Into Darkness

by T. J. Brearton

  Shannon tried to remember more from that moment, but her memory stopped on an image of the reporter crossing the road, reading from her phone as she hurried in her heels. Her memory would just not go any further. She wanted to see the footage Bufort had mentioned. A cameraman from another network who heard Shannon calling out to Baldacci and turned just in time to see the explosion.

  Had the killer been watching? There’d been no building over two stories high in the neighborhood. It was all supply companies and warehouses. Perhaps he’d been on a roof a half a block down, but she doubted it.

  Had he been expecting to see it on TV, then? See his work on the news as it interrupted daytime programming? Killers often craved publicity. Maybe he wanted to see his handiwork displayed between Pepsi commercials and ads for the American Stars show finale, like he was part of the Zeitgeist.

  But even if he’d felt confident someone in the press group would capture it on video, he’d have to realize it was too graphic for broadcast television. Maybe he’d hoped it would wind up on YouTube, but those chances were slim – the FBI had squashed it. And she thought she knew why. It would be graphic, yes, but since the explosion, Tyler was thinking about terrorism. An IED in a dumpster kicked open some more doors at the FBI. The National Security Branch was monitoring now. Backroom conversations were being had, playbooks consulted, worst-case scenarios considered, potential responses auditioned.

  When her phone rang again, Shannon took the call. “Hi, Dad.”

  They went through it, and she told him what she could – which wasn’t much – and assured him she was all right, in good health, and that everything was well in hand.

  “I think about you down there in that city,” he said. Thomas Ames had been a farmer all his life – he’d inherited the land from his father, but worked it like he’d paid every penny for it himself.

  “New York is safer than it’s ever been,” she told him, remembering Caldoza’s comment about rich women pushing strollers.

  “According to whom?”

  “The FBI.”

  She could hear hens clucking in the background. She asked him about the farm, the weather, her three living brothers, until she finally asked, “How’s Mom?”

  He hesitated. “Oh, you know, she’s good. She misses you. Hopes you’re well.”

  And that was it. Shannon returned two more calls – one to her good friend Kelly, whom she’d met at Quantico, and to Leslie, her best friend from college. Maybe in the old days you could get injured during the course of an investigation and not have people know about it, but not today, and not with a case ramping up to be as sensational as this one. One way or the other, everyone was seeing it, hearing about it.

  Shannon sat up on the couch and gently kneaded her thigh. She painfully pulled on a pair of army-green shorts. She stood and limped to the terrace, thinking about an ultra-connected world. The terrace door was open, a warm midday breeze blowing in. Warmer than warm – it was going to be ninety-five again today. After standing a minute in the soupy heat, looking out over Queens, Brooklyn in the distance, she closed the door and turned on the air. She made a pot of coffee and opened her laptop on the dining room table.

  She’d bought the place semi-furnished, and the furniture had looked like something you’d find on an old-fashioned ship. Dark wood with a natural, rough look. The hardwood flooring was a couple of shades lighter, the walls cream. Leslie would think it too masculine, maybe. Shannon’s favorite part was a small antique desk with a high-backed chair with curvy legs. Buttoned-down leather upholstery. One of the few things she’d bought herself was the small glass dining table, which replaced the preexisting ugly, square white table.

  Coffee ready, she got a cup and sat down, wincing at the pull of bandages still on her leg and arm. She began with Eva Diaz. Twenty-eight years old, originally from the Bronx. Diaz’s death was mourned by a huge family; a picture of her mother, attending the burial, face twisted in agony, was particularly gut-wrenching. Diaz had been a reporter with Channel 2 for just four years. Even then, she’d only been an on-air field reporter for two of those years, covering mostly entertainment news. She’d started in the actual mailroom at CBS, according to her bio on the company website. A true story of a local girl who was a self-made success.

  Her looks too, Shannon thought without cynicism, had to have helped her as well.

