by Meg Gardiner
She holstered the gun.
“I forgot my house keys here earlier.” His voice had gained a deadly calm. “I came back to get them. I called because I didn’t want to bang on the door and scare you.”
She turned and went inside. When she flipped the lights back on, she saw his keys by the toaster.
She slumped against the kitchen counter, balled her right hand into a fist, and bumped it repeatedly against her forehead. All the windows bled to the night, to darkness, to a deep and vast hiding space where the monsters crawled. Where they could see her, inside, shaky and huddled under thin pools of light. She strode to the living room, where the blinds were drawn.
“Sean. I’m sorry.”
He stepped inside. “Okay.”
His tone was ice. She tried to pull herself back down off the ceiling, but her nerves skittered in all directions. She paced.
“Seriously. I’m sorry. But you walked into my backyard in the dark.”
“I can’t fault you for extreme caution. But you’re cranked so tight, you’re going to blow.”
“You think I should take it down a notch. I get it. I’ll be better in the morning.”
“And next time?”
“What’s your point?”
“You’re letting this own you.”
“It’s twenty-four/seven right now. We’re at battle stations.”
“You’re losing control. There’s a blind curve ahead, and you’re gunning straight at it.”
She stopped and put the heels of her palms to her eyes. “I can’t do this right now.”
“The case isn’t just bleeding into your life. It’s bleeding you dry.”
“Back off.” She put her hands out. Stop. “Don’t lecture me. Not tonight.”
She walked back to the kitchen, picked up his keys, and held them out. After a cold second he took them. The door banged shut behind him when he left.
She stood staring at the walls. Heard his truck pull away, hard. Outside, the trees raked against the roof in the wind.
She was way off-kilter. She couldn’t lie to herself about that. The compass was spinning from true north to west and the lands beyond direction.
She opened the cabinet and took out the bottle of tequila. She poured a clattering inch into a tumbler. She eyed it, shining under the lights. Screw it. She poured another inch. She threw it back, coughed, and stood pressing the back of her hand to her lips.
She tried to phone Deralynn, but once again got Call Failed. Shadow padded in with her chew toy drooping from her mouth. She dropped it at Caitlin’s feet and looked up with guileless eyes.
Caitlin walked to the living room and dropped onto the sofa. What had she done?
43
She wasn’t sure at first what woke her. A sound. On the sofa in her living room, Caitlin stirred. She had drifted off sometime after one A.M.
She heard the sound again. Low and guttural. A growl.
It was Shadow, standing on the floor beside the sofa. Caitlin jerked fully awake.
On the coffee table, her phone was jittering in a slow circle. She had turned off the ringer again, but it was vibrating like a rat in a trap. She sat up and grabbed it. Number Blocked.
Her head pounded. The phone kept vibrating.
She connected and heard a harsh whisper.
“How can you sleep? After failure upon failure. All those dead bodies, Caitlin. Piling up.”
Sparks danced at the corners of her vision.
How the hell. It was him.
Careful. “You can’t put this on me.”
“I didn’t. Your father did. It’s in your blood. Catastrophe. Insanity.”
Beneath his scorn lay an undertone of rage. Her breath came quick. Don’t blow this. Keep him on the line. She put the call on speaker, scrambled for her iPad, and hit RECORD on Voice Memo.
“That’s not me. It’s you,” she said.
“You can’t save them.” He was eerily calm. “You think you can, because you saved the baby. I saw the news, you carrying her out, holding her tight against the chaos.”
Her mouth went dry.
“It looked heroic,” he said. “But chaos always wins.”
Her computer glowed awake. On-screen a dash-cam video played. Suburban street. House with a skateboard ramp and army men on the sidewalk.
Deralynn’s place.
“How does it feel to want something you can never have?” the voice said.
Jesus God. Caitlin ran to the kitchen and grabbed the cordless phone from the counter. What was Deralynn’s number? Shit—she only had it in her cell phone. On the cordless, she hit 911.
