The Dark Corners of the Night

by Meg Gardiner

  Emmerich nodded. “Let’s go.”

  49

  A uniformed officer snapped the padlock with bolt cutters and they slipped through the gate into the nowhere zone.

  The screened construction fencing dimmed the noise and lights of the city. The air was saturated with the cold. Ahead, darkened buildings stretched for a quarter of a mile. It was an expanse not of ghosts but of nonexistence.

  The search group split into teams of two and moved out silently, taking their designated search sectors. Caitlin proceeded with Emmerich, her peacoat unbuttoned, her quick-clearance holster within unimpeded reach. Within a few seconds the other teams disappeared around corners and through doorways.

  They took the east side of a street two hundred yards deep in the demolition zone. The wind whistled around corners and through the empty window frames of twenty-story office buildings. Beyond the fencing, skyscrapers dazzled the sky. They seemed incomprehensibly distant, separated from the dust-brushed street where Caitlin was walking as if she were viewing them through a time slip.

  Drawing their weapons, she and Emmerich cleared a decrepit auto body shop, scuffing across a concrete floor that was gummed with ancient oil spots, checking the empty office, aiming the beams of their flashlights into the service pits and up to the rafters. When they exited, they drew an X on the door in white chalk. On the radio, they heard the other teams moving yard by yard, floor by floor, calling “Clear!” and talking in murmurs, signaling to each other.

  Caitlin and Emmerich moved on to a corner market. The glass was missing from the front windows. They stepped through. Swept past empty shelves, open refrigerators, through the swinging doors to the stockroom and loading dock. Up a flight of stairs to an empty apartment. Caitlin’s heart hammered with every corner they took, every room they entered.

  And behind that hammering, she heard the steady drip of seconds running out. This nowhere zone was huge. But it wasn’t endless. If Hayden spotted the search teams before they found Hannah, things would go sideways. He wouldn’t simply throw down his weapon and surrender.

  From the back of the apartment, Emmerich said, “Clear.”

  They jogged down the stairs. Caitlin radioed Keyes.

  “Any more pings from Hayden’s phone?”

  “Negative,” Keyes said. “He’s gone dark. Silent running.”

  Caitlin climbed out the market’s empty window behind Emmerich and drew an X on the wall. Up the street, hundreds of yards away, the beam of another searcher’s flashlight passed between two windows of a building, four or five floors up.

  “Keep listening,” she said.

  “Roger.”

  She and Emmerich jogged through a park crammed with construction equipment. And a vacant lot stacked with rusting, discarded fire escapes. They crossed an intersection. Beyond it, on the street corner, a building filled the winter sky and blocked the stars.

  It was a darkened hotel. Faded brick, at least thirty stories tall—at one time it must have been a jewel. Art Deco touches, scrollwork over the grand entrance. A keening sound bent the air—wind, whining as if it was blowing through an evil harmonica. Caitlin’s skin crept. Though the building ate the night, slivers of light pierced its edges. The glass in the windows was gone. Caitlin could see in one corner and out the next.

  The sign above the entrance had been pried off, but rusting bolts remained. the swallowtail.

  Emmerich tilted his head up to take the building in. “Ever hear of H. H. Holmes’ Murder Castle?”

  “The hotel in Chicago.”

  Built and operated by a serial killer. Dr. H. H. Holmes had designed the hotel himself and committed a slew of murders there during the 1893 World’s Fair. The building had been fitted with windowless interior rooms, secret passageways, an asphyxiation chamber, and a basement crematorium.

  “Acid vats, blowtorches in the walls,” she said.

  “Alarms that buzzed in Holmes’ office if anybody tried to leave their room.”

  “Check in, never out.”

  “Watch your six.”

  Emmerich radioed in the address.

  A scratchy voice acknowledged—a task force detective stationed outside the cordon to coordinate and run comms. “That’s an SRO hotel. Once upon a time was high-end. Grand lobby, bar, ballroom, twenty floors of hotel rooms. Apartments on the top five floors.”

  Maze. Rat’s nest. Final home to the down-and-out. Lair.

  “We’re entering.”

