No Man's Land

by Sara Driscoll

  “Or maybe he was hired by one of the investors so he or she kept their hands clean,” McCord suggested. “But either way, I agree, he’s killing on behalf of someone else in the fund, not himself.”

  “Maybe not,” Sykes said, “but if he’s killing for a relative, he may be waiting for the money to come to dear ol’ grandpa before ol’ grandpa becomes the last tragic death.”

  “And we still don’t have any idea why the urbex locations.” Meg considered the search sites they’d explored. “You want these people to die and you’re not going out of your way to hide their identity. But then you’re not leaving them where they can be easily found. What if someone got missed? Then there’s no big final payout because the fund is ongoing.”

  “What if he’s trying to give himself some space?” McCord proposed. “What if he will ensure the bodies are found, he just wants some time to go by so his fingerprints aren’t all over the killing, so to speak. If he’s familiar with urbex sites, he may know how often they’re explored, so he knows that the bodies will be found within a matter of weeks. I still think he’s there, in that community. That’s where we need to go looking for him.”

  “These are good questions.” Kate considered the flow of numbers down the statements. “Questions we need to answer to finish this. The circle is closing in on him, though. We’re getting closer. It’s only a matter of time now.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Texta: A marking pen with a thick writing point made of felt or fiber used to paint graffiti.

  Thursday, November 15, 7:53 PM

  Jennings residence

  Arlington, Virginia

  “What are those? Crime scene photos?”

  Meg had been so involved in her work, she hadn’t heard her sister come back from walking all three dogs, and she jumped at the sound of Cara’s voice in her ear. She turned her head to find Cara’s chin practically on her shoulder as she leaned in to study her laptop screen. “Hello to you, too. How were the dogs?”

  “Fantastic, as always. Starting to be a serious nip in the air, though.” Cara circled the sofa and plopped down beside Meg as Hawk and Blink vied for space on the dog bed. Saki followed Cara to curl up beside her with a satisfied sigh. “What are we looking at?”

  “I was looking at the photos from the urbex sites. Because I work for the FBI.”

  “And you know very well I would never tell anyone I looked at them. Besides, so far all I’m seeing is a picture of peeling paint, rust, and a metric ton of grime. Even if I was going to talk to someone, that information would tell them nothing they couldn’t find in a Google image search. Which site is that?”

  “The psychiatric hospital in Fredericksburg. More specifically, it’s the front lobby.” Meg flipped through a sequence of photos. “These are the stairs we could only barely climb. Some of the exam rooms. The basement. And this is where we finally let Hawk have his head and start the search he’d been telling me about all along, only I wasn’t listening at first.”

  “From the looks of this place, it could be dangerous, and you’d think people would leave it alone. But look at the graffiti. Clearly a number of people are exploring it.”

  “Urbex is apparently a bigger pastime than I ever imagined. Chuck Smaill says there are entire online communities devoted to it. People share exciting urbex sites and stories, give warnings about dangerous locations, teach rookies the ropes, give tips about how to evade security measures, etcetera. They try to keep a lot of what they do on the down-low because as soon as a site becomes public, people outside the community flock in to see what the fuss is about and pretty much destroy the place.”

  “Don’t the urbexers do that?”

  “The way Chuck described it to me, people get into urbex because it’s fascinating to see the slow-motion dismantling of civilization by nature and the elements. For them, the gradual degradation of these sites is what makes them fascinating. They can go to the same site for years, and each time it’s a different experience as sections of it fall apart, revealing new elements. They respect the sites and want to share them with their community. They do not want outsiders who are just going for a lark, destroying and vandalizing the sites.”

  Cara studied the photo displayed on the monitor. “These are the furnaces where you found the first victim?”

  “Yes.”

  Cara pointed to the rolling garage-style door near the coal bin. It was covered with graffiti in multiple colors and styles, some words, some stylized drawings. “And that’s not vandalizing the sites?”

