That Darkness

Book 1: Gardiner and Renner Novel

by Lisa Black

Genres: Psychological Thrillers; Mystery; Medical Thrillers

Synopsis

In this tour de force of psychological suspense, bestselling author Lisa Black draws from her experience as a forensic investigator to create fascinating characters, including a woman in a lifelong relationship with death. Her latest case is an unidentified female in her early teens, discovered in a local cemetery. More shocking than the girl's injuries-for Maggie at least-is the fact that no one has reported her missing. She and the detectives assigned to the case (including her cop ex-husband) are determined to follow every lead, run down every scrap of evidence. But the monster they seek is watching every move, closer to them than they could possibly imagine.

Release date: April 26, 2016

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

Monday, 8:10 p.m.

The room wasn’t much, just a steel table and chairs, old paint on the walls with the occasional rust stain, two windows frosted by contact paper and a battered desk in the corner, well out of splattering range. A siren sounded in the distance but traffic on the street outside stayed minimal at this past-dinnertime hour. A typical county services budget leftover, a hand-me-down formerly used as a storage room, standard government issue all the way. Jack Renner’s clients would have seen many such rooms in their time and it would fit their expectations. Opulence would make them nervous, and he didn’t want them nervous.

Jack now sat across the table from his current target, the man’s file open before him, a twelve-year history of wrack and ruin. Impressive—considering the compilation began at age ten—and inevitable. Father unknown, mother’s drug problem kept her drifting through jails and invariably on the outs with children’s services, time spent in foster homes, then a bad series of abuses in one. By the next the abused had turned into the abuser and had to be removed. After fifteen he had abandoned the system completely and all entries after that time were arrests and field interviews. He had already been incarcerated twice, once for murder during the commission of armed robbery, but the penalty for one drug dealer killing another drug dealer had not been too stiff.

Jack thumbed through three pages of arrests, possible involvements, and “potential suspect” type reports, though he knew them all practically by heart. He had learned to do his homework—that lesson, like all the important ones, garnered the hard way.

“So,” he said. “Brian.”

Brian. Not De’Andre’je or Ziggy Z or Killer. Just Brian. Jack found that almost remarkably admirable and stopped himself immediately. He wasn’t supposed to admire them. That could cause serious problems.

But though Brian Johnson’s name might not fit the part, his wardrobe did. He wore designer jeans three sizes too big, two equally oversize basketball jerseys, enough gold jewelry to stock a kiosk at the mall even if one left out the metal glinting from his mouth. He wore his cap backward and had tattoos everywhere that Jack could see skin, his hands, his forearms, his neck, his earlobe. Jack couldn’t see what he was wearing on his feet, but they smelled. Modern-day criminals did not seem to understand how impossible they made it to take them seriously when they dressed like a twelve-year-old who had dressed like a gangster for Halloween.

But Brian Johnson didn’t appear too concerned about Jack’s impressions. He lounged back in the chair, as well as one could lounge in a cushionless steel chair that had been bolted to the floor. The table had been bolted as well. It kept things from being hurled in Jack’s direction during fits of rage, and made cleanup easier. The young man, after a quick assessment of the room—exits, potential threats, items to exploit, returned his cold gaze to Jack. “Who’re you, then?”

“I’m Dr. Renner. This is a pilot program to see if we can’t get at some of the root causes of your difficulties.”

“The only difficulty I have is bein’ here when I should be out.” He meant out of custody. Technically he had been released an hour ago, but Jack had let him believe that this “exit interview” was not optional.

“Anything you say or, within reason, do in this room will not be used against you in court or entered in any official record. This is purely research. Anonymous research.”

The man raised one eyebrow. Everything he had ever said or done had been used against him, beginning when he soiled his first diaper and his mother punched him hard enough to break a rib. Why would this be any different? “What if I jumped out of this chair and ripped your throat open, watched you bleed out all over this table? Would that be held against me?”

