by Meg Gardiner
Caitlin tried to shout but merely hacked, “He’s under arrest. I shot him, but he’s still dangerous.”
The water in the Tahoe was filled with Detrick’s blood, the air with his labored gasps.
“I don’t care if he vomits his heart onto his lap. Don’t take him into the helo,” she said.
He glanced at her, half aware, teeth bared. Another Jet Ski swung alongside, engine revving against the current. Behind the driver was a Portland tactical officer with a rifle. He aimed it at Detrick.
The firefighters hooked him into a harness. The helicopter winched him out of the Tahoe and carried him, dangling, to the riverbank, where a slew of police vehicles and a SWAT unit waited.
The firefighter turned to Caitlin, raising bolt cutters. “Your turn.”
She remembered the sweet ting of the handcuff chain being cut, and the calm expertise of the firefighters who helped her into the inflatable. She recalled saying, Thanks. As the inflatable gunned its beautiful Evinrude against the swollen river, she noticed the headlights on the shore. Shadowed in front of them, she saw Emmerich’s hard silhouette. Beside him stood Brianne Rainey.
She vaguely recalled a paramedic leading her to a warm ambulance and wrapping her in a silver thermal blanket. Eventually, when the shivering subsided, the night came back into focus.
Rainey sat across from her, bedraggled and bloody. Butterfly bandages closed a long gash across her cheek. She was still littered with glass spall. Under the harsh lights, it seemed as if a tiny galaxy was alight on her. Caitlin reached out and took her hand.
Rainey squeezed. “Emily’s outside.”
Caitlin stood, shivering, and climbed down from the ambulance.
Emmerich walked up. “Are you . . .”
“I’m fine. Where is she?”
He nodded past the vehicles. A group of young women stood at the edges of the light. They too were swaddled in thermal blankets, after carrying out their impromptu rescue. Emily was with them, speaking to a Portland police officer.
“Does she know?” Caitlin said.
“About Lia? No.”
She shed the blanket and walked toward the young women, with Emmerich alongside.
Emily saw her, and though she was wet and hypothermic and had experienced a near drowning, she walked away from the policewoman and strode up to Caitlin and threw her arms around her. Caitlin let out a breath, let her shoulders drop, and held her tight.
“I thought . . . ,” Emily choked out. “I saw the car go over, and I thought . . .”
“I know.” Caitlin had seen Emily’s face earlier, as the girl climbed out of the Tahoe. That meant more to her than anything. “You’re okay.”
Emily nodded tightly.
Caitlin held on to her. “We have other news.”
They told her. Emily’s head dropped. She cried for a rough minute. Then she straightened her shoulders.
“How soon can I fly to Nevada? I have to get out there to . . .” Her voice cracked. “To take care of Lia’s body.”
“Soon,” Emmerich said. “Tomorrow or the next day.”
Caitlin admired the young woman’s grit. Emily was the polar opposite of Brandi Childers, who had latched on to a serial killer in a twisted grab at power and gratification.
Emily wiped her eyes. Her girlfriends walked over. Caitlin felt an ache, knowing that today alone Detrick had taken two young women, and maybe a police officer, within the space of a few minutes, and that nothing could bring them back.
Caitlin said, “You have amazing friends.”
Emily nodded. The girls circled into a raw group hug.
Under the flashing lights, paramedics loaded a gurney into an ambulance. Detrick lay strapped down on it, unconscious, shackled hand and foot, guarded by two TAC officers with rifles. The doors slammed shut.
63
The next day the storm blew east and the sun rose gold in a porcelain sky. The streets, the hills, the trees, all gleamed under a brisk breeze. Caitlin rose with lingering exhaustion, her fingers tingling as if she were still immersed in cold water.
She stripped, cleaned, oiled, and reassembled her Glock, before spending time at the firing range in the basement at the Portland Police Bureau. The semiautomatic fired a magazine without jamming, clean and smooth. She felt calmer with it holstered on her hip. Centered.
After that, she, Rainey, and Emmerich spent the morning shuttling between the Detective Division at the police bureau downtown and the Xi Zeta house. They worked the crime scene alongside Portland homicide detectives—interviewing witnesses, outlining search warrant requests, and gathering evidence that would shape the prosecution against Kyle Detrick.
The police officers who had been on duty guarding the Xi Zeta house both had been badly injured. The driver of the patrol car had been found in its trunk with a head injury. Detrick and Brandi had driven up in an SUV that looked like an FBI vehicle and walked up to his car with their fake credentials out. When he lowered his window, Brandi tased him and Detrick beat him with a tire iron. He and his partner were both hospitalized. Their prognosis was guarded but hopeful.
The Portland police’s cyberdivision coordinated with Nicholas Keyes in Quantico, tracing Detrick’s path from Crying Call to Phoenix, Jester, Lake Tahoe, and Portland. The burner phone that had been in his pocket when he was arrested needed to be carefully dried before the crime lab could recover data. Brandi’s burner contained texts she’d sent, coordinating Detrick’s escape from the courthouse. One told him where she’d parked the car he would use as a getaway vehicle. Another said, Arrived Oklahoma. On way to Rincon.
