The Darker Side (7 page)

She doesn’t so much step back as shift her weight onto her right leg. I can see her considering what I’m saying, weighing whatever directive she’d been given regarding keeping an eye on us against the wisdom of bugging the Director. She’s not worried, she’s thinking it through. Hinson is used to exercising her own discretion.

“Look,” I say, to help her along, “You know I’m not here just because the Director ordered me to be.”

“Functionally, you are.”

“Functionally, but not
actually
. I’m here because the congressman’s wife asked for me.”

The smallest of smiles ghosts her lips, a slight softening of that all-business blankness. It’s a smile of respect, an appreciation of my not-so-subtle name-dropping.

“Fine, Agent Barrett,” she says, stepping back now. She reaches into her inside jacket pocket, giving me a glimpse of a weapon held by an under-the-armpit shoulder holster. She produces a simple white business card and gives it to me. The card says:
Hinson
in black type, followed by a phone number and e-mail address. Nothing else.

I glance at her. “We’re into brevity, I see.”

She shrugs. “I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve handed that card out. Please call if you need anything. You can reach me twenty-four seven.”

She turns and walks off without another word, pumps clacking against the cold gray concrete of the hangar.

Round one to me, but I remember AD Jones’s warning and I’m sure now he was right to give it.

“Hm,” Alan rumbles, “how do you describe someone like that? Scary? Tough? Both?”

“Describe her as she lives to be,” I murmur.

“Which is?”

“Useful. Useful is her higher power. Now let’s check out our crime scene.”

“I’VE NEVER BEEN ON A
totally empty plane before,” Callie says. “It’s odd.”

“Too quiet,” Alan observes.

They’re right. Under normal circumstances, planes have their own noise, a kind of murmuring crowd sound. This one is a tomb.

“What is this, a seven twenty-seven?” Alan asks.

“This is a seven thirty-seven eight hundred,” James replies. “Medium-sized, narrow body, seats one hundred sixty-two passengers in a two-class layout—which is what this plane has. It’s one hundred twenty-nine feet long with a wingspan of a hundred twelve feet. It weighs ninety-one thousand pounds empty, can travel over three thousand nautical miles fully loaded, and has a cruising speed of roughly mach point seven.”

Alan rolls his eyes. “Thanks, Encyclopedia Brown.”

“Where was she seated?” I ask.

Alan consults the file. “Twenty F. Window seat.”

I frown. “One question to ask: How did he ensure he had a seat next to her? That requires prior knowledge of her seating arrangements. We need to find out how she booked her flight.”

“There are too many variables here,” James says.

I glance at him. “Meaning?”

“Look, the way he killed her
required
that she have a window seat.” He pulls the file from Alan’s hands and removes a photograph. “He left her leaning up against the window, with a blanket pulled over her, like she was asleep. He wouldn’t have been able to do that if she was sitting in the middle seat, much less an aisle.”

“So?”

“My point is, there’s various ways he could have found out what her seating assignment was. He could have bribed someone, or hacked into the system. From there, he could have requested the seat next to hers, or talked the person who was originally supposed to sit there into giving it up to him, any of a number of things. But post nine eleven, there’s virtually no way he could have
guaranteed
she’d have gotten a window seat. No way to plan or arrange that.”

I understand now what James is saying. “Killing her on the plane wasn’t a given.”

He nods. “Right.”

It’s a tiny thing, but, as always, it is a piece of the overall puzzle, a part of seeing the man who did this.

He started out with the decision to kill Lisa Reid, not the decision to kill her on a plane. He stalked her, watched her, gathered information about her life. He found out she was going on a trip, found out somehow that she had gotten a window seat, and only then planned and arranged killing her here. If events hadn’t fallen into place the way he needed them to, he would have killed her somewhere else.

“Location interested him,” I murmur, “but it was an aside, a novelty, a ‘see what I can do.’ She was the most important factor, not the location. Lisa was the key.”

“Wait,” Callie says. “There’s another possibility, yes?”

“Which is?”