  The detective came back. “Heads up. We’re cross-referencing addresses in the demolition zone with known associates of Hayden Maddox. The Swallowtail comes up as the last known address of Trey Laforte.”

  Hayden’s uncle. Emmerich and Caitlin exchanged a glance and again drew their weapons.

  The massive bronze-gilded doors creaked as they pulled them open. The lightless lobby smelled musty. Their boots squeaked on the marble floor. Their flashlights caught a vaulted ceiling, Greek columns, faded Jazz Age grandeur. A lonely pair of chairs faced each other in the lobby. A malnourished palm drooped in a pot by a fireplace. Dust choked the floor, but there were clear footprints along the main path to the bar and elevator lobby. They couldn’t tell who those footprints belonged to—construction workers, or someone else.

  They advanced, nerves stretched thin. Emmerich sidestepped to the front desk. It was grimy with layers of dirt. He peered around it, weapon aimed, flashlight sweeping.

  “Clear,” he said.

  They turned and crossed toward the bar, Caitlin leading. From behind them came a ding.

  They spun. Across the decrepit lobby, an elevator door slid open. A single dingy light bulb illuminated the elevator’s interior.

  On the floor inside, under its greenish glow, a man sat slumped. Legs splayed, blood-drenched, dead.

  50

  Caitlin and Emmerich ran across the lobby toward the elevators. The gaping doors slowly slid toward each other, the dingy light narrowing to a slice. Emmerich jammed his arm between the doors like a knife. They spread again. He leaned in and locked them open.

  The man inside the elevator had been shot multiple times. Chest, face. The wall behind him was a mad spatter of blood. He sat with his hands upturned at his sides, like a penitent. Slumped, face upturned as well, pointing heavenward.

  His eyes were gouged out.

  A bolus of acid rolled up Caitlin’s throat. She clenched her jaw, dizzy, appalled and unable to turn away.

  Emmerich stepped into the elevator. Fingers to the man’s neck.

  “Body temp’s same as mine. He just died.” He put on gloves, teased the man’s wallet from his back pocket, and flipped it open. “I think we just found Uncle Trey.”

  Caitlin didn’t want to stare too long into the elevator. Her own eyes might burn with the light, and the sight. She needed to be able to see what was in the lobby, beyond the glare, in the dark. She blinked and swallowed.

  Stared hard at Trey Laforte’s face. There was a silver glint in the dead man’s mouth.

  Not the silver of alloy fillings. Not teeth. A dull gleam, mixed with a coppery color, that filled the space between his parted lips.

  “What’s that?”

  Emmerich nudged his jaw open. The man’s mouth was packed with spent bullets.

  Caitlin let out a rough breath. “Jesus God.”

  The rounds, copper-jacketed, had peeled open when they hit their targets, blooming with a leaden shine into six-point flowers of death. From their luster, they had been washed after being dug from victims’ bodies, but blood-black streaks remained. Hollow-points.

  As Emmerich parted Trey Laforte’s lips, the man’s head tilted. The bullets poured out and down his chest. Tumbling like deadly petals, poisonous, glinting under the grimy light bulb.

  Emmerich rose and backed away, staring at the body. He seemed to be struggling as hard as Caitlin was to process
this. To force it to make actual sense. To believe it existed.

  From the opposite end of the dark elevator lobby came another ding.

  Caitlin turned. Down the elevator bank, another door opened. The bulb inside was winking erratically. Every nerve in Caitlin’s body seemed to blaze at once.

  Inside the elevator, hands bound and mouth gagged with duct tape, was Hannah Guillory.

  She was standing. Breathing. Round-eyed with fear, shoulders shaking. The flickering light bulb buzzed, like a bug sending Morse Code. Like lightning.

  Caitlin’s heart tripped. Hannah was alive. Right there.

  Behind her, his face shadowed, stood a figure in black.

  It took less than a second but felt like an hour. The shadowed figure, eyes hidden beneath the brim of his ball cap, put a hand to Hannah’s back to shove her out of the elevator ahead of him. Hannah stood rigid. Her eyes, like spotlights, hit Caitlin.

