Into Darkness

by T. J. Brearton

  Shannon turned and looked at the smiling face of Charlotte Beecher, that touch of melancholy in the girl’s eyes. “The question is, who is on that list?”

  30

  Wednesday afternoon

  The sky was gunmetal gray through the rain-flecked single window of her office. Shannon’s muscles felt stringy, nerves knotty, vision grainy. But she couldn’t stop working the question around in her head: who might be next? And really – would he go after someone else now?

  A few remnants remained of her victim wall – the torn corner of a photograph, a few scraps of newspapers clinging with Scotch tape.

  Her own impulsivity – tearing down the wall – had surprised her. But it was over now; they knew the identity of the Media Killer, and they were going to get a net around him, bring him down. It was only a matter of time. What mattered, to her, was making sure he didn’t take anyone else down with him. The FBI, along with half the NYPD and the Department of Homeland Security, were out hunting Henry Beecher. They would be watching the hospital that kept his wife. Watching his wife’s parents in Flushing. His brother in Connecticut. Talking to every friend from the police force. They would have Beecher eventually, but so far he’d been smart and elusive. Could he be up to something? Could he have expected the events of that morning as an eventuality and planned for it?

  The dark-haired agent’s question persisted in her mind: what’s the criteria? The victims were people who’d publicized or remarked on Charlotte Beecher’s gaffe in some inflammatory way. But was there any pattern to the way in which Beecher had killed them? Did such a pattern merely meet with logistical, practical necessities, or was there some judgment rendered?

  In other words – had he killed the victims in order of the level of guilt he attributed them? After all, Diaz was just “doing her job” as an entertainment reporter. But the Priests were the ones, by any definition, to truly make the Charlotte Beecher story go viral. It was inarguable that their tweet had been what amplified the thing from a passing curiosity to national social outrage.

  Was there someone out there Beecher thought had done even more grievous harm to his daughter? It was hard to imagine. Hard to know. And Shannon was utterly exhausted. Her mind buzzed with a kind of background static, bits of conversations looping in her memory, scenes from the past week replaying over and over, everything jumbling together.

  She went home. She just needed a couple of hours. It barely seemed possible that the Priests’ double homicide had been just last night. She’d been eating dinner, hadn’t she? With Caldoza, at an Italian restaurant. It felt like a long time ago.

  Too tired for the subway, not trusting herself to drive, she took a cab from the resident agency to her apartment, drizzle coming down. Her role in this was over, according to Tyler. She’d been the one to identify Beecher and his credible motivation. It hardly seemed like the time to be passing out, but that didn’t stop her from crawling onto her bed, fully clothed, and collapsing.

  When she awoke, the rain had passed; the sky outside her apartment was purple tin. She checked the time on her phone – going on seven p.m.

  Damn. Four hours down.

  She had to pee. She shuffled to the bathroom, blinking at her phone.

  A missed call from Caldoza. Two from Tyler. One from her family.

  She sat on the toilet, listening to Tyler’s first message.

  “Beecher’s wife, Teresa, is no longer a patient at Kingsboro. Beecher came and got her this morning.”

  Shannon unspooled the toilet paper and said to Jasper, watching from the doorway, “Oh boy.”

  They’d just missed him.

  Tyler: “We have an eyewitness from outside the hospital saying the SUV, the dark green Chevy Tahoe, was headed west.”

  They’d run Beecher through DMV, of course, and discovered his vehicle, the Tahoe. Green, like Olivia Jackson had said. Plus, it was a make and model that matched the type of tire rubber found at the crime scene in Hunters Point.

  Shannon wondered about the Dodge Challenger seen by Mendoza. Maybe it was nothing, or maybe it was a secondary vehicle Beecher bought for cash and avoided registering. She needed to check for any police reports of unregistered vehicles.

  She flushed and rinsed her hands and then leaned against the sink.

  Tyler’s second message was from an hour later. She’d been so tired she’d slept right through her ringing phone.

  “Beecher left the city. Vehicle was on a traffic camera crossing the Whitestone Bridge. And his phone showed up – he made a quick call from New Jersey, and he used his credit card at a gas station. NYPD is at the end of their jurisdiction, but we’re on it – we’ve got our agents on it, and New Jersey has joined up.”

  She let out a long, slow breath, puffing out her cheeks. Beecher was on the run. Took his wife and hit the road.

  She looked at herself in the mirror. Big circles under her eyes. The little bit of mascara she wore had escaped the corner of one eye, like she’d been crying in her sleep. She turned on the tub faucet. As the water pounded the porcelain, she listened to the message from Caldoza. From half an hour ago.

  “Hey. Ah, it’s just me. Luis Caldoza. The, ah, guy who kind of looks like the new Magnum PI. You ever see that show? Look, I don’t care if that dude is Latino. I mean, I’m Latino, but so what? I’ve got every right to want a white guy to play Magnum. That was my childhood. But I don’t. I don’t care if he’s white or brown or green. But I gotta tell you, no mustache? That’s just horrible. That’s sacrilege.”

  She felt herself smile and roll her eyes at Caldoza’s humor as she ran her fingers under the water. Getting nice and hot. She’d never been big on baths, but since her arm wounds sort of forced her into it, she’d come to like them a bit more.

