Closed at Dark

by Rob Blackwell

Soren sat in the dark, staring at a computer screen for the second evening in a row.

  This time, however, he wasn’t alone. Sara and Alex were in bed, but Ken sat next to him. It was his computer, and unlike before, this was no random search. Ken had hooked into the police database. He seemed tired, but determined not to let Soren have access by himself.

  Soren glanced at the clock and realized they had been at it for three hours, but were no closer to finding anything useful. In that time, he’d seen some truly horrifying cases. The apparently bottomless pool of human depravity never ceased to amaze him. Unfortunately, none of it seemed connected to Alastair or Alex’s case.

  Ken, meanwhile, had been cross-referencing any mention of kidnappings near playgrounds or soccer fields, even just looking for victims in Alex’s age range. But so far, Alastair Horne seemed to be the only case with the same specifics as Alex’s, unless they counted the other alleged “sightings” of the white-haired man.

  Soren discounted those for a relatively simple reason: nobody had disappeared. It was possible that the shade had somehow “saved” those kids, but he doubted it. The stories mostly lacked the kind of concrete specifics necessary for him to put much weight behind them.

  Soren leaned back in his chair. The two of them had been uncomfortably hunched over what passed for Soren’s dining room table. He sighed in frustration.

  “We need another approach,” he said.

  “I’m open to suggestions,” Ken replied gruffly. He kept his eyes on the screen, but sipped a cup of coffee he’d made recently in Soren’s kitchen.

  “Can we hash this out or are you going to be passive aggressive with me all night?” Soren asked.

  Ken looked up and his brown eyes met Soren’s.

  “I don’t like you,” he said.

  “I’m devastated,” Soren replied.

  “I’m just trying not to be passive aggressive,” Ken said with a hint of a smile.

  “There was nothing between Sara and me,” Soren replied, answering a question that hadn’t been asked. “Her fiancé was my best friend. End of story. Happy?”

  Ken stared at him for a full minute. Soren watched as he ran his tongue underneath his lip, apparently thinking about what Soren had said.

  “Not really,” he said. “There’s definitely some kind of thing between you two. I see how you look at her. Worse than that, I’ve seen how she looks at you.”

  Soren sat up abruptly.

  “You’re imagining things,” he said, more sharply than he intended. “Sara doesn’t see me like that.”

  “You sure about that?” Ken asked.

  Soren rubbed his hand along his chin. He briefly considered what Ken was suggesting and then almost as quickly discarded the idea. Sara was his friend, that’s all. But he didn’t know if he was trying to convince himself of that or if it was really true.

  When Ken had left to get his clothes, Sara had briefly tried to explain her relationship to the cop.

  “We dated for about a year,” she started. “It broke off because…”

  Soren had waved his hand at her.

  “You don’t have to explain to me,” he said. “You’re entitled to date whoever you want.”

  He’d tried to sound sincere when he said it, yet he had to admit he was disappointed. In his mind, she should have never been able to move on after John. He knew that attitude was deeply unfair, however.

  “When’s the last time you dated anyone?” Sara had asked.

  “How do you know I’m not dating someone right now?” he said.

  Sara raised an eyebrow at him.

  “I’ve seen this whole place,” she said. “Trust me, there is no hint of a feminine influence here.”

  Soren shrugged.

  “It’s been a while, I guess,” he said.

  That was understating it dramatically. He’d had a couple of flings in the past seven years, but those had been few and far between. Women complained he was “cold,” “distant,” and “emotionally unavailable.”

  And Soren knew he was all those things. He’d lost the connection to his former self and though sometimes he fought to regain it, it just didn’t seem to work. It was as if he could no longer be that man anymore. All he had left was his mission, his drive to avenge John and the two other friends he’d lost.

  And maybe it was for the best. One day, his mission would get him killed. It seemed safer not to involve anyone else in that.

  “We care about each other,” Soren told Ken, snapping his mind back to the present. “We go way back. And I feel responsible for what happened to John.”

  Ken snorted and Soren knew what he was suggesting. Ken was implying Soren had killed John. A lot of people believed that. In fact, that was the opinion of most people who’d heard about the case, even his own mother. Soren felt a familiar rush of anger at Ken’s response, but let it pass. He didn’t need to get into that conversation. If Ken really believed Soren was guilty, he wouldn’t be working with him.

  “My point is that she’s my friend,” Soren continued. “One of the few I have left in the world. I don’t want to fail her, or her son, the way I failed John. So stop trying to strut your feathers or whatever the hell peacocks do. When all this is over, I’ll go back to my cases, and she’ll go back to her happy life in Arlington. If that includes you, great. But it doesn’t include me.”

