Eat the Dark
Eat the Dark is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Del Rey Trade Paperback Original
Copyright © 2007 by Joe Schreiber
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Schreiber, Joe.
Eat the dark: a novel / Joe Schreiber.
p. cm.
1. Serial murderers—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.C4635E28 2007
813'.6—dc22 2007022352
www.randomhouse.com/delrey/
eISBN: 978-0-345-50251-3
v3.0_r1
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
EPILOGUE
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALSO BY JOE SCHREIBER
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
1.
Mike Hughes thought: It’s dead.
From where he stood, Tanglewood Memorial Hospital rose like a pile of bones, the remains of some animal that had fallen down behind the acres of trees that surrounded it and never gotten up.
On the other side of the rotunda, he saw workmen on scaffolding and ladders, hammering sheets of plywood across the windows, filling the evening air with the reassuring tap-tap-tap of endless American labor. They’d been working all week, covering every door and window to dissuade any thieves or vandals who would soon be tempted by Tanglewood’s unwatched grounds, and now the work was virtually complete. The entire building was boarded shut in an irregular crossword puzzle of wooden planks.
In two hours it would be dark. It was the Fourth of July weekend, temperatures in the mid-nineties with the kind of humidity that gave even the lightest fabrics an itchy, clutching dampness. Mike continued along the walkway, the moist heat creating little sweat blotches on the front of his blue scrub pants, and stopped outside the main entrance, where two men in yellow hard hats were packing up the last of their tools and carrying them to a waiting pickup.
“Almost done?” Mike asked.
“Just about,” one of the men said, not bothering to look up.
“How are people getting through?”
The hard hat nodded vaguely off to the right. “Emergency room exit.”
Mike followed the cement path beneath the long overhang where for decades ambulances had dropped off casualties. Exchanging sun for shadow, his eyes lost their squint and his face softened, becoming younger, friendlier. He was thirty-four years old, an age that had once seemed as insurmountable as Everest but now felt as lived-in as his old beach sandals. Parenthood had added the first wrinkles around his eyes, and his hairline was beginning to thin. Lately, without saying anything about it, Sarah had begun buying low-fat snacks and sending salads with his supper, which he knew was as close as she’d ever come to remarking on the fact that they were both, unthinkable as it once seemed, broaching the hinterlands of middle age.
Mike went inside, walking past Steve Calhoun in his alcove set just within the emergency room entrance.
“Seven o’clock already?” Calhoun asked, scowling down at the Sports page.
“Almost.”
“Ain’t you the eager beaver.” The security guard shook his head. “My old man said never trust a fella that isn’t late for work once in a while.”
“Sounds like the model employee.”
“Then there’s you,” Calhoun continued on, “never been a minute late in your life. Coming in early, even.” He seemed to mull it over in his mind. “Man like that must have something real special waiting for him downstairs.”
“Excuse me?”
“Come on, sweet Jolie Braun?”
Mike flushed. “Now listen—”
“Okay, take it easy,” Calhoun said, looking up from his newspaper to nod at the wall of video monitors rising alongside him. “I get paid to notice things, that’s all. Doesn’t mean I got to tell nobody.” A smile crept over his face. “You’re a married man, ain’tcha? Got a kid at home?”
Mike set his hands on the security counter and leaned forward, forcing Calhoun to meet his eyes. “You’re way off base on this.”
“Not that I blame you. Lord knows I’d give my left one to get my hands around some of that.”
“Look—”
“All right, all right, don’t get all bent out of shape.” Calhoun leaned back on his rickety stool and Mike heard the big key ring on his belt jingle. “You know, I’m surprised they even made your sorry ass come in to work tonight. You must have really pissed somebody off up the food chain, huh?”
Mike blew out his breath, relieved at the turn in conversation. “Must have.”
“And the midnight shift no less?” Calhoun scowled at him, the incredulity building in his eyes like an impending sneeze. “Christ Jesus, there ain’t even anybody here! Ambulance fleet transferred the last patients out to Good Sam’s this morning. All that’s left is files and furniture. Otherwise this whole place is as hollowed-out as my checking account.”
