Into the Black Nowhere

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Into the Black Nowhere Page 3

by Meg Gardiner

Caitlin and Rainey mulled that, expressionless. After a minute, French handed them his business card. “I’m around.”

  He meandered back to his truck and drove off.

  Caitlin watched the pickup pull away. “As witnesses go . . .”

  “He’s a dandy.” Rainey put on her shades.

  • • •

  Phoebe Canova’s red Nissan Altima sat in a shed at the sheriff’s impound yard near the station. Detective Berg met them there.

  Caitlin circled the vehicle. It had a ding on the right rear panel, but the damage was edged with rust.

  “No evidence that another vehicle collided with this car the night of the abduction,” she said.

  “No,” Berg said.

  In the shed, out of the wind, their words felt close. Caitlin pulled on latex gloves. The car had already been processed, the vehicle was dirty with fingerprint powder, but it was procedure for her, and habit.

  Rainey said, “Any hits on prints?”

  “Phoebe’s prints on the driver’s door and interior. Her younger brother’s on the passenger-side door. He’s sixteen.” Berg caught Caitlin’s curious glance. “Anybody with a driver’s license or state-issued ID in Texas has a print on file.”

  “Gotcha,” Caitlin said.

  The interior had been vacuumed for trace. Berg said that the vacuum evidence had been sent to the county crime lab but nothing useful had turned up.

  Caitlin said, “The car was found with the driver’s window down? It hasn’t been lowered or adjusted since then?”

  “Deputy who responded to the nine-one-one call found it exactly like this.”

  “Driver’s door was open,” Rainey said.

  “Wide-open.”

  Caitlin opened the driver’s door and crouched down. A red fir-tree-shaped air freshener hung from the rearview mirror. The interior of the car smelled like wild cherry.

  She said, “Was it this cold that Saturday night?”

  Berg said, “Colder. Near freezing.”

  She stood. “Why did Phoebe lower the window?” She looked at Berg. “What was the condition of the interior when you first saw the car? Neat? Messy?”

  “Purse wide-open on the seat. Whataburger wrappers in the passenger-side foot well.” He rubbed his chin. “Bunch of receipts in the cup holders.”

  “Loose papers. But they hadn’t been blown around the interior. Suggests she didn’t lower the window while she was moving, but only after she stopped at the railroad crossing.”

  Berg grunted.

  “Why’d she put it down?” Caitlin said. “To toss a cigarette butt?”

  “She didn’t smoke,” Berg said. “At least, there’s zero evidence of that. No cigarettes in her purse. The auxiliary power unit in the dash here has a phone charger plugged in, not a cigarette lighter.”

  Caitlin nodded. “The air freshener doesn’t seem to be covering up any lingering tobacco smells.”

  Rainey leaned in. “Or weed.”

  “So why’d she roll down the window when she stopped for the train?” Caitlin said. “To call to someone on the street?”

  “It was past midnight.” Rainey crossed her arms. “You get much foot traffic that time of night?”

  “No,” Berg said. “Everything on that block was closed up tight, and we haven’t had any witnesses come forward.”

  Caitlin thought about her next words. “To speak to a cop who pulled her over?”

  Berg shifted. Caitlin became newly aware of the chill in the air.

  Berg stuck his thumbs under his belt buckle. “It wasn’t one of our officers who did this.”

  He couldn’t have looked more chapped if he’d actually adjusted his tighty-whities.

  But he spoke. “GPS in the department’s cars shows that none came within three miles of the railroad crossing in the twenty minutes before the nine-one-one call came in,” he said. “When Darley French phoned, the nearest unit was across I-35. Yeah. All our vehicles have GPS. You can download it and see for yourself.”

  Caitlin nodded. She was sure that Emmerich was doing exactly that.

  “Solace sheriff’s substation has four patrol cars,” Berg said. “Plus the unmarked pool vehicle for detectives. None of them was anywhere near the railroad crossing when Phoebe vanished.”