“I said within reason,” Jack told him, not too concerned. They all had to establish the ground rules at first, mark their territory, stare down the other dog. But while Brian Johnson could be extraordinarily dangerous out on the street, here Jack felt fairly certain he would behave. A frequent flier like Brian Johnson always behaved while in custody; he had no reason not to. He knew brute force would get him nowhere, not while surrounded by armed guards, and lack of cooperation would only delay his release. Everyone in his world knew who and what he was and he needed to prove exactly nothing, in jail or out of jail; plus given the competitive nature of his line of work he felt generally safer in custody than he did on the street. Now, even though Jack had removed him from the armed guards and the barred windows, the same mindset continued.

And, Jack had made a number of modifications to the room.

And, he wore the standard-issue bulletproof vest, the better to absorb any blows or shivs that might erupt during the conversation.

And he had done this fourteen times before without a major difficulty. Minor hitches, yes, but those had been adjusted until his system had become as foolproof as humanly possible. So he didn’t worry.

Not too much.

“So let’s get started,” he said, closing the file and folding his hands on top of it. “Last week, you raped and beat Ms. Brenda Guerin with a pistol and a crowbar. She is in a medically induced coma—at the taxpayers’ expense—and her right ear is permanently disfigured. Oh, and deaf.”

Brian Johnson sat up and scowled, a formidable sight. “I ain’t sayin’ nothin’. If you think I’m believing that won’t be used against me shit, you are even crazier than you look.”

“No, no, it won’t be. I’m not here to prosecute or even investigate Ms. Guerin’s injuries. You can see I’m not writing down or recording anything you say. All I really want to know is, what caused this altercation? Why did you do it?”

The scowl deepened. “I ain’t—”

“Okay, sorry—that was an abrupt beginning. Let’s do this. Someone did this to Ms. Guerin. Why do you think someone would have done that?”

Johnson slumped back. “Like we’re speaking hypothetically?”

“Yes.”

The man shrugged. “Maybe ’cause the bitch just wouldn’t shut up.”

Jack let that hang in the air for a moment before continuing. “Shut up about what?”

Johnson paused a long time before answering, and Jack let the quiet surroundings work on him. No inmates shouting, no homeboys breathing down his neck, watching from the tenement towers. No lawyers, no detectives. No jury. Just one obviously naïve as hell do-gooding sociologist.

Plus, like all people, Brian Johnson loved to talk about himself, and never got sufficient opportunities to do so.

“Some baby she thought she was having. And money, she wanted more money. Throwin’ other guys in your face. You know, typical bitch stuff.”

Jack nodded, face calm, neutral. “And Tina Mullen? Last month? She needed forty-two stitches in her face and arms.”

Another shrug. “Same thing. They all alike.”

“Why do you think meth has overtaken heroin in street value?”

Johnson blinked and straightened, happier to discuss business. “Coupla things. Price is better ’cause it’s produced locally. Less transportation costs. And you got more control over supply.”

“So if your supplier is late, you can go see him.”

“ ’Stead of relaying messages all the way to damn Guatemala, yeah, getting some spic runaround, blaming it on the border cops.”

“Last week one of your suppliers was found with third-degree burns over three-quarters of his body. He barely has any skin left; they’re still not sure he’s going to make it.”

“That”—Johnson sat back again—“could have been an accident. Meth is wicked shit to make, man.”

“True.”

“Wicked.” Johnson shook his head. “Better to just put a bullet in the guy’s brain, than keep him sufferin’ with all those tubes ’n’ shit.”

“True,” Jack repeated. “I agree. But what about the cat?”

A pause. “You know about that, even?”

Jack Renner knew about the cat. He knew about Brian beating his foster mother with a golf club in the sixth grade. He knew about the man’s recruiting methods, his ways of increasing territory, how his guys branched out into armed robbery and home invasions when the local economy tightened up. He knew because he had read every form, every note, and every report written on Brian Johnson. They were not difficult to find once you knew where to look.

So Brian Johnson had some catching up to do in this contest, and everything in Brian Johnson’s life was a contest. He had been studying Jack as intently as Jack had been studying him, but didn’t seem to have stumbled over any red flags yet.

Jack had dark hair and a bit of a baby face, appearing younger than his real age of fifty-one. His looks were rugged—not as in ruggedly handsome, only as in rugged—so that he could be equally convincing as a street thug or a Special Forces soldier, yet when he combed his hair back and put on a pair of glasses he looked a bit dorky, professorial. He also kept his movements low and nonthreatening, hands on the table, expressions accepting, because the Brian Johnsons of the world were not stupid. They wouldn’t have survived in their violent world long enough to pass twenty if they were stupid.

