UNSUB

by Meg Gardiner

  With two fingers he lifted a wallet from the pocket. “Well. You’re every bit the Valkyrie I heard you were.”

  “Toss it here.”

  He flipped the wallet across the ten feet between them. Caitlin caught it. Opened it. In a window inside was a California driver’s license. Bartholomew Fletcher. His photo.

  Her rabbit pulse eased off, but her anger built. She crossed the distance to him, Maglite trained on his face. “You can lower your hands. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m covering the story.” He took the wallet, still squinting. “Including you.”

  “You’re following me?”

  “No.”

  “Bullshit.” She felt flushed. She hadn’t noticed anyone tailing her.

  He raised his hands again and put one across his heart. “Not following you, Detective. Though if I were, that’s not illegal. We all have our sources. And I’d like you to be one of them.”

  “You covered the story earlier in the week without bothering to contact me for comment.”

  “And here I am.” He smiled, a toothy grin that stopped halfway up his face.

  “Let’s leave things the way they were.”

  She put a hand on Deralynn’s back and urged her along the path.

  “You done here? I don’t want to cut your trip short,” Fletcher said.

  Caitlin kept walking. Deralynn shot a glance at her, then at Fletcher, then at the bark on the ground.

  Fletcher caught up and leaned inquisitively toward Deralynn. “You are? Ma’am, your name?”

  Caitlin didn’t say anything to stop her, but the raging black stare on her face might have kept Deralynn’s lips sealed. They crunched along the trail toward the park exit. Caitlin wanted nothing but to drive away from Fletcher at light speed.

  He skipped ahead and turned to walk backward, crowding them. He smelled of beer and breath mints. “What was it like growing up in a home overshadowed by the Prophet?”

  Caitlin ignored him and led Deralynn to the car.

  “How did you cope when your father was committed?” he said.

  She reached the car and turned to him. “No goddamned comment.”

  He hovered, just inside her comfort zone. “It must have been a searing experience. Is that why you became a police officer?”

  She urged Deralynn around to the passenger side and opened her own door. “And if you ever hinder an ongoing police investigation again . . .”

  “I hear you got a message today,” he said.

  What? How did he know that? She turned the death stare on him.

  He held up a yellowed notepad. “Look familiar?”

  Under the streetlight, writing was visible on the notepad. Fletcher held it up until Caitlin turned the Maglite on it.

  In faded ink was scrawled, Dripping blood our only drink.

  It was the Prophet’s FedEx message—plus more. Caitlin said, “Where did you . . .”

  “Heard it in 1998, when I spoke to the survivor.” His toothy grin returned. His eyes stayed dark and fervent. Seeking her response.

  She tried to speak in a neutral tone. “We have the survivor’s statement.”

  “Call me to set up your interview. You’re going to want the rest of my notes.” He dropped the smile and walked away. “Because she didn’t tell you everything, did she?”

  20

  Joe Guthrie hurried up the flight of stairs outside the San Francisco boardinghouse where Mack Hendrix lived. Through the heavy wooden front door he could hear a voice raised. Caitlin’s voice. He rang the bell. How she’d beaten him here he didn’t know. Familial rage was a powerful thing, bending even time and space.

  The landlady let him in. He followed Caitlin’s voice along the hall to the kitchen.

  “No. It wasn’t a stupid mistake,” she said. “It was calculated. And dangerous.”

  Guthrie walked in. Caitlin had her back to him, arms spread wide. Across the kitchen, with the island between them, Mack Hendrix paced, head down, as though keeping a barricade between himself and his daughter. The guy might be a nutcase, but he wasn’t dumb.

  “Look at me, goddammit. I asked for your advice, and instead you set me up at the park.”

  Mack mumbled something Guthrie didn’t catch, raising his hand, seemingly trying to placate her. He stared at the floor. He seemed to be talking to himself more than to her, shaking his head.

  She slapped a hand down on the countertop. “You called the Prophet out. To a scene you told me to investigate.”

  “I didn’t know you were there,” he said.

  “The hell you didn’t.”

  “I did not.” He glanced at her, shoulders drawn up like a boxer in a defensive crouch. “You said, ‘What should we look for?’ We. We. Like Homicide was planning a trip to the park.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? You used me as bait.”

  Open horror filled his expression. “Never.”

  The apparent depth of his shock seemed to take Caitlin aback. “Then what the hell did you think you were doing?”

  “Drawing out the poison,” Mack said.

  “It didn’t work,” Guthrie said. “She nearly drew her weapon on a reporter.”

  Mack turned his head in surprise, as if only now seeing that he was there. Caitlin half glanced at him over her shoulder, and turned back to her father with barely contained fury.

  “You put me in jeopardy,” she said. “I was with a civilian.”

  That jarred Mack to a stop. “You’re the one who came to me. With that video. Begging me to help you stop him.”

  “Dad, I was nine years old when you spread those case files across the workbench in the garage and asked me to organize them. You’re the one who brought this into the family.”

  Mack’s shoulders slumped. He took a breath and sat down at the kitchen table.

  Caitlin took a second to get her emotions under control. When she spoke again, though her voice still sounded sharp, she talked at conversational volume.

