Dead Before Dark

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  But at the time, it was a gut reaction, and she always trusted her instincts.

  Maybe she was so drawn to Randy because he was unavailable. Maybe she was too independent back then, freshly sprung from her gilded cage, not ready for all that their relationship would entail if he were free. Maybe she just couldn’t handle what his leaving Carla would do to her conscience. Maybe she was afraid of needing him. Needing anyone.

  Maybe, maybe, maybe…

  So much uncertainty. She loathes uncertainty, and it dogged every move she made with Randy—even after it was over.

  Did she expect Randy to tell her she was wrong about them? Did she want him to fight for her, make her change her mind?

  As if anyone ever could.

  But if anyone could, it was him.

  Didn’t he know that?

  No. He didn’t know.

  Anyway, girls like Carla deserve a fairy-tale ending, right?

  Randy transferred to an out-of-state job on the Jersey shore. Married Carla.

  Lucinda built a nice little life for herself and put the past behind her.

  Now that Not-Prince-Charming is back on the scene, though, she’s got her work cut out for her. With three more joint press interviews scheduled in the next two days, Lucinda can’t escape Randy just yet.

  “Okay, let’s go! Cell phones off, everyone. You’re on right after the author interview.” The production assistant is back to herd Lucinda, Randy, and the Hastingses down the hall toward the studio.

  People stride importantly past them in both directions, clipboards and props in hand. The scene is becoming familiar. Lucinda knows what to expect beyond that soundproof door: on-air talent who are household names, authoritative producers, bustling stagehands, jeans-clad cameramen, bright lights, a clip-on mike, arctic air conditioning….

  The door opens, and in they go.

  Yup—right again.

  Lucinda is getting to be an old hand at this TV stuff.

  “Nervous?” Randy whispers as they’re led to the interview chairs.

  “Nah. Are you?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Liar.”

  He shrugs, grins. “We can’t all be as cool and composed as the Comely Clairvoyant.”

  She rolls her eyes. He’s quoting yesterday’s New York Post, which Lucinda’s friend Bradley Carmichael, who lives in Manhattan, called and woke her to tell her about at five-thirty A.M. when it was hot off the press.

  “You’re a tabloid star, darling!” Bradley, on his way to the gym, has always been oblivious to the fact that some people aren’t up at dawn to work out. “Just like Paris and Britney.”

  Not quite.

  But the press has been all over this story, particularly her role in it. She’s pretty much been portrayed as a Sexy Soothsayer Superhero—that being this morning’s Daily News tagline beneath a particularly flattering photo of her.

  “The Daily News says you have a smokin’ hot Jennifer Aniston bod and a Demi Moore bedroom voice.”

  “Bedroom voice?” She laughed at that. “If I’d been in a bedroom lately I wouldn’t have this voice.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “Meaning I always get hoarse when I’m over-tired,” she informed Bradley.

  “Well, the world doesn’t know that. The world thinks you’re a smoldering femme fatale.”

  Forget the world. Lucinda can’t help but wonder what Randy’s wife thinks of all this. Is Carla at home watching right now? If so, will she suspect that her husband and the Comely Clairvoyant slash Sexy Soothsayer Superhero were once a hot item?

  Probably not.

  Anyway, what does it matter? Once is the key word.

  Once upon a time…

  Yeah. Unlike Princess Grace and Carla Karnecki Barakat, Lucinda Sloan only got the fairy-tale beginning.

  Middlebury, Vermont

  “Never, ever, ever turn on the television in the daytime. You do, and it’s all over.”

  That was the advice Vic Shattuck’s former colleague David Gudlaug gave him upon his mandatory retirement from the Bureau’s Behavioral Studies Unit last summer.

  Dave had already been retired for a good decade by then, and was full of other nuggets of advice, which didn’t, thank God, include buying an RV.

  Vic’s had his fill of travel over a twenty-five-year career with the FBI. Not so with Dave, who’s on yet another cruise with his wife this month, somewhere in the Mediterranean.