“This is Detective Caitlin Hendrix of the Alameda Sheriff’s Office.” She reeled off her badge number and Deralynn’s street. She couldn’t recall the number but described the house. “Attempted murder in progress. Suspect is armed and extremely dangerous. It’s the Prophet. Get units there. Now.”
From her cell phone, the voice spoke. “Average law enforcement response time in that neighborhood is twelve minutes, Caitlin.”
She ran back to the living room. Fuck him. She grabbed the cell phone, put the voice on hold, and scrolled to recent calls, searching for Deralynn’s number.
On her computer, the camera light came on. The voice rolled through the laptop’s speakers.
“You can’t escape. No matter which way you turn, death awaits.”
The dash-cam video cross-faded to a new scene. Urban road, four lanes. Headlights caught a red Camry ahead.
Caitlin froze. “Oh, my God.”
It was her mother.
* * *
On the road, Sandy Hendrix slowed and stopped at a red light. Ten minutes earlier she had dropped a friend at her apartment complex. The woman lived alone and worked swing shift at the Radisson in Concord. Sandy had waited at the curb while she walked to the lobby, and while she unlocked the glass door, went in, securely locked the door again, and gave a thumbs-up.
Now Sandy was half a mile from home. She was tired, but this was worth it.
In the cup holder, her phone flickered. Before she could check it out, a black pickup pulled up on her left and stopped beside her at the red light. The driver honked.
The passenger window of the pickup scrolled down.
The driver shouted something. Sandy turned down the radio and cupped a hand to her ear, indicating, Say again.
A man shouted, “Said, your right rear tire’s flat.”
She couldn’t see his face. The truck had jacked-up suspension, the cab a good three feet higher than the driver’s seat of her Camry. In the night, with only the dim red illumination from the traffic light, all she could see was the driver’s hand, gesturing at her car.
He pointed at a side street. “If you’ll pull over, I can take a look at it.”
* * *
In her living room, Caitlin clutched her phone. Her finger hovered over Deralynn’s number.
Shadow stood before the computer, growling at the screen. The dash-cam video showed Sandy’s car stopped at a red light beside the vehicle with the camera.
Were these videos both live? Was one recorded? Which?
What did he want?
Barely breathing, she hit CALL.
It rang. Once, twice. Caitlin knelt in front of her laptop. On the dash cam, the vehicles remained stopped at the red light. The phone kept ringing.
The call was picked up. “Caitlin? Sweetheart?”
“Get out of there,” Caitlin yelled. “Go. Drive to the nearest police station and—”
“Oh, shit.”
Caitlin heard her mother’s phone hit the center console as Sandy dropped it. On the dash cam, the Camry floored it through the red light, screeching away.
“Drive, Mom, drive, drive, just go,” Caitlin yelled.
Through the phone she h
eard the engine rev. On-screen she watched the Camry recede from view. Her chest heaved.
Hands shaking, she ended the call with her mom and dialed Deralynn. The phone rang.
On-screen, the dash cam remained stationary. The vehicle hadn’t run the light to chase her mom. The traffic light turned green.
Deralynn’s phone continued to ring. Nobody answered.
From the computer speaker, the voice said, “You see? You turn, and turn, until inexorably, you turn on someone. It’s inevitable.”
The dash-cam vehicle slowly pulled away from the light and took a soft turn onto a side street. The view showed nothing. The computer screen went dark.
The voice returned. “When your demons wake you at night, do you hear the dead screaming? Because you’ll never make things right. You don’t understand that, but they do.”
A woman came on. “Stay back. Don’t.”
Her voice was trembling, choked and hoarse. Shadow jumped back from the table, barking, hackles up.
Caitlin said, “What are you doing? You bastard, stop—”
“You don’t want to hurt me. I’m too useful to you. You . . . Oh, God.” The woman broke into a sob. “God, no. Don’t. Jesus, no, no . . .”
The woman screamed. And screamed.
The whisper returned. “Every step you take makes it worse. You betray everybody you touch.”
Caitlin’s legs weakened. The screaming filled her ears. The call went dead.
44
Sunday
They found her at dawn. At a gas station off of I-580, halfway up Altamont Pass, Deralynn’s body was stuffed into an outdoor freezer, buried in ice.
Blue and red lights turned the desolate hills into a carnival sideshow. Caitlin’s breath frosted the air. The morning star rode the eastern horizon, above a red streak of sky. Its light faded even as Caitlin approached the crime scene tape.
She nodded and approached Guthrie. She didn’t think she could speak. The gas station clerk sat in the open door of a patrol car, looking vacant. The Crime Lab team and medical examiner were already there.
The photographer was leaning over a bloody object on the asphalt in front of the freezer. When he took the shot, the flash reflected off a stainless steel blade.
It was a heavy cleaver.
Caitlin stopped at Guthrie’s side. “The murder weapon? He left it?”
“Presumptively.”
That had to be deliberate. It was a message.
The attending ME was Zachary Azir. He leaned over the freezer and paused, staring down. Caitlin’s stomach wrenched and she shut her eyes.
Guthrie walked toward Azir. She heard his footsteps fade. Her feet seemed screwed into the ground. It took every effort to move them, one at a time, and approach the freezer. But she had to. She couldn’t look away.
Deralynn deserved her witness.
The dawn light broke across the hills as she reached the freezer, glass and steel glazing red. The ice was heaped on top of Deralynn, bags slit open, burying her like she’d been overcome by an avalanche. Only the tips of her fingers, and her face, were visible. Her skin was a flat gray, her lips blue, half parted. She’d been bled nearly dry somewhere else. Her eyes were closed.
Caitlin’s vision seemed pinpoint clear, and pulsing. A high hum rose in her ears. There were voices around her, people moving with purpose. She couldn’t hear their words at first.
Dr. Azir leaned over Deralynn. “Something at the corner of her eye.”
The ME opened her eyelid. Mercury ran out. The quicksilver tear caught the rays of the sun, swimming gold and orange.
“Damn. Get me something to contain this so it doesn’t contaminate everything,” Azir said.
Caitlin said, “The cleaver . . .”
The photographer’s flash blanched Deralynn’s face. Caitlin choked up and had to stop.
Guthrie, ashen, prodded her. “Which scene from hell?”
“More than one. The blade . . .” She cleared her throat. “In the Eighth Circle, the Sowers of Discord are hacked apart by demons. The ice, that’s the Ninth Circle. Treachery.”
They watched the ME work.
Caitlin said, “She promised she wasn’t going to meet anybody.”
“Her back door was wide-open and a kitchen trash bag was spilled next to her garbage cans. The dog was shut in the garage, lured in with a hunk of steak. It looks like Deralynn stepped outside to empty the trash and was abducted. Somebody, maybe from that message board, got her home address.”
And Caitlin was the one who’d urged Deralynn to dig into the case via the message board. She was the one who delayed a call that could possibly have warned her. You betray everybody you touch.
Guthrie said, “I’ve taken the gas station clerk’s statement. You search the scene.”
She couldn’t look away from the freezer. “Sergeant, he got into my computer via malware. It’s probably infected everybody’s. Shanklin’s, Martinez’s, yours. He may know where all of us live. He got my contacts. If the malware spreads easily, it might be in our contacts’ devices too. Like my mother’s. Your family’s as well.”
He looked at her darkly. “We’ll get Computer Forensics on it. Get yourself a new phone. But . . .”
“But I have to keep my current number active. So he can call me again.”
“Yes. We’ll set up a tap on it this morning.”
She nodded.
“Your mom all right?” he said.
