The Dark Corners of the Night

by Meg Gardiner

  Caitlin said, “She told me she’s been wearing her clothes to bed and trying to stay awake like a sentry.”

  “That may explain the hammer we found on the floor in her room.”

  Oh, girl.

  “Good chance the phone could be in her pocket,” the cop said. His gaze flicked to the backyard. “Or at least that it was when he took her out the window.”

  The officer’s face was drawn. Caitlin knew why. Nobody had searched the attic. Nobody had considered the possibility that the Midnight Man could have been hiding up there.

  “Got it,” Dave shouted.

  Hands shaking, he pulled out his own phone, bent over the desk, and peered back and forth between a Post-it and his screen, typing.

  After a couple of shaky wrong entries, his breath left him in a rush. “Here.”

  He handed Solis his cell. In the center of the screen, overlaid on a map, was a throbbing red dot.

  Solis nearly swelled with urgency. He lifted a portable police radio to his lips.

  “All units.” He rattled off the location of the cell phone.

  Mina jumped up from the sofa and clamped her hands around Dave’s arm. Pain, hope, and fear poured from Dave in waves. Caitlin felt a sick ache for them. Less than forty-eight hours earlier, she’d become alarmed when Hannah disappeared for ten minutes—at the headquarters of the LAPD. Tonight, Hannah had been swept into a vast and voracious darkness. With the most indiscriminately violent killer Caitlin had ever confronted. How the Guillorys were holding it together, or simply standing, she couldn’t conceive.

  Charlie slid off the couch and padded over, blanket trailing. He leaned against his father and wrapped his arms around Dave’s leg.

  Dave stared at the throbbing red dot. “They on their way?”

  “Multiple units are on their way,” Solis said.

  Dave nodded. Caitlin, however, pressed her lips tight. On the map, the red dot pulsed, but didn’t move.

  Dave scraped his knuckles across his forehead. “I’m going to the location.”

  “Let our officers handle this,” Solis said. “Please.”

  “I can’t sit here. I’m going.”

  Solis put a hand on Dave’s shoulder. “It’s safer for everybody to let us do this. For you, our officers, and Hannah.”

  Dave clenched his fists, took a breath, and stalked to the window. The radio squawked.

  “We found it,” a staticky voice said.

  Dave spun back around. Mina grabbed his hand. Solis turned and walked out the front door.

  The Guillorys looked stricken.

  Caitlin knew that Solis wanted to hear the news, no matter what it was, out of their earshot. Dave and Mina started after him. Caitlin put a hand on Mina’s arm to stop her.

  “Give Solis a minute.”

  Mina tried to shake her off. “That’s my daughter out there. Not his.”

  “But it’s a police operation, and he needs to focus. Let him do his job, which is to reduce the danger to Hannah. One minute.”

  Thinking, the cop on the radio said it. Not her. And the pulsing red dot hadn’t moved an inch.

  Though tormented, Mina relented. On the front porch, Solis stood heavily, staring into the distance, listening to the report from the responding officers. Raising a finger, Caitlin asked Mina to stay inside. She stepped out, pulled the door shut, and drew near enough to Solis to hear the voice of a cop at the scene.

  “Laying in the dirt a few feet off the roadway. Face is smashed up pretty bad.”

  Caitlin’s legs went stringy.

  “We’ll bring it in. Maybe the tech guys can recover data from this thing.”

  Caitlin put a hand against the wall of the house, hoping it wouldn’t be obvious that she was steadying herself. Silently praying into the deep. Thank you. But, please …

  She saw Emmerich, Keyes, and Rainey jump out of a Suburban and jog across the lawn toward them.

  Caitlin stepped toward Solis. “If your techs want backup, Keyes is the man. He can get anything broken to sing like an opera star.”

  Solis nodded. “Bring the phone in. Immediately.”

  Caitlin waved to Keyes. “You’re up.”

  Solis eyed her. “Phone was thrown onto the roadside three miles from here, at an on-ramp to the Artesia freeway. You read that like I do?”

  She nodded. “It took the UNSUB that long to figure out Hannah had the phone on her. He was focused on other things until then. And pitching it out the car window instead of destroying it sends us a message.”

