Hold Me in the Dark Page 10

  I felt her staring at me for a moment. I think she knew it was a ploy, but she could also see I was telling the truth. She crossed her arms. Uncrossed them. Then, finally, “Let me explain it.”

  She’d blinked away her tears and those green eyes were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. She could have explained the life cycle of goddamn turnips and I’d have listened.

  “To the power of just means multiplying something by itself,” she said. “Three to the power of one is just three. Three to the power of two—which we call squaring it—is just three times three, which is nine. Three to the power of three—cubing something—is just three times three times three, which is twenty-seven.”

  I screwed up my forehead. “So when they said eight to the power fourteen, that was just—”

  We said it together. “Eight times eight times eight times eight….”

  “...until you have fourteen eights written down, total,” she finished.

  We stared at each other, her now placid and my brain going at a million miles an hour, fast-forwarding through all the years that had confused the hell out of me. “Why did no one just tell me that?” I mumbled at last. A swell of anger joined the embarrassment. Because I was just the big dumb jock. No one had thought I was worth it.

  But Yolanda...she thought I was worth it.

  All of those feelings I’d crushed down inside me escaped and expanded, filling me until I couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. Goddamn it!

  If I kept looking into her eyes, I was going to do something stupid. I forced myself to stand and I put my hand on her shoulder. Just a quick squeeze, like thanks, like we’re friends, like—

  I couldn’t let go. She looked up at me and I looked down at her. My thumb wanted to stroke across her collarbone, my fingers wanted to draw her gently forward so I could lean down and—

  No! I caught myself just in time. I didn’t deserve her. Not after Becky. And besides, she needed someone smart, not a big lunk like me.

  I let go of her shoulder.

  We had to catch this bastard. But as soon as the case was done, we needed to go our separate ways. Until then, what I could do, what I had to do, was protect her. I wasn’t going to let my work destroy her, the way it destroyed Becky. No way was I letting Yolanda back into that house, not until I made some changes.

  I marched over to the officers manning the scene and started barking orders.

  * * *

  While the coroner removed the body, I helped set up big, portable lights, three times the number we’d normally use. With them blasting at full power, the house turned as stark and bright as a laboratory. It was overkill, but not a single cop complained or suggested we turn them down. Everyone could feel the dark horror of the place pressing in around us, waiting to swallow the light: every time the generator stuttered for a second and the lights flickered, everyone would freeze and glance around uneasily.

  We laid Perspex sheets on the floor and up against the walls, sealing away anything that crawled out of the cracks. Only then did I let Yolanda back in.

  She looked around. Looked at me and nodded. Thank you.

  And she went to work.

  It took hours. For most of that, she was constantly moving, shooting around the room from one spider to another, rocking on the wheels and twirling her pen absently around her fingers as she thought. Even in the light and sealed behind Perspex, the spiders were deeply unsettling to look at. Yolanda traced the equations with her finger to keep her place and when she brushed a spider’s curving fangs, I felt physically sick. It was everything I could do not to grab her wrist and pull her hand away.

  Occasionally, she’d hit some dense knot of math that challenged even her, and she’d slow down as that incredible brain soaked up all of her energy. She’d become more and more still and then, sometimes, she’d stop. She’d sit there, eyes closed, lips moving, and I knew she was deep. I’d seen it before, at the first crime scene, but this time was more unsettling. She stayed down longer: not just a few minutes, but ten or fifteen each time. And when she did resurface, she looked confused and disoriented. As if she hadn’t just gone deep into her own head, but had been dragged off somewhere else. I knew that made no sense, but it felt bad. Dangerous. And I couldn’t stand the idea that I might be putting her in danger.

  I cared about this woman more than I wanted to admit.

  I scowled and forced myself to think of something else. This place was the ideal place to kill someone: a quiet street, an abandoned house... no wonder the body hadn’t been found for a while. So why the hell hadn’t the killer brought Daniel Grier here, too? It made no sense.

  Behind me, Yolanda gave a sigh of satisfaction. I spun around as she slumped back in her chair. “Okay,” she said, pointing to one of the spiders. “This part is the countdown to the next killing and the date and time works out as this.” She passed me a piece of paper.

  “That’s when Daniel Grier was killed.” That proved she’d been right: the equations at each killing told you where and when the next one was going to happen. This killing predicted Daniel Grier’s. Daniel Grier’s would predict the next one, the one happening in two days’ time. “Anything else you can tell me?”

  “Five of the spiders contain pairs of letters that aren’t part of the equations. Initials, maybe?” She showed me and I went to write them down, then realized I’d left my notebook in her car. So I scrawled them on my hand, instead: AV ES AT AN AS. I had no clue what they meant. When I glanced up, I was looking right into Yolanda’s eyes and what I saw there made my stomach knot. She was as beautiful as ever, but something had changed since that first day I’d met her. She looked paler and those lush green eyes were haunted. The case was taking its toll on her. What am I doing, getting her involved in this? She’s not a cop!

  But if I wanted to catch this guy, I needed her.

  My phone bleeped and I checked the message. “Come on,” I muttered. “Autopsy’s ready.”

