Hold Me in the Dark Read online

  The detective shook his head. Not like he was being an ass. Like he had no words to describe it.

  That bad feeling I’d had came back.

  “What floor?” I asked.

  Giggs looked over his shoulder at the apartment building and his face paled a little more. He swallowed. Swallowed again. “Fourth.” He said it quick and quiet, like he was trying not to disturb his stomach. But it didn’t work. As I walked towards the building, I could hear him throwing up behind me. Not a good sign.

  On the fourth floor, there was an officer standing guard, a big guy with black hair. His uniform said Kowalski. He looked queasy, too, but he was holding up better than Giggs. I noticed he’d taken up position just far enough down the hall that he couldn’t see inside the apartment. Another bad sign.

  “Anyone go in or out since it happened?”

  “Just me, Sir. I was first on the scene. Went in to check the victim was dead, then locked it down and called Detective Giggs. He had a look at the scene and called the FBI. No one else.”

  “Good.” I took a step down the hallway.

  “Sir?” blurted Kowalski.

  I turned back to him. Kowalski was at least as big as me but in that second, he looked like a scared kid. He stood there, big-eyed and open-mouthed, unable to find the words. But I got it. He was trying to warn me. On some primal, instinctual level, he didn’t want me to go in there.

  I nodded that I understood and carried on down the hall. My stomach was churning, the hairs on the back of my neck rising. I swore it was getting colder.

  The apartment door was wide open, crime scene tape across it like it was trying to hold the badness in.

  I looked.

  —

  Now I knew why Detective Giggs had called us in. God, to think I’d actually been glad to get this case.

  All I wanted was to turn around and walk out of there. Tell Giggs tough, we were busy, he could handle it himself. No, wait: I wanted to do one more thing. I wanted to slam that apartment’s door tight shut, lock it and never let anyone go inside again.

  “Sir?” asked Kowalski from down the hall. “Did you ever see anything like that before?”

  “No,” I said quietly. “I didn’t.”

  But I couldn’t walk away. Because Giggs had been right to call us. The NYPD were way out of their depth. And if I didn’t take this, no one would. And the person responsible would go free.

  “You said you went in to check the victim,” I said. “And Giggs, too. But the floor looks undisturbed.”

  “We figured out a way, sir.” Kowalski picked up a plank of wood and some bricks. “They’re doing some construction, one street over. I borrowed these.” He put the bricks just outside the apartment’s door, then rested the plank on them so it extended into the room, hanging in mid air like a diving board. Finally, he stood on the hallway end of the plank to counterbalance me. Now I could go inside without touching the floor.

  “That’s pretty smart, Kowalski,” I said. “Got a feeling you’ll make detective one day.”

  Kowalski glanced inside the room and quickly looked away. “Not sure I want to, sir.”

  I took another look inside. “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t blame you.”

  I walked slowly down the plank and into the room. I didn’t look at anything else but what was in front of me. I’ve never lost it at a crime scene, but I had to be careful because I could feel it starting: that cold that sinks into your skin and soaks into your brain, building up and up until it comes out as throwing up or pissing yourself or just running, bolting down the hallway and not stopping until you feel the sun on your face again. I’d seen all those things happen, over the years, but I couldn’t let any of them happen to me because if I lost it, I still had to come back and carry on. I wouldn’t pass this one on to anyone else. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

  Just focus on the body.

  It was in the center of the room. A black guy in a suit, sprawled on his back on the floor, his eyes closed as if asleep. I could see why Kowalski had had to check he was dead. But looking closer, I could see the gray tint of the skin. I knew what that was.

  The body had been completely drained of blood.

  At any other crime scene, the next logical question would be, what did they do with all the blood? But not at this one.

  Don’t freak out, Calahan. Don’t you fucking freak out.

  I took a deep, slow breath and finally allowed myself to look around.

  Every single square inch of the walls, the ceiling, even the floor, was covered in a pattern, intricate and incredibly complex. And so disturbing, you’d go crazy if you looked at it too long.

  It was a thing that didn’t live in nature, that had no place in our world. It was made up of things like tentacles, dark and slender, some twenty feet long, so knotted and tangled together that they were difficult to trace back: I couldn’t see where the center or body was, if there even was one.

  There was no one place you could say looked like eyes, and yet it felt like you were being watched. There was nothing that looked exactly like a mouth, but you felt you were about to be devoured. When you looked closely, the entire thing was made up of writing, the letters packed so close they formed solid lines.

  And the whole thing was written in bright red blood.

  The last place I looked was straight up. JESUS!

  I did something I hadn’t done in a very long time: I crossed myself.

  Directly above me, as if waiting to drop from the ceiling, was the heart of the thing. I could feel myself starting to panic-breathe. It was spidery, but it didn’t have enough legs: only seven. And the legs were too long, curling and winding, reaching out for me. It made me think of something that lived at the bottom of the sea and never sees sunlight.

  The room was wrong. Wrong on some deep, primal level. I could feel sweat soaking my shirt and I felt twitchy and unstable, eyes darting around the room too fast. Fight or flight. My body wanted me out of there, now, and only my stubborn brain was refusing. I looked down at my hands. Jesus, I’m shaking.

