Into Darkness Read online

  “I can see him doing it,” Caldoza said. The detective’s gaze roamed the room, more people trickling in, bringing their drinks and conversations with them. People from The New York Times, VICE, BuzzFeed, the Associated Press, Reuters, ProPublica. Newsday, where Baldacci had worked. “I can see him cleaning them.”

  She thought she could, too.

  She tried to settle in and looked over the list of awards. There were more than thirty. Everything from Newspaper or Digital Beat Reporting to Opinion Writing to Spot News Photo and Local Television Spot News Reporting. The gamut was covered. She’d never seen so many newspeople in one place. She recognized several faces from TV, and more from the investigation. People who had worked with Monica Forbes. A photographer whose images often accompanied Baldacci’s reporting. No one associated with Diaz, though.

  Mark Tyler joined them. He had his wife with him. A pretty redhead in her late forties, she looked stiff and unhappy to be there. Heinz emerged from the bar with a Heineken. Caldoza made a remark about it: Heinz drinks Heineken.

  Waitstaff came around and took orders. There were three to choose from: steak with roasted red potatoes and asparagus, salmon with lemon rice and broccoli, or vegetarian lasagna. Each came with a salad and bread. Just as they finished ordering, applause rippled through the room. Todd Spencer picked his way through the round tables. He reached a podium between the two giant screens. From here, he looked like a handsome, hip, thirtysomething journalist.

  Scumbag.

  “Good evening,” he said. The sound levels were good, the acoustics were good. The audience, mostly black tie and gowns, a few rebels like Heinz in more casual wear, were hushed. Spencer said, “Thank you for being here tonight, at the Forty-Eighth Annual Crunchtime Club Awards Dinner!”

  The crowd erupted into more raucous applause and cheers. Spencer grinned wide and launched into a spiel about how great it was to be hosted by the Harvard Society. He went into the history of the Crunchtime Club – founded sixty years prior, back when “New York City had twenty daily papers, three wire services, eight radio stations – and no TV stations.”

  The audience rippled with laughter. Flashes of bright white smiles. Heads leaning together, nods, more laughter. Ah, the good old days before TV.

  “Back then,” Spencer continued, “new members were inducted in a special ceremony. Black robes and lighted alcohol lamps. The initiation ritual included dedicating one’s self to the pursuit of truth. ‘He who serves truth serves best’ – that’s the motto.”

  The applause began and grew sharply and loudly, and people got out of their seats. Clapping vigorously. Whistling. Nodding to Spencer, nodding to each other. When it gradually died down, Spencer said, “And we have always been forward-thinking. Though both the national and local organizations accepted only male journalists as members for the first seven years, that rule was abolished in 1967–” It was hard to hear him over the fresh eruption of cheers and applause, until Shannon could make out the words, “–was a broadcasting pioneer and we saw the first woman sworn in as a Crunchtime Club member.”

  Ugh, she thought.

  Spencer let the applause subside before continuing. “In those early critical years, we met in the old Times tower. Later, we met in various newsrooms and venues around the city. New York University, Columbia University …”

  Caldoza looked at his watch. Then he found Shannon’s eyes. “Can we arrest him now?”

  Tyler overheard, and Shannon explained that Caldoza wasn’t being literal. In her mind, she was thinking of a saying her father used: “It’s not set in stone, but we’re carrying bags of mortar.”

  Spencer said to the room, “Each summer for the past forty-eight years, the club has honored excellence in New York journalism at this, our annual awards dinner.”

  More applause. Would they ever get through it alive?

  “What I’d like to do now,” Spencer said, “is take a look back at last year’s winners.”

  He stepped away from the podium and watched the screen on his right-hand side. A waiter set out salads at Shannon’s table as the lights went down and the screens flickered. Shannon watched Spencer – he sat at a nearby table. The room grew still and quiet, properly reverential.

  Someone screamed.

