Signal by Patrick Lee
FOR THOM AND JUDY SHARP
PART ONE
SATURDAY, AUGUST 8, 2015
CHAPTER ONE
The smell hit Marnie Calvert even before she got out of the car. The vents sucked it in from outside: a mix of charred wood and oxidized metal and melted plastic—maybe from linoleum or carpet backing. Then there was the other smell, beneath all those. That smell reminded her of backyard gatherings and nice days at the park. It made her want to throw up.
She wasn’t going to throw up. She never had, in eight years with the Bureau. She killed the engine and shoved open the door and stood up into the desert night.
There were already ten or twelve vehicles at the crime scene. State Police, San Bernardino County sheriff’s cruisers, three fire trucks out of Palmdale. Most of the units were idling, their flashers strobing and their headlights aimed inward on a focal point: the burned-out husk of a mobile home, all by itself next to a gravel road in the middle of the Mojave.
Outside the car, the smells were all stronger. Marnie gave her stomach ten seconds to relax; she turned in place and took in the landscape. Far to the west, the lights of Edwards Air Force Base dotted the plain before the foothills of the San Gabriels. The mountains stood in faint contrast against the lit-up haze above Los Angeles, maybe seventy miles away. The only nearer light was Barstow, a dim smudge off to the north. Everywhere else, the desert was black and empty and baking hot—four in the morning, early August.
“Agent Calvert?”
Marnie turned. A sheriff’s deputy came toward her, out of the glare of the scene. He was fifty, give or take, a stocky guy just going soft. The nameplate above his badge read HILLER. Marnie had spoken to him on the phone.
She shut the door of her Crown Vic and crossed to him. Her shoes crunched on the hardpan.
“My forensics people are on their way,” she said.
Hiller nodded and led her between the nearest cruisers. Past their stabbing light, Marnie got her first full look at the ruin of the trailer. The hand she’d been shielding her eyes with fell away, and she stood staring.
There was almost nothing left of the thing. The walls and roof were gone, and even much of the base had collapsed between the cinder-block stacks that’d supported the place. A few structural metal uprights still stood, connected by shallow roof arches, like blackened ribs.
There were four body bags arrayed on the ground beside one of the fire trucks. Nothing in them yet.
Marnie knew the whole story already. She’d heard the first details in her office, at the federal building in Santa Monica. The rest had come by phone while she’d driven out here, including an audio file sent to her by e-mail: a recording of a 9-1-1 call that had come from this trailer, just about two hours ago now. She had listened to it three times, then opened the Crown Vic’s windows and let the oven air of the desert rush in around her. As far as she could remember, her thoughts had simply gone blank for the few minutes after that.
9-1-1 Emergency—
Can you trace this? A girl’s voice. Almost whispering.
What’s the nature of the emergency—
I’m on a cell phone. Can you trace where I am?
Are you in danger right now?
No answer.
Miss, are you in danger?
Three more seconds of silence.
Then: My name is Leah Swain. I’m here with three other—
The girl cut herself off with a rush of breath, high-pitched and scared.
Miss?
We didn’t call anyone! the girl screamed. It sounded like she had the phone away from her mouth, her voice aimed at someone in the room. We didn’t call anyone! I promise—
That was it. The line went dead on that word, at 2:04 A.M. and 20 seconds, by the time stamp on the dispatcher’s computer screen. Also on the screen were the caller’s GPS coordinates; the phone had sent them by default, in response to 9-1-1 being dialed. Within the next thirty seconds, a state patrol unit on I-15 had been routed toward the location. Five minutes later, when the trooper was still two miles out, he reported seeing the flames. The trailer was an inferno by the time he arrived, and its listed owner, Harold Heeley Shannon, white male, age sixty-two, history of criminal sexual misconduct, was nowhere to be seen. Only tire impressions remained where his car, a red Ford Fiesta, had been.
Marnie crossed the empty space of the trailer’s dirt yard. She tracked around the wreckage clockwise until she was no longer downwind. She was close enough now to see the collapsed debris that had settled into the structure’s footprint. The soggy remnants of the walls and ceiling and floor, and all that they’d enclosed.