by Scott Frost
Every imaginable emotion began churning inside me. Anger, fear, panic, frustration, and worst of all, hopelessness. Whether I had always understood it or not, Lacy was what defined me. Take motherhood away from me and I was just a cop, and that wasn’t enough. I could feel her slipping away. If I lost her, I knew I would be lost without her. I turned and walked back to the conference table and took my seat across from Hicks.
“In your estimation, what does this mean for my daughter?”
“Do you really want to talk about this, Alex?” Chavez asked protectively.
“I’m not walking away from any part of this. . . . I can’t.”
Hicks took a long, deep breath to give him time to figure out how to respond.
“That he has used her as a bargaining chip indicates that there’s a very good chance she’s alive still, and is an integral part of his . . . play.”
“What would happen if we cancel the parade?” Chavez asked.
“My daughter will be killed, and he’ll pick another target. One we would have no chance of stopping.”
“I agree,” Hicks said.
I stared at the file for a moment, thinking that I had missed something.
“Were any of his victims women?” I asked.
“No.”
“Then why did he take my daughter? Most serial killers at some level are working from sexual dysfunction. Killing for them is a form of power over whatever the victim represents in their damaged mind. If he’s killed all men, then the need that is fulfilled in him when he murders may only be satisfied when he kills a male. So why did he take Lacy?”
“To get to you.”
Hicks was talking about the deal Gabriel believed he had made with me. I could save my daughter’s life, or a stranger’s.
“But why? I’m a woman, something would still be missing for him.”
“Maybe you and Lacy were never intended as victims. It’s possible he has something else planned for you.”
“And what the hell is that?” Chavez said.
My heart began to race and I took a breath to slow it down. “He needs the two of us for the end of his play to work.”
I looked at Hicks and he nodded.
“A serial killing live on television disguised as an act of terror. Somehow Lacy and I are a part of that.”
The room fell silent.
“That’s not going to happen,” Hicks said. “Security was already tight before this. Now it will be even tighter. We know what he looks like, and nothing that could hide a bomb is going to get anywhere near the route, particularly the first two blocks that are televised.”
“Maybe it will rain and keep people away,” Chavez said.
Hicks shook his head. “The storm is supposed to be east by midnight. Tomorrow’s going to be beautiful.”
“A picture-postcard day,” I said softly. “What about the phone he called me on?”
“He used two different ones, both stolen. They’re useless.”
“So what do we do in the next twenty hours?” Chavez asked.
“We have two things going for us,” Hicks said, looking at me.
I finished for him. “One, he’s going to use me, and two, we know he has no intention of martyring himself for a cause that doesn’t exist.”
“How do you know that?” Chavez said.
“Serial killers aren’t suicidal. In fact they’re usually afraid of their own mortality. Until they’re caught, they’ll do anything to survive.”
“There’s another possibility,” I said reluctantly, as if the words had snuck out involuntarily. “Regardless of what we think we know about Gabriel’s previous crimes and their patterns, or what we actually learn about what his mother did to him or his father, or the next-door neighbor, or whoever damaged him as a child. One thing can render it all useless.”
“What is that?” Chavez said.
I glanced at Harrison and saw in his eyes that he knew what I was about to say. “None of it matters if he’s evolving, turning into something new with each act of violence.”
A cell phone rang in the room. Everyone reached to check theirs and then looked at the phone in my hand.
“If it’s Gabriel, don’t let on that we’ve identified him. If your daughter has any chance, it’s by keeping this fiction of his going.”
I nodded, took a breath to gather myself, and then answered.
“Delillo.”
“Lieutenant, did you like the fire?”
Gabriel spoke in the same dispassionate voice, a voice that was the picture of well-measured reason or insanity. The result was the same either way. I felt as if I had just been lowered into an ice bath.
I glanced at everyone in the room and nodded.
“You didn’t need to do that to him. He couldn’t identify you.”
“One must be so careful.”
“He didn’t need to die.”
He laughed, if you can call the sound he was making laughter. It escaped from a place in the soul that was the domain of fever dreams.
“Everyone needs to die.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re weak and need to be punished.”
“I want to speak to my daughter.”
“No,” he said, dismissing me like an angry parent. “Tell the FBI that they are children and that I’ve corrected all mistakes.”
The line went dead. Anger welled up inside me and I had to fight the impulse not to smash the phone on the table.
“What did he say?” Hicks asked.
I quickly replayed the words in my mind, trying to decipher their meaning.
“He said ‘I’ve corrected all mistakes.’ ”
“What the hell does that mean?” Chavez said.
I looked at Harrison.
“What mistake?”
“Killing Sweeny, making up for missing him at the bungalow?”
“ ‘Mistakes.’ It was plural. What’s the other one?”
“If he’s talking about something we don’t know about, then it’s meaningless to us.”
“He wouldn’t have told me then. He wants us to respond. He was boasting. He’s done something else.”
Harrison searched his memory, working backward through the carnage of the past forty hours.
