*
He felt the edge of weariness creeping in on him as he drove. He did the math: thirty-some hours now without sleep, and probably twelve without food. Five miles farther on, an off-ramp sign advertised a McDonald’s. He took the exit and hit the drive-through, then parked in an Albertson’s lot next door, with a double order of sausage biscuits and hash brown patties and a large coffee.
He reached to turn on the Explorer’s radio out of habit, then stopped himself. He leaned over and grabbed the hard plastic case instead, lifted it onto the passenger seat, and opened it.
He turned on the tablet computer and pulled up the program that controlled the machine. The machine itself was off, silent except for the low cyclic hum from deep inside it.
Dryden tapped the ON button on the tablet screen. He heard the machine’s hum speed up and change pitch, as it had done when Claire had switched it on before. A second later the computer’s speakers began playing the familiar static. Dryden heard something trying to break through it right away: some ’80s song he couldn’t quite put a name to. A few seconds later it was gone, lost in the hiss.
Somehow, it felt right to have the thing turned on.
No—that wasn’t quite true. Dryden thought about it a few seconds longer, then understood the feeling better: It wasn’t that it felt right having the thing on, it was that it felt wrong having it off.
His mind kept going back to the four girls in the trailer. If Claire hadn’t been listening to this thing last night—
All at once he pictured her, sitting at the wheel of her Land Rover, dark hollows under her eyes after three days of hardly any sleep.
Maybe this machine was like a drug, once it got in your head. Something you couldn’t let go of. You would never know when you might hear about a car accident that killed a mother and two little kids—three people still alive and well, somewhere out there in the here and now.
Maybe Claire had saved other lives before the trailer last night. There were all kinds of bad things reported on the radio, around the clock.
Three days without sleep.
Had she just been unable to turn away from the damn thing?
Knowing what she might miss by five minutes?
Dryden listened to the steady hissing from the speakers and thought of metal bars and tiny hands gripping them, and lighter fluid and blue flame and smoke and screams.
He pushed the images away—but left the machine on.
*
Marnie saw the Explorer from two hundred yards away. She pulled into the parking lot of a Pizza Hut that bordered the much larger Albertson’s lot, and parked the Crown Vic. She took a pair of binoculars from her center console compartment and fixed them on Dryden’s vehicle.
He was sitting at the wheel, eating a little breakfast sandwich—probably fast food from the McDonald’s right next door. His gaze stayed trained mostly through the windshield, out past the edge of the parking lot, to the sharp blue water of the Pacific below. The morning haze had nearly gone, leaving a choppy surface that glittered in the early light.
Marnie’s phone rang in its dash mount. She lowered the binoculars and answered the call on speaker.
Don Sumner’s voice came through. “I’ve got something you want to hear. Might be about your guy.”
“Let’s have it.”
*
Dryden felt the coffee taking the edge off the weariness. If that was a placebo effect, he didn’t care.
Way out on the ocean, maybe five miles offshore, a giant container ship crept by. It was moving south, gradual as the minute hand of a clock at this range, maybe heading for the Port of Long Beach.
*
“I’m looking at a story about a dead cop in the Mojave,” Sumner said. “About an hour’s drive from the trailer where the little girls were being held.”
“That’s a long way,” Marnie said. “Who says there’s a connection?”
“No one, but the cop’s dash cam says the cruiser was approaching two parked vehicles off the roadside. One of which looks like a Ford Explorer, recent model.”
“Do we have a plate number?”
“The cop didn’t get close enough for that before he was killed.”
Marnie was silent, still watching Dryden.
“What I’m saying,” Sumner said, “is there’s probably enough here to bring Dryden in for questioning, if you want to.”
“I’ve got prints on a junked washing machine at one scene,” Marnie said, “and a vehicle that kind of looks like his at another. That’s pretty thin.”
“We don’t need enough to charge him with a crime. I’ve seen someone detained as a person of interest on less than this.”
Marnie lowered the binoculars. Even without them, she could see Dryden pretty well.
“I can have the assistant U.S. attorney on the phone in thirty seconds,” Sumner said. “He can fax me the signed warrant in another minute or two. You’d be free to arrest Dryden yourself at that point.”