Yolanda started the coffee machine going again, then shot off across the kitchen. She opened a metal tin, snatched a couple of somethings from inside, then raced towards her desk, eyes straight ahead. Why wouldn’t she look me in the eye?
She threw something over her shoulder and I caught it on instinct. “Thought you probably needed food,” she called without looking back.
I looked at what I was holding. A homemade granola bar, wrapped in plastic wrap. I glanced at the kitchen area. There are two sorts of kitchen: ones for people who like to cook, with lots of pans, fresh ingredients and well-used surfaces, and ones like Yolanda’s, where the coffee machine and the microwave were center stage. I couldn’t imagine her baking. So who made these? “Thanks,” I said.
She grabbed her laptop, notebook and a pen, threw them all in a bag along with her granola bar and shot back towards the kitchen, eyes still avoiding mine. I couldn’t take it anymore. The idea that she was pissed with me really bothered me. At the last second, I sidestepped in front of her. “Hey!” I said, holding up my hand to stop her.
She pulled up just before her knees would have hit my legs.
“You okay?” I asked. “Are we okay? You mad at me?”
“No,” she said quickly. “It’s fine. We’re fine. It’s all fine.” And then, when I didn’t move out of her way, she sighed and finally looked up at me, just for a split second.
And her face turned scarlet again. She wasn’t pissed. She was embarrassed. Why would she be embarrassed? I stepped out of the way, confused but relieved.
The coffee machine had brewed another two cups and she dumped both of them into a travel cup and screwed on the lid. She showed me it apologetically. “Sorry. I only have one.”
“We can share,” I deadpanned. “I don’t have cooties.”
I saw a tiny smile pull at her lips as she rolled towards the door. “Come on, then,” she said. “Let’s go.”
* * *
She drove. It was a little after four and her sports car shot through the empty streets at a speed that made me furtively grip my seat in the darkness. We hit green light after green light—at first, I thought we were just getting lucky. Then I saw Yolanda’s eyes flicking between the lights and the speedo. She’d worked out the damn rhythm. She’d calculated when the next set of lights would go green and the exact speed we needed to go to pass through them in time.
“Anyone ever tell you your mind’s kind of incredible?” I asked, passing her the coffee.
She glanced across at me, then quickly looked away, shrugged and drank some coffee. Her embarrassment seemed to be easing a little, but she still went awkward and shy whenever she looked at me. I would have given a million dollars to know what was going through her head.
“Wish I had your brain,” I said. “I have trouble just filling out my tax return.”
Silence. I thought that was all I was going to get but a few intersections later, she said, “You don’t want to be like me.”
I turned to her and waited patiently. She didn’t look at me, but I knew she could feel me watching.
“We were never normal, my brother and me,” she said at last. “We wanted to do math puzzles instead of play Little League. We went to college at sixteen, so when everyone else was out partying, we had to stay home. We didn’t really learn to talk to people.” She threw me a guilty glance. “That’s why I can be a little…difficult.”
Our eyes met for a second. I saw her flush and I felt my face going hot. Both of us looked away.
“You’re not so difficult,” I muttered.
There was a long, warm silence. I had to break it, before something happened.
“And your brain is incredible,” I said.
She stared hard at the road ahead. “My brain does one thing well. And it’s...delicate.”
I frowned. I didn’t like the sound of that.
“They had to call a psychologist in, when we were kids,” she mumbled. “They were worried about us. Minds like ours can... break.” Then she gave a little snort of anger and glared down at her legs. “Wasn’t my mind they should have worried about.”
I nodded sadly. Opened my mouth... and then closed it again.
“What?” she asked, glancing at me for a split second.
“Nothing.”
She shook her head. “I know that expression. You want to ask something.”
Now I shrugged. “I know questions piss you off.”
“They don’t piss me off, I just—” She sighed. “Do you know how often people ask the same things?”
I shook my head. “Forget it.”
She drove in silence for three more intersections. Then, “New rule, Calahan. You get to ask me one question per day about…” She nodded down at her legs. “One.” She passed the coffee back to me.
“No matter how dumb?” I asked, my voice a little teasing.
The faintest hint of a smile. “No matter how dumb.”
“Okay,” I said, pleased. I settled back in my seat, drank and thought. “Why do you live on the fortieth floor of a skyscraper? What if there’s a fire? What if the elevator breaks down?”
Silence for a few seconds. Then, “I like being high up.” She shot a look at me and her eyes were big and scared. Scared that I’d laugh.
But I just nodded solemnly. That made complete sense.
She relaxed a little. Then, “We’re here.”
We pulled up between two patrol cars and climbed out. It was still at least an hour before the sun would be up. When I saw the place, I wished we’d driven slower.
The house was old enough that the roof visibly sagged. The clapboard that covered the walls had been blue, once, but the paint had long since flaked away and the exposed wood had been sun-bleached to the color of bones. Every window was boarded up. I’ve never seen a less inviting place.
The creepiest thing was the darkness. No lights were on because the power had long since been disconnected. But there must be officers with flashlights inside and yet I couldn’t see even a faint glow between the boards on the windows. It was as if the house sucked in light. Just like the apartment in Harlem, there was something...wrong in this place.
