The Dark Corners of the Night

by Meg Gardiner

  He was on screen for six seconds, then gone. Caitlin exhaled.

  “Which direction did he head?”

  “North.”

  Caitlin pictured it. “Coming downhill, toward the Valley.”

  The young detective nodded and pulled up another video clip. “This we got from a camera on the street behind the McDonald’s where the sheriff’s cruiser was hit with the ninja rock.”

  Residential street. Trees, ranch homes. No traffic.

  “Time stamp shows it’s three minutes after the deputy called for assistance.”

  A figure walked along a suburban sidewalk. His distinctive strut was instantly recognizable. Once again, he appeared to be in no hurry. Same basic clothes, same head-down pose. Hands in his pockets.

  “Hoodie’s bulky. He could be hiding a slingshot in the waistband of his jeans,” Caitlin said. “Along with a handgun.”

  “Easily,” Weisbach said.

  He seemed utterly calm, as if at home in the neighborhood. He had a definite pep in his stride.

  Ten seconds into the video, the reflection of flashing lights illuminated the trees.

  “That’s backup inbound to the McDonald’s,” Caitlin said.

  The figure on the screen slowed and stopped. The lights swept past toward the restaurant. The figure slowly turned on the sidewalk to watch them go.

  “Jesus,” Caitlin said.

  There was absolutely no question in her mind that this was their UNSUB. She felt excitement welling. She felt unnerved.

  The figure continued to turn, doing a lazy pirouette, watching the flashing lights of the sheriffs’ cruisers sweep past a block from where he stood. He was in a peaceful residential neighborhood, among dozens of homes where families slept. Within arm’s reach of them.

  But he seemed uninterested in the hundreds of people he walked among. Not that night. He finished his pirouette and continued down the sidewalk out of sight. Thirty seconds later, off screen, a car’s headlights came on, glowing up the road. They swept in a circle as the unseen car made a U-turn and faded away.

  “It’s him,” Caitlin said. “This is great work.”

  “That U-turn put him heading west,” the detective said.

  “Send me everything, would you?” she tapped a fist against his shoulder. “Thanks.”

  She turned to go but had another thought. “You said the time stamp on this video starts three minutes after the deputy radioed for assistance. How far from the McDonald’s was the camera located?”

  “Half a block. Maybe sixty yards.”

  She calculated. “It would take him roughly thirty seconds to walk that distance. That means after he shot the ninja rock at the cruiser, he stayed put for two and a half minutes. He could have maintained concealment to avoid discovery, but I think he stayed to watch the chaos he unleashed.”

  “Enjoying it.”

  “Lording it over the deputy who thought he was under fire.” She looked at Weisbach with something approaching disgust. And a chill.

  She thanked the detective again. As she headed for the stairs, she called Keyes.

  “Got something for you. Saddle up.”

  Keyes was tossing a baseball back and forth between his hands, eyeing his laptop as if urging it to steal home, when Caitlin found Emmerich in the hallway, speaking to Weisbach and Alvarez. She waved them toward the war room.

  “Keyes is almost ready,” she said.

  When they approached, Keyes knuckled the baseball. “I’m compiling the environmental data. Weather, temp, moonrise. Also pulling the historical Google Maps imagery from the dates of the killings and integrating it with the FBI’s latest satellite data. I’ll have the geographic profile in a minute.”

  His eyes were shining. His hair was a poodle mass falling over his forehead. He nudged his frames with a knuckle and put a map of the LA basin on the big screen. He clicked. Four red dots appeared. And seven yellow ones.

  “Yellow dots are the police car vandalism.” He gestured. “North Hollywood. Southgate. Van Nuys. Miracle Mile. Buena Park—that’s Orange County. East San Gabriel.” He turned. “Each in a different LAPD or LA Sheriff’s patrol area, or in a city with its own police department. Seemingly a small-bore problem, unlikely to become widely known across divisions or between departments. It’s a form of camouflage and counterforensics.”

