by Meg Gardiner
Paige remained in the interview room, reluctant to talk now that she realized something bad was going on and she was in the middle of it. Caitlin couldn’t believe Paige was as clueless as she presented herself. Not if Titus Rhone had urged her to apply for a job with the sheriff’s office. Not if she was encouraged to keep her eyes and ears open and share that information with him. Keenly. Like a friendly kitten, instinctively driven to rip apart small animals without remorse.
Guthrie clicked through photos of the house. “We had a plainclothes officer perform a drive-by of the residence in an unmarked car, fifteen minutes ago.” He raised a hand. “The officer’s personal vehicle, not anything the suspect could make. He reports the suspect’s Chevy Volt is parked in the driveway.”
The SRU commander said, “We have eyes on the dwelling. Front and back. The vehicle is still in the driveway and nobody has left the house.”
Guthrie squared up to the room. “This man is presumed to be armed. He is exceptionally dangerous.” He looked at each member of the team individually. “Let’s do this.”
With a rustle of gear, they moved. Adrenaline seemed to tingle in the air. As Caitlin turned to go, Guthrie stopped her.
“Walt Hobbs came home. He and the boys are safe.”
“Thank God.”
Even as relief poured through her, grief welled at the thought of Deralynn, and what her family was now enduring. Guthrie briefly looked drained. She knew he had been the one to notify Walt Hobbs of his wife’s murder. She nodded crisply.
As they headed through the door, the medical examiner came down the hall. Azir looked stern.
To Guthrie he said, “News?”
“Yeah.” Guthrie nodded at the manila envelope in the ME’s hand. “The autopsy results on Gaia Hill and J. T. Wilcox?”
Azir nodded. “I wanted you to have them as soon as possible.” He watched the tactical team pass by, and Martinez, ballistic vest tight, badge hanging from a strap around his neck.
The ME said, “I don’t need operational details, but—if you’re attending another crime scene, or . . .”
Guthrie eyed him. “Or. Yes. And we’re on our way.”
“I won’t keep you. But I will warn you. Take exceptional care with hazardous material exposure when you raid wherever you’re going.”
“Got it, Doc.”
Guthrie started past, but the ME pointed at the manila envelope. “The mercury contamination at the last crime scene was off the scale. It’s the vapor. It can be in the air and you won’t know you’re inhaling it.”
Caitlin glanced at the envelope.
The ME frowned at her. “How many of these crime scenes have you attended?”
“Three. Four if you count the burning car.”
“Closed environments, incendiary devices—those fireworks were poisonous.”
Guthrie wanted to get going. So did Caitlin, but a dark worm was burrowing under her skin.
Azir said, “I’m issuing a bulletin about the dangers of mercury vapor. You need to take precautions not to suffer further exposure.” He raised a finger to both her and Guthrie. “This could have permanent, catastrophic health consequences.”
Guthrie was itching to move.
Azir waved. “Go. Be safe. But make sure your people are safe from mercury too. Not every deadly weapon is a bullet.”
“Got it.” Guthrie stalked down the hallway, headed for the car pool. Caitlin followed.
She turned and walked backward. “What consequences?”
“Tremors. Memory loss. A sensation that insects are crawling beneath the skin. Insomnia. Emotional volatility. Headaches. Loss of peripheral vision,” he said. “Don’t mess around with this.”
“I understand.”
Caitlin followed Guthrie outside into the sun. But a light had already flipped on. Her father.
Mack’s symptoms. The shaking. The bugs crawling beneath his skin. The insomnia, the rage, the headaches, the gaps in memory. The way he only saw you when you were right in front of him.
He wasn’t rude or obstinate—he’d lost his peripheral vision.
She reached the car. Checked the shotgun in the trunk: broke it, looked down the barrel, snapped it shut, and assured herself that the box of shells was secure and ready. She replaced it, climbed behind the wheel, and fired up the engine with something approaching shock and dread and enlightenment.
