The static from the machine ebbed. Some kind of gospel station came through. Dryden caught the words shepherd and praise before it faded back out.
“I’ve worked kidnapping cases for six years,” Marnie said. “I had one that made me come close to giving it all up, finding some other job. It started with a home invasion at a house in the Central Valley, middle of nowhere, broad daylight. A woman and her daughter, ten years old, lived there. The mom called 9-1-1 and screamed for about a second and then the call cut out. The first black-and-whites got there twelve minutes later and found the house empty. There was a bathroom off the little girl’s bedroom that had been locked from inside, and broken in around the latch. Like the girl tried to hide in there, and the intruder kicked it in. But while she was in there, in those seconds or whatever time she had, she tried to write something on the vanity mirror for the police to find.”
Dryden glanced at Marnie. She had her hands balled tightly in her lap, but he saw them shaking, just noticeably.
“It was the letters COI,” Marnie said, “written with her fingertip. She must have been smart enough to not breathe on the mirror first, so her attacker wouldn’t see it.”
“COI. Did she get cut off in the middle of writing a name?”
“I might have thought so,” Marnie said, “but she wrote it big, right across the mirror. There wouldn’t have been room for a fourth letter, so … COI seemed to be the whole message. We thought it might be someone’s initials, strange as that would be for a ten-year-old to write. We made a list of everyone the girl and her mother might know, and started working through it. I was on-site about an hour after the first responders. I took over the case, and the list. I thought about the girl’s teachers, her friends’ parents and relatives, anyone and everyone. But we didn’t find one person with those initials.”
She unballed her hands and pressed them flat to her pantlegs. The shaking was still visible.
“We tried license plates, even though it didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. The girl couldn’t have seen the driveway from that bathroom, and anyway, not many license plates use the letters O or I; witnesses mix them up with 1 and 0 too often. That approach came up empty right away. Then, about two hours in, we thought we had a lead. We found out the mom had been dating her boss and keeping it secret from her co-workers. A week earlier, she and the boss had been out at dinner with the little girl, and there had been some kind of fight between the couple—bad enough that the restaurant called the cops. An officer showed up and talked to them, took down their names but didn’t arrest anyone. It made the boss at least a hell of a maybe in my book, even though his initials didn’t match the three letters. And then we found out he’d been at a conference two hundred miles away when the break-in happened. He had about a hundred people to vouch for him.”
Out ahead, the hills flanking the road drew aside. Dryden could see broad, flat expanses of farmland planing away to the north.
“COI,” Marnie said. “I sat in that woman’s living room all that afternoon and evening, while the crime scene techs came and went, and I tried to figure it out. I kept going into that little bathroom and picturing the girl in there, scared out of her mind, listening to her mom being attacked down the hall. I asked myself what could be so damned obvious and simple that even a little kid, under that kind of stress, would think to write it on the mirror. And then, about six hours in, it just hit me.”
She was about to go on, when the static broke again. Dryden heard a man speaking slowly, his tone flat and calm. It reminded him of the baseball game. Almodovar at the bat. Then the last of the static fell away and the man’s words came through. It wasn’t a play-by-play.
“… minutes from now, so that you’ll hear it at present. We look forward to meeting you and reaching a fair agreement. Message begins here: Whoever has the machine, we hope you’re listening to it. We will trade your friend for the machine. At nine this evening, bring it to the place where you last saw her. We are programming our system to compromise multiple broadcast stations and play this message ten hours and twenty-four minutes from now, so that you’ll hear it at present. We look forward to meeting you and reaching a fair agreement. Message begins here: Whoever has the machine, we hope you’re listening to it. We will trade your friend for the machine. At nine this evening…”
Dryden listened as static slid back over the transmission, washing it away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN