UNSUB

by Meg Gardiner

Live oaks lined the street. Jacarandas, flowering purple, surrounded the empty playground. At the back of the park a grove of redwoods stood formidable against the deepening sky. It was dusk, the time of the killing.

  “Trees are taller. Noticeably,” she said.

  After a moment’s uncertainty, she sent a text to her father. What should we look for at Peñasquitos Park?

  They walked through the gate. It was chilly, too late for sports, too dark for picnics. The only sounds were distant traffic from the freeway and the dull roar of a jet taking off from Oakland Airport. Deralynn knew the way.

  “You’ve been here,” Caitlin said.

  “Never with a cop.”

  The crime scene was an equipment shack on a trail beyond the playground. They followed a bark path. The trees closed in.

  “This trail was the victim’s regular jogging route. We presume the killer ambushed Giselle Fraser along here,” Caitlin said. “She lived alone. Nobody knew she was missing until the park maintenance crew unlocked the door to the equipment shack.”

  Deralynn clenched and unclenched her fists. Her lime-green jeans were the brightest beacon in the park. The bark crunched softly beneath their feet. If Giselle Fraser had run along this path that night, her footfalls would have been audible to anyone waiting in the shadows.

  Giselle ran religiously, every evening when she got home from her job as a teller at a nearby bank. A two-and-a-half-mile loop through the neighborhood, with a dogleg through Peñasquitos. The killer had to have known that. Giselle was not a random target.

  Deralynn exhaled hard, with excitement—or maybe nerves. “I have to thank you.”

  “Why?”

  “Most cops roll their eyes at me.” She shrugged. “I know it. Less-than-amateur sleuth. Not even self-taught. No qualifications. A mom.”

  “You trying to get me to knock moms? No way,” Caitlin said. “This is your own private deal, but you’re as organized and thoughtful as some investigative reports I’ve read.”

  Deralynn’s lips parted and she pressed her hands to her cheeks. “Really? I’m blushing. Thank you. Jeez.”

  Caitlin smiled, hoping it would encourage Deralynn to keep talking. It was always better that way. It felt less like an interrogation. And Caitlin well knew that when people saw her badge, a part of them always expected her to read them their rights.

  Forget it. She was a cop. At a crime scene. “What does your husband think about your . . . dedication to this case?”

  “He says it’s no surprise you ended up carrying a gun. But me, I’m a nut.” Deralynn turned to her. “I remember your dad. He came to my school to talk to us about Lisa Chu.”

  Lisa Chu was the Prophet’s teenage victim. The sixteen-year-old high school junior was drowned in a water treatment pond, chained to the concrete block that weighed her down. It was Chu’s arm on which the killer wrote the message: Infinite wrath and infinite despair.

  Lisa Chu’s death terrified every parent, and every young woman, every girl child, in a way that killing middle-aged couples hadn’t. It cast the killer’s scythe in a horrifying gyre.

  “I didn’t know the department sent my dad—or anyone—to speak to the public about it.”

  “Lisa babysat me,” Deralynn said.

  That was it. The link. Or, at least, a link—the personal connection that helped to explain Deralynn’s obsession with the case.

  “She was like a big sister.”

  Deralynn said it without hesitation. The cut was hardly fresh. But her cheeks flushed a deeper red. And even in the failing light, Caitlin saw a glimmer in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” Caitlin said.

  “Your dad talked to us about personal safety. To always tell somebody where we were going. To walk in groups, stay to well-lit streets. We were majorly freaked out. But he was so calm and reassuring.”

  Mack, calm. The image jarred. And, at the edges, it tugged at her.

  “I remember it like it was yesterday. He seemed larger than life,” Deralynn said. “Like you. Now.”

  Oh, honey. “I get paid to do this. You’re the volunteer.”

  “We all talk about catching the killer. But you actually put yourself on the line.”

  “This case got to both of us.” Caitlin’s breath frosted the air. “You handle it with insomniac web sessions. Me, I just . . .” As she stopped herself, she could practically feel the scars burning on her wrists. “I found a different way.”

