Into the Black Nowhere

by Meg Gardiner

  “With women he’s subdued and restrained,” Caitlin said.

  “I’d say he put that technique to use tonight.”

  Caitlin’s stomach tightened. “Possibly.”

  “You doubt it?” Pacheco frowned. “Detrick did this before, in Solace, didn’t he? Shana Kerber. Late-night silent entry into a remote residence.”

  Her eyes felt scratchy. She hadn’t eaten dinner. Or lunch. She was running on charred coffee and sick adrenaline.

  “This attack is similar,” she said, “but only on the surface. This killing doesn’t follow Detrick’s MO.”

  “I agree. But this was retaliation, not a sex slaying. Revenge doesn’t play by the rules.”

  Emmerich drummed his thumb against the desk. “Detrick’s arrest was a stressor that could have caused him to explode with rage.” He turned to Caitlin. “You’re the one who thought Detrick might attack Gage—why are you discounting that insight?”

  “I was afraid Detrick would attack Gage’s wife and daughter,” she said. “Detrick kills women because he thinks they’re lesser, weaker objects.”

  Pacheco said, “I agree that he may have come looking for Ann, and would have done something awful to Maggie if Aaron hadn’t put a dent in him.”

  She turned square to the screen. “Detrick didn’t kill Aaron. He doesn’t have the balls to confront a man.”

  Pacheco leaned back and stared at the ceiling.

  Caitlin pressed. “I know that right now, all likely motive and evidence points to Detrick. I’m telling you, it wasn’t him. It had to have been someone else.”

  Emmerich said, “It’s extraordinarily unlikely Gage’s murder is coincidental. If not Detrick, who? Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Pacheco shook his head. “I’ll talk to you after the forensic unit works the scene.” A deeper fatigue settled on him. “Ann Gage can’t get back from Oklahoma City until the ice storm clears. I have to check on Aaron’s little girl.”

  It was the emptiest ending Caitlin could imagine.

  Pacheco closed the link. Caitlin continued staring at the blank screen. She felt sick. She’d had Detrick checkmated. Now he’d flipped the board.

  “Do you want me to go to Oklahoma?” she said.

  After a pensive moment, Emmerich said, “I’m going. This murder is connected to Detrick’s other killings, but in a way I don’t understand. I need to get a handle on it.”

  She nodded.

  He looked her and Rainey up and down. “You’re toast, both of you. We’ll pick this up in the morning.”

  They gathered their things and pushed out the back door to the cold night. The only vehicle in the parking lot was the Suburban Caitlin had arrived in.

  “How’d you get here?” she asked Emmerich.

  “Hitched a ride on a snow plow to the edge of that pileup. Walked from there.”

  At the motel, Caitlin closed the door to her room. She sat on the end of the bed, hands hanging between her knees. Her eyes stung with fatigue. She knew she should find something to eat but couldn’t summon the will to move. She felt wrung out.

  She had to pull it together. In the morning, she needed to be ready to fight.

  Her colleagues were in adjacent rooms, but she felt isolated. An unspooling anger overcame her, and the sense of being unmoored and alone. The image of Aaron Gage fighting to save his daughter’s life grabbed her like a claw.

  She stood and paced, raking her fingers through her hair. After a minute, she pulled her phone from her pocket. She called Sean.

  He didn’t pick up. Outside, the wind wailed. She paced, pinching the bridge of her nose.

  She called Michele.

  She normally wouldn’t put a load on a friend’s shoulders, but she needed a loving voice.

  Three rings, four. “Hey.”

  Relief flooded Caitlin. “Hi.”

  “Girl. You all right?”

  “Long day in a lonesome town.”

  “Hang on.”

  In the background, Caitlin heard music. She wondered if she’d caught Michele out to dinner. She heard Michele walking down a hall. The music dimmed.

  “Sugar, you sound fried,” Michele said.

  “Bad day. I just wanted to hear a friend’s voice.”

  “You got it. Want to talk? Just want me to swear at you?”

  Caitlin paced to the window. “Colorfully. Please.”

  “You first.”

