Which, come to think of it, wasn’t a bad idea…
As I stepped back towards the layout, my foot kicked something. It was the magazine Arlo had been reading when I first entered the store: Model Train Enthusiast’s Monthly, something like that. The cover photo showed a sleek locomotive chugging towards a railroad crossing, where—this was weird—a pewter figurine of a boy with a soccer ball had been placed on the tracks, his back to the oncoming train.
The locomotive had a monkey on its side. Not Curious George, or any other friendly cartoon simian—this was a badass nightmare monkey, with sharp fangs tipping a blue-and-red snout. THE MANDRILL, screamed the caption, ON SALE TODAY.
Inset in a box in the lower right-hand corner of the magazine cover was a second, smaller photo, of two women in train-conductor uniforms. The uniforms must have been digitally added, but the doctoring job was so skillful that I almost didn’t notice that the women were me and Annie. The caption on this photo read: “They’re coming for you—details, pg. 23.”
The door to the store’s back room was locked. I kicked it until it wasn’t. The space beyond was lined with more shelves, but instead of trains they held teddy bears, cereal boxes, and toothpaste dispensers…There was a workbench, too, covered with papers and tools, and a couple of empty soccer-ball cartons.
Arlo was gone, of course. I ducked out a side door into the alley. There was no sign of him there, either, but that china doll I’d first seen almost two weeks ago was still sitting in the dumpster, still holding out its hand to shake. Someone had dropped a paper bag over its head.
I broke out my headset: “Hello? Anybody?”
“This is True.”
“Arlo’s on the run,” I told him, hoping this wasn’t news.
“What happened?”
“The short version is, his monkey friends sent him a warning…Please tell me you saw him leave.”
“We’ve had some difficulties with the surveillance.”
“Ah, man…”
“I’m tasking additional resources to the search as we speak; Dexter shouldn’t get far. How long ago did he—”
“Hold on.”
A corkboard had been mounted on the wall above Arlo’s workbench. Looking back at it from the alley door, I noticed that the board didn’t hang quite flush. When I grabbed it by the edge and pulled, it swung outwards. “Holy shit.”
“What?”
“I found the briefcase.”
“You did?”
“Arlo must’ve been in too much of a hurry to take it with him.”
“Perhaps,” True said warily. “But before you open it—”
“Too late.”
There was a brief silence, and I had this clear mental picture of True pursing his lips. “Very well,” he continued. “Describe the contents, without touching them.”
“Right…The case is foam-lined, with slots holding what look like digital stopwatches. Each watch has three small buttons on the left side and one big one on top—don’t worry, I’m not going to push any of them. The brand name on the watch-casings is—”
“Mandrill.”
“Yeah.”
“This next question is very important, Jane. Are any of the stopwatches running right now?”
“Counting down, you mean? No—trust me, that’s the first thing I’d have mentioned. But there is some bad news: Arlo may have left the briefcase behind, but it looks like he took a couple of the watches with him. Two of the slots are empty.”
“All right, I’ll notify the other teams. What I need you to do next is look around the area where you found the case. Can you see anything that might indicate where Dexter is headed?”
“Maybe…” I moved aside a soccer-ball carton. “There’s a map of SFO airport here.”
“Are any of the terminals circled?”
“Yeah, all of them…Listen, True, assuming these watches are what I think they are, is Arlo going to be able to get them through airport security?”
“That’s an irrelevant question.”
“Why?”