by Meg Gardiner
“He has something else planned,” she said.
“He always does. This is his revival. His spring tour.”
“He’s showing himself to us. The airport—that’s like saying he can come and go anywhere. This note. All of this. The lilies.”
Lilies. Signifying spring. Common at funerals.
Your desperation only visits grief upon multitudes and your savagery is repaid threefold. Day upon day upon day.
An image popped into her mind—the church she and Sean had passed on their way to get coffee that morning. It seemed a millennium ago. The colorful banner hoisted across the church facade, advertising an Easter sunrise service. Traditional images: a cross, a golden dawn, and lush, almost gushing bunches of flowers. Easter lilies.
Day upon day upon day.
“Martinez. It sounds like a schedule.”
“What does?”
She was already out of her seat, crossing the war room to Guthrie’s office. “‘Day upon day upon day.’ Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday.”
32
Caitlin rapped hard on Guthrie’s office door and didn’t wait for him to respond, just went straight in and told him.
“Today, tomorrow, Sunday. If that’s the Prophet’s schedule, this morning was just the start,” she said. “And we’re in for hell.”
He leaned on his elbows.
“We have to do something,” she said. “Put out another bulletin telling people to be alert.”
“After this morning, I think they are.”
“He’s been building up to something for twenty-five years. This is it.”
“Serial killers never reach ‘it.’ That’s why they keep killing.”
“But he has an elaborate fantasy. This ties in with the cold cases. Somehow. He’s working up to something and we need to figure out what it is.”
He thought for a long moment, his face shadowed. “You have the cold case files. You have everything we can get. You have stuff only you can get.” Eyebrows raised. “Use it.”
He was talking about her father. She returned to her desk. Sat down and told herself to focus.
She had to analyze the evidence. To do that, she had to calm down. Because she knew she was good at finding connections. The links she sometimes saw were blinding, instant, as clear as glass. She didn’t think that was mysterious. Some people thought she relied on freaky intuition. But to her, it added up. Almost mathematically. The evidence was being run through some equation, some algorithm, that operated deep beneath the surface.
She got that from Mack.
His duffel bag was on the floor beneath her desk. Though she’d had it more than a day, she’d barely had time to catalogue its contents, much less dig deeply into them. In truth, unzipping it felt like tearing open a wound. But she pulled it out, opened it, and unloaded everything. Bracing herself, she began to read. The notepads, scrawled with first impressions from crime scenes. The notes he wrote while interviewing suspects. The journal.
March 21. At scene, words scratched in fence with a nail. “The soul falls headlong.” What the GODDAMNED hell? This soul didn’t fall. He STABBED her and called her KIDS to tell them where to find her. FUCK.
She tried to read further, but closed her eyes. She saw it. But what she saw wasn’t the Prophet’s next move.
She saw what had shattered her dad.
For the first time, it was clear to her. What ruined him wasn’t simply his failure to capture the Prophet. It was the pain of the victims and their families.
She rested her hand on the passage in his journal. His anguish was still there, scrawled deep into the page. Five years working this case, nonstop—the relentless exposure to sadistic violence had stripped him of all joy and driven him to despair.
She knew he wasn’t the only cop who buckled under such sustained assault. Long-term work on serial murders could cause PTSD in the most dedicated officers. She’d known that, intellectually, but hadn’t felt it viscerally. As a kid, she had felt its effects—in his rages, his wanderings, his hallucinatory diatribes. She’d glimpsed the truth late one night in the garage, and had been swallowed by her own screams. But she hadn’t seen what the case looked like from the inside of Mack’s head and his tormented heart.
She ran her fingers over his furious words. Mack had taken on the horror. And in the Prophet case, the horror was too much for one man to bear.
But the message he’d transcribed—had that appeared anywhere else in the evidence? The soul falls headlong. She started going through her inventory sheets.
Movement at the corner of her eye brought her back. Shanklin was walking toward the photo wall. Guthrie beckoned.
