by Meg Gardiner
He mouthed, Love you.
“I love you too,” she choked out. “Hang on.”
The wheezing stopped. His hand fell to the platform.
She dropped the shotgun and rolled him onto his back.
“Dad.”
She listened for his breath, felt for his heartbeat. “Dad.”
She knelt over him and cleared his airway and began chest compressions, one-handed.
“Dad. Mack. Wait. Look at me.”
She listened and watched and knew and kept going, her own voice pressing into him, going through him, chasing after something that had fled across a divide where she couldn’t follow. Calling, her voice softening, from a summons to a wish to a ragged prayer, a good-bye. But he was already gone, and couldn’t hear it.
Her radio hummed. “Stay with us, Detective Hendrix. Help is on the way.”
58
Caitlin emerged from the pit into a night blazing with stars and flashing lights. Detective Martinez and two Special Response Unit officers led her from the abandoned factory into a cold glare and dark, sparkling air. She held her injured right hand against her chest. Martinez ran interference, clearing her path, supporting her elbow in case she passed out. Concussed. She’d heard him say it into the radio.
The paramedics would get to her. First, they had to bring Sean up. On the underground train platform, she had bent over him, talking, even though he was only marginally present, floating back and forth, in and out.
No. She had rasped it. You don’t go anywhere, Rawlins. Looking around the dark, where the black swallowed all, knowing the darkness didn’t mean absence of light; it meant death. Wanting Sean to squeeze her hand and look up at her, even as an irrational thread wanted to put her lips to his ear and whisper, Go get my father and bring him back.
Everyone was there. ATF, sheriffs, EMTs. The bomb squad was below. The firing circuit had apparently been faulty, but they were taking no chances neutralizing the explosives. Her vision straightened, then slipped double again. She saw Lieutenant Kogara stalk through the wide rolling gate, tie and jacket flapping, looking stern and concerned.
As he approached, Martinez raised a hand, like a halfback blocking an approaching tackle.
“Getting Detective Hendrix to the ambulance, sir. She’s pretty beat-up.”
Kogara got a good look at her. His face was half bleached by floodlights. She squinted and tried to focus. He seemed to take in the state of her hand.
“Rhone?” he said.
“Dead.”
The hum rose in her ears again, and for a moment she felt far away, weightless, looking down on the site from a depthless height. Then a hand cupped her elbow and she regained her balance.
Kogara’s voice came to her as through a tin wall. “We’ll talk after you get treatment. Go.”
She may have said thank you. Martinez led her away. He said, “Everybody’s looking at you. Nails like claws. You’re Wolverine.”
He was trying to buck her up. Or keep her conscious. She walked toward the gate, toward the exit from hell, through the tunnel of kaleidoscope lights. A shout rose behind her. She tried to look back, and stumbled.
Martinez steadied her. “The EMTs are bringing Sean up, and they’re moving fast. That’s a good sign.”
“Wait,” she said.
The paramedics hustled out of the building, shepherding Sean strapped to the stretcher, already swathed in monitors and gear. Portable IV. Cervical collar. ECG monitor. A female EMT ran alongside, keeping pressure on one of the wounds in his chest.
Caitlin caught up with them and tried to run alongside. “Sean, you’re out. You’re safe. You’re going to be okay.”
The EMT looked at her like she might be mad. Caitlin hoped it was because of the way she looked, and not because of Sean’s condition.
“Hear me, Sean? You’re going to be okay.”
He opened his eyes and looked at her. He blinked, maybe acknowledgment, maybe agreement.
“You’re going to fight,” she said, “like a mofo. For all of us. For you. And me.” Her voice broke. “For Sadie, and Michele. Got it?”
He blinked again. She took his hand. Thought she felt him squeeze.
Overhead came the drone of a helicopter. A medevac helo swooped in off the bay, navigation lights flashing. Across the street, on a vacant lot, deputies had marked out a makeshift landing zone. The helo descended, noise echoing between the buildings, downwash blasting dust. The paramedics leaned over the stretcher, protecting Sean. The helicopter settled on its skids and the engine cycled down.
