Another kind of assurance suddenly came to him—far less comforting than the belief that no stray vehicle would come barreling down the gravel road.
The second assurance was that Claire’s captors would not kill her anytime soon.
If they had no other way to find out who he was—the unknown man who had the machine they wanted—then interrogating Claire would be their only recourse. As long as she didn’t tell them anything, they would keep her alive and under questioning. If anything, they would have her on suicide watch.
The notion brought him no relief; it brought only the hope that he could still get to her. That the fuse had length yet to burn.
He closed the messenger bag and took it to his Explorer. He set it on the passenger-side floor, beside the hard plastic case with the machine inside it.
Then he opened the Explorer’s back end and grabbed the emergency kit he kept there. Among the items inside were three road flares and a towing rope.
*
It took only a minute to secure the rope from the Explorer’s hitch to the Taurus’s frame, at the front end.
He spent another minute giving the entire scene one last look. He had already kicked dirt and dust over the blood drops the bodies had left when he’d dragged them, and scuffed the ground further to erase the drag marks themselves. Not a perfect solution, but good enough.
There would sure as hell be no useful forensic evidence found in the wrecked Tahoe. For good measure he wiped his fingerprints from the door handles, and held the road flares without the pads of his fingers touching them. He popped off the igniter caps and struck the flares alight one after another. He lobbed two of them into the vehicle—one up front, one into the rear seats—and set the third against the front tire on the driver’s side, its white-hot flame directly against the rubber.
By the time he’d sprinted to the Explorer, climbed in, and put it in drive, there were already black tendrils of smoke coming through the Tahoe’s open windows, where the upholstery had begun to burn.
*
Ten minutes later and two thousand feet higher in the hills, he stopped. He was no longer on a gravel road, but a mostly overgrown two-track that punched like a ragged tunnel through the evergreens. On the left side of the path, the land pitched upward at forty-five degrees. On the other side it dropped away just as steeply, toward a brush-choked pond thirty feet below. During summers when he was a teenager, Dryden had been up here lots of times with friends, usually at night. The pond was more than sixty feet deep in the middle, its sides like a funnel angling down into the murk. He’d heard rumors that there were old logging trucks down at the bottom, but he’d never heard of anyone going in with scuba gear to find out for sure.
He unhooked the tow rope and stowed it and pointed the Taurus at the edge of the dropoff. He put the car in neutral and shoved it over the lip. It bounced and jostled its way down the slope, crashed through the shrubs lining the pond, and hit the water with an explosion of mud and foam. Giant ripples rolled outward, crisscrossed, settled. For thirty seconds the car looked like it wanted to float. It bobbed with its front end pulled under by the engine’s weight, and drifted out away from the shore. Then physics asserted itself. The passenger compartment flooded and the car pitched farther forward, its back end tilting up, and within another minute the whole thing had gone under. Dryden studied the gap in the brush at the water’s edge, where the car had punched through. Most of the plants had simply bent and were springing back now. The scrub-covered earth showed no tire tracks. Someone standing here five minutes from now wouldn’t suspect a thing.
From far away through the trees, in the direction of town, came the sound of sirens. Police and fire units responding to the burning Tahoe, the origin of which would forever be a mystery to them.
Dryden got back in the Explorer and pulled away.
He returned to the paved two-lane by a different route than he’d taken to the pond, avoiding the Tahoe.
He drove back into El Sedero and pulled into the broad parking lot of a strip mall three blocks in from the shore. He took a spot at the periphery, far from the packed rows closer in.
He hauled the messenger bag up onto the passenger seat and opened it, and took out the five binders and the stapled letter. Everything I know.
It was 8:45 in the morning.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
At 8:46, Marnie Calvert stood at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the computer lab in the Wilshire Federal Building. From twenty-three stories up, the window faced south over the 405 freeway. Marnie leaned lightly on the glass with the knuckles of one hand. Far below, a bright red sports car merged onto the freeway from Wilshire. She watched it slip away into the morning haze toward Marina del Rey.