  I crouched on the plank so that I could see the words that made up the thing up close. I squinted. Turned my head. But I couldn’t make sense of it. The letters weren’t right, there were too many Ss and Is—

  And then my brain realigned and I realized I wasn’t looking at letters at all. All those Ss and Is were fives and ones. I was looking at numbers. And the words weren’t words. They were little groups of numbers, symbols and Greek letters. Equations.

  The whole thing was made up of equations.

  I’ve been around. I’ve seen more murder scenes than I can count. But this killer was like nothing I’d ever seen. He hadn’t panicked and run, or tried to cover things up. He’d stayed at the scene for what must have been hours, writing all this, just to send us a message. That took nerves: the guy was ice cold. And, given that I couldn’t make head or tail of the equations, he was smart—a hell of a lot smarter than me. And given the blood, and the patterns, he was batshit crazy.

  Cold, smart and crazy. A really bad combination. I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions, but I knew the type and these guys never kill just once.

  A feeling washed over me, one I’d had many times before. I was suddenly dog-tired and ahead of me was a long swim through an ocean of cold black tar. I didn’t want this case. I never even wanted to be a cop.

  But if I didn’t stop this guy, who would?

  I started making phone calls. Kowalski helped me fetch more planks from the construction site and we got the crime scene photographer in and meticulously photographed every inch of the pattern. But I knew flat pictures weren’t going to do the job of capturing it. Nothing could. To get the feel for how it arched overhead, how it spread like a dark cancer around corners and up door frames, you had to be there.

  I checked around for other clues. The killer had been careful: we couldn’t find a print anywhere. The only thing I did find was a fragment of a cherry-red plastic wrapper, sucked tight against
the intake of the air conditioner. It was a triangle, as if someone had torn open a packet and discarded the corner. I bagged it and shoved it in my pocket to go into evidence.

  The coroner came and took the body away. I stumbled outside and stood there in the sunlight, trying to get some warmth back into my bones. The light was turning gold and red: another hour and the sun would be down. I’d spent the entire day working the scene, lunchtime forgotten. I told myself that’s why I felt like death.

  I got a text from one of the eggheads in the FBI’s tech division. I’d sent her a couple of photos of the equations, just to see what she thought. The text said, Way out of my league. I passed them around, but no one here has any idea what they mean.

  The killer had sent us a message, knowing we wouldn’t be smart enough to read it. He’s out there, laughing at us.

  There’d been a thought trying to surface in my head all day, ever since I’d first seen the equations, but until now, I’d been mercilessly holding it down. I knew someone. Someone even smarter than the killer. Someone who could read the equations.

  No. No way was I bringing her into this. I wouldn’t wish that scene on another FBI agent, let alone a civilian. And especially not her. Not someone I... liked.

  And there was a bigger problem. I was too damn attracted to her and that would make being around her hell. I couldn’t get involved with anyone. Not after what I’d done. The last thing I deserved was happiness and the last thing she deserved was a screw-up like me.

  I couldn’t call her. For both our sakes.

  5

  Yolanda

  I WAS ON the bike, sweat pouring off me as I pedaled for my life. The muscles in my legs are just fine and the bones have healed: it’s the nerves that no longer work. Without nerves, I can’t make the muscles do anything. And if muscles sit around doing nothing, they atrophy, and you get matchstick legs.

  The bike prevents that. I stick electrodes to my legs, little electric shocks stimulate the muscles, my legs pedal and my muscles get a workout. Having your lower body working away with no conscious control is about as disconcerting as it sounds and it doesn’t make it any less exhausting. But it works and anything that helps me feel a little more normal is a win, so I do it every day.

  The problem is that it leaves my brain free to wander. And it kept coming back to one thing, as it had done for weeks.

  Sam Calahan was like a big, heavy rock that sat right at the center of my mind. He just had so much rugged, muscled mass, so much gravity, that every other thought got captured and sucked in until it slapped up against that hard roughness. Should I make coffee after this? I wonder how Calahan takes his. I need to get some new workout pants. Pants... damn, his ass looks good in those suit pants. God, I’m so sweaty. He looks like he works out. I bet he does it topless, all tanned and glistening—

  Every time I closed my eyes, he was close to me again, his stubbled jaw inches from rasping against my cheek. I could feel his hand brushing my bare wrist, the hot heaviness of him heating my skin. I could smell vanilla and cinnamon—

  A timer beeped and I lifted myself off the bike and into my chair, then took a shower in the wet room. Thin white lines gleamed on my thighs and calves as they caught the light: my legs are a mess of scars from the accident.

  But hey, it’s not like anyone’s ever going to see them.

  I pulled on some fresh clothes and rolled over to the chalkboards. But as soon as I started working, I could hear his voice, deep and rough and vibrating all the way down my spine. Math was impossible. Dammit!

  Fine. I’d get him out of my system. I’d find out about him. That would demystify him and then I could forget about him.

  I shot over to my computer and rattled his name off on the keyboard, running a deep search on all the databases I’m plugged into. I blushed at just how urgently I did it, how breathless I went when the first picture appeared.

