Only one thing had held its shape: a cage with thick metal bars, forming a cube maybe six feet on each side. Marnie covered the last few yards and stopped at the boundary where the trailer’s end wall had been. The cage stood just inside, canted atop the burned rubble of the floor it had rested on.
Marnie had been to bad scenes before. She’d found a body in a plastic drum once, decomposed after being sealed inside for two years. The bones had lain cluttered like discarded hand tools, submerged in a soup of fluids that’d leaked and separated and settled. Another time she’d seen a crawl space where a woman, thirty-one years old, had been kept for a weekend before her captor strangled and buried her. On a pine beam in the corner, where she must’ve hoped the police would someday see it, the woman had written with her fingernail, Becca I love you, grow up to be happy no matter what happens. With a child counselor’s help, Marnie had delivered that message in person. Days like that one usually ended in her basement in West Hills. She had an old catcher’s mitt from her days in Little League, twenty years back, and she would sit in the dark down there for an hour or more, feeling the stitching and the worn-smooth leather. She didn’t know why she did it. Didn’t care why, either, on those kinds of nights.
There were four bodies in the metal cage. They were blackened, with only shreds of clothing stuck to them. All lay pressed flat to the barred floor of the cage, positioned the way they’d died: trying to breathe the last air in the room.
Marnie became aware of Hiller standing next to her.
“All kids,” he said softly. “Not even in their teens, that size.”
The wind shifted, just for a second. It was long enough to send the smell at Marnie again before she could think to exhale—the smell that was awful because it was familiar, even pleasant. The smell of cooked meat.
Leah Swain had disappeared from a playground in Irvine just over three years ago, when she was eight. Marnie had put in time on the case back then, along with a dozen other agents in L.A. and San Diego. The girl’s parents had done interviews on local and national news, begging whoever had their daughter to return her. Maybe those interviews had played on a TV set here in this trailer, where Leah had sat in her cage. Where she had lived for these past three years. Where, tonight, she had somehow gotten hold of Harold Shannon’s cell phone. Where she had burned.
“We’ve got the plate and vehicle description out to every cruiser in California and Nevada,” Hiller said. “Shannon’s DMV photo, too.”
Marnie had seen the man’s picture herself, on her phone. It looked like a mug shot. Gaunt face, sunk-in eyes, long hair and beard the texture of steel wool.
At the edge of Marnie’s vision, distant headlights appeared. She watched them come in. They were half a mile out, taking it slow on the washboard ruts of the gravel road. Probably her forensics guys. She walked back to her car to wait for them, but by the time she got there she saw that it wasn’t an FBI vehicle arriving. Just an uplink truck for ABC7 News out of L.A.
She leaned against her Crown Vic and rubbed her eyes. When she opened them again, some of the cops nearby were watching her. Maybe they thought she was crying. Maybe they thought she looked too soft for the job. That was fine. Their thoughts were their business. She stood upright again and walked away from the scene, out into the pitch black, where it would be okay to let her hands shake. She wasn’t going to throw up, wasn’t going to cry, either, but her hands were going to shake like hell as soon as she let them. The rage had to go somewhere, that was all.
A hundred yards west of the trailer, she stopped—there was a deep, wide arroyo channel carved into the desert floor there, running south from a culvert under the road. The arroyo’s depth was filled with years’ worth of trash: jagged metal engine parts, broken appliances, plastic garbage bags torn open by animals. All of it lay in shadow beneath the plane of the surface, leaving the arroyo nearly invisible in the dark. Even with the lit-up crime scene casting its glow over the desert, Marnie had almost walked right into it.
She sank to a crouch and sat on the channel’s edge. In the faint light, the strewn trash made her think of a lion’s den scattered with bones. Leah Swain had ended up in a lion’s den because she’d gone to a playground during the wrong ten minutes. There would never be any better answer than that.
Marnie turned her gaze up to the horizon and watched for the forensics team, and felt the first tremors in her hands coming on.
CHAPTER TWO
Four hours earlier, when Leah Swain was alive and waiting for Harold Shannon to go to bed, when she was staring at the cell phone he’d left on the coffee table, just reachable with the strip of quarter-round wood molding she’d pried off the base of the wall behind the cage, Sam Dryden was staring at the ocean.