and clears them away, finding nothing, but the butterflies draw his eye toward a place in the floor where the bricks are loose. He recognizes it as what must have been a mechanic’s pit and pulls the bricks away to find a final cardboard box. He opens it just as Amanda Beck pulls up, and what he sees inside reminds him of his son’s assertion that he was speaking to “the boy in the floor” (148): In the box are the bones of a child.

Pete arrives at the home of Norman Collins and knocks on the door, thinking that even with an alibi for the Carter crimes, Collins was never a trustworthy figure. Norman answers the door and is hesitant to allow Pete inside but eventually relents.

He leads Pete into the living room. Pete asks him about his visit with Victor Tyler as he looks around the room. Collins recalls Tyler’s victim’s name, and Pete realizes that Collins has a ghoulish fascination with violent crime toward children. Norman reveals that the decorations in the room, which are arranged like museum pieces, are artifacts and evidence from different serial killers and other violent criminals. Collins thinks of himself as a collector, and he claims that he acquired everything legally.

The collection disgusts Pete, but he’s unsure if it’s criminal. His phone rings, and Amanda’s on the other end. She tells him about the second body and instructs him to go ahead and bring Collins in.

Tom arrives at school to pick up his son, accompanied by Officer Dyson, who cautions him to act normal. He assures Tom that this is all precautionary and that the person who killed the boy Tom discovered is already in prison. Tom isn’t reassured.

Tom runs into Karen again, and she notes how exhausted he seems. He demurs, telling her that he’ll explain sometime. The children start to exit, and it’s clear that Jake is in trouble again for some reason, as he’s being held back. Jake’s teacher tells Tom that Jake hit Owen after he tried to take Jake’s Packet of Special Things.

Tom begins to agree with the teacher, but he’s secretly proud of his son for standing up for himself, and he’s indignant that the teacher wonders whether Jake should be bringing his packet to school. When the teacher casually touches Jake’s head, Tom tells her not to touch him and says that he’ll talk to Jake—but only about better ways to stand up to bullies.

Pete watches from his car as the CSI team enters the home of Norman Collins. He has Collins under arrest in the back seat and is looking through the details of the house Tom and Jake live in, ignoring Collins’s protests that he’s done nothing wrong, as the discovery of Tony Smith’s body makes Collins a suspect. Pete’s thoughts arrive at Dominic Barnett, whose murder he’d dismissed as a drug-related killing at the time; now he wonders about a possible link between the bones in the garage, Barnett, Collins, and the previous tenant, Julian Simpson, who lived in the house at the time of Tony Smith’s disappearance.

Though police didn’t investigate Simpson at the time, his age made him a good fit for some reports of a second person involved in Carter’s killings, and the house was in a location that would be convenient if Carter needed to get rid of Smith’s body quickly. Pete worries that he may have missed something he should’ve seen sooner.

Amanda calls him and asks him to find housing for Tom and Jake for the night. He agrees and then looks up Tom Kennedy to confirm that it’s who he thinks it is, though the narrative won’t reveal it for several chapters: Tom is Pete’s son.