However, it was remarkably easy to convince people you were what you were not, if you simply paid a little attention to detail.

Jack was good at detail. “Hey, are you hungry? It’s past dinnertime. We could order in.”

A half smile. He had nice skin, this demon of the streets, high cheekbones and good structure. In proper clothes he would be a handsome young man, ready to take on Wall Street or med school. It was a pity, it truly was, and the weight of it settled on Jack’s shoulders. Brian Johnson was a wild, dangerous animal . . . and he had never had the slightest option of being anything else. It was not his fault that the world had tossed him into a pack of jackals from day one. If anything, he should be commended for rising to the top of that pack.

So fine, Jack thought, duly commended. But still dangerous.

Brian Johnson examined this latest offer for land mines. “You goin’ to feed me too?”

“Like I said—pilot project. What’s your favorite? Anything you want, lobster, barbecue, filet mignon. On the taxpayers’ dime,” he added, his fourth lie since they entered the room.

It took a while, but he finally got Brian to admit a preference for scallops and sweet potato fries and Jack ordered from Lola. While they waited for the food to arrive Jack went back to the incident with the cat.

Brian sighed. “I didn’t really mean for that to happen.”

Was this a sign of regret? Remorse? Could there still be a human being in there somewhere?

“I was just goin’ to do the tip of the tail, watch it run around, that’s all. But it wiggled and twisted round, and the gas got everywhere.”

“But you still lit the match,” Jack pointed out.

Small shrug. “Already poured the gas. No sense it going to waste.”

He didn’t even bother with hypotheticals. With everything else the police wanted him for they would never waste time with animal cruelty.

The food arrived, delivered by a young man in a ball cap and Jack tipped him well. The man saw part of the room, but one delivery would not linger for long in the mind of the average gofer. Brian lit into his seafood and seemed to enjoy it. Jack picked at his, apologized for the plastic utensils—“rules,” he explained. Just because he might not be overly worried about his own safety didn’t make him reckless enough to hand a steak knife to a violent criminal.

He asked a question here or there about Brian’s early years, his troubles with the authorities, but paid minimum attention to the answers he already knew. He offered Brian Johnson a drink, a real drink, asking him to name his poison, then gently leading him around to the Crown Royal, Johnson’s favorite. Jack knew that, too. He had a number of bottles installed on the sidebar, its new granite countertop the only sign of renovation in the room, all top-shelf. His clients deserved a little top shelf in their lives.

He set down the tumbler with its amber liquid, pushing aside the wariness in Johnson’s eyes with another explanation of the pilot program. It amazed him how easily they always accepted this story, but then guys like Johnson had seen countless doctors, counselors, and social workers of every type, the true believers, the burnt-out cynics, the slackers, the rich kids trying to feel good about themselves and the ones who just didn’t give a shit. Guys like Johnson had been through so many programs, schools, incarcerations, examinations, and therapies to know there was always a new bleeding heart with a new idea to save them from themselves. Why not try good food and quiet conversation? It might work. Nothing else had.

“So you never had much of a chance,” Jack stated. He didn’t have to explain what he meant.

“Never. Everybody, everybody, been fightin’ me since I took me my first breath. So I fight back. What else is there?”

“Refill?”

“Don’ min’ if I do.”

Jack carried the glass to the sideboard between the windows, behind where Brian Johnson sat. He picked up the whiskey, tapping it against a liter of Grey Goose. “I believe that when you meet your maker, He will take that into consideration.”

“I met my maker. That bitch is the reason I ain’t Donald Trump. Or the president.”

Brian Johnson didn’t turn to watch what Jack was doing. Brian Johnson wasn’t concerned about what Jack was doing.

The clink had nicely covered the extra movement required for Jack to open the low box behind the bottles and extract his grandfather’s Beretta .22, with an added suppressor. He’d already taken the safety off, but he checked anyway. Details. If you didn’t master the details, they would master you.

Then he turned and placed the glass on the table near Johnson’s left hand. “There you go.”