  Vic found that out from Dave’s son, who answered the phone when Vic called this morning to ask, with regard to turning on the television in the daytime, “What’s all over? The day? Life as I knew it? What? Is it really so bad?”

  Vic’s wife Kitty had left for work a little while ago as he settled into his chair in front of the TV.

  “What are you going to do today?” she asked.

  “Same as I do every day. A whole lot of nothing.”

  He saw the look in her eyes. Kitty can say less with silence than most women can say with a week’s worth of words.

  Vic has never been big on television—daytime, or otherwise. He managed to follow Dave’s advice, at first. Re-settled with Kitty to their native New England after years living near Quantico, he golfed every day the weather would allow. Kitty, who doesn’t golf, went stir crazy after a few idle weeks and found an accounting job at the university. On rainy days, he kept busy with Kitty’s lengthy Honey Do list around their new—albeit centuries old—saltbox home, mostly landscaping.

  But then winter settled over the mountains of New England, and there wasn’t much to do—around the house or otherwise.

  One morning, Vic turned on the television to see if it was going to snow—it was, big surprise—and wound up watching the entire morning newscast waiting for weather updates.

  The storm held off till the next day, so he tuned in again to check the local closings and cancellations list—not that he had anywhere to be. And not that a winter storm in the mountains of Vermont was out of the ordinary in the least.

  But it was good, sitting there in front of the wood-burning stove with a cup of coffee, catching up on what’s been going on in the world.

  Not as fulfilling as working, of course. But he didn’t have a choice about that. You reach fifty-seven, and ready or not, there you go. You miss your job and the people. You try to stay busy. You think about the things you did right and the things you’d do differently and, always, about the one that got away.

  When spring came, he started golfing again—until he threw out his back. Two specialists and one surgery later, he’s been ordered to stay away from the golf course until it’s fully healed.

  So here he is, on a beautiful summer morning, watching the morning news as has become his daily habit. He’ll follow it up with a couple of lame talk shows targeted toward women, and channel surf after lunch, avoiding the shopping networks.

  The way he sees it, as long as he stays away from home shopping, he’s not pathetic.

  And as long as he remembers to keep dirty dishes out of the sink and fold the laundry, Kitty doesn’t seem to think he’s pathetic, either. At least, she doesn’t say it.

  Maybe it was better when he was pleasantly oblivious to the news, though. Between the political coverage out of Washington, a passenger airliner crash in South America, and another hurricane bearing down on the Gulf Coast, things are looking pretty grim.

  Vic looks around for the remote to turn the channel.

  “This morning,” the beautiful anchorwoman says, “we’re going to talk with a New Jersey woman who as a child overcame the tragic suicide of her older sister, only to have her young daughter abducted by a serial killer just days ago. Meet the police detective and beautiful psychic who teamed up to rescue the teen and apprehend the killer—and learn why they are seeking new information on the decades-old so-called suicide.”

  So-called suicide?

  In other words, they’re looking into the possibility that it might have been a homicide. Interesting.

  Vic stops
looking for the remote.

  “But first,” the anchor continues, “we have the author of a new book on the disappearance of aviator Amelia Earhart, and he claims to have solved the mystery at last.”

  Ah, Amelia Earhart. One of the great unsolved mysteries of all time.

  Solved?

  Vic watches the segment with interest. The author is a journalist who has spent the past two years with a team of scientists digging up convincing forensic evidence on an island in the South Pacific.

  “What made you decide to write this book?” the author is asked as the interview winds to a close.

  The journalist shrugs. “I’ve just always been obsessed with what happened to her.”

  “I know the feeling, buddy,” Vic mutters.

  It was an obsession with an unsolved case that led him to FBI work in the first place.

  He’d gotten interested in crime back when he was a psych major and a notorious murderer was terrorizing the Northeast—the one the press called the Night Watchman. He became so fascinated by newspaper accounts of the murders that Kitty—who was just his girlfriend at the time—had a suggestion for him.