  “Actually, no, not in the sense they mean. For them, vandalizing a site is ripping it down, speeding the destruction. Pulling stuff off walls, taking materials out with you. I asked Chuck about graffiti, because I thought of it as vandalism, too. But that’s not how they see it. They’re leaving their mark, an I-was-here totem, often at the farthest point of their exploration. If you can reach a point like that, and there’s no graffiti, then you have the honor of being the first explorer and being the first to leave your mark.”

  Cara zoomed in on the image. The rusted steel door was covered with multicolor images and words, some bare bones, some in plump bubble letters in shaded tones. Some signatures were simple initial pairs, and some were clearly screen names—FreeLancer536, Captain Blackhawk, Tunneldigger—because you wouldn’t want to leave your real name in a place covered in No Trespassing signs. “Got to hand it to these guys, they do some interesting work. Look at this one.” She blew up the image of a monkey’s face with glowing red eyes and a furious snarl. “Or this.” A grinning skull sporting a set of headphones. “Or this one.” It looked like a bug with twin antennae. She resized the image to its original proportions. “Have you considered—”

  Meg grabbed Cara’s wrist. “Wait. Go back.”

  “Back to what?”

  “That last symbol.”

  It took Cara a moment of moving through a section of graffiti before she found the symbol again. “This one? The bug?”

  “Yeah.” Meg leaned in and studied it. Spray-painted in a vibrant electric blue, the body took on the shape of an upside-down teardrop, the lower part of the body halved and then crosscut into segments leading down to a curving, whiplike tail. Twin antennae sprouted from the head and curled down to flank the body on both sides. “That . . . bug. I’ve seen it somewhere.”

  “At that site?”

  “No.” She minimized the photo and held still for a moment, her eyes closed, trying to remember where she’d seen it. That shape, that color of blue on a dark background. Black . . . no dark red. Brick. Her eyes flew open. “The smokestack. On the roof.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Bowie Meat Packing. On the roof where I did the balance beam routine. The smokestack is built out of dark-red brick.” She selected a folder and scrolled through thumbnails of photos. She opened a photo. “Wrong angle.” Another photo, then another. “This one.” It was an image of the open space of the roof. The shattered skylight was on the right, stretching back toward the middle of the photo, with the smokestack behind it, rising high into the sky, disappearing out of view of the camera. She zoomed in on the base of the smokestack. “There.”

  Cara leaned in, her nose only a few inches from the monitor. “Well, I’ll be damned. That is the same symbol. Do you think he’s leaving a signature for the killings?”

  “No. I think he’s exploring places to compile a list of where to leave the bodies and leaving his mark like he probably always does. But how many places are out there, over how many states that carry his mark? Assuming that it is him, of course, and not some other urbexer who happened to hit the same two locations. Now, if we can find this specific mark in every place that’s been a dump site, that could help tie them together. And if we can connect the suspect to this individual mark, then we’d have definitive proof that he’d been there at some point.” She stared at the photo on-screen, restlessly tapping her fingers on the palm rest. “But I don’t remember seeing it at any of the other sites.”
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  “Doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. Maybe you just missed it because of where it was situated or the light level. Or because the floor collapsed under your feet. Come on, I’ll help you look through the pictures again.”

  They strategically searched through the other two sites, starting with Bethlehem Steel, where Cara spotted the symbol high up on blast furnace D, behind one of the upper walkways.

  “I never saw it,” Meg admitted. “We came to furnace D because Brian found Warren Roth, so first he had my attention, and then the wannabe cop did. Once we’d found the victim, we didn’t pay any more attention to the site itself.”

  “What’s left, the jail?”

  “Yes. And we were purposefully doing that search by moonlight, so I won’t be surprised if it’s there.”

  “My gut says it is. This is him, I can feel it.” Cara caught Meg’s pointed look. “Not that we’re looking at these pictures or anything. I’m pretty sure I’m at my dog training school finishing off a private lesson.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s exactly how this evening has gone.” Meg opened the final site folder and the pictures from the cell block structure. “All these pictures were purposely taken the next morning, by daylight.” She flipped through a number of photos. “This whole incident would have been so much easier in the light. I bet we could have ended it then and there.”

