It’s quiet in the hallway, and he’s excited. His heart is pounding in his chest as he waits for Annie to open the door. One hand is poised to knock again, the other holds…what? A knife?
Yeah.
He has a story to give her, and he’s rehearsed it many times. Something simple, like…he’s a neighbor from the floor below with a question. Something that feels like it belongs.
She opens the door, and not just a crack. It’s early evening; the city is awake. Annie is at home, inside a security-gated apartment building. All of her lights are on. She has no reason to be afraid.
He comes through the door before she can react, an unstoppable force. He pushes inside, knocking Annie down, closing the door behind him. He rushes to Bonnie. He pulls her close and puts the knife to her throat.
“Make a sound and your daughter dies.”
Annie forces back the instinctive scream that had been building in her throat. Her shock is total. Everything has happened too fast for her to process. She’s still looking for some kind of rational explanation. Maybe she’s on a hidden-camera show, maybe a friend is pulling a prank on her, maybe…crazy ideas, but crazy would be better than the truth.
Bonnie is gazing up at her, eyes full of fear.
Annie would have accepted then that this was no prank. A stranger had a knife to her daughter’s throat. This was REAL.
“What do you want?” was her first question. She was hoping that she could bargain with this stranger. That he wanted something less than murder. Perhaps he was a burglar, or a rapist. Please, oh please, she’s thinking, don’t let him be a pedophile.
I remember something. “She had a small cut on her throat,” I say.
“What?”
“Bonnie. She had a small cut in the hollow of her throat.” I touch my own. “Here. I noticed it at the hospital.”
I see James think about this. His face goes grim. “He made it with the knife.”
We can’t be sure, of course. But it feels right.
The stranger takes the point of his knife and pricks the hollow of Bonnie’s throat. Nothing major, just enough to draw a single bead of blood, a single gasp. Enough to show that he means business, to make Annie’s heart jump and thud and quiver.
“Do what I say,” he says, “or your daughter dies slow.”
And right then, it was over. Bonnie was his leverage, and Annie belonged to him.
“I’ll do whatever you want. Just don’t hurt her.”
He smells Annie’s fear, and it excites him. An erection stirs in his trousers.
“I think Bonnie was there while he raped and tortured Annie. I think he made her watch it all,” I say.
James cocks his head. “Why?”
“A few reasons. The main one is that he kept Bonnie alive. Why? It gave him an extra person he had to control. It would have been easier if he’d just killed her. But Annie was the prey. He’s into torture, he likes fear. Anguish. Having Bonnie there, having Annie know she was there and seeing what was happening…it would have driven her insane. He would have liked that.”
James mulls this over. “I agree. For another reason too.”
“What?”
He looks me in the eye. “You. He’s hunting you too, Smoky. And hurting Bonnie makes the cut that much deeper.”
I stare at him in surprise.
He’s right.
Chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chug-a, the dark train is picking up speed…
“Do what I tell you, or I’ll hurt your mommy,” he says to Bonnie. He uses their love of each other like a cattle prod, driving them toward the bedroom.
“He moves them into the bedroom.” I walk down the hall. James follows. We step inside. “He closes it.” I reach over and shut the door. I imagine Annie, watching it close and not realizing that she would never see it open again.
James stares at the bed, thinking. Envisioning. “He still has two of them to control,” he says. “He wouldn’t have been afraid of Bonnie, but he can’t relax yet, not until Annie’s secured.”
“Annie was handcuffed in the video.”
“Right. So he made her handcuff herself. Just one wrist is all he’d need.”
“Take these,” he’d said to Annie, removing a pair of handcuffs from a bag, tossing them at her—
No, that wasn’t right. Rewind.
He has the knife to Bonnie’s throat. He looks at Annie. Looks her up and down, owning her with his eyes. Making sure she understands this.
“Strip,” he says. “Strip for me.”
She hesitates, and he wiggles the blade against Bonnie’s throat. “Strip.”