Her father had mercury poisoning.
49
They rolled toward Paige Rhone’s house under a blinding blue sky, racing past shotgun homes and tired apartment buildings on an overgrown Oakland hillside. The black SRU command vehicle spearheaded the convoy. At the wheel of an unmarked car behind it, Caitlin pressed her foot hard on the gas. A refrain ran in her head. Come on, get there, do this. Take him. The moments before had never felt as protracted, or as perilous.
Fifty yards from the driveway, the command vehicle braked to a stop, angling across the street. Two sheriff’s office Chargers roared past it, lights flashing. Caitlin swung her car to a stop behind the command vehicle, angled the opposite way across the blacktop, blocking the road.
The Chargers cut off the far end of the road. The SRU team poured out of their vehicle. On the driveway sat Titus Rhone’s gold Chevy Volt.
At the house, the curtains were closed. The front door stood in shadow. The place looked unexceptional and menacing. Still and hunched, as if growling at a frequency too low to hear.
Over the radio, Caitlin heard the leader of the SRU team that was staging at the back. “In position.”
Caitlin drew her SIG. Her heart beat against her vest. Beside her, Guthrie stared at the house as if he could hear it breathing. Shanklin’s jaw looked tighter than a guy wire. Nearby, Martinez touched his crucifix. He caught Caitlin’s gaze and nodded.
The SRU commander led them to the door, single file. They stacked up, and every second felt like a bottomless age. The commander signaled Go. Caitlin put her hand on Shanklin’s shoulder and went in behind the battering ram, behind SRU’s shouts and Guthrie’s animal force.
The light was dingy, the rooms a warren. The house smelled of cigarettes and bleach and old books. Weapons level, they cleared the kitchen, living room, bathroom, bedroom, bedroom, garage. They swept closets, cupboards, cabinets, and the attic.
The house was empty. Rhone was gone.
* * *
Caitlin stepped outside the Rhone house and walked to the Crime Lab truck. She brushed a strand of hair from her face with her forearm. She wore latex gloves and paper booties over her boots. She ignored the crowd that was gathering at the end of the street behind the sheriff’s barricade.
Until she saw her father standing among them. Motionless, silent, watching.
She ducked under the yellow police tape and strode along the street to the barricade. The uniformed deputy doing crowd control was Lyle, who had been at Silver Creek Park the night the crow-filled car burned.
Caitlin pointed at Mack. “He’s with me.”
Lyle let Mack around the barrier. She drew her father out of the crowd’s earshot.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
He wore a heavy work shirt with a frayed collar, jeans, and mud-caked boots. He hadn’t shaved. He held up his phone.
“Police scanner app. I heard the code for a tactical op go out as I was heading back to San Francisco. Nobody mentioned the Prophet, but I read between the lines.” He looked at the house. “What is it?”
She knew what happened when somebody broke big news to Mack. His circuits fried. He could explode or withdraw, turn turtle. But Lieutenant Kogara had scheduled an imminent press conference. This was going to break in the next few minutes. Mack deserved to hear it from her. She breathed.
“We know who he is,” she said.
Mack stilled like a spike driven into the ground.
“Hi
s name is Titus Rhone. We know this for sure. It’s him.”
She waited for him to react. His gaze lengthened beyond the horizon. Then his face crumpled. And his knees.
“Dad.” She put a hand beneath his elbow.
He caught himself, straightened, raised a hand. “Titus Rhone.” He said it slowly, one syllable at a time. “My God. How?”
She explained how they’d traced him. Then got her phone and pulled up Rhone’s driver’s license photo. “This is him today.”
Mack looked. For long, aching seconds.
“There’s something wrong with him. You can see it,” he said.
She nodded. He continued staring into the photo. He looked up at her. “You . . .”
Pressed his lips together. Fought back emotion.