  Soren hated having this conversation. He would have disliked it under the best of circumstances, but especially with this person.

  Yet Soren also needed to get through to Ken. For the past few hours, the detective’s responses had been monosyllabic. Soren had the feeling that all his ideas were being completely ignored.

  “Well, until two days ago, it didn’t include me anymore either,” Ken said. “It’s hard to live in a dead man’s shadow.”

  Soren nodded.

  “I get it, I do,” he said. “But I’m not the threat you think I am. And right now, for Sara’s sake, I really need you to listen to me.”

  Ken started to object with a line about his police training.

  “I’m not saying you aren’t more qualified to catch a criminal,” Soren said. “But I’m the guy who catches monsters.”

  “Why is that, anyway?” Ken asked. “How did you get into this line of work?”

  “Let’s not worry about that now,” Soren said. “I just want you to set aside whatever grudge you’ve got against me and try to work this through. You can go back to hating me the minute we’re finished. Okay?”

  Ken nodded slowly. Soren wasn’t sure how sincere it was, but it would have to do. He was no good with this relationship stuff.

  “How deep have you gone into the Horne case?” Soren asked. “I’ve only seen what was on the web.”

  Ken tapped a few keystrokes on the laptop and the smiling face of Alastair Horne appeared. The kid looked cheerful and happy, his whole future in front of him. Ken turned the computer in Soren’s direction and leaned back in his chair, giving Soren control.

  It was the first time Soren had been allowed to touch the laptop. Soren eagerly dove into the case file, looking for anything of interest. But the police had few clues to go on. As he suspected, the case file mentioned that Horne’s mother reported the white-haired man had “disappeared suddenly,” but the police had assumed that meant he fled. Otherwise, the officer on the case appeared to have done a thorough job. He had interviewed neighbors, friends, relatives, and anyone else with access to Alastair.

  Soren knew that despite the fear of “stranger danger,” the most common kidnapper was someone a victim knew. Yet while the detective had come across some unsavory people, none of them fit the right profile. In short, there was no indication of who might have done this other than the shade.

  Looking at the picture of the boy, Soren had a sudden inspiration. He changed the search parameters to look at all unsolved crimes in the town where Alastair was taken. What he received back was a list that was several pages long.

  Sore
n opted to focus on unsolved murders and adjusted the search input accordingly. A much shorter list came up.

  He noticed Ken lean forward with interest. Soren rapidly flipped through the first several that appeared on the list, but they were the wrong profile. One was of a 30-year-old woman shot in a robbery attempt, another was a hit-and-run. Soren pulled up a case of a home invasion of a man in his late fifties and scanned it. He was about to move on, but some instinct told him to give it a second look.

  The victim’s name was Peter Strode, a local artist. Someone had broken in during the night and shot Strode while he lay in bed. Yet his house had not been robbed. More strangely, the police didn’t seem to have any suspects.

  There were few other details, but something about it bothered Soren. Maybe it was the contrast to Alastair’s file, which was loaded with notes about interviews and potential leads. This one just seemed bare. It was as if the cops had gone through the motions, but hadn’t been interested in finding the killer.

  The more Soren thought about it, the weirder it was. The town was a suburb of Portland. It didn’t see many unsolved homicides. And yet here was a home invasion, presumably a rare event, and it was as if the cops couldn’t be bothered. Soren would have assumed they’d be worried the killer would strike again, but that didn’t appear to be the case.

  “Can you pull up a photo?” Soren asked Ken.

  “What’s this have to do with Alastair?”

  “Call it a hunch,” Soren said. “There’s something damn odd about this case.”

  Ken took back the laptop and pulled up photos of the crime scene, but Soren couldn’t make out what the murder victim looked like. Finally, he found a different kind of picture. In it, Strode looked defiant, an older man staring down the photographer as if he wanted to break the camera by sheer force of will. His face looked battered. He had a black eye and a cut on his right cheek.

  But the man also looked stunningly familiar. Part of it was his intense stare, but mostly it was his stark white hair. The man had hazel eyes, not silver, but there was no question: Peter Strode was the shade.

  “Holy shit,” Ken said. “That’s him. That’s the guy.”

  The type of photo was also important. Soren had seen them many times in the paper and on TV — he even had one of himself. This was Peter Strode’s mug shot.

  Ken started clicking through to a related file. Even before the information came up, Soren thought he could guess the crime Strode had been arrested for. He was unsurprised to learn that Strode had been accused of kidnapping a 4-year-old boy. The child had survived. He was found in Strode’s home after an anonymous tip led police there. But the case had fallen apart amid accusations of police brutality and a forced confession.

