Into Darkness

by T. J. Brearton

  “Ben,” she said, mustering conviction, “we’re going to get this guy.”

  “Yeah …” He sounded a million miles away.

  She repeated it with a slight amendment.

  “Ben – I’m gonna get this guy. I promise you.”

  The birds were chirping in the pin oaks on the sidewalk when Shannon stepped out of the cab. The forty-story building loomed above her, grayish-beige, its hundreds of windows reflecting the powder-blue sky. FBI’s New York City field office was massive, took up five floors, and was run by the assistant director in charge – Ronald Moray.

  Upstairs, Moray’s head was so polished it gleamed. His silver glasses looked fused to his skull. Shannon had met him twice before, but Moray didn’t recognize her as he approached her and Tyler in the hall. He was neck-breaking tall with long, spidery fingers that gripped like a Terminator. He smiled down at her and then turned to Tyler, and the smile vanished. “Are we just about ready?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “See you in there.” Tyler hurried away, checking over his shoulder that Shannon was following; she was.

  “You doing okay?” Tyler asked.

  “I’m good, sir.”

  His expression said he didn’t trust it. “You eaten?”

  “I’m all set.”

  He stopped then and stepped close, so that she moved back toward the curved hallway wall. She had a partial view of an open area – a common area with lots of desks and a ceiling three stories higher. A young man with a box in his arms glanced over at her and Tyler.

  Tyler said, “We’re going to present to thirty people. I need to know that you’re in good shape.”

  “I’m in good shape.”

  He continued to gauge her with his eyes. Finally he relented, opening up a little space between them. “Okay.”

  The room to hold the briefing had been arranged with theater-style seating, a laptop, projector, and screen. Tyler moved quickly to the back of the room, opened his leather valise, and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “Hand these out. Thirty-five of them. Just set them in the seats.”

  It was the killer’s words, a transcript of what Monica Forbes had been forced to read on camera.

  She distributed as asked, and agents were filing in by the time she was done.

  Tyler began the presentation. “I’ve given you all a copy of what we’re calling the manifesto,” he said. “We’re going to start with two things to focus on. One, digital forensics. If you don’t know Special Agent Amy Dodd, there she is.”

  A blonde agent blushed and raised her hand.

  Tyler said, “While digital forensics studies the video for clues to the type of equipment used – camera and lights and microphone – they’re also looking for any tip-offs on location. Exact time of day, all of that. They can listen; they can judge the acoustics. Get a sense of how big the room was. Everything. While they’re doing that, we’re also pulling apart this manifesto. We’re studying the words. I’ve had top forensic linguists looking at it all day. Special Agents McIntosh and Gowarski – they’re our linguists.”

  People looked around at a skinny man and a heavyset man, who both nodded and looked like they preferred the attention to be elsewhere.

  FBI agents: shyer than you’d think.

  “And over there in the corner is Special Agent Stratford. Agent Stratford specializes in hate crimes, hate groups. He’s going to help us as we go through this line by line. He’s going to run every expression, turn of phrase, and idiom against the groups we know about. Their rhetoric, their slogans, their bumper stickers. Everybody got it?”

  There were murmured agreements and nods. Across the room from her, Ronald Moray looked pleased, overhead fluorescents shining off his head.

  Tyler said, “What we’re going to do now is, we’re going to all watch this video.”

  Someone dimmed the room. Tyler hit a button on his laptop. The projector beamed colored light onto the screen. It was a recreation of the previous evening, in a way.

  It was the first Shannon had seen the video since the awards dinner. She’d been distracted then, focused on locating the source of the disruption, then getting people to safety. She could sit now and watch.

  As before, Forbes read from the sheet of paper in her lap. She would look up at the camera every once in a while, like the trained public speaker she was. It was clear she struggled to be strong. She thinks she might get out of this, Shannon considered. It was in her eyes, in her voice – Forbes was trained to be on camera, to have poise, but in this situation the thing motivating her was the promise of getting back to her life, back to her family. To survive. Anyone would try to rationalize a horrific situation like that. Anyone would hope for humanity in her captor.

