by Meg Gardiner
The Guillorys barely noticed Caitlin as they ran past. Their entire world had just telescoped to the girl in the car. Mina broke into a sprint. Dave broke into tears.
Hannah jumped up and didn’t hit the ground before she was swallowed by her father’s arms and her mother’s kisses. Caitlin hung back. Weisbach met her gaze.
The Robbery-Homicide detective needed a tough hide, and a tough heart, to do this job. But the look she gave Caitlin was everything. A world. She was witness to a reunion that, as a murder cop, by definition she rarely experienced.
As Caitlin turned away, Hannah called to her. The little girl’s voice, tired but giddy, had a note of anxiety. Hannah squirmed from Dave’s embrace, ran up, and tearfully hugged Caitlin.
The girl buried her face in Caitlin’s shoulder and gripped her like a monkey. Right then, Caitlin almost let everything go.
“Are you leaving?” Hannah said.
“Not yet. Lots of work to do here, helping the police.” Caitlin lifted Hannah’s chin and took in her dirty, lucky face. “How about I give you my card? It has my work address and email at Quantico.”
Hannah nodded, appearing impressed.
“We can be pen pals,” Caitlin said. “Trade palindromes.”
Hannah smiled. “Or do karate. I kicked my way out of that bathroom, you know.”
Caitlin laughed, deeply, and gave Hannah a fist bump.
Inside the hotel lobby, Gretchen Maddox sat in a dusty wingback chair, being interviewed by her LAPD colleagues. She hadn’t been seriously injured by her son. Hayden had controlled her with her own Taser before tying her up and jamming her mouth full of bullets and gold bands. But Caitlin was sure that if she hadn’t shown up, Gretchen would have been Hayden’s next victim. Perhaps he would have forced her to witness his suicide, leaving her to be consumed with guilt. More likely he would have killed her.
Gretchen confirmed that her brother, Trey Laforte, was the faux detective who spoke to Hannah at LAPD headquarters. And that he had painted the billboard in the Guillorys’ neighborhood with red eyes.
Gretchen and Trey, terrified that Hayden might be the Midnight Man, had come up with a plan to draw the boy in from the cold. The billboard was painted as both a warning and a lure. They had hoped to catch Hayden without alerting the police. The plan backfired spectacularly.
Detectives asked Gretchen if Trey had also filmed the drone video.
“What drone video?”
That was the last thing Gretchen said to them. A zipped black body bag was wheeled through the lobby on a gurney. Gretchen shut her eyes and her words dissolved into sobs. Trey Laforte’s body was taken away.
And Gretchen was left as the last lonely member of the Maddox family in the demolition zone.
Hayden was already on his way downtown, zip-cuffed in the back of an LAPD cruiser. Once he got there, he would be booked and processed and shackled in an interview room until the task force detectives arrived to interrogate him.
Surrounded by SWAT, with Caitlin’s hand on his elbow, the Midnight Man had been hauled into the blue twilight narrow-eyed and hunched. But as soon as he stepped into the clear air and heard the city bubbling around him, he straightened and resumed his light-footed strut.
He glared at the tactical officers, and the uniforms, as he was marched to the patrol car. At everybody but Caitlin. He had met her eyes already, and, she thought, couldn’t survive another glimpse of himself. Not while he was in custody, unable to strike out.
She had stolen his victory from him, and he knew that if he ever looked at her again he would see too much.
So he turned his head away from her and sauntered to the black-and-white, arms cuffed behind his back, his face transforming in the early morning light. Seeming to turn younger. To fill with hurt. And deliberate helplessness.
In the sky above, multiple news helicopters hovered. His video had gone live.
Caitlin knew that no matter what happened to their son, Robert and Gretchen Maddox would absorb much of the blame for his crimes. As he was put in the back of the police car, he looked up at the hovering cameras.
His face filled with a pseudo pathos. He tilted his head, like a baby bird.