  “Wait!” Cara pushed Meg’s hand away and went back to the previous photo. It was shot from the ground floor of the cell block, looking up toward the upper levels. In the photo, the jagged gaping hole on the fourth level was starkly visible, twin boards still stretching across the chasm. “That’s where you went through?”

  Meg’s stomach curdled just looking at the photo and remembering the terror of the floor falling away from under her feet, and the certainty that her death lay below. “Yeah.”

  “Damn. I mean, you told me about it, but seeing it . . . That’s completely different. That must have been terrifying.”

  “That’s putting it lightly.” Meg, not able to look at the image anymore, steered the topic back to the investigation at hand as she flipped to a new photo. “There’s lots of graffiti on this lower level, but I don’t see much up top. But now that I think about it, I did see some at the stairs as we were going up. Just a few flashes of color. It had to be graffiti.”

  They found the graffiti exactly where Meg remembered it. Then they found the symbol on the upper level at the top of the staircase.

  Cara flopped back against the couch cushions. “There you are. Four for four. Think it’s a coincidence?”

  “In four sites, spread across Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland? I can’t say that it’s not, but I’d say the chances are significantly smaller. At least it gives us a place to start. I’ll pass it on to the team first thing tomorrow, but I want to show this symbol to Chuck Smaill and see if he recognizes it.” She reached for her phone but froze with her hand suspended over it.

  “What?” asked Cara.

  “He’s on shift with Todd right now at the firehouse.”

  “You talk to Todd when he’s on shift as long as he’s between calls and not busy with firehouse business. Could you talk to Smaill?”

  “Maybe.” She grabbed her phone. “I’ll text Todd and find out if they’re available. If I don’t hear from him, then they’re on a call or doing firehouse duties.”

  “At this time of night?”

  “Well, the calls can happen anytime, but I agree, they’re likely not washing down the trucks.”

  She typed in a message for Webb and was rewarded with an answer only minutes later.

  “They’re just back from a two-alarm fire,” Meg reported. “They’re hitting the showers to wash off the soot, but then they’ll be sticking around the house unless something else happens. He’s suggesting I come by.” She glanced at the time on her phone. “Seems kind of late for that.”

  “He says to go in, so go in. He wouldn’t have suggested it if it wasn’t okay. You’ve been there before?”

  “A few times. Hawk’s a big hit there.”

  “Then take him with you. If you’re nervous about it being late, Hawk will be the icebreaker.”

  At this name, Hawk’s head shot up from where he was curled around Blink on the dog bed.

  Meg closed the lid of her computer and stood. “Come on, Hawk. It’s back to work. But not really for you. You’ll have fun at the firehouse.”

  “Pics or it didn’t happen.” Cara flashed her a wide grin. “You know what they say about firefighters. Do a girl a favor?”

  Meg rolled her eyes at her sister and called her dog. But Cara had lightened her mood, which Meg suspected was exactly her goal.

  Thursday, November 15, 9:08 PM

  Engine Company 2, DC Fire and Emergency Services

  Washington, DC

  Twenty-five minutes later, Meg pulled her SUV up to the curb in front of the blocky monstrosity that housed the District of Columbia’s Fire and Emergency Services Engine Company 2. She glanced up at the shapeless poured-concrete square and grimaced. For someone with a love of classic architecture, anything built after about 1950 had an excellent chance of offending her sense of taste, and this building certainly qualified. But in the end, the only thing that actually mattered was what and who it housed. DC’s fire department, after a bumpy few years and some major budgetary problems, was trying hard to get back on its feet with a substantial overhaul.

