Into the Black Nowhere

by Meg Gardiner

  Their Rough Guide said all rooms at the motel featured black velvet clown paintings. They were hoping to get a room overlooking the cemetery, for the full creepazoid experience.

  Heading for the office, they strolled past the empty swimming pool. Tumbleweeds filled the deep end, twitching in the breeze. There was only one other car in the parking lot. They couldn’t see lights in any of the rooms.

  “Guess we didn’t need to worry about the place being sold out,” Lissie said.

  A washing machine sat on the porch outside the office. Through the front window, they could see a small television on the counter, showing a sitcom. Nearby, the cemetery gate banged under a gust of wind.

  Xander opened the door for Lissie. A bell tinkled. They stepped inside, and stopped.

  Lissie laced her fingers together and pressed her hands to her chin, breathless. It was real: The entire room was crowded with clown dolls, figurines, paintings, and masks. The shelves on the walls groaned with harlequin toys. On a bench in the corner, a quartet of garish tramp mannequins sat in tableau.

  “Check it off the bucket list,” Xander said.

  The office was empty, the fluorescent lights buzzing. Despite the tinkling bell on the door, their entry brought nobody from the private office behind the counter. The TV gurgled, a laugh track adding false cheer.

  Xander rang the bell on the counter. Nobody came. The overhead fluorescents flickered and continued to buzz.

  “Hello?” Xander called.

  Lissie approached the counter. “Where is everyone?”

  Then she realized that the lights weren’t the only thing that was buzzing.

  Her voice came out as a whisper. “Xander.”

  He was frozen beside her.

  Slowly they turned. In the corner, among the mannequins, flies were swarming.

  Lissie tried to understand what she was seeing. Xander made a choked, gurgling sound. Like he was about to vomit.

  The flies covered the eyes and mouth of a woman, gowned in white and heavily made up, propped among the clowns. She was dead.

  The Baileys screamed.

  54

  The chartered Gulfstream swept into a bank and descended toward a narrow airstrip five miles outside Jester. The desert raced by below. Sharp hills cast long shadows across rocky ground in the morning light. From the air, Caitlin thought, the town looked like a collection of children’s building blocks dropped along a black stripe of highway, in the middle of a thousand square miles of emptiness.

  As the jet lined up on final approach, Emmerich’s phone chirped. He glanced at it. “Homicide detective will meet us at the motel.”

  The jet flared and touched down, thrust reversers roaring. They taxied toward a hangar and single-wide trailer that served as the airstrip’s operations base. A rental car was waiting, the rental company agent twirling a key ring nervously around his index finger.

  The jet braked to a stop, the engines spooled down, and the first officer emerged from the cockpit to open the main door. Rainey grabbed her things. Caitlin jogged down the stairs behind her.

  The morning sun was brilliant, the cold sky a flawless blue, but a black void seemed to eddy at the edges of her vision. She knew what was waiting for them in town.

  Caucasian female, midthirties. Brown eyes, bleached blond hair. Well nourished, no identifying marks.

  Emmerich took the car keys from the rental agent with a thank-you. They got in. Emmerich pulled onto the empty highway and sped toward town at seventy miles per hour.

  Rainey checked her phone messages. She listened to voice mail with pursed lips.

  “Message from the Crying Call police chief. We know how Detrick was communicating with the outside—and how he got out of town,” she said. “Somebody smuggled a cell phone and a car key into the jail. A cashier at the local KFC ran his mouth to some friends—said a woman gave him a phone and key and asked him to plant it in a big-box meal.”

  The desert flashed past. Horse corrals. Trailer homes.

  Caitlin said, “Detrick was being served KFC for lunch almost every day. I saw an empty box on the floor of his cell.”

  “An officer buys lunch for prisoners. One of Detrick’s fans apparently followed the cop to the KFC. Convinced the cashier to slip the burner phone and key into the bottom of the box below the wax paper and greasy chicken. The cashier stuck the box in a plastic sack and handed it to the cop. The sack was heavy enough that the officer didn’t notice the extra weight. Didn’t search the box. At least not all the way to the bottom.”

  Emmerich said, “The clerk was paid?”