“Caitlin.” He reached out with a shaking hand and looked like he might squeeze her arm. “Unbelievable.” He whispered it. “You found him.”
“We still have to catch him. But he’s on the run now. He can’t come back here. BOLOs, full press, blanket news coverage. He can’t hide anymore. We’ll get him.”
“But his house . . .”
“He just lost his home base.”
He whispered something she couldn’t make out. A prayer, maybe. A curse. He looked at her with dark eyes and nodded. He didn’t need to say anything else. She took his hand and held on. He looked at the house, his expression unreadable.
“There’s something else you need to know. It can’t wait,” she said.
He kept staring at the house. She paused. But there was no way except forward.
“Dad. Everybody working the Prophet crime scenes has been exposed to mercury vapor.” She squeezed his hand, trying to capture his attention. “You more than anyone.”
His head turned slowly, as though on a swivel.
“You’ve been poisoned,” she said.
His lips parted but he said nothing.
“The ME ran down the symptoms. Tremors. Bugs below the skin. Auditory and visual—”
“Hallucinations.” His voice was distant, as if he’d been pulled underwater. “Colors and lights. Snakes at the edge of my eye, slithering around the corner every time I look.”
“Your restricted peripheral vision.” Her voice was close to cracking. “The depression. Withdrawal. Anger.”
He looked catatonic. Caitlin thought she’d made a huge mistake. He stayed silent for a long minute. She waited for an explosion, but when he spoke again, he was calm.
“You’re saying this has affected me for twenty years?” he said.
“Heavy-metal poisoning. Yes.”
He closed his eyes and shook his head, as though it was unbelievable.
“Tomorrow we hit the doctors. A full workup,” she said.
Now he frowned. “You think there’s something I can do?”
“There has to be.” To relieve his tormented existence. To repair him.
“Most heavy-metal poisoning is permanent.” His expression darkened. “The ME’s concerned about you.”
Fear flicked through her. “Now we know to take precautions.”
She said it quickly. She couldn’t let fear distract her.
Mack stared, seemingly at nothing. “Saunders and I were first on scene at a victim’s house where a kitchen trash can was set on fire. It was full of smashed fluorescent bars. We extinguished it and opened the windows—aired the house out before the crime scene team arrived . . .”
“You didn’t tell anyone?” Caitlin said.
“At that point, what difference would it have made?”
She felt dismayed. “Maybe all the difference. This changes . . .”
“Everything?” he said.
She felt a pang. “Yes. No.”
She told herself to get calm.
She said, “I blamed you. For things that weren’t your fault.”
He took a beat. “But they were.”
She looked at him urgently. “I was still wrong.”
“Because of mercury.”
“Yes. No.”
He almost laughed. For a brief second, the cop’s sense of gallows humor lit his face.
She had blamed him for everything. Now she saw a cascade of cause and effect—homicide work, and his dedication beyond the call of duty, and the newlyweds’ murder, Saunders dying, and mercury streaming through his veins.
“You didn’t jump into the abyss. It grabbed you and pulled you in.” She gripped his hand. “You took on more than one person could carry. I only blame you for trying to shoulder it all.”
He held still for a second. A stone. Then he nodded at the house.
“You get back to work.”
She kept hold of his hand. “I don’t want you to be alone.”
“I need to be. When this is over we’ll talk.” He nodded, seemingly to himself. Then he turned a blistering look on her. “You find this son of a bitch and drag him to the ground.”
50
The wind scurried across the asphalt, blowing empty fast-food wrappers along the road. Choke weeds and thistles crept through the chain-link fence. Sean Rawlins eased his truck along the alley, avoiding broken beer bottles that had shattered against the side of a Dumpster.
What a spot for an Easter egg hunt.
But confidential informants didn’t generally meet him in the bar at the Fairmont. And in truth, he didn’t mind. In fact, he loved this.
