by Meg Gardiner
The Suburban slammed to a stop. The telephone pole swayed. The SUV’s headlights glared into the street.
Caitlin braked, hard. Rainey was calling Emmerich’s name into the phone, calm but urgent.
He shouted back. “Keep going.”
Caitlin glimpsed him holding the wheel, checking the dash. He turned his head and pointed at her.
“Now,” he yelled. “I’ll rejoin. Go.”
Caitlin gave Emmerich a last brief look and gazed up the road. Nothing but red lights and open lanes. To the west, the bubble-wave of flashing blue was stringing out.
Rainey said, “Now, or he’ll get past us.”
Caitlin floored it.
The back end of the Suburban fishtailed. She straightened it out and raced up the street, running the red lights, checking peripherally for cross traffic, hoping the Suburban’s flashing light strip would alert other drivers.
The radio chatter had paused, nothing but dead air. That was an ominous sign.
“Right at the next light,” Rainey said.
Caitlin swung wide for the turn and cut close to the curb, veering onto a curving avenue.
“What’s ahead?” she said.
“Neighborhoods. A greenbelt. A park and playing fields.”
The streets tightened into a maze of crossroads and dead ends. On the radio, everything they heard suggested bad outcomes.
“He turned off the boulevard,” one pursuing deputy radioed.
“He’s on Reinhold. No—dead end …”
Through the radio they heard sirens. Cross talk. The pursuit was growing disorganized. The killer was dodging the cops.
Rainey peered at her navigation app, then the darkened street.
“Best guess,” Caitlin said. “Choose.”
“Right. Then left. No, that left.” Rainey pointed.
They were now navigating by a combination of phone app, last-known-location reports, 911 calls from drivers reporting crashes, and the wet, ever-nearer flash of blue and red lights in the night. Caitlin pushed the Suburban around a corner down a residential street. It was absolutely quiet, the houses lit by her flashing lights.
“What’s at the end of this road?” she said.
“Cut-through to the road where the main pursuit is. Go right.”
Caitlin hit the brakes and nearly slid around the corner. The road ran straight toward the mass of the flashing light storm.
A new voice broke into the radio cross talk—an agitated deputy.
“The suspect has abandoned his car. He’s fleeing on foot.”
Rainey cut into the radio chatter. “This is FBI Special Agent Brianne Rainey, in pursuit. What’s the location, and direction he’s running?”
The deputy yelled back the name of a nearby street. “He ran toward the park.”
“Do you have him in sight?”
“Negative.” His voice was young. He sounded like he’d been sprinting, though they knew he was at the wheel of his cruiser. They could hear the engine and siren.
Rainey aimed her hand at the windshield. “Forget hitting the main street. Left at the corner, that’s the street where he has to run to get into the park from this side.”
Caitlin gunned it around the corner and down the street. The road ended at darkened woods.
She screeched to a stop. No sign of a Jeep. No sign of the Midnight Man.
The agitated deputy’s voice came through. “It’s Ohlmeyer. I’m at the playing fields on the far side of the park. Rain’s so heavy, I need my headlights and side spot. I’m … hold on.”
They waited for a second, doors open, listening for the deputy to continue, but the radio went to static. Briefly locking eyes, Caitlin and Rainey jumped out of the Suburban.
The rain immediately soaked Caitlin, cold, blowing in her face in the gusting wind. They ran down a path under overhanging trees, weapons in their hands, flashlights aimed ahead. The mud was slick beneath Caitlin’s Doc Martens.
Rain pounded the overhead leaves. Branches bent to the wind. Caitlin’s breath feathered in front of her under the beam of her flashlight.
A hundred yards along the path, the trees opened. Ahead, white light poured across the ground—headlights. More diffusely, red and blue police lights popped in the rain. Slowing, they checked every direction. Rainey eyed their six. Caitlin listened for footsteps and rustling brush and hunted for shadows moving in an unnatural direction. Nothing.