  “How did you even think he would—”

  “Because he monitors the forums,” Mack said, looking up at her. “Just like I do.”

  * * *

  Caitlin stared at her father. Her pulse pounded in her ears. She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. Say nothing else. Not in front of Guthrie. Hold your shit together.

  Don’t kill Mack.

  She left the kitchen and stalked along the hall and strode out to the front porch of the boardinghouse. She breathed in the cold air.

  Of course her father was still invested in the Prophet case. Of course he hadn’t cut himself free from it. He never had. He’d told her. He never would, never could.

  She stood on the porch. The night was colder in San Francisco, sharper, more ragged.

  Guthrie’s gaunt form appeared as a shadow beside her. “For a guy who—”

  “I know.”

  “We ripped open a wound, but we needed his input. Can you contain him?”

  She was glad for the night. It hid her sour smile. “When you open a wound, can you control the flow of blood?” She shook her head. “He’s like quicksilver. Liquid and changeable and poisonous.”

  Guthrie didn’t respond. She knew her words were too harsh. She was angry and confused. And felt used.

  “I love him, but this is what happens.”

  She did not say, I told you so. Guthrie looked at her in the dark. She wondered if she was just a tool to him, the sharp stick he was using to pry open all her father’s thoughts. If so, it was working out in the worst way. She didn’t tell him that he was the one who had brought both her and Mack into this case.

  She forced herself to speak levelly. “I got this. He’s going to back off. I’ll see to it.”

  Guthrie held her gaze and nodded. “I’ll see you in the morning.” He walked down th
e steps.

  She stood on the porch, waiting for him to start the car and pull away. The night sounds of the city came to her, traffic and a distant siren and hip-hop thumping from a window up the street.

  Behind her, the door creaked open. Her father’s voice was soft.

  “Caitlin.”

  She stared at the city.

  “I didn’t think,” Mack said.

  She exhaled and shook her head.

  He was a vibrating presence behind her. She waited for him to retreat into the house. Instead, he walked out and came to her side.

  “I read your message wrong. I . . .” He cleared his throat. “I saw what I wanted to see in it. And got carried away. All I could think was to rattle his cage. Flush him out. Do something. Then I lost track of time in the forum.” He stared at the street, and at her. “I should have called you right away. Should have called you first, even before I posted the comment.”

  “Got that straight.”

  “Caitlin, look at me. I would never use you as bait. Never.”

  She gazed down the hill to the bay and across its black surface to the lights ringing the far shore. Berkeley, Oakland, the hills, seven and a half million people in danger.

  Her father grew up in San Francisco, went to high school here, but had lived his adult life in the East Bay. And though he was back in the city now, Mack hadn’t come home. This wasn’t a place to make his life, this boardinghouse. It was a lonely way station.

  It was exile.

  And it had this view. From this house, her father spent his days and nights staring at his former home.

  But it was more than that. Mack had placed himself at a vantage point that overlooked the Prophet’s killing grounds. Every time he opened his eyes, every time he looked out the window, every time he stepped out the door, he was seeking the killer. Endlessly.

  She turned to him. The pain in his eyes could have stripped the light from the stars.

  “I would never deliberately put you in harm’s way,” he said.

  Her voice went quiet. “I can see that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  A band seemed to cinch around her chest. He held her gaze.

  She nodded. “You have to stand down.”

  He pressed his lips tight, maybe to keep his chin from trembling.

  “You do nothing. Zero. You don’t post in the forum, you don’t talk to people on the street, you don’t say the Prophet’s name out loud. You don’t speak about this case to anybody but me. You tell me everything. But you take no action. Period.”

  He nodded.

  “You can’t screw this up,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Say it.”

  “I’ll stand down.”

  He sounded sincere—but his sincerity could, famously, erode in an instant. A car drove past. Its headlights caught a sheen in his eyes. It must have caught the doubts in hers.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  He strode inside. When he returned he was carrying a canvas duffel bag. He dropped it on the porch and unzipped it.

  “Oh, Dad.”

  Inside were his personal case diaries, notes, and crime scene maps. Copies of case photos, dozens of files. A photocopied message the killer had sent him: The more beautiful and pure a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt. Cassettes that could only be recordings of victims begging for their lives.

  It was accumulated tragedy, and her dad was dragging it around like Marley’s chains.

  “You never let it go,” she said.

  “Every year, I’ve watched the equinox, waiting to hear if he’s come back. I could never make myself believe he stopped forever.”

  She stared at everything, distressed. This stuff wasn’t supposed to exist.

  “I’ll back off. I swear it to you.” He nodded at the duffel. “Take it.”

  Mack had told her mother he’d destroyed it all.

  That bad summer, when she was fifteen. Her mom had held her close when she came home from the hospital.

  It’s gone. He burned it, Sandy had said. Don’t think about it anymore.

  Now Mack took a breath and touched her arm. “Use it. Or torch it. But take it.”

  She held still. Here were the ghosts that crowded her father’s life. They seemed to whisper, to extend spectral hands, imploring. She crouched down, peering in.

  She zipped the bag shut. When she stood, she hoisted it over her shoulder.

  “I got it,” she said.