  “He doesn’t plan to use it to communicate.”

  “He is communicating. The Midnight Man’s telling us he has her, and more. He’s saying, ‘I could be taking her anywhere. You’ll never find me.’”

  Solis’ exhaustion was evident from the gray scale of his skin. Caitlin took a calming breath.

  “You get to tell the Guillorys we think Hannah’s alive,” she said. “That’s everything they need to know right now.”

  39

  The screen of Hannah’s phone was cracked, the glass riven and spidery. The charging port had been choked with mud. But in the Electronics Unit of the LAPD’s Technical Investigation Division, Keyes and one of the LAPD’s techs had laid the phone on a workbench under high-wattage strip lights. When Caitlin walked in, they were bent over it like neurosurgeons massaging a tiny brain back to life.

  The electronics lab reminded Caitlin of the garages of Silicon Valley coders and hardware wizards she knew, packed with laptops, snaking cables, HD screens, soldering irons, and the confident air of swashbuckling nerdmanship. Hannah’s phone was connected to power, and as Caitlin hovered, Keyes played with the keyboard. The LAPD tech, a young Latino man in a maroon dress shirt, said, “Now.”

  Keyes hit a command. The phone’s screen lit with a logo.

  “Okay.”

  The tech was calm, but his voice was breathless. Keyes nearly shouted.

  He caught the question in Caitlin’s eyes. “Don’t even breathe. This thing’s on life support.”

  “I’m not even thinking loud thoughts.”

  It took five more minutes of delicate resuscitation. As they worked, Caitlin dimly heard a helicopter lift off from the heliport on the roof of the building. Then the tech abandoned the forced calm.

  “Holy shit,” he said.

  The phone was failing, but they’d goosed it enough to download its contents to another drive. Keyes mirrored it to a desktop screen and displayed the phone’s most recent activity.

  “Double holy shit,” Caitlin said.

  “High holy shit,” Keyes said.

  Hannah had snapped a photo. It showed a dashboard—from the front passenger seat.

  “She was in that vehicle.” Caitlin saw the time stamp. “Had to be just a minute or two after the UNSUB took her.”

  She wanted to yell. Wanted to grab the phone and kiss it, to keep herself from slumping over the table and shaking.

  The Midnight Man had unquestionably taken Hannah with him alive.

  The photo was blurry, poorly exposed. Caitlin could barely grasp the audacity it took to attempt the shot. The killer must have quickly seen what Hannah had done, or tried to do, and thrown the phone out the window.

  But did he know she had actually snapped the photo? Wouldn’t he have deleted it if he had?

  “I think he saw her holding the phone and figured she was trying to call 911, or her parents. Grabbed it from her and chucked it out of the vehicle.”

  On the desktop, Keyes was manipulating the photo to improve the exposure and resolution.

  He brought up the gain. “Vehicle’s manufacturer logo is on the steering wheel. It’s a Jeep.”

  The LAPD tech swung a laptop around and searched for images of Jeep dashboards. It took him less than a minute. “Renegade.”

  Caitli
n was on her own phone, texting the task force.

  “There’s a parking sticker on the windshield,” Keyes said. “Hard to isolate because the steering wheel’s in the way, and there’s exterior glare on the glass. But …”

  The tech leaned over Keyes’ shoulder. “Sharpen it. There.”

  The image on the screen turned etched, and distorted. But legible. Distinct, and indisputable.

  RVHS.

  Above the letters was the logo of a high school mascot—a hawk.

  “It’s the UNSUB’s SUV,” Caitlin said.

  The tech craned his neck. “Alter the focus.”

  Keyes zoomed out. In the windshield was a reflection of the driver. Male. Dirty blond, hoodie, ball cap. Caitlin’s skin prickled.

  “And that,” she said, “is the Midnight Man.”

  Buzzed on an electric thread of hope, Caitlin and Keyes drove back to LAPD headquarters as every law enforcement agency in Los Angeles County got the word: be on the lookout for a late model Jeep Renegade. Inside, Caitlin grabbed a cup of coffee. As she was returning to the war room, her phone rang. She pulled it from her pocket.

  sean rawlins.