  The music swelled as a door opened. Caitlin heard Sadie’s voice, and Michele covering the phone to say, “You should get back to bed, sweetie.”

  The song sounded familiar. It was Gary Clark Jr., “Numb.” Michele came back. “Sorry.”

  “Have I influenced your taste in tunes?” Caitlin said.

  “What?”

  “Only ever known you to be into hip-hop,” Caitlin said. “Never blues.”

  Then she understood.

  In the background, she heard Sean’s voice. “Sadie, let Mommy talk.”

  A jolt went through her. She stopped in front of the window. On the phone, she heard the clink of a bottle against a glass, and something being poured. After a second, she heard the distinct ting of a wineglass being set on a granite countertop.

  Michele was at Sean’s, having a drink with him.

  “You there?” her friend said.

  “Yeah.”

  Am I ever.

  “I’m interrupting you,” Caitlin said. Her voice sounded disembodied.

  “Not at all. I just had a long day too,” Michele said. “Needed a Mommy break, and Daddy was handy. Wish you were here to join us.”

  “So do I.”

  Michele paused before resuming. Then Caitlin paused too—had she actually said that with a cutting edge?

  “Girl, it’s the end of a hard week and we’re watching Finding Dory. Again.”

  “No, I understand.”

  Caitlin didn’t feel jealous—not exactly—but this was throwing her. Shit, it had thrown her like a mechanical bull, practically straight through the wall. She realized she was staring at an indeterminate stain on the motel room’s brown curtains. She turned away.

  “Caitlin.”

  “I—it’s just been one of those days.”

  “That’s not what you’re talking about. Woman? Come on.”

  The walls had stains too. For a disgusting second, she floated out of herself and imagined the room being processed by a crime scene unit in white Tyvek suits. Spraying luminol, hitting the UV light, and watching the bedspread and headboard and ceiling light up electric blue with bodily fluids.

  “If you want to know what occupied my day, turn on the news,” Caitlin said.

  “What?” Michele said.

  Caitlin squeezed her eyes shut. What was she doing? She trusted Sean. And Michele.

  But she felt like she’d been kicked in the gut.

  She didn’t want to breathe, not in this rank room. The air seemed full of evil humors.

  She gave it one more try. “I’m in Arizona,” she said. “I flew out to testify at Detrick’s preliminary hearing, but . . .”

  “I’m looking at the story now,” Michele said. “Holy shit.”

  Distantly, Sean said, “What’s wrong? ’Chele, you okay?”

  Caitlin leaned against the desk. Sean and Michele’s closeness—it should have been obvious. When she lived in California, things were different. She was with Sean every day and ran with Michele twice a week. Potentially difficult moments were limited to picking Sadie up or dropping her off.

  She wasn’t living in California now.

  She had yanked up stakes and hauled ass to the East Coast. She was the one who bolted. To the job of a lifetime, yeah. But she was the one who pulled out of town and kept going, all the way to Virginia.

  Where did she s
tand now? She didn’t know. But it was painfully clear that she was on the outside of a family unit.

  Michele said, “What a nightmare. Are you okay?”

  “Exhausted.” The bone-deep chill of the storm wouldn’t leave her. “I just wanted to say hi. I’ll talk to you when you aren’t so busy.”

  “Cat—”

  Caitlin ended the call.

  48

  The parking lot lights at the motel were on all night, a sickly yellow glow that crept through gaps in the curtains. At three A.M. Caitlin lay awake, her head pounding, all the anxieties of the world crawling over her like centipedes.

  She turned on the light. Sat up. Hugged her knees.

  She couldn’t phone anybody at this hour. She didn’t want to turn on the television. Outside, the wind blew.

  Was Michele spending the night at Sean’s?

  “Stop it.” She said it out loud.

  She knew that wasn’t happening. Knew Michele had lost any physical interest in Sean.

  In Sean goddamned Rawlins, all six foot two inches of him, with his washboard abs and an appetite for lovemaking that was rowdy and unabashed.

  She got up. The room was cold. Her Warriors T-shirt and pajama bottoms were thin against the mountain night. She pulled out her laptop. She knew that was a mistake, that it would suck her deeper into the night-force of obsession and chronic fear, but she opened it up.