  “Why don’t you solve the case?”

  “Because I’m not a detective.”

  Kitty just looked at him.

  The next thing he knew, he’d changed his mind about becoming a shrink.

  With Kitty’s support, he filled out applications, endured tough interviews, passed incredibly difficult tests. Eventually, he found himself in a four-month FBI training program in Quantico.

  As an agent in the seventies, when a rash of what his future mentor Robert K. Ressler coined “serial killing” took hold across the country, Vic grew even more fascinated by the criminal mind. Curious about what made human monsters tick, he found that his earlier interest in psychology came in handy on the job.

  For four years, he took college courses in deviant psychology by night, hunted down the bad guys by day. It might not have been the dream situation for a happily married father of four kids—the youngest being twins—but he and Kitty made it work.

  It all came together when he earned his master’s and was assigned to the FBI’s BSU as a criminal profiler. There, he studied the complex cases of known killers—including the most notorious of all time, Charles Manson—and applied what he learned to active, unsolved cases.

  And to inactive cases.

  Revisiting the long-exhausted evidence on the Night Watchman murders, he pored over every detail and conjured a profile of the perpetrator. He anticipated what the unknown subject’s next moves were likely to have been, and came up with a proactive plan to lay a trap for him.

  All the while, he imagined the satisfaction he would find in solving one of the most notorious cold cases in Bureau history.

  It didn’t happen.

  He profiled the killer as an organized, highly intelligent white male. He was young, probably in his early twenties at the most when the crimes occurred. His relationships with women were unfulfilling. He felt no remorse after killing and was in no hurry to get away; on the contrary, he meticulously staged the victims and left a distinct calling card at the scene.

  Yes, Vic knew who they were looking for.

  He just didn’t know when—or where—or whether—the unsub would strike again.

  He didn’t.

  Still, not a day goes by, even after almost forty years, that Vic Shattuck doesn’t wonder what happened to the Night Watchman.

  All those brutal killings—and then nothing.

  Vic has a theory, of course—just like everyone else who ever had anything to do with the case. The killer either died, or went to prison for some unrelated crime.

  For years after the murders had ended, the evidence boxed away, pending inactive, Vic held his breath. He waited for him to reemerge, waited for another woman to turn up dead at the hands of the Night Watchman.

  There were a number of crimes with a similar M.O.: woman who lives alone is killed by an intruder in the night. One, years after the last known Night Watchman murder, was even an obvious—and flimsy—copycat crime. It was a domestic abuse case that ended in murder, and the husband tried to make it look otherwise.

  No one bought it for a minute, not even the press.

  The moon wasn’t even full that night.

  But for the investigators, the dead giveaway—as it were—was that the Night Watchman’s calling card, the one that had never been revealed to the public, was conspicuously absent at the scene.

  The victim’s lips hadn’t been smeared with red lipstick.

  It’s the red lipstick that gets him.

  It always has been.

  She’s a beautiful woman, yeah. Great body—skinny with big boobs. Just the way he likes them. Who doesn’t?

  But that luscious red mouth has him mesmerized, even before he actually hears the words spilling from it in a hauntingly throaty voice, or reads the caption superimposed over her image.

  LUCINDA SLOAN, PSYCHIC DETECTIVE

  Fascinating.

  Utterly fascinating.

  “Yes, I’ve been involved in missing persons work for years now,” she informs the handsome interviewer in a throaty voice, “but they don’t always turn out this way.”

  “In other words,” the interviewer says, “you don’t always catch the bad guy—or woman, as the case may be? This was just a lucky break?”

  She appears to weigh her response carefully before acknowledging, “It was absolutely a lucky break in the sense that Tess Hastings’s life was saved. But two other girls lost theirs to a ruthless serial killer.”