  Caitlin and Rainey exchanged a glance. The Solace sheriff’s substation had five vehicles. How many did surrounding cities have? Austin? San Antonio? The broader county sheriff’s fleet? The state troopers and the Texas Rangers?

  “You jump to conclusions awfully fast, Agent Hendrix.”

  “I’m not concluding anything. Perhaps Ms. Canova lowered her window to speak to somebody she thought was a police officer.”

  Berg didn’t look placated. “You’re saying we’ve got nothing.”

  “That tells us something.”

  “Anything worthwhile?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  But Berg wasn’t far wrong. They had no witnesses. No forensics. No apparent connection between the women who had disappeared. Just a black hole into which they’d seemingly fallen. Caitlin quietly closed the door of Phoebe Canova’s car.

  6

  When Caitlin and Rainey returned to the sheriff’s station, Emmerich stood at a new corkboard in the detectives’ room. He had tacked up a large map of Texas. He was sticking pushpins into it.

  “Results?” he said.

  “Plenty.” Rainey walked over to the board, hands in the pockets of her slacks. “The UNSUB left no prints on Phoebe Canova’s car. He either wore gloves or never touched the vehicle.”

  “If he didn’t touch it . . .”

  “He persuaded her to get out.”

  Caitlin approached. “He didn’t touch the car.”

  Emmerich raised an eyebrow. “That a hunch?”

  “Deduction. The car was found with its engine running. And the transmission in park.”

  “Maybe Phoebe put it in park because she stopped for the train.”

  “The train took two minutes to pass—same time as some stoplights. And at a stoplight, if you’re driving an automatic, you don’t shift gears. You sit on the brake,” she said. “Phoebe put it in park when she decided to open the door and get out, so the car wouldn’t roll forward.”

  Berg and Chief Morales came in. The map drew their curiosity.

  Emmerich nodded at it. “These are the locations where each of the five missing women was last sighted.”

  Laid out visually, the implications were painfully obvious. The Red Dog Café. The college quad. The multiplex cinema. The railroad crossing. The Kerber home.

  “They range north to south across almost fifty miles,” Emmerich said. “But—”

  “But they’re all within two miles of I-35,” Morales said.

  The red pushpins looked like a set of buttons running up the front of a shirt.

  “More than that. They’re never more than two hundred meters from a road that feeds directly into a freeway on-ramp.” Emmerich took a red marker and connected the abduction sites in a fat line that ran down the page like a vein. “It’s a feeding ground.”

  Morales turned to him. “What do we do about that?”

  “We construct a profile of the UNSUB. So we can start hunting him.”

  • • •

  The team checked into a Holiday Inn Express, hard by an exit on I-35. Caitlin changed into jeans. Across the street was a taco stand. She texted the others, asking if they wanted her to pick them up anything.

  Rainey replied, Bring the fire. Emmerich texted, Street food?

  Caitlin replied, TEXAS street food. Bigger, better. And it’s the law.

  She jogged across the road, feeling tired but wired. Working for the BAU carried serious responsibilities, and could drain her. She’d seen it in the eyes of the Solace officers today. Tell us we really
do have an UNSUB at work. Tell us who this SOB is.

  And do it now, because Shana’s out there.

  To the east, empty hills rolled toward the horizon. The interstate kept up its asphalt drone. At the taco stand a few pickups were parked, and people at picnic tables waited for their orders, huddled into jackets, texting.

  They looked relaxed. But female customers stayed near the light from the stand’s interior.

  When Caitlin worked a case somewhere she’d never been before, she always found a cheap, busy, local place to eat. It was a way to judge the temperature on the ground. Getting dinner from a local dive meant more than merely recouping your per diem. You learned about a place by walking it, and talking to people, and listening with your ears and your inner tuning fork.

  Here, she sensed that the taco stand was someplace construction workers and college students and soccer moms all felt welcome. Behind the order window, mariachi music blared from a boom box. She heard English and Spanish and maybe Hindi. The place felt friendly and seemed safe. But people were keeping their eyes on their surroundings. Women were avoiding the shadows. Solace was jittery.

