Signal: A Sam Dryden Novel (Sam Dryden series Book 2) Read online

  “Hi, Leah. My name’s Marnie. I’m an FBI agent.”

  “Are my mom and dad coming?”

  “They’re going to be at the hospital when you get there, and that’ll be soon. The police are going to drive you there.”

  “I don’t want to go to the hospital. I want to go home.”

  Leah’s voice cracked, but she kept her composure. She looked practiced at doing so.

  “Hey,” Marnie said softly. “You’re going to be home before you know it. And guess what. Pretzel’s still there.”

  At the mention of that name, a trace of happiness flickered through the girl’s eyes. The emotion seemed to surprise her.

  Pretzel, a golden retriever, had been a three-month-old puppy when Leah Swain disappeared in the summer of 2012. Marnie had seen the dog herself when she’d interviewed the parents back then. Half an hour ago, speaking to Mr. Swain on the phone, Marnie had heard the retriever barking like hell in the background, the wife calling its name and telling it to sit. Dogs were emotional antennas—it was hard to imagine the vibe it must be picking up in that house tonight.

  Leah blinked repeatedly. Her eyes were just noticeably moist now.

  “I promise I won’t bother you with too many questions,” Marnie said, “but can I ask you just three or four? They might be important.”

  Leah nodded.

  Off at the far edge of the lit-up scene, Marnie heard men’s voices greeting someone. She turned and saw a man she recognized: the chief of the LAPD, walking in from where the chopper had touched down. She was pretty sure the desert south of Barstow was hell and gone from the guy’s jurisdiction, but this was one of those cases where all the boundaries were sure to get blurred. And it had ended happily, which meant politicians would want their faces associated with it. Marnie wondered whether the guy would have flown out here if the night had turned out differently.

  For a moment that image forced itself into her head: the scene she might have rolled up to, if Harold Heely Shannon had gotten his way. The awful picture was unusually vivid in her thoughts.

  Marnie pushed it away and turned back to Leah.

  “You told the police two people came into the trailer and stopped Mr. Shannon from starting a fire,” Marnie said. “A man and a woman. Is that right?”

  Leah nodded.

  “Did you ever see those people before?” Marnie asked. “Did Mr. Shannon know them?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “Did they say anything to you or the other girls?”

  Another head shake.

  “What about names?” Marnie asked. “Did they call each other anything?”

  Leah thought about it. Her eyebrows drew closer together. “I don’t think so.”

  “Can you remember anything they did say?”

  “They were in a hurry to go. The lady kept saying they had to leave before the police came. So they did.”

  The girl thought about it a moment longer, then simply shook her head again. Even through the mask of shock and suppressed emotion on her face, it was clear the girl was keeping nothing back. She had no idea who the man and woman had been, or how they’d managed to arrive at that exact moment, seconds after a 9-1-1 call nobody on earth could have anticipated.

  * * *

  Two minutes later, in a caravan of police SUVs and cruisers, the girls left the scene. Hiller waved Marnie into the trailer, where the cops had so far treaded lightly; an FBI forensics team from Santa Monica was still en route to process the place.

  Inside, the cage held Marnie’s attention for a full ten seconds. Then her gaze fell on Harold Shannon, his eyes open and pointed at the ceiling, his brains and most of his blood soaking the carpet in a tacky puddle. The first responders had noted that the exit wounds suggested hollow points and that the shooter must have taken the shell casings. So much for ballistics evidence—fragmented scraps of bullets weren’t going to tell them anything.

  Hiller was standing at the mouth of a hallway leading off to the trailer’s back rooms.

  “You got a strong stomach?” he asked.

  “I’ve seen worse corpses,” Marnie said.

  “I wasn’t talking about the body.” Hiller nodded behind himself, down the hall. “There’s something back here I guess you’ll need to see. Or … know about, anyway.”

  She wondered at the odd choice of words but followed him as he led the way out of the living room.

