“We walk from here,” he said.
She wished they had stopped somewhere to buy insulated jackets and boots. However, the forecast had called for only a fraction as much snow as had fallen, and outfitting herself and this man, in his condition, had seemed a daunting task fraught with risk.
As if privy to her thoughts, he said, “It’s a short walk.”
2
The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department maintains a major substation in Borrego Springs, which means deputies are on scene at the market almost before the last echoes of the gunfire fade away. They are well-trained, professional, efficient—and a pain in the ass, as far as Carter Jergen is concerned.
He and Dubose are NSA agents, among other things, and these guys are nothing but generic fuzz, plain-vanilla cops. Nevertheless, they want to have a role in the investigation of the shootings because this is their turf, their town; these are their neighbors.
There is no damn role for them. This is ostensibly a national security matter, far above their pay grade. None of them possesses the necessary security clearance to work the investigation. Not one of their precious neighbors has so much as suffered a paper cut in the course of the event. The only significant damage to property is the bullet-drilled cash register. Otherwise, losses involve only a small quantity of candy bars, gum, and tabloid newspapers spattered with blood and brain tissue; no big deal.
Yet here they are, frustrating Jergen and Dubose, taking photos of the so-called crime scene and busily collecting the names of those witnesses who haven’t fled.
Dubose puts in a call for backup. There will be other agents on scene as soon as they can be choppered in. Greater numbers will help push the hometown boys out of the picture.
But then the watch captain from the substation shows up, a guy named Foursquare, if it can be believed. He has a bulldog jaw and the steely eyes of a Vegas pit boss who would call his own mother a cheat and throw her out of the game if she won more than forty bucks at blackjack. He wants to know who the decedents are, and he’s not satisfied to be told only that they are foreign agents. He wants to check their ID, but Jergen heatedly argues against disturbing the cadavers, even though there’s no ID to find; he and Dubose had the foresight to take the wallets from the bodies of Washington and his wife before the local gendarmes arrived. They have also found a key to a Honda in one of the dead man’s sport-coat pockets.
While Jergen debates jurisdiction with Foursquare, Dubose goes into the parking lot, supposedly to make a list of the vehicles that might belong to the deaders and to record the license-plate numbers, but in fact to try Washington’s car key in each of the Hondas.
No sooner does Foursquare stop grumbling about needing to know who the decedents are than he takes aside Oren Luckman, the store manager, and is recording a statement from him. One of the deputies is searching for expended shell casings, and another escorts a tall, somber civilian to Jergen and introduces him as a town mortician who also serves as the coroner.
Dubose returns and takes Jergen aside to inform him that the key fits the green sedan. The car contains a trunkful of groceries in bags from the town’s other major market. Evidently, they were stocking up for several weeks of hibernation. There is nothing else in the Honda to identify its owner, no registration paper and no insurance-company card in the glove box, as there should be.
While Captain Foursquare records Luckman’s fevered reimagining of the shoot-out, Dubose goes to the manager’s office. He intends to use the market’s computer to back-door the California DMV and run the Honda’s license plate to find the registered owner.
Jergen is left with the swarm of uniformed busybodies. If there’s one thing he despises the most about local cops, no matter what locale they hail from, it’s that too damn many of them think they have a sacred duty to enforce the law, as though the law isn’t just what a bunch of money-grubbing power-crazed politicians cobble together, as if instead it’s handed down by God on stone tablets. And here in Borrego Springs, he seems to be dealing with a nest of their kind.
He counsels himself to be patient with these sworn-to-serve-and-protect types. All will be well. If Dubose can identify to whom the Honda is registered, they will most likely have the address at which the Washingtons took shelter.
That’s where the boy will be.
3
The tightly gathered trees took most of the snowfall upon their boughs, admitting but a fraction to the ground between them. No wind had yet arisen. Snow sought the earth in silence, mounding for the most part beneath the barren limbs of the deciduous hardwoods. The undergrowth was sparse. Carrying her leather tote bag, Jane had no trouble following Hendrickson, although the day was cold enough to make her eyes water. Her breath plumed from her.
How he knew, she couldn’t tell, for the woods seemed too uniform to provide easily recognizable landmarks, but he glanced over his shoulder to say, “We’ve just stepped onto the estate. Not much farther now.”
Anabel owned nine acres here, wrested from Booth’s father in their divorce settlement. Only the lower three acres, on which the house was situated, were walled, the upper six left for some future purpose.
The stairhead building stood under pines, the lower limbs of which had been cut off to accommodate the structure, and therefore it was canopied by higher growth. Windowless, crafted from native stone, perhaps twelve feet in diameter, the structure had a domed roof of the same stone, so that it suggested an oversized, ancient kiln. The steel door stood in a steel frame.
She put down the tote and examined the Schlage deadbolt. The cylinder was rimless, preventing anyone from pulling it out of the escutcheon. The two spanner screws that fixed the escutcheon to the door had been soldered so they could not be removed. If anyone had been curious enough to want to break in to the building, they would have required a couple hours and would have made so much noise that even the caretakers of the house five hundred feet below would have been aware of the effort.
As Jane took the lock-release gun from the tote, Hendrickson let out a thin sound of distress and turned from the building and stood trembling more violently than could be accounted to the cold.
“You can do this,” she told him. Then, remembering the power she had over him, she said, “You will do this.”
He harked back to his childhood, as he had done before, his brow furrowing and his eyes narrowing and his voice turning hard. The rant came from him in a rush: “Finding your way with a light is nothing, boy. But when you can go through it top to bottom in the bitter dark, as blind as some dung beetle living on bat shit in a cavern, then you’ll be something. These stairs are life, boy, the truth of this life, of this dark world, the truth of humanity in all its cruelty and viciousness. If you want to survive, you pathetic little shit, you better learn to be strong like me. Go down the hole and learn, boy. Down the hole.”
His recital of his mother’s tirade ended with a shudder and a series of frantic gasps for breath, as if he were drowning, though great exhalations smoked from him.
The storm-faded light grew dimmer at just that moment, the winter sun more an idea than a reality. The tree-roofed clearing seemed to be a borderland between the material world and a realm of spirits. A breeze arose at last and swept some snow off the boughs overhead, and shapen clouds of flakes moved through the clearing like half-formed figures of people lost and seeking.
“Don’t make me go down in the dark,” Hendrickson pleaded.
From the tote, Jane retrieved a flashlight and gave it to him.
She had one for herself.
“We won’t be in the dark. We’ll have our lights. You’ll show me the way. You will show me the way. You understand, Booth?”
“Yes.”