Annie does, weeping, as Bonnie watches. She leaves her bra and panties on, one last resistance.
“All of it!” he growls at her. Wiggles the knife.
Annie complies, weeping harder now—
No. Rewind.
Annie complies and forces herself not to weep. To be strong for her daughter. She removes her bra and panties and holds Bonnie’s eyes with her own. Look at my face, she’s thinking, willing. Look at my face. Not this. Not him.
Now he removes the handcuffs from the bag he’d brought in.
“Handcuff your wrist to the bed,” he tells Annie. “Do it now.”
She does. Once he hears the click of the ratchet, he reaches into the bag and pulls out two other pairs of handcuffs. These go around Bonnie’s tiny wrists and ankles. She is trembling. He ignores her sobs as he gags her. Bonnie looks at her mother, a pleading look. A look that says: “Make it stop!” This makes Annie cry harder.
He’s still cautious, careful. He’s not letting himself relax yet. He moves over to Annie and handcuffs her other wrist to the bed. Followed by her ankles. Then he gags her.
Now. Now he can relax. His prey is secure. She can’t escape, won’t escape.
Didn’t escape, I think.
Now he can savor the moment.
He takes his time setting up the room. Positioning the bed, getting the video camera just right. There is a way that things are done, a symmetry that is important, vital. You don’t rush this. To miss a step is to take away from the beauty of the act, and the act is everything. It’s his air and his water.
“The bed,” James says.
“What?” I look at it, puzzled.
He stands up and walks over to the baseboard. Annie’s bed is queen-size, formed of smooth, rounded wooden pieces. Sturdy.
“How did he move it?” He walks to the headboard and looks down at the carpet. “Drag marks. So he pulled it toward him.” He moves back to the base of the bed. “He would have gripped it somewhere here and pulled it by walking backward. He’d need leverage…” James kneels down. “He’d have grabbed it at the bottom and lifted it.” He stands up, walks to the side of the bed, drops onto his back, and squirms under the bed up to his shoulders. I see the light of his flashlight go on, then back off. When he comes back out, he is smiling. “No print powder there.”
We look at each other. I can almost feel each of us crossing our fingers.
People make the mistake of thinking that latex gloves prevent the transfer of fingerprints. In most cases, this is true. But not always. These types of gloves were originally developed for surgeons so they could maintain a sterile buffer during operations. The flip side of this is that the gloves have to fit like a second skin for the surgeons to use their instruments with no loss of precision or sensitivity. This tightness and thinness can cause the gloves to form-fit into the ridges and bifurcations of the prints on the hand and fingertips. If—and this is a big if, but still possible—someone wearing the gloves then touches a surface that can take an impression, they can leave a usable print. Annie’s bed is made of wood. It’s possible that cleaning solutions used on it could have left a residue that would retain a fingerprint impression, even through the killer’s gloves.
A long shot. But possible.
“Good one,” I say.
“Thanks.”
Oil and ball bearings, I think. On the killing ground, this is the only place that James
plays nice.
The stage is set. He’s moved the bed…just so. The camera is positioned…just so. He does one last check to make sure that everything is perfect. It is. Now he gives Annie his full attention, gazing down at her.
This is the first time she truly sees. He’s been distracted, setting up his theater. She still had hope. Now his gaze is fixed on her, and she understands. She sees eyes that have no horizon. They are bottomless, black, and filled with an unending hunger.
He knows when she knows. When she understands. It enflames him, like it always does. He has extinguished hope in another human being.
It makes him feel like a god.
James and I have arrived at the same place on this timeline. We are there. We see him, we see Annie, and out of the corner of our eyes, we see Bonnie. We smell the despair. The dark train is picking up speed, and we are along for the ride, tickets punched.
“Now let’s watch the video again,” he says.
I double-click the file, and we watch as the montage rolls by. He dances, he slices, he rapes.