Caitlin bent and kissed Sean, and the paramedics took off with him, running for the helo.
Martinez said, “He’s in good hands.” He led her toward the ambulance. “Come on.”
She was halfway there when a sheriff’s office car came barreling down the alley, lights screaming from the light strip inside the windshield. It stopped sharply beside the ambulance. Guthrie jumped out.
Behind them, the helicopter door slid shut and its engines spooled up. Caitlin turned and watched it lift off, pilot’s face uplit in the cockpit, talking into his mic. She wished it into the air, her left hand in front of her face to block blowing grit. It rose, blades whirring against the floodlights, then dipped its nose and swooped in a broad turn, heading hard out over the bay. It beelined for the glow of the city across the water. She knew what that meant.
“San Francisco General,” she said.
“That’s good,” Martinez said.
She didn’t nod. San Francisco General Hospital was a Level 1 Trauma Center. If they were flying Sean there, it meant he needed the people who brought you back from the farthest edge.
She lost sight of the helo in the lights of the Bay Bridge. She kept looking anyway, until the engine faded into the hum in her ears. She felt she wasn’t quite grounded, that the veil between this world and the other was porous, and she stood at the brink. She felt that she needed to keep her back to the hole in the concrete inside the factory, to bar anyone else from finding it. And to bar anything within the pit from getting out and pursuing Sean. To stop it from ever again reaching those seared by the Prophet’s touch.
“Detective.” Guthrie approached gingerly. “Caitlin. You hanging in there?”
“Yeah.”
He and Martinez walked her to the waiting ambulance. More cars pulled up. Sean’s boss from the ATF. A second federal vehicle, a black SUV with a whip antenna. The driver got out, a somber, hawkeyed man in a dark suit, who stood at a distance, watching her. FBI.
A paramedic jumped down from the open doors of the ambulance. He asked her to climb inside. She got as far as the rear bumper. Sat.
“In a minute,” she said.
The paramedic shone a pinpoint flashlight in her eyes, asked her to follow his finger, checked her head, palpated the massive, throbbing bruise on the side of it.
“Did you lose consciousness?” he said.
“Maybe.”
“Headache?”
“Like Godzilla.”
“Nausea? Vomiting?”
“Not yet. But the stars and the humming and the—dizzy.”
After a few seconds, it ebbed. The paramedic had a hand on her shoulder. “We need to transport you to the ER.”
“In a while. San Francisco General first. My boyfriend . . .”
“Now.” He gently turned her hand. He tried to stay professional, but said, “Damn, girl.”
He helped her stand. She looked at Guthrie and Martinez, and a bolus of tears tried to rise in her eyes. She blinked it away. “Shanklin. Lyle.”
Guthrie nodded. Martinez stared at the ground.
“They were . . . they tried . . .”
“They did,” Guthrie said.
The cold seemed finally to penetrate, all the way through her.
Outside the factory buildin
g, someone whistled and called to Martinez. He leaned in and spoke quietly to Caitlin.
“You did good. Hang in, kid.”
He headed off.
The paramedic said, “I’m going to leave the nails in situ. You’ll need a hand surgeon to evaluate this injury. Come on.”
She looked back at the factory. “My dad’s still in there. I don’t want to leave him alone.”
Guthrie’s shoulders dropped. “Detective. The crime scene team will take hours.” His voice gentled. “The ME needs to attend. Dr. Azir will take care of your dad.”
Her throat locked. She nodded. “Then take me to San Francisco General.”
The paramedic said, “Lake Merritt. They know you’re coming. And you can’t help your boyfriend in this state.”
He assisted her as she climbed into the ambulance. The doors closed. They drove from the scene, and the flashing lights faded to nothing.
59
Thursday
At Calvary Cemetery, Caitlin walked beside her mother from the graveside service. The trees brimmed with pink blossoms under a cobalt sky. Behind them, white blooms covered the casket.