  She thought she’d said it coolly. Offhandedly. But Deralynn seemed to sense that Caitlin’s wounds were not far beneath the surface, and could still be fatal.

  “But you’re doing it anyway. You’re damned well doing it.” She squeezed Caitlin’s hand. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, of course you’re okay. You’re here. But, you have a support system? Friends? A church? You have kids?”

  “Dog.”

  Deralynn pulled out a photo. “My family. You met my husband, Walt. And William and Weston.”

  Caitlin smiled. “Love the matching bow ties.”

  They kept walking. Caitlin was glad that the dusk shaded her face, that the wind caught her hair and blew it across her eyes. They rounded a bend and came upon an open field. The equipment shack was ten feet off the path, weathered wood, its roof green with moss.

  She paused, getting a look at it. No windows. Redwoods behind it.

  She turned to see the view from the shack outward. The field, the path. Open, but screened by trees on three sides.

  He could have stood to the side of the shack, just off the trail, mere feet from the door, waiting invisibly for Giselle Fraser to run past. Or he could have listened for her footsteps, then sauntered toward her. Whistling, or listening to music through headphones, or limping like he’d sprained his ankle. He was patient and cagey. He had social skills. He could probably lure people into his orbit with charming talk, before he isolated and killed them. He didn’t blitz attack in a fit, like psychotics or disorganized killers.

  He drew maps of the entire neighborhood, with concealment spaces highlighted and escape routes plotted in detail. And with his goal inscribed in hard capital letters. PUNISHMENT.

  Caitlin took out the key the parks department had loaned her. The night of the murder, the killer had jimmied the lock with a screwdriver. Now there was a stronger door, with heavier hinges, and a Yale dead bolt. Caitlin opened it.

  The smell of wood and dust and fertilizer hung heavy inside. She got her Maglite.

  Deralynn said, “It would have been this dark, wouldn’t it?”

  “He wanted concealment. He was daring, but uncertain of himself and the environment.”

  “I’d think they would have torn this shack down. I would have. Holy jeez. The exposed rafters are still there.”

  He had to have brought all his gear ahead of time and stashed it inside the shack. When he gained control over Giselle, all he had to do was kick the door shut.

  Giselle had been strangled with a silk scarf. And she had multiple bruises around her head and face. He had punched her with a closed fist, possibly knocking her unconscious, before he killed her.

  But he didn’t hang her from the neck. He stripped off her socks and shoes, her running shorts and T-shirt. He left her in her bra and panties. He bound her hands with sturdy rope and threw it over the exposed rafters. Then he hauled her up and left her hanging by her wrists with her head thrown back, as though weeping in anguish.

  How long did he work to raise her? How long did he stay in the shack, admiring his work? Did he touch her as she swung, dangling, her body slowly beginning to cool?

  What do you want, you bastard?

  And then the killer booby-trapped the building. That was the vicious detail. He brought an entire mud-dauber wasp nest in a Hefty bag, and he left it inside the door, so that when the maintenance crew arr
ived in the morning, they knocked it over and set loose an enraged hive.

  Caitlin stepped outside. The scene was fading to gray. She had an unsettling feeling that the play of the shadows in the wind was less than random. Sounds moved within the brush.

  “From the start, he set up a secondary ambush. A way to hurt people when his crime was discovered,” she said.

  “From his first kill, you mean.”

  Caitlin nodded. It was presumed that Giselle Fraser’s death was not the Prophet’s first crime. He would have worked up to murder. Peeping Tom. Flasher. And earlier: Animal torture. Arson.

  The wind swirled Caitlin’s hair. Deralynn’s hedgehog spikes remained unbowed.

  “Think she knew him?” Deralynn said.

  “I think there’s a good chance she at least recognized him. Somebody she’d seen in the neighborhood. Maybe another jogger. A dog walker.”

  “Somebody who didn’t arouse immediate distrust.”