“Everyone,” he said.
Shanklin’s eyes sparkled darkly. “We have a suspect.”
Caitlin and Martinez approached. Shanklin held an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of paper. She grabbed a thumbtack and jammed the sheet against the corkboard with her thumb.
Caitlin stilled. She stared at the driver’s license blowup, inhaling every detail.
Shanklin planted her feet wide and spoke briskly. The iron Brownie troop leader.
“Caucasian male, age fifty-four. He’s a customer of Zodiac Match. That’s how we first clocked him.”
Caitlin turned sharply to her.
Shanklin returned the look. “Your friend Deralynn Hobbs? Maybe her theory that the Prophet kills women he profiles on dating sites isn’t nuts after all.”
Caitlin stared again at the photo. A suspect.
There had been more than two thousand suspects over the last twenty-five years. She’d seen the endless names in the files. They included people fingered through anonymous tip lines. Men whose neighbors or coworkers or friends or enemies had contacted the police. People whose license plates had been captured near crime scenes. None of them had proved sufficiently compelling to arrest, much less to prosecute.
This man wasn’t one of them.
“I thought of geographical profiling,” Shanklin said, “but it’s inexact. It gives us a cross-reference when we have potential suspects’ addresses. It predicts but can’t pull a suspect out of the blue, especially in a dense urban zone like the Bay Area.” She nodded at the photo. “But we could cross-reference the Zodiac Match data with something else.”
It was her moment, and nobody stopped her.
She stabbed the suspect’s photo with her finger. “He’s on probation for DWI. He wears a GPS ankle bracelet. And that bracelet has been clocked at every recent crime scene.”
Martinez said, “You’re shitting me.”
Shanklin smiled a grim smile of triumph.
The man in the photo was Bart Fletcher.
33
Caitlin approached the photo of Bart Fletcher, desperately trying not to shake her head. This was their suspect? The reporter?
Shanklin said, “He’s been under our noses the whole time.”
Martinez said, “The sneaky shit.”
“All the evidence fits. He’s the right age bracket.”
He’s at the top end, Caitlin thought. Fighting it.
“He’s got the perfect cover. A press pass. He’s a crime reporter. And look at the Prophet’s new messages. Flawless grammar and spelling. The killer obviously styles himself a writer. Plus, Fletcher’s intimately familiar with the case.” Shanklin looked at Caitlin. “He covered the story from the time your father worked it.”
“But . . .” Caitlin shook her head. “I checked his background. Fletcher came to the Bay Area from Iowa, in the middle of the original murders. He wasn’t here when the Prophet started killing.”
Shanklin simply tilted her head at Caitlin. “Fletcher has a dating profile. And the ankle bracelet confirms his presence at every new murder scene—even those he was not assigned to cover.”
“What?”
“He’s the co
pycat,” Guthrie said.
And Caitlin saw deeper into Fletcher’s photo. The morose eyes, the not-quite-clean hair. A washed-up drunk. Or not.
A career marooned in the shallows for years, until the story of his lifetime called to him again. Was that it? Fletcher had decided to imitate the Prophet for the sake of glory? It seemed impossible—the violence, the frenzy.
The dramatic story line. The starring role. The Pulitzer Prize.
Caitlin said, “He has to know his location can be tracked. That’s the whole point of the ankle monitor.”
Guthrie rubbed the side of his nose. “Fletcher’s probation imposes a curfew. That’s why he wears the monitor. But it only alerts if he removes or disables it. And unless it alerts, let’s be honest. Nobody tracks the GPS records of these things in real time. Most monitors will never have their travel history examined.”
“Every. Single. Crime scene,” Shanklin said.
Caitlin’s fingers felt cold. The cornfield. Silver Creek Park. Fletcher had been there. Been there first. Always seeming to know about the crime before the other news organizations.
Shanklin said, “Sequoia High School. That Arabian horse ranch. He was there.”
