UNSUB
Page 17
Caitlin said, “No way.”
Sean grabbed a pen from his shirt pocket. She pulled one from the glove box.
“Thirty-seven point eight six eight eight seven four, negative one twenty-two point two six four eight two nine.”
Caitlin scrawled on her palm. “Did you get it?”
Sean had a piece of scrap paper in his hand. “Yeah. Map coordinates. Latitude and longitude in decimal degrees.”
On the radio, the mechanical voice said, “They should hurry.”
Sean grabbed his phone. He typed in the coordinates.
“Berkeley.” He zoomed in. “Whoa, they’re—it’s Fulton Street. On campus.”
Caitlin looked at the phone. “It’s Edwards Stadium. The track and soccer field.”
Sean zoomed out. “It’s just over two miles away.”
They looked at each other. Sean squealed the tires backing out of the parking spot, spun the wheel, and floored it.
29
Sean slewed out of the coffeehouse parking lot, the heavy pickup bouncing onto the street. Caitlin fought to buckle her seat belt as he swung toward the traffic light at the corner. He gunned it as the light turned yellow and hit a hard left, heading south toward the UC Berkeley campus.
On the radio, the flat mechanical voice said, “Time is ticking, ticking.”
“Got it, yeah, got it,” the deejay said in a rush.
“You got nothing. But you’re going to.”
Caitlin still had the call to the sheriff’s station open on her phone. She put it to her ear. “Martinez? You get those coordinates?”
Martinez said, “We’re recording. Yeah. Soccer stadium on the Berkeley campus.” He paused. “You sound like you’re in a vehicle moving at high speed.”
Sean passed the fender bender at the intersection. The drivers were talking but pointing at their radios. Everybody was listening.
Sean swung around a Prius and accelerated. The coffee in Caitlin’s hand sloshed as the cup hit her in the chest. The lid popped and half of it slurped onto her T-shirt. She flinched from the heat. With her elbow she put the window down and poured the rest of the cup out.
Traffic was slowing ahead, backed up from the morning rush. Sean said, “Shit.”
Caitlin wished she had a light strip to flip on, and a siren. But this wasn’t even her jurisdiction.
“Hendrix?” Martinez said.
“I’m with Sean. We’re a mile and a half from the coordinates. We’re on our way.”
“Berkeley PD—”
“Of course. But we’re on our way.”
Guthrie’s voice came on. “Hendrix.”
She waited for him to tell her to back off and let the local police handle it.
“Just got a call from a Berkeley detective.”
“Sergeant, I . . .”
“He thinks he found the location of the Prophet’s graffiti. The Prophet may have taken two more people. And he left a timer at the kidnapping site, counting down.”
“Where?”
“That’s not the point. The timer was at twelve minutes, and that was six minutes ago. Haul ass.”
“Sean, we have six minutes.”
He cut a glance at her. He was gripping the wheel, muscles in his forearms corded. Traffic ahead was backed up at the next light.
“We need to get off the main roads,” he said.
“Side streets will have stop signs but much less traffic.” She leaned out the window to check the gutter along the sidewalk. “Bike lane’s clear. Go.”
He braked hard, swerved into the bike lane, and accelerated along the curb. Bits of paper and discarded Taco Bell wrappers blew into the air.
“Set your own timer,” he said. “Count it down for me minute by minute.”
Caitlin swiped through her phone. The engine gunned. Sean screeched to a stop at the corner and checked cross traffic before swinging right and racing down the street to the next block. He turned left into a leafy urban neighborhood. Tall Spanish-style homes. Redbud in bloom, ivy marching over fences. The road was narrow and cars were parked along the curbs. The school run was just getting started. Sean saw a couple of kids coming out of a gate and heading toward the corner. He braked sharply.
“School bus stop ahead. Can’t use this street.”
At the stop sign he headed left, spinning the tires, back toward the way they’d come.
“Five minutes,” Caitlin said.
The light at the main road turned green when they were halfway up the block. The speed limit was thirty.
“Hang your badge out the window,” Sean said. He had his own badge in his left hand.
That could normally get her in big trouble, but she figured if the Berkeley police had called Alameda for information, she was damn near deputized on this. This was an ad hoc emergency task force. Sean raced across the intersection as the light turned red again.
Two blocks up he took the right-hand turn without even tapping the brakes.
“Four minutes. We’re point seven miles out,” she said.
“Berkeley PD has to have units in the area.”
“The stadium’s on campus. It’ll be campus police.”
Another stop sign, and another, and another.
“Three minutes,” she said.
The homes broke out into a row of shops along the street. Coffee bars and boutiques. They were still half a mile away. Through another stop sign. Over a hill and down toward campus.
Caitlin said. “There’s gonna be traffic on University and . . .”
Sean hit the brakes hard. Caitlin lurched forward against the seat belt.
A delivery truck was parked outside a bakery. It took up the entire lane. Sean laid on the horn and swung around the truck. The street was narrow, lined on both curbs with parked cars. The Tundra barely fit.
A UPS truck was coming straight at him. He had nowhere to go.