  “This park is a place where he felt comfortable. He knew it. Knew the neighborhood.”

  “So did Giselle, unfortunately.”

  Did Giselle Fraser sense danger as she rounded the bend? Did she feel eyes watching her, sense any threat as the killer lunged in? Caitlin nodded at the grove of redwoods.

  “Let’s walk the park the way it would have happened that night.”

  Deralynn looked troubled, but she followed. “Coming in the way Giselle did, going to where it happened, and following the killer’s probable path out? You mean we’re putting ourselves in the footsteps of both the victim and the killer.”

  “If there’s something to find, we have to look at it from every angle. And from both outside and in.”

  * * *

  Across the park, screened by trees and the deepening twilight, a man watched.

  Look at her. Detective Hendrix, here to relive the opening chapter.

  19

  On the park playground, the swings hung empty. The slide caught the last embers of sunset. Beyond the oaks, out on the road, streetlights came on. The moon was rising, the scene falling into chiaroscuro. Deralynn stuck close by Caitlin’s side.

  The killer had walked this path. He had come into the park from the back, on foot, from at least a mile away—over the hill, along the creek, through the storm drain. Silently, through the empty grove of redwoods that stood tall under the rising moon.

  “Have you heard of geographic profiling?” Caitlin said.

  “Analyzing the location of connected crimes to determine where the offender most likely lives.” Deralynn looked around. She still seemed eager, but less bouncy—more jumpy, like a small woodland creature sniffing the air for hawks. “You think the killer lives around here? That we’re headed in the direction of his home?”

  “I think this park is probably the crime scene closest to where he lived at the time,” Caitlin said. “And we’re heading the way he did after he killed Giselle Fraser.”

  Deralynn didn’t know about the hand-drawn map. That wasn’t public knowledge. They followed the trail beneath the towering redwoods. The bark dwindled to dirt.

  Deralynn said, “You think he came this way because . . .”

  You’re lost, Hendrix. Gone astray in a dark wood.

  They topped a rise in the path and looked downhill. The path ran alongside a creek. It headed perhaps two hundred yards to a picket fence and then a quiet road.

  “You think he parked there?” Deralynn said.

  “No. I think he was more careful than that. He didn’t want anyone to recognize a car parked outside the park entrance, or remember a man coming through this gate. Especially not a man carrying a coil of rope, though he might have hidden that in a backpack. And I think he might have had a flashlight, because he knew it would be dark when he left again.”

  You’ll never find the path. But someone will . . .

  Maybe this was the dark path the Prophet meant. Maybe he wanted her to follow it.

  “Come on,” she said.

  She cut off the trail, down to the creek, and aimed her Maglite along the creek bed. It was wide but contained only a trickle of water. Ahead, it ran beneath the road, through a square concrete storm drain. That was where her father found the Prophet’s map.

  Deralynn hurried along beside her. “How much farther do you think we should go?”

  They reached the storm drain. Caitlin stepped inside. It was about forty yards long, with mud along the bottom, the creek running in a channel choked with weeds and trash.

  “He came this way,” Caitlin said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. He either walked from his home, or drove and parked his car another half mile up the creek. There’s a shopping center over the next hill. It’s been there for forty years. He could have left his car there without being noticed.”

  “He planned.”

  “Like a mofo. But he wasn’t perfect.”

  Something had spooked him, or at least distracted him. He had been in a hurry here—finished with his deed, eager to get away.

  What led him to lose the map in this storm drain? Had he pulled it out to check that he was moving in the right direction? Was he careless about shoving it back in his pocket? Did he hear something, see someone, and impulsively take off?

  Or was he distracted by his own joy?

  “As killers gain confidence, they expand their hunting grounds,” she said. “But this was his first.”

  She turned her flashlight on the walls. Skater graffiti. Slowly she panned it.

  “You think he might have come back? Left a message?” Deralynn’s words rushed out, sounding somewhere between eager and terrified.