They had Aaron Gage’s cell phone, stolen when Brandi broke into his house and stabbed him. That was what had exposed Lia Fox’s home address.
They were only beginning to excavate the link between Brandi and Detrick.
Her twisted attachment to him had been evident from the day Caitlin met her. In retrospect, so had her scorn for other women and her contempt for law enforcement. Brandi’s passion for Detrick apparently grew from tangled psychological roots. She had an arrest record for attacking a love rival with a broken vodka bottle. She had an ex-husband who’d gone to jail for pistol-whipping another driver in a road rage incident. Brandi had married him at the courthouse while he was on trial. Violence had long aroused her.
She was the figure on the Solace multiplex theater CCTV video who surreptitiously tailed Detrick as he stalked his victim. She had known by then that Detrick was a kidnapper. Far from repelling her, his criminality—transgressive, cunning, risky—had drawn her to him.
After Detrick’s arrest, Brandi threw herself into helping him escape. Freedom put him in her debt. Caitlin suspected that Brandi thought he’d be grateful. And that she had expected him to bond with her as his partner.
Maybe she’d thought they were outlaws. After all, Bonnie and Clyde had been from Texas too.
But Caitlin couldn’t imagine that Detrick saw things that way. Brandi had made herself complicit in his crimes. Once she crossed that line, she was trapped. He owned her.
He wasn’t grateful to her. He was a psychopath. He used her.
In the end, Detrick used her up. As she lay fallen from a shotgun blast, he didn’t give her a second glance. He simply drove away.
The sorority house and street outside were cordoned off while forensics worked the scene. Caitlin’s energy drained as she entered the kitchen and saw the outline where the first body had been found, blood spreading beyond it.
Primitive envy. If Detrick couldn’t have it, he would destroy it.
At lunchtime she drove back downtown, to the bustling, green city center, and wrote a report on the confrontation with Brandi and Detrick. She got a burger at a café on Northwest Twenty-Third. Clean sunlight poured through the plate-glass window fronting the street, and she paused eating, to write. She breathed in the fresh air, took notice of t
he firs that carpeted the hills, let normal conversation, laughter, excitement, workaday purpose, wash past her in the café.
Her phone buzzed with texts and calls. Every time Caitlin scrolled through her messages, she saw Michele’s unanswered text. We okay, girl?
Caitlin knew she needed to connect with both Michele and Sean, and that the longer she let this hang, the harder it would be. She finished her glass of iced tea, picked up the phone, and started to reply.
Hey, girl. Been crazy times. I
She deleted what she’d written.
Tried again. Didn’t mean to leave you hanging. I’ve been on the run and
Backspaced. Her thumb hovered over a smiley face.
She heard a knock. Rainey was peering through the window, hands tented over her eyes. Caitlin waved her inside.
She came through the door tapping her watch. “Leaving for the airport in fifteen.”
Caitlin stuck her phone in her back pocket. “I need to make one stop on the way.”
• • •
The medical center was a tree-dotted complex near the Trail Blazers’ basketball arena. It overlooked skyscrapers on the riverbank. When the Suburban pulled under the portico at the main entrance, Caitlin told Rainey and Emmerich, “I won’t be long.”
Upstairs, in the bustle and hush, the zone where technology met raw physical frailty, she showed her credentials to the nurse at the desk in the hospital’s intensive care unit.
“No visitors,” the nurse said. “No questions.”
“I’m not going in.”
She walked down the hall. Outside Detrick’s room, a police officer was on guard.
Beyond the glass wall Detrick lay motionless, bristling with tubes and monitors, hands cuffed to the bed rails. She didn’t even step to the doorway. She was fine keeping safety glass between them.
But she wanted him to see her. To see that she was standing, and he was not. She peered through the glass, waiting, until he turned his head.
He stilled, waxen. His chest rose and fell. He glared.
Caitlin lifted a hand. She waved. And, when she was confident she had his full attention, she smiled.
EPILOGUE
On Saturday night, the emergency room at Temescal Hospital in Oakland was getting slammed. It was seven forty-five P.M. when firefighter-paramedics brought in a raving woman. Not the first raving woman of the night, but the worst off.
She was strapped to a gurney, writhing. The paramedics wheeled her through the doors and greeted the triage nurse.
“Caucasian female, approximately forty years old. Found on the Berkeley campus, lying supine on the sidewalk, agitated and screaming incoherently,” the senior paramedic said. “No wallet or ID.”
They wheeled her along the hall. Her clothing was filthy. It didn’t, however, smell like long-term street clothing. The woman arched her back and shrieked. Her eyes rolled and spittle flecked her lips. Her words were unintelligible.
She was covered in blood. Her wrists were bound with . . .
“Barbed wire?”
“She fought, trying to stop us touching her,” the paramedic said. “We barely managed to lift her onto the stretcher. We started to open her jacket, but she lunged and tried to bite me.”
The nurse directed them to an exam room. They parked the gurney beside the exam table as the emergency resident came in. He was pulling on latex gloves. His eyes were tired, his scrubs wrinkled. He’d been on call for twenty-six hours.