  “I understand you were working with the police to find those missing kids and had had visions of their deaths before Tess Hastings was kidnapped?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you tend to use a process called psychometry, is that right? You make physical contact with something that belonged to the person you’re trying to find—say, a piece of jewelry or clothing—and you are then able to glean information about the person?”

  “That’s right.”

  Psychometry.

  He finds a scrap of paper and a pen, writes the word down along with

  Lucinda Sloan, Psychic Detective.

  “And that’s what you did in the case of those two missing girls?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever think there was hope of finding them, Ms. Sloan?”

  For a moment, she bites her luscious lower lip. Then, shaking her head, she says, “I didn’t, no. It’s not an exact science, but in my line of work, I’m brought in after the fact, so with my visions, I tend to see things after they happen.”

  “In other words, when it’s too late.”

  She nods.

  “Do you ever get immune to dealing with human anguish on a daily basis?”

  “Not immune—I guess accustomed is a better word.”

  “How do you cope?”

  “It’s never easy. You have to be able to compartmentalize your life—you know, remove yourself from it.”

  “Remove yourself.” The reporter nods. “I understand that you were supposed to be on an Alaskan cruise vacation right about now, but you missed the boat, so to speak, in order to help find Tess Hastings.”

  “That’s right.” She shrugs. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “Detective Barakat, hindsight is twenty-twenty, but I’m sure there are some on your force who might have criticized you, at the time, for putting any stock into a psychic’s visions?”

  Regrettably, the camera shifts to a man whose caption reads DETECTIVE RANDALL BARAKAT, LONG BEACH TOWNSHIP.

  “Well, it’s not like I went around broadcasting it.”

  “How did her involvement come about? Was it official, or unofficial?”

  “Unofficial—I mean, I’ve known Lucinda for years. We used to work together on missing persons cases when I was back in Philly. I’ve seen her do some amazing things.”

  Oh you have, have you?

  The detective’s go
ld wedding band is clearly visible as he fidgets with his lapel. The guy is married—not to the amazing Lucinda with the luscious red lips, or the caption would undoubtedly say so.

  But something in the man’s blue eyes—a flicker of admiration, a flash of regret, a glimmer of lust, perhaps—conveys that Detective Randall Barakat has more than casual interest in Lucinda Sloan, Psychic Detective.

  Hmm.

  Interesting.

  “They’re calling Lucinda a superhero these days, Detective Barakat. Do you agree?”

  “Sure. You know, danger goes with the territory when you’re a cop. But Lucinda, she’s fearless. Nothing ever fazes her.”

  The camera darts back to her as the interviewer asks, “What do you say to that, Lucinda? Is there anything at all you’re afraid of?”

  “The dark,” she says promptly—almost glibly, with a jittery little laugh and a sidewise glance at the detective.

  Again—interesting.

  “You’re afraid of the dark?” The interviewer looks amused.

  But she’s not kidding. She means it. I can tell.

  “Ever since I was a little girl. I guess I always figured bad things couldn’t happen in broad daylight, you know? When the sun goes down, the boogeyman comes out.”

  His gaze narrows.

  He stares thoughtfully at her until the camera cuts away again, to a man and woman identified as CAMDEN AND MICHAEL HASTINGS, PARENTS OF KIDNAPPED GIRL.

  The interviewer drones on, questioning them about their ordeal. His mind drifts until the screen shifts again.

  In sheer disbelief, he finds himself looking at a vintage photo captioned AVA NEARY, SUPPOSED 1970 NYU SUICIDE, SISTER OF CAMDEN HASTINGS.

  “Now that Mr. and Mrs. Hastings’s daughter has been found, they—with the assistance of Lucinda Sloan, are looking into the death of Mrs. Hastings’s sister, who supposedly jumped to her death from a building at New York University over thirty-five years ago.”

  Well, well, well.

  What a small world.

  Lucinda Sloan’s red mouth announces, “We’re asking anyone who knew Ava Neary at NYU and might have any information on the period leading up to her death to please come forward.”