The guy’s fingers closed around the crystal tumbler, just as Jack lifted the gun and pulled the trigger.

Monday, 4:15 p.m.

Maggie Gardiner’s neck had started to ache about an hour before, and now protested with quick tremors that shot past her shoulder blades and raced along her spine. She didn’t move. Two more of the blasted things and she’d be done. Not done for the day, of course, just for that case.

“Unidentified female,” Denny announced as he walked into the lab. She could hear his footsteps wading through the two counters filled with sinks and gas nozzles and microscopes in order to reach her desk. “Down at the morgue. She was found this afternoon. I know it’s late, but can you run over there and get her prints?”

Maggie didn’t look up, but kept her eyes hovering above the two round magnifying glasses on their squat legs, side by side above two different inked fingerprints. Below the lenses she used two evil-looking metal spikes, slightly thicker than syringe needles, to keep her place as she moved along the tiny ridges of the skin patterns. “Twenty-three pawn slips. This guy pawned his ill-gotten gains in twenty-three different places, like he thought that would help. It only means they can charge him with twenty-three counts. If they charge him at all, of course.”

“The purpose of the justice system is to pursue all wrongdoing,” he agreed piously. “Problem is, there’s too little justice system and too much wrongdoing.”

“And he’s got some of the worst prints I’ve ever seen. I think he washes his hands in battery acid,” Maggie continued to whine as she finished up the comparison and put down her pointers.

“Or he’s a roofer, or a bricklayer,” her boss answered absently, citing two of the professions that are hardest on the skin’s surface. “If you can’t go, I’ll stop there on a roundabout route home.”

She took the sheet of paper he handed her, straining her already pained neck to look up at him. Denny stood well over six feet, his black skin glistening, a worried wrinkle appearing between his eyebrows that had nothing to do with either the unidentified body or Maggie. His wife was about to produce their third child . . . but truthfully Denny always looked like that. He was a worrier.

And the coroner’s office really hated to have their hallways crowded with gurneys while they waited on a fingerprint officer to collect prints.

Maggie shoved aside the twenty-three pawn slips without reluctance. “I’ll take care of Jane Doe. You go home and get some sleep. Save some up for after the baby comes.”

“I wish it could work like that,” her boss muttered.

“Picked out a name yet?”

“My wife’s leaning toward Jessica but I like Angel. What do you think?”

“Angel sounds . . . optimistic.”

“Given what I’ve experienced of fatherhood so far,” he said, “it’s more like delusional.”

She took Chester Avenue down to University Circle, driving a Taurus she had checked out of the city vehicle pool. She had sold her own car when she moved into a loft downtown, within walking distance of the huge Justice Center complex that housed the police department—including the labs—the courtrooms, and all the offices for the attorneys, judges, clerks, civil division, and records that accompanied them. Parking a car cost too much and she never seemed to go anywhere else, anyway.

Cleveland looked good as the sun slipped toward the horizon, one of those spring days with a cobalt-blue sky and fluffy clouds making the reckless promise of a summer to match. Well, the sky looked good; parts of Chester were not exactly picturesque.

Maggie had worked as a civilian criminalist for the police department for fifteen years; she’d started in serology, did some DNA, but they kept threatening to hire only people with doctorates for DNA and even if she had one it meant she’d be stuck in the lab pipetting liquid into tiny test tubes for eight hours a day. Instead she went into crime scene. She began to work with fingerprints (cross training, Denny said innocently), which then became an increasingly large chunk of her job over the years. Maggie didn’t fight this; as she passed thirty she learned to avoid the unpredictable hours and late-night wake-ups of crime scene work as much as possible.

Fingerprint examination was comfortable—comfortable hours, comfortable surroundings, comfortable coworkers. She couldn’t say she enjoyed it because there was little to enjoy about fingerprints; they were pretty much pure tedium. Maggie drew herself to routine even as it oppressed her, like piling on the blankets because the bed is cold, knowing all the while that you’ll wake up at 2 a.m. sweating your ass off. But the next night you feel cold and pile them on again.