I showed my badge to one of the officers. “First floor or second floor?”
“First,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder at the house and brushed his arm with his hand, as if brushing something off it. “First floor.”
I cursed. I’d been hoping he’d say second because no way was there a working elevator in that place and so Yolanda would have had to stay here. I was the one who’d brought her, but suddenly, looking at the place, I didn’t want her going inside. “Okay,” I muttered to her. “Let’s be careful.”
As we neared the house, my flashlight seemed to do less and less. It was as if the darkness was just swallowing the beam. Maybe the batteries are dying.
Inside, it was even worse. Anything outside of the flashlight beam was just black. The first room we came to was empty. The furniture had long since been stolen and all my flashlight revealed were a few broken bottles, some used needles—
And the cracks.
The walls and floor were made of wood and the planks had shrunk and warped with age, opening up dark spaces between them in which anything could lurk.
Yolanda was using the flashlight on her phone. When I caught her eye, she looked as shaken as me. I looked questioningly at her. You okay?
She nodded quickly and rolled down the hall towards the next room. I hurried to get ahead of her, but the hallway was narrow: there wasn’t room for me to squeeze around her. Having two flashlight beams merged together was disorienting and confusing, so I switched mine off, but that made the darkness press in even more. “Yolanda,” I warned. “Wait, maybe I should—”
Too late. She gave a little moan of fear as her flashlight lit up the room.
It had been the kitchen, once. Now, you could only tell by the checkered linoleum on the floor, brittle curls of it reaching up to brush our ankles. And in the center of
the floor—
Like Daniel Grier, the body was fully clothed. Like him, it had been drained of blood. But—
Yolanda looked up at me, her face pale and stricken. “I wasn’t expecting it to be a woman.”
I put a hand on her shoulder and gently squeezed. The guilt was tearing at me: I’d forgotten that she wasn’t used to seeing bodies. And there was something especially disturbing about this one. The woman was about Yolanda’s age and build and she had dark hair. Her clothes were neat and perfect: she’d been something young and bright, but someone had snuffed her out and just dumped her here, one leg awkwardly bent under her like an abandoned doll.
“How...how long?” Yolanda’s voice had a quaver to it I didn’t like. She was one or two steps from panic.
I tried to keep my voice level and calm. “I’d say a week, maybe ten days.”
Yolanda said nothing. Both of us just stared at the body and I knew we were thinking the same thing. It was terrifying that someone could just be plucked out of their life, away from friends and family and their job, and left to lie there in the darkness for all that time and no one found them.
I reached down and found Yolanda’s hand in the darkness. It had gone cold as ice. I took it in mine, listening to her breathing, waiting to see if it would speed up into a panic. But it gradually slowed as she got herself under control. God, she was brave. There was something about this place that would make even hardened cops turn and run, but she was still here.
When she looked up at me, her jaw was set, resolute. My chest went tight because I knew what was happening and I knew how dangerous it was: the case was becoming personal. But I nodded that I understood. We have to stop this guy.
Yolanda moved her flashlight off the body and started searching the floor. Immediately, I understood what they’d told me on the phone. This scene was different: at the apartment, we hadn’t had to search for the equations at all. They’d covered every square inch. But here, the flashlight revealed just smooth, dusty floorboards.
“Maybe they’re—” She swung the circle of light onto the wall: nothing. She tried a patch of ceiling: just bare plaster.
Yolanda cursed and rolled towards one corner, sweeping her flashlight back and forth like a searchlight.
What the hell is going on, I wondered. Where are they?
Yolanda screamed, dropped her phone and shot backwards, all at the same time. Her phone clattered to the floor, and the room went black.
16
Calahan
YOLANDA’S SCREAM rang in my ears. I had time to blink once at the sudden, suffocating blackness and then her wheelchair slammed into me. One wheel rolled over my foot, a handle hit me right in the stomach and something metal scraped my shin. I bent almost double, leaning over the back of it. “It’s okay,” I wheezed. My face was close to Yolanda’s: I couldn’t see her, but I could hear her taking huge panic breaths in the darkness. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
I tried to push the chair off my foot, but Yolanda’s hands were rigid on the wheels. Wincing, I grabbed the handles and lifted the whole thing, freed my foot and then put it down. I groped my way to the side of the chair. Yolanda’s breathing was out of control: she was full-on hyperventilating, now. Shit.
I did the only thing I could do: I knelt down in the blackness, leaned in close and put my arms around her, cradling her head on my shoulder. “Shh,” I told her. “Shh. It’s okay. I’m here.”
Her breath was hot against my neck. Wetness plopped against my forearm: something had scared her so bad, she was crying with fear. “Shh,” I said again.
There was a whisper of sensation on the back of my outstretched leg, as if something had brushed against it for a second. I ignored it, too focused on Yolanda. “Shh.”
At last, she began to calm. Very gently, I unwound myself from her and looked around. Across the room, I could see a faint glow: her phone, lying flashlight-side down on the floor. I stood and took a hesitant step towards it.