  When it was over, McIntosh said, “One problem. We don’t know if she’s reading verbatim. She could be straying from what he’s given her.”

  “I’d say she’s probably pretty close,” Shannon offered. “She’s used to cue cards. She’s familiar with the camera – even as unusual and scary as it had to have been, this comes naturally to her.”

  McIntosh was nodding agreement. “That’s true, I’m sure, but as we get into the very fine details of this, I’m saying it’s dubious to build our analysis off this transcript.” He shook the paper in the air. “Because it’s ultimately her interpretation. Even if it’s ninety-nine percent accurate.” McIntosh pointed at the screen. “But how do we know? Right near the end, for instance, she says, ‘This is …’ but she doesn’t complete the thought. After that, she delivers the line, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ et cetera. All we can really evaluate is her performance.”

  “All right,” Tyler interjected, “but–”

  McIntosh cut him off. “I’m saying that might work to our benefit, too. As a professional, Monica Forbes could be a step ahead of her captor. She could be anticipating where this is going to go – out to the public, where law enforcement will sit in a room and do exactly what we’re doing – she could be giving us clues. What we need to do is get together with the video team and say, ‘Okay, at fourteen seconds, she glances up and blinks twice. Or, at seventeen seconds, she looks off camera.’ We need to analyze this for anything she might be trying to communicate.”

  Tyler was nodding, but hastily, darting looks at Moray, and he said, “Right, okay – I understand all of that. But I don’t want to miss the forest for the trees.”

  “Of course not,” McIntosh said.

  “This is a terrorist’s mission statement,” Tyler said. “Okay? It’s right there in front of us. She says – he says – ‘this is a reckoning.’” Tyler looked over their faces. “He’s punishing.” His eyes lingered on Shannon. “Don’t you think he’s punishing?”

  She didn’t have a ready answer. Not because she hadn’t thought about it – she’d been thinking about it for a day – but because her theory was still brewing, and she needed more to back it up. “I think he’s preaching,” she said. “I think it’s punishment. But it’s not necessarily punishment for what he’s preaching.”

  All eyes locked on her at that point. So much for holding back.

  Tyler scowled. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying if it was truly punishment for the sins of the media – for everything he’s saying through Monica Forbes in that video – then there would have been a bomb. There wasn’t. There was one victim – Todd Spencer.”

  Tyler shook his head. “There was more than one victim, Agent Ames – everyone was terrorized. He caused an absolute panic. You were there, weren’t you? You don’t call three hundred people running for their lives, nearly trampling each other to death, a form of punishment?”

  Bufort spoke up from where he sat near the back of the room. “And this is his whole thing. Pick ’em off one at a time. It’s no fun to just blow up a whole room of journalists. Right? He’s got to drag it out, torture them.”

  Shannon turned around to face him. “Maybe, but why them?”

  Bufort stared back at her. “I fe
el like we’re going in circles. Why them? Because those are the people he’s seen on TV. The people’s names he’s seen in black and white.”

  She shook her head. “I think it’s more than that.”

  “Okay, so let’s get to it. What is it?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  Tyler waved his hands in the air, redirecting attentions his way. “All right, fine. That’s all fine. But, Agent Ames, I think you’re so hot to get into your own theories, you’re missing what’s right in front of us.” He meant the video; he meant the manifesto Monica Forbes had been forced to recite. Forbes, on the screen right now, frozen in time, paused just before she delivered her tearful threat: a bomb in the building.

  There was no question that the effect of that threat – the entire video – was terrorizing.

  The heat rose in her cheeks. “I’m not missing it,” Shannon said.

  Tyler glared at her. She realized she was dangerously close to arguing with him in front of Moray, the man on whom Tyler wanted to leave a positive impression.

