Into Darkness

by T. J. Brearton

  Ten minutes later, the alarm: an officer searching in Hunters Point had seen a car matching the description parked in the garage of a disused factory.

  They roared through the night, lights going, sirens wailing. Shannon rode with Officer Gray. When they got close to Hunters Point, she advised everyone to kill the sirens. A dozen NYPD cruised the streets with their deck lights off but the occasional searchlight sweeping the blank-face buildings of abandoned factories and warehouses. Long Island City’s extra-wide roadways lent the city a sprawling, disconnected feel. A fat moon hung low and yellow-tinged over the Manhattan skyline.

  “This place,” Gray said again. “The yuppies love it.”

  He turned down a side street. A busted chain-link fence glinted in the moonlight as they neared a green four-story warehouse.

  Three NYPD vehicles parked in the road at odd angles to each other. The cops stood around arming themselves for war.

  Shannon sucked in a breath and held it. She searched the black windows of the building. Gray stopped the vehicle and hopped out. A van rolled slowly down the street toward them, the letters S.W.A.T. painted on the sides.

  Gray popped the trunk and handed her a bulletproof vest. She grabbed it and put it on. Third time in one week. He took off his standard utility belt and replaced it with another, loaded with ammunition. She looked up at the building.

  “Do we know what this place was?”

  “Swingline Stapler, maybe? Pepsi? Who knows. There’s been every kind of company and manufacturer around here at one time or another.”

  As he talked, three more vehicles arrived. Bomb squad. Another unmarked pulled in after them. Shannon glanced at the building. If Beecher was in there, he had to know he had company.

  Tyler stepped out of the unmarked car behind the bomb squad and spotted her. They approached each other in the middle of the street. He put a hand on her shoulder and looked into her eyes. “Caldoza is going to make it. So’s the girl.”

  She felt the emotion welling up and fought against it. Later.

  He studied her. “You sure you’re okay? You’re up for this?”

  She nodded.

  Tyler looked past her at the building. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We thought we had him … I thought we had him …”

  Shannon took a cleansing breath. “It’s okay. Let’s do this.”

  She followed behind Gray and Tyler and a SWAT team holding their high-powered rifles. Then they split up, with half the guys running down the street to get around behind the building. The rest gathered in front of a large retractable door. Tangles of power cables hung looped and disconnected; phone lines sagged from the corner of the building across the street to a pole. According to Ben Forbes, banks often owned buildings like this – reclaimed after city taxes went unpaid. No one really policed them, and they sometimes became home to squatters and drug users. But mainly they sat, ignored, waiting for a rich buyer to breathe new life into them.

  After the bomb squad team examined the entry for any triggers or switches, two SWAT members used bolt cutters on a rusted padlock and raised the door.

  Dark inside. A pungent smell immediately fumed in her nose – gasoline. As her eyes adjusted, she saw the Dodge Challenger. The sound of an engine was louder, but still a ways off. It wasn’t the car engine; it was likely a generator. Beecher had power.

  The SWAT team moved in, folded together in a tight pack, and Shannon went in behind them with Tyler now flanking. Headlamps probed the darkness – a cavernous room, three stories high, concrete floors and walls, suspended ductwork overhead.

  Then a light beam fell across the strangest thing, the most out-of-place thing, sitting in the middle of the giant space.

  A bathtub.

  The old kind, claw-footed, ivory white.

  It had a single word painted on it in dripping red paint:

  SMILE.

  “Nobody move,” someone said.

  Another voice: “Don’t touch anything!”

  Tyler: “We need to get the bomb squad in here, now.”

  Shannon had her light shining. Without proceeding any farther into the room, she swept the beam through the darkness. She saw the red, blinking light in the far corner before the light illuminated the device.

  “Camera,” she said. “Right there.”

  “Got another one over here,” Gray said.

  “He’s filming us.”

  “Yeah, but where the hell is he?”

  The voices were near-whispers, just audible over the grumble of the generator somewhere in proximity.

