CHAPTER 3: RABBIT HOLES

The brown van became everything.

It started as a lead—a thin thread that Ghost Reid had provided, a vehicle seen in neighborhoods where children had disappeared. It was the kind of thing that could go nowhere, that probably would go nowhere, but it was something to pull on, and Mercer had become the kind of man who pulled on threads even when the whole fabric was already unraveling.

He started with the Rodriguez case. Ghost said he'd seen the van in that neighborhood the day Melissa disappeared. Mercer tracked down the woman who lived on the corner, a Mrs. Harriet Walsh, sixty-three years old, who spent most of her time looking out her window and watching the world go by. She was a valuable witness because she was observant and because she had nothing else to do.

"Brown van," Mrs. Walsh said, sitting in her living room that smelled like cat urine and old furniture. "I remember it because it seemed out of place. This is a residential neighborhood. We don't get many commercial vehicles. It was dented on the driver's side, like someone had hit it and left. The windows were tinted."

"License plate?" Chen asked. She was taking notes, her handwriting neat and precise.

"I didn't see the full plate. But I remember it started with a three. Or maybe a five. I'm not certain."

A plate that started with three or five. In a city with a hundred thousand registered vehicles, that could be anything. But it was a start.

Mercer and Chen spent the next three days hunting brown vans. They started with the DMV, pulling registration records for any vehicle matching the description. Brown, Chevrolet or Ford, dented on the driver's side, plates starting with three or five. The list was long. There were seventeen vehicles that matched the criteria in the city proper, and another sixty-three in the surrounding counties.

"We need to narrow this down," Chen said. They were in the precinct, surrounded by files and coffee cups and the accumulated debris of their investigation. "We need something else to connect them."

"Ghost said he saw it in Webb's neighborhood too," Mercer said. "And possibly near Porter's location. If we can establish sightings in all three neighborhoods, we can cross-reference locations."

So they started interviewing people. They went to the neighborhoods where the children had disappeared and asked everyone they could find if they'd seen a brown van. Most people hadn't noticed. Some had seen vans but couldn't remember the color. Some remembered the color but not the make. The information was fragmentary and often contradictory.

But slowly, a pattern emerged. A brown van, possibly a Ford, possibly with a dent, possibly with tinted windows, had been seen in the vicinity of all three neighborhoods where children had disappeared. The sightings were clustered in time—in the hours before or after the children went missing. It wasn't proof of anything, but it was evidence of something, and in a case with almost no evidence, something was everything.

Mercer became obsessed.

He carried the list of seventeen vehicles with him everywhere. He looked them up during his breaks. He drove past the addresses of the registered owners, trying to spot the vans, trying to match faces to vehicles. He stopped sleeping, or rather, he slept in his car in parking lots while he waited for nothing, while he watched nothing, while he pursued a thread that might lead to a killer or might lead to nothing at all.

"You need to take a break," Chen said. It was three in the morning, and they were still at the precinct. "You need to sleep."

"I'll sleep when we catch him," Mercer said.

"You'll be useless if you don't sleep. You'll make mistakes. You'll miss things."

Mercer didn't care. He'd passed the point where self-care mattered. The investigation had become his entire existence. He called his ex-wife once, during the second week, to ask about his daughter. Margaret answered and listened to him talk for about thirty seconds before telling him she didn't have time for this, that he needed to get himself together, that Sarah didn't want to talk to him. He accepted this information without comment and hung up.

The brown van investigation wasn't progressing. They'd ruled out six of the vehicles. The owners had solid alibis, or the vans didn't match the description well enough, or there was no reason to suspect them. But that left eleven vehicles. Eleven brown vans owned by eleven different people, any of whom could be a murderer, and most of whom probably weren't.

Mercer decided to approach this differently. He would stake out the vehicles. He would watch them. He would see where they went and who drove them and whether any of them visited the locations where the bodies were found. It was technically illegal without a warrant, and it would definitely be inadmissible as evidence, but Mercer had started to care less about what was legal and more about what was necessary.

He started with the first vehicle, registered to a man named Gerald Morrison, forty-six years old, who worked as a maintenance supervisor at three apartment complexes in the city. Perfect access to basements, to isolated spaces, to places where a child could be hidden.

Mercer staked out Morrison's apartment for five days. He watched him go to work. He watched him come home. He watched him buy groceries and eat dinner and exist in the mundane routines of a normal life. There was nothing suspicious about Gerald Morrison except that he was a middle-aged man with a brown van, which in the context of a serial killer investigation was enough.

On the sixth day, Mercer approached him directly.

Morrison was coming out of an apartment building where he'd been doing maintenance work. Mercer was waiting for him in the hallway.

"Gerald Morrison?" Mercer asked, his badge already out.

Morrison's face went pale. "Yes?"

"I'm Detective Mercer. I'd like to ask you some questions."

"Questions about what?" Morrison looked scared, which meant either he was guilty or he was innocent and frightened by the sudden appearance of a cop in his workplace.

"About where you were on the afternoon that Melissa Rodriguez disappeared."

"Who's Melissa Rodriguez?"

"A six-year-old girl who was kidnapped and murdered three weeks ago."

Morrison's hands started to shake. "I don't know anything about that."

"You have a brown van registered to you."

"Yeah, I have a van. I use it for work."

"I'm going to need you to show me the van."

Morrison led him to the parking lot where the van was parked. It was brown, and it was dented, and it had tinted windows. It looked exactly like what Ghost Reid had described. Mercer's heart was racing. This was it. This was the moment where the thread led to the killer.

He searched the van without a warrant, which meant anything he found would be inadmissible, which meant it didn't matter that there was nothing to find. The van was empty except for tools and supplies. No evidence of children. No sign of blood or rope or anything that suggested violence.