  Moray said, “This is good. I think you want multiple ways into something like this.” He began to stand up, pausing to brush some invisible detritus from his pants before unfurling to his full height. “Keep me posted,” he said, his gaze landing on Shannon, and then he walked out.

  She rode the subway back to the Brooklyn office. It was where Tyler wanted her – out of sight, out of mind. She didn’t want it to be this way; she respected Tyler, but there was a tension between them, competition. Multiple ways into something like this. Tyler surely registered this as a tacit endorsement of that competition. As if Moray was saying, May the best man win.

  Whatever. It didn’t concern her. What concerned her was the promise she’d made to Ben Forbes. The one she’d made to herself, and to the public, when she’d been accepted into the FBI.

  Back in her office, pictures of Monica Forbes, Eva Diaz, Jordan Baldacci – and now, Todd Spencer – covered her wall. Professional headshots of each, plus some candids found online, and of course, clippings from their work. A still photo of Diaz in the field, standing in front of a movie theatre premiering the latest Scorsese picture. Monica Forbes sitting on set with her three co-hosts of The Scene, discussing a school flooded from a broken water main, indicative of citywide budget problems (probably Monica’s idea).

  The picture of Baldacci showed her on the steps of city hall. She had one foot up on a higher step, her arms folded – a power pose. Baldacci looked like a force to be reckoned with, no question.

  Shannon turned to her laptop. She studied the database she’d been creating: each victim and all the projects they’d worked on. The silver lining to Todd Spencer’s murder? It narrowed things down. It helped, in a twisted way; the more victims there were, the fewer stories that could be cross-referenced. So if the murders were related to something like Paul Torres and his shady rezoning deal, she’d be getting closer to finding it.

  But that was a big if, a theory not shared by Mark Tyler. Bufort didn’t buy it, either. The two of them were full steam ahead on domestic terrorism.

  Tyler had uploaded the video to a secure FBI server. Shannon navigated there and entered her password, then a separate access code for the video. She didn’t want to watch it again, but she had to.

  The video began with the image of Forbes on the upright gurney, covered in a blanket. Behind her, slightly out of focus, a bluish-gray wall. Dirty or possibly paint-chipped, cracked. Maybe all of the above. Shannon leaned close and studied Forbes. Forbes said, “Hello. I have a message to deliver to you tonight. A message to deliver to the–”

  Shannon hit pause. She’d noticed it before, but now that she was able to scrutinize, Monica Forbes’s wet hair was confirmed.

  According to the National Weather Service, the New York metropolitan area had been experiencing a run of sunny, hot weather. It was humid, but hadn’t rained in over a week. Monica Forbes’s hair was wet because the killer had cleaned her first before recording her recital. And the blanket, wrapping her, because she was naked beneath. Because she’d just been bathed, for God’s sake.

  Why clean her up before recording the manifesto? Why not after he’d killed her and all was said and done?

  Most investigators were assuming the cleaning occurred posthumously, to remove trace evidence, but Shannon had never been sure. It could have happened immediately following the abduction; a kind of preparation for what came next. Plus, both autopsies had revealed traces of sevoflurane, an anesthesia, in the victim’s bloodstreams. Sevoflurane was similar to chloroform, but faster acting and with greater potency. The victims were drugged. Incapacitated. Pliable. Perhaps he washed them while they were unconscious.

  Shannon backed up the footage to the beginning. “Hello,” Monica Forbes said. “I have a message to deliver.”

  McIntosh had a point, voicing concerns over how to interpret the video – where did its content and Forbes’s performance diverge? Had the killer, for instance, written hello into his manifesto? Or, with her brain in pure fight-or-flight panic, had Monica Forbes reverted to a kind of newscaster persona and ad-libbed the word?

  What was also interesting, along that pathway of thinking, was what she didn’t say in the video. She didn’t say, “Hello. I’m Monica Forbes. I have a message …” She hadn’t identified herself.

  Why not?

