The Darker Side

  “I’m following up with all of the local law enforcement,” James says. “I’ve made myself the sole point of contact. I’ll have them assume any of our confirmed missings are a homicide, and get them to put their best detectives on it. Anything found will get funneled through me, and I’ll collate it and add it to our database on these victims.”

  “We have a database?”

  He points to his computer. “I wrote one.”

  “Good work, James.”

  “I know.”

  He turns away from me, a dismissal.

  The door to the office swings open and Callie comes marching in with a big map of the U.S., mounted on foam-core. Kirby is following her, jabbering away.

  “So we’re good on the flowers? The price is fine?”

  “The price is wonderful, Kirby. How about the cake?”

  “I’m not fucking the cake guy. He’s got back hair.”

  “Very funny. The pricing?”

  “It’s under budget. Oh, and good news on the photographer. There’s a guy I used to know. We worked together, stuff like that. He used to do surveillance, but he’s good with a camera and, hey, it’s kind of the same thing, right?”

  I watch Callie mull over the wisdom of letting Kirby bring an old work buddy to her wedding, given Kirby’s background.

  “Fine.”

  “Bridal pragmatism wins again,” Alan opines. “That’s going to be some wedding. Kirby will have fucked or threatened half the vendors, and the rest will be a collection of ex-mercenaries she used to know.”

  “Not ex,” Kirby says. “A lot of them are still on the market.”

  “I hate to break this up,” I say, “but—Callie?”

  “Hey, I’m outie,” Kirby says, “I know what I need for now. See you later Callie-babe.”

  “Yes, please call me later.”

  “I’m only up till four in the morning,” Kirby chirps. “Girl needs her beauty sleep, you know?”

  Callie holds up the map for us to see.

  “I got James to print out a list of all the locations of our victims for me, and I marked them with pushpins.”

  We crowd around to get a look.

  “I see we have a few clusters,” Alan says. He points to Los Angeles, where there are over twenty. “And here.” Las Vegas, Nevada.

  “Sun and sin,” Callie says.

  The rest are spread out among the Preacher’s other target states. Some are in cities anyone would recognize, others are in small towns I’ve never heard of. The overall effect is sobering.

  “Like a fucking forest,” Alan growls, an echo of my own thoughts.

  “Excuse me,” Kirby says. She hadn’t left, after all. “Why is this name on this board?”

  She’s pointing to one of the Los Angeles victims. Willow Thomas.

  “Why?” I ask.

  The smile she gives me is mirthless and terrible. It puts me on immediate alert.

  “Please answer the question.”

  Her tone is mild. She could be someone asking about the weather. But the leopard eyes have appeared, and they are cold, cold, cold. This is the absolute indifference of a hired killer, the kind who shoots a man not because he was a particularly bad man, but because someone wanted him dead and was willing to pay to make it so.

  “Haven’t you been watching the news, honey-love?”

  Kirby flicks her gaze at Callie, then back to me.

  “Now, if I’d been watching the news, I guess I wouldn’t be asking the question, would I, Callie?”

  The fact that Kirby uses Callie’s name without adding any twist to it heightens my unease. Her voice is still mild, the chide she throws at Callie just a languid “pshaw” of a slap, but the air feels electric and dangerous.

  What the hell?

  “There’s a man,” I say, watching her for a reaction. “We think he’s been killing women for the last twenty years. We’re pretty sure the names on the board belong to his victims.”

  “Victims? As in dead?”

  “Yes.”

  She walks over to me and puts her arm around my shoulders. It’s anything but friendly, an intense and uncomfortable closeness. “And?” she whispers, her mouth near my ear. “Do we know who this man is?” Her words could have been carved from ice, they’re so cold.

  “Not yet.” I pull away and look at her directly. “Not sure I’d tell you if I did.”

  She stares at me for what seems like forever with that arctic gaze.

  “Can I talk to you?” she asks me. “Alone?”