So when she needed a break she would double as the lab’s microscopist, an outdated term for the outdated art of looking at really tiny things under a microscope. It gave her eyes a chance to strain in a different way and could be equally peaceful, just Maggie and an ancient Zeiss comparison scope that she wouldn’t let Denny replace because anything the city could afford to purchase in this day and age wouldn’t be as good. And of course she still had to do her rotation on crime scene duty. All this kept her busy. Busy felt good.

She pulled into the tiny lot behind the battered, three-story building, searching carefully for a parking space; parking next door at the medical school would require the rigmarole of getting reimbursed for the two or three dollars it cost. Maggie wouldn’t be there that long.

A guy in a white coat pulled out of a skinny space at the end of the row, grabbing an early end to his workday, and Maggie wedged the pool car into it. A few more clouds had joined the last and the sunlight dimmed that much more. The air was cool but not crisp, already debating how much humidity it might drop on the city during the summer months.

Maggie knew she had to be the only person at her lab who actually liked going to the coroner’s office, and not because she harbored a tendency toward necrophilia. First, it got her out of the lab without requiring great exertion or getting dirty, as when dusting an entire house with fingerprint powder. Second, the coroner’s office was a bright, bustling place with remarkably cheery people. They had pressure, certainly, were as overworked and underpaid as any other government office with no control over their work flow—when people die, they die, and on some days more die than others. But unlike a hospital the patients here were already dead and no worse fate could befall them, and unlike a police department they weren’t on the front lines for the public’s wrath.

All in all, it seemed a pretty cool place to work. Maggie often thought she would apply for an opening there herself, except they rarely came up and she would feel like a skunk if she left Denny.

Maggie wore a uniform of sorts, baggy pants with lots of pockets and an unflattering polo shirt with the police department’s logo embroidered over one breast, so the intake person standing on the dock having a smoke felt no qualms about opening the door for her. She thanked him by name and went inside.

The smell promptly hit her—another reason she had never actually applied for a job there—a combined miasma of slaughterhouse and disinfectant. She tried to keep her breaths shallow and strode up the back hallway, tiled halfway up in burgundy ceramic with light from various doorways spilling into it. She could have been strolling through an old school building if not for the gurneys lined up along one wall. The corpses lay still under their white sheets. Maggie did not look at them and hoped they did not look at her.

Despite the relatively late hour the autopsy suite was in full swing—suite being a bit of an overstatement for a thirty-by-twenty room with three tables and one long counter. Three victims rested on the tables, with one doctor and one assistant working on each. The smell intensified.

Maggie gravitated to the lone female victim, hoping this would be her Jane Doe. If not she would have to go looking for the victim in the cooler. The cold would make the fingertips that less malleable and the walk-in cooler gave her the creeps. She was fine with the bodies; she just hated the cooler.

Maggie greeted the doctor, consulted her sheet, and confirmed that this was indeed their unidentified white female, approximately twelve to fifteen years of age, pale blond hair that appeared to be natural, blue eyes that now stared through Maggie with a mute, startled horror. Her autopsy had nearly reached its end. The chest cavity had been flayed open and emptied so that when Maggie looked inside she could see the girl’s spine. The remains of her dissected internal organs rested in a red plastic biohazard bag settled between her legs.

It seemed a horrible violation to someone so young and small—but it was also the only way to find out exactly what had happened to her. Maggie had seen plenty of autopsies in her time. She pushed any qualms, any stabs of sympathy, to the back of her mind where she could deal with them later.

“I’d guess fourteen, if pressed,” confided the pathologist, a portly guy about her age. “But the dentist can probably tell you better. Five-three, sorta normal weight for her size in this day when all teenage girls think they have to be anorexic.”

“Empty stomach,” the deiner put in, sweat turning his black skin glossy. It had been a long day indeed; usually autopsies had been completed by two or three in the afternoon, and anyone new who came in after the room had been cleaned would wait until the following morning. He used a scalpel to slit the girl’s scalp across the crown from ear to ear, preparing to take out the brain. “Maybe she was hungry instead of fashionable.”

The doctor nodded. “Could be. Certainly she hadn’t had a lot of dental care in her life. And the few fillings she does have look—weird.”

“Weird?” Maggie repeated.

Shouting to be heard over the bone saw, the doctor said, “Can’t put my finger on it, just not like what I normally see. I’ll have the odont. . .