  “I think he’s always followed the investigation obsessively. And that he’s picked up where he left off, maybe because he found inspiration in revisiting the site of his early work.” She continued looking around. “Whether he’s taking a victory tour, I can’t say.”

  She mentally pictured the map the Prophet had drawn. The entire thing was exacting. But the only feature marked for scale was the storm drain. 125 ft.

  The killer liked to go off road. But more than that, he liked to go underground.

  At Sequoia High, he had placed the geographic coordinates in a culvert. At Silver Creek Park, the ravine where Stuart Ackerman’s car was set ablaze had a creek at the bottom that disappeared beneath a road into a corrugated steel pipe. The killer might not have used it that night, but Caitlin was sure he knew it was there, and available as an escape route.

  The night sharpened. She let the sensation soak into her.

  “He likes tunnels. He used them then. He’ll use them now.”

  Her phone buzzed. The screen showed a text from her father. Him.

  She stared, disconcerted. What was he saying?

  Deralynn said, “Okay, I’m just going to admit it. This place is creepy.”

  Caitlin entered her password to unlock the screen. As she did, the phone rang. Guthrie. She answered the call.

  “Hendrix. We’re monitoring the forums. FindtheProphet.com. Deralynn and her crime-geek friends.” He sounded harried. “Traffic’s been going crazy—we’re keeping an eye on it.”

  “Is something . . .”

  “Your father posted a rant. Directly calling out the Prophet.”

  The heat seemed to leach from Caitlin’s hands. “What?”

  “He posted it on the open forum. Publicly. Where anybody can read it.”

  Caitlin turned to Deralynn. “Pull up a post on the public forum. It’s—” Hell. “It’ll be from my father. Mack Hendrix.”

  Deralynn grabbed her phone. She bent over it, face lit by the screen, and brought up the site. After a second, reading, she inhaled.

  Her eyes were wide and anxious when she showed Caitlin the screen.

  To the Prophet. You SICK LOSER—you’ve left a s
tink every place you stepped. It’s not 1993 anymore. Forensics can peel your thoughts from the earth. From that bloody water trough to the shack in the park, the cops are closing in on you. This very second.

  Any remaining heat seemed to drain from Caitlin’s body. Son of a bitch. Mack’s text. It was his answer to the question she had sent him—what she should look for.

  Him.

  She heard the wind through the storm drain and felt the shadows shifting around her. She grabbed Deralynn’s arm. “Out of the park. Now.”

  They hurried from the storm drain and along the creek bed until they could scurry up the bank. They reached the footpath and Caitlin pulled Deralynn into a run.

  Ahead she saw a dark form, nothing but a shadow, moving at sharp angles and speed. Right at them. She pulled up.

  From the trees directly ahead, a man burst onto the path.

  Shoving Deralynn back, Caitlin reached toward her gun. “Sheriff. Don’t move.”

  He jerked to a stop and raised his hands. “Don’t shoot! I’m press!”

  Breathing like a rabbit, Caitlin raised her Maglite in her left hand. Her right rested on her holstered SIG.

  In the beam of the flashlight the man squinted and turned his head away. His hands stayed up, one blocking the light and obscuring his face. They were empty.

  “Keep your hands up,” Caitlin said. “Who are you?”

  “Bart Fletcher, East Bay Herald.”

  Fletcher. Supposedly. Squinting under the light, he looked vampirish, shadows turning one side of him dark. He wore a bomber jacket over a Giants T-shirt. He was gaunt, aside from a middle-aged paunch. His knuckles looked arthritic.

  He stepped toward her. “I’m . . .”

  “Don’t move,” she said.

  He stopped, frowning.

  “ID,” she said. “Put your right hand behind your head. Get your ID with your left. Very slowly.”

  “It’s in my wallet. Which is in my inside jacket pocket. I’m going to reach for it. Very slowly.” Gingerly he reached into his jacket.

  “Careful,” she said. Eyes on him, focused, but trying to keep a sense of what was happening behind her. Fortunately, Deralynn was still there, a fizzing presence at her back.