He and the oncoming UPS truck both hit the brakes. Sean’s pickup slid toward it. Caitlin inhaled. The pickup screeched to a stop. The brown UPS truck kept coming, looming, cab swinging down as the driver stood on the brakes. It filled Sean’s windshield.
It stopped five feet away. Its grille was right in front of Caitlin’s face. The driver, in his brown uniform, was feet from her, shaking his head, arms spread wide, implying, What the hell?
Caitlin and Sean both raised their badges.
Sean leaned out his window. “Back it up,” he shouted. “Federal agent. It’s an emergency.”
The guy ground the long gearshift into reverse. Slowly, with the inertia of a lumbering beast, he backed the truck up the street and angled to the curb.
Sean spun the wheel, squeaked past it, and poured on the gas again.
“We need a police scanner,” he said.
“Two minutes,” Caitlin said. “Quarter of a mile.”
The radio was filled with Chaz’s chatter. The Prophet had gone silent, the mechanical voice quiet, but there was a buzz-like sound that Caitlin realized was the caller breathing. The hair on her arms stood up.
“He’s still on the line,” she said. “He wants to see what happens when people get to the coordinates. He wants to be live on the air when the results come in. Jesus Christ.”
They reached a T junction. Sean turned right, downhill, toward central Berkeley. The sun was up, cresting the green hills. The view ran all the way to the bay. The water gleamed in the morning sun, blue flashing to molten pewter. The Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco white on the hills across the water—where the SFPD was surely going balls to the wall to trace the Prophet’s call.
But she couldn’t imagine he would do anything less than play with the cops. With everybody.
With the people he’d taken.
Sean raced along, his face fierce with concentration, leaves of low-hanging trees brushing the wi
ndshield, birches and willows. He snagged the corner of a blue recycling bin with a hollow whack. It spun and flew onto the sidewalk.
“Ninety seconds.”
They squealed out of the residential neighborhood onto a broad street at the border of the campus. Tall university buildings formed a wall along the far side of the street. Sean screamed down the road. The stadium was still a couple of hundred yards away. Tall fir trees swept by, a picket fence of green. They swung onto Oxford Street, which ran along the front entrance to the campus. Horn blaring.
“Sixty seconds,” Caitlin said.
They reached an intersection. The traffic was backed up in all directions.
She pointed. “I can see the stadium.”
“There’s a damn traffic jam of people trying to get there,” Sean said.
He laid on the horn again.
Everybody was laying on their horns.
Sean screeched to a stop. All lanes, in all directions, were jammed.
“We can make it,” Caitlin said.
“We can’t.” He looked at her. “Not in the truck.”
He jammed the transmission in park and put on his flashers. They jumped out and ran.
“Forty-five seconds,” Caitlin said.
She was fast, but Sean had longer legs and was damned fit.
“Go,” she said. “I’m right behind you.”
Sirens were coming from several directions. She ran down the middle of the street, around stopped cars. Bicyclists eyed her, perplexed. She looked down a side street. Two police cars were stuck behind a line of traffic, lights flashing, sirens wailing.
In the distance, she heard the blatt of a helicopter. She kept running. Sean was outdistancing her. The stadium, about twenty thousand seats, was on a corner of the campus, right up against the road. In every car she passed, she heard Chaz and T-Bone. In stores along the street, TVs were on. Local stations had broken in with coverage. Overhead, a news chopper swept past. Students were everywhere. Some were following Sean, running toward the corner.
Caitlin ran along the sidewalk behind him, ivy on a wall greening against the sun, hair falling from her clip into her eyes, breathing hard.
“Guthrie, we’re there,” she said.
The timer chimed.
“Sean, we’re out of time,” she yelled.
She heard the radio from a dozen cars stopped in the street, people jumping out and running after Sean. She heard the Prophet’s weird mechanical voice.
“Time’s up.”
From car speakers, a repeating buzz sounded. Like the buzzer at a basketball game.
“Fuck.” Caitlin ran harder.
The buzzer faded in the background, but it seemed to drill into Caitlin’s head, deep, reverberating. Something was off-key and looming.
Sean reached a gate, a six-foot cyclone fence outside the stadium. It was locked. He leaped for the top, jammed his boot into the latch, and hauled himself up.
A bright fear shot through her. “Sean—be careful.”
He kept going, rolling over the top and dropping to the other side.
Campus police cars snaked around the corner, sirens shrieking. So did Berkeley PD units. They pulled up at all angles, and officers poured out. Caitlin felt a surge of support. A blue wave. She ran to the gate. She held her badge out and passed a dozen people who were running in her direction, all holding up cell phones, already recording the scene.
The Prophet’s voice poured from cars on the street. “Do I hear sirens?”
Caitlin leaped at the fence and scrabbled hard to pull herself up and get a foot on the chain.
“Where are the sirens? Is that what I hear?”
What the hell was the Prophet talking about? Sirens were everywhere.
“No. I hear something different.”
She hoisted herself to the top of the gate and paused. Sean was halfway to the field. Nobody else was there.
From the radio came the clicking of a computer keyboard.