  She walks toward my office without waiting for an answer. I turn to Alan, Callie, and James.

  “Not a clue,” Callie says.

  “I never know what’s going on in that psycho’s head,” Alan says.

  Only James is silent.

  WE’RE SEATED IN MY OFFICE with the door closed. I am waiting for Kirby to start talking. The fact that she’s not is unnatural. The wind blows, Kirby talks; it’s one of the axioms of life.

  She’s sitting in the chair that faces my desk. She’s picking her lip and looking off. She gives me a lopsided smile.

  “If you’re waiting for me to lose it, you’re going to be waiting for a loooooooooong time, Smoky.”

  The attempt at flip, something she’s normally so good at, right now seems less than genuine.

  “I think I already did see you lose it.”

  She scrutinizes me, flashes a smile and shrugs.

  “Well…maybe I had a little bit of a reaction there.”

  “Cut the shit, Kirby. I appreciate what you did for me in the bathroom. Let me return the favor.”

  She shakes a finger at me. “Now, now, I don’t let anyone behind the curtain, Smoky. You should know that.”

  “Tell me about Willow Thomas. Who was she? Who was she to you?”

  Again, the lip picking. I’ve never seen Kirby this wordless or evasive. She’s generally about as subtle as a two-year-old.

  “Willow was…a friend of a friend. She was a civilian. Always. She was born innocent and probably died that way. She was a puppy dog, a kitty cat, too bright eyed and bushy tailed for the world you and I live in, you know? She wasn’t like me or my friend. We were never civilians. We came out ready to rock and roll, prepared for the shit and shinola the big ol’ bad ol’ world dishes out. Not Willow. She was weak.”

  “What was your friend’s name?”

  Another finger wag and lopsided smile. “Nice try. But no. I’m not sharing that particular information right now.”

  “Is it germane?”

  “If I thought it would help you figure out who this future dead man is, I would tell you.”

  Future dead man. It has the ring of utter certainty coming from her mouth.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Willow made the right choice. She left us for a nice, normal life. We never spoke again, but I checked in on her every now and then to make sure no one was taking advantage of the puppy dog. One day I checked and she was gone. I used some of my—ah—resources to try and track her down, but she’d vanished. It was like she swam out into the ocean one night and never came back.”

  “When was this?”

  “About ten years ago.”

  “Does she have any family?”

  She takes a long time to answer.

  “No. She was an orphan.”

  “I see.”

  I wait for more. Kirby smiles.

  “Hell will freeze over first. She was an orphan, she disappeared ten years ago from sunny Los Angeles, she never deliberately hurt a person in her life besides herself. That’s all you need to know.”

  “She was hiding something, Kirby. That’s how this guy operates.”

  I explain the video clips to her. I watch her face as I do, looking for a tell, some crack in that Kirby-facade. She just listens, twirling a strand of blonde hair with one finger while she does.

  “I understand,” she says when I’m done.

  “Kirby, did Willow have any problems you know about? Drinking
, drugs? Did she go to meetings, anything like that?”

  “Actually, yeah. She drank. She kicked it, though. Big AA attendee.”

  Bingo, I think.

  “Anything else you can tell me about her?”

  “Nothing that will help you.” She leans forward. Again, there’s that feel of something predatory and electric in the air. “So you don’t have any idea yet who he is?”

  “Nope.”

  She nods. “Well, okay then. I guess we’re done here.” She stands up to go.

  “Kirby. Do you want to see the clip?”

  She pauses, her back to me, hand on the doorknob.

  “No. I know the secret that she was hiding.”

  She turns the knob and leaves.

  A CIVILIAN. THAT’S WHAT KIRBY had called Willow Thomas. I understand the reference, watching the woman on the video in front of me.

  She had the look. She would have been surprised by the cruel cuts of life, would never have failed to feel betrayed by them. She’d have survived on a plane of hopeful fairy tales, idealizing and dreaming until something smashed into her and brought her back down to earth.