  Alvarez nodded. “He’s a knowledgeable fucker.”

  “Psychology influences what ‘least effort’ means to a criminal choosing between various possibilities.” Keyes circled the table and picked up the baseball again. “So ‘closest’ can be a difficult thing to determine. Isotropic surfaces—spaces that exhibit equal physical properties in all directions—are hard to find in real life. Maps can look flat, but on the street, travel will be easier in some directions or along certain routes, and harder along others. The navigation apps on your phone will give you exact travel times down to the minute, day or night. But they don’t tell us the psychological comfort a particular person gets—or doesn’t—from taking a certain route.”

  Keyes’ laptop caught his attention. He leaned over it and started typing. “That’s what I mean by ‘mental maps.’ What the offender’s attitude is toward a place. It’s his subjective feeling about a neighborhood.” Keyes stared at his computer screen. “Here we go.”

  His voice sounded both excited and uncertain. Hitting a key, he sent the results of his calculations to the TV. The geographic profile appeared.

  He straightened. “Huh.”

  On the flat-screen was a 3-D rendering of the Los Angeles basin. Overlaid on it were rings like the slope of a volcano—ramping up to the lip of a crater and falling away to a central hole, like a caldera.

  Caitlin knew what the map represented. The high peaks around the lip of the crater were comfort zones, which included the sites of the Midnight Man’s attacks—and locations where he was likely to commit further attacks. Their gradual outward slope indicated distance decay. The hole in the middle of the caldera showed his home ground.

  Weisbach whistled. It wasn’t in admiration. It was in confusion.

  The result of Keyes’ algorithmic computation didn’t show an area where the killer lived. It showed two.

  One zone was in the San Fernando Valley, centering on the Van Nuys / North Hollywood area.

  The second zone was right downtown, practically on top of the LAPD HQ building where they were standing.

  “That’s unexpected,” Keyes said.

  Caitlin’s hopes receded. Each of the two buffer zones was roughly two miles in diameter.

  Keyes’ voice grew distant. “The Midnight Man’s hunting style is dispersed, which aligns with a power-control killer, but I didn’t expect this.”

  If this were some patch of desert where the population was six people per square mile, they’d be on their way out the door to surveil and arrest somebody. But in the second largest city in the United States?

  Keyes frowned hard at the screen, his gaze jumping. “No—I’ve seen something like this before. An English case, serial rapist, the geographic profile indicated two buffer zones. Manchester Police were able to focus their searches. The offender was a truck driver who lived in one zone and visited his mother’s house in the other. So don’t despair.”

  Alvarez glowered at him from under heavy brows. “Despair isn’t my first reaction, cupcake.”

  Keyes’ eyes flickered, registering the remark, but he continued scanning the screen. He didn’t crack back at the detective.

  “This is accurate,” he said. “Based on all the information the task force has gathered. You can concentrate your offender searches, your patrols, on these two zones.”

  “And what about his next attack?” Alvarez said. “Where can we concentrate our resources to prevent it?”

  Keyes voice went flat. “You can’t.”

  Gnawin
g on his wad of gum, Alvarez cut a glance at Emmerich. “Thought this was your big gun, gonna give us not just a target but a bull’s-eye.”

  Caitlin’s hackles rose. “Come on, Alvarez. You know that Keyes couldn’t, wouldn’t, and didn’t promise that. Blow off your steam outside, not at Nick.”

  Weisbach set her shoulders back sharply. A dragonfly sweep.

  “We can use this. Thank you, Mr. Keyes.” She nodded at Emmerich and jabbed a pointed glance at Alvarez. “And we have information to put out to the public. Let’s prep a press conference.”

  The podium had an emblem on the front, the Los Angeles Police Department’s insignia with the motto to protect and to serve. It was set up between the US and California flags in front of a beige wall in a nondescript conference room on the first floor of LAPD headquarters.

