by Meg Gardiner
“The guy who screamed, ‘Shoot the dog’ at an eighth grader might not be the role model to turn the kid away from sociopathy.”
“We’re contacting military records. See if we can get a current address. At least information on where Laforte’s VA benefits land.”
Weisbach leaned out the front door and beckoned to Solis with a two-fingered wave.
Solis stepped inside. He and Weisbach held a brief, intense debate. Scowling, Weisbach made a phone call. She shook her head, hung up, and Solis came back out.
“We’re going to release Hayden Maddox’s name to the public. Make an announcement.”
“Good,” Rainey said. “And?”
“On the guidance of the top brass and LAPD’s lawyers, we’re going to withhold his photo.”
“Fuck that. Pardon my Russian.”
Caitlin felt punched. But she said, “This was inevitable.”
“Hayden Maddox is a juvenile,” Solis said. “By a significant margin. He’s not coming up on eighteen. Nowhere near it.”
“He’s suspected of committing multiple murders,” Rainey said.
“And despite the gravity of the case, the law firmly requires us to guard his privacy.” The bags under his eyes were the color of charcoal. “I love it just as much as you.”
He stalked toward his car.
Rainey looked ready to spit tacks, but Caitlin just shook her head.
“The kid’s protected. And you can bet he counted on this,” she said.
At the end of the street, where two LAPD cruisers blocked access, a tall figure showed ID and squeezed past. Keyes jogged up, eager and grave.
He gazed at the unexceptional ranch home, eating up every detail. “This is it. Ground Zero in the UNSUB’s buffer zone.”
Emmerich’s voice came from the front hall of the house. He stood backlit in the doorway. “No longer an UNSUB.” He waved them inside. “Let’s talk.”
Emmerich gathered the team in the living room, near the cold fireplace.
He crossed his arms and spoke pensively. “The hunting trip.”
“December,” Rainey said. “Start of Christmas season. That’s a nasty trigger.”
She regarded the living room. A scraggly Christmas tree had been tipped sideways into the wall. Possibly by cops searching the room, more likely by an angry Hayden.
“Goddamn mind job,” Caitlin said. “Maybe Hayden’s poor dog couldn’t have been saved. But what a cruel thing to do to a kid. Even to a budding psychopath. Damn.”
“‘Man time,’” Rainey said. “But the kid blew it. How’d that affect him? Mortification. Shame. Which he turned into rage.”
Emmerich nodded. He paused for a moment. “Do you know the concept of liminal space?”
Caitlin shook her head. Keyes nodded, slowly, as if making a connection.
“Liminality relates to times, or places, or experiences located at a sensory threshold,” Emmerich said. “It relates to the transitional. The in-between. It’s the moment of falling into sleep. Dusk is a liminal time. So are dawn and midnight. Highways are liminal spaces. Airports. Hotels. Borders. Crossroads.”
“The Twilight Zone,” Keyes said.
“Precisely.”
Caitlin felt a pull, something drawing her into thoughts both opaque and icily clear.
“Liminality is unstable,” Emmerich said. “It’s alluring and disorienting. Every ritual has a liminal moment—when participants are no longer their old selves but haven’t yet attained their new status.” He paused. “Screw up the transformation, and you’re stuck. In some traditional societies, people who fail a ritual passage are branded as dangerous.”
“Hayden Maddox failed his rite of passage to manhood,” Caitlin said.
Emmerich nodded. “The hunting trip trapped an exceptionally dangerous boy in an unstable psychological space and lit a smoldering fuse.”
“He’s been ritually tormenting children,” Caitlin said.
Keyes shook his head. “He’s nowhere. Always in a seam. No wonder it’s been a nightmare to build the geographic profile.”
Emmerich took a second to catch each of their eyes. “We have to get into that space ourselves—mentally and physically—to figure out how to predict his next moves.”
They were silent for a moment. Caitlin said, “Hiding places. He’s paranoid. He’ll have secret places—some between the walls …”
Rainey spun toward the hallway. “His room.”
She hurried down the hall and leaned through the doorway to speak to the detectives searching Hayden’s bedroom. Then she leaned back out, alert and alarmed, and waved.