He mouthed his message to the unblinking electronic eye. “Innocent. Help.”
Caitlin watched with revulsion and something approaching wonder.
Now she headed outside into the scintillating morning air. Fresh helicopters loitered in the distance. She found coffee. It was her fourth cup in the last hour. With the bass-note drone of the rotors dulling her hearing, it took a moment to notice that her phone was humming in her pocket. She slid it free and saw a text. sean rawlins.
All her nerves instantly spun up again, and her vision throbbed, because it was always possible that one of his teammates had retrieved the phone and was trying to reach Sean’s emergency contact.
She bent to the screen. After two fumbling swipes, the text opened.
We’re clear.
The ATF raid was over. Sean was safe.
Caitlin took a breath and set her coffee down on a concrete construction barrier. Then, hugely relieved, sat herself down too.
She sent Sean a reply, an A-okay emoji, and let her hand drop, trying to get her pulse back down to triple digits.
She’d been suppressing thoughts of the raid all night. Now residual anxiety flooded her skin and evaporated in the cold.
A new text arrived from Sean.
You were right.
With a swooshing sound, he sent a photo from the cabin they’d raided in the desert. Broken windows covered with torn plastic sheeting flapping in the wind. Dun-brown landscape outside. A tight, stone-walled cabin with a collapsing roof. Single main room—fireplace, dining table, dirty kitchen.
It was filled wall to wall and floor to ceiling with coils of barbed wire.
It was an ambush. Trip wires on doors
and windows.
Caitlin gaped, stunned. She swiped the screen to phone Sean, but before she could put the call through, he sent a video.
Taken from the doorway to the house, the video alternated between gray shadow and the stark white beams of searchlights. It panned the living room of the cabin. Stuck to the coils of barbed wire that filled the room were photos. Snapshots.
“The fu …” Caitlin muttered.
The photos had been taken at bombing scenes—in the aftermath. They were scrawled over with notes written in silver marker. One message said, everything has a spark.
The photo showed Sean and Caitlin outside the bombed Temescal ER, jogging alongside Michele as she was taken to an ambulance.
Caitlin abruptly wanted no more coffee. “Jesus.”
She tried to parse the photo, the scene, the meaning, the cold that had all at once settled behind her rib cage.
Sean’s next text pinged.
Coming home soon. How about you?
I’ll be there.
Want to see you. Got some news.
56
San Francisco Bay swept past below the wings of the jet, closer, deep blue, light sparkling off whitecaps in the afternoon dusk. The hills that ringed the bay were already black in the winter twilight. The city briefly glimmered in the window as the plane banked on final approach to Oakland. The whitecaps neared, the runway slid beneath the jet, and they touched down. Caitlin leaned back against her seat as the thrust reversers roared, fighting the forward inertia. Fighting against throwing herself headlong into emotional turmoil.
But who was she kidding? Whatever was going on with Sean, something was about to change. The airliner decelerated, the engines throttled back to idle, and, as the red sunset arced through the windows, Caitlin grabbed her phone and turned it on.
No messages.
Sean had her itinerary. He should be waiting in Baggage Claim. She didn’t need to hear anything from him in the interi
m. And she couldn’t help worrying about why her screen was empty.
But as she schlepped up the aisle with a hundred fifty other passengers, lugging her computer case and roller bag and avoiding people hauling Christmas gifts from the overhead, she heard the cell ping. She had to wait to grab the phone until she reached the echoing terminal. The concourse was over-bright with conversation and bustle and holiday spirit. She had a text.
It was from Michele.
Did you hear?
Caitlin couldn’t stand the uncertainty. She stepped away from the flow of people, to the windows, where the reedy tones of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” faded to syrupy Muzak.
Texting back would be too cowardly. And she didn’t want a reply burning pixels into her screen if the news was bad. Fearing what she was going to learn, she phoned.
“Girl,” Michele said.
