Hold Back the Dark

Thank you, first and foremost, to Carol, Andy, and Spring. Without you, I would not have had the courage to even begin this project, much less finish it.

Huge thanks to Carol Kirshnit for her endless patience while discussing my imaginary friends. Any details that I’ve gotten wrong are the result of my faulty understanding and not her excellent tutelage. Thank you to Sergeant Matt Young of the Sacramento Police Department for the fascinating tour, to Adam Weintraub for knowing the answer to every question I ask, to Antoinette O’Neill for her great eye for detail, and to Allison Brennan for her help and encouragement.

Last, but certainly not least, thank you to Pamela Ahearn and Micki Nuding for believing in me and in this book. You guys are the best.

P
hone calls at two a.m. were never good news. So when Aimee Gannon’s cell phone rang, vibrating its way across the bedside table early Tuesday morning, she woke with a knot in her chest.

She’d been swimming at the edge of a nightmare, getting caught in its current and then fighting her way clear, never quite waking but not resting, either. It was almost a relief to be woken by the call. She groped for the phone as she struggled upright, then flipped the phone open. “This is Dr. Gannon.”

“Dr. Gannon, this is Detective Josh Wolf of the Sacramento Police Department.”

The
police
? “What can I do for you, Detective?” Aimee swung her feet over the side of the bed onto the cool wood floor. Why the hell were the cops calling her in the middle of the night? She stretched her shoulders, trying to unkink her neck and readying herself to find out who was in trouble and why.

“I think I have one of your patients in custody and I was hoping you could come help us with her. She’s…uncooperative at present,” the man said, his deep voice crackling over the cellular connection.

Uncooperative plus custody definitely equaled trouble. Janelle, maybe? She was an angry drunk, and altercations at bars often led to police custody. Or maybe Gary, her sex addict, had been picked up in a prostitution sting? Wait—the detective said “she.” “Who are you talking about, Detective?” Aimee rubbed some of the sleep from her eyes.

“The girl’s name is Taylor Dawkin,” Wolf said.

Aimee sat upright. “Taylor? In custody?” Crap. Taylor had plenty of problems, but Aimee felt they were making progress. Big progress.

“Can you come?” Wolf asked, ignoring her question. “She’s at Mercy General.”

“Why is she at the hospital? Has she been hurt?” Aimee tucked the phone against her shoulder and grabbed a pair of jeans out of the dresser.

“I’d prefer to explain things in person,” Wolf said, his staticky voice hard to read.

Shit. This guy was going to give her zero information. “Are her parents already there? Can I speak to them?” Taylor was only seventeen. Her relationship with Orrin and Stacey was everything ugly that a teenage girl’s could be, but they would certainly be at the hospital with her.

There was a pause at the other end. “That’s not an option at the moment. I can send a squad car for you. Someone could be there in ten minutes.”

Aimee froze for a second. Not an option—what the hell did that mean? “Has Taylor done something? Is she under arrest?”

Another pause. “I’d really prefer to explain in person.” Wolf’s impatience was clear despite the bad connection. “Shall I have an officer pick you up?”

“I can get myself there, Detective,” Aimee said curtly, fishing a tank top from a drawer. Impatience was a two-way street. “Give me thirty-five minutes.” She snapped the phone shut.

The bright bathroom lights hurt her eyes when she snapped them on and their faint electronic hum made the muscles of her neck tense up. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail, quickly brushed her teeth, then threw a jean jacket on over her tank top and hoodie. It had been in the sixties that afternoon, but the night would be cool and the hospital would be freezing.

Aimee took a deep breath at her front door. She hated the anxiety that formed in the pit of her stomach at the thought of walking through the parking garage alone in the middle of the night, but Taylor needed her.
Push through it. You’re bigger than the fear.

She locked the condo and took the elevator down to the parking garage. Even wearing sneakers, her footsteps echoed in the deserted garage. The harsh lights cast stark shadows that seemed to leap out, and the low ceiling felt like it was pressing down on her. Checking behind her, she pressed the keyless entry and her Subaru gave a welcoming double beep. She got in and locked the door as fast as she could, then stopped and made herself breathe. The locked, secure garage was part of why she’d bought the condo after she and Danny had split up. She was safe here.

