The Dark Corners of the Night

by Meg Gardiner

  He turned to the group. “Then the McKinley home.”

  Solis clicked up a picture of Natalie McKinley’s bedroom.

  “This time he didn’t even pause to turn the doorknob,” Emmerich said. “He kicked the door open, though it wasn’t locked. He was violently asserting control. And he went much further in defacing the room and traumatizing the children.”

  Emmerich pointed at the photo. “Drawing on the walls in their parents’ blood is a primal gesture. It invokes power. Pain. He arrived enraged. But he also came prepared to put on this show. This was transgressive—but controlled.”

  “Scaring the children into silence?” Solis said. “Intimidating witnesses?”

  They all focused on the photo of Natalie’s bedroom. Outside the war room on the street below, traffic growled. The low sun cast a cherry glow on the walls.

  Caitlin spoke. “He not only left witnesses alive at every scene but made sure the children saw him. He’s deliberately created surviving witnesses.”

  Emmerich eyed her, hawklike. Solis ran the back of a hand across the stubble on his chin.

  “There’s more,” she said. “He wants the children to know who he is.”

  She walked to a whiteboard, picked up a marker, and wrote the midnight man.

  Alvarez stood up.

  I am beyond good and evil, Caitlin wrote. I am the legion of the night.

  “And he drew eyes on his palms,” she said.

  “The actual fuck?” Alvarez said.

  She and Rainey recounted their interview with Noah and Natalie McKinley.

  “Iconography,” Caitlin said. “Mythology, a worldview, something. He’s got a narrative about himself.” She reread what she’d written on the whiteboard. “He’s creating his own legend.”

  “He drew the eyes on his palms before he entered the house,” Emmerich said.

  “Yes,” Rainey said.

  “He came with a script. From the word go, he planned to put on this terrifying spectacle for the children. It was a controlled display of aggression. Ritualistic terror.”

  “Nasty show to star in,” Alvarez said.

  Caitlin tossed the marker onto the table. “A killer’s always the star of his own fantasy. The problem is, he can never perfect it. And the moment fades.”

  “So he tees up the next one,” Alvarez said. “Infinite loop.”

  “Circle of death.”

  Rainey nodded at the whiteboard. “Where’s he going with this? Grander shows?”

  Caitlin clenched her hands. The memory of the children’s bedroom, the claw marks on the wall, little Natalie’s quiet horror, all hit her. Her skin crept.

  “Let’s just say it. He’s not targeting couples. He’s striking families with children. And he’s becoming bolder.” She looked at all of them. “What happens when he loses control?”

  6

  The concept behind behavioral analysis arose from a surprisingly straightforward insight: The criminal and victim must inevitably cross paths. When they do, at the crime scene, the offender’s conduct leaves behind clues that reveal his psychology, his personality, and, inevitably, his identity. He might leave evidence or take evidence with him. Might pose victims’ bodies, comb their hair, masturbate, cover their faces with a blanket. Bite them. Help himself to a beer.

  To profile the Midnight Man, to turn the shadow into flesh, Caitlin and her colleagues needed to make sense of his crime scene behavior. In the war room, as the setting sun fired the windows, the FBI team spread files on the conference table. The mood on the floor had turned jangled. There was a sense of a heavy engine revving, a dynamo spinning up and throwing off sparks. The task force leaders conferred and handed out assignments to detectives: Hunt down videos from cameras within a two-mile radius of every crime scene. Canvas the McKinleys’ neighborhood. Interview victims’ family, friends, and neighbors.

  Caitlin fanned crime scene photos across the shining tabletop.

  Rainey inspected them. “The killer’s getting into a rhythm. Definitely establishing a pattern of behavior.”

  Emmerich said, “Once could be happenstance. Twice is planning. Three times is ritual.”

  Caitlin said, “What he did at the McKinley house seems more than personal ritual. It seems almost ceremonial.”

  Emmerich turned his head.

