Only to Die Again Read online

  She supposed the doubts had started creeping in around that time. Little uncertainties that gave her pause now and then, like static lines flickering in the movie of her life. There were social issues, for one. She was twenty-four and had never had a boyfriend – nothing that’d lasted beyond a few weeks, anyway. She knew she was pretty, and it wasn’t hard getting the attention of boys. Yet the few times she’d let someone in – nice guys from her classes who didn’t push for things to get physical right away – had ended horribly. Three or four dates along, she would make the first move. Things would happen, enjoyable things if a little clumsy and brief, and then she’d find herself lying awake all night next to a sleeping body, her mind trying like hell to avoid the unwelcome truth: that she felt nothing for this person; that she wished she was back at her place, alone with her books and her lab notes; that she had no idea what to say in the morning.

  Then, two months into her time at Cornell, a different kind of boy had come along. His name was Daryl, and he didn’t wait for her to make the first move, and when things happened they were neither clumsy nor brief, and they were way the hell past enjoyable. Sometimes Aubrey had still lain awake all night next to him, but only to worry that she might do something wrong and lose him. That fear had been there from the moment she’d met him, the sense that she had never quite won him over, though she couldn’t define it more clearly than that.

  She found her interest in the books and lab notes waning just a bit in the months after meeting Daryl, though her academic work didn’t suffer much for it. Instead, her time with Daryl came at the cost of time with her friends, a fact Daryl seemed just fine with. He didn’t like her friends all that much. He certainly didn’t like her spending time with them. In hindsight, that should’ve been a red flag, but it hadn’t been. She had not been looking for any flaws on his side of the equation; all her focus was on worrying about her own flaws.

  Other flags should have been more obvious. Like when he would pick her phone up off the table and check whom she’d called that day, right in front of her, as casually as if he were reading the newspaper.

  You talked to Laney? he would say. What was that about?

  Some little spark inside of her wanted to reply, She’s my best friend, and it’s none of your fucking business what it was about.

  Then another part of her would think, Don’t lose him, don’t lose him, don’t lose him, and when she opened her mouth all that came out was the answer to his question, in detail, and somehow in the tone of an apology.

  They’d been together six months when he suggested she drop out of the program. She wouldn’t need an income, he said; his own would be mid-six by the time he was thirty. They had never talked about getting married, but the possibility of it had been there for months already, in the subtext of their conversations.

  It was in the days after that talk – days she spent giving the idea real consideration – that younger Aubrey started piping up in her head. Younger Aubrey with that old Beetle packed full of clothes and books, rolling out of South Bend on a summer morning. She began to call that version of herself Proust Girl, because among those books in the Volkswagen had been a boxed set of all Proust’s published work. Proust Girl had not read a word of the man’s writing yet, back then, but fully intended to. She had meant to have it deeply absorbed by Christmas break of freshman year, not just so she could whip out quotes and look brilliant, but for the light it would shine on her understanding of human nature. Proust Girl couldn’t have known that she would get fifty pages into the first book and throw the whole goddamned set in the trash. She couldn’t have known the writing would feel like ham-fisted overacting on the page, any more than she could have known that nice boys would never be able to get her off – would never even be able to make her smile. Proust Girl was none too happy at the idea of dropping out of Cornell, but what the hell did she know? Proust Girl could never’ve seen Daryl coming.

  When it finally happened, it did so in the most mundane of places: the kitchenware aisle of a Target, just off campus. She and Daryl had been out to dinner and had stopped for groceries afterward. Aubrey saw a vegetable steamer she’d looked at two or three times before; it was on sale now, a hundred dollars instead of one fifty. She set it in the cart, and Daryl took one look at it and told her to put it back on the shelf.

  Don’t worry, she said. I’m paying for it.

  No you’re not. You can’t afford it. Put it back.

  No joke in his tone, and nothing in his eyes but sternness, and the expectation of obedience.

  That look from him wasn’t quite unprecedented, but it caught her off guard this time.

  Daryl, it’s my money, I’m buying it.

  Never taking that locked gaze off of her, Daryl took the steamer from the cart and set it back onto the shelf. When Aubrey reached to pick it up again, his hand clamped around her forearm hard enough to dig into the muscles. Hurting her. On purpose. And still there was that gaze drilling into her. In that moment she realized she’d seen it before she ever met him. Long before.

  And no, Proust Girl really would not have seen Daryl coming, she thought. Not if he’d been standing in a garage with an old Husqvarna, beating it with a wrench.

  It ended right there in that aisle full of pots and pans, with Aubrey screaming at him to let go of her, screaming even after he complied, her hands coming up and covering her head, the brink of a nervous breakdown right there in front of a dozen shoppers.

  That had been four years ago. She had finished up at Cornell and taken a postdoc appointment at Texas A&M. A year later she’d found herself here, at Arizona State, where she was now contemplating starting over and getting a law degree.

  A paper cup in the wind.

  She gathered the books she wanted from the passenger seat, stuffed them into her backpack, and got out of the car. On the front walk she nodded hello to the guy with the lawn mower, put her key in the lock, and stepped into her unit.

