The Dark Corners of the Night

by Meg Gardiner

  Now, Caitlin thought the woman must have had an inkling. She knew what was coming and was trying to stop it. The explosion left little of her to autopsy. Toxicology had struggled for results. Metabolites of what could be hallucinogens.

  In the final instant, the RN saw wires protruding from a package that lay flush against the patient’s spine. The wires ran up her back to her arms, where they intertwined with the barbed wire.

  The scene was etched into Caitlin’s retinas. The resident, tall and tired and bent entirely to the task in front of him. The nurse at his side, holding the patient’s arm still as the woman tried to jerk it away from the wire cutters. The RN who saw the danger, frantically throwing herself across the exam table at the resident, mouth wide. Yelling, Caitlin was sure, “Don’t!”

  And in the corner of the video, a tiny sliver of the view beyond the ER bay, a woman moving into frame. Small and coiled and competent, raspberry scrubs, a stethoscope draped around her neck. Michele, turning the corner, walking straight at unfolding disaster.

  The time stamp on the video, 19:49:50.6, was frozen in Caitlin’s mind. The wish. The hopeless dread, the if only. One second sooner. If the RN had been taller, her arm longer, the resident less focused on the few square inches of flesh and barbed wire before him. Maybe, then.

  19:49:50.7.

  The flash. Static. Black screen.

  The people in the ER bay died instantly. The patient, two nurses, the resident. Another patient and a hospital orderly died within the same second, when the blast wave and fire blew over them at 3,400 feet per second. High explosives gave no quarter.

  You couldn’t outrun them, not like in the movies. The explosion propagated faster than the speed of sound. You couldn’t dive away from blooming red flames, balletically spinning in slow motion. Before that thought could spread from one synapse to the next, you had been swallowed by the detonation.

  It was a miracle that Michele had survived. Everybody said so.

  Caitlin didn’t believe in miracles. She believed in luck and preparation and Tier 1 emergency response. But this, she thought—Michele sitting on the sofa beside her—might qualify. Might need to be submitted to the Vatican, credited to some saint-in-waiting.

  Caitlin’s throat tightened. She scavenged her emotions and shoved them into a back pocket, crumpled and messy.

  New security measures at Temescal were good. Because something more than frustration, more than injustice or the lack of “closure,” ate at her and had to gnaw Michele to the bone. It was lingering fear.

  Who was the bomber? Where was he now? When would he strike again?

  Michele grabbed a handful of chips and slumped back. The house was quiet. Sadie was with Sean. She’d been with Sean most of the time since the bombing.

  “I’m getting there,” Michele said, though Caitlin hadn’t asked a question. “It’s coming back into focus an inch at a time. Not a day at a time. An hour. A minute. I’m holding on.”

  “How’s work?”

  Michele was doing a desk job. Limited hours. Temescal had been good about that.

  “Calm. Placid. It’s paperwork. Data entry. HIPAA compliance. Nothing requiring me to move fast or make fateful decisions,” she said. “I hate it.”

  “You never were the soothing-music type.”

  “I miss the ER,” she said and stopped. “I mean, we all miss it.”

  It was gone. Temescal was open, because it was a major hospital for the Oakland-Berkeley metro, but the new ER was months from completion. Right now it was a construction site.

  Michele’s eyes welled. “I thought walking into Temescal would get easier after the first day. But it only gets harder.” She clenched her fists. “Nine dead, forty-eight injured, no arrests, no claims of responsibility. The bomber’s kicking back somewhere, laughing at us.”

  Michele had dropped the pseudo-relaxed attitude. Her eyes were shiny. Caitlin noticed that the town house wasn’t merely tidy. Michele was keeping surfaces clean, sight lines clear, destroying reminders of everything she couldn’t currently do. Neither of them said PTSD, but they didn’t need to. Michele was hypervigilant and being eaten away.

  Caitlin took her hand. “The cops and ATF are going balls-out to catch this guy.”

  “Sean is practically obsessed.” Michele hung on. “Do you think it’s the Ghost?”

  Caitlin felt a sick chill. It’s my greatest fear.

