by Saul Black
“Okay,” she said, when it was obvious that John was just going to keep repeating the same handful of facts, “tell me what you’d like to do. My guess is we should report it. I mean, it’s a theft. The station’s down on Alvarado. I can come with you, if you like, if that would help?” Screw the shopping: they could order in pizza. At least the boys would eat it. The rain was coming down hard now.
“You’re very kind, Cassie,” John said. “I don’t want to put you to all this trouble. I just don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.”
“Well, let’s start with the report,” she said. “After that, I can drive you home, if you like. Where do you live?”
“Faber Street,” John said. “But I’m messing up your day. I’m sorry.”
“John, it’s nothing,” she said. “Is there someone else we should call? A relative? I mean, will you be able to manage?”
“I’ll call GDB when I get home,” he said. “They’ll figure something out.”
“GDB?”
“Guide Dogs for the Blind.”
“But I mean, what about this evening? Is there someone…”
“My neighbor upstairs will help,” John said. “He’s a good friend of mine.” Then he added: “I live alone.”
Jesus Christ, Cassie thought. Alone and blind. We don’t know how lucky we are. How did he cook? Was it a life of deliveries? Were there braille microwaves?
“Just give me one sec,” she said. She called her mother and explained she might be a little late for the boys.
“I’m so sorry this has happened, John,” she said. “Here, let me get your seat belt for you.”
“Thank you, Cassie. I don’t know what I would’ve done if you hadn’t come along. I really don’t.”
“Just relax,” Cassie said, shifting the car into drive and easing toward the exit. “You just sit back and relax, and I promise we’ll get this straightened out.”
They had driven five or six blocks when he pulled the knife from his inside jacket pocket and pressed it against the soft flesh of her waist.
“Do exactly as I say,” he said, “or this goes into you and you’ll never see your family again.”
25
Valerie was alone in the incident room when her phone rang.
“Owen, what is it?”
“It’s Cassie,” Owen said. “Something’s wrong. She’s late and her phone’s switched off. Something’s happened. Jesus fucking Christ—”
“Slow down. Tell me.”
“She called your mom this afternoon and said she was going to be late picking the kids up because she was helping one of the guys from the drop-in. Some old blind guy who’d lost his dog. Said she was taking him to the police to file a report and then maybe drive him home. Since then we haven’t heard. And she doesn’t switch her phone off, ever. She just doesn’t.”
“Let me call the precincts—”
“I already called the one near the drop-in. No one came in and made a fucking missing dog report. Val, it’s wrong. You said this guy was going after people connected to you.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m home with the kids and your mom.”
“Is the officer there with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Put him on.”
“Val, for Christ’s sake—”
“Just let me talk to him for a second.”
Owen passed the phone over.
“Officer Wilson, Detective.”
She went through the drill—hospitals and precincts—in case there’d been an accident, but even while she was doing it a cold sickness filled her body. The officer sounded first calm, then, as Valerie’s tone tightened, scared shitless. She told him to put Owen back on the line.
“We need a list of names for people who attend the drop-in,” she said. “Is there someone you can call for that?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. I don’t know who’s in charge there, and they’ll be closed now anyway.”
“Who’s the woman who works with Cass?”
“Bree? Your mom called her already. She said Cassie left at two thirty.”
Valerie looked at her watch. It was 6:40 P.M.
“Call her again and get the names. Get the blind guy’s name. I’m coming over there right now. Was Cassie in her own car?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know the license plate?”
“It’s 62R … J243.”
“Okay, listen to me. Stay where you are. All of you. I’m going to get an APB out on Cassie and the car. Do you know what she was wearing today?”
“What she … No, she was in her pajamas when I left this morning. But your mom—”
“Put her on.”
Valerie’s mother was in tears.
“Mom, calm down. We’re going to deal with this.”
“Why wouldn’t she have the officer with her? I just keep thinking if she’d only listened to you—”
“Just tell me what she was wearing when she dropped the boys off. Think clearly, Mom. Just think clearly and tell me what she was wearing. It’s going to be okay.”
“Jeans,” her mother said, sobbing. “Blue jeans and a pink blouse and sneakers, her white sneakers.”
“Okay. Tell Officer Wilson that, too. I’m on my way. Try to stay calm. She’s probably fine.”
Lies, lies, lies.
On her way to her car she raced through the photos on her phone for one of her sister. The clearest was from her birthday party only a few days ago, e-mailed to her by her mother: Cassie standing over a pile of wrapped gifts and flowers at the garden table, smiling into the camera. All that happiness.
She called Will.
“Cassie’s AWOL. I’m going out to Union City.”
“Jesus, Val—”
“I’m e-mailing a picture to you right now,” she said. “Get an APB out on Cassie’s vehicle: metallic blue 2011 Mazda 3, license Six Two Romeo Juliet Two Four Three. Cassie was wearing blue jeans, pink shirt, white sneakers. Call McLuhan and tell him. I want them to drop everything else.”
“Done,” Will said. “Fuck. I’ll meet you at Cassie’s.”
“No. Stay on it this end. I’ll call you when I get there.”
