labyrinth 8 minutes ago
After Dark put Sibby to bed for the night, he returned to his basement lab and wondered if the FBI had finally called in Riggins and Constance and the rest of Special Circs.
Part of Dark wanted to reach out to Riggins and kick the case around with him. Riggins was in many ways his opposite—brash, crude, given to wild hunches, and a shoot-first-ask-later attitude—but their skills complemented each other. They’d put away countless monsters. Put many of them down for good, too.
Ordinarily, this would have had Special Circs written all over it. Back when Dark was still a young and hungry agent, he could have practically loaded himself in a slingshot and launched himself clear across the country just so he could land in L.A. first. This was the kind of high-profile, byzantine case that Special Circs was designed to investigate.
But Special Circs was in deep trouble.
Dark himself had pulled the plug when he saw there was nowhere else to go but down. He wished Riggins and Constance the best, but he couldn’t stomach the bullshit anymore.
He wondered how Riggins had been able to put up with it for so many years.
chapter 10
RIGGINS
Quantico, Virginia
Agent Tom Riggins rinsed out his mouth, spat into the sink, ran cold water over his face, checked his tongue, and wondered if this was it—if this was the day the job was going to kill him.
From the inside out.
Bumps were still there. Bumps were definitely still there. His GP must be blind. Maybe he needed a new doctor. Maybe he was dying, no matter what the doc said. Dying from the inside out, and now the rot had simply reached his tongue. He washed his face again, this time with water as hot as he could stand, then scooped a handful into his mouth. Take that you little fuckers. After drying his face with a paper towel, Riggins went back to his office. Which was still and dark, and not just because it was after hours on a weekday at Special Circs.
Special Circs: Riggins’s pride and joy, the office he’d nurtured since its birth. The toughest, most elite law enforcement unit ever created on U.S. soil. His baby.
Special Circs: now in a death spiral.
The unit had started out as something amazing. But years of bureaucracy and muddled directives from above had turned Circs into a shadow of its former self. “Elite” in press release only; now in real danger of becoming just another random fiefdom in the byzantine empire of Homeland Security.
Riggins was the head of Special Circs since the beginning, when it was created as a humble side project of the Justice Department’s ViCAP—Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. ViCAP was the computerized think tank that tracked and compared serial killings. It was a vital resource for law enforcement. But sometimes ViCAP tracked cases so violent, so extreme, that local cops or even the FBI weren’t quite equipped to handle them. That’s when Special Circs would step in.
But five years ago, the secretary of defense—Norman Wycoff—took a special interest in Special Circs. Tried to force its agents to cover up some of his own indiscretions.
Succeeded.
And once he’d wormed his way inside, he never really left.
Normally the secretary of defense would have absolutely zero sway over any Justice Department agency. But now Riggins, due to a series of circumstances that still made his stomach turn, found himself as Wycoff ’s errand boy. And Wycoff saw Special Circs as his personal squad of bagmen and fixers.
Just when Riggins didn’t think the situation could get any worse, it did two weeks ago, after it was revealed that Norman Wycoff was under federal indictment for abuse of his office.
Well duh, Riggins thought. You pencilnecks just clueing in to this now?
But it was the worst possible thing for Special Circs. Because the only thing worse than having an evil overlord questioning your every move? The sudden lack of an evil overlord. A patron, even if it’s Satan himself, is better than no patron.
With the serving of the first subpoena, Special Circs—already on the verge of being irrelevant—was now tainted goods. Whatever Wycoff had touched had turned to shit. Wycoff had his fingerprints all over Special Circs. The headlines touched off a mass exodus of the best and brightest manhunters and forensics experts in the world. Riggins had already held good-bye parties for three of his best agents and two lab techs. And the worst personnel blow of all was yet to come....
So as Riggins ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, he could not help thinking that it would take an act of God to turn Special Circs around.
Or—if the early rumblings were any indication—the act of a madman named Labyrinth.
Riggins read about the case last night, and he half-expected his phone to ring any minute. Years ago, in the era Riggins liked to call B.W. (Before Wyckoff ), Special Circs would have easily been the go-to agency for something like this. Are you kidding—a cunning psycho engineering the double homicide of two very prominent Los Angelenos, and dropping clues off at LAPD headquarters like he’s the fucking Joker or something? Special Circs all the way. Hell, back in the B.W. days, Riggins was often turning down cases, determined to devote Special Circ’s resources to only the most extreme cases, the worst of the worst.
But now, in the post-B.W. era?
His desktop phone was a useless lump of plastic on his cluttered desktop. No e-mails, no FedExes, no texts, even.
Nothing.
Riggins chided himself for thinking they’d be calling him.
You fool.
Much as Riggins hated to think along political lines, what Special Circs needed to save itself was to bag this Labyrinth fuckhead early. Look where no one else was looking. Riggins wasn’t worried for his own job. They could shitcan him tomorrow and that would be fine. But Special Circs needed to exist. The country needed it. If anything, the world was an even more insane place. In fact, insanity had been adopted into the mainstream like never before.
