Each dead man had a phone on him, the models identical and cheap. Throwaways, for sure, though they’d been modified with some add-on software. When Dryden pulled up the recent call logs, all the phone numbers were simply lines of asterisks. Only the time stamps remained visible. Neither man had made or received a call in more than an hour—long before the attack on Claire and himself.
Dryden pulled the phones’ batteries, wiped his prints as he’d done with the wallets, and left the phones with the dead men. He got back behind the wheel but left the engine off. He sat staring at the distant crime scene, thinking.
What kept coming back to him was Claire’s behavior right before the shooting started. The way she had suddenly scrutinized the darkness around them, seconds before the first shots were fired. She had somehow known those men were out there—had known someone was out there, anyway—but she had only known it once the cop arrived.
Before that, she hadn’t seemed concerned at all that someone might be watching them.
It made no sense.
How had the random arrival of a patrol car, one that had damn near driven past without incident, tipped her off to the ambush?
It wasn’t as if the cruiser’s headlights had given the attackers away. Claire had not turned her attention to any one spot. She had seemed to respond on a more fundamental level: The very fact that the cop car had shown up, that the officer was about to stop and question them, had somehow told her those men were out there.
Dryden considered it, and got nowhere.
After a minute he turned his attention to a more basic question: How had those men set up the ambush in the first place?
How had they found the spot where Claire had left that phone? There was zero chance they had tracked the phone itself. If Claire Dunham wanted to be electronically invisible, she could do it in her sleep. Data security was her world. Big companies—tech companies—paid her large sums to teach them about it.
She had purchased the disposable phone so she could be untrackable. She would have paid cash for it in some store she’d chosen at random. And before she stashed the phone near that tree in the desert, she would have detached its battery to keep it from pinging nearby towers. She would have done that before she got within thirty miles of the place where she hid the thing.
The shooters hadn’t found that spot by tracking the phone.
So how had they done it?
Dryden thought about it as the minutes passed. Nothing came to him.
The plastic case still lay in the passenger footwell. The machine was still turned on inside it, hissing.
Dryden stared at it. Something about it nagged at him. Some loose thread, trailing from the tangle of things Claire had shown him, though he couldn’t seem to place it.
He picked up the case, set it on the console, and opened it.
The tablet computer’s display was still lit up, showing the bare-bones program that controlled the strange machine.
Ten seconds passed. The static faltered. A twangy voice and a steel guitar faded in, then back out.
Dryden tapped the OFF button on the screen, and the hissing cut out. He closed the program and tapped the only other icon he could see: the file folder of audio clips.
As soon as the list of files opened, he saw the loose end that had been bugging him.
Right below the clip Claire had played earlier, about the burned trailer and the dead girls, there was one last audio file.
Something she must have recorded later on.
Dryden traced his finger over the time stamps for each file; they were displayed on the right side of the screen.
Claire had recorded the news clip about the girls at 9:47 last night. That was a little over two hours before she had called Dryden.
The time stamp on the final clip read 11:56.
Ten minutes before she’d dialed his number.
I had no intention to involve you in all this, Claire had said when they were parked in the desert. Not for something random like the guy in the trailer, and not for the rest of this, either. I never meant to drag you into it at all.
Then why did you?
I didn’t, actually.
Dryden tapped the last recording. The audio app opened, and the clip began to play.
Light static, already receding. A man speaking in the steady cadence of a newscaster:
“… just getting this now, CHP has released the name of the victim in that homicide from earlier this morning. The incident, a shooting, taking place outside a residence just after 7:30 A.M. Neighbors heard gunfire and afterward saw a black sedan and a white SUV leave the scene, though police have said nobody reported a license number. The victim is a resident of El Sedero, a thirty-eight-year-old male named Samuel Dryden.”
PART TWO
SATURDAY, 5:30 A.M.–12:00 P.M.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Dryden listened to it three more times. He found himself parsing the details, breaking it down logically, and finally just letting the thing hit him in full.
His death, rendered in a sound bite that people would skip past on their drives to the mall.
His whole future, everything he ever wanted to do, and to be—all of it gone, two hours from now.
His death.