  Forbes was older, more seasoned, but very pretty, too. Her college education and résumé were impressive. She’d spent many years behind the scenes working as a media producer before joining the ladies on The Scene and had been doing the late-morning show for almost four years now.

  Shannon went to the antique desk, pulled out some paper, a pencil, and returned to the glass table. She started scratching out some notes, just dates, when each victim started working at the jobs they held when they were killed. She’d get more detailed information later.

  She continued to mull over the locations. Forensics called it geographic profiling. But while all three victims lived in the New York City area, Diaz and Forbes lived in Brooklyn, mere minutes from each other. Baldacci had a Long Island address, a suburb called Melville. Almost an hour away.

  Another difference: Baldacci was neither TV reporter nor TV news host. For the past six months she’d been a crime beat journalist for Newsday, a daily newspaper that primarily served Long Island counties, but also Queens. Though the paper used the more compact format of tabloid journalism, it had a reputation for being less sensational than its Daily News or Post counterparts. And Baldacci seemed the “serious” journalist; she also freelanced and had written articles for Insight and the Gotham Gazette – the last a daily online publication run by the Citizens Union Foundation, a government watchdog group.

  Interesting.

  In fact, if memory served, when Baldacci had first introduced herself on North Seventh Street, she’d said she was from the Gazette.

  Shannon spent the next hour browsing recent articles from Baldacci, searching for segments featuring Diaz as the reporter on camera for WCBS-TV, and watching clips from Monica’s show. Watching Monica was surreal. Because Shannon had just seen her beneath a bus, dead, yes. But also because of the way she looked on-screen. Like she was unable to completely hide the fact that discussing recent movies and hot new gluten-free recipes was a better job for someone else. She looked out of place. She looked like she belonged with Baldacci, in a way, chasing down the bigger stories.

  Ben Forbes had said Monica was always trying to push the show content, to squeeze in a bit more of the intellectual. Like what? Shannon wanted to know more. Maybe dig into the thing with city hall that Forbes had mentioned.

  Done for now, she stood up stiffly and gimped her way to the bathroom, using the walls to brace herself. She ran the tub and dumped in the rest of the Epsom salts she had beneath the sink. She lit candles. The plan was to soak for a full forty minutes, but she only made it halfway. She needed the water cool to keep from aggravating her burns, and lukewarm baths kind of sucked. Plus, she had to keep her arms out of the water.

  After toweling off and blowing out the candles, she called Bufort.

  “That didn’t take long,” he said.

  “I need a car,” she said to him. “I need, ah, my car.”

  “Not gonna happen. Not unless you want Tyler coming down on you. He’s got you written off until at least Saturday.”

  “I just need to … I need to look at a few things. My leg is … you know what? It’s fine. I’ll take a cab. Thanks.”

  She hung up before he could say anything else. She ran a trembling hand through her damp hair. Dammit. She wasn’t the type to get rattled like this. All her life, people had been telling her she had two gears: steady and steadier. She had the right temperament for this kind of work. But, then, so far there had been nothing holding her back.

  Maybe she wasn’t as perfect as everyone thought.

  So be it.

  She dressed and brushed her teeth, all of her movements slow and deliberate. Sh
e applied some burn cream and fresh bandages to her arm and leg. She removed the one from her jaw, dropped it in the trash, and didn’t replace it. Instead, she used a little foundation makeup – a Christmas gift courtesy of her aunt Bernice. She pulled her hair back and added just a touch of eyeliner. Then a swipe of rouge and the subtlest lipstick.

  There. It almost looked like she’d never been in a deadly explosion caused by a psychopath.

  10

  Thursday Afternoon

  “Right here,” Shannon said.

  The cab pulled over. She was still half a block away, but wanted to keep her business private. She paid him and stepped out onto the street and waited until he drove off before she started down Second Avenue and turned onto Fifty-Fourth.

  The walking was excruciating. After everything that had happened, it was her leg and hip, not her head, giving her the trouble.

  The yellow crime scene tape became visible as she neared the Baldacci murder site. Two NYPD cars and an NYPD van blocked the street in this direction – there were more vehicles at the other end; they’d cordoned off at least a hundred yards of street. The lot where Forbes had been found was also protected. A handful of crime scene techs in white suits remained. One was scraping residue from the side of the Salt and Pepper Food, Inc. building, just beyond the ragged hole created by the blast. Two uniformed cops stood talking in the middle of it all, hands on their belts. And pressing against the crime scene tape, a latecomer reporter and camera crew.

  Shannon stopped when she saw them, and moved behind a loading truck parked across the street. The last thing she needed was her own face splashed all over the news, especially when she was supposed to be standing down.

  She backtracked to Second Avenue and walked around the construction site, thinking about explosives. Along Center Street, a guy with chest hair sprouting from his wide-open collar was selling men’s shoes and belts. He tried to strike up a flirty conversation with her. She hailed a taxi and was saved when it pulled over and picked her up.

  Forty-Eighth Street in Maspeth was much quieter, but the scene was eerily similar. Dylan Engineering and Construction sat on the corner. Forty-Eight ran north-south and Fifty-Fifth went east-west. Dylan had a large backlot where they kept a small squad of diesel trucks, equipment trailers, and massive refuse bins. Shannon peered in through slight gaps in the sheets of corrugated metal attached to a chain-link fence. Yellow crime scene tape remained in the lot, stretched from the back of the building to the fence at an angle, forming a triangle out of the overgrown southwest corner.

  Shannon stepped back and looked up. The fence was only six feet high. Diaz had been found on the ground inside the fence. Found by one of Dylan’s construction workers about fourteen hours after police believed she’d been dumped there. Dumped, it was determined, by being lifted up and dropped over the fence. Wrapped in black plastic garbage bags.

  Which said a couple of things, Shannon thought, limping her way to the building’s entrance, at least one of them for sure: that the killer was strong enough to lift a hundred-and-ten pound woman six feet in the air in order to clear her over the fence. The other thing it said, or at least suggested, was that he hadn’t wanted this one to be found right away. Monica Forbes was under a bus, but that was perhaps just to give him enough time to get away – perhaps after double-checking his hidden bomb – and then make his anonymous tip to the reporters.

  Shannon went into the building. A young woman sat at the only desk, a closed door behind her. The nameplate on the desk read S. Martinez. She was chewing gum and poking at an iPhone. Without looking up: “Help you?”

  “Hi. Special Agent Ames, FBI.”

  A glance, then the young woman’s gaze riveted back to her phone. “You want to see the place? Where she was found?”

  “I was actually wondering if I could talk to who found her.”

  S. Martinez set down the phone. “Oh. Well, that’s Alfonso. He’s off on medical. Well, his wife is having a baby.”

  Shannon smiled. “Good for him. Is the owner here?”

  “Two owners. Brothers. Tim and Jeff Dylan. They’re in the city on a big project.” Martinez shifted her gum to the other side of her mouth and looked Shannon up and down. At last, realization: “Oh, you here because of the thing over at Hunters Point?”

  Shannon nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Crazy, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the deal? Someone got a thing for reporters?”

  “Could be.” Shannon pulled a card out from her inner jacket pocket and handed it to Martinez. “Would you hold on to this? Ask Mister … ask Alfonso to give me a call when he has a chance?”

  “Sure.”

  “How about you? Is there anything you could tell me about the discovery of Eva Diaz?”

  “Oh yeah. Absolutely. She was wrapped up in garbage bags, for one thing. So, see, Alfonso was getting the trucks ready. That’s primarily his job – we’ve got a lot of trucks, lot of equipment, and you need someone to keep all of that running smooth, right? So he’s out there, four in the morning, he’s checking the trucks, and he sees this lump of bags in the corner, goes to pick it up. Like it fell off a truck and didn’t get into one of the bins. And he goes for it and he’s like, ‘shit’ – sorry for the language – ‘dang, this is heavy.’ And he’s feeling around, trying to get a grip on it, and he knows. In like, a couple of seconds, he knows. You can just tell the shape of a human body, right?”

