Dryden took the first exit for Santa Maria at 11:35. He could already see the building.
Mission Tower has gotten a lot of pushback from Santa Maria residents just for its size. It’s really not the type of building you expect in a town like that.
From the elevated exit ramp, the whole city appeared spread out like a carpet; Mission Tower could not have looked more out of place in the sprawl if it were a pyramid with a sphinx guarding it. Standing at least twenty stories tall, it was probably the only structure in the city that topped out above forty feet.
Structure seemed like the right word for it—not so much a building as the skeleton of one, a framework of steel uprights and concrete slab floors, like a parking structure without perimeter walls.
Dryden put its distance at just over a mile. He could see a tower crane braced to the north side. The crane’s mast, standing three hundred feet tall, looked as delicate as a vertical truss of glued-together toothpicks. The long horizontal jib and counterjib, balanced atop the mast, swung slowly around as the operator lowered some kind of load onto the building’s rooftop. Dryden couldn’t see the workmen from this distance, but they had to be there.
He turned off the exit ramp onto the surface street.
*
Marnie managed to stay one light behind him, all the way across town. She watched Dryden turn onto the main drag that ran east-west through the city, at the far end of which stood a huge building under construction. Two minutes and three stoplights later, she saw the Explorer pull to the curb twenty yards from the build site, its boundary protected by orange mesh fencing and NO TRESPASSING signs.
Marnie pulled over half a block behind him. She killed her engine and sank down a little in her seat.
Dryden was out of his vehicle within seconds of stopping. He had something in his hand—a hard plastic case of some kind.
Without so much as looking around, Dryden crossed the distance to the construction zone, shoved down the mesh fence, and stepped over it into the site.
Marnie stared after him, as confused as she had been at any point since arriving in the Mojave at four in the morning.
She got out of her Crown Vic and followed.
*
Twelve dead. Nine injured.
None of that was going to happen on the ground floor of the tower, Dryden saw. There was nobody at all on the first level. Not inside, anyway. He could hear men shouting to each other outside the structure, way on the other side. Crewmen positioning the heavy loads that remained for the tower crane to pick up.
Dryden could see the crane’s reinforced base, midway along the north side of the building. A massive footing of steel and concrete, probably bolted to foundation piles that punched fifty feet down into the earth.
Whatever was going to go wrong, the crane’s base was not going to be a part of it. It looked solid enough. It looked like it would stay right there for five hundred years, even if everyone went away and left it to the elements.
Certainly the equipment failed, but of course there were extenuating circumstances …
What sort of equipment—and what extenuating circumstances?
And why of course?
Something in that phrasing had troubled Dryden since he’d first heard it.
He came to an exposed stairwell—there were no walls yet boxing it in; it was wide open to the surrounding space of each floor. The stair treads were bare steel that would someday hold ceramic tile or padded carpet. He stopped at the bottom and cocked his head. From high above came the sound of voices echoing down through the vertical space. All of them seemed to come from way up in the building, closer to the top than the bottom.
Distracting him from the sound was the static coming from the plastic hardcase in his hand. He had cranked the tablet computer’s volume to its highest setting, loud enough that he could hear it even with the case shut.
He started up the stairwell.
*
Marnie waited for him to disappear up the stairs before crossing the orange fencing outside the site. She walked softly on the concrete, her footfalls all but silent.
She started toward the stairwell Dryden had gone into, then saw another, twenty yards to the left. She made her way across to it and climbed to the first landing. She stopped and listened, and found she could hear Dryden easily. He was making no attempt to be quiet as he climbed through the structure.
She kept thinking about the hard plastic case.
What the hell was in it?
Obvious possibilities came to mind. Drugs. Money.
Other scenarios were less likely, but uglier. Like a bomb.
None of those things made any sense at all, but neither did anything else about Sam Dryden.
Marnie started up the next flight, unsnapping the safety harness of the Glock 17 holstered beneath her jacket.
*
For the first fifteen stories, Dryden saw nothing that could pose a threat to anyone. Just one empty floor after another, each one a wide-open concrete space running out to its edges. Beyond was blue sky and the spread of Santa Maria planing away to the mountains that encircled it.