  Shannon looked up from her salad. Dominating the two screens was a familiar face, tearful and bruised. She was dressed in a dirty sheet and tied to a medical gurney, propped upright.

  She was the woman Shannon had found dead beneath a bus.

  On screen, Monica Forbes, in a trembling but strong voice, said, “Hello. I have a message to deliver to you tonight. A message to deliver to the country.”

  Shannon was on her feet. Caldoza was up, too. Tyler pushed his chair back and stood, saying, “Shit. What is this?”

  Nobody moved. They’d had discussions about how they would respond to another event – an explosion like the one in Hunters Point – but this was a video.

  What did it mean?

  Monica Forbes said, “For too long, the media has gone unaccountable. We have never had to apologize for the fear we sell. Never apologized for the way in which we influence elections and trials and congressional investigations. The way we spread fear, generate outrage, and disseminate disinformation.”

  Shannon’s mind worked fast: this had happened between Monica’s abduction and her murder, a longer period of time than with Diaz. The killer had put a camera on her, attached a small microphone – even the lighting looked good.

  Shannon started moving through the room. Everyone else was riveted. Somehow he’d hacked in to the system? Or – he was here, and he’d put a damn DVD into the player feeding the two screens?

  Someone shouted, “Shut it off! Shut it off!” But Monica’s voice continued to boom through the room.

  “As many of you no doubt know, network news was once a loss leader. But once corporations started buying those networks, the news needed to become profitable. So you focused on violence. You focused on fear. You focused on political scandal. It’s not a problem that you divide people with your partisan coverage, it’s the point – the division is good for ratings.”

  Shannon found a door at the back, which led to a small control room. The second she opened it, a young man wearing black, looking panicked, was coming down the stairs so fast he nearly plowed into her. “How is this up there?” Shannon asked. Others had gathered behind her – Caldoza, and two of the evening’s organizers, a man and a woman. “We need that shut down now,” the man growled.

  The young tech spread his hands. “I didn’t do it.”

  Shannon asked, “Is it a DVD? A flash drive?”

  He was stuttering, nervous. “Laptop. PowerPoint. Video is embedded. Someone changed the video.”

  The organizer crowded in. “Well, shut it off!” he growled.

  The tech looked scared. “The door is locked. My key is gone.”

  “What?”

  “Someone took my key …”

  Shannon put it together: the tech was terrified because whoever had altered the presentation to play the Monica video was among them. Here, at the dinner.

  Spencer? Maybe, but he’d been on stage. Working with someone else, then?

  She quickly scanned the faces of the people beside her. Everything was new, like she’d stepped through an invisible door and into this parallel universe where everyone was a suspect. “Relax,” she whispered – to herself as much as the people surrounding her. “We don’t want a panic …”

  And to Caldoza, the faintest whisper: “We need to get to Spencer right … now …”

  On screen, Monica Forbes continued, speaking through tears, her face streaked and haunted: “You’ve become sloppy, breaking a story before it’s confirmed. Others then reference the first story as fact, leading the public on wild-goose chases. Yet you take no responsibility. You shape civil discourse in this country, you influence policy, you shape culture – you shape lives. You barely even understand the consequences of this. Instead, you cele
brate. You behave like celebrities in a gross display of narcissism. If you won’t hold yourself to account, the people will. This is a reckoning. This is the beginning of your atonement. This is …”

  Monica Forbes stopped talking and looked off camera, fully crying. “I can’t,” she said. “I won’t say that …”

  Shannon moved closer to the screen. People were mumbling, some were crying. “Quiet!” Shannon called. She strained to hear – Monica’s captor might say something, give her a vital piece of information about who he was, where they’d been, a clue as to where he might even be at this very moment.

  But the only information came through Monica’s eyes, shining with fear.

  She swallowed, pulled herself together, and finished.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen, there is a bomb in this building rigged to detonate in sixty seconds.”

  Cutting her off in mid-sob after she’d delivered this news, the video ended. The screen went black, plunging the room into darkness and screaming chaos.