* * *
The drive to Union City was a warped dream, wrapped around with the siren’s keening and the traffic’s sluggish parting like the Red Sea resisting the miracle. Valerie’s civilian self flailed around all the harmless explanations—a confusion of lost phones and dead chargers and she ran into an old friend and lost track of the time and the car broke down and—but her cop self was already set in dead certainty. Images of the victims’ bodies and he uses the knife on them while he fucks them and this can’t happen this can’t happen except it happens all the time and all of Cassie’s beauty and strength and love would count for nothing, nothing, nothing, because there’s no God and the universe is innocent, press a knife against someone’s flesh and it cuts, it goes in, it doesn’t matter who they are because no one is watching and no one comes and you could see in all the videos of Katherine and the Man in the Mask that their victims kept going in that same wretched loop of thinking this couldn’t be happening to them but it was and all that was left to them was the desire for it to be over.
Stop it. That pulls you into madness. You don’t get him that way. You don’t save Cassie that way. Cold. Think. Machine.
One of the guys from the drop-in. Some old blind guy who’d lost his dog. Valerie remembered him—the graying beard and dark glasses and white cane, the gentle dog in the Seeing Eye harness—but not his name. Two possibilities: one was that he was genuine and had nothing to do with it. Something could have happened after Cassie called in to say she’d be late. Maybe the guy changed his mind, or they found the dog, or there was an accident. The other was … the other was obvious. He was a fake. Neither blind nor whoever he said he was. Her own words came back to her: In any case, we’ve got to assume the whole bag of tricks with this guy. Disguises, high mobility, resources, and a tech IQ off
the chart. It’s more than likely he’s altered his appearance completely since the original killings.
Some old guy. How old had he looked, really? Dark glasses. The beard. Fake blood at Raylene’s house.
Raylene’s. The man on her front lawn had a dog.
Fuck.
She could see how sweet that would be to him. His “blindness,” which stopped them from seeing what was right under their noses. She’d been in the same room with him. And Cassie, all these months, serving him coffee, chatting. He’d been right there. He’d been right there.
* * *
At Cassie’s house, Owen had to be virtually physically restrained from getting in his own car and going out to look for his wife.
“I need you to stay put and take care of the kids,” Valerie told him. “What have you said to them so far?”
“Just that their mom got a call from the hospital to cover a shift.”
“Good. She didn’t, right? I mean, you called there?”
“Yeah, I called.”
“Everyone who can look for her is looking for her. This is a federal case, so we’ve got extra eyes from the Bureau. We’ll find her, Owen.”
“You can’t know that. How can you know that? You know what this sick fuck does. You know what he does.”
“Oh God, don’t say that, Owen,” her mom wailed. “Don’t say that!”
“Keep your voices down,” Valerie said. The kids were in the den, watching TV. “Both of you, listen to me. The way to do this is by letting us do what we do. That’s how you maximize the odds. Did you get the names and addresses from Bree?”
“She doesn’t have names and addresses. It’s not that kind of place, for Christ’s sake. It’s a drop-in center. It’s first names. All she knows about the blind guy is that his name is John and he lives here in the city. Faber Street. She says his surname might be Hendricks, but she’s not sure.”
“What about the Volunteer Bureau? Who runs it?”
“It’s a city-funded nonprofit. I got the cell phone number for the manager but she’s not answering. The place closed at five thirty.”
Valerie called McLuhan. She needed access to the Volunteer Bureau’s CCTV. If the FBI couldn’t get hold of someone who could let her into the building, she’d break a fucking window.
“I’m going out there now,” she told McLuhan. “We know she left the building on her own, but there’s half a dozen stores there that share the parking lot. They might have externals that picked her up. You need to run a full check on residents of Faber Street, Union City. Possible suspect, first name John, surname possibly Hendricks.”
“On it,” McLuhan said. “Valerie, listen, all the resources are dedicated. We’ll find her.”
Or maybe you’ll just find her body. Tortured, raped—
Stop. Stop.
She called Susanna Arden. “What has she got?” she said.
“Part of a first name only so far. Andra.”
Andra. Sandra. Cassandra. Cassie. Valerie’s center of gravity fell away.
“Listen to me. Forget the name. Tell her to focus exclusively on the location.”
“The location?”
“His last note to me said he was including the scene of the crime. Tell her to deal with that and only with that.”
“You have the name already?” Arden said, lowering her voice. Valerie assumed she had stepped out into the corridor once she saw who was calling.
“Is she within earshot?”
“No.”
“Yes, we have the name. We need the location.”
“What’s the—”
“It doesn’t matter. Just get her to work on the location.”
She’ll know you’ve got a live case on your hands. What will she do with that?
“Okay,” Arden said.
“And no restriction on computer access, time, whatever. She works, that’s all. If you have to, call McLuhan and tell him to make it right with the warden. Whatever the existing parameters are, they’re gone. I don’t care what he has to do. Understood? McLuhan can send someone to relieve you.”
Pause.
“Understood. We’re live, I’m assuming?”
“Yes, we’re live. I’d say don’t tell Glass, but it doesn’t make any difference. She’ll know. Any resistance, any trouble with Warden Clayton, you call me immediately.”