  It would have been a never-ending cycle, started as a result of some great harm done to her that she never really recovered from.

  She’d been beautiful, in a limpid-eyed kind of way. She had straight dark hair and she was thin, painfully so. The gauntness brought out her beauty, the way it will in some women. She had pale, pale skin, with color at the cheekbones. Her lips had been full and red.

  “Tell me about the scars, Willow,” the Preacher says to her.

  She is shivering. Her eyes dart every which way; at him, right, left, then staring straight into the camera so that I feel like she’s looking right at me. Her tears aren’t constant. The corners of her eyes take a long time to fill before releasing single, huge drops that careen down her cheeks and plop almost immediately onto her naked thighs. I am hit with a wave of queasiness when I realize she is covered in goose-flesh. He must have been able to smell her horror.

  “Willow,” he prods, gentle as always. “The scars. Or I’ll have to hurt you again.”

  This prompts a shiver so powerful I hear the chair legs rattle against the floor.

  “No!” she cries.

  “Then talk, please. Tell me about the scars.”

  “But, but you already know,” she whines. “I know you do, you told me.”

  “Yes, but I need you to say it on camera.”

  Her shivering stops. She heaves a single, huge sigh. Then another, a lung-filling whoop of breath in, a noisy rattling out. Her head drops so that all that straight hair hangs down and tickles the top of her tear-spattered thighs.

  “We used to cut each other,” she whispers.

  “Who, Willow? You and who?”

  “Me and Mandy. Mandy was my sister. She was two years older than me. We went into foster care together because Mom and Dad beat us so much. Mandy told me about cutting, how it could make you feel better when you hurt a lot.”

  “And did you? Hurt a lot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on.”

  “We used a razor. Most of the time we’d cut on the inside of our legs, above where you’d ever see it if you wore a skirt. Sometimes, we’d do it for each other.”

  “That’s what you were doing that day, isn’t it? Cutting each other?”

  “Yes.” It’s the smallest voice I’ve ever heard. Barely audible.

  “What happened?”

  “She’d cut me first. It felt…wonderful. I can’t describe it. Before you cut, you’re feeling numb and hurting at the same time, it’s all unreal, but then you cut and the pain is real, it’s sharp and sweet and now. No future, no past. Just now. Cutting made everything only about that moment. It made you real, it made you matter.”

  “Go on.”

  “I was feeling kind of hot and good, you know. She’d cut me pretty deep. She saw how great I felt, and she told me to cut her deep too. Real deep. So I did.”

  “Did you cut too deep, Willow?”

  Her face comes up and I’m shocked at how white it is. This is a corpse face.

  “I cut into the artery,” she whispers. “She was always so thin, we both were. I was pushing and I wasn’t paying enough attention because I was still feeling the adrenaline rush and endorphins from when she cut me and I just cut too deep. She started to bleed so fast, so much.”

  She stops talking.

  “Tell the rest of it. What did you do then?”

  I see the first hint that there’d been any strength in this woman; her eyes gleam with pure hate for the Preacher. If she could have, I think she would’ve cut him deep too.

  “I told her she was bleeding bad. She looked down at it and—and—she smiled. She smiled. She told me to get out and not to tell anyone I was the one who’d cut her. I told her no, she needed help, but she told me it was too late, she was going to die, and that it was okay, she didn’t mind, kind of liked it, really, but she didn’t want me to get into trouble so I needed to leave and come back and act like I found her and like it was a big surprise so I did and I counted to five and I came in and she was already going unconscious and I screamed and there was blood everywhere and—” The torrent only stops for her to draw in another one of those whooping breaths. “I was holding her and trying to stop the blood, but it was too much. I was in a pool of it, I could have gone swimming in it.” A beat of silence. “She died.”

  “Did you do what your sister told you, Willow? Did you pretend?”

  She nods. She’s gone even paler. Her eyes sparkle with her hatred, naked and pure.

  “Say it, child,” he tells her.