  17

  Yolanda

  WHEN WE EMERGED from the house, I froze in shock at the bright sun. It was noon: I’d been immersed in the equations for over five hours! By the time I’d driven us to the hospital, I felt almost jet-lagged: a four a.m. start, then the dark house, then the bright artificial light all morning and next we’d be underground in the morgue. “How do you do this?” I mumbled to Calahan.

  He stopped at the hospital’s coffee stand, bought two coffees, and pushed one into my hand. Oh.

  Doctor Liedner was waiting for us. “Calahan!” she said warmly. She grinned at me. “And Yolanda.” She gave Calahan a sly smile. “Again.”

  I saw the flush climb Calahan’s neck and turn his ears red. My face was going red, too, because even just a harmless quip took me straight back to the night before and my dream, the feel of him as he filled me—

  I focused very hard on calculating how many rivets there were on the stainless steel walls.

  “Okay,” said Doctor Liedner. She stopped beside a table and pulled back the sheet. The woman—I couldn’t think of her as a body—from the spider house lay there, her clothes gone. It felt wrong, that she was just lying there naked, as if her dignity didn’t matter, anymore. “Same muscle relaxant in the blood, same anti-clotting agent, same needle mark in the neck, same zip tie marks on the wrists and ankles. No question, it’s the same killer.”

  “They ID her, yet?”

  Doctor Liedner passed him a file. “Sharon Kubiak, worked at a grocery store, disappeared eight days ago, which fits with my estimated time of death.”

  Without being asked, Calahan squatted down so I could look over his shoulder as he read. When we’d finished, we frowned at each other, confused. Daniel Grier was a well-off, African-American man in his forties. Sharon Kubiak was a blue-collar Caucasian woman in her twenties. What’s the connection?

  Calahan sighed. “Anything else?”

  “Just one thing.” Doctor Liedner beckoned us over to Sharon’s head. Then she carefully lifted the left eyelid. I felt my stomac
h churn for a second, but when I focused on Sharon’s eye, I forgot my nausea. There was a diagonal slash of black across the iris, as if the pupil extended through it. “Coloboma,” said Doctor Liedner, awed. “Maybe one in ten thousand people have it, but an extreme case like this is very rare. They used to think it was the mark of a witch. Literally, the Evil Eye.”

  I felt myself pout. Superstitions and me don’t really get on. Especially ones that lead to people being singled out because they look different. There used to be all sorts of that crap, people had weird ideas about what made someone a—

  “Oh my God,” I said aloud.

  I whipped out my phone. No signal, because we were underground. I rushed off towards the surface, yelling goodbye to Doctor Liedner over my shoulder.

  18

  Calahan

  I HAD TO RUN to catch up with Yolanda. Just as she reached the main doors, she heard me coming and spun around, crashing through the doors backwards. “Do you have the number for Daniel Grier’s brother?” she asked breathlessly.

  I found it and read it to her as we moved out into the sunlight. “What are you doing?”

  “Checking a theory,” she muttered, and put her phone to her ear. “Mr. Grier? I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m working with the FBI, investigating your brother’s death. I need to know: how many brothers did your father have?” She waited. “And he was the youngest?” She drew in a deep breath. “Thank you, Mr. Grier.”

  She ended the call and looked up at me, but it was several seconds before she spoke. “I have a theory,” she said at last. “But it’s kind of out there.”

  I crossed my arms. “This whole case is kind of out there. Spill it.”

  She leaned forward and I squatted down to listen. “Daniel Grier had six brothers, all older than him,” she said. “And his father also had six older brothers. That makes Daniel the seventh son of a seventh son. That’s in the bible. It’s meant to be a sign of a person of great power, or in some cultures a mystic or a healer. And Sharon Kubiak had coloboma, which used to be a sign you were a witch.”

  I stared at her, stunned. “You think our killer is hunting witches?”

  “I think that’s what he thinks he’s doing, yes.”

  It made sense. It explained why the two victims had nothing in common. “But why does he leave the cops messages written in math? That doesn’t fit with folklore at all.”

  We frowned at each other as we thought. We were doing that more and more, figuring things out together. I knew that was dangerous. I had to keep my distance. But we worked so well together….

  The silence was broken by Yolanda’s stomach giving a loud, long rumble. She flushed and looked away.

  “C’mon,” I told her, standing up. “I’m buying you the best dog in town.”

  About twenty yards down the street was a hot dog stand, run by an old Italian-American guy called Petey. He has shaggy, silver curls and skin almost as leathery as his Hush Puppies, and he serves up the best dogs in the city. I go to his stand a lot, because it’s right outside the morgue.

  I bought two dogs and handed one to Yolanda. I didn’t have to ask her what she wanted on it because, honestly, to mess with one of Petey’s dogs in any way would be sacrilege. You take it as it comes or not at all.

  “Oh God,” said Yolanda after one bite. “This is amazing.”

  And it was. The bun was lusciously soft and chewy, the sausage was properly salty and meaty, the onions melted on your tongue and then you got that hit of mustard and the tang of ketchup. We took our time eating, not talking, just people watching in companionable silence. When we finished, and threw the paper in a trash bin, I caught Yolanda looking around wistfully. “What?” I asked.