  There were only two rooms off the hall: a tiny bathroom, and then Shannon’s bedroom.

  There was nothing special about the bathroom, beyond that it was filthy. Marnie gave it a glance and continued along the hall. She found Hiller standing just inside the doorway to the bedroom, yet keeping his gaze pointed back into the hallway. He didn’t want to look at the room. Marnie stepped past him and saw why.

  The furniture was basic enough: a bed and a nightstand, both about as disgusting as the rest of the trailer. The bedsheets appeared to have never been washed. The nightstand was covered with beer bottles full of cigarette butts, and paper plates and bowls caked with rotted food scraps. There was a single window, with dark green curtains pulled over it. There was a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Marnie saw all those things and forgot them in the same half second, as she took in the reason Hiller had his eyes pointed away from the room.

  The space was wallpapered with photographs. Digital shots, home printed on 8½"-by-11" sheets of high-gloss paper. The pictures were lined up on the walls in a grid that covered them floor to ceiling, corner to corner. Their edges met with absurd precision, though not a scrap of tape was visible anywhere. Maybe the paper sheets were spray-glued to the wall. A labor of obsession.

  Marnie realized she was keeping her viewpoint moving. Unwilling to let it stop on any single image. All the same, she saw them. Saw what they were. After a few seconds she blinked and aimed her gaze at the doorway. Hiller was still standing there. Marnie could hear his breath hissing in and out through his teeth.

  Her own breathing stayed quiet, but she could feel her hands wanting to shake.

  * * *

  When she stepped back out onto the porch she saw an uplink truck for ABC7 News parked at the edge of the scene. No sign yet of the forensics team.

  She walked to her car, then went past it into the darkness, away from all the eyes. A hundred yards west of the trailer she came upon an arroyo channel—almost walked into it, in the trace light. The thing was strewn with garbage and broken machinery. She sat on its edge, her gaze fixed on the horizon, and let the tremors in her hands set in.

  She was still sitting there five minutes later when headlights topped a rise to the west, her team rolling in at last. She squinted and turned away—her eyes had adjusted to the darkness—and found herself staring at the arroyo’s edge beside her.

  Where she could just make out what she’d been unable to see a few minutes before: scuff marks and scrapes from hands and shoes. Like someone had landed on all fours here, maybe after vaulting over the arroyo. Or out of it.

  Marnie took a miniflashlight from her pocket and switched it on. She studied the scour marks on the desert hardpan, then swung the beam to the far side of the arroyo. Nothing particular jumped out at her over there, but in the beam’s peripheral light something else did.

  A scrap of fabric, caught on jagged metal in the arroyo’s depth.

  She shone the light down onto it. It was a torn piece of denim, hanging from the spearlike point of a broken axle.

  In almost the same moment, something closer drew Marnie’s attention. She adjusted the light again and blinked in surprise.

  Three feet below her, an old washing machine lay half-submerged in the arroyo’s dirt wall. Along the nearest edge of the washer were two shapes stamped with desert dust: the impressions of a pair of shoe soles, from the balls of the feet forward.

  And maybe something else.

  Marnie lit up the channel’s wall beneath her, dug one of her feet into it, and slid carefully down to the washing machine. She crouched over t
he thing, putting the flashlight and her eyes three inches from the shoe impressions.

  They were flanked by handprints, just visible in the light glare. Eight fingers, pressed to the metal. Eight fingerprints.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The man who called himself Mangouste stepped out the back door of his home and closed it behind him. The night was cool and moist, unseasonable for this part of California. He crossed the rear yard to a gate at the back, opened it, and stepped through into the forest beyond. Here the air was thicker still, the undergrowth looming out of a ground fog that had settled into the lowest parts of the wood.

  There was a way through the brush—not quite a trail, but close enough. Mangouste followed it a hundred yards, to where it opened to a clearing fifty feet across.