Caitlin ran a hand through her hair. “No. Something’s off. All those locations can be explained—at least on first glance—by a reporter doing his job. And they’re all public record.”
“Hendrix,” Guthrie said. “Look.”
On the conference table, Shanklin opened a ream of GPS printouts from Fletcher’s monitor. She pointed to a time stamp and coordinates. “This location is in Union City. It’s the Olive Garden where Melody James worked as a waitress.”
Caitlin leaned over the printout. “March nineteenth.”
“Yeah. Before Melody and Richard Sanchez were kidnapped. He was there that night.”
Shit. The cold spread along Caitlin’s arms.
“What about San Francisco?” she said. “The call to Sweetness and Light Floral, ordering the black lilies, was made near the Civic Center bus station.”
Shanklin flipped through the GPS data. “What time?”
Caitlin told her. Shanklin ran her finger down the page. Stopped, and pointed. “Is this it?”
Caitlin entered the coordinates in her phone. On the map screen, a red pin dropped near the bus station. The chill sank through her.
“Yes,” she said.
Guthrie nodded at Shanklin. “Excellent.”
Caitlin’s stomach felt hollow. She had dismissed Fletcher too quickly.
“I’ll prepare the warrant application,” Shanklin said.
Caitlin thought: the Oakland airport. Fletcher had been there too, ahead of the TV news crew. Energized. Breath mints but no beer. Freshly showered.
Like he’d scrubbed off any trace evidence.
She realized that she’d had him at the park, two days before the latest killings. She’d had him there, with him shoving the words dripping blood in her face. With him giving her the link to Kelly Smolenski and the entire message, to the graffiti on the wall outside Coffee, Tea & Tarot.
She’d had him, and she’d let him go.
* * *
At a crumbling asphalt lot along the Alameda waterfront, Bart Fletcher hunched against the wind. His lank hair flattened across his face. Rain clouds were boiling in from the Pacific across the San Francisco hills. The bay was scalloped with chop.
He paced. When his phone finally rang, he answered it with cold fingers.
“You said you could mask the ankle monitor signal without alerting the cops,” he said.
A couple of cars passed on the nearly empty street. He turned his back to them. The cars were headed in the direction of the USS Hornet Museum. At the end of the road, beyond aging warehouses and bent Monterey pines, the decommissioned aircraft carrier’s conning tower bristled against the sky. Its flight deck cut the horizon, as flat and sharp as a razor blade.
Fletcher listened and pressed the phone to his ear. “Yeah, I’m having doubts . . . You . . .”
He ran a hand across his jaw.
“Of course what you’ve provided is valuable. I’m not saying . . . I would never do that. But if I’m going to take it to the next level, I need absolute assurance that the GPS and cell signals are being spoofed. If they aren’t, I’m compromised. You’ve . . .”
He shook his head, calmed himself, and walked toward the water. “Listen. I’m about to use what you’ve given me to get deep inside the sheriff’s office. I need to be positive I don’t leave a trail. For both our sakes.”
He listened some more. “Yeah, I will . . . Yeah, immediately’s good.”
He hung up. The road had emptied. Nobody was on the running path along the bay. He was alone. A gust of wind scoured the waterfront. For a while Fletcher paused and breathed it all in: the hills that ringed the Bay Area and turned it into a vast amphitheater; the turbulent sky; the deep cold waters of the bay, which went dark and deadly with silent currents below. Nobody could see him, yet he felt center stage.
Big things were happening. Once he took care of this technical issue, his path would be clear. This source was gold—and was about to help him unlock the vault. Of all his dreams.
He sent a text to his boss at the Herald, saying he would be in to the office in an hour. He looked up from his phone and hustled to the black pickup that was pouring exhaust at the far end of the lot.
34
The judge signed the arrest warrant at three forty-five P.M. Five minutes after that, with Shanklin and Guthrie hovering beside her desk, Caitlin phoned the East Bay Herald.
“Bart Fletcher, please.”