  There was a group shot of him in his police academy graduating class. Another of him in a newspaper after a court case that had put some big mafia don in jail. He’d looked rumpled even then. But he looked happy. Up until….

  The change seemed to come four years ago. In all the photos after that, his eyes had that sadness they had today. What happened?

  There wasn’t much publicly accessible, so I did what anyone would do: I hacked the FBI. That isn’t as big of a deal as it sounds. They rely on a flawed encryption algorithm I broke years ago, so I just breezed in.

  I dug through Calahan’s record. A whole slew of commendations but an even bigger list of reprimands. He must be wearing out the carpet between his desk and his boss’s office.

  He seemed to be working on a new case. There was a folder called SoC Photos. Curious, I opened it and brought up the first one—

  A man in a suit lay on the floor. His black skin had turned a sickly gray and there was something about the way his limbs lay, too loose, too slack—

  SoC. Scene of Crime.

  I let out a moan of horror and grabbed for the mouse to close the picture, but nudged the scroll wheel by accident. Another picture appeared and I flinched, bracing myself.

  But it wasn’t another body. It was math.

  Equations, but not written in an order I could make sense of. They were arranged in a sweeping, curving path and I had to rotate the image to follow them. They were written in some weird, red ink—

  I realized what it was and my stomach lurched. But I couldn’t look away. The math had a rhythm to it, a shape. It was like discordant music, rasping and jangling against my nerves... and yet, at the same time, it was expertly composed. I went back to the folder of photos: God, there were hundreds. I opened another and another. Some elements made sense: that was to do with probabilities within a population, that was to do with time, measured over centuries and—

  I leaned forward, transfixed. That’s for calculating the routes of wormholes in space. The math was amazing in complexity and scale. My brain itched to see the whole thing, to dive in and begin solving it. For a moment, I felt a little drunk, like a crossword fiend who’s just been handed a crossword puzzle the size of a football field. And yet there was a wrongness to it that made my skin crawl. Math had always been beautifully pure, in my mind, beyond love or hate or politics. But this math felt evil.

  And then I saw it. A giant, starfish-like thing with seven legs that stretched out to the corners of my screen. I went rigid in my chair, my skin going cold. There was something deeply disturbing about it. I’d been using the mouse pointer to keep my place, but when I brought it close to the starfish thing….

  I didn’t want to touch it, in case—

  You’re being stupid.

  In case it moved.

  How could someone create this? How could someone be both so brilliant that they could handle these sorts of equations, but so disturbed that they could forge them into... that?

  I zoomed in until the equations that made up the thing filled my screen and went to work. An hour passed. Two. The equations were repetitive, but a little different each time….

  I drew in a strangled gasp, grabbed my phone and dug Calahan’s number from his FBI file. Three rings and then I heard that gravelly, no-bullshit voice. “Calahan.”

  I wasn’t ready for the effect his voice had on me, my entire body singing like a tuning fork. “It’s a countdown,” I blurted.

  There was a second’s pause. When he spoke again, his voice was different. Gentler. “Yolanda?!”

  “It’s a countdown,” I said again.

  “What are you—What’s a countdown?”

  I live so much in my own head, I sometimes forget that other people aren’t in here with me. “I saw the crime scene photos,” I told him. “The equations. I hacked the FBI.”

  “You—” It started as a yell, but became a hard whisper. I imagined him furtively cradling his phone. “You did what?!”

  Now he said it like that, hacking the FBI did sound kind of bad. “That doesn’t matter,” I told him. “I saw the equations.
I can help you.”

  Silence for a few seconds as he debated. I could feel my heart thumping.

  “We’re fine,” Calahan said at last. “We’ve got our own people.”

  “Have they solved it yet?”

  “Not all of it,” He sounded defensive. Not any of it. “But they’ll get there.”

  “You don’t have time,” I told him. “That black spidery, starfish thing—you know the part I’m talking about?”

  A second’s pause. “Yeah,” he muttered, and I could hear the unease in his voice. He feels it, too, when he looks at that thing.

  “The equations count time. It’s cyclic, but it reduces each time, until it disappears completely. I can’t tell when without seeing the whole thing, but… it’s a countdown, Calahan!” I swallowed. “Until he does it again.”

  Silence.

  “I can help,” I said desperately. “Let me help.”

  I could hear him breathing. I didn’t understand: what is there to debate?

  Then, “No.”

  And before I could argue, he ended the call.

  6

  Calahan

  I STEPPED BACK from the board. In the center, photos of the apartment building together with a map. Then photos of the victim and details of his family. And around that in a huge, red cloud, the photos of the equations we’d still made no progress in solving.

  The idea of the board is, it helps you think in new ways and see connections you’d missed. But however hard I looked, there was nothing. It had been two days since I took the case and I was no closer to a suspect.

  The door opened behind me and someone approached. I didn’t need to turn around: I recognized the heels. A moment later, a paper cup of coffee was pressed into my hand.

  “Security said you’d been here all night,” said Carrie. She looked at the board. “Want to talk me through it?”