Into Darkness

by T. J. Brearton

  “That’s what I’m going to find out.” They were silent a moment, and then Shannon asked, “What can you tell me about that area?”

  “Hunters Point?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, it’s like a lot of places in the city, undergoing this kind of facelift.” Forbes got a little more animated as he talked, some color returning to his face, life to his eyes. “It’s gentrification, I guess, and you can say that in the pejorative, and it definitely has a downside – where there’s no rent control, people get priced out of the neighborhood. Or, just, groceries get more expensive. Even in Williamsburg … We used to go to a diner on Union and Metro. The whole family. The kind of place that home fries came out of a frozen box. You know what I mean? Cheeseburgers that have those individually wrapped slices of American cheese.”

  She was happy to let him talk, to live in the memory. “I do know what you mean.”

  “And then it gets new owners. Better food, but of course the costs go up. And I asked the waitress one day if the clientele had changed. And she said, ‘Yeah, some people stopped coming. Just, that’s it. Couldn’t afford it, and they’re gone.’ And it’s like, what do you do about that? Just shrug and say, that’s change, I guess? That’s progress? I don’t know.”

  Forbes picked up his coffee for the first time and took a sip. His gaze drifted to the street again. When he looked at her again, he’d acquired a sheepish look. “Sorry.”

  “No. Please.” Shannon thought a moment and said, “I’m interested. Especially in places like that, Hunters Point, getting this makeover, as you put it. This facelift …”

  Forbes nodded again, said, “A lot of these abandoned places in the city are going away. But you’ve still got railway stations, old colonial forts, psychiatric facilities, or places that just can’t seem to work. They have these enormous water and power costs. There’s mold, rot you can’t get out – rats. Giant rooms, seventeen-foot floor-to-floor heights, everything dripping with condensation, streaked with rust, brick crumbling and paint peeling, abandoned.” He shook his head. “But then, places like the Eagle Electric warehouse – different story. Something like that, you’ve got intrepid developers obtaining conversion permits and, boom, ground-floor retail units and expensive apartments on top installed within three months.”

  “Was that one of your projects?”

  “It was.”

  Forbes seemed to have burned through his renewed energy and sagged again. He looked into his coffee, as if lost in thought.

  “What did Monica think?” Shannon asked.

  His eyes came up. “About the changing city and all that?”

  “Yeah. About what you do, all of it.”

  “She thought it was … you know. She was an optimist. But she knew, you know. People get left behind. She was compassionate.” Forbes looked like he was going to slip off the deep end, the grief going to push him over.

  Shannon said quickly, “Did she ever tackle that with her reporting? Or try to? You mentioned something earlier. About city hall.”

  Forbes had something in his eyes now, behind the nascent tears. He cleared his throat and took a quick look around, as if suddenly on alert for eavesdroppers. “Yeah, she was looking into that. It was kind of about gentrification, in a way, but really it was about something else. Something shady.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Well, I mean, I don’t know everything. Just that maybe there was this city councilman, and he was doing a deal with the developer, and people thought the developer was into some stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like organized crime.”

  Shannon thought about it. “Interesting. And you’re sure Monica was looking into this? No offense, but when we spoke last, it seemed like kind of an afterthought.”

  “I was in shock,” Forbes said. His eyes had dried and his gaze was sharper. “But I’m telling you now – that’s what she was working on.”

  11

  In the 90th Precinct squad room, Shannon pulled down the New York City map from the ceiling. She used a red laser pointer she’d found at the podium. Heinz and Whitaker stared openly at her burns and the way she favored her right leg. At least Caldoza seemed genuinely interested in what she was about to say, waiting patiently.

  Aiming the red dot at the map, she said, “This is where we found Monica Forbes. It’s also where Jordan Baldacci was murdered. Site A. And over here, this is where a Dylan Construction employee found Eva Diaz dropped over a fence. Site B. Site A and site B are two and a half miles apart. Via Borden Ave, that takes eight minutes. I drove it.”