  Forcing herself to concentrate on the case, she thought: Lia Fox.

  If Kyle Detrick had made it to Oklahoma and murdered Aaron Gage, Lia was relatively safe, because it indicated that Detrick was fleeing east, traveling at high velocity away from Phoenix. But if it wasn’t Detrick—if someone else had killed Gage . . .

  She rubbed her eyes.

  If Detrick wasn’t the one who killed Aaron Gage, he could be anywhere.

  • • •

  The dawn came through the curtains too early. At the roadside motel, Kyle Detrick opened his eyes.

  He stretched, luxuriously, enjoying the good mattress and soft pillow. The clean sheets and warm, cosseting comforter felt smooth on his naked skin. After a few minutes, he climbed from the bed. At the window, he peeked out. A heat shimmer rose from the parking lot, the desert sun already doing its work. Across the highway, saguaro cacti stood in the brown rocky soil like props in a tourist brochure. The desert stretched on endlessly, to red-stained hills and the horizon beyond. Welcome to Anthem, Arizona.

  He smiled.

  Dropping the curtain back in place, he stretched out on the bed and turned on the morning news.

  Look at that.

  He turned it up. “. . . still no sign of Kyle Detrick, who escaped from the Crying Call Courthouse Thursday morning.”

  It was a live report from the scene. The reporter was some Latino man in a puffy ski jacket and hat with the Phoenix station’s logo. He sounded stern and aggressive. So self-serious, these local nobodies. The man stood with a mic in front of the big smash-up on the highway out of Crying Call. Wreckers were clearing the last vehicles from the road.

  It had been like throwing a strike at the bowling alley, Detrick thought. They all went down like bowling pins.

  The report switched to file footage shot at the courthouse during his arraignment. On the motel room bed, he propped himself up on his elbows and watched himself. Or rather, watched the version of Kyle Detrick that had existed before he buzzed off his hair and got himself some clothes that made him look like a trucker. On the TV screen, he looked self-possessed. Even as he stood in the courtroom with the stinking chain gang, he had risen above. His chin was up. He looked righteous. He had shown them all that the injustice he was bearing would not stand.

  And he had not let it. His smile returned, wider this time.

  He felt amazing. He was free.

  The news report retraced his escape path, the reporter pointing at the side door where the fire stairs dumped out of the courthouse. The snow was trampled, footprints impossible to follow. The news team interviewed astonished and breathless townspeople in Crying Call, and courthouse fans exhilarated by his escape.

  He tried to suppress a laugh. It was delightful.

  The report cut to a Main Street bar. A local band had written “The Ballad of Kyle Detrick.” The report briefly showed the band onstage, wailing the chorus. The reporter cut back to the studio.

  There on the set, under the lights, in their makeup and cheap suits, the morning anchors shook their heads.

  “That is over the top,” a hair-sprayed woman complained.

  “It sounds fun, but Detrick’s twisted,” a man said.

  “Scary times,” someone said. They called him sick. Called him dangerous. They pursed their lips.

  He ground his teeth. He wanted to shout from the rooftops that he had won. He escaped from the courthouse. He outwitted the chickenshitting FBI.

  Heat burned in his chest. A need. The anger.

  He stood up. Aaron Gage’s death hadn’t hit the news yet. When it did, it would shut these clowns up. He clenched and unclenched his fists. He wanted to grab a knife. A life.

  He stalked back and forth across the room.

  Somebody had set the FBI on him. He knew that, because the affidavit from Caitlin Hendrix supporting his felony arrest mentioned a confidential informant. A snitch.

  Since landing in jail, he’d been trying to figure out who that snitch was. Somebody from work? From church? No. He’d been too careful. It couldn’t be anyone from Austin. Which meant it was someone from his past.

  When had he failed to be careful? In college. And who had glimpsed his weakness? Aaron Gage. Gage was the only person who knew about his thing for the white nightie. It had to be him. The drunken asshole had no concern for him, for his life, his needs. Nobody else could have so easily told the FBI about him.