Look at the reaction to this Labyrinth fuckhead. Riggins scrolled through the comments on that YouTube site and saw more high fives and attaboys than he did expressions of grief or shock. The whole country was losing its goddamned mind.
If he had Steve Dark and Constance Brielle on this guy, they could . . .
Riggins stopped himself, chided himself again. Stop thinking about what you don’t have. Concentrate on what you do. What you’ve always done.
Catch this son of a bitch.
Riggins had done it before; he could do it again. Namely: Put together the top crime-fighting minds on the planet and catch a monster. They’d caught the worst of the worst before. And while the Sqweegel case was one of the more tortured takedowns in the history of the department—they got it done. Special Circs may be down, but it was not out.
They could still cut through the bullshit red tape and catch this Labyrinth psycho before things escalated.
chapter 11
DARK
West Hollywood, California
Two days later, Labyrinth’s identity was still a mystery.
On the plus side, the killer hadn’t sent any new packages or uploaded any additional video clips.
On the minus side, he didn’t have to. The media was still in the middle of a full-on Labyrinth/Elizabeth/Loeb feeding frenzy.
The FBI, following the media’s lead, seemed to be focused on the Hollywood angle. Two dead detectives were tragic, but the members of the LAPD put their lives on the line every day. Celebrity murders, however, seized the public imagination like nothing else. People invested parts of themselves in the lives of the famous. When something awful or thrilling or shocking or embarrassing happened to them, it was a form of vicarious living.
Dark, however, didn’t pay attention to any of that. Over the past six days, he’d turned his attention to the homeless man—the walking time bomb.
Who was just as much a mystery as Labyrinth himself.
No I.D. of any kind, no print match, no DNA match on any known databases. Eyewitness claimed he just walked in off the str
eet and remained fairly calm as he was forcibly separated from the box. The man was trembling, and he reeked like the inside of a tomb, but he was not a man under duress, eyewitnesses claimed. He appeared to be resigned to his situation.
But nobody knew who he was.
People didn’t just materialize out of nowhere. The cutout had to be born somewhere to end up in the middle of L.A.
One thing was clear: “Labyrinth” wasn’t a one-off. The whole thing was too elaborate, too carefully planned. The clock, the art theft, the little maneuver with the LAPD stationery. This was him showing off: Ooh, look what I can do.
Nothing would make Dark happier than to catch this guy right now and tell him, face-to-face:
Here’s what I can do.
While the LAPD had come up with zero hits on the homeless man, they were also severely hampered by the number of databases in the world. There were more databases in the world than the ones accessible by law enforcement. There were extra-legal and so-called black databases that had existed even before Sir Alec Jeffreys made his DNA profiling breakthroughs at the University of Leicester back in 1984. Aggressive sampling and reporting and outright genetic theft had filled in the gaps to create a truly rich database of nearly every living being on the planet, as well as many of the dead.
That was the kind of database Dark would be accessing—again, thanks to his guardian angel Graysmith, and her nebulous intelligence sources.
Josh Banner had smuggled him a piece of the homeless man’s DNA out of LAPD HQ this morning. Dark had processed the sample, and now was awaiting a hit.
Praying for a hit, actually.
Dark’s phone buzzed.
Gray smith again.
She’d been away somewhere in the world—and as usual, she wouldn’t divulge where, exactly. But now she was back in California and wanted to stop by and talk about Labyrinth.
Six months ago Graysmith had seemingly materialized out of nowhere and acted like a guardian angel to him—offering him access, weapons, intel, even goddamned planes that would slingshot him from coast to coast in pursuit of the monster. She told him she had access to a discretionary budget from deep within U.S. intelligence channels, and not to worry about where it all came from.
You’ve seen, firsthand, what kind of resources I can offer you, she’d said.
But what do you want in return? Dark had asked.
I want you to catch the monsters.
Special Circs does that.
But Special Circs isn’t as good as you. And they’re not able to follow the job through—to give the monsters out there what they deserve.
Which would be what?
Death.
A guardian angel—with a bit of the devil inside her.
Dark harbored serious doubts about Graysmith during that first case—the hunt for the so-called Tarot Card Killer. For a time he suspected that she was the Tarot Card Killer, and was worming into his life just to fuck with his head. Those suspicions were unfounded. She’d been vital to the investigation. She had given him exactly what she’d promised—nothing more, nothing less.
By the end of their first case, Graysmith had hinted that she was going to quit her unspecified job in U.S. intelligence and join him full-time.
And then do what? Catch serial killers in our spare time? Dark had asked.
Yeah, she’d said, squeezing his hand.
For the past six months, that is what they did. Whenever Dark wasn’t being a father. They used a sophisticated database program to track all unusual murders worldwide and looked for patterns. Graysmith still apparently had her access to both databases and funding. When Dark had asked her about that, she told him not to worry and keep looking for monsters. There had been promising developments in Europe, but then the killer had tripped himself up and was caught by Interpol. Dark continued to search, to study the patterns.
But all along, Dark wondered: Who was funding her? Where was this all going? He’d done some digging and found some answers.