  “Check that out,” someone said.

  Their flashlight beams clustered on two artist’s easels, each propping up an enlarged photograph.

  “Jesus …”

  The photo on the left was the familiar school picture of Charlotte Beecher. Smiling bright, full of life and hope for the future. The one on the left was a morgue shot. Beecher must have obtained it through police channels, using his retired cop status, his grief as the father. A striking contrast, those two images. The warmth of life and the cool touch of death.

  Bomb squad arrived – four guys. SWAT formed a protective shell around them. They moved forward in their tight formation, zeroing in on the bathtub. In seconds, SWAT were pointing their rifles into it. “Ah, guys? Feds?”

  Tyler and Shannon moved forward. Coming upon the tub, a kind of preternatural memory flooded her mind – nothing she had herself gone through, but as if she was able to know what the victims had. Awakening here, perhaps, in this dark and dripping place, being washed by a stranger. A man who had abducted them. Someone they’d initially trusted, because he’d appeared as a cop.

  Two bodies were laid out in the tub – James and Evelyn Priest. They’d been positioned to just fit inside, arms and legs folded over one another, evoking children. Their flesh had discolored to blue, their necks showed the mottled bruises of their hangings.

  One of the cops coughed, like he was dry-heaving.

  “This is a tell-all,” Shannon said quietly.

  “What?” Tyler looked at her, and so did all the other faces gathered around the white tub in the dark room.

  She said, “It’s a confessional moment. He’s left everything here for us to find.”

  She shined her beam up at the ducts crisscrossing beneath the ceiling. She moved the light along the walls, the chipped paint, the streaks of rust. Beneath the ubiquitous muffled growl of the generator, a rat squeaked somewhere in the shadowed distance.

  The SWAT commander, a graying guy in his late forties built like a linebacker, waved his arm forward. “Spread out, eyes up. Go two by two. Let’s find this son of a bitch.”

  Shannon went with Tyler and two SWAT guys into the dripping black. Radios burst with static and voices, light beams slid over the rotting walls. Tyler breathed loudly beside her as they searched. “Is he here or what?”

  SWAT located the generator. Shannon and Tyler found the soundproofed room where Beecher had likely recorded Monica Forbes. His police uniform was located in a third room, laid out with all its decorations, along with three white jumpsuits – the head-to-toe zip-in kind worn by crime scene technicians – plus a box of blue latex gloves, booties that covered shoes to reduce contamination, and several hair nets.

  A moment later, SWAT were talking to each other about the second floor. Shannon and Tyler ascended to what was probably once the administrative center of the factory, including several offices. In one were elements for explosives, including a thyristor, model rocket fuses, and a pile of stripped USB cables, copper laid bare. Near these, a box of dynamite and two bags of fertilizer. The high-in-nitrogen kind. Tyler alerted the bomb squad, who handled it.

  In another office, two long folding tables sat end to end. Scattered over their surfaces were half a dozen pay-as-you-go phones. One file box was brimming with receipts. Three more boxes contained photographs and paperwork. It was a glut of information that mirrored the wall she’d torn down in her own office.

  Tyler said
to the SWAT commander who’d joined them, “Keep looking. We’ll be here.”

  As law enforcement continued to search the structure for Beecher and more evidence of his crimes, Shannon pored through the boxes with Tyler. Encountering pictures of Baldacci and Diaz, and sifting through more pictures of people she’d yet to recognize, she shared her theory with Tyler that there was a hierarchical order to Beecher’s killings.

  She added her own caveat: “But he risks something with that structure. He risks getting caught before he can reach the ones he considers most culpable.”

  Tyler grunted. “I don’t think anyone is going to argue that Beecher’s mind is organized like a normal person’s.” He pushed around some paperwork – printed articles and even the CVs of some victims and potential victims. “Or maybe it’s hubris, and he just thought he’d never be caught.”

