Silent Night

by L T Vargus

  Bloodstains smeared the floor here. Puddled in the crevices between the tiles. The surrounding machinery, boxes of straws, and red and white striped popcorn buckets were spattered with red.

  This was where the violence would have been up close for the first time. Personal. Faces on these victims. Individuals, not just bodies in a crowd.

  So he’d finished them off, then what? They knew from the interior surveillance that he’d gone into one of the theaters down the hall — packed with roughly two hundred potential victims — but he’d come back out without firing a single shot. What had stopped him from continuing the spree?

  Loshak took one last look at the dark smudges on the tiles, then turned toward the hallway.

  Before he made it to the wide corridor leading to the individual theaters, Spinks caught up to him.

  “I was talking to Captain Frye out in the lot, and he said we’ve got something interesting from the preliminary interviews of the witnesses.”

  Loshak stopped beside him.

  “What?”

  “A nine-year-old girl,” Spinks said. “She was face-to-face with him.”

  Chapter 16

  Spinks rode with Loshak to the hospital where the girl, Ivy Grayson, had been admitted, but as they were getting out of the car, the reporter’s phone went off. The latest burner phone. He dug it out of his pocket and checked the number on the screen.

  Loshak raised an eyebrow at him.

  “The investigator?”

  “Yeah,” Spinks said, his voice a little breathless. “Go ahead without me. I’ll see what our guy wants, then meet you inside.”

  The beepy ringtone started over from the beginning.

  “As long as we’re not his one phone call,” Loshak said.

  “He’s got enough brains not to call us if he gets caught.” Spinks hit the glowing green answer button. “I hope.”

  While the reporter answered the phone, Loshak left the rental behind and headed for the hospital entrance. Wind howled through the levels of the parking garage, carrying away the exhaust fumes, but dropping the already icy temperature another thirty degrees or so. He shoved his hands down into his coat pockets, pulling it a little tighter around his torso. Officer Lennie hadn’t been kidding about the wind chill. The air stung his nostrils like it was trying to freeze them solid, and his cheeks felt stiff and chapped.

  The sound of his footsteps bounced back and forth between the concrete floor and ceiling, blending eerily with the wind, the rumble of an engine, and the squeal of a vehicle in desperate need of power steering fluid somewhere in the upper levels. Loshak picked up the pace and jogged the last couple steps to the wide automatic doors. They whooshed open, admitting him and a blast of freezing air into a world where it was perpetually springtime.

  It took Loshak a few minutes of following signs to find the information desk. There, a fragile-looking nurse with a pen behind her ear and a slumped posture directed Loshak to the girl’s room, one floor up.

  When Loshak made it upstairs, he found Ivy Grayson’s father in the hallway, on the phone. Late twenties to early thirties, windburned face, Cubs sweater, jeans with flecks of drywall mud on them, high-mileage steel-toed boots. He looked like he’d rushed over from a construction site.

  “Like I fucking know,” the guy said into the phone, dragging a chapped hand through his hair. “I kept asking, but they wouldn’t tell me. Ivy’s OK, and that’s about all I fucking care about right now.”

  The guy realized Loshak was staring at him and made a face that Loshak read as, Fuck off, pal.

  When Loshak didn’t avert his gaze, the guy’s jaw hardened.

  “What, you never seen somebody talk on the phone before?” He threw a thumb over his shoulder. “Take a hike.”

  Loshak pulled out the little black wallet with his credentials in it. The phone drifted down from the side of the guy’s head. Loshak could hear a voice coming from the earpiece, someone asking Jake whether he was still there.

  “Mr. Grayson?” Loshak asked.

  The guy nodded dumbly.

  “Special Agent Loshak. I need to ask Ivy some questions about the shooting. She might have seen or noticed something that will help us find the guy who did this.”

  Mr. Grayson — Jake — according to whoever he was on the phone with, stiffened up and his ruddy face went a darker red. He leaned in a little bit and lowered his voice.