“No!” Yolanda grabbed my arm and hung on with a death-grip. Her voice wasn’t her own: it was shrill and almost childlike. My stomach knotted. She was so logical, so rational... for something to unsettle her this much, it must be—
“It’s okay,” I said with confidence I didn’t feel. I patted her hand, but she still wouldn’t let go and I had to gently coax her fingers loose. I swallowed and took a step into the almost total darkness. Another one. Another. I could feel my heart racing out of control. I couldn’t ever remember being so scared.
I bent and felt for the phone. As I lifted it, its flashlight lit up a patch of floor and—
The blood had dried, so the equations were matt black. They were written much, much smaller than before, the numbers packed so tightly together that they formed a solid, ovoid body. Branching out from that were eight thick legs made up of more equations, and the whole thing was edged in individual lines of equations so delicate they looked like coarse, dark hairs.
It was a spider the size of my head. And—I moved the flashlight around—there were others, lurking on the walls, in the corners, swelling up out of the cracks between the floorboards. That’s why the equations didn’t cover the room. The killer had written smaller and tighter, squeezing the same amount of writing into—I scanned around—twenty, thirty, maybe a hundred of these things. They were all around us and—
I saw something move, just at the edge of the flashlight beam, and jerked in fear. Yolanda saw it too, and cried out.
There were real spiders in here, too. I remembered the brush on the back of my leg, and the cop outside, unconsciously trying to brush things from his uniform. My throat closed up.
No wonder Yolanda was terrified. She knew that to solve the equations, she’d have to stay here in the blackness for hours, going slowly mad with fear as she searched out every one of the killer’s drawings, while real spiders crawled up onto her from the floor and dropped into her hair from the ceiling, scuttling out of the cracks and running over her hands as she followed the equations on the walls.
The killer had planned it this way. Want to decipher my work? I’ll make sure you go mad trying.
No way. No fucking way. Not Yolanda, not her incredible, fragile mind. I marched back to her, grabbed the handles of her wheelchair and went. I rushed her out of the room, down the hall and outside, not stopping until we were well away from the house. Dawn was still some way off but after the blackness, the dark blue sky felt like noonday sun.
I moved my hand to Yolanda’s shoulder and I could feel her trembling. The fear went beyond just the murder scene or the dark or the spiders. It was an instinctive reaction to something deeply, deeply wrong. Something evil.
I moved around in front of her and squatted down. Her eyes were darting around the ground as if worried that the spiders had followed us outside. “Hey,” I said. She didn’t respond. I put my thumb under her chin and gently lifted her head. “Hey.”
Those lush green eyes looked at me from a face gone even paler than usual. She was breathing too fast and I could see tears welling at the corners of her eyes. The guilt felt like a punch to my guts. I did this to her. Me. I’d dragged her out of her apartment. Sure, she’d been trapped there, but she’d been safe.
I pulled her to me and wrapped my arms around her.
And something unexpected happened.
I was trying to calm her, but when I pressed close to her, when I felt her soft cheek against mine and buried my nose in her hair... I felt her calming me.
Becky used to say that I came home from work dirty and at first I thought she meant the layers of grime and grease New York leaves on your skin. But she meant a different kind of dirt, the kind that coats you at crime scenes and grinds itself into your soul in interrogation rooms. All cops have it. It’s the dirt we try to wash away with alcohol, the stuff that makes us yell at our kids and fight with our wives.
Yolanda took it away. Maybe it was those eyes, like cool, misty forests. Maybe it was her amazing mind, sharp and methodical and clear
of hate. Maybe it was the feel of her, the softness of her curves and the sweet little hollow of her collarbone, where my chin fitted so well. The calmness, the peace of her... it felt so good I wanted to weep. And never, ever let her go.
No. No, goddamn it. I didn’t deserve peace. And she deserved a hell of a lot better than me.
I slowly unwound from her and pushed her gently back. I had to look off to the side, so she didn’t see how much I wanted her. Needed her. The sense of loss, as the cool air rushed in and filled the space between us, was gut-wrenching.
I forced my feelings down deep, where they belonged. She was still twitchy and tearful, still throwing terrified glances over her shoulder at the house. My fault. I’d forced her way out of her comfort zone.
Maybe I had to put her back into it. Get her talking about what she loved. “I got a confession to make,” I said. “I basically failed math in high school.”
She frowned, her eyes still shining with tears. “They wouldn’t have let you join the FBI.” And she glanced at the house again, still panicked. I had to fix this.
“Oh, I passed. But only because I copied off Johnny Timms. I didn’t know what the hell it meant.”
She took another look at the house. She couldn’t stop looking at it. This wasn’t working. “Like, ten-to-the-whatever,” I said desperately.
That made her look at me. She sniffed and then frowned, as if she thought maybe she’d misheard. “Like ten to the five? Six to the power of four?”
“Yeah.”
She cocked her head to one side suspiciously. But it was working. Her breathing was slowing. “Everyone knows that.”
“I don’t!” I was overjoyed that she’d stopped looking at the house. But then, when she looked aghast, I felt all the blood rush to my face. I was the dumb kid in high school again, praying the teacher wouldn’t call on me. “I actually don’t,” I admitted, and looked at the ground.
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