  The lights of Hunters Point glimmered in the bank of office windows, but it was mostly dark in the room. She looked across the table at Tyler’s shape, then illuminated him with her flashlight. “Who do you think was next on the list? After the Priests, who was next?”

  He shielded himself from the light with a hand. She moved it off him.

  “Let me talk to Special Agent Dodd. She’s been the one going through his computer.” He keyed his phone and put it to his ear, walking toward the windows.

  Shannon continued to look over the information. More reporters, most of them. But someone else she thought she might recognize as affiliated with the American Stars show. Where would Beecher stop? With cameramen? Producers? Shareholders of the network that aired the damn program?

  Tyler hung up. “Dodd says it’s not clear. Going by your theory, there are some people who should’ve already been killed. Low-level types, spot news reporters. Maybe his list isn’t perfect. Maybe he had to ignore some because they were too logistically inconvenient.”

  That didn’t gel with what she felt about Beecher. These killings weren’t driven by something abstract. These people writhed under his skin. The idea of them walking around, breathing air, when they’d so callously and thoughtlessly set the wolves on his daughter, that wasn’t something Beecher could stand.

  The night sharpened. She and Tyler continued searching the evidence. Papers rattled with a crisp urgency. The faces in Beecher’s stash of photos seemed to stare at Shannon as she hunted for just the right pattern.

  Tyler was on and off the phone, calling for police and FBI to locate the people potentially on Beecher’s list and protect them. At one point, he held up an image of a gray-haired man. “Here,” he said. “Frank Percy. According to this little dossier, not only was Percy the director of the American Stars episode, but he’s quoted by Todd Spencer saying that Charlotte Beecher had no soul.” Tyler shook the photo with certainty.

  Shannon felt a sour twist in her stomach. She’d seen the name Percy while reading Spencer’s article and could even remember the quote. If she’d been more on top of things, she would have been thinking laterally like this – considering not only the reporters and TV people who covered the story as culpable in Beecher’s eyes, but those people who gave interviews and shook their heads woefully, who called Charlotte soulless and evil.

  Someone came running up the stairs and into the room. Officer Gray was slightly out of breath. “We got into the car.” His eyes widened as he saw what Tyler was holding. Gray pointed at the photo of Percy. “That guy, right there. That same photo is in the Challenger.”

  Tyler glanced at Shannon. He returned his attention to Gray. “Then that’s where he’s going next.”

  The two men hurried out of the room.

  35

  Shannon didn’t move. Tyler and Gray’s sudden departure left a kind of stultifying vacuum around her. Her head throbbed with a developing migraine; her bones ached with fatigue. But a single, clear thought cut through all the chaos and exhaustion:

  This is what he does.

  And then came an onrush of further understanding.

  Tuned in from the beginning, Beecher had anticipated their every move. He’d set up an elaborate plan, each crime serving the next, each victim a stepping-stone. There was no proof that he had a kill order beyond that which worked to his opportunity and convenience, but it made sense that he did when you considered the role each victim had played in the Charlotte Beecher story, the exposition of her poor behavior which led to her humiliation and her eventual death.

  This is what he does …

  Along the way, Beecher had set up misdirection. Red herrings for the cops to follow. Dissemination of disinformation. Maybe Frank Percy made some sense as a high-value target in Beecher’s eyes, but it also made sense Percy was more misdirection. And that someone else, ultimately, was the one Henry Beecher considered guiltiest of all.

  In Beecher’s twisted mind, that was probably sixteen-year-old Josie Tenor, his daughter’s best friend – the girl who’d betrayed her. The one who’d been one of the first to circulate the video online and hadn’t risen to Charlotte’s defense when the attacks got underway. Perhaps worst of all, the girl who had simply survived to serve as a living reminder of what had been taken from Charlotte: her light, her future, her life. And too, a reminder of what had been taken from Beecher himself – his only child. His wife’s mental health. His world.

  And yet, not only had he been unsuccessful in killing Josie Tenor, he’d also failed to complete turning her sin against her – the Wi-Fi in the Tenor home had been too weak to livestream her confession.