  “Look, man, off the record, I’d give anything for half an hour alone in my garage with this sicko. Getting this fucker off the streets and into a prison where he’ll get pounded every night for the rest of his life is right at the top of my wish list.” He pointed a thick finger at the door of her room, his harsh Chicago accent sharpening as his emotions threatened to overwhelm him. “But my baby girl just saw two of her best friends shot to pieces right in front of her face. Fucking fourth-graders, no older than she is, mowed down. She’s shook the fuck up. Can’t you do this tomorrow or some other time?”

  Grayson was obviously shaken up, too, but Loshak didn’t point that out. He put his hands up and lowered his chin a bit, trying to look as nonthreatening as possible.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Grayson. I understand where you’re coming from here. I have a daughter of my own—” Loshak hadn’t meant to say it like that. He hadn’t slipped tenses where Shelly was concerned in forever, but now that the lie was out, he kept going. From Grayson’s eyes, it had made a connection with him, meeting him on a dad level, and Loshak didn’t want to lose that. “—and I’d be worried as hell about her if I were in your shoes. But she’s the best hope we have for finding this guy before he puts some other little girl through what Ivy’s been through. I’m not asking her to testify or point him out in court. I just want to ask whether she saw hair color, eye color, heard him talk… The little things can help us put this guy in that prison on your wish list.”

  Grayson’s eyebrows pinched together, worried. The voice on the phone had given up getting Jake back, and the screen went black in his hand. Seconds ticked by while he wrestled with himself.

  Then a little blonde head and a torso wrapped in hospital gowns poked out of the hospital room door behind him.

  “I didn’t see what color his hair was,” Ivy said.

  Grayson spun around to face his daughter.

  “You’re supposed to be in bed, Ives,” he said. “You need some rest.”

  Now that he’d engaged with her, however, the kid’s Parent Susceptibility Detector had activated, and she came all the way out into the hallway with them. Loshak would be willing to bet money that Ivy managed to avoid a lot of bedtimes with the same technique.

  “Are you a policeman?” she asked.

  For all Grayson’s fears, the girl didn’t seem very shaken. But kids were a very different breed than adults. Resilient in places adults were fragile, able to compartmentalize what they couldn’t cope with to a scary degree, and almost always ready to put aside something upsetting in favor of something new and distracting.

  “Kind of,” Loshak said. He pulled out his badge and handed it to her. “I work with the FBI, though, so they call me an agent instead of an officer.”

  “I know what the FBI is,” Ivy said. She turned the wallet toward the light, making the inset watermark on the ID shimmer. “I’ve seen it on my mom’s shows. She watches all the murder shows.”

  “That’s where lots of people see it,” Loshak said.

  “You’re trying to catch the killer?”

  Loshak glanced at Grayson. Without parental consent or a warrant, he couldn’t legally speak to Ivy about the case.

  Grayson let out a huge sigh and threw his hands up.

  “Fine,” he snapped. He pointed at Ivy. “Get in bed, then you can talk.”

  The little girl grinned, then turned around and headed back into her room. Grayson grabbed Loshak by the upper arm.

  “If you don’t take it easy on her, you’re out,” he growled. “And don’t think I’ll be nice enough to have one of the nurses call securit
y.”

  Loshak let the threat go, nodding meekly before he followed Ivy into the room. The guy had almost lost his daughter tonight, and there hadn’t been a damn thing he could do about it. He wouldn’t just be feeling like a shitty father, he’d be feeling powerless. If he needed to reassert that he was the protector here, Loshak was happy to let him.

  Ivy climbed back into the bed and arranged the pillows and a teddy bear with the tag still hanging from its ear around herself. Meanwhile, her dad hovered at her side, arms crossed, ready to step in and stop Loshak. With force, if necessary.

  Loshak rolled the doctor’s stool over and sat down, both to make himself appear smaller to Grayson and to get on eye level with Ivy.