People in dark suits headed quietly to their cars. Sandy cinched an arm around Caitlin’s waist. Caitlin was feeling stronger, but her right arm hung in a sling, swathed in a blue cast, the bones of her hand glued back together, fingers wired. Her face was a thunderstorm of bruises.
The crowd was small—loyal friends, Sandy’s colleagues, a few people from the sheriff’s office. Martinez wore a tie, which Caitlin found strangely touching. The plainclothes old-timer with the jowls and slouch, who had knocked on her door the night it all started, gently offered his condolences. Caitlin and Sandy both thanked him.
The last to catch up with them, as they neared Sandy’s car, was Sergeant Guthrie.
He wore a suit with a crisp white shirt but looked as gaunt and wary as ever. “Mrs. Hendrix. Caitlin. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” Caitlin said.
“Mack would have appreciated your coming today,” Sandy said.
She sent a last, lingering gaze toward her ex-husband’s grave. Then she kissed Caitlin’s cheek.
“I’ll wait for you in the car.” She peered at Guthrie over her sunglasses. “Five minutes, Sergeant. She was only discharged from the hospital yesterday.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
They stood under the trees for a moment, and Caitlin said, “Let’s walk.”
“You up to that?”
“I can’t stand still.”
They headed slowly across the lawn. Guthrie eyed her with concern. “What’s the latest on Sean?”
“Touch-and-go.”
That was as much as she could get out. She needed to hold every thought inside, to gather her strength and summon all the powers of earth and heaven, so that she could get back to Sean, hold his hand, talk even if he drifted half aware. Send it all to him. Stay alive.
Guthrie held himself to her sluggish pace. “Highway Patrol found the Dodge Ram pickup abandoned in a gully in San Francisco. Wiped clean. We haven’t found the confidential informant Sean went to meet. But not all the blood on the factory floor belonged to Sean. It could be the CI’s.”
“You still don’t know if he was for real, or somebody Rhone paid to set Sean up.”
“We’re working on it,” Guthrie said. “Paige lawyered up, by the way.”
“She’s a smart little survivor.”
They slowed beneath the lowering branches of an oak.
“The abandoned factory,” she said.
“It was his grand finale, wasn’t it?” Guthrie said.
“Yes—but not in the way he planned it to be.”
Though still fighting through her shock and pain, she was trying to put the pieces together. In her mind, she heard Mack’s voice.
“Serial killers never quit. Dad had that right. The only things that stop them are death or capture. And Rhone never planned on either.”
As she had done countless times since Sunday night, she tried to rewind the descent into the tunnel—to slow down the moments before the Prophet attacked, and see them with granular clarity. Her recollections were fuzzy, pointillist impressions. But as she walked with Guthrie, she tried again to put them in mental order.
“Rhone said, ‘At last you come to the Ninth Circle.’ Like it was part of his master plan,” she said. “But when he had Dad at gunpoint . . .” The memory bloomed, vivid and hideous. “At that point, Rhone started improvising.”
“Maybe he had his script worked out, but the heat of the moment, the fight, threw him off.”
“Possibly.” She shook her head. “But something doesn’t add up.”
“What doesn’t?” Guthrie said.
“In the Inferno, the Ninth Circle of Hell punishes treachery.”
“To Rhone, the fact that you’re a cop was treacherous. In his mind, every move you made was intended to betray him,” he said. “He was a psychopath. Ease down.”
That was like telling a rocket sled to hit the brakes after it had launched into the air across the Grand Canyon.
“That isn’t it. Rhone tried to force me to betray either Dad and Sean, or the people in range of the explosives. He said he’d let me live if I chose which of them would die.”
“There doesn’t have to be an ‘it,’ Caitlin.”
She turned to him. “This is the Prophet. Of course there does.”
Her head began to pound. “In the Inferno, the deepest pit of hell isn’t a lake of fire. It’s solid ice. Betrayers are encased in it.” She tried to recall how Dante categorized them. “There are those who kill their kin—Cain. Mordred. Then traitors and turncoats, who betray their people or their country. Then those who betray their guests. And finally, the center of hell . . .” She put a hand against her forehead. “I’m rambling.”
