The Dark Corners of the Night

by Meg Gardiner

  He turned back to the screen. “It’s going to be tough. But not impossible.”

  Emmerich had heard Keyes’ talk before. More than once. Keyes was brilliant at what he did, but less than accomplished at public presentations. Emmerich pointed at the big screen—the four red dots spread out across the map of the Los Angeles metro.

  “Explain what those four points tell you,” Emmerich said.

  “Yeah. The way humans move, search, and hunt are universal patterns,” Keyes said. “Because the way all animals move, search, and hunt are universal patterns. We rely on routine. We use the least effort possible. We’re comfortable in familiar geography.” He shrugged. “We’re fundamentally predictable.”

  He pointed at the red dots. “We know that serial killers hunt for prey in a concentrated area. And they do it in specific ways—far enough from their homes to conceal where they live, but not so far that the landscape is unknown to them.”

  “The farther away from their crib, the less likely they are to attack,” Alvarez said.

  “Just as the farther we travel from our homes, the less likely we are to shop for groceries. It’s more work for us, it takes more time, and we feel less comfortable in a neighborhood we don’t know well. We get lost. We don’t know where to park. We aren’t sure how to get back on the freeway to get home. It’s a combination of time management, psychological comfort, and risk assessment.”

  He took off his glasses and cleaned them on the hem of his shirt. “Geographic profiling uses an algorithm that analyzes this distance decay and identifies the buffer zone around the UNSUB’s home. If I can capture enough information, that’ll let me zoom in on where the killer lives.”

  “So what does it take?” Alvarez said.

  “Shoe leather, to begin with,” Keyes said, and held up a hand. “Mine. You have enough to worry about.”

  “Roger that.”

  “I have to hit the street. I could sit at my desk at Quantico and pick apart five hundred crime scene photos, or zoom in on satellite images from multiple angles, but I wouldn’t understand how a location feels in the flesh. Where the shadows fall at two a.m. under a full moon. How the traffic lights are sequenced late at night. Whether illegally parked cars get clamped on a particular street or a storm drain floods an intersection every time it rains. I need to get out there.”

  Weisbach nodded. “What do you need from us?”

  “Maps, weather reports, a charger for my video camera. A car,” he said, glancing at Emmerich. “And a bus map for the region. A pass for public transit, if you can arrange it. I’m going to find out how this prick is getting to and from the kill sites.”

  14

  At eleven thirty p.m. the next night, the streets of Monterey Park were tranquil. The city, ten miles from downtown Los Angeles, was small relative to the megalopolis that engulfed it, and a home to thriving Chinese American and Vietnamese American communities. On its palm-lined boulevards a few restaurants and bars were open. Above the power lines and yellow streetlights, the winter sky burned brilliantly. The neighborhood where Beth Lin and James Chu had been shot to death was quiet and upwardly mobile.

  Across the street from their home, shielded by the night, Caitlin stared at the empty house. The crime scene tape had come down, but a tatter remained, like leftover bunting from some gruesome party.

  She crossed the street without leaving the shadows. The gate to the backyard swung open soundlessly. A Big Wheel sat forlornly on the patio, aimed at the sliding glass doors, as if waiting for the little girl who had lived here to come out and play.

  The kitchen window over the sink had provided entry. The Midnight Man had jimmied it and slid inside. The spotless counters let him whisper into the room.

  This night was still and cold. The Santa Anas were no longer blowing. Against the chill Caitlin wore a black watch cap and Under Armor running gear beneath her combats and FBI windbreaker. She raised the rifle nightscope and swept the yard. The view turned green, throbbing, pixelated. Nothing moved.

  She walked along the back wall of the house, scope to her eye, and rounded the far corner. A specter boomed into shape directly ahead.

  “Keyes,” she hissed. “Damn you.”

  When she lowered the scope he disappeared, almost invisible in a black hoodie and jeans.

  “How long have you been here?” she said.

  “Three minutes.”