  In the center of the clearing was a place where the ground hummed with a vibration from below. He could only just feel it; a person who didn’t know better could walk over this spot a dozen times and not notice.

  Mangouste moved in small steps until he found the place where the hum was strongest, then sat down there, on the damp leaves. He spoke under his breath in French and ran a hand through his hair. His fingertips passed over the faint remnant of a scar hidden there. He’d had it since childhood, more than thirty years back—the result of a brick swung by another child who had probably meant to kill him.

  He had lived in France then, in Caen, eleven years old, long since orphaned. There were places for orphans in the city, but those places were worse than being alone on the street, so he had stayed away from them whenever possible. Being on your own was dangerous, of course, but danger could be adapted to. He had been homeless for nearly two years when the incident with the brick happened. He remembered it almost perfectly, even now—how quietly the attack had come, how nothing more than stupid luck had made him turn his head just then, taking a glancing blow instead of a dead-on impact. He recalled how instinctively he’d reacted. What it had felt like to put the blade of his knife into the other boy’s throat. How that strange moment had been intimate, in its own way: holding the boy down on top of the trash bags, pinning his arms and listening to him whimper as the blood came from his neck in hot little spurts. When the police found him there, an hour later, he was sitting with the dead boy’s hand in his lap, moving the digits one by one, mesmerized by the absence of life in them.

  He had expected to go away to prison, but it didn’t happen that way. What happened was that he spent two days in a jail cell, and then in the middle of the night a policeman woke him up and took him out through the back door. The man put him into a van and drove him away; he rode for hours, lying on the backseat, truly afraid for the first time—he simply did not know what would happen to him at the end of the ride.

  What happened was that he fell asleep in the van, and woke in a very comfortable bed in a room overlooking a resort town of some kind—a hillside full of enormous villas sweeping down to a lakefront. It turned out to be Lake Como in Italy. There was no sign of the policeman when he woke, but there were plenty of other people in the giant house—grown-ups and children, too. They were kind to him. They understood his mistrust and allowed him to come slowly out of his shell. They knew where he had come from, and how he had lived. They knew more than that, actually.

  Your father was a soldier, they said. Did you know?

  He nodded. Yes, he knew. It was just about all he knew of his parents—that one sentence.

  Your father was a very good soldier. A loyal one, who helped us. You’re here because we owe it to him to look after you. This is your home now.

  This had seemed too good to be the whole truth, and it hadn’t been. He had learned the rest of it in time: Yes, his father had done something for these people, but he himself would also be expected to do something for them, years down the road. He would be expected to do a great many things, as it would turn out. That was why they had taken him in.

  But that was fine.

  It was more than fine, in fact. By the time he understood the whole picture, he had come to agree with it. He had lived among those people for years by then, in their beautiful homes all over Europe, and their view of the world had persuaded him.

  Some people call us a movement, they said, but that’s the wrong word. We’re something purer than that. We’re an idea—the most important idea in the world. We came very close to changing the world, once upon a time. What we want now is another chance to try.

  Toward that end they were using all their power, which was considerable. They had what must have been billions of dollars. They had their own airliners, done up inside like yachts. They had powerful friends who visited sometimes and stayed up late into the night, sitting around the table, talking about what might have been, had things gone differently all those years ago. And talking about what might still be, somewhere down the road.

  If we’re patient. If we can bide our time and stay low.

  Some of their powerful friends were minor politicians from countries in Europe and even the United States. A few were not minor. There was even a famous American actor who came around now and again to pledge his financial support to the cause; he would drink Grey Goose and sit poking the embers in the giant fireplace in the den. Think of what the world could be, he would say, his eyes reflecting the guttering flames. Think how beautiful it could be.

  The boy was in his teens by then. He spoke five languages and had developed a gift for regional accents capable of fooling native speakers. His American English was especially good—midwestern, the way all the newscasters talked. He was tall and lean and fair-haired, the scar from the brick long-since buried away. He was shaping up to be everything his caretakers had dreamed of.

