Into Darkness Read online

With the Williamsburg NYPD precinct plugged into the GPS, she got the dark blue Chevy Impala up to speed on the parkway. She was prompted to turn right onto Metropolitan Ave, which would take her most of the way.

  Waves of heat rose off the asphalt. Sunlight spangled off the chrome and glass of the careening cars and trucks. Eva Diaz had been abducted, yes. And then she’d been found a day later with the life choked out of her. If the two were connected, that meant Monica Forbes might have less than twenty hours to live.

  3

  He unclipped the microphone from her and carefully wound the cord as he walked back behind the camera. It was over, and the fear returned:

  He’s done with you. Now what?

  “Sir,” Monica said, “please.”

  He kept his back to her as he packed away the tiny lavaliere mike in its own small case. Finished, he focused his attention on the camera and began to unseat the accessories: the zoom and focus control, the headset. He detached the camera from the tripod, and the shoe from the camera, ignoring her as she spoke.

  Scream!

  “Please. I have two children. A boy and a girl. They need their mother.” Her voice trembled on the edge of a whisper. “I have a husband. I have a life. Please. I’ll quit my job. I’ll leave the city. We’ll all just leave.”

  He placed the camera in a case. Pelican brand, she recognized. Top of the line.

  She scrutinized him. Still in his surgical mask and white jumpsuit, booties on his feet and hairnet on his head, he was nevertheless familiar. Something in his posture, in his gait, in the very vibes coming off him.

  Who are you?

  She wondered, out of nowhere, if he was someone Ben knew. Maybe even one of Ben’s guys. Ben had jobs in places like this. His crew would come in and do the renovations on an industrial space turned residential. It was happening all over the city, and not just in the boroughs, but across the East River in Jersey City – millennials buying condos in buildings that used to warehouse coats and shoes or make plastics. They even had a name for it – “residustrial.” Hell, it was happening all over the country. All over the world.

  Ben had worked some contracts, some big jobs, places in Queens and Brooklyn. Places that, until the right developer came along, just sat there, rotting, rusting, infested with rats.

  “Please,” she said. “I’ll do what you want. I’ll go on air tomorrow and–”

  “Shut up,” he said. He set down the cord he’d been winding and strode over to her. At first she thought he was going to hit her – there was unmistakable rage in his eyes – but then he went around behind her. A moment later, she was moving. He was wheeling her again, upright.

  She let the scream rip. She screamed, and then she called for help.

  Then the resonance of her high-pitched cries soaked into the walls and died.

  They went through a doorway, and he banged the edge of the gurney in the doorframe and shoved her through. This room was dark, funky with mildew and something fouler – like bodies, like homeless drug addicts living in their own urine and vomit. He stopped the gurney and moved away, scuffing in the dark.

  Her breathing was rapid, her pulse working in her throat. “I’m sorry I screamed. A lot of what you said, it makes sense,” she said. “You’re right about a lot of things. I want to help you. Please, let me help you. Think of all the good I can do out there …”

  Suddenly it was bright. He had an area light on a tripod, an orange extension cord snaking out of the room to whatever battery or generator he was drawing power from. She thought she even heard a distant engine …

  Not that it mattered. What mattered was what was right in front of her, on the wall.

  Two pictures, side by side. He’d affixed them to the rust-stained, crumbling wall with duct tape.

  As she absorbed the images, Monica stopped breathing.

  She stopped thinking she was going to be okay.

  She began to understand what this was, and she knew that these were her final moments.

  “Oh God …”

  A single fresh tear carved a hot line down her cheek.

  He was just behind her. She could feel his exhalations on the side of her face.

  Scream again!

  Something sharp and tensile bit into the flesh of her neck, cutting off her air. She struggled to free her hands, to claw at the thing across her throat, but the restraints were rigid. She heard sounds, her own sounds – gurgling noises, like the last of the water being taken down the drain.

  And as she faded, she stared at the two pictures. The one on the left, such a bright and beautiful face, so full of promise and hope. The one on the right ruined and dead.

