Twenty minutes earlier she’d been in her office, pacing, her mind doing 60. Then her computer had dinged with an incoming e-mail, a positive match on the fingerprint search she’d sent in hours before.
The mystery man who’d saved the girls at the trailer had exactly one blemish on his record: an arrest for assault when he was eighteen years old, the charge dropped almost immediately on grounds of self-defense. He’d flown pretty straight since then: army service immediately following high school, including time with the Rangers and then 1st SFOD-Delta. Then, apparently, he’d vanished into another dimension for six years, because his military record simply went blank for that stretch of time. Not even redacted. Just nonexistent. From age twenty-four to thirty, there was no Sam Dryden.
The paperwork picked up again with his honorable discharge at thirty. Within the next year there was a marriage license and a birth certificate—in that order, but just barely. Then came two death certificates, the wife and the daughter, and reference tags pointing to police reports about the traffic accident that had taken their lives.
After which Sam Dryden’s document trail went almost blank again, though not by way of secrecy this time. Rather, his life seemed to dial itself down to the lowest burner setting. He worked, but only a little: private security stuff here and there, putting his background to use. He didn’t generate much income, but then again he didn’t need to. He had inherited a significant chunk of money from his parents, back during his time in the service. But for those years after he lost his wife and child, he didn’t spend much of the money. His credit card records showed him paying his bills and his property taxes and buying groceries. He didn’t do much else. For the better part of five years, there was no sign that he’d traveled or purchased much more than basic essentials. To the extent that paper records could show a man’s world shrinking down to a solitary confinement cell, Sam Dryden’s seemed to do so.
Then something had changed—not quite two years ago, toward the end of 2013. There was no indication of what had triggered it, but all at once Sam Dryden seemed to begin living his life again. There were airline tickets—flights to places like Honolulu and Vail and Grand Cayman. There were weeklong hotel stays at those places, and boat rentals, and payments for all the things people did on vacations just for the hell of it. The plane tickets were always for two, and the other ticket was always for a woman: someone named Riley Walker for the first seven or eight months, then a few others in succession. Dating. Living. Taking in the world. Something or someone had come along and jolted Sam Dryden out of his exile.
He was working again, too. Buying and fixing and then selling houses, from the look of his financials. Pretty damn nice houses, if the prices and locations were any sign.
And apparently, maybe just for kicks, he had now taken up the hobby of preventing horrifying tragedies no human could have predicted.
“How the hell did you know to be there?” Marnie whispered.
She watched a light business jet take off out of Santa Monica Municipal Airport, a few miles to the south and west. Watched it climb and bank out over the Pacific, a white speck and then nothing.
“You wanted to see me?”
Marnie turned. Don Sumner stood in the doorway of his office, where he’d been on the phone for the past three minutes.
Marnie nodded and crossed to the door. Sumner stepped back and let her through.
Sumner was fifty and going gray at the temples. One wall of his office was lined with deep shelves, on which were arrayed detailed models of mid-twentieth-century automobiles. There was a ’64 Mustang, a ’51 Bel Air, a ’42 Packard Super Eight. Even some kind of Studebaker from the ’30s. Sumner had built the models from kits, then airbrushed them and done all kinds of intricate detail work; some of the cars were actually made to look weathered and worn. Marnie had studied the collection up close before, and had concluded that Sumner could have been a special effects guy for one of the movie studios, back before CGI had become the norm.
“Have a seat,” he said, dropping into his own chair. “What do you need?”
“Help on this Mojave thing.”
There was no need to specify which Mojave thing she was talking about. The story was already in heavy circulation locally, and was beginning to get traction on CNN and Fox. It had all the right ingredients: a miracle rescue, a very nasty, very dead bad guy, and two mysterious saviors who had appeared out of thin air and vanished back into it. The networks would feed on it for days—maybe longer if the two rescuers remained unknown.
“What do you have?” Sumner asked. He nodded at the printout in Marnie’s hand: Dryden’s info.