  “Rituals can be private,” Caitlin said. “Crossing yourself. Obsessive handwashing. Ceremonies involve performance. A shared experience.”

  Emmerich became thoughtful. “Yes. Ceremonies are a formal observance to mark special occasions. Marriages. Graduations. Coronations.”

  “And ceremonies typically have assigned roles. Shaman, priest. Penitent, acolyte.” She paused. “Victim.”

  Emmerich lifted a photo of Natalie McKinley’s bedroom. “The Midnight Man prepared the ceremonial space. The claw marks he drew on the bedroom wall.”

  “What do they signify?” Caitlin said. “Wolf? Tiger? Eagle?”

  “Dominance,” Rainey said. “He’s the wolf. The alpha. Apex predator.”

  “Marking his territory,” Caitlin said.

  She turned back to the files on the table. Among them was a fresh drawing, pencil on construction paper. It had been made by little Natalie, at Rainey’s request, to describe the eyes on the palms of the Midnight Man. It was simple: the shape of a football, with a circle in the center and a black pupil within that, staring directly ahead.

  “His ceremonial finale,” Caitlin said.

  Emmerich picked the drawing up. “Eyes. Windows to the soul.”

  “Omniscience,” Rainey said. “Judgment.”

  “Watchfulness,” Caitlin said.

  “There’s a counterpoint,” Rainey said. “Covering the eyes creates mystery. It veils. Obscures the truth. This killer has never let his surviving victims see his face. I think he’s doing more than merely hiding his identity. Covering the eyes is designed to intimidate.”

  Rainey had a background in military psyops. Caitlin took her at her word.

  “What’s he trying to do when he presents these eyes to the children?” Caitlin said. “Tell them they’re being judged? Owned?”

  Emmerich leafed through a printout. “Let’s rewind to an earlier moment in this ceremony. Cleanup. Note what’s missing from the crime scenes. Fingerprints. DNA. Cartridge casings—the killer polices his brass.”

  Rainey said, “I don’t see ballistics. Didn’t Crime Scene recover the rounds that killed the victims?”

  Emmerich shook his head. “From the wound tracks, the killer was firing hollow-points. But he was close enough that the rounds exited the victims’ bodies.”

  Rainey frowned. “What kind of a huge piece is he firing? How close to the victims was he? Good lord.”

  Hollow-point bullets expanded when they hit their target. Their pitted tips peeled back into a mushroom cap or starburst. The results were ugly. Instead of arrowing through a target in a fairly straight trajectory, a hollow-point formed a shock wave, cavitated, and essentially blew apart what it hit.

  Most law enforcement agencies used them. A hollow-point could disable a bad guy with a single shot. In cop speak, it maximized stopping power.

  And hollow-point rounds spent almost all their kinetic energy within a few inches of impact. They rarely exited a target’s body and continued across a room. They inflicted maximum damage and remained inside the target.

  Caitlin had been shot as a young deputy on patrol duty in Alameda County. The bank robber’s bullet had punched through her deltoid without hitting major nerves or the brachial artery. If she’d been hit with a hollow-point round, she wouldn’t have kept running toward the bank. She’d be missing an arm, or dead.

  “Policing the through-and-through rounds is stratospherically careful,” she said. “Or compulsive.”

  She picked up another file. “Know what else i
s missing from the scenes? Home security systems. He targets houses where no alarm system is activated.” She turned a page, searching. “And, apparently—where there’s no dog.”

  “He has burglary skills,” Rainey said. “And he knows exactly what makes a home an easy target. No lights. No alarms. No barking.”

  Talia Weisbach walked over. The Robbery-Homicide detective’s demeanor was reserved. Despite her volcanic curls and dentist’s-drill energy, Weisbach could flatten her manner to a thin layer, smooth and opaque.

  “You talked about what the killer’s going to do next,” she said. “We have no idea, and we don’t know where he’s going to do it. But you can dissect where he’s been. You can give us a deep dive into the meaning behind some data.”