  Caldoza blinked. “I see where you’re going. But you’re talking about a very small data sample.”

  Whitaker added, “Plus – Baldacci is from Long Island.”

  Heinz snapped his fingers. “Shit. Listen to this. Baldacci is from Melville, right? That’s in the Huntington Township on Long Island. And then Forbes and Baldacci were found – well, one found, one killed – near Hunters Point in Long Island City, Queens.” He glanced around. “I mean, pretty crazy with the names. Huntington – Hunters Point. Long Island – Long Island City …”

  Caldoza grunted. “All right, dickhead.”

  Heinz grinned.

  Caldoza spoke to Whitaker. “Sir, she’s talking about a hunting ground. We’ve all been thinking about it, even if Wonder Boy here wants to sound like an idiot.”

  Heinz blinked rapidly and touched his chest. “Me? I’m Wonder Boy?”

  “I think we’ve got to give it a serious look,” Caldoza said.

  “Look how? Consult the serial killer playbook? Stick with the evidence,” Whitaker said dryly. His eyes connected with Shannon. “Traffic cameras, eyewitness reports … if you’d like to help, Special Agent Ames, we’ve got a shit ton of hotline calls to go through.”

  “I’ll be happy to help there,” she said quickly. She flicked a finger at the map. “My point is actually that two of our three victims are local. And our unknown subject abducted both of them. Which suggests – doesn’t prove, just suggests – he could be local. He can nab the victims in his area, but a third one – Baldacci, who lives outside his area, he lures her in.” She looked from Whitaker to Caldoza. “Speaking of traffic cameras …”

  Caldoza nodded right away. “We got the MTA video from Fourteenth Street. And I’ve seen her with my own eyes – Monica Forbes changed to the L train. We know she was on it. So that really puts the chances that our witness is, in fact, talking about Forbes when she describes the two people outside her apartment on North Seventh. Otherwise, we’d be looking at the world’s greatest coincidence.”

  Shannon nodded. “Right. Thank you. And Monica Forbes got into the back of a vehicle. As bad as Olivia Jackson’s eyes are, we can all agree it’s hard to mistake someone getting into a vehicle. The sound of doors, the vehicle pulling away, the fact that no one was standing on the street any longer.”

  “No one arguing, either,” Caldoza added. He looked at Heinz and Whitaker. “Though Jackson did indicate she thought the guy was using some lines on Forbes. Bullshitting her.”

  Shannon said, “Forbes was abducted. And Diaz was abducted – we don’t know exactly how, if it was with the same method, but we know she was reported missing and then found two days later. We know she wasn’t killed in the Dylan Construction equipment lot.” Her eyes on Whitaker, she said, “That’s what all the evidence tells us.”

  Whitaker scratched his head. “Okay. So what about Baldacci?”

  Shannon ran the laser pointer east until she was off the map. “Melville, which is halfway down Long Island. She’s the one victim from outside this area, so, again, he had to get her there. He leaked the location to the press, knowing she’d come. Or, at least, strongly suspecting. Not only does this suggest he’s local, it suggests he’s got a place he uses. Unless he’s abducting these women and leaving the city and coming back and dumping them, he’s in the area. And I’ve run the numbers. Between abduction and time of death, there�
��s not enough time to go far. Heck – between abduction and discovery there’s not that much time. We’re talking a few hours in each case. So to clean them, he’s got to be operating near the abduction sites.”

  “We don’t have a definitive on when Diaz was abducted,” Whitaker said.

  “No, but we’re close on it. She’s last seen leaving work – just like Forbes. She’s leaving work on a Monday, though, six p.m. She’s discovered four a.m. on Wednesday the tenth, with time of death estimated at twenty-four to twenty-eight hours prior, so, roughly midnight on Monday, only six hours after she’s last seen. That’s a six-hour window in which she was abducted, killed, cleaned – or vice versa – and dumped. To do that, you’ve got to have a place close by.”

  “Like his home?” Caldoza asked.