  She had dropped him off twenty minutes earlier, a quarter of a mile away. “Effing phantom. Did you come over the hill and climb the back fence?”

  “No. Too many barriers to entry. The landscaping on the other side of the fence is cactus—a solid wall of needles. And the house on the right has a Rhodesian ridgeback.”

  He ambled toward her, jerking a thumb at the hillside behind the neighborhood. “Plus, the nearest road on the far side is half a mile away. It’s a main thoroughfare, completely exposed, brightly lit. He wouldn’t park a vehicle there. I came in the same way you did, through the side gate.”

  “Without being seen. Which convinces me the killer did the same.” She frowned at him. “There’s a Rhodesian ridgeback on the other side of the fence? You didn’t even set it barking.”

  “Paintball taught me stealth.”

  She half laughed. “Ever think of applying to Hostage Rescue? You have the skills to be a sniper. Blending with the absolute dark like a ninja.”

  “The dark, that’s the thing here, yeah,” he said. “The streetlight’s out. At every attack site, a streetlight’s been out. And this road has more than one exit. He always chooses homes on streets with more than one escape route.”

  It had been two days since Keyes arrived in Los Angeles, and as far as Caitlin knew, during that time he hadn’t done more than nap.

  To prepare the geographic profile, Keyes had spent hours at each crime scene, learning the landscape and trying to understand it from the killer’s perspective. He had walked. He had run. He had driven hundreds of miles. He traveled between scenes, backwards and forwards. He worked in daylight—and tonight, again, in midnight darkness.

  Keyes turned toward the front of the house. “I think he parked on the street, under the broken light.”

  He towered over her in the dark, always an uncommon phenomenon because Caitlin was five ten and even taller in her Doc Martens.

  “I do too,” she said. “He gains a sense of power by standing outside a home’s front door—the face it presents to the world—while the family inside is oblivious to the danger they’re in. He wants to savor the sight, and the sensation that he’s destruction itself, about to descend. And to bask in the thought that once he breaks in, all that will be left is death and fear.”

  He said nothing for a cold moment. “Deep,” he finally murmured. He pointed at the corner of the house. “The gate.”

  “There’s no lock on it. No mention of one in the police report. The toddler’s too little to have reached the latch. This is a safe neighborhood. They didn’t lock it.”

  “Safe neighborhood,” he said.

  She couldn’t read his face. But his voice had an undertow.

  She walked back across the patio. “He came in from the street. No lights on. No barking when he opened the gate. He prowled around back and saw a little kid’s toys. No dog bowls. No curtains on the kitchen window. This was where he staged.”

  Keyes gazed at the sky. The half-moon going down. “He attacked at this time of night, but six weeks ago. The moon was a waxing crescent. It had already set.”

  “He calls himself the Midnight Man for a reason,” she said. “The geographic profile includes the sky as well as the ground?”

  “Yeah. It’s weighed on by the whole solar system.”

  “And this guy waits to kill until the earth turns her back on the sun.”

  The cold felt bracing. If she suppressed her awareness that terror and murder had been unle
ashed within the house, the night seemed peaceful. The quiet was soothing.

  “Safe neighborhood,” she said.

  “It didn’t protect them.”

  She listened. The only distinct sound in the air was distant traffic.

  “Notice what we haven’t heard tonight?” she said. “Sirens.”

  “It’s a low-crime area.”

  “Exactly. But notice what we haven’t seen in this neighborhood tonight? Cops.”

  He turned. “You’re right.”

  “Not one Sheriff’s car,” she said. “Because low crime doesn’t equate to a cop around every corner.”

  “Even though a double murder occurred on this street.”

  “The Sheriff’s Department has upped patrols since the murders. Eventually a deputy will drive by,” she said. “But low-crime areas don’t generally have a heavy police presence. Residential street like this? You can expect not to see a cruiser most nights. I think he knows that.”

  She led Keyes out through the gate to the driveway. Peered up and down the road.