  So?

  Would Beecher just give up his pursuit? Write her off as the one who got away?

  This question in mind, Shannon finally made her way out of the factory. Men and women rushed past her as they processed the mother lode of evidence inside the massive crime scene. Outside, in the swirling lights and chaos, a few onlookers had gathered. It was late, approaching midnight. The area was neither residential nor commercial, but that mix of old and new – though it still drew a few night owls who watched as forensics crews in their ghostly white jumpsuits carried bags upon bags of evidence from Henry Beecher’s lair.

  The onlookers continued watching – and word was probably already spreading – as two bodies came out, zipped into black bags.

  The Priests.

  A mortuary service waited to take them away to the morgue in a specialized van. An ambulance also waited, and Shannon limped to it. Its back doors were open. A paramedic regarded Shannon with concern, his eyebrows raised in question. “Like me to have a look at you, ma’am?”

  She gazed back at him, then her attention floated to the Priests again, now being loaded into the dark van. She then watched as a couple of uniformed cops stood around, one talking into his radio. Thinking more about Beecher’s motives and tactics, Shannon held up a finger to the paramedic and took out her phone. She called Tyler.

  “What is it? We’re getting close to Percy – he’s way uptown. Might be at some party tonight, is the word.”

  “Percy’s not the target. It’s still Josie.”

  “Why? How do you know?”

  “We chase what he wants us to chase. But he wants her. I don’t think there’s anyone in Beecher’s mind who’s as guilty as she is. Maybe there were more that were supposed to be before her. But her death – her confession – it justifies everything for him.”

  There was some static and background commotion on Tyler’s end. He sounded frustrated. “So what are you saying? He’s going to come back for her?”

  Shannon glanced at the ambulance as she spoke. “Yes. I believe so.”

  Another pause from Tyler. “Then we send NYPD over there. I mean, there’s already units there keeping an eye on her, but we’ll reinforce.”

  “He’ll still get her.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he’s got people who will sympathize. Cops who don’t think he’s guilty. But more than anything, he’s got ears on everything we do.” She took a breath, steeling herself. “It’s got to be me. It’s got to be me, alon
e. And it’s got to be quiet. Everybody stays back, radio silence.”

  “Ames, absolutely not. You stand down. I’ll make some calls to–”

  “It has to be now. Or he’ll run and hide and wait us out. He’s waited this long. He’ll never rest until he’s finished.”

  “Ames! Stand down. You hear me? That’s a direct–”

  She hung up and put her phone in her pocket. Having drifted out of earshot of the paramedic, she now returned to him and said, “I think I need to go in.”

  He snapped into action, seeming relieved she was going to get the medical attention he clearly felt she required.

  As the paramedic helped her up into the back of the ambulance and laid her down on the gurney, she asked him if he knew which hospital Josie Tenor had been taken to, reminding him who she meant.

  He nodded. “Yeah, I know where she went.”

  “That’s where I want to go.”

  He watched her a moment. “All right, we can make that happen.”

  From the ambulance, she called one other person on her cell.

  And that was it. No turning back now. She could almost feel it, the squeeze of being between a rock and a hard place. If Henry Beecher didn’t show up, she’d be screwed with Tyler. Maybe with the FBI.

  If he did, she could be killed.

  But she knew Mark Tyler a little bit. Angry as he was with her, he would follow her lead. Probably he would have the place surrounded, but with everybody back and staying off-radio.

  She was going to be on her own.

  Once in an ER room at the hospital, she pulled the IV from her arm and unclipped the pulse monitor. The machine made an angry buzzing sound, and she shut it off. When a young-looking nurse came in, Shannon showed her ID and assured her everything was all right.

  “Can you tell me which room for Josephine Tenor? Has she been moved to the main hospital yet?”

  The nurse shook her head. “No, she’s still here in the ER. The attending doctor hasn’t seen her yet. It’s been a busy night.” She gave Shannon a head-to-toe look. “You sure you don’t want to get back in bed?”