  Monica thought of her children once more, pictured their own faces, remembered the smell of them, all at once, babies and teenagers and everything in between, their smiles, their tears, and she waved to them as they sat at the breakfast table – Joe, Kyle, and Ben. The three loves of her life. She smiled and waved to them as she said goodbye.

  4

  Williamsburg’s local 90th precinct was on the corner of Montrose and Union, a gray, squat, two-story building. The law enforcement vehicles parked around the building were white with blue letters: NYPD. The building also housed the local Fire Department and Emergency Services Squad #8, and a large sign above an open bay door thanked the squad for its help during 9/11. Shannon circled around and found more parking in the back, near an elevated subway line.

  She passed through a security checkpoint inside, and a female officer in a blue uniform took her to a small office. Lieutenant James Whitaker was under forty, according to his bio, but had that high-blood-pressure look, making him appear older, his white collar too tight against his neck. He was talking on his desk phone when the uniformed cop showed Shannon in. He held up a finger, then motioned her to sit.

  Shannon thanked the uniformed cop, who left, shutting the door, and Shannon took a seat.

  “All right,” Whitaker said into the phone, then listened. “Look, I gotta go. The woman the FBI sent over just got here. All right, yeah. All right …” He hung up and fixed Shannon with a smile, the kind a scarecrow might have. “Find the place all right?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Yeah, I guess today, it’s all GPS. I can’t get used to it. I mean, we use it here, in our line of work, of course. But we go somewhere, and my wife is yelling at me because I never want to switch it on.”

  His faded blue eyes lingered on her for a moment. There was a thing people did, both men and women – this initial evaluation. They looked at her hair – she had a lot of it, but had tamed it back into a tight braid – and her small nose, light freckles; she knew she looked young. So they checked her out, asking themselves to what extent would her age and inexperience be a liability. Then they packed that question away unanswered – most of them – because they had no choice.

  Whitaker lost the smile and stood. “Need a cup of coffee or anything?”

  She stood, too, shaking her head. “No thank you.”

  “Let’s get right to it. Come with me.”

  He moved past her, redolent of cologne and cigarettes, and she followed him out the door. Down the hall, a couple of uniformed officers going in the other direction, a man and woman, and then to a larger room, a squad room or “roll call” room, with long desks and chairs set out classroom style and a podium with whiteboards behind it. Two detectives were sitting and chatting and stopped when Whitaker came in.

  “Boys, this is Special Agent Ames, FBI.” Whitaker stopped in the middle of the room and faced her. “Sorry – it was Cheryl?”

  “Shannon.”

  “Special Agent Ames, this is Detective Greg Heinz and Detective Luis Caldoza.”

  They nodded at her; Caldoza stood and extended his hand and she shook with him. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt and had kind eyes. Heinz stood and offered his hand as well. Heinz was tall and blond and wore a dark Brooks Brothers suit. Both men had their badges hooked to their belts. Heinz wore a hip-holstered pistol, Cald
oza a brown leather shoulder holster.

  Whitaker walked toward the front of the room, saying, “Okay. All right, so this is what we’ve got.” He pulled down a map in front of the whiteboards, and Shannon got a bird’s-eye view of the five boroughs. He pointed to a spot near Central Park. “Monica Forbes works here. This is Channel 7, which is WABC-TV, the New York affiliate. We’ve got video of her leaving work, leaving the building, last night at ten thirteen p.m.”

  Heinz asked, “Why so late?”

  Caldoza answered, “Husband says she was working on a project. They’ve got two kids, both of them upstate at summer camp, so their being away was giving her some extra time to work.”

  Whitaker was waiting for Caldoza to finish. “Right.” Whitaker then faced the map again. “Her normal route is this – she takes the A/C/E from Columbus Circle down Eighth Avenue to Fourteenth Street, where she switches to the L. Takes the L over into Brooklyn, practically drops her right at her door – just a couple of blocks. We’re going through MTA video to verify she was on her usual trains. So far, we’ve got her going through at Columbus Circle. Fourteenth Street had some issue, but that footage is forthcoming.” He looked at Caldoza. “Lou? What’s the deal on the husband?”

  Caldoza picked up notes from the desk beside him. “Ah, okay, the 911 call was placed by Benjamin Forbes, Monica’s husband, at 3:58 a.m. He said he’d been waiting up for his wife since midnight.”