  The young man working the counter said, “What’ll you have?”

  She read the menu board behind his head. She counted twenty-five different tacos, ranging from pulled pork to Jamaican jerk chicken to sriracha shredded lamb with Cotija cheese and cranberry habanero jam.

  “Yeah. All of them.” She laughed.

  She returned to the hotel with two bulging bags of hot food. Rainey came down to the lounge area off the lobby. Caitlin handed her a fat handful of napkins.

  Rainey unwrapped a taco and took a healthy bite. “Goddamn.”

  Caitlin ate relentlessly. “I may put in for a transfer to the local field office.”

  Restored, she checked her watch. The team was going to meet in an hour to analyze the results of the day’s investigation. She had time. She cleared up, headed outside, and called Sean Rawlins.

  “Babe,” she said.

  “Howdy.”

  His voice had a smile. She warmed, even as the chill evening turned her breath to frost.

  “They speak American here. You don’t have to translate,” she said.

  “You buy cowboy boots yet?”

  “Black with skulls and red roses.” She was wearing Doc Martens. She would rather pour hot sauce in her eyes than shop. “You on the road?”

  “Crawling across the Bay Bridge.”

  She felt a pang, a deep wish for the bay, the soaring towers of the bridge, the sunlight skipping across ten thousand whitecaps between the Golden Gate and Alcatraz. She wanted the scent of the Pacific, and the beauty of the cities and the mountains, and her man. She closed her eyes.

  She opened them and felt small, surrounded by the sweep of the continent. The sky was vast. It was glorious and terrifying.

  “Brief me on Texas,” Sean said.

  His abruptness made her laugh. Sean sounded strong. His energy was everything she had barely dared hope for a year back. Sean had been gravely wounded by the Ghost, the UNSUB who’d nail-gunned Caitlin, during the confrontation that killed her father. For excruciating days, Sean had hovered near death. She had never felt so powerless. And, as he fought for life, she had grasped how completely she loved him. It had shocked her into an electric understanding that here and now is everything.

  “Cat?” he said.

  The sky had turned cobalt. A full moon was rising. The horizon was chalky pink.

  “Here,” she said.

  “This investigation going to turn into something?”

  “It has. Something serious.”

  She told him about the case. The breeze scudded past, but she didn’t go back inside the hotel. Out here, she felt a connection with Sean—as though, if she could only see over the western horizon, she would spot him in his Tundra pickup, one arm hung on the windowsill, the other draped across the top of the steering wheel, dark hair windblown. He was an ATF agent, a certified explosive specialist. And he was fifteen hundred damned miles away.

  She had taken the FBI job with almost no hesitation. Sean had encouraged her. He told her she would kick herself if she passed it up.

  She had no regrets. But now, while she was working from Virginia, he was three thousand miles away in Berkeley.

  “How’s Sadie?” she said.

  “She’s perfect. She spilled a bottle of glitter in the truck the other day. By the time I got to the field office I looked like a disco ball.”

  Caitlin smiled. Sadie was four.

  Sean shared custody of the little girl with his ex-wife. Their divorce was amicable, but everything hinged on the fragile construct of “co-parenting.” Michele had a good job as an ER nurse that she had no wish to leave. She would never agree to Sean moving to the East Coast with Sadie. And Sean would never move to Virginia without his daughter.

  Caitlin and Sean had said, We’ll work it out. Two feds. How hard could it be?

  She stood under the sunset. “Kiss Sadie for me. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  She hung up. The air had turned cold. But the sunset raged on. The western horizon was an acrylic red, spreading, never ending, deepening to purple.

  When she finally headed inside, the clerk at the front desk smiled.

  “Bet they don’t have sunsets like this where you come from,” he said.

  “Never seen anything like it.”

  “Austin was originally named the City of the Violet Crown. Because of sunsets like this.”

