She blinked against the flashlight beam, then reached for his hand.
He holstered his gun. She was naked, and still wet from the bath. But there was no blood on her at all. She reached for his hand, squeezing his fingers so hard it hurt.
“Gavin—is he gone?”
“You can come out of there,” he said. “But stay in this room.”
She didn’t move.
“Lucy—I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
He let go of her hand and got his phone. Nagata answered on the first ring. He already knew where she was. The sirens were right outside the house.
27
HE TURNED ON the porch light and stood outside at the top of the steps with his badge in his left hand as the line of patrol cars came down the hill and stopped in front of the house. Nagata came out first. Eight other officers followed her. There was Frank Lee, from the Homicide Detail, and the rest of them were patrol officers he didn’t recognize. None of them had his gun drawn, which meant Nagata must have gotten on the radio as soon as she’d hung up with him.
“There’s blood,” a young cop said.
“I see it,” she said. “Wait down here.”
She came up the stairs, avoiding the bloody footprints, and stood with Cain near the door. She looked into the house, then at Cain.
“She’s upstairs,” he said. “In the bathroom. Hiding under the sink where I found her.”
“She’s lucky,” Nagata said. “That’s twice now.”
“I’m not taking another chance with her,” Cain said. “Not like this. She can’t live this way. Have your men check the whole thing again. I still haven’t gone in the basement or the garage.”
He started to go back into the house.
“Cain—”
“We’ll talk in the living room,” Cain said. “You and Frank and me.”
But before he talked to Nagata, he went upstairs. He took clothes from her closet and brought them into the bathroom. He shut the door, then rolled up the bloody bath mat and set it aside. He used the ruined hand towel to clean up the rest of the blood from the wall and the countertop, and then he sat down in front of the cabinet and opened the doors.
Lucy looked out at him, her eyes the color of wet slate.
“I’ll help you out of there,” he said.
She reached for his hand and he helped lift her from behind the drainpipe and out of the cabinet. He pulled her onto his lap and reached into the cabinet again for a clean towel to put around her. She was shivering with cold or fear, and her skin was covered in goose bumps.
“He wasn’t looking for you,” Cain said. “He was looking for me.”
She put her arms around him and held him tightly.
“This won’t happen again,” he said. “I promise you that.”
“What do we do?” she whispered. “We can’t stay here, can we?”
“We can’t. We won’t.”
“I saw him,” she said. “Through the crack in the doors.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was tall. And hurt. Bleeding all down his leg.”
“Did you see his face?”
“He was too tall,” she said. She was whispering into the side of his neck. “He stood right here. He was throwing things. I saw his hand—the only skin I saw. He was white. I thought he’d open the cabinet and find me. I was sure he’d find me.”
He held on to her, not wanting to press her with any more questions, but knowing he had to.
“Did it sound like it was just the one guy, or did he have someone else?”
“Just one.”
If there had been two, they would have talked to each other, and she would have heard them. And even if they hadn’t talked, their footsteps would have given them away.
“How long between when he left and when I came home?”
“Not long,” she said.
He waited for her to go on, for her to play the memory back and answer his question with precision. She had a perfect sense of time and cadence, knew the length of every note and every rest. At the Ashbury Heights Elementary trial, she had taken the stand before Matt Redding, and Cain had been sitting at the prosecution’s table, watching. The cross-examination turned on her ability to recall the timing of shots in a span of five minutes. How long had she spent kneeling under the stairs, using her body to shield the twenty children she’d silently gathered and rushed into that crawlspace? When, exactly, did she put her hand over the crying boy’s mouth, clamping so hard to silence him that his lips bled onto her palm and he passed out in her arms?
Lucy was tapping her finger against his back, measuring her time in the dark.
“He left and went down the stairs,” Lucy said. “And then you came in. Two and a half minutes.”
From downstairs, Nagata’s men began to call out as they’d cleared the basement and the garage. Through the bathroom window, Cain heard another officer in the back garden. The blood tracked out the basement door, through the flower beds, and over the back fence. Then Nagata was on the radio, asking for backup, every available unit. She wanted to saturate the avenues, go door-to-door. She needed a CHP helicopter to sweep from above with a searchlight; someone needed to bring dogs.
Cain held Lucy back from him so he could see her face.
“Can you get dressed?”