All the intensity, the violence, the dark pursuit of this specter, gathered and permeated the air. He seemed a relentless scythe. Yet a vision of a young face floated behind Caitlin’s eyes—lost, striking out. Too young to buy a beer. Reloading, maybe. Her head buzzed.
Where are you?
Who are you?
They stepped from the tree-lined path.
They emerged onto a flooded football field. A sheriff’s car sat on the fifty-yard line, driver’s door open. A Crown Vic, high beams and side spot aimed downfield at the goal line. Raising their guns, Caitlin and Rainey advanced across the field.
Their shoes splashed, water soaking Caitlin’s legs. The cruiser’s engine was running, idling high.
The car was empty.
They were both breathing hard. They’d lost radio contact with the pursuit once they left the Suburban. Now they heard it from the deputy’s car. Rainey cast the beam of her flashlight at the grass by the open driver’s door. The field was submerged in two inches of water, but directly outside the door they saw clearly defined shoeprints, heavy tread, filled with mud. The shoeprints led away from the car.
“He jumped out.” Rainey turned her flashlight in the direction Deputy Ohlmeyer had apparently run.
Carefully, heads swiveling, they followed the footprints. Chewed up grass, glare of pooling water. The rain hammered them. They kept out of the direct beam of the cruiser’s headlights, trying to stay shadowed, knowing they were backlit to anybody lurking in the trees. Rainey’s shoulders rose and fell with every breath, but her Glock held steady.
Where the headlights faded, they found Ohlmeyer.
Face down, jacket starting to float. The water around him swirled red with blood. One gunshot wound to his back. Another to his head.
“Oh, God,” Rainey said.
They rolled Ohlmeyer over. Caitlin knelt at his side and pressed cold fingers to his neck. Felt no pulse. Above her, Rainey scanned the field. Caitlin grabbed the deputy’s shoulder-mounted radio.
“Officer down.”
Tearing her gaze from the young man’s lifeless face, she got to her feet. She and Rainey backed against each other, gaining 360-degree visibility, and swept their flashlights across the field, searching for the shooter. Nothing. Nobody moving.
Then, as Caitlin turned, her flashlight caught the gray reflection of stone. She inhaled.
Headstones. They were outside the entrance to a cemetery.
The buzzing returned to Caitlin’s head, overwhelming her thoughts, ringing in her ears. The killer was gone.
From the empty patrol car, the radio blared. “All units.”
She and Rainey returned to the car. Rainey leaned in and picked up the radio transmitter. The dispatcher’s cool voice was ragged along the edges.
“Suspect vehicle last sighted on Alamagne Drive.”
A new voice broke in to the cross talk. Emmerich.
“Am at the Alamagne Drive location,” he said. “The suspect’s vehicle is no longer there. Repeat, no longer there.”
Rainey hesitated before pushing the radio transmit button. She looked at the deputy’s body. Caitlin slumped against the cruiser. The Midnight Man had escaped.
30
The overhead lights in the war room were silver-white, mind-numbing, relentless. Caitlin stared at the whiteboard. She had a cup of coffee in her hand. When she took a swallow, she was surprised to find the cof
fee cold. How long had she been standing there?
She found the clock on the wall. It was three thirty a.m.
The room was bright and beyond dismal. The silver tinsel had fallen off one corner of the large-screen television and hung like a strangled snake. Across the floor, Solis was speaking to a group of LAPD brass. Caitlin didn’t recognize any of them except the commanding officer of Robbery-Homicide, who had come downtown in the deep of the night shortly before Christmas because events had turned desperate. The atmosphere was so jagged that Caitlin could practically hear it humming beneath the lights. Grief, and anger, and dread.
She stared into her paper coffee cup. The milk had curdled. She drank it anyway.
Her eyes burned from exhaustion. Her boots and jeans were wet, her shirt too, where the rain had sneaked down the back of her coat. Her hair stuck damply to her head.
The whiteboard, at which she was staring blankly, hadn’t been updated. None of tonight’s attacks had been added to the timeline. Stiffly, she walked to the board, uncapped a marker, and started to write her thoughts. The pen squeaked across the board.