  “So, you were right,” Loshak said, mind racing ahead to make sure none of the words he was picking and choosing from would set Grayson off. “I’m working with the police to catch the bad guy. It would really help me if you could tell me anything you remember about tonight in the theater.”

  “First of all, he was a killer,” she said, her brows drawing low with seriousness. “Bad guys are for cartoons, not real life.”

  Loshak nodded to show he agreed but didn’t interrupt her.

  She scratched her cheek, maybe a nervous habit, and looked into the middle distance.

  “He shot a lot of times. Then he walked down to me. Like all slow. And he stopped in front of me and just stared at me.” She went silent for a second, then she jumped a little and her whole demeanor shifted. From thoughtful to a theatrical disgust, like she was playing to a classroom of fellow fourth-grade students. “Like a total cuh-reep-o.”

  “Did he say anything?” Loshak asked.

  The dramatic expression faded, and she relaxed back into the pillows.

  “No. We just looked at each other. For, like, a long time. Then he pointed the gun at me, and I thought he was going to shoot it, but then his phone started ringing and he just left.” She shrugged.

  “Did you see his face?” Loshak asked.

  Ivy shook her head.

  “He was wearing a ski mask. That’s why I didn’t see his hair, either.”

  “Could you see any skin around the edges of his mouth hole or eye holes?” Loshak asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember if it was light or dark?”

  “It was white,” she said. “He was white, I mean. Like me and you.”

  “Did you see any facial hair? Whiskers or a beard or mustache?”

  “He had whiskers, but they were short,” she said, touching her face again. “Not like a mustache. Like before Dad shaves in the morning.”

  “You and him looked at each other for a long time,” Loshak said. “Did he seem upset or angry?”

  “No.”

  “Agitated?”

  Ivy thought about this for a second.

  “Is agitated like—” She raised her hands and shook them out, looking over one shoulder, then the other, in an exaggerated pantomime of nervous fear.

  “Pretty much,” Loshak said. “But it can be like twitchy or jumpy. Like he can’t hold still.”

  “No, he wasn’t like that. He was just normal.”

  “Happy?”

  She shook her head.

  “No, like when you’re bored and you don’t care. Like, whatever. You know?”

  “Yeah,” Loshak said, the word “detached” echoing in his head. “Did you notice anything about his clothes?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like if he wore a watch or what his shoes were like or what color his pants were,” Loshak said, hoping for some key piece that would either support or detract from the doctor or lawyer theory. A Rolex or Porsche driving gloves or something, though he knew it was preposterous. “Anything about what he was wearing.”

  She squinted. Hesitated, then shook her head.

  “I don’t think so. Mostly I just looked at his eyes.”

  “Did you notice what color they were?” Loshak asked.

  “Blue or brown,” she said, but she didn’t sound sure at all. “Or green. It was hard to see the color because they were so weird.”

  Loshak sat forward on the doctor’s stool.

  “Weird in what way?”

  “Like this,” she said, pulling her eyelids open with her fingers, “but only the black part. Like how my cat, Sheba, gets when I play with her. The black part of her eyes get all huge and crazy when she’s about to pounce, and it’s hard to see the color parts.”

  Ivy let go of her eyelids and pulled the new teddy bear into her lap, hugging it.

  “His eyes were like that.”

  Chapter 17

  Walking back through the halls to the parking garage, Loshak kept replaying what Ivy had said about the shooter’s eyes. Dilated pupils, like those of a cat about to pounce. Something kept nagging at the back of his mind, a thought aching to come to the surface, but it remained just out of reach for the moment like an itch he couldn’t scratch.

  There was an empty waiting area just off the hall, nothing more than a niche with a row of wood and rough cloth seats, but he would be able to see Spinks in case the reporter passed by. Loshak turned into it and leaned against the wall. He needed a second to think. Just think.

  He closed his eyes. Pictured the ski mask. Nondescript white male inside. The eyeholes. Loshak pictured cat’s eyes there, the pupils going large as the shooter’s stimulation increased. As he got ready to pounce.

