Mangouste had searched anyway. And had seen what he expected: a police report about a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy stopping in the desert to investigate two vehicles, only to be killed seconds later by rifle fire from unseen assailants. By the time police reinforcements descended on the remote site, more than twenty minutes later, there were no other people in the vicinity. Just a wrecked Land Rover, eventually traceable to Claire Dunham by way of the same trick with the oil filter. No identity for any second person at the scene. No other info at all.
Mangouste hadn’t minded seeing that report. It told him enough. It told him the attack would work: that his men would capture Claire and her friend and escape the scene. Good news, all around.
And the attack had worked. His men followed protocol and kept their phones switched off while they were in the desert, so that authorities couldn’t later check the cell network and see that multiple unknown parties had been out there. Burner phones were untraceable, in theory, but why give the cops anything more than you had to?
Mangouste had watched the clock, starting from the point when his men would carry out the attack. He guessed it would be another half hour after that before they would reach the crowded safety of a freeway, switch on their phones, and report in.
Two of them had. They had Claire and were en route to the interrogation site. They said the other team was bringing the stray machine home, along with Claire’s companion—a man in his thirties, by their description, which told Mangouste it was most certainly not Dale Whitcomb. Who the hell was he, then?
Mangouste waited for the second team to report in and tell him the rest of the story. They never did. Neither did they respond to calls made to their cells, even long after they should have reached the interstate.
There was no pleasant way to interpret that set of facts. No way to fill in the blanks without assuming the two men were dead and the stranger was loose out there somewhere. With the machine.
Mangouste had set his people to work using the system, scouring the future for news reports of unidentified bodies. Assuming the worst—that the stranger had left the dead men someplace remote—it might be weeks before they were found. By that point their fingertips would be too decomposed to identify them, and they had no official ID on their bodies.
The system had found a result right away—and then about three dozen more. As it turned out, Southern California produced a fair number of unidentified corpses in a given month or two. Even when you narrowed by age range and race, it was information overload. It occurred to Mangouste that it wouldn’t help much anyway to find where the mystery man had left the bodies. That moment must have already come and gone.
Even as that search had begun to prove pointless, other news reports started filtering in—ordinary news on TV, in the present time. Reports about the miraculous rescue of four little girls at a trailer in the Mojave, by a man and woman who had shown up just in time to prevent a tragedy. Authorities seemed baffled as to how the two, who had quickly fled the scene, had known to show up there at all.
Into the phone, Mangouste said, “Tell me what you’ve got on the trailer. Tell me the cops eventually have a name for this guy.”
“In a way, they do,” the caller said. “Two days from now, a man named Clay Reynolds comes forward claiming he and his girlfriend were the ones who saved those kids.”
Mangouste’s eyes narrowed. “He identifies himself?”
“Proudly, according to the articles we’ve seen. But later the same day, a second couple speaks to reporters and says Reynolds is lying—claiming they saved the kids, not him. By the next afternoon there are two other couples taking credit.”
Mangouste pressed a hand to his forehead, shutting his eyes hard. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“It ends up being a real sideshow for the next month or more. Something like fifty different people swear they were the ones—anyone who even loosely matches police sketches the girls provide. It’s like that time all the Z-list celebrities ran for governor of California. We found a Newsweek rundown of Jimmy Fallon and Conan O’Brien’s best jokes about it, dated six weeks from now.”
“There have to be real leads the police end up following. There must be something.”
“We’re still working on it. It’s just … kind of a busy haystack to sift through.”
Mangouste didn’t reply. He stood there, gripping the phone, thinking it all over.
Hours earlier, everything had seemed to be in the bag. Three targets, three apparent leads. Now two of those had come up empty. There was no sign of Dale Whitcomb, and even Curtis Wynn had slipped away, somehow taking the stakeout team with him. There had been a final check-in from those men, tailing the kid down the Pacific Coast Highway around 6:00 in the morning, but that was the last contact. They had vanished as completely as the guys who’d been transporting the stranger from the Mojave. Even a search using the system had proved fruitless: There was no record of their vehicle being found anywhere, at any point in the foreseeable future.
“What is this?” Mangouste asked softly.
“Sir?” the caller said.
Mangouste opened his eyes. “Keep working on the trailer,” he said. “Call me when you have something.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE