A skeletal man with long gray hair and a long gray beard, holding a bottle of lighter fluid and picking at the cap with his fingertips. Trying to open it.
The man jerked around at the crash of the door. His face seemed caught between expressions—rage and surprise. As the guy’s voice had done over the earpiece, that face gave Dryden the impression of something not quite human. Some predatory thing, instinctive and feral.
The man’s eyes darted away from Dryden, to the filthy countertop that separated the living room from the kitchen. Amid the clutter there, five feet away, lay a twelve-inch hunting knife.
The guy’s attention came back to Dryden, the eyes narrowing in fast calculation. Dryden didn’t wait for him to finish it. He centered the guy up and put two shots through his forehead. The man spasmed and fell back, collapsing at the base of the wall.
The bottle of lighter fluid landed beside him.
Still sealed.
Near silence fell over the room. The girls had stopped screaming. They were only staring now, eyes huge, their breath hitching.
Running footsteps outside. Claire landed on the porch, crossed the threshold, and came to a stop just behind Dryden. The girls’ eyes went back and forth between the two of them.
All four were just kids, somewhere between eight and twelve years old. They wore simple T-shirts and sweatpants. They had long hair brushed straight, and trimmed nails, and clean skin.
Groomed pets, Dryden thought, and felt like emptying the rest of the Beretta into the dead man’s face.
He saw an iPhone lying on the floor inside the cage, and a long strip of quarter-round molding just sticking out through the bars. A single nail remained at one end of the molding—the end that lay outside the cage. Dryden considered the nail and the phone, and thought of the cat’s-claw-on-upholstery sound he’d heard before the 9-1-1 call: the sound of the nail catching on the carpeting, as the girls dragged the phone toward them from wherever it’d been. They had made the call the moment they had the phone in hand.
“We need to go,” Claire said.
Dryden turned to her. Claire’s anxiety was gone—most of it, anyway. Dryden pictured her during the last minutes of the drive, constantly checking the clock, keenly aware that time was running out.
“How the hell could you have known?” Dryden asked.
“Later,” Claire said. “It’s time to leave.”
Dryden made no move. He looked from Claire to the girls, and then to the phone on the ground, trying to make any of it fit.
“I’ll explain,” Claire said. “I’ll show you. But not now.”
Dryden continued staring at her. It was the first time tonight that he’d seen her in bright light. Though the immediate tension was gone, in other ways she looked far worse than Dryden had realized earlier. She had dark hollows beneath her eyes, and her skin was pale. She hadn’t lost any weight—she was the same lean-framed five foot eight she’d always been—yet she seemed diminished in some way. She looked physically exhausted, far more than a long drive and a short sprint could account for.
“I’ll explain,” Claire said again. She made as if to leave, then seemed to catch herself. She turned and scanned the carpet to Dryden’s right, stooped and picked up the two spent shell casings from the Beretta. She pocketed them and moved past Dryden, out onto the wooden porch.
Dryden turned his attention back to the cage. Steel bars welded roughly together. A crude door, made of the same bars, latched with a heavy padlock.
The whole situation still landing on him, one miserable piece after another.
The four girls stared out through the bars, their eyes still wet from crying.
From outside, Claire said, “They’ll be fine when the cops get here. We won’t. Come on.”
Dryden hesitated a moment longer, then turned and stepped through the doorway. Claire was already running for the gravel road and the Land Rover. From far away in the night, in the direction of the freeway, came the keening of a police siren. Dryden stepped off the porch and sprinted after Claire.
CHAPTER FOUR
The smell hit Marnie Calvert even before she got out of the car. The vents sucked it in from outside: a mix of alkaline dust and aviation fuel exhaust. A helicopter had just touched down close by; she’d watched it descend as she covered the last half mile of the drive.
She killed the engine and shoved open the door and stood up into the desert night.
There were already ten or twelve vehicles at the crime scene. State Police, San Bernardino County sheriff’s cruisers, three ambulances out of Palmdale. Most of the units were idling, their flashers strobing and their headlights aimed inward on a focal point: a decrepit old trailer with a red Ford Fiesta parked in front of it, all by itself next to a gravel road in the middle of the Mojave.
Outside the car, the kicked-up dust was thicker, but it was already drifting away into the scrublands. The desert was black and empty and baking hot—four in the morning, early August.