  She shakes once, another one of those chair-leg-rattling shivers. “I killed my sister and let everyone think she’d killed herself.” She spits the words out, bitter, venomous.

  “And did you garner sympathy for this?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you tell people about your own cutting?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the last thing, Willow. Did you tell them your sister led you down that path? Did you let them think she was the one who made you do it?”

  “Yesssss.” It comes out in a moan. Her eyes are fluttering. Her facial expression morphs from hate to despair and through all the permutations in between.

  He waits. I get the sense he’s well satisfied, and I feel a little bit of my own hatred rise.

  “Thank you, Willow. Remember: God is love.”

  Fade to black.

  I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath. I exhale and lean back in my chair.

  So that was Kirby’s friend, I think.

  I wonder if this really is the secret Kirby seems to think she knows.

  A knock on the door interrupts. James pokes his head in.

  “We have a lead.”

  27

  “WE HAD WARRANTS DRAWN UP TO SEE IF WE COULD ATTACH an IP number to the uploads of the video clips,” James says. “We wanted to find out if he was stupid enough to lead us to his Internet connection. Given the sophistication of this perp, it seemed unlikely, but he put up a lot of material, so it was worth a try.”

  “And? You’re saying he left a trail?”

  “Most connections operate on the basis of a dynamic IP number. The Internet provider assigns a new IP to the user machine every time they connect, or every day. Some people prefer what they call a static IP—a number that never changes. The number associated with these uploads is static.”

  “Which means it couldn’t belong to anyone else but that particular bill-paying user.”

  “Correct.”

  I pace, thinking about this.

  “Seems really really strange. It doesn’t make sense he’d be so smart about everything else and so stupid about this. Is it possible this isn’t our guy?”

  “Very. If the owner of this IP uses a wireless router, and he didn’t password protect it, then someone could conceivably park a car in front of his home with a laptop an
d hijack his connection for the uploads.”

  “Is it really that common for home wireless networks to be insecure?”

  “Yes. A lot of people buy a router and just plug it in and go. They never bother to secure the connection, mostly because they don’t understand it themselves.”

  “Show me the guy.”

  He taps a key on his keyboard and points to the screen. A picture of a California driver’s license is displayed.

  “Harrison Bester,” I read. “Age forty-one, black hair, blue eyes. Normal enough looking. Do we know anything about him yet?”

  “We do now,” Alan says, walking in the door, waving a manila folder.

  He plops down in his chair and reads aloud.

  “Harrison was a systems engineer who parlayed a pretty good severance package into purchasing a franchised shipping store. He doesn’t make big money, but he’s definitely middle class. Lives in Thousand Oaks. He’s married, wife’s name is Tracy. They have two kids, both daughters, aged seventeen and fifteen.”

  “Which, again, sounds all wrong,” Callie observes. “Harrison and Tracy were sitting in a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g at a fairly young age to have a seventeen-year-old. That doesn’t fit with our boy’s timeline. He’s the dedicated sort. No time to be a family man.”

  “I agree,” James says.

  “Me too,” I reply. I think for a moment and come to a decision. “Callie, I want you to take a laptop and your car and park in front of the Bester house. See if Bester has a wireless connection and if he isn’t up on his security. In the meantime, I’ll coordinate with AD Jones and get this guy put under twenty-four-hour surveillance.”

  “Safe than sorry?” Alan asks.

  I shrug. “I don’t think Bester is the Preacher either, but thinking and knowing are two different things. Even if he isn’t, that doesn’t mean they don’t know each other. Maybe they’re in cahoots. Or maybe they’re just longtime drinking buddies and Harrison has no idea his friend is a serial killer. There’s always the possibility—slim, but possible—that the Preacher will decide to come back and steal some more wireless time. It’s our best lead, for now.”

  “Cahoots,” Alan snorts, teasing me.

  “I’ll go and see about Mr. Bester,” Callie says, grabbing her laptop bag and heading toward the door.