  “Hey.” She heard the rush of energy in her own voice—and the note of surprise at hearing from him.

  “Want you to have a heads up,” he said.

  Engine noise nearly obscured his voice. Turboprop engines. His tone sent her veering to the windows, where she’d have a bit of privacy.

  “Sounds like you’re on the move,” she said.

  “On a taxiway lining up for takeoff. Not going to get airmiles for this one.”

  She stood at the window. The street below was streaming with vehicles, headlights a white flow. Sean was telling her he was on a government flight. His obliqueness told her to hold the news close to the vest.

  “The case?” she said.

  “Team-building trip to Garlock. SRT will meet us there.”

  She knew Garlock. She’d driven through. It was a Mojave Desert ghost town—a collection of played-out miners’ shacks fifty miles north of Edwards Air Force Base. Garlock was tumbleweeds and hills and brown, brown, brown to the desiccated horizon. And it was sunbaked desert rats who built crazy scrap-lumber cabins and God knows what kind of home-brewed fortresses back in the canyons and gullies.

  SRT was the ATF’s Special Response Team. Their tactical unit.

  The urge to know was like an irresistible salt taste on her tongue. “Whatcha got?”

  “The lab completed their chemical analysis of the last two bombs,” Sean said. “Managed to identify a detection taggant. EDGN.”

  Caitlin tried to recall—in the United States, EDGN was added to Semtex, among other high explosives. “US manufacture. Obtained in the country.”

  “They also identified sourcing for components of the Temescal bomb, including its detonator and barbed wire.”

  She put a hand against the window. The glass was cold. “What are you searching for out there, Sean?”

  “We have a name.”

  The noise on his end flared. The plane sounded like it was beginning its takeoff roll.

  “Going to lose the call in a second,” he said. “But want you to know. We have a suspect. We’re on our way to a remote cabin he owns.”

  Caitlin’s mouth felt dry. She inhaled slowly, feeling a powerful sense of excitement. And concern.

  And she realized what had been nagging at her earlier in the evening. “The barbed wire,” she said. “It’s not just his signature. It has to symbolize a manifesto. He’ll use it again.” She kept her voice level. “Watch for booby traps. Stay safe.”

  “Plan to.” He paused. “Talk to you afterward.”

  Her heart felt wrapped in thorns. Sean had been working toward this, toward something like this, for what seemed an endless age. It had half eaten his gut. He didn’t need her to send him off with only a caution.

  “Get him, Sean.”

  “You too, Cat.”

  It was as close to declarations of love as they would get when surrounded by cops and federal agents in the deep of a deadly night. She ended the call.

  As she lowered the phone, voices rose across the room. She turned from the soothing cool of the windows. Detective Weisbach beckoned. Caitlin jogged to her desk.

  Weisbach jabbed a finger at her computer. “I found the mascot logo. Rio Vista High.”

  The Rio Vista Hawks. The school logo was the swooping profile of the bird, red against a black field—the school colors Hannah had identified on the UNSUB’s sweatshirt.

  Weisbach pulled up a map. Keyes crowded in. Rio Vista High was in the east end of the San Fernando Valley, less than ten miles from where they stood.

  Keyes said, “It’s in the northern buffer zone of the geographic profile.”

  At another desk, Detective Alvarez shouted. “Got it. ID’d the Jeep Renegade. And its owner.”

  The energy in the room rose so abruptly that the overhead lights seemed to flare. Alvarez put up a photo on the big-screen TV.

  “Hayden Maddox.”

  The photo was of a driver’s license, but Alvarez read from a rap sheet.

  “Maddox has a petty criminal record. Shoplifting. Theft from a vehicle. Breaking and entering. Vandalism.” He shot a glance at Keyes. “We cross-referenced him against the thirty-seven names on your preliminary suspect list.”

  Caitlin walked toward the screen. The photo showed a Caucasian face. Bright blue eyes transfixed by the blare of the DMV flash camera. Blanked of personality. Blond.

  Keyes’ voice floated behind her. “Cross-referenced against … oh.”