  By then, they had given him his nickname: Mangouste. Mongoose. He’d liked the sound of it, and insisted on it whenever he was among friends. He chose to believe it had always been his name, even when he had lived alone on the streets—especially then. The name was like a heartbeat, like something real and true at the center of him, a thing to remain constant across the years and miles and lies that would make up his life.

  All this time later, half a world away, Mangouste leaned back and pressed his hands to the forest floor behind himself. He felt the vibration in his palms. The thrum of heavy machinery, deep in the ground.

  If we’re patient.

  If we can bide our time.

  Mangouste closed his eyes. The time for patience was over.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Highway 395 was empty. This stretch of it, far north and west of Barstow, lay nowhere near any inhabited place. Dryden was in his Explorer, following Claire. They passed an old billboard positioned at ground level, its face just blank wood, baked white by years of exposure in the desert. A quarter mile farther on, the Land Rover braked and turned off onto the flat hardpan. In the sweep of its headlights, Dryden saw nothing but open country and a few low hills.

  He followed the Land Rover. It rolled another two hundred feet and then Claire killed its headlights. Dryden pulled up beside her and did the same. The Mojave was pitch black, one horizon glowing faintly red in the predawn like a heated blade.

  When they’d left the trailer they’d gone east, away from the incoming police units, then made a wide backroad loop to reach Arrowhead from the other side and retrieve Dryden’s Explorer; now they were an hour’s drive away from the crime scene.

  Claire opened the Land Rover’s door and got out. In the glow of the dome light, she walked forward and crouched at the base of a Joshua tree and came back up with a cell phone in her hand. It looked like a cheap pay-as-you-go model, the kind you could use a few times and throw away, without leaving any trail that led back to your real name. No doubt it was the same phone she had used to call Dryden earlier, before reaching this spot and stowing it here.

  A disposable phone, and still Claire had felt the need to leave it behind when she went to the trailer. Dryden considered the degree of paranoia that would inform such precautions.

  Claire pocketed the phon
e and returned to the SUV, waving for Dryden to join her. Dryden shut off the Explorer, stepped out, and got into the Land Rover on the passenger side.

  Even in the near dark, Dryden could sense the condition Claire was in: the same exhaustion she’d shown in the trailer. Her breathing sounded wrong. In silhouette against the dim horizon, she sat slumped at the wheel, all but holding on to it for support.

  “I’ve barely slept for the past three days,” she said. “Couple hours total, maybe.”

  “Tell me what this is,” Dryden said. “All of it.”

  Claire nodded but didn’t speak for a long time. Dryden had the impression that only stress had been propping her up earlier. She took a deep breath, then let go of the wheel and turned in her seat. She reached down behind the seatback, took something from the floor in front of the middle bench seat, and set it on the console between herself and Dryden. In the dark it sounded like a hard plastic case.

  Claire opened it and reached inside, and a second later the screen of a tablet computer flared to life, bathing the Land Rover’s interior with pale light.

  The plastic container was the size of a briefcase, its interior and lid both padded with gray foam. The tablet computer was strapped to the lid’s underside, facing upward now because the lid lay fully open.

  The other half of the case contained a machine Dryden couldn’t identify. It was the size of a small cereal box, lying in its padded indentation. The machine was made of black plastic, with ventilation slats on its top and sides. Faint red light shone through the slats, from an LED somewhere inside. The machine emitted a deep, just-audible hum that rose and fell in its pitch. A slender wire, probably a USB cable, connected the device to the tablet computer.

  For the moment Claire ignored the strange machine. She tapped an icon on the tablet’s screen, labeled ARCHIVE. A file window opened, displaying a long list of what looked like audio clips—the icons were all tiny speaker symbols. Claire scrolled to the bottom of the list and tapped the second-from-last file.

  An audio program opened and the file began to play.