“Us and her. But first they’d have to suspect the boy’s in this area. How could they?”
He and Jessie rarely took Travis off the property. And as far as anyone knew, he was their nephew, Tommy, staying with them while his exhausted parents looked after his eight-year-old sister who was fighting cancer. There were only two known photos of Travis, both frequently shown on TV, one from when he was only three. The other, more recent, didn’t provide a clear image of him.
“Anyway,” Jessie said, “if somebody thought they recognized him and reported him, this place would already be crawling with Feds.”
“Not if maybe they checked out our story about a nephew and found it was bogus. And then discovered a link between us and Jane. They’d wait for her to call us.”
“It’d be pretty damn expensive to pull a couple of these surveillance planes out of San Diego or L.A. just for this.”
“Your tax dollars at work. Anyway, say they get her burner location.”
“Say.”
“And say she doesn’t know they have it. So she doesn’t throw it away after calling us.”
“They could get to her fast.”
“Considering what’s at stake, they’ll put any resources they have into finding her.” He cocked his head and turned one ear to the northbound plane until he said, “Getting louder. I think it just turned west.”
About two feet long from tail to ear tufts, with a four-foot wingspan, the great horned owl sailed off the oak branch and swooped down the darkness, beautiful and pale and terrible. It came toward Jessie and Gavin, eyes luminous yellow in a catlike face, passed low over them, and glided lower still. From among the carpet of crisp oak leaves, the bird snatched a soft, warm vole or a field mouse or another small earthbound creature born to the short life of easy prey.
The owl vanished into some high roost to consume its catch in silence, but overhead the aircraft grew louder and nearer in its patient patrol.
Gavin wondered if the drones, earlier in the day, had not been searching for them—because their location was already known—but instead had been meant to spook them just enough so that they might call Jane’s burner phone to ask her advice.
“If she calls us,” Jessie said, “we warn her and hang up. But if this plane is what we think…”
“They’ll know we’re on to them,” Gavin said, “and they’ll be all over this place in ten minutes.”
He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled loud, and the dogs came running from out of the darkness.
“So we go?” Jessie asked.
“We go. And if it’s a false alarm, we come back.”
She took his hand. “I don’t think we’ll be coming back soon.”
13
An imposing house at the end of a cul-de-sac. Soft contemporary architecture. Black slate roof, smooth rather than textured stucco, honed limestone paving, enormous sheets of glass on the view side of the residence. Palm trees and ferns. Beds of anthuriums with red heart-shaped spathes like bursts of blood in the landscape lighting.
Sanjay Shukla parked at the curb near the residence.
Tanuja was living her recent novel, or perhaps researching a sequel, much as she had when she stood in the rain to catalogue the feelings of her character Subhadra in the novelette she’d not yet finished writing.
Alecto Rising, her recently published novel, magic realism with a comic edge, had received kind reviews. It concerned a young woman named Emma Dodge into whom was manifested one of the Furies, Alecto. In classic mythology, Tisiphone and Megaera and Alecto, daughters of the earth goddess Gaea, punished crimes in the name of the victims. In Tanuja’s story, Alecto descended to the earth because current-day crimes were so horrible that humanity risked annihilation if criminals were not taught to fear again the justice of the gods. Being a pagan goddess, Alecto preferred swift and harsh retribution, bloodier than not, but Emma Dodge, a twenty-eight-year-old personal shopper with a stubborn streak, at first bewildered to be sharing her body with a violence-prone divinity, had ideas of her own. In the novel, Alecto taught Emma the value of a moral code and respect for higher powers, while Emma put Alecto through an enlightenment less destructive than that of the eighteenth century, and together they devised lesson-teaching punishments as effective as evisceration but less lethal. In his usual acerbic way, Sanjay called it Death Wish Meets Pay It Forward.
A Mercedes sedan and a BMW were parked immediately in front of the Chatterjee residence. On the last Saturday of every month, Aunt Ashima and Uncle Burt invited the same four guests to dinner and an evening of cards. Justin Vogt, the attorney who had advised them during their management of the Shukla Family Trust, following the death of Baap and Mai in the plane crash, who had helped them protect the funds they had looted from it, and his wife, Eleanor, would be there. So would Mohammed Waziri, the accountant, and his lovely wife, Iffat.
As Tanuja got out of the Hyundai, the skulls strung round her neck clicked softly, one against another.
The house faced onto a canyon that declined to the sea; and the sea had effused a fog into the canyon, so that the darkness of that void had given way to a pallid and amorphous mass that now began to overflow, questing between the houses with its many ghostly hands.
She drew a deep breath of the pleasantly cool night air and surveyed the street, which curved around an oval island—planted with japonica bushes and three mature coral trees—before doubling back on itself.
Of the six houses on the cul-de-sac, four were dark, including two immediately to the east of the Chatterjee property and the one adjacent to it on the west side.
For a moment, Tanuja came unmoored from her purpose and did not know why she found herself in this place. Alecto Rising was written and published, and she had no need to research it. Anyway, how was it possible to research what it felt like to share one’s body with a pagan divinity? Such a thing could not be researched, only imagined.
From the nearby canyon rose the ululation of coyotes in the frenzied pursuit of prey. She had heard these cries often before. Although the sound always had the power to ice the spine, the chill she felt this time was not related to pity for whatever terrified creature might be fleeing through the night. This time, the coldness in her marrow was spawned by a sudden ability to vividly imagine the horror of being in the grip of a blood delirium, of being the chaser rather than the chased, of life lived in the regimentation of a pack, where the frenzy of one became the frenzy of all.
Be at peace, she told herself. Saturday night is for fun. There is fun to be had. Do whatever you feel you must do to be happy, and tomorrow you will write your best work ever.
Sanjay came around the Hyundai to her side, and her concern greatly diminished with his arrival. She did not know where this research would take her after they went to the house and rang the bell, but that was, after all, why one conducted research—to see where it might lead.
He had opened the tailgate to retrieve the reciprocating saw and the orange extension cord. She had forgotten about those items. She couldn’t imagine to what purpose they would be applied.
Well, they were just tools. One needed tools to accomplish any task, whatever it might be.
“No. Not yet,” he said, and he closed the tailgate.
Already, under the streetlamps, the blacktop glistened with a condensation of fog, and wetness mottled the sidewalk, and the grass was diamonded, and the glossy red spathes of the anthuriums dripped.
14