  Had the killer written the manifesto with a specific speaker in mind? Could that be determined based solely on whether or not the speaker formally introduced themselves?

  It was dizzying, the questions Shannon knew she could ask and never have answered.

  Monica Forbes said, “For too long, the media has gone unaccountable. We have never had to apologize for the fear we sell …”

  McIntosh and others were analyzing every choice of word, regardless of Forbes’s possible distorting effect. McIntosh hewed to the idea that, as a professional, Forbes would be delivering the manifesto with close to 95 percent precision. And so, he studied how the sentences were structured. What that might say about the killer’s background, his level of education, his intelligence.

  Others were drilling down into the technical aspects of the video itself, from the frame rate to the depth of field and potential lens used, while still others were studying the wall behind her, the gurney, the type of blanket wrapped around her – every conceivable clue that might shed light on the location, or that might lead to revealing the killer.

  Toward the end of the ninety-second-long video, Forbes delivered the threat: “If you won’t hold yourself to account, the people will. This is a reckoning. This is the beginning of your atonement.”

  The beginning of your atonement.

  Atonement – a kind of frou-frou word. Suggesting the killer either used such a word unconsciously, or he’d splashed it in to convey tone. But beyond that, the message seemed cut and dried: anti-media sentiment had been percolating through the culture for decades, but it had gotten acute over the past few years. However, the killer didn’t make any specific references to public figures or political parties, the grievance was broad – a dressing-down of the media at large. An indictment of the for-profit model; the massive advertising industry tangled up in the news – what some called the “infotainment complex.”

  Was the killer anti-media, or anti-corporatism? Did it matter? It might matter, since people on both ends of the political spectrum had their bones to pick with the seeming corporate takeover of society. Where had he gotten his ideas? A political family? A local culture? How about academia? Thinkers like Marshal McLuhan and Neil Postman warned against a Big Brother-like state of mass media. Controlled not by central governance, but by private entities. Did the killer agree?

  There were no answers. Shannon watched the video several more times, made copious notes, and finally relented. She left her office, went down to the Starbucks on the main floor, and got a coffee. It was 10:16 p.m. The morgue was still open. After all, it never closed.

  The sign near the rows
of human freezers read: Remember – Always Load Bodies Head Out.

  On duty tonight was a medical student looking all of twenty-two. The fresh-faced kid said, “Forbes, here we go,” and opened the small stainless-steel door. Grunting with the effort, he rolled out the body encased in an opaque bag. Then he glanced up at Shannon, kind of shyly, and said, “You want me to open it?”

  “Please.”

  The kid reminded her of Gabe, one of her older brothers. The way he was when Shannon had still been a young girl. Delicate, somehow. Strong, tough, but always quiet.

  Wearing blue latex gloves, the attendant carefully unzipped the top of the bag.

  Monica Forbes looked like they all looked after a few days’ refrigeration – a kind of bluish-purple, bones prominent against the skin, eyes glued shut.

  “Thank you,” Shannon said.

  He offered a slight smile. “I’ll leave you to it, ma’am.”

  As she stood looking down at Monica, considering the snaking bruise around her neck, Shannon read from the autopsy report she’d gotten from upstairs. She knew most of the material it contained. Time of death, cause of death – strangulation. It had come to include her last meal (a slice of pizza) and the toxicity of her blood, which was negligible. No drugs, no drinking. Just the sevoflurane.

  Touch DNA had yet to be determined; DNA took a long time. But a swab of her neck had gone to the lab and came back as bearing trace elements – fibers – of a synthetic material called Cordura nylon. This material was so widely used, from belts to backpack straps, military wear and performance apparel, that on its own, it didn’t help much. What she knew was that such fabrics were considered highly durable and resistant to tears and abrasions. Only a minute amount of material had been found embedded in the victim’s flesh. Microscopic.

  Shannon set the report down on a nearby tray table. She stood looking at Monica Forbes. Then she lowered her head and closed her eyes.