The Dark Corners of the Night

by Meg Gardiner

  This was the view the killer saw. A moonless night. The glass of the house dim, flat, black. The darkness mysterious, almost inherently frightening.

  And this view had excited him. It had unleashed him.

  It had sent him up the walk to the house, coursing with the urge to kill. It had propelled him inside, where the family woke to the realization that they weren’t protected, weren’t safe within their own walls, but were isolated, overcome, torn apart.

  “The dread, the darkness—they are the Midnight Man,” she said.

  It was a terrifying thought.

  On the cracked pavement of a vacant lot, the Midnight Man jogged past ragged weeds and broken bottles. The lights of downtown, the skyscrapers, the pillars of money, the glow of commerce, sports, shallow entertainment, the pond scum that constituted humanity, it all throbbed, mindless of him. The tangle of nearby freeways was a murmur rather than a gushing roar—an ultrasound heartbeat. He kicked an empty bottle of Thunderbird. It clattered, glinting, across the crumbling asphalt.

  Nobody heard it. Even the homeless didn’t hang out here at three thirty a.m., not on open ground.

  He crossed the vacant lot and jogged along a railroad spur. It took him toward the decrepit, bristling heart of Los Angeles. The perfect place to blend in, camouflaged among the human rodents that swarmed LA. Among the trash and germs that constituted the life-form called Homo sapiens.

  Old warehouses rose on either side of the railroad tracks. Parked cars, some abandoned, some stripped. If anybody slept in the cracks and doorways, they didn’t stir when he loped past. Street lights buzzed on the corners, but the corners were far apart. The hum of electricity was to the west, in the gold-lit spires that towered overhead. Here, amid trash and graffiti and razor wire, he was cloaked. Especially when he stuck to the tracks.

  At a split in the rails he ducked into the decaying zone that wasn’t even Skid Row, but the ass crack of Skid Row. Checking his surroundings, he sneaked past a construction fence. Then slowed to a walk. He sauntered toward a dilapidated building marked for demolition.

  Out of the open air, screened by the construction fencing, he pulled down his hood. He took the bullets from the pocket of his jeans. He held them in his palm. The metal was warm. It was irregular.

  Personalized.

  He rolled the rounds in his hand. The words coming from his mouth were mere mutters.

  More to come. Next. Next.

  He squeezed the bullets tightly and pressed his fist to his lips, then slid the rounds back into his pocket. He checked for hostiles one more time, eyes sliding across the view, ears tuned to rats’ feet and drunks’ stumbles.

  It was just him. He slipped into the building and into darkness.

  10

  It was close to dawn when they circled back via the 405 and headed downtown. Rainey drove and Caitlin rode shotgun. Headlights pierced the deep blue of morning twilight. The city was stirring itself like the rough beast it was. In the wing mirror, Caitlin could see Emmerich’s head bent to his phone. On the East Coast it was already office hours, and he was answering email.

  Palm trees flashed past. Caitlin felt, as always, the push-pull of this city. Home of dreams, paradise, fragmented. The freeways were its arteries but didn’t pump blood to its heart. They served as barriers, as corridors, passageways, pulling millions along in isolation. They were meant to be experienced in motion. Stop along the shoulder and the sense of displacement was inevitable, of being in a world that had suddenly become wrong.

  Rainey’s phone pinged. It was resting in a cup holder, and she glanced at the display but didn’t pick it up. Both hands on the wheel, going sixty-five.

  Caitlin said, “Want me to see who it is?”

  “It’ll be Bo. Or the boys.” Her husband and twins. “Please—check that there’s no school-day crisis brewing.”

  Caitlin snagged the phone. “Text and a photo. Breakfast.”

  The snapshot showed the twins, ten-year-old TJ and Dre, digging into scrambled eggs. When Caitlin showed it to her, Rainey’s expression warmed.

  Caitlin read the text. “‘TJ wants to know how Santa can get to Wakanda if it’s camouflaged from radar and satellites.’”