“Okay.”
“Tell her right now.”
At the doorway, Owen said: “If she’s … If anything happens to her…” He couldn’t finish. A vestigial part of Valerie knew in her old life she would have put her arms around him and given him a hug. But she was oddly removed. There was an outer blaze of terror and desperation, but inside, a cold, dead swooning surrender to something, as if she’d known all along that this was what her life of the last weeks had been leading toward. Ever since the first note. Katherine Glass stays in prison, more people die. Katherine Glass. Every step forward was a step into darkness. There was nothing beyond it. Only the force of it, drawing her on, like the current of a pitch-black river.
26
Cassie came up from darkness into pain.
Pain was the first thing. Her head’s warm throb and the stone ache of her arms. Thirst. Her mouth was stuffed with something sour. There was a smell of raw earth and kerosene.
For a moment, she knew nothing but these sensations.
Then her mind found its gear—and she knew everything.
Everything that had happened. Her situation. The worst situation.
The sourness in her mouth was a cloth gag.
The understanding was like death. It was impossible that she was living through this. But she was.
The room was the room she’d seen through the blur of tears. Small, dilapidated, gracefully cobwebbed in its corners. Old floorboards. A dead fireplace. The bare brick wall at her back. The wooden stool. Two windows with curtains shut, twin squares of orange light. The front door was closed. Frayed red and green bungee cords hung on its coat hook. To her left, a doorway into a room she couldn’t see. She had supposed hunters, climbers, no-frills hikers, a rough place to hole up in overnight. But years ago. Decades, it felt like. The place had a ghost of generic masculinity.
How long had she been unconscious? Hours? Days? It was light outside. The air was different. The storm must have passed. Or he’d driven far away from it. Yesterday?
Dad, how come Mom’s not home?
The sense of her children rushed her. Their faces somehow seeing this, what seeing this would do to them, what it was doing to them. The countless times they said, for countless reasons: Mom? Her boys. The horror wasn’t her own death but Jack and Vincent having this forced into their lives. And Owen alone in the wreckage, a man in a bomb crater. All the love. Her life. Now this. You’ll never see your family again. Valerie. She had an image of her sister searching for her. That focus Valerie had. Somehow forcing concentration through the sickness and panic. She’ll find you. Stay alive, because she’ll find you.
Pain forced her to move. Her knees straightened and she took her weight back onto her bound legs. Her arms, tied with twine above her head to a vertical iron pipe, reported their relief immediately. Blood began unpacking itself in her limbs.
Her shirt was open. Which brought the memory of him undoing the buttons, pulling the center of her bra away from her chest and going through the elastic with one movement of the knife. The tip of its blade had nicked her flesh, and the intimacy of that had registered in a distinct, mean detail. The terrible exposure of her breasts. The yearning to cover them tightened now in her throat. She’d pleaded in her head. Please. Stop. Please. Don’t. He hadn’t said a word. Just sat on the stool and stared at her like a serene animal.
He.
Him.
I’m not going around with a police officer the whole time.
Him. She knew who he was now, what he’d done. Valerie had spared her the specifics, but the whole world knew about the videos. Cassie knew what he’d done, which meant she knew what he was g
oing to do. The certainty of it hit, suddenly, like the heat from an explosion.
Scream for help. Someone passing—
But when he’d dragged her from the Mazda’s trunk she’d seen trees in the twilight, in all directions. Screaming might bring him. He could be right outside the door.
She didn’t scream.
Where was he?
Her ankles were bound with the same fibrous twine, but they weren’t attached to the pipe. She twisted her neck and looked up. Her wrists were fastened above a small bracket holding the pipe to the wall. To prevent her from lowering herself, from sitting, from finding any comfort. She’d seen it in his eyes, a calm relish in the maximized awkwardness of her position.
She had to get her hands free. Without that there was nothing. She remembered Valerie telling her the drill instructor’s mantra during hand-to-hand training. You will survive. You will survive.
Oh God, please. Please.
Could she reach the stool?
Maybe. With her feet.
Which would mean more pressure on her wrists. The pain there was already searing. It felt as if any tightening of the twine would cut through to the bone. Some devious knot that increased the constriction the more you struggled.
But there was no alternative. The last time she’d seen her boys was at breakfast in the bright kitchen. Fresh sunlight on the surfaces. The gentle morning chaos. Scrambled eggs and the smell of coffee. She’d said: One of these days someone is going to say, Thanks, Mom—and I’ll die of shock. Then what are you ungrateful creatures going to do?
Cassie arched her back and forced her feet in tiny slaloming movements forward. It was another obscenity that the adjusted angle opened her shirt wider. The room’s warm air on her breasts and belly was a sly assault, brought a feeling of childhood shame. The way he’d just looked at her, as if he were watching from another universe.
The ties sawed at her wrists. She couldn’t stretch any farther. She had to. The tips of her toes were inches from the nearest leg of the stool. The muscles in her back were at their tearing point. She heard herself moaning, sobbing. Forced herself to stop that. She had a history of being tough on herself.