  “That’s what he’s seeking out. Safe neighborhoods,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Maybe he hunts in low-crime areas because he figures people who live there take their safety for granted and set their defenses too low. And maybe …”

  She felt the emptiness, the black cover that the calm night provided.

  “Neighborhoods like this one—the streets aren’t dicey. The only threatening thing out here is him.” A chill slithered down her spine. “What’s the only unsafe thing in all these neighborhoods? Families.”

  Keyes’ voice dropped to a whisper. “Damn. Yes.”

  “It’s dangerous to belong to a family. That’s the message.” She turned to him. “And he doesn’t just mean that families are in danger—he’s saying families are treacherous.”

  Five minutes after leaving the darkened Monterey Park crime scene, Caitlin accelerated up an on-ramp onto the 10 freeway. Stands of eucalyptus swept past the headlights as the Suburban looped around a cloverleaf. She joined late-night traffic and rolled toward downtown LA, instantly anonymous on the ten-lane highway—an interstate that ran 2,400 miles across the continent and, she felt sure, had brought the Midnight Man to Beth Lin and James Chu’s peaceful street.

  Serial killers often used freeways to commit their crimes. So many, in fact, that the FBI had created the Highway Serial Killings Initiative.

  She spoke quietly to Keyes. “It’s impossible to believe that the Midnight Man doesn’t use the freeways. Is there any way the HSK database will help you with the geographic profile?”

  The initiative kept track of the number of bodies dumped along the side of the road. The FBI’s ViCAP analysts had compiled a list of more than 750 murder victims found along or near US highways. And more than 450 suspects.

  Many of those suspects were long-haul truckers. And most victims were truck-stop prostitutes. A driver could pick up a prostitute at a New Mexico truck stop, rape and murder her, and dump her body on a Colorado roadside hours later, before rolling on toward Wyoming. Neither the killer nor the victim would have any ties to the location. Without the HSK Initiative, local law enforcement agencies might have no way to link a murder in their jurisdiction to similar killings elsewhere.

  “The HSK data won’t be pertinent,” Keyes said, “because he doesn’t dump bodies at the side of the highway. But some of its paradigms will.”

  “Hunting style.”

  “Yes.”

  In the dark interior of the Suburban, he pulled down the hood of his sweatshirt. His hair was disheveled. His glasses reflected passing headlights.

  “He roams,” Keyes said. “I have a vague picture of him in my head, cruising the freeways late at night. Like this.” He nodded at the road ahead. “But not with a pinpoint destination in his mind. More like listening to music, loud, and driving until his emotions reach a peak and he pulls off someplace that strikes him as promising.”

  “Mr. Data Analysis, going with a gut feeling?” Caitlin said.

  “I have to consider all possibilities. It’s fractal.”

  The big Chevy engine hummed as they rolled west. The cityscape filled the view alongside the freeway, hills and streetlights and railroad tracks, chain-link fences and night-dark businesses, hypnotic, repetitive.

  “He’s highly mobile,” Keyes said. “I want to label that hunting style nomadic.”

  “Want to but you can’t.”

  “No.”

  Nomadic killers traveled far more widely in search of victims. They killed and kept traveling. They were the long-haul drivers. Desert hitchhikers. Rich boys on round-the-world tours who strangled backpackers.

  “The Midnight Man sticks to a single urban area,” Caitlin said. “A vast urban area, but still. He roams—but always heads home. He has a single game preserve.”

  Keyes crossed his arms. A consternated vibe rolled off of him.

  “What’s bugging you?” Caitlin said.

  “He’s an outlier in so many categories,” he said. “Something like sixty percent of serial killers murder at one location, then transport victims’ bodies to a secondary dump site. And most of them attempt to conceal the bodies. The Midnight Man doesn’t display his victims in public, but he does leave the dead in the presence of living witnesses.” He seemed to fight off a shudder. “And he kills within the victims’ homes, but he’s not a stationary killer.”