The surprise in Michele’s voice, perhaps at Caitlin’s courage, or forwardness, or desperation, was blatant.
“Don’t know what I’ve heard or haven’t heard. It’s been busy. Tell me,” Caitlin said.
“Oh.”
Michele’s tone changed—as if Caitlin had rapped her knuckles with a ruler. Caitlin dropped her computer case and pinched the bridge of her nose.
“I’m moving,” Michele said.
Caitlin gazed down the concourse. People flowed past her, all on the way to somewhere else.
“From your town house?” Caitlin said.
“I can’t stay at Temescal. I think you know that. I think you saw that.”
More confused than ever, Caitlin felt a needle in her heart—compassion for her friend.
“What are you going to do?” she said.
“I need a fresh start.” Michele’s sigh sounded both heavy and relieved. “I’ve been offered a job. Emergency Nursing Coordinator at Pearson-Lehman Hospital.”
Caitlin hadn’t heard of it. She was about to ask, but Michele kept talking. “It’s in Fort Washington, Maryland.”
Caitlin’s lips parted. She was trying to process this. “You’re moving across the country?”
“That’s where Maryland is. Hey, I’m picking Sadie up from day care. Gotta jet,” Michele said. “Sean can tell you the rest.”
Then she was gone, and Caitlin was walking through the concourse like an automaton. The escalator down to Baggage Claim gleamed like the cheap tinsel in the war room back in Los Angeles. Arrivals was packed with people greeting holiday travelers. Which, Caitlin supposed, she was. She should have felt buoyant. She felt like a sack of thrashing snakes.
Sean was waiting at the back of the crowd. His expression was neutral. As soon as he saw her, he stepped forward. Caitlin walked directly up to him, put a hand to his chest, and stared him hard in the eye.
“Well?” she said. “The news?”
He looked so strong, so certain, so beautiful. Dark hair, raider’s stare, loose and lithe and wound just tight enough. And still he gave nothing away.
“I’m transferring divisions.”
Caitlin couldn’t help it. Her heart grabbed. The thought filled her brain, her heart, the air: To be with Michele.
Sean’s face was solemn. Almost regretful. “I mean, you’re not planning to leave the BAU.”
She shook her head.
She’d sworn to Emmerich that she was committing herself to the case, the team, the job, the mission. But this wasn’t the price she’d wanted to pay. Anything but this.
Sean put his hand over hers and squeezed. She could feel his heart. Feel his breathing. He seemed to set himself more firmly on the floor.
“We’re going to close this bombing case,” he said. “Abso-goddamn-lutely.”
“I believe it,” she said, with a sense of bewilderment.
“Then I’m moving to DC.” He was looking her straight in the eye. “I didn’t tell you, because it’s been iffy. It’s been winding its way through the ATF bureaucracy for months. It’s a promotion.”
“Congratulations.”
Now he was the one who looked bewildered. As if she wasn’t as happy as he had thought she would be. She felt like she was being cast adrift on this conversation, and might get swept out the doors into the lowering darkness.
“It’s close to Quantico,” he said. “And Michele wants to tell you her news as well—”
“She did.”
“Oh—cool.” He was definitely perplexed now. “She’ll be in Fort Washington, and that means the two of us can continue to coparent Sadie. We won’t have to adjust the custody arrangement. We’ll be within driving distance.”
“What?”
He took Caitlin’s face in his hands. “You and I said we’d make it work, and we will. Getting a place together would be good. As long as you don’t quit the FBI.”
She felt like a fool. She hoped he hadn’t noticed. She could have jumped and punched a joyous hole in the ceiling.
Instead, she punched Sean on the arm. And laughed. And kissed him.
57
That night, lying in bed with Sean, Caitlin watched the Christmas lights sparkle on the Bay. A soft chill pervaded the air, and a sense of the long, welcoming night, of restfulness and unending depth, of a pause that bathed them in the ancient starlight pouring through the window. Sean brushed his fingertips through her hair. Across the neighborhood there was a palpable feeling of anticipation, people cycling up toward celebrations.