  Heinz said, “Why’d he wait so long to call?”

  “We’ll ask him. Ah, so, she was working late on a project, he said. Maybe he was giving her space? Anyway, we sent a patrol car to their condo at 308 North Seventh Street, and our two officers talked to him, took his statement. He said there was no reason why she wouldn’t have taken the usual route home.” Finished, Caldoza looked up from his notes. He glanced at Shannon, then watched Whitaker.

  Still at the podium, Whitaker said, “Okay, so, because of Eva Diaz over in Maspeth, this isn’t the ordinary missing persons case. Heinz, you talk to them over there at 104?”

  Heinz nodded, looking at a small spiral notebook in his hand. “Eva Diaz, twenty-eight years old, from Ditmars-Steinway, found on Forty-Eighth Street in Maspeth by a construction worker at four in the morning on Wednesday, July eighth. So two weeks ago. She was last seen leaving work that previous Monday, just after six in the evening. Ah, victim was strangled. Rape kit came back negative. No blood, hair, tissue samples to work with, no touch DNA. Medical examiner said she had been cleaned with astringent chemicals.”

  Shannon spoke up for the first time. “Posthumously?”

  Heinz glanced at her. “That wasn’t determined. Probably, would be my guess. She was strangled, then this guy cleaned her up to get rid of any trace evidence.”

  There was a pause, and they waited for Whitaker. Whitaker said, “Okay so we’re pinging Monica Forbes’s phone, we’re checking video, and we’re going to do a press conference” – he checked his watch – “in half an hour. We’ll put out the hotline and see what turns up. And we got the BOLO out.” He looked around the room and shrugged. “You know, we’ll try some door-to-doors, but at the moment, we don’t know if something might’ve happened between Fourteenth Street and Bedford Avenue.”

  Shannon asked, “Is her phone not showing up?”

  Whitaker shook his head. “Nothing.” A moment later he added, “I mean, you ask me, she could have had an accident, fallen onto the tracks. It happens.” He straightened upright. “All right. Boys?” He watched Caldoza and Heinz and waited.

  Heinz said, “I’ll keep on it until we get that video from Fourteenth.”

  “I’ll go follow up with the husband,” Caldoza said.

  Whitaker clapped his hands. “All right. And we’ve got everybody out looking, so …” His eyes connected with Shannon, almost approval seeking.

  “I’d like to go along to talk to the husband, if that’s okay.”

  Caldoza nodded. “Let’s hit it.”

  5

  Nine a.m. It was already hot and getting hotter. “You believe this?” Caldoza walked fast toward an unmarked white car in the parking lot. He’d donned a pair of black Ray-Ban sunglasses. “Going to hit a hundred degrees today by this afternoon.”

  “I know.” Shannon looked for her car, saw it, and glanced at Caldoza. “I’ll follow you?”

  “Or we could just ride together.”

  She thought about it. “Sure.”

  Caldoza was nimble with traffic and didn’t drive too fast. “So where you from?”

  “Upstate.”

  “Oh yeah? Westchester?”

  She laughed a little. “Way farther. The Adirondacks.”

  He came to a full stop at a traffic light. “Wow, yeah, okay. Almost to Canada, eh? Hey, but not bad – you’re not too far from home, though. Did you request New York? Is that how it works?”

  “You can put in a request, yeah. I didn’t.”

  “So it’s by chance you’re here and not Hawaii.”

  “They try to put people where they’re going to have some experience, some background.” She looked out the window at the hustle and bustle – scaffolding that surrounded a building under construction like some kind of overgrowth; a double-parked delivery van, drawing shouts and honked horns and shaken fists; a deli next to a tattoo parlor next to a Realtor next to a corner grocer teeming with fruits and vegetables. “Not that I had any real experience with New York City before getting posted. The one time I was here was on a class trip in the eighth grade.”

  The light changed and Caldoza hit the gas. “Where they put you up?”

  “I live in Rego Park. It’s just a mile away from the resident agency.”

