Into the Black Nowhere
Page 1
ALSO BY MEG GARDINER
Phantom Instinct
The Shadow Tracer
Ransom River
UNSUB NOVELS
UNSUB
JO BECKETT NOVELS
The Nightmare Thief
The Liar’s Lullaby
The Memory Collector
The Dirty Secrets Club
EVAN DELANEY NOVELS
China Lake
Mission Canyon
Jericho Point
Crosscut
Kill Chain
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Copyright © 2018 by Meg Gardiner
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Gardiner, Meg, author.
Title: Into the black nowhere / Meg Gardiner.
Description: First edition. | New York : Dutton, [2018] | Series: An unsub novel ; 2
Identifiers: LCCN 2017045253 (print) | LCCN 2017049873 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101985564 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101985557 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Serial murder investigation—Fiction. | Women Detectives—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Suspense. | FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | Mystery fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6107.A725 (ebook) | LCC PR6107.A725 I58 2018 (print) | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045253
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
For David Lazo
CONTENTS
Also by Meg Gardiner
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere.
—Ted Bundy
1
The cry pierced the walls, ringing through the darkness. Shana Kerber roused and squinted at the clock. Twelve forty-five A.M.
Her voice came as a sigh. “Already?”
Shana huddled for a minute under the comforter, clinging wishfully to warmth and sleep. Hush yourself, Jaydee. Please. But the baby’s crying intensified. It was her strong, wide-awake, I’m hungry cry.
The night was bitter. Early February, the north wind scouring Texas. It whistled through the cracks in the farmhouse, rattling the doors in their frames. Shana rolled over. The other side of the bed was cool. Brandon wasn’t home yet.
For a few more seconds Shana lay still, aching with fatigue, hoping Jaydee would quiet. But she was crying to beat the band. Ten months old and still up twice a night. Shana’s mom swore things would get easier. She’d been swearing so for months. When, Mom? Please, when?
“Coming, baby,” Shana murmured.
She tossed back the covers, brushed her sleep-tangled hair from her face, and slogged out of the bedroom. The hardwood floor creaked beneath her bare feet. Jaydee’s cries grew clearer.
Six feet down the hall, she slowed. The crying wasn’t coming from the nursery.
The house was completely dark. Jaydee was too little to climb out of her crib.
Shana turned on the hall light. The nursery door was open.
A sliver of ice seemed to slide through her chest. At the far end of the hall she could see into the living room. On the sofa, half lit by the hall light, a stranger sat holding her little girl on his lap.
The icy sliver sank through Shana. “What are you doing here?”
“Don’t worry. I’m a friend of your husband.” The man’s face was in shadow. His voice was soothing—almost warm. “She was crying. Didn’t want to wake you.”
He seemed completely relaxed. Shana walked slowly to the living room. She glanced out the front window. The moon was full. An SUV was parked outside. A placard hung from the rearview mirror.
“Is that . . .” She looked him up and down. “Army? Are you . . .”
The baby twisted in the man’s arms. He bounced her. “She’s quite the little doll.”
He tickled Jaydee and made baby talk. Shana tried harder to see his face. His eyes remained in shadow. Something stopped her from turning on the table lamp.
Is he a friend of Brandon’s?
Shana extended her hands. “I’ll take her.”
The wind battered the windows. The man’s smile persisted. Though she couldn’t see his eyes, Shana had a gut certainty that he was watching her.
She edged forward. She was eight feet from him. Out of his reach. “Give Jaydee to me.”
He didn’t.
Her hands were open. “Please.”
Jaydee twisted in the man’s arms. Her chubby legs pumped like pistons. Shana’s heart thundered. She saw the power in the man’s hands and knew she couldn’t simply charge at him.
The shotgun was under her bed. Five seconds was what it would take to run to the bedroom, grab it, and r
ush back down the hall. It was a twelve gauge. It was loaded.
And it was useless, because this man was holding her child to his chest. Her breathing caught, like a cloth snagging on a nail.
She inched forward. “Give her here.”
For a few seconds, he continued bouncing Jaydee. Crying, the little girl reached starfish fingers toward Shana.
“She wants her mama,” the man said. “Aww, come here.”