Still, as she drove up 18th Street to J and then headed east, she shivered as she drove past all the darkened houses. She reminded herself that her problems were much smaller than whatever had landed an already traumatized teenaged girl in the hospital with no one but the police looking after her.

Aimee pushed the gas pedal a little harder toward the floor.

Detective Josh Wolf closed his cell. The shrink didn’t sound delighted at being woken up in the middle of the night, but at least she was coming. It was a straw to grasp at, and he didn’t have much else. Who could have done this? And why?

He stared down at the two bodies that lay on the floor, hands duct-taped behind their backs and more duct tape covering their mouths. The back of the man’s head had been bashed in, most likely with the blood-covered lamp lying next to him. The woman had clearly been strangled. He didn’t know what had been used to choke the life out of the slightly overweight blonde with the gray roots; the murderer hadn’t left that behind. A souvenir, or something incriminating? He ran his hand over his face. It was going to be a very long night.

Camera flashes strobed the living room, making it even more macabre as the crime scene technicians and photographers tried to find anything and everything that could possibly point to who had done this. The place was covered with fingerprints and blood. The driveway was a road map of tire tracks. An empty wine bottle had been smashed. A pile of cigarette butts was mounded in the bushes outside the front door, a puddle of vomit nearby. Footprints abounded. Sorting through and tracking down the possible leads could keep him and Elise busy for weeks. His best lead was the girl, and she was in no shape to lead anywhere.

“Nice place.” Elise Jacobs, Josh’s partner, looked around the large living room.

She was right. Even with the bottom falling out of California real estate, this place would be worth a pile of dough. Great neighborhood in the Pocket, the little U-shaped section of Sacramento that jutted out into the river from the west side of I-5. A well-tended half-Tudor on a big lot with a pool in back. The kitchen was all stainless steel and granite, and an entire family could live in one of the bathrooms. They didn’t build places like this anymore. Josh had a cousin who was a contractor, and he knew this place must have cost a mint.

“Call me crazy, but I’m not sure I like what they’ve done with the place.” Josh gave Elise a wry smile. Not many other people appreciated his gallows humor.

“I know what you mean,” she replied and they both turned to look at the smears of blood covering the living room walls. “Someone spent some time on that, but it is
so
not a good thing.”

“True that,” Josh replied. A series of geometric figures covered the walls, the same pattern again and again: a long, low rectangle divided in three, a circle, then another long, low rectangle divided in three.

“Any idea what it means?” Elise stepped closer on her plastic-covered feet.

“Not a damn clue.” Josh moved up to peer more closely at the blood-smeared walls. Was it a message? From the killer? It wouldn’t be the first time that a killer had left messages to taunt the police. Josh had seen
Zodiac
, and that was based on a real case and one pretty close to home.

Elise shook her head and turned away from the wall as if to dismiss it from her mind. “They figure out what to do with the girl yet?”

“They’ve got her at the ER at Mercy with a guard. They already had two gunshot wounds at the ER at UC-Davis, and she didn’t need a level one trauma center. At least I didn’t think so. Hard to tell.”

Until they figured out whether the girl they’d found covered with blood, mumbling incoherently, and rocking herself violently needed a victim’s advocate or a lawyer. Or both.

“I called the shrink,” Josh said.

“Good.” Elise nodded. “Sometimes it’s easier to get what we need with honey than vinegar.”

Josh squatted next to the bodies, killed where they lay. The way the blood had pooled beneath them when their hearts stopped circulating it and the spatter of blood and brain matter on the carpet and furniture and walls told him that. Whoever had done this would be none too clean, either. There was no way you could bash a man’s brain in that way and not end up getting some on you. Was someone wandering around Sacramento right now with another man’s blood on his clothes?

Josh stood. “Meanwhile, whoever did this is getting a little extra time to clean up.”

Elise held up her hands. “The shrink’s worth a try and we need to try something. By the way, no forced entry at any of the doors and windows. Whoever did this waltzed right in.” She sighed, looking around at the crime scene.

Josh looked, too. It was littered with potential evidence. The problem was going to be figuring out what was evidence and what was only the detritus of an ordinary family leading their ordinary lives until someone interrupted them with unthinkable violence.

Unless that someone already lived here or had invited whoever had done it in. Then it was going to be even harder to figure it out what was what.

Hence the phone call to the shrink.