  21

  Thursday

  Wishing that blustery March mornings didn’t make her feel so stiff, J. T. Wilcox turned up the thermostat in the café and bustled past her aches. It was 6:08 A.M. Coffee, Tea & Tarot opened at seven.

  The coffeehouse sat on a side street off Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. The shop was cozy, with hardwood floors and wicker baskets that held exotic teas. The walls boasted posters of several of the tarot’s major arcana—the Magician, the High Priestess, and the Moon. J.T. brewed the coffees of the day. Sumatra, Guatemala, and Empress Blend. Knuckles throbbing, she wrote the morning’s selections on a chalkboard. She pulled upside-down chairs from tables and set them upright, preparing for the early birds. Her dangling red earrings, which depicted the Wheel of Fortune, swung as she worked.

  Gaia Hill, her partner, came out of the broom closet they used as an office. Gaia was the morning person. J.T. called her Steel-Cut: She was sturdy and small and wore her gray hair razored short on the back and sides, with a marine’s crew cut on the top. Even though she’d been out of the corps for thirty-five years. Gaia’s T-shirt read, I’M JUST A POE BOY FROM A POE FAMILY, with a drawing of a nineteenth-century group, all Edgar Allan Poe. Dad, mom, sons, and daughters. Even the dog. Gaia would never give up her dream of expanding the shop into a bookstore. But for now, she made do with the tiny free library she’d built from a dollhouse outside the front window.

  Gaia bustled behind the counter, shaking her head. “Computer’s glitchy again.”

  “You sure it’s not your eyes?” J.T. said.

  “Just because I’m five years older than you, doesn’t mean I’m going blind. The screen keeps flashing. It’ll strobe for a few seconds, then stop.”

  “You tried hitting it?”

  “Of course. Now I’ll try calling the repair people.”

  She glanced outside. A black pickup was parked across the street.

  “You see that truck before?” Gaia said.

  J.T. set a pink bakery box of croissants on the counter. She glanced out the window. “Sure. That truck’s all over the place. I’ve seen it everywhere a guy wants to feel bigger than he is.” She smiled. “Why? Have you?”

  “Seems like I might have. Those rims—not exactly Berkeley style. So shiny. I thought maybe it was parked on the side street yesterday?”

  “You think . . . ?”

  “Wondering if Mr. Pickup’s the one who spray-painted the graffiti on the wall outside.”

  J.T. harrumphed. “That was more likely some poser. Goth asshole or teenage vampire fan. ‘Dripping blood . . .’” She rolled her eyes. “I’ll get the paint later and white it out.”

  “At least it’s low, and on the side of the building away from the street. With the Jeep parked there you can’t even see it.”

  “You worried?”

  “Just wondering if it’s a hate message. Against our spirituality, or us.”

  “If so, it’s obscure and indirect. Sweetie, it’s graffiti.”

  There wasn’t a sound, not even a disturbance in the air. But at the back of the shop, the light shifted. A shadow crossed the hallway. It caught the edge of J.T.’s vision.

  “It isn’t graffiti.”

  Without seeming to move, or breathe, a man slid into view. One second the hall was empty. The next he was there.

  J.T.
froze. She and Gaia traded a look, brief and full of meaning. The back door was locked.

  The stranger stood in half shadow, staring.

  Gaia grabbed for the phone. And like a whip, he unfurled in motion, flying at her.

  * * *

  Late morning, Caitlin stood in the war room, feeling bruised and jumpy. Guthrie was the only one who knew that Bart Fletcher had surprised her at the park the previous night. Guthrie had no love for the reporter. And he hadn’t berated her for getting surprised at a notorious crime scene.

  Fletcher had claimed that he didn’t follow her. She was tempted to buy his denial. She was ninety percent certain he’d ferreted out her plans from the Find the Prophet forums. That he got the location thanks to Mack’s post.

  But that last ten percent of uncertainty nagged at her.

  She ran a criminal background check. Fletcher had a misdemeanor arrest for drunk and disorderly and was on probation for driving while intoxicated. He was required to wear an electronic ankle monitor and to install an ignition interlock device—a Breathalyzer—in his vehicle. She recalled the smell of beer on his breath, and the breath mints that didn’t cover it. She wondered whose car he had borrowed so he could drive to the park without having to blow into the ignition lock.

  Fletcher had covered the original Prophet murders, and it didn’t take long to unearth his archive and biography. His earliest byline for the East Bay Herald was 1995—two years after the Prophet began killing. Caitlin found earlier articles he’d filed as a staff writer for The Des Moines Register. The night Giselle Fraser was murdered at Peñasquitos Park, Fletcher had covered a flood and looting at an Iowa strip mall.

  She rubbed her eyes. Guthrie had called it. Fletcher was a washed-up drunk writing venomous articles. Still, she wanted to kick herself for letting him get that close.

  She downed the last of her coffee. It burned her tongue. She threw the take-out cup in the recycling bin like a dart, and headed to her desk with an eight-by-ten photo she’d printed earlier.

  Because damned if Bart Fletcher, asshole supreme, hadn’t given her a lead.

  The survivor. She didn’t tell you everything, did she?