Shana held still, her own arms outstretched. “Give me my baby.”
The smile stiffened. The man set Jaydee gently beside him on the sofa.
Before Shana could inhale, he lowered his shoulders, gathering himself. He was in motion when the light finally hit his eyes.
• • •
The dashboard clock read one thirty A.M. when Brandon Kerber turned onto the gravel driveway. The truck bounced over the ruts, stereo blasting Chris Stapleton. Brandon whistled along. His rare Saturday night out had been golden—a Spurs game in San Antonio with friends from his army days. He curved past the stand of cedars and the house came into view.
“What . . .”
The front door was open.
Brandon gunned the F-150 up to the house. The windows reflected the truck’s headlights like wild eyes. He jumped out. In the wind, the door was banging back against the wall. An acid taste burned his throat. Banging that loud should have woken Shana up. Inside the darkened house, he heard a mournful sound.
Crying.
Brandon rushed in. The living room was cold. The headlights threw his shadow ahead of him on the floor like a blade. The crying kept up. It was the baby.
Jaydee lay huddled on the floor. He scooped her up. “Shana?”
He hit a light switch. The living room lit up, neat, clean, and empty.
Jaydee’s eyes were red-rimmed. She was exhausted from sobbing. He pulled her to his chest. Her cries diminished to pathetic hiccups.
“Shana.”
Brandon ran to the bedroom with the baby and flipped on the light. He spun and strode down the hall, looking in the nursery. In the kitchen. The garage. The back porch.
Nothing. Shana was gone.
He stood in the living room, clutching Jaydee, telling himself, She’s here. I just can’t see her.
But the truth closed in on him. Shana had vanished.
She was the fifth.
2
Early-morning shadows slashed the road. The sun blazed gold through the pines. Caitlin Hendrix accelerated and swung her Highlander into the grounds of the FBI Academy in Quantico.
Beneath her black winter coat, her credentials were clipped to the left side of her belt. Her Glock 19M was holstered on the right. The text on her phone read Solace, Texas.
Caitlin got out, and the freezing wind lifted her auburn hair off her shoulders. The Virginia winter constantly reminded her she was an outsider here. She liked it that way. It kept her on her toes.
She buzzed through the door and headed for the Behavioral Analysis Unit.
Suspected serial abductions, the text read.
The people Caitlin passed walked faster than the detectives she’d worked with back at the Alameda Sheriff’s Office. They turned corners more crisply. She missed her Bay Area colleagues—missed their pride and camaraderie. But she loved seeing FBI on her creds, with the words Special Agent beneath her name.
Phones rang. Beyond the windows, the blue glass walls of the FBI Laboratory complex reflected the rising sun.
Caitlin approached her desk in BAU-4, where she was currently one of eight agents and analysts assigned to Crimes Against Adults. She said good morning to her colleagues as they arrived. Everyone had received the same text.
The Behavioral Analysis Unit was a department of the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime—a branch of the Critical Incident Response Group. Its mission involved investigating unusual or repetitive violent crimes. Critical incident response meant that when a hot case came to the BAU, it acted, and fast, because time was limited and people were in danger.
Like today.
She barely had time to take off her coat before an office door opened at the far end of the room.
“Don’t get comfortable.”
People looked over. Special Agent in Charge C.J. Emmerich strode toward them.
“Five women have disappeared from Gideon County, Texas, in the last six months. The latest was two nights ago,” he said. “The victims have all vanished on a Saturday night. And the period between abductions is diminishing.”
Emmerich’s gaze swept the room and landed on Caitlin.
“Escalation,” she said.
His nod was brief. “Commonalities between the abductions indicate that we’re dealing with a single offender. Someone who’s growing bolder, more confident.”
Emmerich was her official mentor as an agent-in-training. A legendary profiler, he radiated such self-discipline that it unsettled her. Solemn, intense, he attacked cases like a hawk attacks prey. When he swooped in for a kill, his talons were sharp.
“The Gideon County Sheriff’s Office has requested our assistance,” he said.
His assistant stood and passed out file folders. Caitlin flipped through hers.
Escalation. She scanned the pages in the file, looking for exactly what that word meant in this case.