  Behind the podium stood members of the task force, including the BAU team. The media provided the other half of the show. Television lights, handheld microphones, boom mikes, photographers with big lenses, TV correspondents, print reporters with smart phones recording the proceedings, all massed symbiotically around the front of the room, with a no-man’s-land blank space between them.

  A buffer zone, Caitlin thought.

  The commanding officer of Robbery-Homicide, a man with yardstick posture and a neat white mustache, introduced himself, along with the commanding officer of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s Detective Division. They’d stepped into these glaring lights on a Friday in the run-up to the holidays in a show of force and seriousness, to try to reassure the thirteen million people in the region that law enforcement was doing everything humanly possible to keep them from ending up dead on the floor in front of the Christmas stockings.

  By force of trained habit, Caitlin scrutinized everyone in the room. But this press conference wasn’t open to the public, only cops and press. She saw the same grim-faced officers who had been upstairs when Emmerich presented the profile. They were even grimmer-faced now.

  The Robbery-Homicide commanding officer held forth, stating that they had assembled to request the community’s assistance and put out information regarding the series of murders that was ongoing in Los Angeles County. He was dry and thorough, and the press was antsy.

  After running through the basics, he turned the stage over to Detective Dave Solis.

  Solis grabbed the podium by both sides and read from a printout. “We have information to release about a person of interest in these murders.” His gentle voice, gravelly with fatigue, sounded gruff. He waited until a video was cued up on a nearby screen. “We’ve obtained images of a man we’d like to talk to.”

  The new CCTV videos of the Midnight Man played. The atmosphere in the room instantly turned electric.

  When the video that had been taken near the McDonald’s ninja rock attack reached its end, it paused: a shot of the white-negative figure across the street from the camera, caught midspin as he sauntered away from the scene. Wild and eerie. A white flame.

  “We’re requesting the public’s assistance in identifying this individual,” Solis said.

  The video should have provided a clear identification of the murderer, but instead showed a faceless golem, draped in baggy clothes, hooded, loose in the world, unconnected to the streets he floated through with his malign designs and gamma-ray eyes.

  Solis took questions for several minutes. He thanked everyone for coming and ended the conference. His microphone shut off. The group behind the podium dispersed. The lights of the television cameras shut down.

  Rainey watched the reporters and assorted officers scatter. “We’ll see.”

  The Robbery-Homicide commanding officer strode past with a nod. Emmerich shook his hand. Solis came over. His attitude was both bleak and dogged.

  “Somebody knows him,” he said. “Somebody knows exactly who he is.”

  “The city’s hooked into this,” Emmerich said. “There’s an army of amateurs out there right now, trying to figure out how to identify him.”

  Keyes started to mutter something, then stopped himself. Caitlin thought he’d been about to say, Good luck. Enhancing videos the way TV cop shows and movies did it was a fantasy.

  “Let’s hope it goes viral,” he said. “And this guy’s boss or girlfriend gets a funny feeling that it’s him.”

  “We’ll be ready,” Solis said. “Thank you.”

  He shook everyone’s hand and left. The BAU team followed, into the lobby of the building. It was vast and echoing, and the afternoon light had passed overhead to leave them in shadow.

  It was Friday. The task force was going back upstairs to continue winnowing information and reading interviews and staring at crime scene photos and adding tips to their lead board. To stay up through another night, skipping school plays and soccer games and holiday parties and dinner with the family.

  For a minute the BAU team hung in the lobby.

  Emmerich said, “Thank you all. That’s it for now. I’ll see you Monday morning at Quantico.”

  From here, it was up to local law enforcement.

  They’d given the task force all they could. But the UNSUB remained at large. It felt like a lit fuse.

  21

  The day was chillier. The sun hung at a sharper angle at the crest of the coastal mountains. Pink light above it, soft in the winter sky. Birdsong and the smell of wood smoke. Caitlin’s face stung from the cold.

  The feeling in the air was welcome. It reminded her of college, of finishing finals and rolling into the driveway in her beat-up old Subaru after the drive down I-5. Of her mom waiting up with the lights on in the kitchen. The tactile memory of long starry nights, happy times with candlelight and a warm house full of laughter.

