“Understood.”
A few miles away, Charlie’s radio chirped while he and his partner, Tony Harris, were interviewing a woman who accused her husband of beating her with an eighteen-inch length of hard salami after she refused to go to the store to buy him more beer. They had nearly been forced to feign a coughing fit just to keep from laughing, but they was still determined to help this poor woman—the deli meat had left significant marks on her face and arms.
“Detectives Walker and Harris, an officer is under fire near your location,” said the operator, reading off the address. “You are the only officers in the vicinity. It’s requested that you cease all further action and assist Detective Banks. You are advised to proceed with extreme caution.”
Quickly apologizing to the irate woman, they left the house and hurried to their car. Fortunately, traffic was light on this side of town and they were able to make it to Banks’ location faster than anticipated. He could hardly believe his eyes when he reached the house.
On the porch steps laid a large black man, a shotgun lying next to him with a bright red shell casing not far away. Blood soaked through the man’s white T-shirt over his left shoulder. Charlie noticed that he was alive: his chest was rapidly heaving.
“What the fuck happened here?” wondered Harris aloud, drawing his weapon and carefully getting out of the car.
“I don’t know,” admitted Charlie, readying his own weapon. “Stabilize him if you can, then get an ambulance down here. I’m going inside to check on Banks. This doesn’t look good.”
“Copy that,” said Harris, his concern darkening his tone.
Charlie rushed to the house first, kicking the shotgun away onto the lawn and stepping around the injured man. Upon entering the house, he followed a thin trail of blood into the living room. Detective Banks lay at the end of this bloody streak, looking all the worse for wear. He had a close-spread shotgun wound on his upper thigh and hip. Oddly enough, it wasn’t bleeding as much as it should have been.
“Walker. Took you long enough,” Banks joked, wincing.
“What the hell happened, Rick?” Charlie asked, bending down to inspect the older man’s wound.
“It ain’t as bad as it looks, kid. I was in the house for a minute…then the fucking neighbor showed up—turns out the asshole had a shotgun loaded with rock salt. Stings like a bitch, but it shouldn’t even need stitches. My Kevlar took half the shot anyway. I fired on him after I was hit. I didn’t kill him, did I?” Banks asked, genuinely concerned.
“No, he’s still kicking,” Charlie reassured him. “Through and through on the shoulder, I think. He might not be a great tennis player after this, but he’ll live. Harris is out there working on him right now. Ambulance shouldn’t be far behind.”
“Good, good.” He swallowed and sighed, preparing to say something important. “Walker, let me ask you something—you been following this Holloway case?”
Charlie thought for a second.
“Yeah, I’ve looked over the files. It’s a strange thing. We know exactly who he is, but it’s like he’s invisible—he leaves no evidence other than that card, and even
that
means nothing. It’s an interesting case, for sure.”
“Right. Well, the house I’m bleeding all over belongs to a woman. And if we don’t bust our asses and nail this son of a bitch, it’ll be the former residence of the Hollow Man’s twenty-third victim,” stated Banks. “Now, obviously, the brass isn’t going to let me carry on. I’ll have to get dragged off to the hospital, but we honestly have a chance to get him this time, kid.”
Banks winced and attempted to sit up straight before continuing.
“So, neighbor across the street calls 911 just over an hour ago and says he saw our guy enter the house but never saw him leave. Not two minutes later, the lady next door calls in and tells us she saw some guy in the backyard carrying a tarp. Both callers gave Holloway’s description to the letter. There’s an alley that runs behind this place and he probably had his wheels parked back there. I’ll bet my pension that our girl was in that tarp. No way the neighbors could have seen the alley through those hedges back there to ID a vehicle though.”
“Why are you telling me this, Rick?” Charlie asked.
“I’m telling you because this is
your
case now, Walker. Pete tells me you’re a bright little fucker, so it’s time we stopped wasting your talent on all those B and E’s and you catch yourself a headline-maker. You’ve recovered a lot of stolen stereos, but now it’s time to move up to the big leagues.”
“Where do I start?” Charlie asked, not wasting any time.
“The way I see it is this: you’ve got just under five hours, give or take, before he kills this woman. Postmortem puts the time of death of most of his victims at around midnight on the night before they’re found. His last four victims died on the night of their abduction and were found on display the next morning. So we have a time. We need a place. What do we know?”
“A place…” Charlie thought aloud. “From what I gather, he
has
to work in the same spot every time. He’s not killing them in different places; he brings them to a central location. A lot of his work was done with surgical tools—specialized power saws and drills—not the kind of thing you’d carry around to carve somebody up in an alley. He’s got to be somewhere that he can access these tools and also maintain the privacy he needs to do his work.”
“Good, keep going,” Banks encouraged him, wincing as he adjusted himself once again to find a more comfortable position.
“Contusions on the cranium show blunt force trauma; I’m assuming he knocks his victims out and revives them when he reaches his location.”
“Common knowledge,” Banks stated. “Also—not relevant right now. Think more specifically. We know what happens
when
he takes them, but what happens when they reach his hideout?”