  She got out of the SUV, shouldered her laptop bag, and let Hawk out of his compartment. He stood still on the sidewalk as she clipped the leash onto his collar, and then they climbed the short flight of steps to the glass door leading off the street. Meg pulled open the door and let Hawk precede her into a small vestibule. Unlocked during the day, the door leading into the firehouse was locked after hours, so she pushed the buzzer to alert the company to her presence.

  Webb’s voice sounded over the intercom. “Engine Company 2, can I help you?”

  “It’s Meg.”

  “I thought it might be you. Be right there.”

  Thirty seconds later, Webb appeared on the other side of the glass door. He shot back the deadbolt, held the door open for her, and then he closed and locked it behind them. She grinned up at him, neatly dressed in his navy DCFEMS uniform, and touched her fingertips to the edges of his still-damp hair. “Looking good, Lieutenant. I don’t often get to see you in uniform.”

  “You should have seen me half an hour ago, in filthy, wet bunkers and covered in soot.”

  “You clean up good, though.”

  He flashed her a grin. “Thanks. But I’m assuming you didn’t come to ogle me in uniform.”

  Meg let out a sigh as her smile faded. “Sadly, no. I’m here on business. I think I made a breakthrough tonight, and I need to talk to Chuck.”

  “Really? What?”

  “Let me brief you both together. Where is he?”

  “In the kitchen. He was helping Ox with dinner. The call came in just as we were about to start meal prep, so no one has eaten yet.”

  “Ox?”

  “You’ll see.”

  He led her through the darkened firehouse admin office and toward the company living quarters. They passed windows that opened out to the giant garage housing a line of shiny red trucks—an engine, a rescue squad truck, a mobile command unit, an ambulance, and the fire chief’s SUV. Farther down the hall, they entered a brightly lit shared kitchen and eating space with long tables flanked by chairs. A mixed group of men and women either lounged at tables or prepared dinner. A huge man with shoulders twice as wide as Webb’s stood at the stove stirring a massive steaming pot.

  “What’s tonight’s special, Ox?” Webb called.

  Ox waved a tomato-sauce-stained wooden spoon at him. “Firehouse chili. Keep your hose handy. You’re going to need it.” He chuckled at his own joke as he turned back to his cooking.

  “Now I see why you call him Ox,” Meg said under her breath.

  “He’s a mountain of a man, b
ut he’s light on his feet when he’s dancing around flames. On top of that, he’s an amazing cook. His chili is a thing of beauty. Feel free to join us.”

  “I’m kind of afraid it might blow my head off after that warning. There’s Chuck. Can we grab him for a few minutes?”

  “Sure. Smaill!” Webb waited until Smaill looked up from the chopping block where he was preparing veggies. “We need you for a few.”

  “Will do. Rafe, you’re up!”

  A tall Latino man seated at the table looked up from his phone. “I helped out at lunch.”

  “And now you’re helping out at dinner. You want to eat or what?”

  “Well . . . yeah.”

  “Then get over here. I have a meeting.” Then Smaill ruined the serious nature of his order by squatting down and patting his thighs. “With this handsome boy. Come here, Hawk.”

  Meg quickly unclipped his leash and gave Hawk the hand signal to go. Hawk raced over to happily greet Smaill while Meg turned to Webb. “Where do you want to do this?”

  “How private do you need this to be?”

  “It’s an active case, so more private than this.”

  “No one will be using the briefing room at this time of night. Smaill! Briefing room!”

  “Yes, Lieutenant.”

  Webb led Meg back the way they’d come. She gave a low whistle, and Hawk immediately trotted after her, Smaill following behind. Webb stepped through a dark doorway and flipped on the light switch to reveal a room with rows of tables, each table backed by a row of chairs, all facing forward toward the whiteboard on the front wall. Framed newspaper stories of the company in action lined the walls spaced between a few faded safety posters. “This is where we do training and the Morning briefing.” He dragged a couple of the chairs over so a group of three was arranged around one end of a table.

  They took their seats, Hawk settling between Meg and Smaill as she lowered her laptop bag to the floor, leaning it against a chair leg.