  She jammed her hands deep in the pockets of her peacoat and walked up the path to the town house. The sycamores let the last of the dappled light hit the grass. Behind the complex, the sunset reflected red from windows high in the Berkeley Hills. It had been a short flight after a long week. Bringing her home to a city where she no longer lived.

  The town houses were wood-sided, cozy, nestled far enough from Telegraph Avenue to provide a feeling of calm amid the Berkeley frenzy. Caitlin paused at the door for a gut check and knocked.

  She counted slowly, figuring it would take a while. Peered at the fish-eye of the peephole. After hitting twenty, she raised a fist toward the door.

  Before she could knock again, it opened. “If you’re selling Avon, I’m not buying. Your makeup looks like shit.”

  “Look who’s talking.”

  Michele Ferreira stood in the doorway, lips pursed.

  The sun hit her face full on as she gazed up at Caitlin. She was half a foot shorter and, leaning on a cane, seemed small and crooked. Her pixie fauxhawk was messy. She wore raspberry scrubs and a threadbare expression.

  For an interminable pause they stared at each other. Then threw their arms around each other, fighting back tears.

  Michele backed up, relying heavily on the cane. “Come in, goddammit.”

  The stiffness in her body drove a sharp ache through Caitlin. This was Michele, the mighty mite of their running club, who in years past frequently dared Caitlin to race her down crazy inclines in the hills, swearing viciously as she pounded for the finish before spitting and laughing and tossing Caitlin a beer. Today she could barely hobble the five yards to her living room sofa. She had been seventy feet away when the bomb exploded in the ER.

  The town house was tidy, modern, with a patio and small play area overhung with birch trees. The décor was preschool artwork and a passel of dinosaurs on the coffee table.

  Michele eased herself onto the couch. “You look like a goddamn FBI agent. What are those—slacks?”

  She was smiling. Her shoulders were tight. As she settled herself, the strain seemed to ease. Caitlin hated seeing her like this.

  “Chips and salsa?” Cait
lin was already walking to the open kitchen, and Michele waved her on. She grabbed a bag of blue corn chips and a tub of pico de gallo from the fridge. She nearly plopped on the sofa next to Michele but caught herself at the last second and sat without jarring the cushions.

  An ID badge from Temescal Hospital sat on the coffee table amid the velociraptors. Michele caught Caitlin eyeing it.

  “New security features on all staff and visitor badges,” she said. “Biometrics. They’re changing the entire security protocol for the hospital, all hospitals in Alameda County, working with local fire and police departments and Homeland Security.”

  She made jazz hands. “We’ve hit the big time.”

  But the attack on the hospital hadn’t come via a breach in staff security. The bomb was brought into the emergency room strapped to the back of a woman who had been found incoherent on the street near the University of California campus.

  The woman had worn layers of dirty clothing and a heavy coat. Her wrists were wrapped with barbed wire that ran up her arms under her sleeves. She wouldn’t let the firefighter-paramedics remove it. She bit at the EMT who tried to unbutton her coat. The paramedics rolled her into the Temescal ER on a Saturday night, unsure whether she had overdosed, sustained a brain injury, or gone off her meds.

  As they departed, an RN managed to cut away the patient’s blouse. The sleep-deprived trauma resident got a pair of surgical wire cutters to remove the barbed wire digging into the woman’s wrists. The RN saw that the patient’s torso was extravagantly wrapped in duct tape, and delicately lifted the woman so she could see what was so bulky against her back—

  Caitlin had seen the video feed from the ER.

  She’d watched it hundreds of times. It showed the raw, final milliseconds in the lives of everyone in the exam room.

  The patient thrashed on the exam table. She was in her early forties, carried no ID, and nine months later, still had not been identified. She fought the doctor and nurses, who tried to understand what she was saying. Garbled utterings, the paramedics had written.