What was the Prophet doing? Caitlin scrambled over the top of the gate and dropped to the pavement on the other side. Ahead, Sean pounded down the stadium steps and jumped from the bleachers onto the track. He ran onto the field. She sprinted after him.
On the radio, there was a pause. Then came the sound of a final, heavy key being hit.
She hurried down the bleacher stairs, dropped to the track, and ran onto the soccer field behind Sean.
Sean reached midfield and stopped, turning in a circle. Caitlin ran toward him.
A cry fell from her lips.
The stadium scoreboard lit up.
Caitlin spoke into her own phone. “Guthrie. It’s a ruse. They’re not here.”
On the scoreboard, a video feed came on. It showed two middle-aged women sitting in front of a wall hung with a white sheet. They were swaddled in white sheets as well. The camera was tight on their faces. One had a gray crew cut. The other wore dangling red earrings.
Sick fear raced through Caitlin. White sheets. Shrouds.
The two women watched someone off camera. Their eyes were hot. Simultaneously they shrank back. Someone was approaching them.
The woman with the earrings looked at her friend. “I love you.”
Fast as a bullet, she turned toward the unseen figure and lunged, teeth bared.
Someone stepped in front of the camera, obscuring the view. A gut-splitting scream poured from the screen.
Caitlin ran toward the scoreboard. “No.”
The scream intensified. The sound rolled out of cars and from cell phones tuned online and from open windows all along the street. It poured over Caitlin, Sean, and two hundred thousand horrified radio listeners from Berkeley to Santa Cruz.
Caitlin swept past Sean, running raggedly toward the scoreboard. He grabbed her arm but she shook him off.
“No. No.”
The news chopper swooped overhead and turned in the sky to hover over the stadium. Its engine couldn’t block out the agonizing screaming. Caitlin slowed, helpless, beneath the scoreboard. Sean’s arm went around her from behind. She struggled, then sank back against him, chest heaving.
The scoreboard went dark. The voice on the radio spoke confidently, with vicious delight.
“I am the way, the proof, and the strife. Those who defy me will suffer.”
The call went dead.
* * *
The news came twenty minutes later. Caitlin was stalking up and down the soccer field. Sean was talking to the Berkeley cops.
“Construction site at the Oakland airport,” Guthrie said. “Double homicide.”
She looked at Sean. He was prowling, frustrated and angry. The light in the sky seemed too brilliant.
“On my way.”
Guthrie paused, and a crack entered his voice. “Hendrix. This one’s bad.”
30
Caitlin walked with flickering dread toward the construction site, a half-built operations building at the edge of the Oakland airport. Bulldozers belched black exhaust, and sparks cascaded from arc welders. The airport stuck into the bay, and the sea breeze blew strong and salty. Beyond the Bay Bridge, San Francisco’s Financial District seemed close enough to touch. A heavy jet accelerated down a nearby runway and roared into the air.
Eleven million passengers a year, and it seemed not one of them had witnessed the Prophet leave his latest two victims here.
Sidestepping a fat roll of rebar, Caitlin logged in to the scene and ducked under the yellow tape. Construction had been halted in this building. Ahead, Guthrie was waiting for her.
His face looked more gaunt than it had even a day ago. His eyes burned. This time he didn’t seem to be taking her measure so obviously. He looked like he’d been struck across the forehead with a two-by-four.
That wasn’t good.
“Sergeant?” she said.
“Construction foreman found the victims when he arrived at eight thirty. He called it in.”
He jerked his thumb at a man wearing a high-visibility vest and heavy boots, a hard hat in his hand, sitting on a pallet of plywood just beyond the yellow tape. The man’s eyes looked someplace beyond vacant, like he’d seen something that had wiped his brain.
They walked to a corner of the building. The walls and ceiling closed in and the wind died.
“Any other witnesses?” she said.
“No.” There was bite in Guthrie’s voice. “The site is secured overnight and a guard makes rounds, but the killer got in and out unnoticed.”
Caitlin saw it like a photo under the camera flash. “He’s showing off.”
Ahead, a forensics team was working. They wore white Tyvek suits. Their collection cases were open on the concrete floor. A photographer circled the area, snapping the scene. Guthrie and Caitlin stopped six feet from what they were working on.
“Doc,” Guthrie said.
The medical examiner stood from a crouch.
Zachary Azir was gray bearded and stout. “Joe,” he said. “We’re just getting started. Don’t have anything for you yet.”
Caitlin faced the scene on the concrete and braced herself. The bodies were draped in the white sheets that had been visible in the scoreboard video. The victims’ heads were now shrouded. They lay on their backs and were both barefoot.
The Prophet’s symbol was cut into the soles of their feet.
There was little blood. Postmortem, Caitlin thought. Hoped.
Guthrie’s hands hung at his sides. “He killed them here.”
Caitlin seemed to see the video again. I love you. A heartbreaking good-bye. A battle cry.
Don’t lock your knees. If she was going to work Homicide, if she was going to work this case, she had to keep herself upright.
“They were found this way?” she said. “The construction crew didn’t drape them?”
“Not according to the foreman,” Guthrie said. “But he did pull back the sheets. When he saw the bodies, he covered them again. Then ran.”