  She put an arm around Michele and pulled her close. “There’s no evidence for that.”

  Her friend felt like a wounded cat under her embrace, shivering and ready to pounce.

  Caitlin left Michele with a plate of food she’d heated, the television on, and her evening meds parceled out. She embraced her tightly and kissed her cheek and Michele said, “Hug my girl for me tonight.”

  Caitlin got in her cheap rental car and headed across Berkeley toward the bay. She glimpsed the firefly sunset on the water, and the glorious sparkle of San Francisco beyond it. To the east the sky was bluing to black.

  As she pulled around the corner into Sean’s neighborhood, she still felt unsettled and downbeat. The narrow street was lined with parked pickups and hybrids, crowded with houses, illuminated by warm lights behind living room windows. Sean’s front yard was just large enough for a single orange tree. His F-150 took up the entire driveway. The gingerbread eaves of the Victorian house glowed red, blue, and green with Christmas lights. It didn’t soothe her, not after seeing Michele’s state, not enough.

  Not until she parked and climbed out, carrying Thai takeout in brown paper bags, and spotted the curtains in the front window dropping back into place did she begin to calm. She strolled up the walk to the front steps as the door blew open and Sadie blasted out.

  “Cat!”

  The little girl leaped on her like a monkey. Caitlin tried to hold onto her while keeping a grasp on the takeout. She didn’t need to worry. Sadie’s grip was wiry and relentless. Her hair smelled like watermelon shampoo. Her arms squeezed Caitlin’s neck tight, hard enough to choke, but Caitlin didn’t care.

  Sean appeared in the doorway, backlit by amber light.

  “What did you bring to eat?” Sadie said. “Is it pot stickers? Pad Thai? I’m starving.”

  “All that and green curry too,” Caitlin said.

  Sean ambled out and pried Sadie loose. He propped her on one hip, smiling. With his free arm he grabbed Caitlin and twirled her. Caitlin laughed.

  He slowed, his face close to hers. “’Bout time you got here.”

  She kissed him. The world folded around her shoulders, stars and night and life and his smile and heat enclosing them, surrounding her with everything she needed right then.

  Later, after she tucked Sadie into bed and told her a story, after she kissed the little girl good night and jogged down the narrow stairs, she and Sean shrugged into their coats and headed to the backyard. Sean lit a firepit. Bathed by its orange heat, they sat under the stars and let the cold night settle around them. Sean poured tequila shots.

  “Michele’s hanging in there,” Caitlin said. “But it kills me to see her struggling so hard.”

  “There’s trauma counseling for the survivors. Took her a while to agree to it, and I had to drag her into the first group session like pulling a stubborn bulldog by the leash.” He warmed the shot glass in his hands. “She’s nails, that one.”

  The fire heated Caitlin’s face. She didn’t react to Sean’s remarks. She felt that wisp of unease, deep inside, about his feelings for Michele.

  But she was the one who had brought it up, and knew Sean needed to talk about the case. They both wanted to. It was like sharing a needle. Their fix.

  “How’d your week play out?” she said.

  “Couple of leads we got from the wholesaler who sold the wiring for the Temescal bomb might be solid,” he said. “We’re digging, even if the bomber’s still a pha
ntom.”

  The bombing campaign went back fifteen months and led from New York City to Monterey, San Francisco, and Oakland. On the map, it seemed to coil in a spiral—like the barbed wire that had been wrapped around the Temescal Hospital victim.

  “Could be anybody,” he said.

  The first two bombs, planted at New York Presbyterian Hospital and outside the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, had been pressure-cooker-type devices that used hydrogen peroxide. The lethal devices that exploded at a biotech firm in San Francisco and at Temescal had not only been packed with screws and razor blades but used PETN and boosted TNT.

  High explosives weren’t easy to come by. You couldn’t grab the ingredients off the shelf at Home Depot. And wiring bombs wasn’t like plugging in your toaster. Sure, some amateurs got away with it, but others ended up in bits, plastered against their basement walls.

  Sean downed his tequila shot. “Anybody. But the Ghost knows explosives.”

  The Ghost had lured Sean to an abandoned warehouse on a false tip about stolen blasting material. After sabotaging the explosives in the BART tunnel, he left Sean near death on a train platform.