Caitlin thought about Hayden Maddox.
“He claimed he was beyond good and evil. But I’m convinced none of us ever can be,” she said. “A psychopath might not feel remorse or compassion. But he can understand and follow the law. He can avoid deliberately damaging people.”
And if he didn’t want to help others live and thrive, he could leave room for them to do so. And watch, impoverished, from behind a scrim of lovelessness.
She laced her fingers with Sean’s. “Have you heard of liminal time and space?”
“Like police work?” he said.
“Damn, now you’re going to get deep?” She laughed. “One foot in the legal world, the other in the underworld?” She considered it. “You’re right. We walk the edge.”
“And have to navigate the divide,” he said. “Deal with the ambiguity. Without losing the reins.”
Caitlin knew these remarks were aimed directly at her. That life was complicated. That opening your heart was messy and dangerous. And worth it.
Sean tentatively turned her arm to reveal the fresh cuts she had made.
He knew her history. He had been the one to help her own up to her struggles, her choices, and to accept her scars as part of her life story. He’d suggested she tattoo her arms, claim her own skin in a new way. The literary tattoo on her right forearm, The whole sky, had been her response. Tonight, the whole sky felt both close and very far away.
Sean’s eyes asked the question.
“Yeah,” she said. “Over the weekend. But I’m done. For good.”
He held on. Touch, a connection, a promise and a demand. Will you find a way to move beyond the craving? To live in the world without needing to punish yourself for it?
She exhaled. “Think your friend Jo Beckett could refer me to somebody?”
He pulled her closer. Nodded.
“Are you going to get these tattooed too?” he said.
She examined a healing cut. It was scar tissue, joining both sides of the wound. Walk the edge.
She shook her head. “These have to stand alone for now. I have to own it.”
She curled against his shoulder. Their breathing came into sync. They wrapped their arms around each other and sank to sleep in the starry night.
EPILOGUE
Twenty miles west of Berkeley, on the summit of Mount Tamalpais, a figure stood at the overlook. Past the dark mass of the mountain, San Francisco Bay spread below him, shrapneled with
light. He inhaled, taking it in.
The cabin in Garlock had been discovered. The name on the deed, the alias, was blown. The devices inside the cabin had been neutralized. But the photos would have been found. That was still a win. He could live with that.
It was a long game.
And he had his drone feed, which had provided valuable insights into the methods and psychology of the target he was pursuing. Patience would pay. After a minute, he spread his arms, raised his head, and let the night seethe through him.
The Ghost stood alone, and thought, Your time is coming, Caitlin.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe my gratitude to a number of people whose expertise, support, enthusiasm, and hard work have helped me write the best novel I possibly could. In particular, my thanks go to everyone at Blackstone, especially Josh Stanton, Stephanie Stanton, Lauren Maturo, Josie Woodbridge, and Anne Fonteneau. For his unswerving advocacy of my writing, I’m grateful to Shane Salerno. I couldn’t have a better agent in my corner. Thanks also to the team at the Story Factory, especially Ryan Coleman, and to writers who have generously encouraged readers to pick up my novels, including Don Winslow, Steve Hamilton, and Reed Farrel Coleman. A special thank you goes to Ken Price for taking an afternoon to guide me on a research tour of a major infrastructure site. It was fun, and great grist for a thriller. And above all, I’m thankful to my husband, Paul Shreve, and my children—Kate, Mark, and Nate—for their love and support.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MEG GARDINER is the critically acclaimed author of the UNSUB series and China Lake, which won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original and was a finalist for NPR’s 100 Best Thrillers Ever. Stephen King has said of Meg Gardiner: “This woman is as good as Michael Connelly…her novels are, simply put, the finest crime-suspense series I’ve come across in the last twenty years.” Gardiner was also recently elected president of the Mystery Writers of America for 2019.