  “Is there a particular data set you want us to analyze?” Emmerich said.

  Weisbach put up a map on the flat-screen television. The Los Angeles metropolitan area, from Zuma Beach to Canyon Country to the border with Orange County. She clicked, and three red dots appeared. The crime scenes.

  “You’re not all special agents and profilers in the BAU, right?” she said. “Your unit have a quant?”

  “We have a technical analyst, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Can this technical analyst crunch map data and develop a geographic profile of the killer’s hunting zone?”

  Emmerich eyed the projected map. The red dots were separated by miles, by mountain ranges, by city boundaries. He adjusted the band of his dive watch. It was a tell. He was uncomfortable. Maybe wary.

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  “Good. If your guy can zoom in on the killer’s home ground, we can tighten a noose on the bastard.”

  Emmerich scanned the map. “Three crime scenes give us little go on. But we have somebody who can draw an entire world from a few bytes of data.” He turned. “Let’s get Nicholas Keyes out here.”

  Rainey punched a phone number and walked across the floor as she called Keyes at Quantico. At the conference table, Caitlin examined a photo of the Monterey Park crime scene. The child’s bedroom. The words scrawled above the little girl’s headboard. night mine.

  “Thoughts?”

  Emmerich’s voice caused her to raise her head.

  She lifted the photo. “The phrase is declarative. Possessive. So was the way he stomped across the girl’s bed. Treating her as trash beneath his feet. Demonstrating his power.”

  Caitlin thought of the little girl—suddenly alone, grasping with both hands for a father and mother who had been annihilated. A coil of piano wire seemed to cinch around her heart.

  “What’s the girl’s name?” she said. “Is there a photo of her?”

  She sorted through printouts on the table. Found a family snapshot. The child had shining eyes, wide with curiosity and wonder.

  “Hendrix.”

  “This UNSUB. He’s black smoke. I can’t see him.”

  “Caitlin.”

  He was across the table, his gaze pinning her.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Everybody’s shook,” Emmerich said. “The public, the detectives, the brass. That’s why we’re here.”

  Her shoulders dropped. “No kidding.”

  “But we can’t let it tip us off balance.” His gaze drifted to the photo in Caitlin’s hand. “Compartmentalize. These killings are distressing. The fact that children are traumatized is especially distressing. But I need you to bring your A-game to this case.”

  “Of course.”

  She barely got the words out before he raised a hand to forestall her saying more.

  “I know Detrick took a toll on you.”

  Kyle Detrick and the Saturday Night Killer case had taken the BAU team to Texas and across the western US. Going one-on-one against a devious, manipulative killer had dredged up Caitlin’s darkest fears and carried her to the edge. But she’d put it to bed. The case was considered a huge win.

  “It took a toll on all of us,” she said. “Main thing is—”

  “Case closed, yes,” Emmerich said. “You don’t have to pretend it was a walk in the park.”

  Since the day she joined the BAU, he’d been trying to get her to open up. Emmerich had personally recruited her to the Bureau, and she sometimes thought he regarded her as more than a bright spark, an agent with investigative potential. That he had seen a street cop he could shape into a weapon. A Sidewinder missile, a heat-seeker who could sense the dank motivations of serial predators and lock on target.

  She drank this work like spring water. She loved it. She felt addicted to it.

  She knew that could turn into a problem.

  When she first pinned on a badge, she’d written out hard rules for herself. Dedication. Persistence. Job stays at the station. Those rules were meant to erect an electric fence between relentless pursuit and dangerous obsession—a barrier her father had crossed, to his ruin.

  Emmerich knew about her code. He understood and accepted it. But he wanted her to reset the boundary line. To slice into deeper psychological territory. He knew that meant exposing herself to emotional risks.

  He didn’t know what she feared might happen if she truly threw wide the gates.

  “Detrick is done. For good,” she said. “Don’t worry about him.”

  “Noted. I also understand the strain the Temescal bomber has put you under.”