“That it was a random killing. Perhaps the location
was
the key factor for him. He got himself a middle seat and planned to kill whoever was unlucky enough to be sitting next to him, and that just happened to be Lisa. Maybe he has a problem with this airline, or air travel in general. I’ve wanted to kill off an obnoxious fellow passenger myself once or twice.”

“Possible and definitely disturbing,” I allow, “but unlikely. The fact that it was Lisa Reid—transgendered person and offspring of a congressional family?” I shake my head. “That’s not a coincidence. He likes planning and control. Victim choice would be an integral part of that. I could be wrong, but…this doesn’t feel random to me.”

Callie considers this, nods in agreement. “Point taken.”

We move down the single aisle. The 737-800 has the classic seating arrangement, rows of three seats on either side. The air is cool but not cold yet. Airplanes hold heat well. We arrive at 20F.

“How far did their Crime Scene Unit get, Callie?” I ask.

She flips through the file. “Full photographs, with good coverage both before and after removal of the body. They collected her luggage, which is down there in the hangar. That’s about it.”

“Someone jumped on this one fast,” Alan observes.

I take a moment and look. Nothing fancy, nothing psychic. This is it, right here, the place where one human being murdered another. A life ended in that seat by the window. If you believe in the soul, and I do, this is the location where the
essence
of the
who
of Lisa Reid disappeared forever.

I’m struck, as always, by how inadequate the location of death is when compared to the truth of death itself. I saw a pretty young woman once, staked out in the dirt. She was naked. She’d been strangled. Her tongue lolled from her swollen, beaten mouth. Her open eyes stared at the sky. She still had some of her beauty, but it was fading fast, being eaten around the edges by the coming entropy. Dead as she was, she still put the dirt to shame. There was no forest, no ground, and no sky, there was only her. No canvas exists that can really add to an ended life; death frames itself.

“I see blood on her seat cushion,” Callie observes, jarring me from my thoughts. “Easiest thing to do will be to just take the whole cushion. Take hers, take his, then search for prints. That’s a good avenue. It would have stood out if he’d worn gloves. Then vacuum everything for trace. That’s pretty much going to be it.”

“I think he would have taken something,” James notes.

I turn to him. “What?”

“A trophy. He left something in her, the cross. He’s into symbols. He needed to take something.”

Not all serial killers take trophies, but I agree with James. It feels right.

“Could have been anything,” Alan says. “Jewelry, something from her purse, a piece of her hair.” He shrugs. “Anything.”

“We’ll go through her belongings, see if something obvious is missing,” I say.

“It’s only getting colder, so what’s the game plan, honey-love?”

Callie’s right. I’ve started to get the smell of him but there’s nothing else here that’s going to help me.

“You and James are going to stay here and finish processing the scene. Call me when you’re done. Alan, I want you to drop me off at Lisa’s place, and then I want you to interview the witnesses. Flight attendants, passengers, anyone and everyone. Follow up on how he bought his ticket as well. Did he use cash? A credit card? If he used a credit card, it was probably a false identity. How’d he make that happen?”

“Got it.”

Callie nods her assent.

I take a final look at the window Lisa had died next to, turn, and walk away from it forever. It’ll fade eventually, I know. Someday I’ll be sitting at a window seat on an airplane and I won’t even think of Lisa Reid.

Someday.

6

ALAN AND I ARE ON THE FREEWAY HEADING BACK TO ALEXANDRIA.
We don’t have much company on the road; just a few other night-drivers who, like us, probably wish they were in bed.

Alan is silent as he drives. We have the heaters blowing full tilt to deal with the cold. Darkness has really settled in, darkness and silence and
still
.

“What is it about the cold that makes things seem more quiet?” I wonder out loud.

Alan glances over at me and smiles. “Things
are
more quiet. You’re used to Los Angeles. Doesn’t get cold enough there to drive people and animals inside, usually. It does here.”

He’s right. I’ve experienced this before. Between the ages of six and ten, before my mom died of cancer, we used to take family driving trips. Mom and Dad would synchronize their vacation time and we’d spend two weeks trekking halfway across the U.S. and back.

I remember the hard parts of these trips; the unending sound of the wheels on the road and the world rushing by, the intense, almost painful boredom. I also remember playing car games with my mom. I-spy, counting “pididdles” (cars with only one headlight working). Raucous, off-tune car songs. Most of all, I remember the destinations.