  “Just... I can’t remember the last time I ate a hot dog. Or….” She looked at the street, the people. At New York. The last time she was a part of this. I nodded sadly.

  We headed back down the street and we were almost back to the car when it happened. One second, she was rolling along beside me, chatting away, and then she cried out and suddenly the chair was on its side and she was sprawled on the sidewalk like a rag doll.

  I stood there stupidly for a second. What the hell happened? Everyone stopped and turned to look, saying things like oh dear and ooh and is she okay and meanwhile Yolanda was dragging herself along the sidewalk on her arms, her legs just a dead weight behind her. I saw now what had happened: she’d clipped a wheel on the edge of a concrete planter, hooked to one side and tipped.

  For the first time, I really understood why she never left the apartment. Out here, one mistake, one tiny slip, and she was helpless.

  She’d reached the chair, now. Her face was red with humiliation as she tried to get it onto its wheels without it rolling off the sidewalk into traffic—

  Why the hell am I just standing here, watching? I started forward, mad at myself, my hands going down to grab her under the arms.

  “Don’t pick me up!” she snapped, glaring at me.

  I froze. “Why not?”

  There were tears in her eyes. “Because I’m not a fucking child!”

  She finally got the chair back onto its wheels and got the brakes on. Then she hauled herself up hand over hand, the muscles in her upper arms standing out, and finally swung around and dropped into the seat, panting and sweating. She took the brakes off and I saw that her palms were scraped raw where they’d hit the sidewalk. But she didn’t even hesitate, she just wheeled herself off towards the car and I had to hurry to keep up.

  We climbed into the car and she tried to slide the chair into its slot behind the seat, but it refused to go, bouncing back each time she shoved it in. She finally slammed it home with a yell of frustration, then sat there, hands nursing the steering wheel. “Sorry,” she muttered, not looking at me. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”

  “No,” I said, my voice thick with emotion. “It’s okay. I get it.”

  She shot me a suspicious look, but she must have seen in my expression that I meant it because her face softened and she nodded. Then she started the car. “Come on,” she said. “I’ve got a plan.”

  19

  Yolanda

  WE WERE BACK in my apartment, nursing mugs of coffee as we looked at my computer monitor. “Here’s what I’m thinking,” I said. “I hack the big search engines and look for people who’ve been searching for both advanced mathematical formulae and myths and superstitions around identifying witches and other people of power. That’s a pretty unusual combination, especially if I limit it to New York IP addresses. I bet we’d only get one or two matches. And one of them would likely be our guy.”

  I finished, breathless and excited, and looked across at Calahan. He was staring at me, open-mouthed. “What?” I asked, bemused. Then I sighed. “Calahan, this is what I do! I won’t get caught!”

  “It’s not that! It’s—” He looked at me, like: you know.

  But I didn’t. “What?”

  “We don’t have a warrant for anything like that!”

  “Oh no,” I put a hand to my mouth in mock horror. “And I never break the law.”

  “It’s not just the law, it’s wrong! It’s people’s search history, it’s private!”

  “You’re always breaking the rules!”

  “There’s a difference between breaking the rules and—” He sighed. “It’s wrong.”

  I blinked at him. He was serious. He actually believed in doing the right thing, some sense of justice and fairness that went beyond the law. I felt myself warm to him in a new and totally unexpected way, one I didn’t know how to deal with. So I pushed back from the desk and wheeled myself over to the chalkboards instead. “We have less than two days to figure out where the next killing’s going to be,” I said gently. “And I’m no closer to understanding the location part.” I pointed to the equations. “Maybe I’ll get it in time, but maybe I won’t. Even if I do get it and we can swoop in and catch him red-handed, wouldn’t it be much safer to track him down now and arrest him, before he
gets close to another victim?”

  Calahan cursed under his breath. He got up and paced for a while, eventually coming to a stop in front of the windows. “You won’t get caught?” he asked, staring out over the city.

  “No.”

  “And you’ll delete everything, right afterwards?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Of course. I promise.” And then I frowned because saying that felt weird.

  He sighed. “Okay. Do it.”

  I rolled over to my desk and went to work. Hacking can be fiddly but it doesn’t consume my whole brain the way math does. So I had plenty of time to think: why had it felt so strange, when I’d said I promise? I’d only said it to humor him, but the words had felt big and weighty as they left my lips. They mattered.

  And that made me think of how he’d stared at me in horror, when I’d suggested the hack. He hadn’t wanted me to do something bad. He wanted to protect me, in some way, keep me clean: or at least, stop me getting any dirtier. That should have seemed silly, but it didn’t. It felt good. And it made me wonder whether he had a point. Had I been hacking for so long that my moral compass had drifted?

  I was one step away from completing the hack when I hit a problem. I’d gotten access to the massive database of what everyone had been searching for, but I couldn’t figure out how to sift through it for the combination we needed. Fortunately, I know Lily, who’s just about the best in the world when it comes to fooling around with databases. I messaged her and she said she could help, but that she was riding with her boyfriend, Bull, and couldn’t be back at her computer for another hour.