The Midnight Man was escalating on multiple fronts.
His attacks were coming closer together.
He had crossed new boundary lines—he broke an age barrier, attacking an eighth grader. He attempted to kidnap the girl.
He killed a cop.
The marker hovered in her hand. She capped it and tossed it on the table. She didn’t need to write down the final twist.
The killer returned unseen to his vehicle. And he got away.
She felt a tap on the shoulder and turned abruptly.
Keyes handed her a long-sleeved T-shirt. “It’ll be too big, but it’s dry.”
An unexpected tightness squeezed her throat. “Thanks.”
Keyes’ Jack Russell energy was subdued. He was normally both enthusiastic and patient, confident that if he fed data into his program and let the software digest its meal, the answer to the problem he was working would appear, crisp and clear and statistically significant. But tonight he looked at sea.
He read her scribbled list on the whiteboard. “It doesn’t lead us closer to him, does it?”
She shook her head.
“I have to do something,” she said. “If I write it down, maybe an answer will pour out through my fingertips when I can’t consciously see the solution.” She stared at the words on the board, and her eyes unfocused. “I …”
She cleared her throat. Across the room, the LAPD brass headed toward the door, heads together, talking in low tones. Solis dropped into his desk chair and ran a hand over his face.
Caitlin turned to Keyes. “I should have known what he was capable of. But I didn’t.”
A wave swept through her, cold and terrible. They were up against somebody darker than she had ever encountered.
“The UNSUB is ramping up at an exponential rate,” she said. “His inhibitions are dropping. His bloodlust is increasing. Cops are now his targets.” Her voice cracked. She breathed again. “And he won’t hold off harming young children forever.”
Keyes’ fierce eyes revealed a pain she hadn’t seen before. It was fear. She should have been able to reassure him, to present a confident attitude. Team spirit. But Keyes’ expression shook her even further.
In her peripheral vision she saw Rainey come through the door with Emmerich. Rainey’s shirt and pants were as wet as Caitlin’s. Emmerich looked worn and frustrated.
She straightened, though she felt unmoored. “Glad you’re all right.”
Emmerich waved away her concern. “No injuries, no damage to the other car. The Suburban’s still drivable. But …”
He pressed his lips white and rubbed his watchband. He didn’t say more. But I wasn’t there soon enough.
Keyes reached into his computer bag and handed Rainey a T-shirt. “Get warm.”
Her face softened with gratitude.
Emmerich eyed the whiteboard. “The deputy apparently knew the park well. So well that he almost succeeded in cutting the UNSUB off when he abandoned his vehicle and ran into the trees.” He shook his head. “But for whatever reason, Ohlmeyer stopped his cruiser in the middle of the field. He got out without being aware that the killer had circled around behind him in the dark. The rain, the engine noise, the adrenaline …”
“The killer wasn’t cornered,” Rainey said. “He didn’t shoot the deputy as self-preservation.” She turned to her colleagues. “Ohlmeyer pursued the Midnight Man to the field, but the killer had a clear path of escape. More than a clear path. Ohlmeyer had lost sight of him. All the UNSUB had to do was run through the cemetery. But he didn’t. He circled around behind the deputy and shot him in the back.” She shook her head. “This wasn’t desperation. It was escalation.”
Behind Emmerich, a figure stormed through the door. Dark hair, darker eyes, wet LASD windbreaker. Detective Alvarez. He aimed straight for the BAU team.
As the expression on Caitlin’s face changed, Emmerich, Rainey, and Keyes all turned.
Alvarez pointed at them. “All your fancy profiling, and you didn’t see this coming.”
The other task force detectives in the room stopped what they were doing. Alvarez came at the FBI group like a freight train.
“Shoveling bullshit about the guy being an officer’s kid,” he said. “You thought the police car vandalism was harmless.”
He practically vibrated, like a machine that was revving out of control, with all the subsurface elements about to shake loose. But it had been a Sheriff’s deputy floating facedown on the football field. Caitlin knew he was seeking a target for his anguish.