“On three.”
Together, two nurses and the paramedics transferred the woman to the table. She thrashed and tried again to speak, but the sounds that emerged from her mouth were animalistic moans.
The paramedic said, “Vitals stable aside from a mild tachycardia. Heart rate one oh three. Gross neuro exam normal. Pupils equal, round, reactive. No sign of head trauma. Was conscious but disoriented when we found her—unable to tell us her name, date, or place.”
He handed the RN a clipboard, she signed off, and they left.
With bandage scissors, the RN began cutting off the woman’s jacket. Thinking: Brain injury? Drugs? The patient twisted. The nurse spoke calmingly, asking the woman her name, but the patient didn’t respond. The resident examined the wire that bound her wrists. It ran up her arms beneath the sleeves of her jacket. The barbs dug into her flesh.
“Wire cutter,” he said.
The RN snipped away the jacket and the woman’s shirt. She stopped. “Doctor.”
The other nurse handed the resident a cannulated pin-and-wire cutter. He braced the patient’s wrist.
The RN stared in frozen horror at the patient’s abdomen.
The woman was wrapped in duct tape. The resident slipped the jaws of the cutter around the barbed wire, preparing to snip it. The nurse leaned down and carefully turned the patient so she could get a view of her back.
The nurse leaped for the doctor, screaming, “No—”
• • •
At her apartment, sheltered by Virginia hickories and the winter night, Caitlin toweled her wet hair and pulled on jeans and a Warriors T-shirt. On the floor, clothes erupted from her open suitcase. Music rang from the stereo. Stevie Ray Vaughan, “Pride and Joy.” Texas—the good stuff. She turned it up.
When she half danced into the kitchen, Shadow jumped to her feet, ears pricking.
Caitlin laughed. “Girl. Not another walk. We ran three miles before the sun went down.”
She ruffed Shadow’s fur and tossed her a dog biscuit from a box on the counter.
Caitlin should have been exhausted but felt weightless. She got a tub of fruit salad from the fridge. Thought again and pulled out a hunk of Parmesan cheese. And prosciutto. And a bottle of Pinot Grigio. The apartment felt warm. It wasn’t exactly home yet, but with its French windows and built-in bookshelves, it worked for her. She heaped a plate, poured a glass of wine, and dropped onto the sofa. Muting the music, she turned on the TV. She cued up Black Mirror.
She sent Rainey a text. Dystopian satire it is.
A reply beeped. Hallelujah. Next: opera.
Smiling, Caitlin held on to the phone. She sighed. No time like now. Thumbing the screen, she sent Michele a message. Sorry I’ve been a brat. Then she called Sean.
His number rang. Shadow jumped onto the sofa. Her eyes pleaded, Treat? Caitlin nudged her back.
With a clatter, Sean picked up. Rushing air and engine noise obscured his voice. “I don’t know anything yet. I’m on my way there. Nobody knows anything.”
She froze. “Sean?”
“There’s no reliable information. It’s chaos. But, Cat—it looks bad.”
A hot needle seemed to stab her between the eyes. She grabbed the remote and turned to a news channel.
On-screen was a blasted building. Flames were shooting from ground-floor windows. Fire trucks crowded the driveway. Beyond them, the sign above the building’s entrance said, EMERGENCY.
Breaking: Explosion at Oakland Hospital.
“Jesus.” It was Temescal.
Michele worked at Temescal.
Through the phone, Sean’s truck engine gunned. “Phones at the hospital are down. Michele’s not answering her cell. Fire crews can’t even get inside.” His voice had a fractured edge. “Caitlin, it’s him.”
Her own voice sounded distant. “The bomber.”
The roar of the truck filled the phone. Orange flames filled the television screen.
Sean’s voice was a rusty blade. “What if it’s him?”
Caitlin’s field of vision shuddered. She felt a sense of déjà vu. Seemed to see a visual echo. A shadow that wasn’t there.
She stood. Her throat was tight.
“I’m booking a flight. Getting on a plane tonight.” Her pulse thundered. “Sean. Hang on. I’m on my way.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always
, I owe my thanks to a number of people whose skill, enthusiasm, and dedication have helped make this novel the best book it could be. In particular, I’m grateful to everyone at Dutton, especially John Parsley, Christine Ball, Cassidy Sachs, Jessica Renheim, and Jamie Knapp. For supporting me every step of the way, I want to thank the team at the Story Factory, especially David Koll and, above all, Shane Salerno. Thanks also to Carl Beverly, Sarah Timberman, Liz Friedman, and CBS; Joe Cohen and Tiffany ward at CAA; and Richard Heller. For providing a sounding board, my thanks go to Ann Aubrey Hanson. For their support and encouragement, I’m grateful to Don Winslow and Steve Hamilton. For explaining how doctors talk, many thanks to Sara Gardiner, MD. For showing me how to disarm an attacker in the dark—and for believing in me from the day we met—my thanks go, forever, to Paul Shreve.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MEG GARDINER is the author of thirteen critically acclaimed novels, including China Lake, which won the Edgar Award. Originally from Santa Barbara, California, she lives in Austin, Texas.
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