Josh had been half-ready to shake some sense into the girl, but Elise had suggested that contacting the shrink might be the kinder, gentler way of getting what he wanted, and wouldn’t that be nice for a change?

He was willing to try anything to get the girl to talk to them. It was hard to figure out what to do until he knew if the girl, covered in blood at the scene of her parents’ murder, was another victim, a witness, or his prime suspect.

“The girl wouldn’t have had to force entry,” he said. “She lives here. She had a key.”

Elise smoothed her hair back into her already smooth ponytail. “I’d like to think a child could never do this to its parents.”

“We both know better.” Their eyes met. They did indeed know better. He wished they didn’t. Josh didn’t know if it made him feel better or worse to see the same hopeless hardening in Elise’s eyes that he knew was in his own.

“It seems awfully brutal, though,” Elise observed. “She’s not that big. I doubt she’s much over five foot four and she’s pretty scrawny. Hard to believe she could get them bound up like that, bash her father’s head in, and choke her mother. It would take someone big, someone strong.”

“Or someone armed. Or she could have let someone else in to do the dirty work. Whoever did it didn’t feel bad about it.” The murderer had left them splayed on the floor like discarded rag dolls. Killers hit with remorse made attempts to cover the bodies or arrange them in a way that wouldn’t embarrass them. This murderer had dropped them like pieces of garbage when he or she was done with them.

“No sign of restitution attempts; you’re right.” Elise nodded. “Don’t you think a daughter would feel bad?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Josh shrugged. “No telling what’s going on inside with that one.”

That was an understatement. The girl had just sat there and rocked herself, making little whimpering noises. She didn’t respond to anyone except to try to slap away the paramedics when they were putting her on the gurney.

Josh glanced at his watch. “The shrink should be at Mercy in about thirty minutes. We should leave here in fifteen to beat her there.”

“It’ll be good to know what she was seeing the kid for.” Elise tapped her pen against her pad.

Absolutely—it could be a place to start to build his case. That and the fact that she was found covered with blood at the murder scene. Josh shook his head. Did a brutal double homicide become okay if the murderer had a rotten childhood?

Not in his book. No way.

“I found the roll of duct tape,” said one of the techs, a young Latino with a pierced eyebrow. “Over this way.”

The detectives followed the tech down the hallway to a craft room. A sewing machine with a swatch of fabric still pinned by the machine’s foot stood in the corner. A basket of yarn with knitting needles sat by a recliner. Shit. Had Stacey Dawkin been fucking knitting when someone came in and murdered her? Josh’s mother knitted.

A small TV mounted on the wall was still on. Loud. “Make a note of the channel and the volume and turn that crap off.”

A roll of duct tape sat on the credenza next to the chair. “Bag it and tag it,” Josh told the tech. Elise shot him a look. “Please,” he added.

There was no mark on the credenza from where the tape had sat. “It hasn’t been there long,” Elise observed.

“Check this out,” the tech said. “These marks in the carpet.”

Starting a few feet from the chair, there were long indentations in the carpet. “Drag marks?” Josh asked.

“Not long enough,” said the tech.

“We should go,” Elise said, glancing at her watch.

Josh nodded and they headed out. As they passed the brutally murdered bodies of the Dawkins, he took in once more the brutality of what had been done to them and let the outrage rise up in his chest.

Outside, the glare of TV camera lights engulfed them. Beyond the circle of their glare, Josh saw a small crowd of neighbors in bathrobes and sweatshirts, probably curious and frightened. He didn’t have time to reassure them now. He wasn’t even sure if he could. He took a deep breath of the cool night air and tried to clear his head, girding himself for the long night to come.

Mercy General blazed like a beacon among the bungalows and mock colonials that made up the rest of the neighborhood. Aimee parked as close as she could and jogged up to the entrance, willing the automatic doors to open faster.

The lobby was half full. A young Latina with dark circles under her eyes and smeared makeup sat in one of the cheap padded chairs and rocked a toddler sprawled in her arms. A skinny white girl with spiked bleached blond hair and tattoos that she’d regret before she turned forty clutched her stomach. A scared-looking middle-aged woman whose hair had been dyed way too many times pretended to read a six-month-old issue of
People
over in the corner. The small room behind the glass window marked triage was empty. Aimee pressed the button for service and waited.