“Keep talking,” Guthrie said. “You’re getting at something.”
A breeze swept through the trees. Blossoms shook free like confetti.
Caitlin let her gaze drift with them. “The deepest pit of hell holds those who betray their lords. Brutus. Cassius. Judas. And at the very bottom is the greatest betrayer of all—Satan. Lucifer, who committed personal treachery against God. He’s a giant with three faces, frozen to the waist in ice, beating his wings in vain. Trapped.”
“Maybe Rhone saw himself as Satan, ruined for betraying the lord of light.”
“No. He saw himself as the lord. He thought he was the light.” She exhaled. “The thing is—I can’t believe he would ever want us to find his lair. He would never lure us there, or toy with us once we were inside.”
But that was what he had done. And he had succeeded. It didn’t matter whether he had died under the blast of a shotgun or the heat of a thousand volts. He had killed Lyle and Shanklin. He had taken her father.
The well of pain rose and broke over her. It felt like the scars on her arms had slit open and begun to run. The tears dropped down her cheeks. She inhaled and let out a stifled sob.
Guthrie set a hand on her shoulder.
“Sorry.” She wiped her eyes. “I shouldn’t . . .”
“Shut up, kid.” He squeezed her shoulder. “It’s catching up with you. If it didn’t, I’d have you sectioned.”
He shepherded her across the lawn toward her mother’s car. “You take all the time you need. Think things through, and when you’re ready, there are people who want to listen.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not the only one who wants to debrief you.”
He handed her a business card. She read it.
“Does this have to do with the black SUV parked over there?” She nodded up the road. “The one with the whip antenna and the guys in Ray-Bans. Same vehicle pulled up at the abandoned factory the other night, just before I got in the ambulance.”
The card read: C. J. Emmerich, Special Agent in Charge. FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit.
“Early on,” Guthrie said, “you asked if the Bureau would reevaluate the Prophet’s profile. Now they’d like to talk to you.” He held up a hand. “When you’re back to fighting fit. No rush.”
Disquiet was burrowing through her. Exhaustion, grief. And a gnawing certainty that she was overlooking a vital connection.
“No, now. Maybe they can help me figure out why this equation seems unsolvable.”
The agent who climbed from the black SUV was the somber, hawkeyed man who had eyed her the other night. He shut the heavy car door with a click. His black mackintosh blew in the wind like a wing.
“Detective Hendrix. Pleased to meet you. I wish it were under better circumstances.”
“Special Agent Emmerich,” Caitlin said. “I’m trying to piece together a complete picture of Titus Rhone’s last stand. I hope you can see whatever it is I’m missing.”
“Tell me.”
She ran over the last minutes in the subway tunnel. Emmerich listened with a kind of hungry tranquility.
“After you shot at the timer, what did he do? Moment by moment,” he said.
“He screamed, ‘Wolfen bitch.’ Watched the timer count down to zero. When nothing happened, he looked stunned. He made a move toward it, but checked himself and turned to attack me first. Then he—got this look of shock, and stopped. He said, ‘So advance the banners of the king of hell.’ He grabbed the spool of copper wire. And I fired the final shot.”
Once again she pictured herself on the abandoned subway platform. A fresh swell of emotion broke over her.
“Detective?” Emmerich said.
“Sean—Special Agent Rawlins—if he hadn’t pushed the Remington within my reach . . .”
Guthrie’s expression hardened. “Sean?”
“I never could have gotten it on my own.”
“Agent Rawlins tells it exactly the other way round.”
She frowned. “No.”
“Yes.” He glanced at Emmerich. “We spoke briefly to him. He doesn’t remember much, but he remembers that. He said the shotgun was beyond his grasp, ‘but not Caitlin’s.’” He eyed her again, and his voice softened. “After a head injury, you can’t expect perfect recall.”
