She unfolded the thin stack of pages and slid them across the desk. “This is a match from a set of prints I found at the scene. When I ran the search, I didn’t tell anyone where the prints came from. As of now, this guy has no official connection to the case. Outside of you and me, there’s nobody who can leak his name. I’d like to keep it that way until I know more.”
Marnie ran through the details of how she’d found the prints while Sumner’s eyes tracked down over the material, his eyebrows edging up once or twice.
“Prints on a washing machine,” he said. “Maybe he owned the thing. Maybe it broke down and he decided to dump it out in the desert.”
“Two hours’ drive from his address?”
“Maybe he was that pissed off at it. Wanted to make sure it didn’t find its way home like in that movie The Incredible Journey.”
“I think it was two dogs and a cat in the movie. Anyway, the scuff marks I found with the prints were new. Dryden was there last night.”
Sumner exhaled and slid the printout back across his desk. “So what is he? A vigilante?”
“Even if he is,” Marnie said, “how did he know enough to show up at that exact moment? Those girls snagged a cell phone off the coffee table and called 9-1-1. That was the trigger for the whole thing. How could Dryden or anyone else have known that would happen?”
“Got a theory?”
Marnie pinched the bridge of her nose. Rubbed her eyes with her thumb and forefinger. “Not even a stab at one. After hours of banging my head against it.”
“Want to tell me why you’re keeping his name off the books?”
Marnie opened her eyes. “Because there’s an easy leap people will make. And I think it’s bullshit. I think it doesn’t fit the facts of his background, but people will consider it anyway.”
“The idea that Dryden might have known the guy?” Sumner asked.
Marnie nodded.
“Might have been old pals with the guy who kept four little girls in a cage,” Sumner said. “Knew all about it, and finally got around to doing something.”
“You know how things get covered. What passes for journalism now. Send us your tweets, America, tell us what you think happened.”
“He did manage to show up there,” Sumner said. “There’s something behind that.”
“Something, yeah. But none of the girls had ever seen this guy before—or the woman. Who I’ve still got nothing on. I want to know more about this before I open the doors and let the circus in.”
“What are you asking me?”
“I want to set up surveillance on Dryden. Without anyone knowing.”
“By anyone, you mean the judge that would have to sign the warrant.”
“Yes,” Marnie said. “Judges have staffers and assistants. Staffers and assistants have cell phones. Things get out.”
Sumner leaned back in his chair. Swiveled it ten degrees clockwise and then back. He looked very tired.
“All I need from you are a few pieces of information,” Marnie said. “A couple of access strings you can look up from right here. I’ll do the surveillance myself, no assets, no support. If I get busted, there’s no proof you set it up.”
Sumner rocked his chair forward again and put his elbows on his desk.
He said, “This kind of intrusion into someone’s life—”
“I’m doing it to prevent an intrusion into his life. Unless it turns out he deserves one.”
Sumner stared into the woodgrain of his desk. In the silence, Marnie heard the wall clock ticking. Five seconds. Ten.
“Christ,” Sumner whispered. Then: “What kind of surveillance?”
“Phone and vehicle, for now. He drives a 2013 Explorer, base model judging by the price, except it has satellite navigation. Which means we can ping it and track him.”
Sumner thought about it for another long moment. Then he nodded and swiveled to face his computer.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Still parked in the strip-mall lot, Dryden turned his ignition key partway and cracked open the Explorer’s windows. The smells of sea salt and fast food and hot blacktop tar streamed through.
Curtis’s five binders were mostly indecipherable. Much of the content inside them was simply computer code, hundreds of pages of it, printed out and arranged in some kind of logical order. Dryden had a passing knowledge of programming, enough to recognize which language this code was written in, but could make no real sense of it. Even the programmers’ comments—plain English lines peppered throughout the code as useful labels and reminders—were little help.
This part waits for the sort algorithm to return any value of 5 or higher.
This boolean returns true if both CroA1 and CroA2 are true.
Hundreds of those, scattered like confetti throughout the pages. They must have made sense to the people who’d written this stuff. Maybe they’d made sense to Curtis, too, after hours of paging through the material, jotting down the names of variables and strings and classes, drawing connections Dryden couldn’t see on any given page.
He flipped through the first four binders in a couple of minutes and set them aside.
The fifth didn’t contain computer code. It was full of printed e-mails instead, but they weren’t much easier to make sense of.