“Nails. Cop’s wife—no way she was going to pull onto some dark street with a stranger. When I called she didn’t hesitate, just floored it. She tore into the Walnut Creek police station blasting the horn. I think she pulled a drift and a hand-brake turn,” she said. “But she’s spooked. Didn’t get the plate number of the vehicle but saw a brand logo on the chassis. Dodge.”
“Good.”
“She’s going to stay with my uncle for a few days. In Chicago.”
Sandy had begged Caitlin to come with her.
Guthrie turned back to the freezer. Caitlin turned to the parking lot.
The bitter March wind sharpened her senses. Work the scene.
The gas station stood on a corner where a country road cut beneath the interstate. On the opposite corner was a diner and beyond it a tire yard. Past that were miles of hills and gullies and trees and the occasional winding farm road. On 580, eighteen-wheelers girned up the climb toward Altamont Pass. The rising sun turned the rain-fed hills a gleaming emerald green.
Which way had he come? Where did he go?
She had a Canon camera in her car. No way could she use her phone now. She got the camera, took photos, and drew a rough map of the scene in her notebook.
The diner was just opening up. Outside it, early-bird customers and a waitress stood talking and pointing. A few wandered toward the crime scene tape, where a deputy stopped them. They were all trying to see past the flashing lights, the cop cars and ambulance, to that freezer. It wouldn’t be long before the media gunned out here in their vans. The news helicopter would swoop in behind them.
She couldn’t stand the thought of a television camera catching sight of Deralynn. Tears welled in her eyes, and an overwhelming protective instinct rose within her. She wanted to run and haul Deralynn out of that ice and wrap her in her own coat, swaddle her and hold her close and protect her from any more insult. To gentle her, tell her it was all okay now, all okay, all . . .
Outside the gas station, Guthrie was staring at her.
She blinked away the tears and turned into the wind. She walked the parking lot, looking for evidence. On the freeway, traffic was slowing to get a good look at the scene. Screw off, she wanted to yell.
Get it together. You’re skidding.
She walked the scene in a grid, slowly. Eyes on the ground; eyes on the view; taking in vantage points, ingress, egress.
The freeway provided easy access. And the gas station had a security camera trained on the front door. She hadn’t heard anybody yell that they’d found something on it.
She walked the station forecourt. Found nothing. She continued her search along the side of the building, and on to the back. Behind the building was a field, bordered at the far side by a creek lined with oaks. At the edge of the grass, she found the tracks.
They were muddy wheel tracks that led from the grass onto the asphalt. About three inches wide. Beside them were footprints in the dew.
A wheelbarrow.
He hadn’t pulled into the gas station. He’d transported Deralynn to the freezer in a wheelbarrow, from beyond the trees and the creek at the far side of the field.
She hollered for the forensics team and photographer.
She crossed the field. The creek wound through heavy oaks, willows dragging their branches in the water. She splashed across, ducked through the trees, and emerged onto a two-lane road.
There was no traffic, but near a bend, a telephone company crew was working on a cell tower. She jogged over.
“Been on-site about an hour,” the foreman said. “Not much traffic. Newspaper delivery guy, just after we got here.”
“Anybody on foot?”
They shook their heads.
Another member of the crew descended from the cell tower. “There was that truck.”
“What truck?” Caitlin said.
“I saw it from up top. Parked down that way.” He pointed around the bend.
“It was here when you arrived?” she said.
“Yeah. Sitting there, dark as hell. I thought it was a strange place to park.”
She opened her notebook. “Describe it.”
“Black. New. Big truck—Dodge Ram or Chevy Silverado. What caught my eye were the wheels. Those chrome full-throttle warrior rims. Been wanting to get some for my own truck.”
Dodge. Like the truck that stopped beside her mother’s car.
“Did you see the driver?”
He shook his head. “I was inside the guts of the tower.”
None of them had seen it drive away.
Around the bend, she found tire tracks in the damp earth along the shoulder. She snapped photos, setting down a ruler to measure tread width. She took the distance between the tires’ front and rear resting points. She radioed Guthrie and the techs.