Muzak came over the speaker as the call was transferred. Caitlin tattooed the tip of a pen against the desktop. Don’t go to voice mail. Then, with a clatter, the call was picked up.
“Detective Hendrix. Well.”
She squeezed the pen in her hand. She had to make it convincing. “Mr. Fletcher. Sorry for getting so hot at the airport this morning.”
There was a pause. “Is your sergeant standing by your desk to confirm that you actually make this call?”
“That would be a big, fat yes.” She eyed Guthrie. “But he’s right. I was out of line.” She cleared her throat. “And he thinks we should talk.”
“What do you know. You ready to go on the record?”
“If you bring all your interview notes.”
Fletcher took a second. “There’s a place on Franklin. The Emerald. Five o’clock?”
Caitlin knew it. A dive bar. Shanklin shot her thumbs-up.
“That’ll do. See you then.”
Caitlin hung up and got a nod from Guthrie. She clenched the pen so he wouldn’t see her nerves. Shanklin was already at her desk, holstering her gun.
Half an hour later, they rolled for Oakland. Shanklin led, loaded for bear. Guthrie rode shotgun for Caitlin, coordinating with the Oakland PD, which insisted on sending officers to assist in executing the warrant.
Nobody wanted to be left out when the killer was captured.
Caitlin drove silently, weaving through the sluggish traffic, getting her head in the space. If Fletcher came quietly, fine. If not, she had a ballistic vest beneath her zipped jacket.
Shanklin’s voice buzzed from the radio. “No movement on the ankle monitor. He’s still in the twelve hundred block on Franklin.”
Guthrie said, “Get the monitoring company to narrow that location down. Way down.”
A minute later, Shanklin came back. “They confirm it’s the Emerald.”
They swung into downtown Oakland and reached the rally point, a corner gas station two blocks from the bar. Oakland PD was going full bore: A four-man tactical squad was waiting for them. Caitlin recognized Sergeant Rios, who had led the raid on the crank house for the Narcotics Task Force.
Shanklin strode up, ponytail bobbing,
lips as red as an alarm, and shook his hand. Rios spread a map on the hood of his vehicle. The wind tried to lift it. The clouds had lowered, gray obliterating the hills. Cars and buses had their headlights on. At the gas pumps, customers filling their cars stared at them.
Rios pointed at the map. “Corner building with doors on Franklin and a rear exit on the alley behind.”
Shanklin said, “I know it well. And GPS confirms he’s there.”
“What’s the time lag on the data?”
“Ten minutes. But he’s been there an hour. Looks like he’s settled in.”
Guthrie cocked a thumb at Caitlin. “Detective Hendrix will enter and identify Fletcher. He’s expecting her. It will keep his guard low.”
Rios shook his head. “TAC leads and is first through the door.”
Caitlin pursed her lips. Guthrie shifted his weight.
Rios said, “You’re serving a high-risk warrant. That’s one of TAC’s specific operational responsibilities. And if this guy’s the Prophet, he’s already a cop killer.”
Guthrie nodded. He thought Fletcher was a copycat, but they were in Oakland. Their show.
Shanklin said, “I’ll make the arrest.”
At the pumps, a man snapped a photo.
This operation hadn’t been on the police scanner. The media wasn’t aware of the impending action—yet. They got in their vehicles and convoyed to the corner where the Emerald sat, garish and dispirited, its buzzing green lights the only sign of vitality.
Caitlin got out, adrenaline popping. Shanklin looked ready to strip Fletcher’s skin from him an inch at a time, with her bare hands.
Rios pointed at his men. “Front and back. Go.”
They crossed the street. Guthrie accompanied the team going in the back. Caitlin and Shanklin followed Rios to the front door. Thirty seconds later they were in position. Rios gave the signal.
They went through the door into gloom and Irish music. Rios and his team swept through the room with Shanklin on their heels. The bartender raised his hands. Patrons turned, shocked. A waitress squealed with fright. At the rear, TAC and Guthrie came through the back door and along the hall.