  The problem: Sean had no memory of the man who set him up. All he had was a spooky sense of déjà vu that overcame him when he saw grainy security videos of the bomber. A figure in a black full-length duster, hoodie, and sunglasses. Five nine, possibly Caucasian. Sex indeterminate.

  Caitlin had seen the Ghost once, in person, without knowing who he was. A skinny young guy walking past her in a dusty bar, heels of his boots scraping on the wood floor, giving her a stony side-eye. She’d been in his presence for a few creepy seconds. White, skeevy, cold.

  The skeevy and cold parts could have been camouflage.

  “The Ghost is a parasite,” Caitlin said. “He found the Prophet and piggybacked onto his crimes, then betrayed him. I don’t know whether he’d instigate a new series of murders on his own.”

  “He said he’d bring you down. The bombings could be part of that plan,” Sean said. “After all, here you are.”

  Caitlin felt a surge of guilt. “If I’d caught him on the BART platform that night …”

  “You didn’t even know he existed that night.”

  “But I was there. And he escaped,” she said. “And now he’s loose.”

  Sean’s voice quieted. “I was there too.”

  He gazed into the fire, maybe beyond, and back. The light flickered on his face, orange, hot. Caitlin realized the weight he was bearing.

  She set down her shot glass, got up, and straddled his lap. She brushed his cheek with her fingers and took his hand.

  “Anything I can do to help. Anything you need,” she said.

  “I need you.” He pulled her close and wrapped his arms around her waist. “And I need you to remember that you’re not alone.”

  She rested her forehead against his. She shut her eyes.

  “You took your badge off,” he said, “but it doesn’t matter. I can tell that the Midnight Man’s spinning through your head. You’re running scenarios backward and forward, ten dozen ways. Working every angle.” He tightened his arms around her. “You can talk.”

  With her eyes closed, she could hear him breathe. She could scent the wood smoke from the firepit. Could shiver from the heat of the flames. She could feel the sureness of Sean’s embrace. She could let go, just a little, knowing that he would hold on.

  She could taste the tequila on his lips when she kissed him.

  Sean poured them each another shot. “I mean it. Your mind’s full of this. Your veins. I can feel your pulse beneath your skin. Tell me what’s going on with the case.”

  She held back only another second. “This guy is like nothing I’ve ever dealt with. Any of us. Including Emmerich and some senior LAPD Robbery-Homicide detectives.”

  She told him everything—the killer’s fascination with eyes, his paranoia, the eerie videos, the vandalism of police cars. It poured out, electric. Talking to Sean was cathartic. But it was more than that. It was an opportunity to slide under his skin, to pump his veins full of everything too. It was a wish for insight.

  “The eyes,” Sean said. “Are they his ‘legion?’ Who are they watching? Who’s supposed to see?”

  “I don’t know. He kills sleeping mothers and fathers with absolute brutality. The police car attacks are petty in comparison,” she said. “He’s striking out at authority. But it’s bizarre.”

  “Daddy. Mommy. The Man,” Sean said. “This guy wants them all dead. But he’s scared of facing the cops. So he hides and torments them with this childish game.”

  Parents and cops. Caitlin’s stomach lurched. The smoke that had clouded her thoughts about the killer abruptly seemed to clear.

  “You’re right. Jesus.” She stood up. “Sean. What if he’s a cop’s son?”

  22

  At her family’s home in Bay Rise, Hannah Guillory lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. Her parents and four-year-old brother were asleep. So was their cat, Silky, burrowed against her shoulder. But Hannah was extremely awake.

  She could hear traffic on the 110 freeway. And somebody’s dog barking down the street. The shadows of the trees brushed back and forth across the walls. She pressed her Fitbit. 12:52 a.m. She wanted to stay awake, but it was boring. And spooky. Her stomach was twisty. Also, she was hungry.

  She got up. Without turning on the lights, she tiptoed past her parents’ room to the kitchen for a glass of milk. The house smelled like their Christmas tree. Wind rustled the bushes. It was unusually dark outside. The streetlight was out.