  It fit with that sense of endless aggression he kept getting from these shootings. In nature, there weren’t many things more aggressive than a big cat on the hunt. A leopard leaping out of a tree to snatch an impala in its jaws. A tiger tracking a herd of deer through the jungle. In society, was there anything more aggressive than a mass shooting? Bombs were more destructive, but they lacked the personal edge a shooting had. A man walking into a crowd and opening fire, killing at random for the sake of killing showed more raw brutality than a bomb ever could. Even after all the time Loshak had already spent thinking about it, the thought made his blood run cold.

  But stimulation wasn’t the only cause for pupil dilation. There was arousal. Terror. Euphoria — both the natural and the chemical kind.

  Drugs. The word echoed in Loshak’s mind.

  That would make sense. In recent years, drug use had gone up among all economic sectors. More people than ever were turning to narcotics to cope with life. And one common side effect of a wide array of drugs was dilated pupils.

  The shooter could be getting high and going out on these aggressive runs, opening fire on the public in an altered mental state, so chemically removed from reality that it was almost like he was playing a video game. Like nothing was real. The lives didn’t matter because they were nothing but polygons on a screen.

  A lawyer could certainly afford drugs. And he’d known a great many pre-law in college who were already getting chemical help to focus and stick out the long hours required by their internships. A doctor would have even easier access. A literal key to the kingdom — or a code to the pharmaceutical storage.

  Drugs. It fit, and it felt right. In his gut, it felt right.

  Chapter 18

  The wind temperature had dropped into the insta-frostbite range by the time Loshak got back outside. Thankfully, Spinks had the heater blasting in the rental, ignoring the “Clean Air Zone” signs posted everywhere that prohibited idling.

  “How’d it go?” the reporter asked while Loshak roasted his hands in front of the vents. “Did she see anything useful?”

  “Maybe,” Loshak said.

  He gave Spinks the rundown on the dilated pupils, but didn’t mention his drug theory. He wanted to see how Spinks interpreted it without bias.

  Spinks sat back in the passenger seat, tugging at his chin and talking through the possibilities.

  “Maybe he’s getting off on it? Like how Hitler used to jizz himself when he got to the climax of one of his speeches?”

  It didn’t fit with rage and aggression in the profile, but Loshak let
Spinks keep talking.

  “There’s drugs, too,” the reporter said. “Meth can keep your pupils dilated for a long time. Cocaine. A lot of the feel-good street drugs.” He turned to Loshak. “But prescription drugs fit with your doctor theory. He could just write himself up a dose of happy, then go off on a theater or food court full of people.”

  Loshak raised his arm a little to put his wrist in front of the vent. The heat helped calm down the arthritic throb in the bones there somewhat.

  “That’s what I came up with, too,” he said.

  He grabbed the file off the dash and unhooked the pen from the manila folder. In the margins, he wrote, Check local hospitals for missing narcotics, then put the file back.

  “That’s all she had, though?” Spinks asked. “Pupils isn’t much to go on. Half the city is probably running around on some kind of prescription drug at any given moment.”

  Loshak gave a one-shouldered shrug as he put the rental in reverse.

  “It’s something,” he said, backing out of the space. “What’d you find out?”

  Spinks looked confused for a second, then his face lit up with recognition.

  “Our guy, right. He’s going to try tonight. He’ll get in touch once he’s made it in and out.”

  Worry tried to twist Loshak’s guts into knots, but he was almost too tired to feel it. Not sleepy, exactly, but wrung-out. He’d walked the scenes of three mass murders today, all of which had taken place in the same eighteen-hour window. He didn’t have the emotional stamina left to worry about their investigator getting caught sniffing around George Whitley’s penthouse.

  Loshak rubbed his eyes with a thumb and index finger.

  “She said something else.” He blinked and eased the rental down the winding ramp to the street. “The shooter had the gun to her head, but then his phone went off, and he turned around and walked out.”