  Caitlin and Emmerich were in motion, arrowing down the lobby. Every synapse, every muscle, every nerve in Caitlin’s body was driving her toward the elevator.

  The Midnight Man spotted them.

  He yanked Hannah back and hit the control panel. The elevator doors slid shut.

  Caitlin ran into them, almost full force. She pounded her left hand against the metal, hammering.

  Emmerich flicked his radio. “All units. This is Emmerich. He’s at the Swallowtail Hotel.”

  No reply. Again, Emmerich keyed transmit and got nothing.

  “Comms are blocked.” He scanned the walls. “We’re in an electronic dead zone.”

  The fear in Hannah’s eyes seemed to burn Caitlin. “Stairs.”

  She ran from the elevator lobby, swinging her flashlight, hunting for the stairs. She found them along the north side of the lobby.

  “Here.” She shoved open the fire door and glanced back.

  Emmerich had his phone to his ear, still trying to contact backup. From the direction he was facing, she knew he wanted to race outside and call from the radio when he got a clear signal—or shout up the street to get another searcher’s attention. It was sensible. It was procedure.

  “Boss,” she shouted. “Call from the stairwell. It has elevation and open windows. Please.”

  She was willing to go without him, though she knew that would be rash. But leaving the building, giving Hayden extra time to harm Hannah, felt intolerably more reckless. Her entire body was vibrating.

  Emmerich held for half a second. Then ran toward her. Her nerves leaped.

  They charged up the stairwell. Boots thudding, hitting broken bits of glass, the night dull outside, walls of other abandoned buildings looming. No echo on the concrete, because the windows were gone, the cold night wind swirling through.

  On the first few floors they took turns darting out, one of them throwing open the door to the hotel hallway hoping to catch the elevator if it stopped soon—or at least get a radio signal—while the other continued to run up the stairs to the next landing. Five flights up, out of breath, Emmerich shouted into the radio, again, “All units.”

  A thin voice replied. “Here. It’s Keyes.”

  Emmerich didn’t slow, kept running, his voice coming in gulps. “Swallowtail Hotel.” He shouted the address. “Get backup. Bring everybody. Rain down hell.”

  “On it,” Keyes called back, his voice swimming away into static.

  In the stairwell, they heard the elevator bell. They paused, listening closely, desperate to confirm the location of the sound. All Caitlin could hear was her own heavy breathing and the drumming of her heart. Emmerich pointed up. The floor above.

  They climbed and emerged into a darkened hallway. It smelled close, of sweat and moldy carpet. Midway down, a dingy sliver of light narrowed, like a snake’s pupil contracting. The elevator door was closing.

  Beyond it, a shadow disappeared into a hotel room and swept out of sight.

  Using hand signals, Emmerich directed Caitlin toward the door. Go. With an agonizing effort at silence they advanced past the elevators, past rooms with closed doors, rooms with missing doors, feeling a sharp draft that pulled threads of Caitlin’s hair from her ponytail. She forcibly calmed her breathing. Needing to hear every creak and bump.

  They had seen a single shadow. He’d left Hannah someplace. Put her someplace. Where?

  At the door where the shadow had vanished, Emmerich paused. Close behind him, Caitlin put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. He nodded. Signaled. Go.

  He cleared the doorway. In close formation they entered the room, weapons raised, sweeping the view.

  Their flashlights caught peeling paint. An empty window, a view over the demolition zone to the spangled lights of East LA. A closet. A door to the bathroom—a corner they would need to clear. No nearby noise. Caitlin’s finger was on the trigger. If she sensed a sound, a dash of motion, a breath on her neck, she had to verify it wasn’t Hannah before she could even conceive of squeezing it.

  She smelled mildew, felt loose carpet bunched beneath her feet. Emmerich advanced, step by step, eyes pinned on the view in his flashlight beam and the darkness beyond it.

  They were five feet inside the door. Emmerich stepping silently. Caitlin was inches behind him. She heard the groaning sound beneath their feet.

  She grabbed for Emmerich’s shoulder. “Back—”

  The floor collapsed beneath them.