  You couldn’t blame people in a panic. Couldn’t expect them to behave rationally. The amygdala took over, the struggle for survival. They became, in a way, the animals they once were. That people slammed into her, Shannon expected. That they screamed and trampled and clawed their way out of the building was normal. What surprised her was the deep sense of calm she felt, as if it had all happened before.

  Maybe it had. Maybe getting locked in the silo that one summer as the corn came pouring in, that experience had burned the panic right out of her. Nothing could ever compare to a drowning cascade of grain, a waterfall of hard pellets, dust quickly choking your lungs, stinging your eyes, so that the death portended was blind and deaf and suffocating.

  All with that dry, semi-sweet stink of corn, an odor she hadn’t been able to stop smelling for weeks afterward.

  “Shannon!”

  She saw Caldoza in the dark. He used a flashlight as he cut across a river of fleeing people. She checked her watch: twenty seconds were gone.

  She looked into Caldoza’s eyes. He said, “I can’t find Spencer. We need to get out.”

  She nodded at him and followed as he led them into the crush of people headed for the main exit. But at the last second, she peeled off and moved into the emptied lounge, needing a quick moment to think. Caldoza didn’t see her go.

  Flickering candles lit the copper-topped surface of the bar, just enough light to see by. Would the Media Killer detonate a bomb here? He’d been specific up to this point, seeming to target individual members of the press. There had been little to no collateral damage. Unless you counted an FBI agent. Damage to her face, her arms …

  Think …

  She went behind the bar and had a hasty look. Spencer had been in this room when she’d arrived. Had he stuck an explosive somewhere nearby? Then a light grabbed her. “Ma’am, need you to get out of there, now! There’s a bomb in the building.”

  She left the bar and approached the security guard. “I’m FBI.”

  “I don’t care if you’re the French Foreign Legion. I’m evacuating this building.”

  It was inevitable. He took her arm and she let him draw her out of the room. She joined the river of people still moving toward the exit, checked her watch: forty seconds had passed since the lights went out. She could see the exit up ahead. Someone screamed. Fresh panic rippled through the escaping group, changing the direction of their movement; people were avoiding something up ahead. The security guard surged past her, and Shannon got behind him, drafting him. More screams as people discovered whatever it was in their path that alarmed them.

  By the coat-check area, Shannon saw it: a man on the ground, his feet slightly kicking. Then she saw the blood. It bloomed out from beneath him in a widening pool. She held her breath. She knew the face, knew the clothing, knew the man.

  Todd Spencer made gurgling, choking sounds as the ragged slash in his neck spit out more blood. He had his hands around his throat. His wide, terrified eyes jerked in their sockets until they fixed on her.

  Shannon dropped to her knees. “Ambulance, now!” She put her hands on Spencer’s throat and was instantly covered in his blood. The security guard who’d yanked her from the lounge stood by, his face blank with shock. Others who’d stopped to look kept a distance. Most kept moving outside. Only fifteen seconds were left before they were all blown sky-high, maybe ten. “Help me!” Shannon yelled. She got around behind Todd Spencer and took his shoulders, tried to lift him, drag him. A man in a tuxedo joined her and grabbed one of Spencer’s legs, the security guard took another.

  The security guard was yelling, “Move! Move, people! Move!”

  Five seconds left. No more.

  The air hit her, hot and thick and smelling like New York City summers. They moved down the steps of the building and into the street and kept going.

  Two seconds left.

  They reached the other side of the street. People were everywhere. Others had joined in to help with Spencer. Shannon barely had something to hold onto now. Her eyes stung with tears.

  But still calm.

  One second.

  Up onto the sidewalk, moving ever farther away. Figures all around, getting away, running or walking fast. A man in a wheelchair, people running him right down the middle of the street.

  And then things slowed a bit, and they reached the end of the block. Her hands and arms were covered in blood. Some of it had smeared across her bare legs. She said, “Okay,” to the people holding Spencer. “That’s good. That’s enough. Let’s put him down. Let’s set him down.”