  “Yeah, that’s mostly Jewish over there. Nice area. It’s coming along a little bit. Some of these areas, though, it’s crazy. The gentrification. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I see women in big sunglasses pushing double-strollers I think, ‘good – less crime.’” He had a smooth, easy laugh. “Right? It’s just a lot different from when I grew up.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “Right here. My parents came up from Puerto Rico in the sixties. Back then, you had close to a hundred thousand manufacturing jobs in this area. In the 1990s? That dropped to around ten thousand. So you can imagine what type of hole that left. That was the seventies and eighties. That’s when I grew up. Crime, drugs. If you could move out, you moved out. But we didn’t. You know that movie Serpico?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was here. Real-life Frank Serpico shot during a drug bust in 1971. That shit was right here.”

  “Wow,” she said.

  Moments later, he made a left off Meeker Street onto North Seventh and then pulled off quickly in front of an orange-brick and gray concrete building for Northside Williamsburg School. Caldoza leaned over, opened the glove box, and took out a package of gum. He offered her one and Shannon declined. “All right,” he said, loading a piece of gum into his mouth. “Here we go.” He opened the door.

  Across the street from the school, 308 North Seventh Street looked brand new. Caldoza waved his hand, palm out, in a kind of semicircular motion. “This building used to be two stories, red brick. Graffiti all over it.”

  It didn’t look that way anymore. Beige stucco, with the first four floors all the same dimension, but the top four done in fancy art-deco fashion, all angles and glass. They crossed the street, went in through the double glass doors, and spoke to a concierge, who buzzed Forbes on the top floor.

  A few seconds passed before the concierge pointed to the elevators and said, “Go on up.”

  Ben Forbes opened the door and showed them into the sizeable seventh-floor condo. Forbes was an emotional wreck. He hadn’t slept at all the night before, he said, and his eyes showed it; dark smudges beneath the bloodshot blue. He was a tall man, his blond-going-gray hair in a shaggy cut, and he stood in the living room in sweatpants and a sweatshirt that read Forbes Contracting – we nail ya good! Behind him, floor-to-ceiling windows yielded an
expansive view of the city, from the rest of Williamsburg to the East River and the Manhattan skyline beyond.

  “The kids are coming home soon,” Forbes said. “They’re coming home and I don’t know what to tell them.”

  Caldoza stood beside Shannon, facing Forbes and the view. “Probably best not to say anything right now.”

  Forbes frowned, touched his forehead and looked into space. “No, I know, I know. I just … I don’t understand where she would’ve gone.” When he looked at Shannon, she saw desperation. “Monica used to travel,” he said. “Through college and for years after, she’d travel abroad. She’s been all over. I thought, when we got married, oh no – she’s not going to like staying in one place. But she dialed right into it. She started with ABC-7 and never looked back. She was a media producer, and then they offered her the daytime spot, you know, the kind of show for the stay-at-home mom, and she took it. She’s not the flashy, on-air type, but it was better pay.”

  Forbes started pacing. He left the living room and walked to the kitchen area dominated by a white marble island surrounded by stools. Suddenly he stopped and looked at them. “I’m sorry – please – can I get you something? Coffee? Tea?”

  “We’re fine,” Caldoza said, chewing his gum. But he glanced at Shannon.

  “No, thank you,” she said. Then, “Mr. Forbes – would you mind if I have a look around?”

  His eyes widened and his spine seemed to straighten. “No. Not at all. Please.” His eyes flicked to Caldoza. “Have you found anything out? What’s the latest?”

  Shannon wandered off as Caldoza brought Ben Forbes up to speed. She peeked in the bathroom – same white marble forming the sink and tub as formed the big kitchen island – and then moved down a carpeted hallway. The first door was shut and she knocked, just a habit, then opened up. It looked like the daughter’s room. Spartan, not even a poster on the wall, but the rack of hair ties gave it away. That and the faint smell of citrus soap or shampoo. The next room was the boy’s room, the walls painted dark blue, baseball trophies on the dresser. In the master bedroom, a family portrait hung near the en suite bathroom. Shannon drew closer, examining their faces. Joe was tall, like his father, but had his mother’s eyes. Kyle resembled her father through her smile. A handsome family. A pretty mother, looking fit, looking as though she was right where she wanted to be, here in the heart of her life.