A Darkness More Than Night

He pulled down one of the old file boxes and let it drop heavily to the floor. Quickly lifting the lid, he began combing through the files for a notebook with some unused pages in it. It had been his ritual with the bureau to start each case he was assigned with a fresh spiral notebook. He finally came across a file with only a BAR form and a notebook in it. With so little paperwork in the file he knew it was a short case and that the notebook should have plenty of blank pages.
    McCaleb leafed through the notebook and found it largely unused. He then took out the Bureau Assistance Request form and quickly read the top sheet to see what case it was. He immediately remembered it because he had handled it with one phone call. The request had come from a detective in the small town of White Elk, Minnesota, almost ten years before, when McCaleb still worked out of Quantico. The detective’s report said two men had gotten into a drunken brawl in the house they shared, challenged each other to a duel and proceeded to kill each other with simultaneous shots from ten yards apart in the back yard. The detective needed no help with the double homicide case because it was cut and dried. But he was puzzled by something else. In the course of searching the victims’ house, investigators had come across something strange in the basement freezer. Pushed into a corner of the freezer cabinet were plastic bags containing dozens and dozens of used tampons. They were of various makes and brands, and preliminary tests on a sampling of the tampons had identified the menstrual blood on them as having come from several different women.
    The case detective didn’t know what he had but feared the worst. What he wanted from the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit was an idea about what these bloody tampons could mean and how to proceed. More specifically, he wanted to know if the tampons could possibly be souvenirs kept by a serial killer or killers who had gone undiscovered until they happened to kill each other.
    McCaleb smiled as he remembered the case. He had come across tampons in a freezer before. He called the detective and asked him three questions. What did the two men do for a living? In addition to the firearms used during the duel, were there any long weapons or a hunting license found in the apartment? And, lastly, when did bear hunting season begin in the woods of northern Minnesota?
    The detective’s answers quickly solved the tampon mystery. Both men worked at the airport in Minneapolis for a subcontractor that provided clean-out crews who prepared commercial airliners for flights. Several hunting rifles were found in the house but no hunting license. And, lastly, bear season was three weeks away.
    McCaleb told the detective that it appeared that the men were not serial killers but had probably been collecting the contents from the tampon disposal receptacles in lavatories of the planes they cleaned. They were taking the tampons home and freezing them. When hunting season began they would most likely thaw the tampons and use them to bait bear, which can pick up the scent of blood at a great distance. Most hunters use garbage as bait but nothing is better than blood.
    McCaleb remembered that the detective had actually seemed disappointed that he had no serial killer or killers at hand. He had either been embarrassed that an FBI agent sitting at a desk in Quantico had so quickly solved his mystery or he was simply annoyed that there would be no national media ride from his case. He abruptly hung up and McCaleb never heard from him again.
    McCaleb tore the few pages of notes from the case out of the notebook, put them in the file with the BAR form and returned the file to its spot. He then put the lid on the box and hoisted it back up onto the shelf that had been the top bunk. He shoved the box back into place and it banged hard on the bulkhead.
    Sitting back down, McCaleb glanced at the frozen image on the television screen and then considered the blank page in the notebook. Finally, he took the pen out of his shirt pocket and was about to begin writing when the door to the room suddenly opened and Buddy Lockridge stood there.
    “You okay?”
    “What?”
    “I heard all this banging. The whole boat moved.”
    “I’m fine, Buddy, I just -”
    “Oh, shit, what the hell is that?”
    He was staring at the TV screen. McCaleb immediately raised the remote and killed the picture.
    “Buddy, look, I told you this is confidential and