Didn’t make it feel any better. Or fair. It felt like shrapnel hitting her in the heart.
“Harmless. You thought him using a slingshot meant it was a joke. That he’d never go after an officer. That he wouldn’t dare. Wrong,” Alvarez said.
Emmerich stepped toward him. “I don’t know if the vandalism was a prelude or a harbinger. But I’m sorry.”
“Fuck sorry.”
Everybody was watching. Nobody moved.
“A deputy’s dead.” Red-faced, Alvarez jabbed an accusing finger at Emmerich, then swept it at the rest of the team.
“Useless,” he yelled. “Worse.”
Emmerich held the detective’s gaze, unshakable, waiting for a moment to speak. Detective Solis approached and put a hand on Alvarez’s back. Alvarez shook it off, raised both hands, and stalked out the door.
The air seemed to shimmer with leftover vitriol. Solis merely raised a hand and shook his head.
“I know,” Emmerich said.
Keyes’ hands hung uselessly at his sides. Rainey said, “Back at it.” She took the T-shirt Keyes had given to her and headed to the women’s room to change.
Caitlin felt a strange weight pressing on her shoulders. It was emotional, she knew, but it felt like a lead apron, and standing up under its weight seemed staggering.
She grabbed her empty coffee cup and, unable to speak, raised it with a question on her face. Keyes and Emmerich shook their heads. She headed out the door in the general direction of the vending machine.
In the hall, with the cold lights reflecting against the empty darkness outside, she threw the cup in the trash and shoved through the fire door to the stairwell. The invisible lead apron was heated. She needed to get it off of her, get rid of the strangling heat and deathly weight. On the ground floor she banged through the doors into the night.
The cold enveloped her, a shock. The rain was still coming down. She walked away from the vibrantly lit building, down the sidewalk, past dark palm trees. The streets glistened black and green and red with reflected traffic lights. She needed to calm down. She was going to be here all night, all day if it took that, and she needed to regroup and get her shit together.
She reached a small outdoor park
ing lot, slowed, and turned her face to the rain. After a minute, the lead apron no longer felt hot. Her hair and shirt were soaked through. The weight remained.
Parked nearby in the lot was Emmerich’s dented Suburban. The back end was a shiny mess of crumples and scraped paint, a half-torn bumper. She peered back at the building. Lights ablaze, catching her. She walked around to the far side of the Suburban and leaned against it.
Cool. The hell. Off.
The building’s lights reflected from the SUV’s side mirror. The glass had a crack in it. She saw herself: hot-eyed, ashamed, enraged.
She was more than ever convinced the killer was a cop’s kid.
Like her. Raised in Blue World, from day one. Bathed in it, baptized, submerged in it.
He was like a dark, fissured reflection of her.
Cop World. Dad in the morning, putting on his aftershave and his Smith & Wesson .38. Watching him and loving it, feeling the pride, always hearing the needle of worry beneath her mom’s send-off: Be safe.
Good times, Dad walking her through the sheriff’s station, holding her hand, introducing her to his colleagues. Bad times. Dad drunk and raging. Mack Hendrix, senior homicide detective, losing it, in public, at Sizzler, because the case from hell was scooping out his insides. Because the case had taken a physical toll on him that nobody would realize for decades. Caitlin with her fork in her hand, food in her mouth that she all at once thought would choke her. Mack backhanding his drink from the table. Hearing it shatter on the floor. Her mom moving to clean it up, and Mack saying, sharp as a rifle crack, “Leave it, Sandy.”
The glass wasn’t what Sandy Hendrix left. Eventually, Mack was.
And across the Sizzler that night, two of her classmates had been watching.
Later, at school, those schoolmates snarked to their clique, within her earshot, about Captain Crazy.
Now, the rain hit Caitlin’s shoulders, a fall of icy needles. She felt alone, as alone as at that moment in school.
The odds of solving this case were far worse than she had imagined. And it wasn’t just the killer who was ahead of them. With tension eating through the task force, capturing the UNSUB would be harder than ever.