  After the home invasion at Gage’s house, he felt sure.

  Because he now had more information. He had the call history from Gage’s cell phone. The phone was taken from Gage’s pocket after he went down, and it told a fascinating tale. It told Detrick that Dahlia must be involved.

  Detrick stopped, the heat pouring over him, though his skin was totally bare. He balled his fists, then spread his fingers, stretching them like talons. He headed into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror.

  Dahlia.

  In one way, he cared nothing about her. Even though Dahli was meant for him. He had seen this in the way she laughed at his witticisms. The way she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

  And the way she had succumbed to his seduction. It had been perfect.

  But then she rejected him. Said it was a mistake. That he was immature and selfish and needed to leave her alone. Looked at him like he was a loser.

  Him, immature?

  He set the apartment on fire, and then he rescued her.

  Him, selfish? He was a hero.

  But she had wanted nothing more to do with him. So he’d sent cards and gifts that were subtle and ominous.

  Him, a loser? When he’d tracked her so skillfully that she never knew it was him. When he’d had the power. Screw that. Dahlia didn’t mean shit to him.

  Get me a knife.

  In the bedroom his phone buzzed, the burner that had been smuggled to him in his jailhouse KFC lunch. Text coming in. He leaned on the bathroom counter, eyeing himself.

  Yeah, he’d outfoxed them all.

  He’d escaped from Crying Call with a fat roll of cash. He had withdrawn it from the safe-deposit box at his Austin bank before coming to Arizona. After his arrest, he had managed to convince Emma to sneak it to him, saying he needed it as jailhouse currency. She’d done it reluctantly and had been a nervous wreck. That was the straw that caused her to abandon him.

  Never mind. Emma had been attentive, and little Ashley adored him, but Emma clearly wouldn’t go to the mat for
him. In the end, she was useless.

  No loss. He had fresh help from a loyal fan. Somebody who wasn’t weighed down by a kid and who was eager to do whatever he asked. A devotee who hated the law as much as he did and who saw in him something magnificent.

  Somebody who would follow.

  Turning sideways, he assessed his upper-body definition, then walked back to the bedside table and opened the phone message. Well, he thought, what do you know.

  He turned off the TV. He showered and dressed and took the towel and wiped down all the surfaces in the room. He picked up the key that had been smuggled to him in jail along with the phone, and went out to the car. In Crying Call, it had been parked several blocks from the courthouse, ready for him. He fired up the ignition and headed south.

  The text message read, Phoenix.

  It was forty miles away.

  49

  The news wouldn’t shut up. On the TV in the kitchen, and in the bedroom, and on Lia Fox’s car radio as she hurried back from the 7-Eleven, where she’d gone when she ran out of smokes at six thirty A.M., it was wall-to-wall. Detrick. Detrick. Detrick.

  The bozos in that Crying Call bar band thought Kyle was Billy the Kid. The Facebook groups were wetting themselves. Some commenters thought Kyle’s jailbreak was the most exciting thing since O.J. Simpson’s freeway chase. They posted photos of him. And drawings of themselves with him, generally locked in a seductive embrace. They posted slash fiction. Some of that featured Kyle kidnapping and exacting revenge on the FBI agent who arrested him, and who—at the end of the story—came around to the greatest orgasm of her life. Most stories starred the authors themselves, going on the run with the fugitive, to a life of endless sex on a beach. Anybody who expressed doubt about Kyle’s innocence was shouted down as a heretic and a bitch.

  What was wrong with people?

  At ten A.M., after calling in sick to work, Lia finished her second pack of cigarettes and stubbed out a butt and broke from her jittering paralysis into frantic action. She pulled a suitcase from the hall closet and packed in a frenzy. After cramming in clothing and makeup and a shelf of her prescription medications, and panties to last two weeks, and a bottle of Chablis, she dragged the roller suitcase into the living room. She sent a text to her sister, Emily. Looked around. She didn’t know how long she’d be gone. She unzipped the suitcase again and pulled photos from the wall and side table, fitting in as many as possible. The bag bulged when she zipped it back up.