“Suits me.” He watched Calhoun’s hand move automatically to the breast pocket of his uniform, finding the soft-pack of discount cigarettes, shaking one out and installing it expertly between his lips. Though he couldn’t have been much older than Mike, Calhoun’s entire physical appearance betrayed a lifetime of spectacular misuse and neglect. He was a scrawny, limping, unshaven man with an enormous Adam’s apple who nonetheless evoked a kind of brute durability, as if the very ligature of his body was strung together by alcohol-cured leather.
For the three years Mike had worked at Tanglewood, Calhoun’s “office” had been a gauntlet that he had to run just to get to the time clock. Here the security guard sat with his keys, cigarettes, and closed-circuit video feeds from every corner of the hospital, as protected as any endangered species: the gainfully employed American functional alcoholic. And from the current smell of things, Calhoun hadn’t waited until he was home to start drinking.
Let him say what he wants about Jolie Braun, Mike decided. Nobody would believe him anyway.
“Ayuh.” Calhoun grinned in a way that made his long chin appear to grow even longer. “I guess you ought to have it quiet tonight.” He looked around with the comical bewilderment of the person the universe had chosen as its straight man more often than not. “But I still don’t see why they couldn’t give you one night off.”
“I appreciate your concern.” Mike was already leaning into the first step that would carry him away from Calhoun and whatever remained of this conversation when he heard rubber squealing up the service road in front of the hospital. Turning, he saw a line of police cruisers pulling into the rotunda, followed by an ambulance. Officers in blue uniforms were already getting out, moving with the swift urgency of men about their work.
Calhoun glanced up. “What the hell is all this happy crap?”
“Got your patient here,” a young cop in sunglasses said, walking up, thrusting a fat stack of pages in Calhoun’s direction.
“Hold it.” Calhoun put down his paper and stood up. But the EMTs were already opening the back of the ambulance, unloading a stretcher with a man in an orange prison jumpsuit strapped to the rails. The man stared into the blue summer sky with an absolute vacancy of expression that seemed to Mike’s eye neither childlike nor tranquil. Like the hospital, he thought, the man on the stretcher looked dead.
“Says here he’s going for an MRI,” the sunglasses cop said. “Either you two geniuses know where that is?”
Mike nodded. “I work there.”
“Yeah? Well, that makes you my new best friend.”
Craning his neck, Mike tried to get a better look at the face of the man strapped to the litter, but the shadows of the officers surrounding him continued to float over his features, obscuring them like a series of ill-fitting masks. It felt like the man’s face was hiding from him, ducking away just when he thought he might catch a glimpse of it. The cops, all five of them, stood looking at one another across the stretcher. Mike realized that the paramedics had already climbed back into the ambulance; within moments the vehicle sped off, leaving them there with the silent passenger.
“Who is this guy?” Mike asked.
Nobody said a word.
2.
The elevator doors jumped open and the cops came out with the stretcher—Calhoun had elected to stay upstairs—when Mike saw Jolie waiting for them. She was holding a digital camera, snapping photos of the man in the prison jumpsuit until the sunglasses cop gave her a hard look.
“If I were you I’d put that away,” the cop said. “That flashing light’s liable to make our friend here lose his happy thoughts.” He was still wearing his tinted aviator specs, despite the fact that he was now underground. “You put our boy here in an agitated state, it’s gonna get ugly in a hurry.” Without waiting for Jolie to reply, he looked over at Mike. “Which way we headed, chief?”
“That way,” Mike said in a voice that, to his own ears, sounded lost amid the unexpected flurry of activity. He hadn’t learned anything about the man on the stretcher, or why Jolie would want to take his picture, but he had finally gotten a clear look at the prisoner’s face in the elevator. It made him feel cold all over. Though the man still wore no expression, he could feel the green eyes watching him, drifting away and coming back again with the lazy watchfulness of a predator sizing up his prey.
They pushed the stretcher past the vacant X-ray and fluoroscopy suites, the waiting room, and a CAT scan whose door stood open to reveal the green glow of the control panel shining across the tile floor. The long hall ahead was empty except for a broken wheelchair and a stack of cardboard boxes. Mounted to the wall was a digital punch-clock, and Mike swiped his badge without breaking stride.