  “No. He’s a step over.” Stationary killers committed their crimes at home or work. Black widows. Angels of death. “The Midnight Man commits his crimes at homes—but not his own.”

  The hillside campus of Cal State University Los Angeles went past, visible between oaks and scrub and firs.

  Keyes watched the Suburban’s headlights devour the concrete. “The house where the first attack took place. Benedict Canyon. Something keeps itching at the back of my mind.”

  “You wondering how far that house is from Ten Thousand Fifty Cielo Drive? Two point two miles as the crow flies.”

  “Two point seven by road.” He eyed her, possibly surprised that she’d had the same thought as he had. He shook his head. “But the Cielo Drive address isn’t visible from the Peretti house. If there’s some resonance, I haven’t found it.”

  “And at Cielo Drive, the killers didn’t sneak in a back window. Tex and the girls went up the driveway to the front door with their knives out.”

  Ten Thousand Fifty Cielo Drive was the idyllic home in the hills where, on August 8, 1969, Sharon Tate and four others were slaughtered on the orders of Charles Manson.

  Keyes nodded. “Unlikely it’s connected, but I couldn’t dismiss the idea. Los Angeles has quite the history of murder.”

  “Hillside Strangler, Night Stalker, Grim Sleeper.”

  “Skid Row Slasher, Black Dahlia, Sirhan Sirhan. The killer OJ’s been trying to find since 1994.”

  “But even in this city, the Manson Family stands out,” she said.

  “Tinseltown. Look, Ma, my name’s in lights.”

  His mordant tone surprised her. Late nights affected everyone, it seemed.

  “If we presume the Midnight Man has staked out a defined target zone—Los Angeles County, roughly—what does that give us?” Keyes said. “He’s a territorial killer?”

  “Yes,” Caitlin said, “but not a marauder.”

  The FBI divided territorial killers between marauders, who traveled less than five kilometers to kill, and commuters, who ranged farther—and who often stayed close to the major thoroughfares they took on their journeys.

  “Yeah—he’s got a big range both geographically and intellectually,” Keyes said. “He attacks mansions and starter homes. He kills victims across the economic spectrum. Multiple ethnicities. He’s comfortable in a wide range of environments—he has a large mental map. It makes the picture har
der to bring into focus.”

  “He wasn’t intimidated by driving into a multimillionaires’ neighborhood,” Caitlin said.

  “Or entering a house where the victims might have spoken a different language than he does.” He held up a hand. “Don’t want to stereotype. But it’s likely the killer is Caucasian, and Monterey Park is majority East Asian heritage. I know Chu and Lin were total Californians, fourth and fifth generation American. But I’m not sure the killer did.”

  “He may have lain in wait, close enough to hear them talking as they went to bed.”

  “Possible. And chilling,” he said.

  “But you’re right—some killers would hesitate to enter a dwelling where the homeowners might speak a language they don’t. It gives the targets an advantage against a lone assailant.”

  “The central issue remains,” he said. “Four crime scenes don’t provide enough data points to create a reliable profile. Right now, anything I produce will be uselessly vague. Blobs dropped on the map.”

  “Don’t tell me we’re sunk.”

  He pursed his lips. His usual energy had dimmed. Then he shook his head. “No. No matter how unpredictable the killer seems, his behavior won’t be entirely arbitrary. Nobody’s is.”

  “Even paranoid schizophrenics can be remarkably consistent in their delusional behavior.”

  “Right.” Reviving, he turned to face her. “For instance, did you know? Research has found that right-handed criminals tend to turn left when fleeing but throw away evidence to the right.”

  She shot him a look. “Seriously?”

  “And when hiding in buildings, most criminals stay near the outside walls.”

  The Suburban arced through a curve. “Wish I’d known that when I was with the Alameda Sheriff. Would have helped when I went through the door on a couple of meth lab raids.”

  He grinned. It made him seem not just fresh-faced, but impish. “File that tidbit away for tactical training. And pub quiz night.”

  She smiled. “You’re confident that data analysis can help unmask this UNSUB.”