  51

  With a nightmare snap, the floor became nothing but fabric and splinters and air. Wood squealed and split. Caitlin and Emmerich plunged through rotten beams. A nerve-sparking, breath-stealing drop. Into the empty dark.

  Instinct flared. With a shout, Caitlin flung out her arms. She grabbed a rusting pipe and jerked to a stop, feet swinging. Choking on dust and wood pulp. The pipe creaked, the thick rust flaking beneath her palms, her hands slipping.

  Below her came a terrible crash. She had a dreadful sense of vacant space below her dangling feet. She heard her Glock and flashlight clatter to a hard floor.

  Emmerich was no longer in front of her. She knew he’d fallen, didn’t believe it, couldn’t bear it. The pipe creaked, whining ominously. Dark above and below. Her scalp prickled. She was exposed.

  She dared to look down. Ambient light from a wall of windows played like mercury on the view below. Through swirling dust, she saw.

  Emmerich had plummeted twenty feet into the decrepit ballroom.

  He had crashed through stacked furniture and hit hard.

  Hanging from the pipe, Caitlin tried to see the room. Tables and lounge furniture. A grand bar—almost directly below her. She hung, hands grinding on the rust, and estimated the drop. Pulse drumming, she swung, held her breath, and let go. She dropped onto the bar with a thunderous clop.

  She crouched and peered back up, fearing what she’d see. The sight chilled her. Overhead, the hole in the ceiling was obvious.

  It was a trap.

  The rug had perfectly concealed the rotting beams. As slow and careful as they’d been, they’d still moved too fast. She should have kept in mind the Midnight Man’s trickery, the way he’d rigged his closet with firecrackers to injure people who walked past or reached into his realm unsuspecting. Hell.

  Through the empty wall of windows came starlight and cold air and the distant sounds of the city. On the floor, from the midst of jumbled tables and furniture covered in sheets, the beam of her flashlight beckoned.

  Aside from the sound of falling debris hitting the hardwood floor, the room itself was silent.

  Crouched, she peered at the jungle of stacked furniture. “Emmerich.”

  No reply.

  “Boss,” she said, louder. “CJ.”

  She jumped off the bar. Cast a tingling glance at the black hole in the ballroom ceiling. Then clambered her way through the mountain of furniture to retrieve her flashlight.

  She grabbed t
he Maglite and swept it around. Her Glock had to have fallen close by. But it could have bounced off any number of surfaces and skidded halfway across the room.

  “Emmerich.”

  A groan.

  She turned. Heard the moan again, and maybe a word. Here.

  Scrambling, pushing aside broken chairs and upended cocktail tables, she moved through the furniture castle. Still couldn’t find her Glock.

  Emmerich lay motionless amid splintered tables and chairs. Face down, arms splayed, right leg at a gut-turning angle. She worked her way toward him.

  “Chris.”

  Still he didn’t move. Jesus, please …

  As she knelt at his side, his hand twitched. Fingers clawing, retracting into a fist. His head was turned away. She put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Can you hear me?”

  He mumbled but didn’t lift his head. She didn’t want to move him. She clambered over his back so she could see his face. Checked that he was breathing normally, that his pupils weren’t blown, that he wasn’t already gone into the dusk of death. He clawed the floor. She shined the flashlight on his face. His eyes met hers. There, not there.

  No sign of his Glock either.

  Overhead came a creak, scuttling noises, rat sounds. She swung the flashlight up.

  A shadow slid through the hole in the ceiling. Dropped, and nimbly landed on the bar.

  The city lights revealed his face. Caitlin’s skin contracted.

  Apple-pie features, school yearbook smile, killer’s eyes. Raging confidence.

  The Midnight Man, Hayden Maddox.

  He crouched, the black hoodie engulfing him like a roach’s carapace, breathing slowly. And drew a handgun.

  Matte black, so small, seemingly so light. A familiar outline, ubiquitous, the staple of every movie and video game teenage boys played. Such a small hole in the end of the barrel. But she’d seen what came from that gun. How quickly, purely, absolutely it rendered death.

  Hayden ejected the magazine, then reinserted it and slammed it home. He was between her and the door.