Her unit—no one else’s. There had been no more Daryls, though there had been a few more sleepless, guilt-heavy nights lying awake beside nice guys, in the endless hope that one of them would somehow light up enough of her buttons.
The thing was, she didn’t crave her academic work on those nights anymore. She didn’t crave much of anything, really, on any night. Which was unnerving as hell, at twenty-eight. Where had all the old rocket fuel gone? Where had Proust Girl gone? She existed only as a nagging thought now and again, all criticism and no advice.
Maybe the law degree would be a way to hit reset. A friend in D.C. had told her she should come out east and get into policy work. Advocate for something. Find a cause. Maybe. Or maybe there was something else she could do in D.C. Something she wasn’t even thinking of yet.
Aubrey set her bookbag on the carpet, stepped out of her shoes and—
Flinched, her breath coming out in a sharp little convulsion.
There was someone in her apartment.
Right there in the kitchen doorway.
Holding something.
These thoughts, in the tiniest sliver of a second.
In the next sliver her eyes locked on to the object: a handgun with a silencer on the barrel.
The first three shots felt like fingertips jabbing her chest, hard enough to shove her backward—and little balloons of ice water popping inside her, deep behind her ribs.
She didn’t feel the fourth shot. It broke the center band of her glasses and punched through the bridge of her nose.
*
The man with the gun watched her fall in a heap of limbs. Watched the carpet become soaked around her head, as if someone had tipped over a pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid.
Her face was just visible in profile, where she lay. She was pretty. Her chin was tiny, and she had a little button nose. It crossed his mind to wonder what she’d done to deserve this, but only for a second. It wasn’t his job to wonder about things.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Dryden felt strange doing what the kid had asked. He would have felt stranger not doing it.
He had the dead men’s Taurus backed up close to the wrecked Tahoe, the trunk lid open. The bodies of the two attackers were already stuffed inside, along with their wallets and phones. The phones were identical to those he’d found on the earlier pair of gunmen, and had the same redaction software blotting out the numbers in the call logs. As before, neither man had made a call or sent a text in the past hour—which was good. It meant they had not phoned their superiors and passed along Dryden’s address after tailing Curtis there. It meant Claire’s enemies still had no idea who Dryden was.
Also as before, the gunmen carried cash and no IDs. Dryden took the money and wiped down the wallets and left them with the corpses.
Crossing back to the Taurus for Curtis’s body, Dryden could see the glint of traffic on the nearby two-lane—tiny reflections off chrome and glass, stabbing through the concealing trees.
But no vehicle turned off that road to approach along the gravel route. No random tourist or Forest Service vehicle, the arrival of which would lead to a 9-1-1 call and a police presence within minutes.
He had the strangest sense of assurance that it wouldn’t happen. He kept thinking of the kid’s last words.
I already know you’ll manage it. ’Cause they’re not here right now killing you.
Dryden opened the driver’s-side door—it groaned at first, lightly jammed by the warping of the vehicle’s structure—and pulled Curtis’s body out onto the ground. He dragged it to the Taurus’s crowded trunk, lifted, and forced it inside, then went through the kid’s pockets and found nothing. No phone and no wallet.
The wallet was in the Tahoe, where Curtis had left it when he went into the restaurant.
There was no ID in the wallet, and no credit card or registration either. Nothing with Curtis’s name on it. Just cash—ninety-six dollars. Dryden took it, feeling only marginally like a thief. No point leaving it.
He opened the Tahoe’s back door on the driver’s side. On the floor sat a black messenger bag, stuffed full of something bulky and square-edged. Dryden opened it and saw five white plastic binders, the kind that held three-hole-punched paper. You could buy them at any office store. At a glance he saw that each binder held a thick stack of pages, maybe a couple hundred each.
The information Curtis had stolen from the people who’d attacked Bayliss. The stuff from the secure server, which he’d printed and organized in the past three days while lying low.
In addition to the five binders, there was a slim stack of pages by itself, fifteen or twenty sheets stapled at the top corner.
I even wrote a letter to go with it. It’s everything I know.
Staring into the bag, Dryden pictured a kind of thread connecting himself to Claire, wherever she was. A delicate strand drawn wire-taut, its tiny fibers straining and snapping, but the line itself still holding.
Whatever chance he had to find her lay in those pages.