  “A hundred dollars,” Rainey said. “He’s now under arrest.”

  “Description of the woman?”

  “White, twenties, eager. She had black hair, but could have been a wig. She wore a hooded parka, ski hat, and sunglasses,” Rainey said. “Crying Call PD is reviewing visitor logs and video to see if she visited Detrick in jail. But presume she wore a disguise and used a fake ID.”

  “Police artist?”

  “They’re bringing one in from the Flagstaff Resident Agency.”

  The car bottomed over a dip in the road. Emmerich’s voice was dry. “Woman in Crying Call. Woman in Rincon. Woman at Hoover Dam. Same one?”

  They barreled down the highway, but Caitlin felt like they were running ten steps behind. Neither roadblocks nor a statewide BOLO had netted anything. Detrick was moving across the vast empty desert—maybe in stolen cars, maybe hitchhiking—but they couldn’t corner him. Couldn’t corner them.

  They crested a hill and hit Jester’s main street. Bleached-brick buildings. MONEY TO LOAN. WE BUY GOLD AND SILVER. LIQUOR. GUNS AND AMMUNITION. FAMILY MINE TOURS.

  At the Circus Inn, the parking lot was blocked off with yellow tape. A forensic team was working the scene.

  The local sheriff’s department homicide detective had driven from the county seat, Coyote Pass, one hundred fifty miles away. The man climbed from an SUV, dressed in jeans and a ski jacket. His grim face was a startling contrast to the gaudy clown grinning down from the motel sign.

  He introduced himself as Dave Perez and shook hands all around. “Victim’s body’s been transported to the local funeral home. Forensic pathologist is on his way from Carson City to perform the autopsy. Once he collects trace from her hands, he’ll take fingerprints, and we can hopefully confirm ID.” His eyes were narrow, his voice flat. “It was brutal.”

  Caitlin had seen photos of the body, taken before it was moved from the lobby of the motel. The victim had been beaten around the head and face, strangled, and her wrists slit. The white nightgown she wore was soaked with blood.

  Emmerich said, “He’s devolving.”

  Not a dichotomy between organized and disorganized. A continuum. And Detrick was sliding along it.

  “That mean he’ll keep picking up steam?” Perez said.

  “Yes,” Emmerich said. “And he’s gained at least one accomplice. A woman.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “She may be a groupie who became obsessed with him while he was in jail.”

  “Groupies don’t usually join their idols in killing sprees.”

  “It’s rare, but a recognized phenomenon—aggressive hybristophilia. Bonnie and Clyde syndrome.”

  Detrick’s new sidekick was the most dangerous of fans—a collaborator. She didn’t think he was innocent. She wasn’t after a vicarious kick from contact with a jailed killer. Fueled by lust, euphoria, and—possibly—fear of him, she was joining Detrick in committing crimes.

  Caitlin said, “She’s a thrill seeker.”

  “Looks like she got her chance,” Perez said. “Armed and dangerous, I presume.”

  “A cop killer.”

  That chilled the conversation. Perez logged them into the scene, lifted the yellow tape, and led them across the motel parking lot.


  Rainey looked around. “No sign of the motel clerk?”

  “No.” Perez’s face was somber. “The manager’s in Reno, long weekend. He left his nephew in charge of the front desk.” He took a spiral notebook from his pocket. “Ezekiel Frye, age twenty. Hasn’t been seen since six P.M. yesterday. We checked the rooms, the Dumpster, the pool. He’s not on the property.”

  That wasn’t good.

  Caitlin absorbed the scene. “No cameras?”

  “Nearest one’s at the gas station half mile away.” Perez nodded at the forensic techs. “They got here an hour ago from Coyote Pass. That’s the nearest lab.”

  They passed the decrepit swimming pool. A chain-link fence surrounded it—maybe to pen the tumbleweeds that filled the deep end. On the far side of the parking lot was the bleakest cemetery Caitlin had ever seen.

  Perez led them to the office door. He gave them a look and pulled it open.

  Caitlin didn’t often feel a spooky chill at crime scenes. Her job was to dissect and analyze the evidence, to help identify and prosecute offenders. And she didn’t believe in ghosts. Not in demons or poltergeists or extradimensional forces that reached into this world to steal souls.