  Her unit – no one else’s. There had been no more Daryls, though there had been a few more sleepless, guilt-heavy nights lying awake beside nice guys, in the endless hope that one of them would somehow light up enough of her buttons.

  The thing was, she didn’t crave her academic work on those nights anymore. She didn’t crave much of anything, really, on any night. Which was unnerving as hell, at twenty-eight. Where had all the old rocket fuel gone? Where had Proust Girl gone? She existed only as a nagging thought now and again, all criticism and no advice.

  Maybe the law degree would be a way to hit reset. A friend in DC had told her she should come out east and get into policy work. Advocate for something. Find a cause. Maybe. Or maybe there was something else she could do in DC Something she wasn’t even thinking of yet.

  Aubrey set her bookbag on the carpet, stepped out of her shoes and –

  Flinched, her breath coming out in a sharp little convulsion.

  There was someone in her apartment.

  Right there in the kitchen doorway.

  Holding something.

  These thoughts, in the tiniest sliver of a second.

  In the next sliver her eyes locked on to the object: a handgun with a silencer on the barrel.

  The first three shots felt like fingertips jabbing her chest, hard enough to shove her backward – and little balloons of ice water popping inside her, deep behind her ribs.

  She didn’t feel the fourth shot. It broke the center band of her glasses and punched through the bridge of her nose.

  The man with the gun watched her fall in a heap of limbs. Watched the carpet become soaked around her head, as if someone had tipped over a pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid.

  Her face was just visible in profile, where she lay. She was pretty. Her chin was tiny, and she had a little button nose. It crossed his mind to wonder what she’d done to deserve this, but only for a second. It wasn’t his job to wonder about things.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dryden felt strange doing what the kid had asked. He would have fel
t stranger not doing it.

  He had the dead men’s Taurus backed up close to the wrecked Tahoe, the trunk lid open. The bodies of the two attackers were already stuffed inside, along with their wallets and phones. The phones were identical to those he’d found on the earlier pair of gunmen, and had the same redaction software blotting out the numbers in the call logs. As before, neither man had made a call or sent a text in the past hour – which was good. It meant they had not phoned their superiors and passed along Dryden’s address after tailing Curtis there. It meant Claire’s enemies still had no idea who Dryden was.

  Also as before, the gunmen carried cash and no IDs. Dryden took the money and wiped down the wallets and left them with the corpses.

  Crossing back to the Taurus for Curtis’s body, Dryden could see the glint of traffic on the nearby two-lane – tiny reflections off chrome and glass, stabbing through the concealing trees.

  But no vehicle turned off that road to approach along the gravel route. No random tourist or Forest Service vehicle, the arrival of which would lead to a 9-1-1 call and a police presence within minutes.

  He had the strangest sense of assurance that it wouldn’t happen. He kept thinking of the kid’s last words.

  I already know you’ll manage it. ’Cause they’re not here right now killing you.

  Dryden opened the driver’s-side door – it groaned at first, lightly jammed by the warping of the vehicle’s structure – and pulled Curtis’s body out onto the ground. He dragged it to the Taurus’s crowded trunk, lifted, and forced it inside, then went through the kid’s pockets and found nothing. No phone and no wallet.

  The wallet was in the Tahoe, where Curtis had left it when he went into the restaurant.

  There was no ID in the wallet, and no credit card or registration either. Nothing with Curtis’s name on it. Just cash – ninety-six dollars. Dryden took it, feeling only marginally like a thief. No point leaving it.

  He opened the Tahoe’s back door on the driver’s side. On the floor sat a black messenger bag, stuffed full of something bulky and square-edged. Dryden opened it and saw five white plastic binders, the kind that held three-hole-punched paper. You could buy them at any office store. At a glance he saw that each binder held a thick stack of pages, maybe a couple hundred each.

  The information Curtis had stolen from the people who’d attacked Bayliss. The stuff from the secure server, which he’d printed and organized in the past three days while lying low.

  In addition to the five binders, there was a slim stack of pages by itself, fifteen or twenty sheets stapled at the top corner.

  I even wrote a letter to go with it. It’s everything I know.

  Staring into the bag, Dryden pictured a kind of thread connecting himself to Claire, wherever she was. A delicate strand drawn wire-taut, its tiny fibers straining and snapping, but the line itself still holding.

  Whatever chance he had to find her lay in those pages.

  Another kind of assurance suddenly came to him – far less comforting than the belief that no stray vehicle would come barreling down the gravel road.

  The second assurance was that Claire’s captors would not kill her anytime soon.

  If they had no other way to find out who he was – the unknown man who had the machine they wanted – then interrogating Claire would be their only recourse. As long as she didn’t tell them anything, they would keep her alive and under questioning. If anything, they would have her on suicide watch.

  The notion brought him no relief; it brought only the hope that he could still get to her. That the fuse had length yet to burn.

  He closed the messenger bag and took it to his Explorer. He set it on the passenger-side floor, beside the hard plastic case with the machine inside it.