  “Sure. Or, this whole area, you’ve got these abandoned places. You have–”

  Whitaker cut her off. “Agent Ames, with all due respect, if you think we’re going to start going around to every defunct factory and warehouse–”

  “No.”

  “I mean, if he’s in the region and if he’s using some space that he has access to, he’s only using it once every couple of weeks. I doubt he’s got someplace set up with a welcome mat and Lair Sweet Lair on the wall.”

  “Hey,” Caldoza said. “Come on, Whit. You know she’s making sense. You know it can’t hurt to put it out at roll call, to have eyes on some of these places.”

  Whitaker scratched his head again, then pinched his nose. “Listen, let’s say we run with this a second, let’s say we go with a killer picking his victims because of their location–”

  “I don’t think that’s the only criteria,” Shannon said.

  Whitaker shot her a look. “Okay. Their looks, too.”

  “Their looks,” Shannon agreed. “Their profession. But there could be more.”

  Whitaker glanced around at Heinz and Caldoza, as if seeking moral support. He sighed and said, “Agent Ames, I appreciate your input. I do. But I’ve got a captain breathing down my neck, and a commissioner breathing down his neck …”

  Whitaker trailed off as she left the map behind and approached him, her limp slight but still there.

  “Then bring this to them,” she said. “Tell them that the FBI special agent who’s monitoring this case has started a profile on the killer. That he’s selective, probably very strategic and organized, but also brutal. And that this FBI agent thinks he’s right in our backyard.”

  “Come with me,” Whitaker said. He led her to a room at the far end of the precinct, closed the door, and dropped a giant three-ring binder on the table in front of her. “We sort the calls from A to D. Basically, from credible to nutcase-calling-with-nothing-better-to-do.”

  Shannon leafed through it. Over four hundred calls since the previous morning.

  Whitaker said, “This is just the first phase, obviously. Everything goes into a database where you can search by keyword. I’ll give you the access codes for that. You can network in with the precinct system, use your own laptop, or I can set you up – whatever you want.”

  She opted to use her HP laptop, pulled it from her bag, and got the necessary information. She thanked Whitaker and started going through the calls. On her first search, she narrowed things by geography. There were a hundred and sixty-four calls originating from Queens. People who thought they’d seen something suspicious, heard a noise, didn’t trust their neighbor. About eighty calls came from within what she considered the likely hunting ground – an area of twenty square miles, from Ditmars-Steinway in the north, to Williamsburg in the south, Elmhurst to the east. The rest of the calls were outside of that, including Long Island and Manhattan, and all the way up to Putnam County and west into New Jersey.

  She read one from Newark, a young man in his teens worried that his grandfather, who constantly ragged on the media for being “fake,” might be someone to check on. A woman from the Upper East Side thought her perverted neighbor was the killer because of how loudly he played the evening news when, she suspected, he was masturbating. NYPD had given C grades to both these calls.

  There were only two calls, out of the entire 433, that rated an A. And each had already been followed up on by a detective. In the binder, the reporters were initialed. Both “L.C.,” for Luis Caldoza. The first was a thirty-five-year-old man who claimed he was the Media Killer – the official name given by the press. It turned out he was a schizophrenic, but not a killer. The second was Monica Forbes’s college roommate. The roommate described a fellow student who’d been obsessed with Monica their senior year, to the point that Monica had had to lodge a complaint with campus security and local police. Checking into it, Caldoza learned that that man, now forty-two, living in Hoboken, had a credible alibi as a night-shift orderly at a local hospital.

  Finally, with Ben Forbes’s story in mind, Shannon searched for anything related to “land use” or “city hall” or “city councilman.” She came up empty.

  Her phone buzzed against her waist. Shit. “Agent Tyler,” she greeted him, “how are things?”

  “Special Agent Ames.” He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “As long as you’re feeling better, out and about, I’d like to see you in my office.”

  Shannon closed the hotline binder and stood up. “On my way, sir.”

  She didn’t bother to ask how he knew. It was the FBI.