The sheer violence of what he is doing sprays blood everywhere, and he can smell it, taste it, feel the slick of it through his clothes. At one point, he turns to look at the child. Her face is white, and her body shakes as though she’s having a seizure. This creates an almost unbearable, near-orgasmic symphony of delicious extremes for him. He shivers, every muscle shaking with emotion and sensation. He isn’t just being bad. He is raping good. Fucking it to death. Music and blood and guts and screams and terror. The world is shaking, and he is its epicenter. He is climbing toward the pinnacle, and he lets it come to him—that point where all of it explodes in a searing, blinding light, where all reason and anything human disappears.
It is a brief moment, and it is the only time that the hunger and need fade to nothing. A tiny instant of fulfillment and relief.
The knife comes down and there is blood and blood and wet and blood and he is climbing, climbing, climbing, standing on tiptoes at the peak of a mountain, stretching his body as far as it will go, reaching a finger out, not to touch the face of God, not to become something MORE, but to become nothing, nothing at all, and he throws his head back as his body shakes with an orgasm more powerful than he can stand.
Then it’s over, and the anger that is always there returns.
Something jitters in my mind. “Hold it,” I say. I use the controls of the player to rewind the video. I let it play. That jitter again. I frown, frustrated. “Something’s not right. I can’t put my finger on it.”
“Can we do a frame by frame on this?” James asks.
We play around with it a bit until we find a setting that, though not frame by frame, at least takes us through it in slow motion.
“Somewhere in here,” I murmur.
We both lean forward, watching. It is toward the end of the tape. He is standing next to Annie’s bed. I see a flicker, and he is still standing next to Annie’s bed, but something is different.
James sees it first. “Where’s the picture?”
We roll it back again. He is standing next to the bed, and on the wall behind him is a picture of a vase of sunflowers. The flicker again, he is still standing next to the bed—but the picture is gone.
“What the hell?” I look over at the place on the wall where the picture would have hung. I see it, leaning up against the overturned end table.
“Why did he remove it from the wall?” James asks. He’s asking himself, not me.
We run through it again. Standing, picture, flicker, standing—no picture. Over and over. Standing, flicker, picture, no picture, picture no picture…
Understanding doesn’t just rush over me. It roars. My mouth falls open, and I get light-headed. “Jesus Christ!” I yell, startling James.
“What?”
I rewind the video. “Watch it again. This time, note where the top of the picture frame is, and track that point on the wall once it’s gone.”
The video moves through, we pass the flicker. James frowns. “I don’t—” He stops and his eyes widen. “Is that right?” He sounds incredulous. I run through it again.
There’s no doubt. We both stare at each other. Everything has changed.
We know now why the picture had been removed. It had been removed because it was a frame of reference. For height.
The man standing over Annie while the picture was still on the wall was a good two inches taller than the man standing over her after it was removed.
We’d reached the engine room on the dark train and had been thrown out of it by the shock of what we saw.
Not one conductor.
Two.
15
YOU’RE RIGHT,” LEO says. He looks up at James and me in amazement.
He has just finished examining the video. “That flicker is a bad splice.”
Callie, Jenny, and Charlie are there, crowded around the monitor. We had filled them in on the sequence of events as we saw them, ending with this bombshell.
Jenny looks at me. “Wow.”
“You run across anything like this before?” Charlie asks. “Two of them working together?”
I nod. “Once. It was different, though. A male-female team, and the male was dominant. Two males working together, that’s very unusual. What they do, it’s personal to them. Intimate. Most don’t like to share the moment.”
Everyone is quiet, mulling this over. Callie breaks the silence. “I should check for those prints, honey-love.”
“I should have thought of that,” Jenny says.
“Yes, you should have,” James bites. He’s back to his old self.
Jenny glares at him. He ignores her, turning to watch Callie.