  It explained why the cops hadn’t been trying very hard to find Strode’s killer. He’d been unofficially labeled a sex offender. The police probably thought someone had broken in and given Strode what he deserved.

  “So we have our answer,” Ken said. “If this is the shade, he’s not trying to ‘save’ Alex; Strode is a pervert.”

  But Soren wasn’t so sure. It was clear that Strode had taken the boy, but it wasn’t obvious why. Terry had said shades were the spirits of people who were powerfully psychic and that they tended to repeat the actions in death that they undertook in life.

  Soren wondered if it was possible he’d taken the boy because he’d been trying to save him from someone else.

  Soren looked at the file again and almost hit himself in the head for his stupidity. The victim’s name was Bobby Strode.

  “They were related,” Soren said. “That’s why the police thought Strode did it. He was the boy’s great uncle.”

  “The perps are almost always related,” Ken said.

  “Exactly,” Soren said. “It’s an open and shut case to the police.”

  Soren examined the file. Strode had refused to talk to the police about why he’d taken his grand-nephew. The police had apparently roughed him up when they arrested him and he wouldn’t answer any of their questions.

  Strode called a lawyer and the police were eventually forced to let him go home soon after his initial arrest. The cops had fucked up the case, but the killer struck quickly afterward. Strode was killed just three days later.

  Soren stood up and began pacing around the room.

  “You’re making me nervous,” Ken said. “Sit down.”

  Soren ran his hands through his hair. It all came down to whether he believed what the shade had told Sara, that he wanted to “save” Alex. If Strode was a good guy, then there had to be a sensible reason he’d taken his grand-nephew. What if Strode knew something was out there, something that could hurt the boy?

  It wasn’t as crazy as it sounded. If shades were former psychics, then it stood to reason that Peter Strode could have sensed there was a threat.

  It would have had to be an imminent concern, something that didn’t give him time to warn the boy’s parents or call the police. Maybe he worried they wouldn’t believe him. So he acted quickly and kidnaps his own grand-nephew. When he tries to explain what happened to the police, they beat him up. Soren looked again at Strode’s mugshot. It was all there in his look of defiance. He did the crime, but he doesn’t feel ashamed of it. Because he was trying to help.

  Soren knew it was a stretch, a loose theory concocted on the spur of the moment. But his gut told him he was on the right track.

  “You want to share what you’re thinking?” Ken asked, watching Soren still pacing back and forth.

  Soren took a breath and told him his idea. Ken’s eyes widened.

  “That’s crazy,” he said.

  “Yep,” Soren said. “But it might still be right.”

  The most interesting part of the theory wasn’t that Strode was trying to save his relative, it was the anonymous tip that pinned him to the crime. Somebody had known Strode took the boy. He doubted it was the kid’s family; there wasn’t a good reason to be anonymous. In fact, Soren couldn’t think of any reason someone would want to be unnamed in a case of a missing kid. Unless…

  Soren always saw cases as a kind of puzzle. The key was putting all the pieces in the right place. In one corner there was Alex, and Alastair was in another, while Peter Strode, aka the shade, was in a third. But there was a fourth party missing, the threat that Strode had been trying to save Alex and Alastair from.

  If Strode was trying to save the boy from an imminent danger, maybe that person had seen Strode take him. Strode successfully saves the boy, but someone else — another person trying to harm or kidnap the kid — watched him do it. He called in the tip to the police.

  Suddenly the fourth part of the puzzle was beginning to take shape. There was another player in the game, one who was lurking in the shadows. Soren was willing to bet he was the anonymous tipper. But he was also something else.

  “I know who killed Strode,” Soren said.

  “Wait, what?” Ken asked.

  “Think about it,” Soren said. “If Strode didn’t take Alastair, somebody else did. Meanwhile, there’s someone feeding information to the police and an unknown murderer. What do you want to bet they are all the same person?”

  Ken started shaking his head and offering arguments why Soren was wrong. They were all sensible and logical, but Soren ignored them. He was right; he felt it in his bones.

  In his mind’s eye, he could see a shadowy figure walking through a house and standing at the edge of Strode’s bed. When the man opened his eyes and started to shout, the figure pulled the trigger.

  “There are two kidnappers,” Soren said. “Peter Strode, who is now our mysterious shade, and somebody else, someone waiting in the wings.”

  “Did you hear anything I just said?” Ken asked.

  “Not really,” Soren said. “The man who killed Peter Strode is the same person who kidnapped Alastair Horne. And if that’s true, he’s still at large — and almost certainly in Virginia. Otherwise, why would Strode care? He’s not
trying to save every potential child victim of a kidnapper, just certain ones. Our guy is out there, only now he’s after Alex.”

  Chapter Ten