  “I think that makes sense.”

  Martinez nodded. “Yeah, and so he’s like, ‘shit, this is a body.’ And he takes the top bag off, where he thinks the head is. It was like, a big heavy-duty contractor bag over the legs, one over the head, duct tape in the middle.”

  “And the police took all of that.”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was, um, the 104. Over in Ridgewood. Well, Ridgewood-Glendale. They service this area, I think. You never know. We’ve got police departments all over, but there’s some places where it’s kind of like a dark spot, you know? An area with bad coverage.”

  They talked for a few more minutes about the police response, about the condition of the body and Alfonso’s reaction to the whole thing. Martinez also shared her theory – the Diaz killer, now the Forbes and Baldacci killer, too, was a Ted Bundy type who was former military. He got to Diaz and Forbes by using his good looks and charm, but when Baldacci didn’t take his bait, he “blew her ass up,” according to Martinez.

  Shannon thanked the woman and left, thinking there could be a mote of truth to her theory – the bit about a charming killer. According to the eyewitness from North Seventh, the killer had approached Monica Forbes right there in the street. And rather than run away screaming, she willingly got into the back of his vehicle.

  A Ted Bundy type? Or, perhaps more likely, someone Monica knew? Someone she didn’t find threatening? Could be. She didn’t seem the gullible type to go for some killer’s line about his lost dog or something. “Will you just hop in the back of my idling SUV and help me look?” No, of course it wasn’t that.

  Outside, Shannon called Caldoza from the corner and watched for cabs. “The witness at North Seventh – what was her name?”

  “Hi, how you doing? Feeling any better?”

  “I’m good.”

  Caldoza just breathed for a couple of seconds. “Okay, ah, you’re talking about Olivia Jackson.”

  “How serious are we about her?” Shannon stepped off the curb and waved her arm at a taxi coming down Forty-Eighth.

  “Considering her degenerative myopia and early cataracts? I mean, it’s the right time for her to have seen Forbes. But we can’t do anything with it. No real perp description, no vehicle description.”

  “I’m thinking more about the description that Forbes got into the vehicle willingly. Because I was wondering about something.” The taxi pulled up, and Shannon slipped into the back seat. “Boro taxis are green. And the witness said green a couple of times.” Shannon covered the phone and leaned f
orward and gave the driver her destination.

  Caldoza was saying, “But Forbes was a block away from home.”

  “Yeah, right, I mean, I don’t know what the scheme might’ve been, completely. It’s just the idea that she trusted him. Maybe she called him. Maybe it was an Uber. Point is that either she knew him, or he was someone who caused her to let her guard down. Could even be a cop.”

  “Whoa now.”

  “I’m just saying we don’t know.”

  “Well, it’s just – we know where all our police vehicles are. We know where our personnel are.”

  “How about Ben Forbes?” Shannon asked after a moment. “Do we know where he is now?”

  “He’s here,” Caldoza said. “I just came back with him from the Office of the Medical Examiner. He identified his wife from a photograph and birthmark on her thigh. I offered to take him back home, suggested maybe he start thinking about funeral arrangements, thinking about his kids, but he asked to come here.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “He’s been sitting in the lobby for an hour. He keeps coming back and checking in with me. The guy’s a wreck.”

  “I’m on my way there,” Shannon said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ll see you in ten minutes.”

  It took some coaxing, but she managed to convince Ben Forbes to leave the precinct with her and go for a cup of coffee nearby. They took a booth overlooking the street. Forbes stared at the bandages on her hand, the visible burn on her jaw.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “How are you doing?”

  He looked all cried out, his face drawn, eyes underscored with dark smudges. “I had to say goodbye to my wife this morning.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He looked out the window and shook his head. “I don’t get it. I don’t get what happened out there.” His gaze slid back to her. “This thing with the Baldacci woman, the reporter … What’s going on?”