  She opened the refrigerator and got out the milk, blinking against the glare of the fridge light. It cast its shine on the sliding glass doors and patio beyond.

  And she saw it. Out there. A shadow. Man shaped.

  She slammed the fridge door. Her heart pounded. Had she imagined the shadow?

  Her eyes adjusted. The shadow stood there, facing her. Tall, skinny, motionless.

  Her legs went stringy, like puppet legs.

  Hoodie. Brim of a ball cap. The same as the killer on the video the police had shown on TV.

  Real, it was real, of course it was, just like she knew it would be. He wasn’t her imagination. She didn’t move. If she moved, her puppet legs would noodle and she’d fall tangled to the floor. She locked her knees.

  He had to have seen the light from the fridge. He knew she was there. He knew the family was home.

  If he was the Midnight Man, that would make him want to break in. Because the Midnight Man crept neighborhoods sniffing for houses where families lived, so he could slither through cracks in the windows and walls to murder moms and dads.

  He stepped toward the sliding glass doors. Hannah stifled a cry and ducked behind the kitchen island. He shook the door handle. It was locked.

  Hannah peered around for a way to escape the kitchen without him seeing her. She couldn’t. The sliding glass doors were clean and shiny. That was her chore—to wipe the doors down. Clean off dust and smears and little handprints. The doors were spotless and gave a perfect view of the room.

  Crouched behind the island, she whispered, “Go away, go away.”

  Outside, footsteps moved across the patio toward the corner of the house. Fingernails scraped the stucco wall. He was rounding the corner to try the window over the kitchen sink.

  Hannah tucked herself into a ball. Go away …

  Behind her, a small sleepy voice said, “Hannah, you spilled your milk.”

  Her head popped up. Her little brother Charlie stood nearby, his blanket trailing on the floor.

  The starry night glittered in Charlie’s eyes. Outside, the scraping fingernails stopped. The shadow appeared outside the kitchen window.

  Hannah swept Charlie into her arms and pulled him against the counter out of sight.

  He inhaled in surpr
ise. She pressed a hand over his mouth. Shook her head frantically.

  Was the window locked? Her dad had checked the doors earlier, tugging on every lock to make sure it was secure. But the windows?

  Their house didn’t have a burglar alarm. Didn’t have flood lights or cameras or a guard dog. They had Dad, and Mom, and Silky, who had claws but didn’t respond to commands, wasn’t an attack cat, and Hannah squeezed Charlie with tears stinging her eyes and please please let the window be locked.

  The man popped the screen and shoved the sash. The window didn’t budge.

  Hannah clutched Charlie. Felt his confusion, felt him catching her fear.

  Her legs were paper. Her throat was a straw. But the Midnight Man was right there. Charlie was in danger and hiding here wouldn’t save him. They had to get out of the kitchen.

  “Follow me,” she whispered. Charlie whimpered.

  They inched along the counter. Risking exposure, she pulled him across the floor and under the kitchen table.

  She caught her breath. The noise at the window had stopped. Was he gone? Or was he standing there, waiting, hoping to fool her into crawling into the open?

  Tiny voice. “We’re going to run to Mom and Dad’s room. On three.” She held up her fingers. “One.”

  She heard a sound in the laundry room. Horrified, she peeked.

  An arm snaked through the cat door and reached for the doorknob.

  She grabbed Charlie and bolted. The house was so dark and the Christmas tree was a looming tower and she ran past, and she couldn’t breathe, and Charlie was running beside her, his little hand in hers, and she ran, the hallway like a telescope collapsing in front of her. She burst into her parents’ bedroom.

  “Call 911!”

  Startled from sleep, her parents rolled slowly under the covers.

  Charlie broke into tears. Hannah hit the light switch. The ceiling light came on harsh white.

  “Call 911 now now he’s here the Midnight Man call 911 hurry he’s getting in now!”

  Her mom was squinting and sleepy but all at once rose like a cobra and grabbed the phone. Hannah hugged Charlie tight as his cries turned long and loud. Her dad flew out of the bed in his boxers, hair crazy straight up. He reached down and grabbed a baseball bat from under the bed.