  Back at the Brooklyn-Queens Resident Agency, back in Tyler’s office, he told her to sit. Bufort was there, too, chewing on a pen.

  “So,” Tyler said.

  “So,” Bufort said.

  “Jordan Baldacci sometimes wrote for the Gotham Gazette,” Shannon said.

  “That’s a real paper?” Bufort scowled.

  “It’s online. I just spoke to the editor over there who said Baldacci was working on a story about a big construction project going forward in the Bronx, suspected organized criminals involved, a city councilman issuing permits. And now, here’s the thing – according to Ben Forbes, Monica Forbes was looking into that exact same story.”

  Tyler frowned. “She was? To bring it to her daytime talk show? They do in-depth reporting on dog grooming, not corruption.”

  Bufort asked, “Did Ben Forbes decide maybe his wife was working on this, too, because, like anyone could understand, he’s a desperate widower hoping for answers?”

  Shannon looked over at Bufort. “He brought it up first. I found out Baldacci was working on it after I talked with Ben Forbes.”

  That shut Bufort up. He studied his shoes a minute.

  Shannon said, “I talked to WABC-TV and WCBS, and they’ve sent me everything our victims were working on going back a year. I figured I’d start there. Baldacci will take a little more work, since she was freelance. But she mostly wrote for Newsday and the Gazette.”

  Tyler pressed his lips together, the face he made when he was most skeptical. “I think that’s a waste of time, Ames, to be blunt. This is about anti-media sentiment. We’ve seen it before, and we’re seeing it again. Killings, bombs, hatred. You read the text message sent to Baldacci – ‘I took out some trash.’ You’re talking about a serial killer, and technically – okay, if this is the same person, or group – it’s a series. Otherwise, we’re not seeing the hallmarks of a serial killer. Autopsy on Forbes is showing no sexual emission. Same as Diaz. This looks less like sexual coveting or sadism and more like hatred.”

  She was silent.

  Tyler glanced away, then looked back at her. “There might be an element of proximity, yes – Whitaker shared your pitch with me. I’ll give you that. These victims live near our subject – that’s probably the case. But from there it’s about hatred of the media.”

  Bufort spoke up. “I don’t know, sir. I could see a psychopath who gets his rocks off killing hot reporters. Even if there’s not an overt sexual component, that doesn’t mean he’s not at home jerking off as he watches this all on TV somewhere.” He glanced at Shannon. “Sorry. I know you’re Christian and everything.�
�

  Shannon said, “There’s a call that came in through the hotline right along those lines,” she said. “Maybe you want to follow it up.”

  He gave her a haughty look and went back to chewing on his pen.

  She stared at a wall in her office, feeling a headache coming on, feeling regret for how she’d behaved in Tyler’s office. Sarcasm, insults – it wasn’t her style.

  On the wall: Baldacci story clippings, screenshots of Diaz in the field, Forbes on her talk show. Shannon built a database from victim employment records and felt a pulse of excitement when the first stories overlapped. Then there were more overlaps, and more, and more. A year was a long time. The average TV reporter covered two to three stories a week, and it was about the same for Baldacci’s journalism. The excitement dwindled; it was too much overlap to be helpful.

  At nine p.m., she went to the supply room and pulled out some Aleve to work on her pains. By ten, the dosage had proved ineffective; her whole body ached. She headed back for more, then decided to give up for the day, took a cab home, and climbed into her bed. After a few minutes, Jasper leapt up beside her and found his spot by her feet. Sleep came fast and hard and dreamless.

  12

  What’s the matter with you?

  Josie entered her room looking at her phone. She locked the door behind her and flopped down on the bed on her stomach. A few seconds later, she dropped the phone on the floor.

  It buzzed again. She hung her head off the edge of the bed and read the text on screen:

  Are you coming out tonight?

  She sighed. She rolled over and stared up at the ceiling. God. Why would she want to go anywhere? Especially if any of the people from her school were going to be there. She had to see them all school-year long as it was. Now during the summer?