Let the others worry about Ancel and Clare. Janis has a project of her own.
Although the house and stables have been searched, Laurie Longrin hasn’t yet been found. The consensus is that the girl went overland, intending to intersect the state highway and flag down a motorist. The others, who seem swept up in magical thinking, believe she’ll either conveniently step on a rattlesnake or be chased down by coyotes before she can get to help.
Janis pities the rattlesnakes and coyotes that try to take a bite of that poisonous little bitch.
Pedro Lobo has come over from Stable 2 and is in the kitchen, guarding Alexis, while Chris Roberts is cruising the state highway, looking for the girl, hoping she’ll mistake him for a civilian and seek his aid.
Janis doesn’t buy into the consensus.
The brat isn’t just smart-mouthed; she’s also smart. She would never go blundering into the dark, wild fields without a light, with no better plan than hoping to flag down a motorist on a lonely road long past midnight. Her very nature is to be sand in the gears, a clog in the pipe, a monkey wrench in the machinery. She’s likely to hang around the property, as quiet and quick as a rat in shadows, looking for the best way to disrupt things.
The phone-intercom units in the stables have been unplugged and locked away. If the girl fled the house, not just her room, when she went through the window onto the veranda roof, she’s probably hoping to sneak back inside just long enough to use a phone.
The doors are locked. The windows are now secured on both the first and second floors.
However, she might know where a spare key is hidden or might have a key of her own.
Or …
Or she might have left the house by one window and at once returned to it by another, aware of some hidey-hole where she could wait out a search undiscovered.
No one but Janis takes this theory seriously. Laurie is a child, they say. They argue that a frightened child would not flee a place of terror only to return to it a moment later.
But the child might do that very thing if she’s something of a terror herself, has never been punished for her bad behavior, has never learned there are negative consequences, because her scheming and trickery are rewarded by her ignorant, deluded father.
Earlier, Paloma Sutherland, who is guarding Laurie’s younger sisters, had searched the upstairs, while Sally Jones and Chris and Janis had hunted for the girl downstairs, around the house, in the garage, and in the stables.
Now Janis explores the ground floor and the second floor as though she’s looking for a child half Laurie’s size, as if the girl must be a contortionist who can fold herself into the most unlikely spaces. In the very back of every closet. Behind the solid doors in the bottom third of a china cabinet that features glass doors above. Under furniture with even as little as a four-inch clearance. Behind the fire screen, in the inner hearth of a fireplace. Wherever there is paneling on an inner wall, she seeks hidden latch releases that might reveal a safe or other secret space.
In the master bedroom, her attention is drawn to an incongruous object lying on the white quartz top of a mahogany pedestal dresser. Arranged just so are an antique silver tray that holds three Lalique perfume bottles with figured crystal stoppers, an antique silver brush-and-comb set, and three small porcelain figurines of Japanese women in intricately colored kimonos. Lying askew to everything else is a pair of cheap scissors with orange plastic handles.
The girl must have cut the zip-ties with scissors taken from her desk drawer. But no scissors remain in her room. Maybe she took them for self-defense.
Evidently, Paloma Sutherland never noticed the discordant scissors among all the pretties on the dresser.
Janis stares into the mother’s dresser mirror as though she possesses the clairvoyant power to see her quarry’s reflection when the room was dark and the girl paused here and, for some reason, put down the scissors.
The en suite bathroom offers no hiding place.
When Janis opens the door to the walk-in closet and turns on the light, Laurie isn’t crouched in any corner of that space.
From the ceiling dangles a pull cord attached to one end of a trapdoor.
Paloma is the most adamant of those who believe that the girl would not have returned to the house a moment after having fled it. When she searched here, she would not have thought the attic was worth exploring. An only child, Paloma has no understanding whatsoever of the capacity for boldness and deceit of the oldest sister in a family of sisters.
The heavy springs of the ceiling trapdoor briefly groan, but the ladder unfolds to the closet floor with hardly a sound.
10
ALTHOUGH CARTER JERGEN is growing accustomed to grotesque sights, he is taken aback when two large, hairy spiders—he assumes they are tarantulas—shudder out of the dark and into a swath of bare earth illuminated by the headlamps of the VelociRaptor, where it is parked alongside the airstrip.
At first it appears that the hideous arachnids are proceeding in tandem, the second close behind the first, but that’s because, in the harsh angled light, it is initially difficult to differentiate between their busy limbs and the elongated twitching shadows of their limbs. In fact, the second spider seems to be climbing onto the first, as if to ride it to whatever work spiders undertake at night. The first tarantula appears displeased and impatient with this impertinence, trying to shrug off the lazy, unwanted passenger. Their legs, each the size of one of Jergen’s fingers, jitter and clash, so that they stagger this way and that, proceeding in such a herky-jerky fashion that they make no progress at all, but instead circle back into the darkness out of which they emerged.
On any other night, the Anza Air Park would be closed. It allows only daylight takeoffs and landings. Monday morning, however, the National Security Agency negotiated a rich five-day contract ostensibly to do emergency testing of an unspecified type of airborne day-and-night communications equipment in desert conditions, without interfering with the facility’s usual business.
In fact, they will mount continuous visual surveillance of the valley while fishing from the air, within a fifty-mile radius, all conversations conducted on carrier waves assigned to disposable phones. Using an analytic scanning program customized to key words that Jane Hawk might use when speaking to her son or to whoever was currently watching over the boy, a computer aboard the aircraft can “read” conversations almost as fast as they are intercepted. When a suspect conversation is identified, that transmission can be tracked to its source and the location of the phone quickly pinpointed.
The NSA maintains such aircraft in major cities thought to be likely targets of terrorism. One has been flown here from San Diego, another from Los Angeles, and they stand now on a taxiway.
The airplanes are de Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otters with two turboprop engines. The longest runway at this desert airstrip is 2,600 feet, but the Twin Otter needs only 1,200 to take off, even less to land. In a standard configuration, in addition to a crew of two, the craft carries nineteen passengers. Customized for this unique form of surveillance, the passenger compartment provides for only four technicians and their equipment.
A tanker truck stands on a hastily poured pad of quick-cure concrete adjacent to the taxiway where the aircraft wait. It contains sufficient aviation fuel to keep the Twin Otters—which will work in four-hour shifts—in the air around the clock for three days.
Four aircraft mechanics, complete with their equipment, have been brought to the site in a sixty-foot motor home parked adjacent to the Anza Air Park terminal. It is their home for the duration, and it also houses the tanker-truck driver and a pump technician.