And soon, they were going to have a little talk about all of this. Because the answers he’d uncovered brought up even more questions.
As usual, Graysmith let herself in, coffee in one hand, beer in the other. She handed the bottle—Shiner Bock—to Dark. He twisted off the cap and took a sip and tried to figure out where she’d been by her appearance. Her smooth skin was slightly tanned, and her hair had been trimmed. Otherwise she looked the same. Her bright eyes always had the same look of bemusement about them—that slight detachment that Dark could never figure out.
“My boss is very interested in Labyrinth,” Graysmith said. “Where are you on the case? I want to be able to tell him something.”
“Or else?”
Dark was keenly aware that his access to databases, forensic tools, parking hangtags—ever ything—could vanish in an instant. He almost expected it to happen. He was a man who had been given wonderful presents throughout his life, only to have them ripped from his hands when he least expected. So if you always expect it, you can soften the blow.
The way Dark was feeling, he wanted it all to go away. Right now. He didn’t need fancy gear to catch this monster.
So he pressed the issue.
“I want to speak to your boss.”
Graysmith smiled, with a hint of sadness in her eyes. Dark’s gut—normally an excellent barometer for these kinds of situations—felt cold.
“You can’t. He values his privacy above all else.”
“Introduce me anyway.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
Every nerve in his body screamed NO. At times they were as intimate as two human beings could be, but Dark was keenly aware of the no-fly zone between them. If Dark wanted the support to continue, he wouldn’t ask any questions.
“Lisa,” Dark said, “it’s not about trust. I want to talk to him. Right
“ now.”
“Impossible. If I could, I would. But that’s just not going to happen.”
“I want to talk to Damien Blair. Now.”
That stopped Graysmith cold.
“How do you know that name?”
chapter 12
DARK
Dark wanted to tell her:
Because I’m a motherfucking manhunter.
After the Tarot Card Killer case, his eyes opened up. Dark was through being pushed around like a pawn. He learned to make his own promises, set his own goals. Create his own fate. As long as he could do that, there was hope. Even when everything else was stacked against him.
So Dark did a lot of investigating on his own over the past six months. He skipped electronic resources and went old-school, following a paper trail. Just like Tom Riggins had taught him, back when Dark was a rookie. And over the past few months he’d been able to trace the supposedly untraceable Lisa Graysmith through financial transactions. Simple fact was if you work for someone, they must pay you. Hard as you might try, it is next to impossible to completely eradicate a money trail from the face of the earth.
Dark didn’t have all of the puzzle pieces. But he did know the name Damien Blair, who had several addresses throughout Europe, South Africa, and Hong Kong, as well as vast fortunes at his disposal. Blair was connected, polished, savvy, and secretive. He was also boring to mainstream media. The only Blair news mention over the past year was that he was a regular attendee at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland—where the entrance fee is a cool half million, not including first-class travel fare, chalet rental, car and driver, helicopter rental, and so on.
Nothing troubling emerged from Blair’s public bio, but that could simply mean that he’d spent millions to obscure his life from prying eyes. A man just doesn’t go through all of the trouble of wooing and funding a retired FBI agent unless he wants something specific in return.
However, Dark figured that was enough of a wedge to crack open the truth.
“You want to tell me about him, or should I go on?” Dark asked. “Or maybe I’ll just call Blair’s offi
ce myself.”
Dark took another sip of beer and waited her out. Watched the bemusement in her eyes turn to annoyance. And then, finally, resignation.
“Let me make two phone calls.”
The first call was presumably to Blair.
The second, however, was to Dark’s mother-in-law.
Graysmith had met Mrs. Collins in the aftermath of the Tarot Card Killer case, introducing herself as a former FBI colleague of Dark’s. His mother-in-law was too smart to take that at face value; she was like her daughter that way. Intuitive, canny, empathetic, almost to a preternatural degree. Dark sensed he and his mother-in-law would soon be having a conversation about who this Graysmith woman was, and what she meant in terms of her granddaughter.
For now, though, Mrs. Collins would keep those thoughts to herself and relish the time she could spend with Sibby.
“It’s all arranged,” Graysmith said. “Your daughter’s covered.”
“You called my mother-in-law?”
“Finish your beer. We’ve got some traveling to do.”
Graysmith drove, taking the 101 up through Hollywood toward Van Nuys. Their private plane would be waiting, she explained. Dark realized he was wearing a semi-clean T-shirt, a hoodie, and a pair of severely distressed jeans. No weapons, no phone, not even so much as a pen. Wherever they were headed, he supposed he’d gather what he needed along the way.
“I suppose you’re going to draw this out,” Dark said. “Make me work for it.”
“No,” Graysmith said. “I have permission to tell you. But don’t make me repeat myself. I’m a scout for a unique and highly secretive group of investigators who have had their eye on you for a long time. Ever since the Sqweegel case, from five years ago. When the Tarot Card Killer emerged, Damien Blair decided to give you the tools you needed to catch him.”
Dark Revelations Page 4
