Pitch Black (39 page)

Message received. After one more moment of silence, all three of them returned to their places around the table and began removing files from the box, one by one.

Without another word, Wyatt Blackstone slipped from the room, leaving them to it.

Sam liked Detective Myers,
who had been on the Baltimore PD for two decades. He talked only a little, asked no obtrusive questions, and showed no sign that he resented driving her to the prison. A perfect escort.

She still hadn’t talked to Alec. She had tried him again, leaving a message about her field trip, stressing that she had an armed escort. Hopefully by the time she heard from him, this brief errand would be finished and she would be on her way back to the hospital.

As they neared the prison, Sam remembered she had promised to let them know what she was doing, and dialed the number from which Mr. Carter had called her. A male employee answered. When she asked if the attorney was there, he put her on hold for several long moments.

Finally, the guard came back on the line. “He’s waiting for you,” he said. “We’ll leave word at the gate. When you get here, follow the signs to the administrative parking lot. There’s an entrance directly into the main offices. Park there and he’ll meet you at the door.”

Thanking the man, she relayed the directions to Myers.

“You must be a big shot,” he said with a wry grin. “I’ve never been invited to the superspecial parking lot.”

“I’d gladly forgo the privilege if it means I never have to come to this place again.”

They reached the complex probably no more than an hour after Carter’s initial call, the light Sunday-morning traffic helping to shorten the trip. As promised, the guard at the gate had been expecting them and directed them onto a private drive leading to the reserved lot. In it, two cars stood close to a door marked,
RESTRICTED ACCESS: AUTHORIZED ADMINISTRATIVE PERSONNEL ONLY.

“Guess that’s us,” Myers said as he parked.

Having been here yesterday, in the visitors’ lot, where there was much more activity, Sam found the emptiness strange. Myers apparently felt the same, because he stuck close as he walked her to the thick metal door marked,
STAFF ENTRANCE.

Though they’d been told Carter would be waiting for them, no one was in sight. Myers tested the handle, to no avail, then glanced at her. “What do we do now?”

She cupped her hands around her eyes, peering through the small, barred window, and saw movement. “There he is.”

The door opened. But to her surprise, they were greeted by the warden, rather than Dale Carter. “Yes?”

“Sorry to disturb you,” she said, still flustered around the man after yesterday. “We’re supposed to be meeting Mr. Carter.”

The unsmiling warden stared at her, then at Myers. His frown deepening, he mumbled, “Who are you?”

He flashed his badge. “Detective Myers, Baltimore PD. I’m escorting Mrs. Dalton.”

“This door is for authorized personnel only.”

Jeez, the guy was a stickler for rules.

“We were told to come this way,” Myers said. He crossed his arms over his chest and raised a brow, as if challenging the warden to make them go around to the public entrance.

“Fine, fine,” Connolly said, not sounding happy about it. He stepped back and ushered them in, quickly shutting the door.

They stood in a small, private alcove just outside the warden’s office. Obviously the man’s job came with perks like an excellent parking place.

Unlike yesterday, when there had been at least some activity, despite the weekend hours, today this part of the building was practically deserted. Their footsteps were the only sounds, and they seemed to echo down the empty corridor, underscoring the feeling of abandon. Certainly, in other parts of the huge building, there were hundreds of people—guards and inmates. But it appeared the admin staff got Sundays off. At least, everyone except the warden.

“Now, what is this all about?” he asked.

“Dale Carter called me this morning and asked me to come down here to pick up something left for me by Jimmy Flynt.”

The man’s head jerked. “Flynt?”

“Yes. An envelope with my name on it.”

The man’s eyes narrowed; he appeared puzzled. “I’m confused. I thought you no longer wanted to receive mail from Flynt.”

“This isn’t typical mail,” she explained. “Mr. Carter said it was a packet.”

“I knew nothing about it.” Turning abruptly, he said over his shoulder, “We’ll get to the bottom of this. Come with me, please.”