  Then she stepped through the door into the lobby of the Circus Inn.

  She stopped so hard that Rainey bumped into her from behind. She went cold. If she’d been a dog, she would have dug her paws in and laid her ears flat and backed out, growling.

  Rainey stepped around her. “Lordy.”

  A hundred clowns stared at her, their manic eyes and skeletal grins seeming to X-ray the room. The sweet, putrid smell of decaying human flesh clung to the walls and floor and ceiling and furniture.

  Under her breath, Caitlin said, “Oh, my hell.”

  Emmerich eyed her as he walked to the corner where the body had been found. The three adult-size harlequin dolls, which had been propped around it, had been removed from a bench.

  Perez brought up photos on his phone, taken before the body was moved. “One thing. You can see it in this photo. The killer . . .”

  His expression turned astringent. He handed the phone to Emmerich.

  Emmerich zoomed in. “What did he do?”

  “We think that’s a bite mark, around the gash on her right wrist.”

  Caitlin felt light-headed. “You think he sucked her blood?”

  “It seemed to be post-mortem. But he may have inserted his tongue into the wound.”

  Emmerich looked up. “If so, there’ll be DNA.”

  Perez nodded. “She’d been dead less than twenty-four hours. Rigor hadn’t passed. And the flies were mature. They hadn’t hatched from maggots.”

  He took the phone, scrolled, and raised it to show them a photo of the flies on the victim’s face.

  Caitlin shook her head. She’d seen it already. Seen all the photos. Despite the clown makeup, and the violence done to the woman’s face, despite the need to obtain fingerprints for an official identification, she knew.

  She was sure it was Lia Fox.

  The black void swirled at the edges of her vision. It thickened and curled around her throat. She inhaled and forced herself to stay calm.

  Her eye caught on three small clown dolls leaning against one another on a shelf above the harlequins.

  “What’s that?”

  The three clowns had been rearranged to look like a human centipede, one behind the next. On each of their foreheads, a single letter was written in crimson lipstick. She stepped in to get a better look.

  F-B-I.

  “Not subtle.”

  The void receded. She saw the scene more clearly. She breathed through her nose, because that would eventually deaden the smell.

  “This took exceptional audacity,” she said. “And it’s a spectacle. Before now, Detrick hid his victims. In places where he could . . . enjoy them, privately.” Anger edged into her voice. “But this is as public as it gets. It’s reckless, but he doesn’t care. He’s beyond boundaries.”

  Emmerich said, “He’s presenting this as a joke. But his fury’s overwhelming.”

  “He’s slapping us in the face,” Caitlin said. “And using murder to do it.”

  Perez said, “You look a tad pale. You all right?”

  “Fine.” She clenched her hands in her pockets to stop them from shaking.

  “It may be the altitude. You don’t notice it because we’re in a bowl on a high plain. But Jester’s higher than Denver. Drink some water and get some breakfast.”

  She wanted to run outside and breathe uncorrupted air. Instead, she nodded. “Can we see the room where he did it?”

  With a curt nod, perhaps reacting to her abruptness, Perez led them outside.

  Defining the crime scene was always a deliberate decision, and homicide detectives had to get it right. Too small, and investigators could not only overlook evidence but leave it unprotected, open to contamination and destruction. Too large, and the search could become attenuated—resources spread too thin, with too little time, trying to cover too much ground.

  Here, Detective Perez had defined the scene as the entire motel property, up to the street in front and the cemetery along the side. Caitlin thought that was probably right. But it meant they had two acres and a forty-two-room motel to search, inch by inch, for fingerprints, footprints, trace, fibers, DNA, and signs of disturbance.

  Along the motel’s back fence, a crime scene tech in white coveralls walked a grid, searching for evidence. Another tech searched the pool, pacing back and forth across the shallow end, working her way toward the tumbleweed-clogged deep end.

  Perez led them across the parking lot to Room 4. The door was propped open, a tech working inside.

  Perez took gloves and booties from a lab case outside the room. “Step inside the door but no further.”

  Caitlin nodded, donned the booties and gloves, and crossed the threshold.