  Rainey laughed. “TJ knows Mom and Dad are Santa and that Wakanda exists only in the Marvel Universe, but still.” The warmth in her eyes lingered. “Tell him Santa magic doesn’t need radar. And add kisses. Bunches of them.”

  Caitlin thumbed the message. She envied Rainey her family. Brianne Rainey was one of the few members of the unit who not only had young kids at home but was on her first marriage. Bo—Charles Bohannan—was a criminal defense attorney, former Air Force JAG.

  Rainey sighed. “Christmas isn’t coming for any of the families who lived in the houses we saw tonight.”

  “No,” Caitlin said.

  Rainey rested a hand on top of the steering wheel. “All these kids getting their parents ripped away … is he pretending he’s helping them?”

  Her voice was tight. Rainey was a vastly experienced agent, a cool, confident operator. She’d been with the FBI more than a decade. Worked counterintelligence, counterterror, and violent crimes before joining the BAU.

  Usually she maintained a thirty-thousand-foot view of a situation, like a Predator drone circling the carnage miles overhead. Caitlin knew that she cared, deeply, about every case they investigated. That she loved the work, found it important. Caitlin had witnessed her put her own life on the line to protect others—to protect her.

  Seeing a crack in Rainey’s armor was jarring. Maybe it was fatigue, the gritty tiredness of pulling an all-nighter. Maybe it was being three thousand miles from home. Rainey’s mouth was set. A vein was pulsing in her neck.

  “The Cathcarts—those two went down fighting to save their family. That young mother, right outside the baby’s room. Swinging, battering, clawing. And what he did to her …”

  In the mirror, Caitlin saw Emmerich’s head come up. He watched Rainey attentively.

  “Maybe the killer was enraged that Maya Cathcart fought back,” Rainey said. “Maybe he was excited. Maybe he wanted to punish the baby symbolically by drawing that monstrous eye on her forehead—and we have to figure out what the hell is going on with that.”

  “We will,” Emmerich said. “It will provide insight into the UNSUB’s fantasy. But I don’t know if it’s critical to stopping him. He may not fully understand its implications himself.”

  “Don’t give a good goddamn about his insights into himself,” Rainey said.

  Emmerich let the remark hang. The Suburban raced along. The sun crested the horizon, golden, burning in the cold clear air.

  “Brianne?” Caitlin said.

  She changed lanes and passed slower traffic. “The Cathcarts. Hurts to see a young brother gone like that. A young sister.”

  She held her breath for a few more seconds, shook her head, and blew it out. “A baby,” she said. “The killer getting closer now, touching her. Defiling the bond between a mother and her child by painting that little girl with her own mother’s blood.”

  Caitlin’s stomach clenched. She’d been trying to avoid feeling the pain, but Rainey’s words punched through.

  “While we were in spitting distance.” Rainey rubbed her eyes. “Good Christ, I am exhausted.”

  Emmerich let her talk. They’d all felt this way at some point. They needed to get it out.

  A Corvette blasted past them. Rainey watched it go.

  She pointed at her phone. “My turn to pick the music, Hendrix. First playlist, first track.”

  Caitlin scrolled and hit play. The Suburban filled with the voice of Maria Callas. Tosca. “Vissi d’arte.”

  “Betrayal and revenge?” Caitlin said.

  “Turn it up.”

  The sun was fully above the horizon, needling the morning sky, when they pulled off the freeway do
wntown. They drove up South Main toward LAPD headquarters, the road wide open.

  Caitlin saw him from the corner of her eye, across the street from the LAPD complex. A man leaning against the hood of a car. Rainey drove past him.

  Caitlin spun in her seat to look out the back window. “Wait.”

  Rainey braked, eyes on the rearview. “Him?”

  Caitlin’s fatigue evaporated. “Yeah.”

  He was reading on a phone, head down. Jean jacket, Carhartt boots, eyes set. Caitlin jumped out and strode toward him.

  “You.”

  He looked up. She kept walking. It was Sean.

  His smile erupted. For a few calculated seconds he continued leaning against the car. He glanced at the idling Suburban and nodded a chin-up greeting to the people inside. Then he straightened.

  She came up to him, her heart pumping.

  “You didn’t even mention that you were coming to town?” She set her hands on her hips. “Bastard.”

  “That’s me.” The grin spread. “Because you hate surprises. Absolutely hate them. Just look at you.”

  He pulled her to him and kissed her. She held her smile in check for a second longer, then threw her head back. She laughed. Her worries and tension dissolved.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  “Lead on the bombings. Have a meeting at the ATF Field Division in Glendale.” He indicated with his thumb. “And you didn’t tell me you were going on an overnight field trip. I’ve been waiting. Way past time for coffee.”

  “Let me finish up a few things here.”

  Behind her came Emmerich’s voice.

  “Hendrix. Grab breakfast and a nap.” He raised a hand in greeting to Sean. “See you back here for the team meeting this afternoon.”

  “Thanks.”

  She nabbed her backpack from the Suburban. In the driver’s seat, Rainey was craning her neck to get a good view of Sean. She had never met him. She put the SUV in gear and pulled away with sly grin on her face—maybe approving.

  Caitlin hoisted the backpack and turned to Sean. “Breakfast?”

  “That really what you want to grab?”

  “Hell no.”

  11

  The trail of coats and shoes and jeans led from the door of the hotel room across the floor to the bed. Pillows and covers lay askew. Caitlin and Sean lay side by side, face up, breathing hard. The morning light flickered on the ceiling, reflecting from the parade of traffic on the street below. Caitlin let out a whistle.

  “I won that round,” she said.

  “It’s not a contest.”

  “Twice.”

  Sean laughed. She stretched and rolled on her side. She was astonished at how wide awake she felt.

  Sean ran a finger down her bare thigh. She was too energized, for once, to feel exposed. He was naturally unselfconscious. She instinctively felt the urge to turtle and protect herself from whatever he would discover by looking at her. All her life she’d believed that her heart needed to be hidden, encased in Teflon, or she would end up emotionally flayed. That letting anybody in was destructive.

  It had taken her months to understand that Sean felt replenished when she came into his view. That she enlivened him. That she—Caitlin Rose Hendrix—could provide warmth and succor to another human being, merely by being herself. That he wasn’t searching for flaws. Didn’t watch to catch her stumbling. That when he looked and really saw her, he felt nourished.

  That shook her. She was a child of divorce. Unhappy endings were her template. For a long time, she had felt like a tightrope walker who expected at any second to be shoved off the high wire with a pole.

  But today she let him gaze on her. She gazed back.

  She still felt invaded. But she stroked his cheek and let his breath and his fingertips pore over her body.

  They’d sworn, We’ll work it out. This, right now, was what work it out meant. They lived three thousand miles apart and found time for ephemeral moments of happiness.

  He was a prize, and she’d be a fool to do anything except hold onto him. But if they wanted to make a life together, something had to change. Something that hadn’t changed in the fifteen months since she moved to Virginia.

  Her voice was soft. “Babe, I missed you.”

  He laced his fingers with hers and kissed the back of her hand, and she knew he understood the deeper meaning in her words.

  She settled herself into the crook of his shoulder under the brilliant winter sun. “What’s the lead?”

  “Forensic analysis of the bomb debris.” His expression was cool but curious. “We’re off the clock.”

  Rule number one in the Caitlin Hendrix handbook: When you’re off duty, you take off the badge. But with Sean on edge about the bombing case, she was suspending it.

  It wasn’t a sacrifice on her part. It was an indulgence.

  She smiled to herself, recognizing the irony. “Just talk.”

  “We found a fragment of the wiring.”

  “When?”

  “An ATF team has been sieving the rubble since the explosion. Hundreds of tons of it,” he said. “Four weeks ago they found a fragment of the blasting cap. Amid debris that had originated near the seat of the explosion. Three days ago, at the facility where the county transported the rubble, they found another. With a sliver of wiring still attached.”

  “After nine months. God bless ’em.”