  Caldoza continued, “So, all right, just checking in with you. I heard they’re closing in on his ass over in Jersey. Are they gonna let you get a piece of this guy? Talk to him? Anything? Maybe not, huh? You’re just the woman behind the scenes. You ride into the town, you save the villagers, and then you just sort of disappear. I like that, you know.”

  He was quiet a moment. She suddenly felt nervous, like he was about to tell her how much he liked her. That he was going to cross that line from vague flirting with plausible deniability into the undeniable realm. Say something he couldn’t take back. She didn’t know if she wanted him to or not.

  “Give me a call,” he said finally. “If you can. When you can. All right?”

  The message ended.

  She stripped out of her clothes and slipped into the hot water, keeping her arms above her head.

  After a few minutes of soaking, she picked up her phone again and listened to the call from her family, expecting to hear her father’s voice.

  “Hi,” her mother said.

  Shannon sat up straighter in the bath, luxurious soak forgotten.

  “I’ve, um, I’ve been following this case on the news, and I just … I hope everything is okay with you.”

  She hastily rubbed some water from her face, listening intently.

  “And I hope you’re … that you’re getting your rest and eating well.” There was a murmuring voice in the background. Deep. Her father. “Your dad says he loves you. He says not to be a hero. All right. Goodbye, honey.”

  Shannon set the phone down on the edge of the tub. Her vision blurred as tears filled in the edges of her eyes.

  It had been a long while since her mother had called. Or expressed any sort of emotion around her, let alone concern. Shannon had stopped expecting it altogether and grown accustomed to communicating through her father.

  This was progress. This was a start.

  But what made her cry, she realized, wasn’t the promise of a reconnection. The sad part was, she’d accepted the freeze between them, become inured to it. Ten years was a long time to have your mother treat you like you didn’t exist, or when she did acknowledge you, as if you were a disappointment. A mistake.

  The dripping water made splatting sou
nds on the cool, hard floor. Shannon realized she’d gotten out of the tub and was standing naked. She toweled off and left the bathroom, dressed in loose and lightweight slacks and a simple white blouse. She ground some fresh coffee beans, with Jasper circling her legs, then put some food in his bowl and stroked his spine. With the coffee brewing, she sat down at the antique desk in the living room and opened her laptop.

  Charlotte Beecher.

  Shannon looked through the online articles and information she’d already bookmarked.

  Fourteen-year-old condemned for gestures on American Stars takes own life. That was probably the biggest one, carried in The New York Times.

  Has Outrage Culture Gone Too Far? Baldacci’s own Newsday had speculated as much.

  Hundreds of articles from all over the region, from the northeast, from across the country, covered the sad story of Charlotte Beecher. The consensus was the opposite of what Todd Spencer had opined. Here was a girl essentially stoned to death by a culture that frenzied over wrongdoing. Even the more liberal of outlets seemed sympathetic, claiming that “cancel culture” had taken its first true victim. While senators and celebrities – adults – might have possessed the faculties to help them navigate public rebuke, a teenaged girl had neither the mental maturity yet, nor the house in the Hamptons in which to hide out for a while. She didn’t have the spokesperson to shield her from the press, either.

  Shannon imagined the girl looking out the window of that narrow, brown home on Seventy-Third. A news van parked in the street. Reporters calling to her as the girl rushed off in the morning to get to school.

  Shannon found one picture, of Henry Beecher, holding his hand up to block a photographer’s shot. Father Defends Daughter’s Actions. “‘She’s just a kid,’ Henry Beecher, NYPD, aged 50, had to say. ‘And anyway, she says it’s not true. It’s not what people think it is. And I believe her.’”

  The taping of the show, a semifinal round in the vocals performances on the globally popular show American Stars, had been in late July, two years before. Charlotte had hung herself just before the start of the new school year.

  For one month, she’d endured it. According to an article in the New York Post, the Beechers had called the police twenty-eight times in a single week to complain of people outside the home, taunting Charlotte, throwing sticks and rocks, lighting off firecrackers. When Henry Beecher caught two young boys trying to spray-paint Cunt on the sidewalk, he chased them off with his gun.

  Shannon wanted to find the point that Charlotte’s identity became public. When had she gone from “Girl Makes Fun of Disabled Performer” to “Charlotte Beecher, Astoria Heights”? But it seemed impossible to discern. As far as Shannon could tell, no one had explicitly doxed her. And no journalist with integrity would’ve revealed an exact address, even if they’d learned her identity.

  God, Shannon thought, if only she’d held on a little longer. The world had a short attention span. Something like this would have surely faded.

  But it had just been too much, apparently.

  Jasper leapt up onto the desk, purring. She scratched behind his ears. When he sat, his tail swished back and forth over the keyboard. “All right. Go on. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  She stared at the computer. She had, currently, thirteen open tabs in her browser. It had to be here somewhere, the moment Charlotte went from being anonymous to literally having rocks thrown at her home. Maybe someone recognized her and talked to the press? That didn’t mean they’d be named as a source.

  Shannon leaned back and bit her thumb for a while.