  The bedroom looked dingy but clean. The bed hadn’t been slept in. But the bedspread was rumpled, and pillows had indentations. Good—lying on a pillow meant leaving hair, and if it was follicular, it would contain DNA. A sad clown grimaced from a painting on the wall.

  She could smell the blood.

  Hands hanging at her sides, Caitlin turned toward the bathroom. The door was open. The counter was smeared with garish makeup. The shower curtain had been pulled back.

  From the riot of red streaks on the wall tile, the blood was spray from a severed carotid artery. Caitlin breathed in. Breathed out.

  She stepped back outside. For a second, she couldn’t think. She could only feel what the victim—what Lia, surely—must have felt as Kyle Detrick forced her into the bathtub and drew a knife. Her terror, her sorrow, her pain.

  She turned away from the room. Perez said nothing.

  Caitlin breathed in again. Out. Gold sunlight needled her eyes. Across the parking lot, the forensic tech paced the empty pool. On the highway, a gravel truck slowed as the driver gawked at the scene. Caitlin half saw Rainey walking toward her.

  Beyond the pool, the cemetery sat dejected in the chilly sun. Crosses leaned at crazy angles, as if it were a Halloween haunted house. Dust scudded across the ground. At the cemetery’s farthest edge, a tumbleweed was caught on the point of a cross, shivering in the wind.

  Rainey approached. “What’s that?”

  Caitlin frowned. “Don’t know.”

  The tumbleweed twisted, as though trying to break free. A ribbon—a silver stripe—was wound among its dry branches.

  “Is that duct tape?” Rainey said.

  She strode across the parking lot with Caitlin. They entered the cemetery and wound their way past the listing crosses and sun-bleached wooden grave markers.

  “Damn. It is duct tape.” Rainey jogged up to the tumbleweed. It was affixed to the tip of the listing cross so it couldn’t blow awa
y.

  “Duct tape’s part of Detrick’s kidnap kit,” Caitlin said. “It’s a signal.”

  “To whom? Us?”

  Caitlin scanned the scene, turning three-sixty. Panning the desert, she climbed over the cemetery’s wrought iron fence and examined the ground. Behind her, Rainey whistled, high and loud.

  “Emmerich,” Rainey shouted.

  A second later she hopped the fence and joined Caitlin. From the cemetery boundary, empty ground ran a mile or so to crinkled brown hills. Cautiously, surveying the sandy soil, Rainey walked forward. After a minute, she pointed.

  “Tire tracks.”

  She crouched. Caitlin drew up beside her. They heard Emmerich loping toward them.

  The tracks originated with twin divots, like the vehicle had accelerated sharply from a standstill. They ran straight across the sand toward the hills.

  “I know what he did,” Rainey said. “What they did.” She stood and peered back at the motel parking lot. “They grabbed some tumbleweeds from the pool and duct taped them to the back bumper of the vehicle. The tumbleweeds dragged on the ground and covered their tracks when they drove onto the sand.”

  Caitlin knit her brow. “But they took them—or at least one—off and taped it to that cross.”

  “Yes. Because they wanted somebody to eventually come looking, and find out which way they went.”

  “Why?”

  Emmerich jogged up.

  “Tracks,” Rainey said. “We need a photographer. And the techs should make molds ASAP, before the wind blows them away.”

  Emmerich’s gaze followed the tire ruts across the desert. “They headed straight for the hills?”

  On the hillside was a square opening, black against the russet earth. Rocks and dirt trailed from its mouth down the slope.

  Caitlin recalled the billboards leading into town. FAMILY MINE TOURS.

  “Mine shaft,” she said.

  Emmerich spun and yelled at Perez to bring the techs and a four-by-four vehicle.

  Rainey took off running, cross-country. “The missing clerk.”

  • • •

  By the time they climbed the hillside, Rainey was wheezing and her face was slick with sweat. Her braids had fallen from her chignon and stuck to her face. Emmerich was wired and blowing hard. Caitlin’s legs felt as wobbly as a foal’s. The mine shaft was abandoned, its support beams split and rotted. The local officers approached the entrance with weapons drawn.