“Traver, could his survival have been considered a mistake?”
I shook my head. Gabriel didn’t care about Traver. The bomb inside the bungalow had worked. The mistake wasn’t on Gabriel’s part. It was on Traver for walking through that door. It was something else that he had “corrected.”
“There’re two people alive who can identify Gabriel. He wasn’t talking about Lacy—he wouldn’t have missed the opportunity to wield his power over me. That leaves the Frenchman Philippe.”
“But if we’re right about Philippe, Gabriel left him alive intentionally so we would have a description,” Harrison said.
So what were we missing? The logic we had been clinging to was sound, but I was missing something in the fine print of the facts. I looked at Harrison. “What did you just say Gabriel wanted us to have?”
“A description—”
“That’s it.”
“What’s it?” Chavez said.
“A description, that’s what Gabriel wanted us to have, and Philippe gave it to us.”
“And the point is?” Hicks said.
“Gabriel will get all the credit he wants for his crimes now. He’s the poster boy of evil.”
Hicks nodded.
“But there’s a big difference between getting credit, and leaving a witness behind who can ID him. Philippe and Lacy are the only two alive we know of who could pick him out of a lineup. And we know he has other plans for my daughter. That leaves only Philippe.”
I turned to Hicks. “Where do you have him?”
“Philippe’s in a safe house in the valley where we house protected witnesses. We have agents watching him. He’s safe.”
“Gabriel said the FBI are children. Why would he say that?”
“There’s no way
he could have found him, he’s fine.”
“He found Sweeny.”
“There’s no way—”
“Hicks, Gabriel’s like the kid in an eighth-grade class with an IQ of two hundred. He thinks the students around him are there for his amusement to be played with and tortured like lab mice. He thinks his teachers are little more than village idiots who can be manipulated and driven to distraction to get just what he wants. You’ve seen what he can do. He kills because it gives him pleasure. He’s proven he can be anyone and anything he wants to be. How much evidence do you need to know that we are way behind his learning curve?”
We stared at each other a moment.
“Are you sure Philippe is safe?”
The steely resolve of his eyes gave way just enough for him to maneuver. He nodded silently, then removed his phone and dialed a number.
“This is Hicks. I want to talk to Philippe. . . . Well, get him out of the room . . . knock on the door and wake him up. Yes, right now.”
I started to walk over to the window to get some fresh air.
“What?” Hicks said, as if he had misunderstood something. I turned and saw Hicks’s square-jawed confidence dissolve. His eyes had the look of someone who’s just been told he has cancer.
“Oh God,” I whispered inaudibly.
“Do not go in. Seal it!” he yelled into the phone. “Wait for an ordinance team. . . . Yes, goddamnit, you heard me! Wait.”
He stood perfectly still as if unable to digest what he had just heard, then spoke to the room without making eye contact.
“His door was locked. One of the agents went outside and found an open window. Through a crack in the curtains, he could see part of the bed. It’s covered with blood.”
He looked at me for a moment with a bewildered sense of surprise—a look you would see in the eyes of a child who has just seen something unimaginable and beyond his ability to comprehend.
“Philippe’s gone.”
16
HARRISON AND I DREW an unmarked squad from the motor pool to replace my charred Volvo and started across the San Fernando Valley on the 101 freeway to the FBI’s safe house. At Van Nuys Boulevard we turned north, passing block after block of car dealerships decorated with thousands of Christmas lights and enormous plastic Santa balloons floating above the cars, promising deals, deals, deals in English, Spanish, and Armenian. At one dealership three salesmen dressed as wise men stood outside trying to attract buyers with offers of no payments until Easter.
In a landscape that had clearly slipped off the track and created its own reality, I couldn’t help but think that Gabriel had found the perfect home.
Three blocks from the last car dealership the endless suburban sprawl of the valley spread out in every direction until there was simply no more land to build on. Nearly a million and a half people lived here. It was the perfect place to house someone who didn’t want to be found, or so the FBI had thought.
The safe house was a small, square rambler on a quiet tree-lined street. It had a wide, deep lawn, a picket fence, a rose bed, and a hedge of rosemary. A weeping willow shaded the front of the house where a curved brick walk led to the front door. Except for the presence of half a dozen FBI sedans in the driveway, it had the appearance of a house plucked straight from a small town in Indiana where nothing out of the ordinary ever happened.
Philippe had occupied a small bedroom in the back of the house. The room had two windows that looked out onto a fenced backyard with a kidney-shaped pool and an alley beyond that. One of the windows was open, the screen had been sliced in a large X. Two FBI agents had been in the house the entire night yet heard nothing.
I stepped in the room and looked around after the FBI bomb squad had declared it free of explosives. It had the appearance of a room that had once been occupied by a teenager, probably a boy. There were squares of masking tape left on the walls where posters had been. Holes from darts that had missed a board dotted the wall next to the closet. The generic rented furniture gave the impression of a motel rather than a home.