  Then he opened the Explorer’s back end and grabbed the emergency kit he kept there. Among the items inside were three road flares and a towing rope.

  It took only a minute to secure the rope from the Explorer’s hitch to the Taurus’s frame, at the front end.

  He spent another minute giving the entire scene one last look. He had already kicked dirt and dust over the blood drops the bodies had left when he’d dragged them, and scuffed the ground further to erase the drag marks themselves. Not a perfect solution, but good enough.

  There would sure as hell be no useful forensic evidence found in the wrecked Tahoe. For good measure he wiped his fingerprints from the door handles, and held the road flares without the pads of his fingers touching them. He popped off the igniter caps and struck the flares alight one after another. He lobbed two of them into the vehicle – one up front, one into the rear seats – and set the third against the front tire on the driver’s side, its white-hot flame directly against the rubber.

  By the time he’d sprinted to the Explorer, climbed in, and put it in drive, there were already black tendrils of smoke coming through the Tahoe’s open windows, where the upholstery had begun to burn.

  Ten minutes later and two thousand feet higher in the hills, he stopped. He was no longer on a gravel road, but a mostly overgrown two-track that punched like a ragged tunnel through the evergreens. On the left side of the path, the land pitched upward at forty-five degrees. On the other side it dropped away just as steeply, toward a brush-choked pond thirty feet below. During summers when he was a teenager, Dryden had been up here lots of times with friends, usually at night. The pond was more than sixty feet deep in the middle, its sides like a funnel angling down into the murk. He’d heard rumors that there were old logging trucks down at the bottom, but he’d never heard of anyone going in with scuba gear to find out for sure.

  He unhooked the tow rope and stowed it and pointed the Taurus at the edge of the dropoff. He put the car in neutral and shoved it over the lip. It bounced and jostled its way down the slope, crashed through the shrubs lining the pond, and hit the water with an explosion of mud and foam. Giant ripples rolled outward, crisscrossed, settled. For thirty seconds the car looked like it wanted to float. It bobbed with its front end pulled under by the engine’s weight, and drifted out away from the shore. Then physics asserted itself. The passenger compartment flooded and the car pitched farther forward, its back end tilting up, and within another minute the whole thing had gone under. Dryden studied the gap in the brush at the water’s edge, where the car had punched through. Most of the plants had simply bent and were springing back now. The scrub-covered earth showed no tire tracks. Someone standing here five minutes from now wouldn’t suspect a thing.

  From far away through the trees, in the direction of town, came the sound of sirens. Police and fire units responding to the burning Tahoe, the origin of which would forever be a mystery to them.

  Dryden got back in the Explorer and pulled away.

  He returned to the paved two-lane by a different route than he’d taken to the pond, avoiding the Tahoe.

  He drove back into El Sedero and pulled into the broad parking lot of a strip mall three blocks in from the shore. He took a spot at the periphery, far from the packed rows closer in.

  He hauled the messenger bag up onto the passenger seat and opened it, and took out the five binders and the stapled letter. Everything I know.

  It was 8.45 in the morning.

  Chapter Fifteen

  At 8.46, Marnie Calvert stood at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the computer lab in the Wilshire Federal Building. From twenty-three stories up, the window faced south over the 405 freeway. Marnie leaned lightly on the glass with the knuckles of one hand. Far below, a bright red sports car merged onto the freeway from Wilshire. She watched it slip away into the morning haze toward Marina del Rey.

  Twenty minutes earlier she’d been in her office, pacing, her mind doing 60. Then her computer had dinged with an incoming e-mail, a positive match on the fingerprint search she’d sent in hours before.

  The mystery man who’d saved the girls at the trailer had exactly one blemish on his record: an arrest for assault when he was eighteen years old, the charge dropped almo
st immediately on grounds of self-defense. He’d flown pretty straight since then: army service immediately following high school, including time with the Rangers and then 1st SFOD-Delta. Then, apparently, he’d vanished into another dimension for six years, because his military record simply went blank for that stretch of time. Not even redacted. Just nonexistent. From age twenty-four to thirty, there was no Sam Dryden.

  The paperwork picked up again with his honorable discharge at thirty. Within the next year there was a marriage license and a birth certificate – in that order, but just barely. Then came two death certificates, the wife and the daughter, and reference tags pointing to police reports about the traffic accident that had taken their lives.

  After which Sam Dryden’s document trail went almost blank again, though not by way of secrecy this time. Rather, his life seemed to dial itself down to the lowest burner setting. He worked, but only a little: private security stuff here and there, putting his background to use. He didn’t generate much income, but then again he didn’t need to. He had inherited a significant chunk of money from his parents, back during his time in the service. But for those years after he lost his wife and child, he didn’t spend much of the money. His credit card records showed him paying his bills and his property taxes and buying groceries. He didn’t do much else. For the better part of five years, there was no sign that he’d traveled or purchased much more than basic essentials. To the extent that paper records could show a man’s world shrinking down to a solitary confinement cell, Sam Dryden’s seemed to do so.