  He propped himself on his elbows. “A centimeter-long section of alloy. Enough to trace a manufacturer.”

  She sat up. “Sales records?” There was excitement in her voice.

  “A wholesaler. First link in the chain. Inland Empire—I’m heading out there this afternoon.”

  She nodded. “Sometimes it ain’t the big things. And you’re a digger.” She leaned over and kissed him.

  After so many months of nothing, no headway, the investigation spinning its wheels, this was the first fresh evidence Sean had been able to tell her about. And she knew that this lead was incredibly tenuous.

  “I don’t want to jinx it,” she said. “But damn.”

  “You can’t jinx anything. I trust your insights and advice. I know you’ve felt frustrated too.”

  The case had become personal for Sean. And like him, Caitlin suspected that the Ghost could be orchestrating the bombing campaign.

  The Ghost—the UNSUB who had helped the Prophet kill seven people in the Bay Area, including her father. The man who crucified her hand to a board with a nail gun. The killer who slipped away from the abandoned BART platform where she watched Mack die. The man who helped the Prophet set up explosives in the BART tunnel, then sabotaged them.

  The shadow who sent her black lilies at Quantico.

  He had warned her he’d be back. That he’d bring her down. He had phoned her at her desk at Quantico to make that promise. Telling her, without telling her, that he knew where she was, and how to touch her. Anytime he wanted.

  She kept a forensic artist’s sketch of his face tacked to a corkboard above her desk at the BAU. She had never for an instant taken his threats for idle boasting or mere taunts.

  Was the bombing campaign that ensnared her friend and her lover part of his plan?

  “It’s one step forward,” Sean said. “This guy is getting more sophisticated. And he wasn’t a novice when he started placing his devices.”

  The bomber had coated one device with black paint. It indicated he knew that fingerprints and DNA could survive an explosion.

  “He’s wary and meticulous. But he may not know the advantage investigators have.”

  “Which is?”

  “Bombs don’t eliminate evidence. They create it,” he said. “We have that sliver of wire. I’m going to trace it all the way back to this bastard’s kitchen table.”

  “Hell to the amen,” she said.

 
He smiled. His handsome face, his dark eyes, were a balm to her.

  Throwing the covers off, she sprang to her knees and straddled him. “Round two.”

  He laughed. “You are the most competitive person I’ve ever met.”

  “You need a break?”

  “If I did, at this point I wouldn’t dare tell you.”

  He pulled her against him. His hands, his mouth, his heat poured over her. Caitlin pressed her lips to his ear.

  “Don’t want a break. Don’t want to waste a second,” she whispered.

  When Caitlin woke, the light had sidled several feet across the floor. Noise from a construction site clanged through the window. She stretched with luxurious torpor. The bathroom door opened, and Sean stepped out, hair wet, a towel wrapped around his waist. He found his jeans and shirt.

  Too soon, she thought. “You have time for breakfast before you go?”

  He pulled on the jeans. “I’m not going. We are.”

  “Where?”

  He nabbed his wallet from the credenza, stuck it in his back pocket, and picked up his phone. He read a message on the screen and smiled.

  “Michele says hi.” He typed a reply.

  She pulled the covers over her shoulders. “Hi back.”

  “She’s asking about the trip.” Still reading the screen, he laughed. “I sent her a photo.”

  Caitlin’s eyes popped. She bolted upright. “Of me? Us? Here?”

  He swiveled, taken aback. “Of course not. Caitlin.”

  She felt her face redden. Saw Sean’s face redden. He occasionally felt apprehensive that his girlfriend was buddies with his ex, wary that they would compare notes. Caitlin had always found his male insecurities—and ego—amusing. Exposing her own insecurities felt less funny.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  He crossed to the bed and held out the phone. “This photo.”

  It had been taken on his flight to LA. It showed a little girl, her hand pressed to the window of the jet, absorbing the sky-high panorama with awe. Caitlin’s anxieties sloughed away. She grinned.

  “You brought Sadie?”

  “Surprise.”