  Caitlin heard Keyes pause, but didn’t turn. She kept walking toward the screen, trying to see into the photo, those eyes, that glowing, unknowable face.

  “He’s the son of an LAPD officer,” Keyes said. “Plainclothes with the Burglary/Pawn Unit. Gretchen Maddox.”

  Caitlin stopped in front of the screen. Alvarez approached.

  “He’s a sophomore at the high school,” he said.

  Caitlin read his date of birth on the driver’s license. Hayden Maddox was sixteen.

  40

  The convoy pulled out: the LAPD Robbery-Homicide detectives, Alvarez and his Sheriff’s Department partner, the BAU agents. SWAT was coordinating. They would lead the entry at the residence of Hayden Maddox—a modest ranch home in the Valley owned by his parents, Gretchen and Robert.

  Emmerich drove, grave and focused, rolling hard behind Solis up the 101 through Cahuenga Pass. He, Rainey, and Caitlin wore ballistic vests. Glocks holstered, Remington 870 loaded. No lights, no sirens. Radio silence. No bulletins or alerts, not yet. Nothing to tip the public, the media—and especially the suspect—that an operation was in progress to arrest the Midnight Man.

  Riding shotgun, Caitlin scrolled through Hayden Maddox’s records. Pages and pages of information, glowing with unearthly intensity from her screen in the Suburban’s dim interior. The SUV ate up the road as they crested the pass and descended into the electric shimmer of the Valley.

  Hayden’s record went back to grade school.

  Truancy. Chronic truancy.

  Arrests. For setting fire to a middle school trashcan. For shoplifting candy bars and condoms from a 7-Eleven.

  “How old when he stole the condoms?” Rainey said from the backseat.

  “Thirteen,” Caitlin said. “Don’t know if he actually had a girlfriend or just thought he might eventually have sex. Either way, it says something about him. Possibly that he was paranoid about getting an STD. Or that a girl who got pregnant would have power over him.”

  She continued reading. Dropped charges. Juvenile court diversion programs.

  Apology letters. Dear Principal Nguyen, I am very sorry for my immature and destructive behavior after the eighth grade dance last week. I have learned my lesson.


  Counseling. Anger management.

  Probation. Restitution. Community service.

  Caitlin read aloud, and between the lines: Hayden Maddox was a kid out of control, playing the system, getting breaks every time he turned around.

  Rainey said it for all of them. “Because he’s a cop’s son.”

  The Maddox neighborhood could have been lifted from a ’70s sitcom about a white-bread suburban family. Edged lawns. Rose trellises. Illuminated Nativity scenes and rooftops atwinkle with flying plastic reindeer.

  LAPD vehicles blocked both ends of the street and SWAT silently, invisibly, deployed. Caitlin climbed from the Suburban into bracingly cold air.

  The Maddox house was dark. There was no sign of the Jeep Renegade.

  Nobody answered the bell. But inside, they heard a cry that sounded like a dog whimpering.

  A SWAT officer in a black helmet and khaki fatigues stepped up. The door was heavy but when he swung the small battering ram, the wood splintered.

  The cops flowed inside. From the rear of the house came a smash, SWAT breaching the back door.

  Caitlin followed Emmerich in close formation, with Rainey on her shoulder. Down the front hall, through the living room. Noise, voices calling, “Clear.” Her heart thundered. Her vision seemed ultraviolet. She held her hopes and fears tight in the back of her chest, calling, “Left clear. Right clear.”

  The house was small—kitchen, three bedrooms, family room. Searching, flowing, step by step, room by room, pistols and rifle barrels swinging, until there was no question.

  “All clear,” the SWAT commander called.

  Hannah wasn’t there. The thunder in Caitlin’s heart became a roar.

  From the back of the house, Weisbach called, “In here.”

  On the floor in the master bedroom, they found Hayden Maddox’s father.

  Robert Maddox was in his mid-forties, stocky, and blood-drenched. He sprawled beside the bed, his hands stretched overhead, tied to the bedpost.

  He had a gunshot wound in his upper chest. Blood glistened on his shirt. He’d been kicked heavily in the face.