  Her back was to Sixth Avenue whooshing with noise and traffic. They had this little bit of quiet on Forty-Fourth Street, this light from the Chase Bank on the corner, and the group of them lowered Todd Spencer to the ground. His eyes remained open, the blood still leaking from his gashed neck, but slowing. His hands formed claws at his chest, his face a frozen grimace of pain and surprise. There was no breath.

  Todd Spencer was dead.

  Shannon looked back down toward the building with its neo-Georgian façade of brick and classical columns. The building still stood unmolested. No smoke roiling out. No bomb. Nothing.

  Shannon located Caldoza on the street in front. He gaped at her, rushed toward her.

  “It’s not mine,” she said about the blood. She pointed down the street. “Someone got to Spencer. Opened his neck.” She swallowed over the lump in her throat and said, “He was here, Luis. If Spencer wasn’t … Luis, our guy was just here.”

  Caldoza put an arm around her, but she pulled away and started pacing.

  When Tyler found them, Shannon insisted on going back in. He shook his head, adamant. “Not until the bomb squad clears it.”

  Only seconds later, the sirens wailed. The fire department, emergency services, local NYPD, and NYPD Bomb Squad. Within minutes after that, the lights were back on inside – the blackout had been nothing more than a flipped breaker. Shannon sat on the curb, cleaning herself with antiseptic wipes, going over it and over it in her mind: the killer had been there with them all along.

  Not Spencer, no – but one of them. Someone from the group of journalists and TV people who’d been attending the gala dinner. Someone who was taking aim at the whole system.

  She crumpled up a wipe covered in Spencer’s blood and threw it in the trash on the street as she watched Tyler, farther down the block with Bufort and other FBI.

  She knew where Tyler would take this now.

  17

  Sunday, early morning

  Hours spent at the scene, then a hasty trip home to shower and change and eat, then back to the scene in the predawn. New York never slept, but it did slow, just a little, for the ditch hours of three and four a.m.

  Shannon sipped a coffee and waited until the NYPD cop got the word to let her in, and then she went through the doors she’d entered almost eight hours earlier. It seemed like a lot longer – a week ago, maybe.

  Tyler and Bufort were set up in the library with three ot
her agents she didn’t recognize. Tyler made quick introductions, explaining to the other agents that she was an agent on her probationary period, whom he’d asked to monitor the Monica Forbes missing person case.

  “We’re working with Midtown Precinct South to get statements from every single person who was here last night,” he told Shannon. “Someone who was here last night got into the system, swapped the video, and killed the lights.”

  “Do we still have it?”

  Tyler glanced at the other faces in the room, then his gaze came back to her. “The video? Yes, we do. It’s not going anywhere.”

  Bufort stepped closer. “But we’ve got a situation. Someone who was in the crowd got it all on their phone and already uploaded it. It’s incomplete, starts a couple of seconds after the disruption began, but it’s out.”

  Tyler said, “We’re getting to that source and we’re going to shut it down. In the meantime, we had over three hundred people here last night. In an hour, we’re going to start the interviews.” He started to turn away.

  “With whom?”

  Tyler squared his shoulders. “People on our list. Agent Ames, this is an act of terrorism, and we’re treating it as such. Every single employee and contractor and person involved with producing this event is being questioned. I don’t care if it’s a waiter or janitor. But we have certain individuals who are going to get a little more attention.”

  She looked between Tyler and Bufort, puzzling it out. Did he mean someone connected to hate groups, or some kind of disruptor organization? It was hard to imagine someone like that embedded in the group of journalists and TV people here last night. Foreign terrorism, then, with one or more sleepers in the Crunchtime Club? But she didn’t ask. She could see it in Mark Tyler’s eyes: terrible as this all was, this was the kind of national attention he wanted, a case that was going to put him in the books. Get him that promotion.