“Well, postmortems also show that he when he rapes the women, they’re alive, and signs of struggle show that they’re conscious. We’ve got friction burns on the wrists and ankles so they’re definitely tied down. We can rule out being drugged at any point though; toxicology always comes up negative. The fact that there are no abrasions in or around the mouth tells me that these women haven’t been gagged, so they’re likely to make a lot of noise. This place has to be somewhere that’s isolated—somewhere that these women won’t be heard.”
“Excellent, Walker. Good shit, but
what else
can we tell from this?”
“It’s in the city—his place. These people are found in elaborate positions, sometimes just a few hours after the time of death. It takes time to set something like that up, so he can’t be placing these people far from where he’s killing them.”
“Perfect,” grinned Banks. “Unfortunately, that’s where I’m lost. I came out here hoping that I could find something that would tell me more, but the place looks clean.”
Charlie racked his brain for useful data, kneeling next to the wounded detective in thoughtful silence. There had to be a way to narrow down the area, but how? Just then, Charlie spied an old, antique-style map that was a decoration on the wall nearby.
“A map,” he said.
“A map?” questioned Banks.
“Yes, a map! Let’s paint a picture of where this asshole has been. Sometimes you can know all this information, but when you actually
see
it, everything comes together.”
Charlie pulled out his cell phone and called Pete Valdez.
“Captain, it’s Charlie Walker,” he said. “I need you to do me a favor. Pinpoint every location where one of Holloway’s victims was found on a city map, scan it and send it to my car’s laptop.”
“What’s this about, Charlie? You’re not on the Holloway case,” scolded Valdez.
“I am now,” Charlie declared. “Listen, I don’t have time to explain. Get me the map as fast as you can.”
Charlie hung up his phone without another word.
“Damn, Walker, did you just steamroll the Captain?” Banks asked, with a small chuckle.
“He’ll get over it,” he said, dismissing the notion. “We can get this guy—we
will
get this guy.”
“What are you on to?” Banks asked, as a siren neared the house and the red and white lights of the ambulance lit up the room.
“My theory is this: the guy is smart—we’ll give him that. But what is the one thing that can pull the rug out from under even the most on-point genius?”
“You got me…” Banks replied with a shrug.
“The subconscious, Rick. The shit he doesn’t even
realize
he’s doing. If I’m right, then this asshole doesn’t realize that he’s literally drawing us a search perimeter. If this map looks like what I think it’s going to look like, the location of every victim he’s left on display will draw us a circle around where this guy is.”
“I see,” Banks agreed. “Put all the locations on a map, connect the dots, and we’ve got ourselves a narrow region where he could be hiding.”
“Bingo,” Charlie exclaimed. “The paramedics are on their way in. Take care of that leg, Rick.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Walker, go catch this idiot, will you?”
“You got it, boss,” Charlie said, making his way outside.
A couple of squad cars had shown up alongside the ambulance and uniformed officers were now cordoning off the area with yellow tape. Charlie ducked under the tape and hurried to his car. Harris was waiting for him inside, his face lit by the laptop screen he was looking at.
“Cap sent you a map,” he said.
“Show me.”
Harris handed the laptop over and Charlie nearly gasped when he looked at the screen. His map idea had worked like a charm. Right on the northeast side of the city, near the river, was a blob of twenty-two pinpoints, heavily concentrated. The perimeter wasn’t much more than a mile in diameter. It just goes to show that sometimes the brightest minds overlook the most obvious details.
“Son of a bitch,” Charlie exclaimed.
“What?” asked Harris.
“James Holloway. We’re going to find him,” Charlie said as he fired up the car and started to drive.
“James Holloway?” Harris asked, incredulously. “The fucking
Hollow Man
? Nobody can catch that guy and, even if they could, he’s dangerous. He’d never go down without taking a few of us with him.”
Harris looked at Charlie, who ignored him and stared straight ahead, a look of furious intensity painted across his features.
“You’re serious?” Harris asked.
“Deadly serious, Tony. He’s just taken another one—we can save her. Get the Captain on the phone and tell him to use that perimeter as a search area. Have him find us a list of every vacant building within it.”
Harris did as he was told and Charlie sped through the streets of Detroit, heading for the area on the map. When he was just a few miles away, the Captain’s search results returned showing only three vacant buildings in that area. Two of them were small stores, but the third was an apartment complex.
“The apartments,” Charlie asked. “Where are they?”
“Right here,” Harris pointed to a spot on the map that was almost dead center of the cluster of pinpoints.
“He’s there. He’s in that complex.”
Charlie was sure of it. The shops were too small and too close to operating businesses, but the apartment complex was tall—twelve stories. The sound of a person screaming inside the complex from one of the upper floors would never reach the streets below. It was the perfect location.
When the two detectives had reached the building, Charlie’s suspicions were reinforced. Charlie circled the structure using the alleys that surrounded it. The place had only recently been abandoned. The windows were still intact and all the doors hung firmly in their frames. No vehicles were present, but that didn’t mean much. A smart criminal wouldn’t park his vehicle nearby in case it was identified. Then again, a smart criminal wouldn’t leave his victims in a near-perfect circle around the place where he killed them all.