Caitlin joined her. The LAPD detectives stood at the open closet. One had shoved clothing aside and was examining its back wall on his tiptoes with a flashlight. The other was tapping on it.
“A false wall,” Rainey said.
“We have a hidden compartment,” the detective said. “And it’s booby trapped.”
He froze, then stepped back, grim.
“There’s a trip wire. If you open the compartment without deactivating the rigging, you’ll stick your hand straight into a nest of firecrackers. M-80s. They’d blow your fingers off.”
He appeared disagreeably surprised but determined. “Don’t worry, we’ll disarm the trip wire and find whatever’s in his hidey-hole.”
At the top of the hall Detective Solis appeared. “LAPD Command is putting together an emergency bulletin, and we’re going to hold a press conference. I’m heading downtown.”
Emmerich said, “You need one of us to join you in a show of unity for the cameras?”
“Please,” Solis said. “Our commander thinks that releasing Hayden’s name may spur him to flee Los Angeles. Consensus is, he’ll dump his car first.”
“Can’t say they’re wrong.”
“LAPD’s posting patrols at Metrolink and Amtrak stations, and at bus terminals.”
“Good.”
He led them to the front door.
“We’re also searching for Gretchen Maddox.” Solis’ voice took on a deeper tone of disquiet. Blue-on-blue concern for a fellow officer. “And we’ve issued an Amber Alert for Hannah Guillory.”
“Great,” Caitlin said.
With the team, she walked toward their Suburban. The arching sky seemed to blast her. Huge, infinite. And all of them so small beneath it, Hannah most of all.
After a second, she found the North Star. She hung her gaze on it. Sean had taken to the night sky not that long ago. He and the ATF team were somewhere under that star, beyond the horizon. They might already be conducting their raid on the bombing suspect’s cabin. Starlight, needle-white, nicked at her.
They reached the Suburban and Emmerich unlocked the doors.
“One last thing,” he said. “Tonight is a liminal moment.”
Keyes said, “How’s that?”
“December twenty-first.” He paused, hand on the door handle. “The winter solstice. It’s the longest night of the year.”
43
The Metro bus pulled up outside Union Station in downtown LA at 9:42 p.m. Though it had been dark for hours, the city was busy. Traffic all the way in. People on the streets and heading into the station. When the pneumatic door of the bus hissed open, he strolled down the steps. Playing it relaxed. A lanky teenager, heading home from a movie or a game. His hood was pulled over his baseball cap.
Hayden Maddox didn’t need to act jumpy. So he didn’t. He was on foot, and alone. He had gotten rid of the Jeep Renegade for the night—not dumped it, but left it miles distant, in an out-of-the-way spot. Nothing conspicuous. Nothing to see here, folks—move along. Pocketed the keys and strolled off, then rode the bus back downtown to cover his trail. No need to act squirrelly.
But he did need to shake anybody who was following him. And people were. The red eyes painted on the billboard overlooking
the Guillorys’ house proved that. Big, all-seeing eyes, crazy-wide, staring down at the street. Somebody had spray-painted them to send a message. To him.
Who? CNN? LAPD? Hannah, who had snitched on him to the LAPD?
He had to stay on top of it.
The station was coldly lit, its white walls screaming cathedral. Art Deco combined with Spanish Colonial. His fourth-grade teacher had made his class memorize it on their field trip. Palm trees and a scent of old glamour, or a stench of urine from the 1930s. He sauntered inside through the side doors. The main hall echoed crazily with jabber and suitcase wheels and tinkling Christmas music. The noise bounced between the high wood ceiling and the red tile floor. The corridors were a torrent of people focused on getting someplace else. Never on who was there.
Screens showed the tracks for departing trains. The ticket windows were open. The only thing that unsettled him was how busy the place was, this time of night. The holidays. Families were rushing to get wherever they thought they should be to nag or scream at their relatives. People were carrying shopping bags. Drunks, pretending to be jolly, were singing along with the tinny carols. Televisions played in the waiting area, showing a news bulletin.
police seek murder suspect.