“Through those double doors.” He pointed with his chin. “There’s a button on the wall.”
One of the cops hit the button and they wheeled the litter into a larger space whose dimly lit perimeters receded into darkness. Monitors and computer equipment lined the walls, and Mike heard the low hum of climate-control systems cycling fresh air through the ventilation ducts. Thirty feet in front of him, behind a square of tinted glass, was the scan room, the six-foot bore of the 1.5 Tesla Philips magnet gaped like an open mouth.
He dropped his backpack on the floor and kicked it aside, out of the path of the stretcher.
“What’s this?” The sunglasses cop reached behind a desk and pulled up an aluminum baseball bat. “You and Florence Nightingale play ball down here when it gets slow?”
Jolie shook her head, pointing through the glass. The entire entourage paused to look at her. “There’s twenty miles of copper wire coiled up inside that bore that holds a constant electrical charge,” she smiled broadly, clearly happy to have everyone’s attention. “And the guys that installed the emergency vent were more interested in my chest than getting the shaft put on straight. If the chamber ruptures and the backup vent fails, we’ve got three seconds before helium gas fills the room. That’s where Mr. Louisville here comes in.” She pantomimed someone swinging a bat toward the glass.
The cop leaned over toward Jolie, and Mike was just close enough to hear him speak into her ear. “I can sympathize with those guys who installed the vent.” He took off his sunglasses. “You got a boyfriend?”
“I dated a cop once. It didn’t work out.”
“Yeah?”
“I wouldn’t let him bring his gun to bed.”
The cop said, “You serious?” and Jolie started saying something about handcuffs, as Mike glanced around the scan room, taking stock of the remaining equipment. Sitting out on the table next to the console was a foil-wrapped bottle and two plastic champagne flutes. It was just odd enough to jar him back into the flow of Jolie’s one-woman show, the kind of “here I am, boys” performance piece she could carry on almost indefinitely, given a willing audience of men.
“Hey, Jo?” He nodded at the champagne. “What’s that?”
A twinge of secrecy shadowed the corners of her lips. “Didn’t you get my note?”
“I got it,” Mike said and felt a prodding finger of unease whose source he couldn’t quite pinpoint. “What’s with the snapshots?” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the other cops once again pushing the stretcher toward the MRI door.
“I’m going to sell them on eBay. Candid photos of serial killers go for a lot of money.”
“Serial killers?” He looked at her more closely, wanting to see teasing in her face but not spotting any. “Who ordered this?”
“Dr. Walker.” Jolie turned to where the cops had stopped with the stretcher and pointed at the door. “Guys, hold up.”
A red sign there read:
WARNING—THIS MAGNET IS ALWAYS ON!
ABSOLUTELY NO LOOSE METAL OBJECTS!
“DO WE HAVE YOUR KEYS?”
“All those metal restraints are going to have to come off Mr. Snow before we put him into the magnet,” Jolie said. “You big strong men might as well get started stripping him down.”
3.
“Mommy, where are we going?”
“To the hospital to see Daddy.” Sarah had answered this question three times already since they’d left the house twenty minutes ago, and it was part of a routine so familiar that it hardly registered. In any case, her mind was preoccupied with more pressing matters.
They were on Route 72, having finally cut away from the herd of holiday traffic coming off the turnpike, deep into soybean fields and grain silos that gave this landscape its texture. Some of the silos had Bible verses painted on the side, most had American flags. On the Outback’s passenger seat, an empty cardboard box rode shotgun. Sarah told herself that she was dropping by to pick up whatever Mike had stored in his locker—books, clothes, coffee cups, the menagerie of personal items he’d accumulated after working three years at Tanglewood. But if she was going to be even remotely honest with herself, that wasn’t the real reason for her visit tonight.
Faintly, she heard her mother’s voice ringing through her head: Once a cheater, always a cheater. Because they know they can. The smug confidence of that voice always made her cringe. Once a cheater, always a cheater. Because they know they can. Because they—
“Stop it,” she said, under her breath, but still loud enough that Eli picked it up from the backseat. He’d always had her sense of hearing.