In a four-year period, I saw great parts of Rocky Mountain National Park, Yellowstone, Mount Rushmore. We crossed the Mississippi in a few places, ate gumbo in New Orleans. We rarely stayed in hotels, preferring to camp instead.

One year, Dad got especially ambitious and drove us all the way to upstate New York in the fall. He wanted us to see the Catskill Mountains, where Rip Van Winkle was supposed to have snoozed. It was an unbearably long trip and we were worn out and cranky by the time we arrived. We pulled into the campground and I got out of that car as fast as I could.

The trees were incredible, either evergreen or with leaves on the turn, short and tall, young and old. It was cold, cold like it is here, and I remember the bite of it on my cheeks, my breath in the air.

“Not only do I have to pee in the woods,” my mother had groused, “but I have to get goose bumps on my ass while I do it.”

“Isn’t it beautiful, though?” my dad had said, a little bit of awe in his voice, oblivious to her anger.

That was one of the things I loved about my dad. He was eternally young when it came to viewing the world. My mom was more careful. Like me, she had a cynical edge. Mom kept our feet on the ground, which was important, but Dad kept our heads in the clouds, which had its own value.

I remember her turning to look at him, ready with some smart quip that died on her lips when she saw the actual joy on his face. She’d pushed her grumbling away and turned to look as well, finally seeing what he was seeing, getting infected with his wonder, stumbling into his dream.

“It is,” she’d marveled. “It really is.”

“Can I explore?” I’d asked.

“Sure, honey,” Dad had replied. “But not too far. Stay close.”

“Okay, Daddy,” I’d agreed and had bounded off, heading into the trees.

I’d kept my word and stayed close. I didn’t need to go far; fifty steps and I had found myself alone, more alone than I’d ever been. I’d stopped to take this in, not so much afraid as interested. I’d arrived in a small clearing, surrounded by a number of tall trees with dying leaves that hadn’t given up the ghost just yet. I’d spread my arms and tilted my head all the way back and closed my eyes and listened to the stillness and the silence.

Years later I’d find the body of a young woman in the woods of Angeles Crest and remember that stillness and silence and wonder what it was like to be killed in the middle of nowhere, to have that solitude as a cathedral for your screams.

I was ten years old on that trip to New York, and it was the last trip we took before my mom got sick. When I think of my parents, I always think of them then, at that age, just thirty and thirty-one, younger than I am now. When I think of being young, I remember those trips we took, I-spy and pididdle and are-we-there-yet and my mother’s complaints. I remember my father’s wonder, my mother’s love for him, and I remember the leaves and the trees and the time when stillness held beauty instead of the memories of death.

LISA’S CONDO IS NEW CONSTRUCTION,
located near the center of Alexandria. The buildings are nice, but don’t really fit their surrounds.

“Kind of like California in Virginia,” Alan observes, putting voice to my thoughts.

The condo is brown wood and stucco on the outside, with its own small driveway. No one has entered yet; there’s no yellow crime scene tape on the door. We pull in, exit, and walk up to the front door. Alan will clear the condo with me before leaving to go chase up on witnesses.

We’d swung by the morgue so I could grab Lisa’s keys. I am fiddling with them in the bad light from the streetlamps to find the one we need.

“Probably that one,” Alan notes, indicating a gold-colored key.

I fit the key into the deadbolt lock and it turns with a click. I put the key ring into my jacket pocket and we both pull our weapons.

“Ladies first,” Alan says.

THE CONDO HAS TWO BEDROOMS,
one of which doubles as a home office. We clear these as well as the guest half-bath and the master bathroom before holstering our guns.

“Nice place,” Alan observes.

“Yeah.”

It’s decorated in earth tones, muted without being bland. Catches of color appear throughout, from maroon throw pillows on the couch to white cotton curtains with blue flower trim along the edges. It’s clean and odorless, no smell of pets or dirty clothes or food left out. She didn’t smoke. The wooden coffee table facing the couch is covered in a happy disarray of magazines and books. Lisa was tidy but not fastidious.