Good fucking luck with that. He kept walking. Hands in his pockets, relaxed. Total calm. Total alertness. Eyes sweeping the scene. The TVs showed a crappy police sketch of the Midnight Man—less than nothing to worry about. A blank, cartoon face, nothing but formless eyes under a hat and hood. It could have been the Unabomber. He smiled.
A name flashed onscreen. hayden maddox.
He stopped smiling. Shit.
He walked, eyeing the screens. Six of them, all announcing hayden maddox.
Under his skin a thousand electric eels began to writhe. He kept his face slack, appearing as half-interested as the rest of the people rushing for their rides out of downtown.
He thought. Who the hell gave his identity to the police? Hannah the snitchwitch, who’d lain in wait in for him with her Chuck Taylors and her daddy’s hammer? (Lotta good that did.) The FBI? Agent Darkstar?
Cops were stationed inside the doors.
Hayden could guess why. He figured they had to have his photo.
The TVs, the police, none of them were flashing his face. Just his name. But announcing hayden maddox meant they would have pulled his driver’s license pic from the DMV. Yet the TV news wasn’t broadcasting it. The cops weren’t flashing a photo at passing travelers and asking, Have you seen this person?
Because he was a minor.
That was good. That was his backstop. It wouldn’t matter if he tore the head off the Queen of England and drop-kicked it down the steps at City Hall. He had rights. They had to protect his privacy.
But the cops themselves had the photo. They were all gaping at it. Memorizing it. Out to get him. Every single one.
But they were facing precisely the wrong way.
They stood ten yards inside the doors, facing the glass. They were watching people coming into the main station entrance—looking for somebody they figured was desperate to get a train out of Los Angeles.
Not somebody heading into the heart of downtown.
Cop 101: Look behind you. Fa la la la LOL, idiots. Ambling, he glanced again at the TV screens. amber alert.
Don’t slow down. Don’t. The fuck? It was Hannah. Last seen in his Renegade.
The writhing eels seemed to crackle and bite. Every eye in the station, the televisions, the departure screens, the phones in people’s hands, all felt like they were pouring their hot sight onto him. But the cops continued eyeing people coming in through the main doors.
Hayden hunched into his sweatshirt and strolled straight past them into the longest night.
44
Under the war room’s cold lights, they spread out evidence seized from Hayden Maddox’s home. Every task force detective, every uniform, every tech they could round up, had arrived at LAPD HQ. The atmosphere was spiky, the tempo intense.
The rat’s nest behind the false wall in Hayden’s closet had been wired to terrify and maim. If tripped, the string of M-80 firecrackers would have set the wall on fire and destroyed the trove inside. But demolition would have given Hayden concrete proof that his foes were spying on him.
“I’ll get you before you get me,” Caitlin muttered.
And from the evidence stuffed behind the false wall, raging against imagined foes was one of Hayden Maddox’s obsessions.
“This is going to keep forensic psychiatrists busy for years,” Rainey said.
There were journals. After they’d been photographed, scanned, and logged, the task force put on fresh gloves and started speed-reading. They needed to mine the journals for information that could lead them to Hayden—and Hannah.
As she read, Caitlin felt herself being dragged into a rain-swollen gully, as if she’d been swept off her feet by a flash flood. The waters were cold, riddled with rocks as sharp as teeth.
hayden maddox.
They watch. They plot. “How can we humiliate Hayden today?”
They think I don’t see it. Idiots.
They think they can trick me yet again into swallowing their mindrape arglebargle. They talk about right and wrong and good and evil but the Theory of Relativity says it’s all just your point of view. Turn around, see the people conniving against you, you’ll discover the truth. Good means submit. Right means crawl.
Wrong means freedom. It means I decide.
So turn the tables. Make them see. Make them know.
Make them pay.
Right now, I can take them unaware. Slack, snoring, weak. Before they even know what hits them. Except when they do, and then it’s even more beautiful.
But soon I will take them at length. And drill it into their heads, all their heads, like a wild wolf tearing through them with its claws, fighting back, rising up in legions to crush them like bone meal.