There was a blood smear on the sheets of the bed—a foot-long red swipe that looked as if it had been made by a hand with a wound in it—a defensive wound. Philippe’s shoes were still next to the bed where he had taken them off to go to bed. It was the only thing of his left behind.
Gabriel’s presence still cast a shadow over the room. He was here, a predator, stalking, playing a deadly game. I thought I understood violence. I’d seen husbands kill wives because dirty laundry had been left on the floor, friends murder friends, strangers point a gun and fire at someone they had never seen before because they held money in their hand. But this was a willful evil that was beyond my understanding. It wasn’t based on hate or rage or love gone horribly wrong. None of the sadly ordinary reasons why we destroy each other applied. He was the nightmare in the car stopped next to you at a red light who you are afraid to make eye contact with—the faceless stranger walking toward you on a dark street. He was everywhere. He made me fear the things I didn’t know. And dread the things I imagined.
Hicks stepped in next to me and looked around in frustration.
“How do you take someone out a window against their will with two FBI agents in the same house, and neither of them hears a thing? How, goddamnit, does that happen?”
I stared at the bloodstain and the slashed screen. A picture began to form in my mind as if flashbulbs were illuminating small pieces of the story in a dark room. I looked at the bed and saw Philippe trying to sleep, desperately seeking some escape from the horrors of what had happened to him earlier in the day. He would have been tossing and turning, occasionally drifting away but never for long. There was little relief. The night was like a fuse slowly burning down.
The sound of the plastic screen being cut would have been nearly silent—a distant zipper being opened in the darkness. If he heard it at all he would have ignored it, burying his head into the pillow. And then he detected the sweet scent of a cheap cologne. And he knew, right then. He tried to turn his head, he tried to scream, but he was frozen. His will had been stolen from him earlier in the day as cleanly as if a surgeon’s blade had removed it.
Hicks walked over to the window, ran his finger along the cut in the screen, and then shook his head in disbelief.
“How the hell is this possible? Why didn’t he scream?”
“I don’t think he could,” I said.
“Why the hell not?”
“Terror,” I whispered.
Hicks turned around and searched the room, trying to find reason where none existed.
“He could have killed him right here. Why did he take him?”
I shook my head in wonder. “To show us that he can.”
“You think too much of him.”
I shook my head. “No, that’s not it.”
“What then?”
“I’m afraid of him.”
Hicks looked at me and shook his head. Fear did not officially exist in the FBI’s sanctioned vocabulary. Cops like me could be afraid. The FBI stood shoulder to shoulder with steely resolve to fight any foe. He turned and looked at the window.
“What is he going to do with him?”
I didn’t want to think about that because the answer could be the same for my daughter. And to imagine that was unthinkable.
“He’ll use him until he’s finished using him,” I said.
Two technicians walked in and began to dust the window cases for prints. It was a useless gesture. We would find only the things that Gabriel wanted us to find. The bloody swipe of a hand on a white sheet, an open window, and an empty room.
“Who knew about the safe house?” I asked.
“No one knew. They’re rented out anonymously and are only used once. The owners don’t even know what they’re used for.”
“Did Philippe call anyone?”
He shook his head. “No calls.”
Hicks drew his hand tightly into a fist and pulled it back as if he were going to hit
the wall.
“What happened here is not possible.”
“Agent Hicks, I’ve learned in the last twenty-four hours that the unimaginable and the possible are not so different from one another.”
Hicks glanced around the room shaking his head, then turned and looked back into the hallway.
“What time was he brought here?” I asked.
“A little after ten. He had a Coke and went to bed shortly after that.”
I hesitated at the door, realizing that there was something incomplete in how I had been seeing the scene. But what? It was like one of those kids’ picture puzzles in Highlights magazines with images hidden inside images.
“Were there any other windows open in the rest of the house last night?”
“What does it matter? He came through this one.”
“Was it jimmied?”
Hicks shook his head. “Doesn’t appear that it was.”
“So it was already open?”
“What’s your point?”
“It was cold last night. Why would he have the window open?”
“You don’t sleep with a window open?”
“Yes, but I have blankets on my bed. His is still folded, it wasn’t used.”
“Maybe he never went to bed.”
“Then why is the streak of blood on the sheet as if he was lying there?”
Hicks looked at the bed. The blood had begun to discolor, taking on the dark hues of coffee. He stared at it for a moment as if trying to decipher a delicate Japanese calligraphy.
“You’re suggesting that he opened it for Gabriel?”
“I’m not suggesting anything, I’m just observing.”
“Why would he let a man into his room who hours earlier had strapped him with explosives and left him to die?”
“I don’t know.”
I walked over to the window and looked out into the backyard. The small kidney-shaped pool was painted dark, giving the water the feel of a wound in the earth. It reminded me of the “tar pits” in Hollywood that lure victims with the promise of water, only to slowly pull them down to their deaths. An icy chill shimmered across the skin on my arms. It was as if I was looking at a portrait of Gabriel. He was there, lurking just under the surface, waiting to pull me down.