Sam exchanged a look with Myers, realizing he, too, felt like a schoolkid with the principal. But they both followed the man, who led them through a door to his secretary’s office, where Sam had waited out the interview yesterday.

“I apologize for the mess,” he said with an expansive wave of his hand. Furniture had been pushed to the side, plastic covering most of it, and a large drop cloth had been spread across the floor. He gestured toward a brown stain on the ceiling. “We had a leak. I have a man working on it. I’m overseeing, which is why I’m here on a Sunday morning rather than at church.”

“It’s fine,” Sam said. “I’m sorry to disturb you. I just need to sign for the package and we’ll be on our way.”

Again came that frown. “As I said, I am completely unaware of this situation. You say Dale Carter told you to meet him here.”

“Yes. He called me not ninety minutes ago. Said Jimmy Flynt had died, that he’d left me a package, and I should come get it.”

At that, the warden’s jaw dropped in shock. “
What?
James Flynt is dead?”

Sam froze. How could the warden not know one of his own prisoners had died? Sure, the place was big, but the death of an inmate seemed like something the head guy should know about.

“How dare they not inform me?” The angry man strode through the receptionist’s area into his own office, heading for his phone. He yanked the receiver and began barking at someone, leaving Sam and Myers standing in the reception area, utterly confused.

“This seem normal to you?” the detective asked.

Sam shook her head slowly.

“This lawyer. Carter. How well do you know him?”

“Not well,” she murmured.

Not well at all
.

Sam gripped the edge of the closest bookcase, shocked by a sudden, awful possibility.

“And he called you directly, this guy. Told you to come here.” Myers unbuttoned his coat, revealing the service pistol strapped to his hip. “I don’t like this.”

“I don’t either,” she whispered, eyeing the door, still open to that long, deserted corridor, where anyone could be lurking. “I need to call Alec.”

She reached for her phone. But she hadn’t even touched it when a muffled
pffft
sound split the morning.

She didn’t even realize it had been a gunshot until Myers dropped like a stone.

After Wyatt left,
Taggert and Mulrooney had buried themselves in the work, each lost in his own thoughts. They’d managed to shove aside their emotional reaction to Lily’s death for a little while, but something like that couldn’t be held at bay for long. Soon they were both muttering worried questions about Lily as well as Jackie and Brandon, needing to know more, needing more than a few minutes to grieve, despite the case.

Assuring them he was fine to continue going through the stack of files—damn this stuffy institution that archived actual paper rather than just keeping a computerized version—Alec waved them off. “Why don’t you take a break? I’ll dig through this last box.”

Taggert nodded. Both men departed to find the others.

It figured that the box they needed would be the last one they looked in. Almost immediately after opening it, Alec spotted the right file and tugged it out. It was thick, stuffed with registration forms filled out by each attendee of the event, and there were at least two hundred.

“Damn it,” he muttered as he thumbed a few pages, wondering why the hell this place didn’t have electronic registration records. This was a waste of time. He needed to bring the folder to the hospital and ask Sam if she remembered any of these guys, anyone who acted strangely, asked a lot of questions, paid her personal attention.

Sam
. She had called as Wyatt was walking in and he’d totally forgotten. Turning his phone on, he dialed his voice mail, doodling idly on a yellow legal pad as the call connected. Two messages.
Shit.

When he heard the first one, he froze in disbelief. Jimmy Flynt dead? Talk about timing. The guy had looked pretty bad yesterday, but they certainly hadn’t left that hospital thinking he was breathing his final breaths.

“So call me when you get this, would you? I’d like to try to get down there; obviously I can’t go alone.”

Damn right.

He waited for the second message, surprised to hear Sam’s voice a second time. “It’s me. Look, I’m going to go ahead down to the prison.”

He almost dropped the phone.

“Before you panic, Detective Myers is escorting me.”

So she wasn’t taking chances. He had hoped she’d stay put until he returned, but he did see her point, especially when she said, “I saw no point in wasting a couple of hours after you return. This way, I’ll be back with the letters close to when you are and we save some time.”