"I'm going to need to ask you some questions," Mercer said. "At the precinct."

Morrison went to the precinct, and Mercer interrogated him for fourteen hours. He asked him about his movements, his history, his relationships. He accused him of killing children. He showed him photographs of the victims and watched Morrison's face for signs of recognition or guilt. But there was nothing there. Morrison was just a middle-aged man with a bad van who'd done nothing wrong except have the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong vehicle.

Eventually, they had to release him. They had no evidence, no witness who'd seen him with the children, nothing that connected him to the murders except for the van and the timing and Mercer's instinct, which had proven to be unreliable.

Chen was angry. "You can't interrogate people for fourteen hours without charging them with something. You can't search vehicles without warrants. You're destroying the investigation."

"The investigation is already destroyed," Mercer said. "We have no leads. We have no evidence. We have four dead children and nothing."

"We have procedures."

"Procedures don't catch killers. They slow us down."

They continued with the other vehicles on the list, and each one was the same. Mercer would stake them out, would interrogate the owners, would tear their lives apart looking for evidence of something that wasn't there. By the time they'd gone through the list, they'd wasted two months and had nothing to show for it except a collection of angry citizens and a growing reputation for harassment.

Captain Hawkins called Mercer into his office in the middle of the third month of the investigation.

"You need to step back from this," Hawkins said. He was sitting behind his desk, and Mercer was standing, and there was a distance between them that was both physical and philosophical. "You're becoming a problem. You're harassing innocent people. You're not following procedure. You're damaging the investigation."

"The investigation was already damaged," Mercer said. "By incompetence. By bureaucratic failure. By a system that doesn't care enough to actually try."

"We care," Hawkins said. "But we care about doing this right. We care about due process and evidence and the rule of law. We care about not becoming the thing we're fighting against."

"That's nice," Mercer said. "But those children are still dead."

"Yes. And harassing innocent people won't bring them back. Violating their rights won't bring them back. All it will do is make sure that when we do catch the killer, we won't be able to prosecute him because all of the evidence will be poisoned."

Mercer wanted to hit him. It was a clean, clear desire, the kind of thing he'd learned to recognize over the years. He turned around and walked out instead, which was probably the better choice but didn't feel as good.

A new captain had arrived at the precinct the week before. His name was Derek Shaw, and he was young—thirty-five years old—and he had the kind of polish that came from a good family and a political network. He'd been brought in as part of some administrative reshuffling, and he'd immediately begun looking over everyone's shoulders, finding fault, suggesting improvements.

Shaw called Mercer into his office the day after Hawkins had reprimanded him.

"I've been reading your case files," Shaw said. He was sitting behind a desk that had just been installed, and he hadn't yet learned how to sit behind it without looking uncomfortable. "The brown van investigation. It's aggressive."

"It's the only lead we have," Mercer said.

"It's a lead, but it's not a good one. A vehicle that might have been in three neighborhoods isn't enough to base a massive manhunt on. And the way you've been pursuing it is concerning. You're cutting corners. You're bending the rules."

"The rules are there to protect criminals," Mercer said.

"The rules are there to protect everyone. Including the innocent. If we start violating them because we're desperate, then we've lost something important. We've become the thing we're fighting against."

Mercer had heard this before, from Hawkins, from Chen, from every voice of reason that was trying to tell him to care about procedure and principle. But he was past the point where principle mattered. Procedure hadn't saved the children. Principle hadn't stopped the killer.

"Remove me from the case if you think I'm a problem," Mercer said.

Shaw considered this. "Not yet. But I'm watching. And if I see you continuing this pattern of behavior, I will."

Mercer left Shaw's office and went back to his desk, where Chen was waiting with files spread out in front of her. She was still trying to solve this the right way, still believing that there was a correct path through the maze.

"We need a new approach," she said. "The brown van didn't lead anywhere. We need to think about this differently."

"How?" Mercer asked. "We have four dead children. No witnesses. No obvious connection between the victims. A killer who's smart enough not to leave evidence, careful enough to avoid detection, patient enough to wait between murders."

"He'll make a mistake," Chen said. "They always do."

"Maybe," Mercer said. "Or maybe he won't. Maybe he'll just keep killing until he dies or gets bored or decides he's had enough. Maybe the only way to catch him is to be there when he strikes next, to be waiting where he's going to attack."

"We can't be everywhere," Chen said.

"No," Mercer agreed. "We can't."

They sat in silence for a moment. Around them, the precinct continued its organized chaos. Phones ringing, officers typing reports, the machinery of law enforcement grinding away without purpose. Mercer smoked a cigarette, which was technically not allowed at the desk, but nobody had the energy to enforce the rules anymore.

"My daughter won't talk to me," Mercer said. It came out of nowhere, a confession without context.

"What?" Chen looked at him.

"Sarah. My ex-wife's daughter. I called her because... I don't know why I called her. And Margaret said Sarah didn't want to talk to me. She's fourteen now. Almost fifteen. And she doesn't want to talk to her own father."

"I'm sorry," Chen said.

"Don't be. She's right not to want to talk to me. I'm not good at being a father. I'm not good at anything except this—at looking at dead children and trying to find the people who killed them. And I'm not even good at that."

Chen didn't have words for this. There were no words for the specific kind of failure that Mercer was experiencing—the failure to catch a killer, the failure to be a father, the failure to be a man who was worth talking to.

Mercer went back to Murphy's that night and drank bourbon until he couldn't remember his own name. The bartender, who knew him well, cut him off at some point. Mercer sat at the bar and stared at nothing and tried very hard not to think about anything at all.

The brown van investigation was dead. The only lead they had was dead. And the killer was still out there, still hunting, still patient. And the city was still gray, and the future was still gray, and Mercer was becoming a hollow version of himself, a man defined entirely by his failures.