Explosives was a funny job. He worked the side of the street that tried to keep explosive materials out of the hands of idiots and maniacs. He wasn’t Explosives Enforcement. Those guys were crazy. Cut the blue wire. Bomb Disposal: full-on nuts.
He went after nitwits who didn’t care whether a factory blew up, and moral deficients who wanted jetliners to break up at altitude. He stopped explosions before they ever got to the stage where a detonator could be attached.
The public had little idea how many explosives filled the world around them and, in his experience, didn’t appreciate how useful explosives were. In mining and demolition. Avalanche control. Fire extinguishers, air-bag inflators. Fireworks. Special effects.
Better living through chemistry. As long as explosives detonated only at the right time.
Explosives specialists tended to come at the job from either a chemistry or an electronics background. Sean’s degree was in chem. He could analyze explosive materials ranging from dynamite and other high explosives to black powder, pellet powder, initiating explosives, detonators, safety fuses, squibs, detonating cord, igniter cord, and igniters. Materials that—despite what some sovereign citizen types thought—it was illegal to ship, transport, or receive without a license or permit.
Of course, organized crime, jihadists, white supremacists, and various wackos disregarded that prohibition. Thus sending him out on Easter Sunday to investigate and interdict.
This tip had come in to the ATF’s San Francisco Field Division. The tipster claimed that blasting materials were being diverted from a construction company that did highway work in the Sierras. Couple of guys were selling an ANFO/emulsion blend to an outlaw motorcycle club. Bikers more commonly dealt in guns—ATF was always chasing that—and if they were moving into the big boom, it was bad news.
One of Sean’s colleagues had worked the CI for a month, before bringing Sean in. The guy wanted to meet. Today, he said. This afternoon. He wanted to negotiate payment and an immunity agreement.
Sean drove past workshops and warehouses that were shuttered for the weekend. In the distance, the loading cranes of the Port of Oakland rose above the docks, like AT-AT walkers from The Empire Strikes Back. He followed the chain-link fence deeper into the complex. He saw a man outside a building on the other side of the fence. The guy was leaning against the wall, smoking. When Sean slowed, the guy tossed the butt and hurried toward him, looking around.
Sean pulle
d alongside the fence. He texted the supervisory special agent in charge—his boss. At meet. Then he put down the passenger window.
The guy hunched into his shirt and squinted through the fence at Sean. His hair blew across his eyes. He acted like he was on the lookout for the Walking Dead.
“You aren’t Peretta,” he said.
“Peretta couldn’t make it. And she told you I would be coming.”
The guy tilted his head thoughtfully. “What, she had her baby last night?”
Sean gave him a neutral look.
The guy cracked a smile. “Huh.”
“Rawlins,” Sean said.
“Dix.”
It was the guy. He looked around again, squirrel style.
There was a gate just ahead, but Dix said, “Can’t come in this way. CCTV still works on this side. Go down to the corner of the building and around.” He pointed at the long road between warehouses. Beyond it, bright in the afternoon sun, a container ship steamed across the bay.
“I’ll meet you there,” the man said.
Sean drove to the corner. He checked for tails, for lookouts, for any suspicious activity. It was a vast industrial site, dirty and run-down and empty on a holiday weekend. Which was ordinary. He saw nothing suspicious.
Around the corner, a couple of hundred yards up the road, Dix pushed open a rolling gate. Signs on the fence indicated the property was a teardown. Yeah. The kind of place that was good for hiding stolen materials. And not great for keeping explosives safe. Sean parked outside and walked through the gate.
The building was the size of an airplane hangar, boxy, faceless, and seemingly abandoned. Seagulls circled overhead, screeching. He walked past rusting fifty-five-gallon drums that didn’t look OSHA compliant. The CI unlocked the door, looking around like a spooked prairie dog. Sean took off his sunglasses and accompanied him inside.
The space was empty, and echoed like a high school gym. The factory floor had been stripped, but he could still see the bolts and anchor points where machine tools had once stood.
