On the drive out to Trabuco to saddle up with the mounted unit, Ben had listened to the serial’s song on the cassette player. Now the song played a loop in his head—the singer’s voice like the voice of the killer himself. The serial was out here somewhere—hiding in the wilderness, cruising the streets, crouched in a backyard beneath an open window, ready to strike—and there was little anyone, including the police, could do about it. This town had never felt this kind of fear. It was in the air, hovering over the city, as palpable as the charge in the Santa Ana winds.
People who moved to Rancho Santa Elena were afraid of the world; that’s why they moved here, to escape it. They believed master-planned order—straight streets, identical houses, brightly lit shopping centers—would keep them safe from the outside world, as though Rancho Santa Elena were a walled-off city, a fortress against the ugliness elsewhere. When they watched the news—the L.A. anchormen recounting murders and gang wars—people here sat on their couches, smug with the self-satisfaction that their home was thirty-eight miles on the right side of paradise. The wolves lived in Los Angeles, and if wolves existed, someone had to be thrown to them—but not these people, not here.
That’s what the killer knew. Locked in a basement, the whole world just a few feet away, no one asking where the little boy had gone. He knew people didn’t give a shit until they thought the shit was coming for them. If you were the one thrown to the wolves, though, you understood fear, lived with it every day until it didn’t feel like fear anymore, and once that happened you were alone, pushed outside the boundaries of civilization where most people lived, forced into a wilderness with its own rules.
Ben was used to being out here, off the grid, out on the perimeter of most people’s existences. He could never really be one of these Santa Elena people, because there was a wolf inside the walls and he had been thrown to him—he and Tucker and Lucero. People knew what was happening, some of them knew who Wakeland was; they just didn’t want to know: It ruined the illusion of their safety. If the predators were here, what did this place mean anymore? Ben had been made alone at thirteen years old, the day Wakeland taught him how to breathe. He had accepted it, made a destructive alliance with it, and, just like a good Santa Elenan, pretended the wolf didn’t exist.
Ben and Tin Man switchbacked down the hill, rode the fence along Wakeland’s backyard, followed the firebreak until they came to the turnout of Junipero Road. There Ben trailered Tin Man, shut himself inside the cruiser, and called the number.
“Hello,” Wakeland’s wife said, her voice soft, friendly, until Ben’s hesitation frightened her. “Who is this?”
He almost felt bad for her, for her and her kids being dragged into this, but he didn’t mind letting her think he was the killer on the other side of the silent connection for a moment.
“I’d like to speak with Lewis,” Ben said finally.
“Who’s calling?”
“An old friend.”
“Can I tell him your name?”
“Lucero Vega,” he said.
The phone went silent for a moment, some kind of music playing in the background, a child’s voice.
“What the hell is this?” Wakeland said in a low voice.
“You said you had some information about a case.”
“Benjamin?”
“Fifteen minutes,” Ben said. “At the apartment.”
—
HE WAS THERE in five minutes, walking the shadows of the greenbelt, the wind shearing leaves from the trees. On the patio, he found the key, slid open the glass door, stepped inside, and pocketed the key. The living room was as he remembered it—the beige couch pushed against a gray-blue wall. A glass-topped coffee table, spotless except for a single tumbler, half empty and staining a ring onto the glass. The oakwood television console, the white curtains hanging open against the sliding glass door, the conch-shell table lamp: all of it the same, a fucking museum to the past. Only the pictures hanging on the wall had been updated: candy-apple-red Ferraris and artsy black-and-whites of female torsos. A Nagel print. Nothing pornographic, all within respectable bachelor-pad boundaries. Exactly the kind of pictures that appealed to teenage boys. The carpet had been changed, a lighter cream color, as if a sheen of ash had fallen over the room. There were footprints on the carpet—size ten and a half, Ben knew.
The guest bathroom had new brass faucets and white porcelain countertops. Next to the toilet was a basket of magazines, just as he remembered. Ben thumbed the stack—Car and Driver, Outside, a Penthouse with Vanessa Williams on the cover. There was a different desk in the office, a new swivel chair, the wall color changed to burgundy, the bookshelves gone. The same metal filing cabinets, though, stacked on top of one another near the closet door. He scraped one open: empty. Maybe he’d find a letter, a picture, anything solid to link Wakeland to Lucero. The next one empty, too. Of course. He checked the desk drawers, the side-table drawers near the living room couch, the cabinets in the kitchen: nothing.