Caitlin flipped through the journal, page upon page of power fantasies, fears, elaborate plans for revenge.
A photo was taped inside the journal’s back cover. She felt a wash of grief. It was a picture of a black Lab. Written in Hayden’s crabbed scrawl was coho.
She spun the journal around and shoved it to the middle of the table. Rainey took it in solemnly. Her phone beeped. She read a text.
“Detectives at his house found a fireproof cash box. Stuffed with prescription meds and a roll of bills.”
“What meds?” Caitlin said.
“Adderall and Zoloft. Hayden’s prescriptions. Seems he hasn’t been taking them, just selling them.”
Keyes came in with his laptop. “His wall stash included a manila envelope containing camera memory cards. This kid is old school. Doesn’t upload his business to the cloud. He kept it within literal arm’s reach.” He sat down. “He wants control.”
He cued up a video. Caitlin and Rainey came around. Keyes hit play.
The video had been filmed with a camera set up on Hayden’s desk. Caitlin recognized the posters on the wall. The clip was short, twenty seconds.
Under the glare of the overhead bulb, Hayden walked into view. Every inch of skin on Caitlin’s arms prickled.
“You.”
It was the figure from every CCTV surveillance video the cops had found. The lanky male frame, the sidling walk. But this video wasn’t high-gain negative. It was the Midnight Man with the lights turned on. The blindingly white figure brought frothing into full color.
He pointed a finger at the camera. “You lying pile of dogshit.”
He was blond. Bright-eyed. A cold scoop of vanilla ice cream. A high school boy that sophomore girls would gape at and giggle over and call cute.
He rushed at the camera, his face getting inches from the lens. “Claiming it’s me—that I’m the problem. Blaming me for everything. All you little s
neaks, you pussies crying in your beds, laughing at me. All you wannabe SS guards, you’re nothing. Nothing like the real thing.” He widened his eyes, hamming it up, pouring on the cheese. “But guess who is. You’ll see. You’ll pay.”
The clip ended.
“Jesus,” Caitlin said.
Weisbach was standing at her shoulder. She sounded as dry as sandpaper. “These pissant demagogues always drool over the SS. They just can’t stop jacking off to the dream of the Third Reich.”
Keyes gestured at the screen. “I’ve gone through a dozen of these. Same theme in all. You’ll suffer. You’re weak. Everybody who’s persecuting me, from the school principal to the girl behind the counter at Taco Bell, is going to hurt. He has an enemies list ten miles long.”
“And now Hannah’s at the top of it,” Caitlin said.
She rubbed her eyes. Then told herself: Shut away these aching thoughts about the danger Hannah’s in. Eat your fears. Focus.
“He started breaking fresh barriers a couple of days ago,” she said. “But what’s gone down tonight is escalation on a whole different scale. Incredibly bold. Attacking in the early evening instead of waiting until families are asleep. He’s unspooling his revenge on us all. Hannah’s some kind of icing on the cake. What he has in mind, I can’t even …”
Keyes nodded. “So far I’ve found nothing to help identify where he might take her. I’ll keep looking.”
Emmerich walked in with a stack of eight-by-ten photo blowups. He stuck them on the whiteboard. They were childhood photos of Hayden.
Caitlin felt a fresh disconnect.
Family snapshots showed an apparently happy-go-lucky kid. The boy had a sunny, shy smile. Picnic photos had a relaxed air, his dad engaged, his mom, Gretchen, quiet but observant. She was sturdy, with her blond hair swept up in a big hair clip, her jeans tight, her bare arms tanned and lithe. Something familiar in her expression, maybe a cop’s watchfulness. Hayden ate hot dogs. Hayden played tag. Hayden made goofy faces.
Caitlin was well-used to criminals who appeared polite, neat, and amiable. Even murderers didn’t stomp around screaming like figures from a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape 24/7. They watched television and grilled hamburgers and updated their LinkedIn profiles hoping for that promotion. Only a few unlucky people saw the mask slip, the rage uncoil, the knife emerge. Everyone else got the bland platitudes from the guy in the corporate polo shirt with the assistant manager’s name tag pinned to his chest.