  Maybe she was coming at this thing from the wrong direction.

  Maybe, if there was someone with secrets to spill, they’d already spilled them.

  She got up from the desk, picked up her holster and gun, and strapped it on. Jasper sat in the middle of the living room floor, white fur almost iridescent in the semidarkness. “Be right back,” she said.

  The 90th Precinct was buzzing. Heads turned as she walked along the edge of the bullpen; voices murmured.

  She found Caldoza at his desk, nose buried in his computer. Heinz was in place at the opposite desk. He saw her first.

  “There she is.”

  Caldoza looked up. The change in his expression was unmistakable. He stood and briefly touched her shoulder. “Hey. Ah – hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “Got my message?”

  “I did.”

  Shannon glanced at Heinz, who snapped a piece of bubble gum and looked away, as if interested in some paperwork on his desk.

  Caldoza glanced at Heinz, too, then focused on her. “What can I do for you?”

  “Actually,” she said, “I was hoping you could help me with something.”

  Paperwork formed dunes and drifts in the filing room. Shannon wasn’t interested in the hard copies of the hotline calls – she wanted the database Whitaker had shown her. And she had access from her office, but this was better …

  “Here we go,” Caldoza said. He booted it up and logged in and pulled out the chair for her.

  Sensing him watching over her shoulder, she looked up. “I’ll probably be a while.”

  She saw him take offense – a knitting of his brow, hardening of his lip line. He tried to make light of the situation. “Oh, it’s like that, huh? Just use me and throw me away?”

  She stood up. He seemed caught off guard and took an uncertain step back. She kept going like that, backing him against the wall. The door to the room was still open, and she gave it a hard push with the tips of her fingers. He looked at the door when it slammed, then his eyes slid back to hers as she pushed her body up against his. This time, touching; she got him good and sandwiched between her and the wall behind him.

  “Listen,” she said, lips an inch from his own, “I think you’re all right, Luis.”

  “I think you’re all right, too.”

  His hands came up her back and she grabbed his forearms, pushing them gently but firmly down. “And after this is over, and Henry Beecher is behind bars, and everyone is safe, maybe you can take me back to that Italian place.”

  He searched her eyes. “Yeah?”

  “Or maybe somewhere else because I’m not super into Italian.” She delivered the line flatly, matter-of-fact, and his breath burst against her face as he laughed. He smelled chocolatey, like he’d just sneaked a donut. But his body wasn’t soft. He had hard arms and a hard stomach. She reached up between them and laid a hand against his cheek. “Is it a deal?”

  “It’s a deal.”

  They kept eye-locked for another few seconds, the heat between them rising. She slowly backed off. He said, “Can I ask what you’re looking for?”

  “Anything,” she said, gradually returning her attention to the database. She sat down at the computer and cracked her knuckles. “Was just going to start with a simple keyword search.”

  He was behind her, but at a distance. “What’s the keyword?”

  “Charlotte.”

  A few minutes later, she had it. Two calls, both originating from Astoria Heights. One from Sunday, one from Tuesday. Same phone number. Same caller.

  All calls were recorded and stored digitally. She pulled up the file and listened.

  “New York Police Department tip hotline. Can I have your name, please?”

  “Josie. Ah, Josephine Tenor.” She sounded anxious.

  Shannon glanced at Caldoza, who nodded and said, “Tenor. Got it.”

  “What can I do for you today, Josephine?”

  “I’m … I’m gonna … I’m gonna be killed. I know it. I’m gonna – he’s gonna come for me. Because of Charlotte.”

  Another look between Shannon and Caldoza. There it was.

  “Wait – sorry? Are you talking about the suspect in the–”

  “Yes. All of it. The guy doing all of it. He’s going to come for me. He’s going to come for me, and he’s going to kill me just like all these other people he’s going to–”

  “Ma’am? Josep
hine? I’m gonna need you to calm down. Josephine – how old are you?”

  Shannon felt cold. “How did this not come through? How did you not get this?”

  He was shaking his head. “I don’t know. I mean, we got three thousand calls since we opened the lines on this.”

  “Three thousand?” Her incredulity gave way to reason: in a city of eight million, three thousand was less than point-zero-zero-one percent. A tiny fraction given a city connected by the media, all gripped in fear or fascination that a serial killer rampaged among them in the dark.

  “There’s got to be a better system,” she said quietly.

  On the call, Josephine gave her age: “Sixteen.”

  Same age as Charlotte. Well, same age as Charlotte would have been.

  “Okay. I’m going to put you through to talk to an investigator, okay, Josephine? We’re overloaded with calls, so it might take a minute. Stay on the line.”

  “Okay.”

  But then the call ended.

  “What happened?”

  “Looks like she was on hold for about twenty seconds.”

  “She just hung up,” Shannon said. More memories of the past week flooded her, instances of her own hedging and doubt. And she was a professional. Considering the typical insecurities of a teenaged girl, it was surprising that Josephine had even called in the first place.

  “Let’s check the second call,” Caldoza said.

  But she waited a moment, letting something work its way through in her thoughts. “Sunday. Sunday morning was after the awards dinner.”