Callie is unpacking a UV scope and its accoutrements. The scope uses intensified ultraviolet reflectance to detect fingerprints. It emits intense light in the UV spectrum. This light reflects uniformly off flat surfaces. When it hits imperfections—such as the ridges and whorls of fingerprints—it reflects these as well, making them stand out against the uniformity of the surface they are on. You can take crystal-clear photographs of these imperfections with a UV camera, usable in fingerprint matching and identification.
The imager boasts a head-mounted display that protects the eyes from the UV rays, a UV emitter, and a hand-carried, high-resolution UV camera. The scope doesn’t always work, but the advantage of trying it first is that it does nothing to the surface you’re examining. Powders, superglue…once these substances are applied, you can’t take them back. Light leaves it the way you found it.
“All ready,” Callie says. She looks like something from a science-fiction movie. “Turn out the lights.”
Charlie hits the switch, and we watch as Callie gets onto her back and squirms under the bed. We can see the glow of the UV emitter as she passes it across the surface of the baseboard. A pause, some fumbling, and we hear a few clicks. A few more clicks. The emitter light goes out and Callie squirms back out, stands up. Charlie turns the lights on.
Callie is grinning. “Three good prints from the left hand, two from the right. Nice and clear, honey-love.”
For the first time since Callie called me to tell me about Annie’s death, I feel something besides anger, grief, and coldness. I feel excited.
“Gotcha,” I say, grinning back at her.
Jenny shakes her head at me. “You guys are truly, truly spooky, Smoky.”
Just riding the dark train, Jenny, I think to myself. Letting it lead us to their mistakes.
“Question,” Alan says. “How come no one complained about the music? They had the volume up pretty high.”
“I can answer that one, honey-love,” Callie says. “Just be quiet and listen.”
We do, and I hear it right away. The thumps of loud bass, mixed with muffled treble, coming from various places in floors above and below.
Callie shrugs. “Young people and couples live here, and some like to play their music loud.”
Alan nods. “I’ll buy that. Second point.�
�� He gestures around at the room. “They were messy. Real messy. There’s no way they just walked out of here covered in blood. They had to clean up first. The bathroom looks pristine, so I’m thinking that they washed up in there and scrubbed it down after.” He turns to Jenny. “Did the Crime Scene Unit check the drains?”
“I’ll find out.” Her cell phone rings, and she answers it. “Chang.” She looks at me. “Really? Right. I’ll tell her.”
“What now?” I ask.
“That was my guy at the hospital. He said Bonnie spoke. Just a sentence, but he thought you’d want to know.”
“What?”
“She said, ‘I want Smoky.’”
16
JENNY GOT ME to the hospital fast; she pulled out the stops, used her siren to run red lights. Neither of us spoke on the way over.
I’m standing by Bonnie’s bed now, looking down at her as she gazes up at me. I am again struck by how much she looks like her mother. It’s disorienting; I just came from watching her mother die, and yet here Annie looks up at me, alive through her daughter.
I smile down at her. “They said you asked for me, honey.”
She nods, but doesn’t speak. I realize there won’t be any more words coming from Bonnie right now. The glazed look of shock is gone from her eyes, but something else has settled in and put down roots. Something distant and hopeless and heavy.
“I need to ask you two questions first, honey. Is that okay?”
She looks at me, speculative. Apprehensive. But she nods.
“There were two bad men, weren’t there?”
Fear. Her lip trembles. But she nods.
Yes.
“Good, honey. Just one more, and then we won’t talk about it anymore right now. Did you see either of their faces?”
She closes her eyes. Swallows. Opens them. Shakes her head.
No.
Inside, I sigh. I am not surprised, but it’s still frustrating. Time for that later. I take Bonnie’s hand.
“I’m sorry, honey. You asked to see me. You don’t have to tell me what you want if you still can’t talk. But can you show me?”
She continues to look up at me. She seems to be looking for something in my eyes, some reassurance. I can’t tell from her expression whether she is finding it or not. But she nods.
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