  Her face heated. At the mention of Temescal, Caitlin once again smelled acrid smoke and saw the search-and-rescue team hauling Michele Ferreira from the rubble.

  Michele lived, she told herself. That was what counted. But nine months after the explosion, Michele was still battling to recover from critical injuries. Her fight was heartrending, not least because the case remained unsolved. Sean was working overtime on the investigation. Every day the bomber remained at large hit him like a rebuke and felt like a timer running out. And he had no evidence to either confirm or disprove that the Ghost, a killer he and Caitlin had faced before, was behind the bombings.

  Caitlin kept her face neutral. “I know, boss. I’m just wrapping my head around these killings.”

  “This is a particularly tough case to work. Attacks on families. That it’s happening during the holidays only makes it more emotionally fraught.” He glanced around the room. “These detectives are feeling the weight. And you’re picking that up by osmosis, because you’re empathetic. Yes, I want you to put yourself in the UNSUB’s head and decipher how he thinks. But step back from the turmoil the detectives here are dealing with. Fine-tune the edge.”

  Poker face, she thought. This killer was making her feel like nothing but edge.

  “I’ll work on it.”

  Emmerich leaned on the table with his fingertips, like a sprinter in the blocks. “I need you focused. And analytical. And that means keeping yourself from becoming too emotionally involved with the case.”

  He pointedly eyed the photo in Caitlin’s hand. She wanted to clutch it to her chest.

  “Otherwise you might as well have stayed at Quantico.”

  A sharp needle seemed to poke her in the forehead. She met his gaze. “Don’t doubt my commitment.”

  He held poised, assessing her. She knew: she couldn’t hold back, couldn’t swerve, couldn’t let her emotions or the messy world around her distract from this. Job stays at the station.

  “Message received and understood. I’m here,” she said.

  “Good.” Emmerich straightened. His expression softened. “The little girl’s name is Maisie Lin-Chu. The situation’s tragic but could have been even worse. Her aunt and uncle will take care of her. She’ll be safe.”

  “We can hope,” she said.

  But she thought of the Midnight Man—a rip in the night—and drew a deep breath. Then straightened her shoulders.

  “I’ll start analyzing the evidence he takes and the messages he leaves,” she said
.

  “Especially the eyes.” Emmerich’s gaze tightened. “Because there’s something he wants us to see, and he’s picking up steam.”

  Weird fucking shit.

  Caitlin was packing her notes and laptop, preparing to head to the team’s hotel to check in, when Detective Alvarez came through the war room. He had a sheet of paper in his hand.

  The early night was closing in, a cool twilight falling on the city. Outside, skyscrapers lit the view. Headlights turned the streets into a moving grid of light. Across the street in Grand Park, the palm trees sparkled with white pinpoint lights.

  Alvarez handed her the sheet. “Press release.”

  He had lost the toothpick but was gnawing on a piece of chewing gum. A pack of Nicorette peeked from his shirt pocket. Good on ya, Alvarez. Working a serial murder case wasn’t conducive to kicking addictions.

  The press release was brief and stark. It stated that the recent Southern California killings were believed to be the work of a single offender. Adult male who referred to himself as the Midnight Man. The killer targeted homes with no lights, no active security systems, no dogs.

  And it warned the public that the killer had so far targeted homes with children.

  Caitlin’s attention lingered on that. “Including the warning is a gamble.”

  Alvarez bristled. “You think we should leave people in the dark?”

  It would set Southern California off. The level of alarm would rocket into orbit. “Not at all. I agree with it. Warning parents that homes with children attract the killer—anything we can do to mitigate that risk is worth it.”

  “So what’s the downside?”

  “The Midnight Man will take it badly.” An image of a black hole, a gaping heart ringed with teeth, came over her. “He doesn’t want children warned or protected from him.”

  7

  Maya Cathcart heard the sound from the depths of sleep. Bang. It jerked her straight up in bed, confused, heart racing. It had come from the front of the house, the living room.