She was no longer a raw rookie but was still finding her feet as a criminal profiler. She had a cop’s experience and instincts; she was learning to interpret crime scene evidence, forensics, and victimology to build a picture of a perpetrator. Profiling was based on the insight that everything at a crime scene tells a story and reveals something about the criminal. The BAU studied offender behavior to uncover how they thought, predict how they would escalate—and apprehend them before they could put any others in danger.
“The victims have been taken from public places and their own homes,” Emmerich said. “No witnesses, and so far, no probative forensic evidence. As the sheriff put it, they simply vanished.”
Vanished. Caitlin’s eye was drawn to the composite sketch pinned above her desk.
White male, late twenties. The sketch caught his slit-eyed stare and casual menace. He had walked past her in a California biker bar. Later, in a dark tunnel, he’d crucified her hand with a nail gun.
The Bureau’s facial recognition software couldn’t identify him. He was the Ghost: a killer, a betrayer, a hiss in the wiring. He had helped the serial killer known as the Prophet murder seven people, including her father.
He’d promised they would meet again. She was waiting for his call.
But that couldn’t rate her attention this morning.
She turned a page in the file folder and saw a photo: a woman in her midtwenties, only a few years younger than she was. Lively eyes, a self-assured smile, halo-gold hair.
Shana Kerber. Caitlin lingered on the photo, wishing she could tell her, Hold on. People are searching for you.
“It’s been twenty-nine hours since the latest abduction,” Emmerich said. “The locals need us on scene while there’s still a significant chance to find this victim alive. And if we can find her, maybe there’s a chance to save the others.”
He pointed at Caitlin and another agent. Caitlin’s pulse kicked up a beat.
“Grab your go bags. Flight leaves Dulles for Austin at ten thirty.”
3
Solace sat halfway between Austin and San Antonio at the foot of the Texas Hill Country, sliced down its eastern edge by Interstate 35. Caitlin and the team rolled in under a white winter sun.
Caitlin had been to Texas only once, as a child. She recalled hours spent driving through vast empty spaces. Since then, the I-35 corridor had become a hundred-mile strip of outlet malls, car dealerships, and condo developments. But when they pulled off the freeway, the fast-food world receded and the landscape opened up: oaks a
nd cedars, dirt roads, cattle grazing behind barbed-wire fences.
“Heavy foliage, few streetlights. Solace is what, four thousand people?” she said.
At the wheel of a Suburban borrowed from the local FBI office, Special Agent Brianne Rainey looked chill behind her sunglasses. “Forty-three hundred.”
In the back seat, Emmerich had his head bent to a file folder. “Gideon County is sparsely populated. But San Antonio’s the seventh-largest city in the US.” He glanced at the countryside. “Doesn’t look like it, but Solace is considered part of an urban megaregion.”
Rainey eyed him in the mirror. “The Texas Triangle. San Antonio, Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth.”
He nodded. “Massive cities mixed with rural expanses.”
He meant: tens of thousands of potential suspects, and millions of acres where they could hide. They passed a water tower painted with SOLACE, HOME OF THE BLACK KNIGHTS. Mailboxes built in the shape of Texas.
“The stars at night are big and bright,” Caitlin said.
Rainey smiled, briefly. “The coyotes wail along the trail.” Her Air Force Academy ring flashed in the sun. Her face returned to its impassive reserve.
Rainey wore her cool poise so expertly that Caitlin didn’t know if it was an innate gift or a carefully honed mask. She was thirty-nine, African American, married with ten-year-old twins. Her long braids were pulled back into a high ponytail. She was thoughtful and frank—Caitlin was learning that if Rainey challenged her, it was usually with good reason. She’d been with the FBI for ten years, the BAU for three. Rainey owned every crime scene she walked onto. It was an intimidating skill. One Caitlin wanted to learn.
Solace High School went past out the windows. Playing fields, stadium lights. The gym was painted with a twenty-foot-tall knight on a rearing warhorse.
Emmerich flipped through the file. “Town’s economic base is agricultural. Three banks, twelve churches. The high school educates seventy percent of school-age students.”
“The other thirty percent?” Caitlin said.
“Homeschooled,” he said. “Shana Kerber graduated from the high school, as did two other victims. Most people in Solace know these women. The offender may too.”