  “That’s lovely.” She tucked her cold fingers in her coat pockets. “Originally? They decide it was too romantic for the Old West?”

  “City fathers changed it to ‘the City of Eternal Moonlight’ after they built giant arc lamp towers to light the streets. Because of a serial killer in the 1880s,” he said. “The Servant Girl Annihilator.”

  “Really.”

  “Killed a dozen people. Two women on Christmas Eve. Chopped them in the head with an ax.”

  She stood immobile.

  He stapled some paperwork. “You and the others are from the FBI, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded to himself, eyes bright. “Cool.”

  She watched him.

  Finally, he said, “Anything else, ma’am?”

  “No. Thanks.”

  Copies of the local paper were stacked on the desk. The Gideon County Star had a splash headline: WHERE ARE THEY? The missing women’s photos ran beneath it.

  In her room, Caitlin turned on the television and pulled out her laptop and her field notes. As the computer booted, a local news report came on the TV.

  A brunette in a red suit looked at the camera with an it’s bad expression. “Police in Solace believe the disappearances of five women are the work of a serial abductor and have called in the FBI. Our Andrea Andrade reports.”

  Oh.

  The screen switched to a report filmed in Solace. The reporter, a younger brunette in a different red suit, walked along the railroad tracks. She spoke of the terror in Solace and the vanishing of young mother Shana Kerber. Shana’s tearful parents appeared.

  “Bring our baby back,” her mother pleaded. “Our girl is precious to us.”

  Caitlin’s throat tightened. She breathed out. Empathize, but maintain your distance.

  She wished Shana’s parents had spoken to her team before going on camera. Emmerich would have coached them to mention Shana by name. To humanize her, turn her into a real person in the eyes of the UNSUB.

  The report shifted to a local firing range. A firearms instructor put five rounds through a paper target at ten yards. He had big shoulders and a bigger belt buckle. His holster was tied around the leg of his jeans with a cord, Wyatt Earp style.

  “There’s evil in this town,” he said. “Satan is loose among us. If you don’t p
rotect yourself, you’re probably going to become a victim of it.”

  The film cut to citizens blazing away at more paper targets. Caitlin shook her head. Even in the worst situations, when an apex predator was killing in a town, most people didn’t become victims. But that’s not how fear worked.

  The report cut again. On Main Street, the reporter was speaking to Darley French.

  “Yeah, the FBI is in town,” French said. “Two women agents interviewed me about that girl I saw go missing from her car.”

  Caitlin tossed her laptop aside.

  “Profilers,” French said. “That means a serial killer. But they have no more clue who it is than I do.”

  The report cut back to the studio. “We’re seeking confirmation that the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit is in Solace. We’ll keep you updated on this worrying development.”

  Caitlin stood. If this story erupted into the national media, the heat could inflate it to a wildfire. A mythology and narrative would take hold. It would be hard to dislodge. And potentially dangerous.

  She didn’t wait for the scheduled team meeting. She picked up the phone and called Emmerich. “We’re on the news.”

  • • •

  Madison Mays pulled into the parking lot at her apartment complex as the last light of sunset faded to gray. She hoisted her backpack over her shoulder and shut the car door with her hip. She was dog tired from a full day of classes at Gideon Western College, followed by her shift as a barista at the outlet mall near campus.

  From apartments came music and conversations and Wheel of Fortune. Beyond the parking lot, traffic droned along I-35. Madison climbed the stairs, reached into her pocket for her keys, and stopped.

  “Shit.”

  She’d left the keys in the ignition. She rushed back down the stairs to the car.

  She grabbed the keys, locked up, and headed back toward the building. As she reached the sidewalk, a car cruised across the parking lot. The headlights swung by, illuminating the breezeway that led to the far side of the building.

  In the shadows, a man stood watching her. She jumped.

  He was tall and dressed like a banker who’d taken off his tie now that the office day was done. His dress shirt was a crisp white. He was holding a phone.

 

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