She was right, not that he liked it. Cutting the connection, he quickly dialed her back to find out where she was. And to make sure Myers knew how serious this situation was.

He got no answer. It was possible they hadn’t even left the hospital yet and were in Tricia’s room. Or the phone might not have reception inside the iron fortress of the prison. Both plausible—but he couldn’t deny that a hint of concern crawled through him.

He wanted to hear Sam’s voice.

She’s fine. She’s protected.

Knowing she wouldn’t be there even if he took the file back to the hospital right away, he paused, unable to get Flynt off his mind. The man had known so much, especially if his note was to be believed. But how? How could he have realized Sam was in danger, that someone was using e-mails to “hurt” people? Was it possible the Professor had an accomplice, somebody who was now imprisoned and might have talked? He questioned whether the unsub would trust anyone, but how else could Jimmy know?

Though he thought about it, no answers came to him. He didn’t get that buzz he usually experienced when he was on the right track. And he didn’t have any time to waste.

“All right, enough,” he told himself. Alec shook his head and put his attention back on the task at hand. Glancing at his pad of paper, he realized just how deep in thought he had been. He’d been doodling all over the page and hadn’t even realized it. He’d written Sam’s name, Jimmy’s, the Professor’s, Darwin’s.

Darwin
. He’d scratched the letters boldly, in all caps. For some reason, Alec couldn’t stop staring at it.

And just like that, the buzz started. Thoughts clicked in his head, as they often did when he sensed he was on the edge of something important.

He’d called their unsub the Professor for so long, it had been hard adjusting to the name he’d chosen for himself. The killer had never referred to himself that way until Wednesday night, when he’d posted those responses to Sam’s blog. Right there, in black and white, spelling out his motives, his philosophies.

Darwin
.

Only . . . in one of those three posts, he had spelled it differently, hadn’t he?

Darwen
. He wrote it down.

A typo? But the Professor didn’t make mistakes. At least, not so far. The page from the book was the first, and it was pure luck the man hadn’t realized how that red ink would stand out. So why would he misspell what he considered his own name?

Alec stared at the letters, tracing them again with his pen, digging even harder until the paper tore beneath the pressure.

“Son of a bitch!” he snapped, suddenly seeing a possibility.

His hand moved, almost of its own volition, rearranging the unsub’s chosen name—not the correctly spelled version of it, the other one. And those six letters transformed into another word entirely.

The answer had been right in front of their eyes all along. “Dar
wen
. You bastard.”

Frantic, he leaped to his feet, grabbing the files, knowing he’d need proof but desperate to get on the road. Because Sam was headed to the prison.

Shoving everything into his briefcase, he cursed as one of the slick, glossy brochures for the legal symposium slid out. He grabbed it, spared it a glance. Then glanced again.

Right on the front of it was a paragraph describing the backgrounds of some of the speakers, though not naming them. One stood out. And when he flipped the brochure open to read the name that went with the title, he knew he had just identified the killer for certain.

The Professor had been toying with them.

No, not the Professor, Darwin. Or rather, Darwen.

Warden
.

“My God,
what have you done?”

Sam stared in horror at Warden Connolly. He stood in the doorway to his office, a gun in his hand, calm and cool, despite having just cold-bloodedly shot a police officer. A police officer she truly liked.

Sam started to bend down, to check Myers’s pulse, to stanch the blood flowing freely from his chest.

Connolly
tsk
ed and shook his head, reading her intent.

“Why?” she asked, unable to form another word.

He made a motion with the gun. “Turn to your right. About five inches.”

She did, until she was nose-to-nose with the book-laden shelf she had grabbed onto for support a few moments ago. Nose-to-nose with a copy of her own book. Reaching for it, she was not surprised to see the title page had been torn out.

No, not at all surprised. Sam had realized a few minutes ago that she had been lured here by the very man she had been trying to evade, the killer known as the Professor. She’d just been wrong in thinking he was Dale Carter.

“You were at the law enforcement symposium last winter,” she murmured.

He smiled, delighted. “Ah, you remember! How wonderful.”