Signal (3 page)

“We didn’t call anyone! We didn’t call anyone! I promise, it’s okay! We didn’t call anyone!”

For a moment it sounded like the girl was somehow talking and screaming at the same time. Then Dryden realized what he was actually hearing: There was another girl inside the trailer. Maybe several.

Even as he registered that fact, a man began shouting over the girls.
“What did you do? What the fuck did you do?”

Next to Dryden in the dark, Claire swore and broke into a full sprint. Dryden matched her. Though Claire had told him nothing about the people in the trailer, the key points of the situation were as clearly defined as razorwire tips.

The man’s screaming became almost indiscernible over the girls’ cries, but the phrase
kill you
stuck out more than once. The man’s shrieks sounded more animal than human. That was the last thought that crossed Dryden’s mind before the ground dropped out from under him.

His feet had been pounding the desert surface, and suddenly one of them came down on empty space. He pitched forward and threw his arms ahead of him, aware of Claire doing the same thing to his left. For a sickening half second he imagined there was nothing beneath him but a hundred-foot drop, and then one knee smashed hard against a metal edge and pain exploded through his leg. His hands landed amid trash bags and scattered pieces of plastic—broken casings of machinery and who knew what else. He heard Claire crash down into similar debris, five feet away, already fighting to climb up the other side of the trench they’d fallen in—an arroyo strewn with garbage.

Dryden moved his leg and found it wasn’t injured. He’d banged the kneecap badly, but nothing was broken.

In the trailer, the man’s screams continued.
“—gonna fucking kill you, do you understand that?”

Dryden was still holding the Beretta Claire had given him. With his free hand he pushed himself upright and scrambled toward the far side of the arroyo—

And found himself yanked to a halt by his other leg.

The calf of his jeans was hung up on something. Some jagged metal corner that’d pierced the fabric and now held like a barbed hook.

Five feet away, Claire was struggling to move, too. Dryden could hear something like rusted bedsprings warping and straining under her exertion, the whole mass shifting amid clutter as she fought to free herself.

Inside the trailer, the man’s voice had taken on a lunatic chanting quality—
“Kill you … kill you…”
—as if he were speaking only to himself now. There came a wooden banging noise over the audio: cabinet doors being flung open, it sounded like, one after the next. Cans and boxes being shoved aside in a mad search for something.

Dryden yanked his trapped leg toward himself with all his force, meaning to rip the fabric free. It was no good; the trash simply shifted beneath him, giving him no purchase from which to pull.

“Kill you … kill you … HERE!”

The slamming of the cabinet doors ceased, along with the voice. All that followed was the sound of the girls screaming.

Dryden jammed the pistol into his waistband and groped in the darkness for any solid handhold. One elbow thumped lightly against a metal surface, the sound of the impact blunt and reverberant. A washer or dryer, half-sunk into the dirt wall of the arroyo. He wrapped both his hands around an edge of the appliance, as if it were the lip of a cliff he meant to scale. He wrenched his body upward and felt the jean fabric tear and give way. Both legs came up fast; he drew them up to his chest, braced his feet where his hands had been, and exploded from the crouch like a runner out of the blocks. Half a second later he was on the surface again, landing on all fours, coming up and sprinting as fast as his body could move.

One hundred yards to the trailer.

Seventy-five.

Fifty.

“Want to see what you get?”
the man inside screamed.
“This is what you fucking get!”

Dryden drew the Beretta and covered the last fifty yards in an adrenalized surge that felt more like flying than running.

There was a low wooden porch in front of the trailer’s door—two steps and a shallow platform. The door was hinged to swing outward, but it was also rusted and damn near falling off its frame. Dryden vaulted onto the porch without slowing and hit the door with his shoulder; the cheap frame buckled and the door burst inward, and just like that he was inside, the details of the space coming at him all at once.

A big steel cage with four young girls in it, screaming and holding on to each other.

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.

“Agent Calvert?”

A sheriff’s deputy came toward her, out of the glare of the scene. He was fifty, give or take, a stocky guy just going soft. The nameplate above his badge read
HILLER.
Marnie had spoken to him on the phone.

She shut the door of her Crown Vic and crossed to him. Her shoes crunched on the hardpan.

“The kids are right this way,” Hiller said.

*   *   *

The four girls were sitting on a metal bench the paramedics had set up beside one of the ambulances. Each looked dazed, certainly scared, but it was clear at a glance there was no immediate medical trauma. The EMTs were as relaxed as such people could be at a crime scene, crouching beside the girls and simply talking to them. No doubt they’d done some basic physical assessments, and the girls would still be taken to a hospital, but those were formalities.

Marnie crossed the dirt yard and knelt down to eye level with the girl on the left end of the bench. The girl whose face had stared at her from her office bulletin board for six months, back when she’d disappeared. Even in the years since then, Marnie had revisited the case file often.

“Leah?” Marnie said.

The girl had been looking at her own hands in her lap. Now she lifted her gaze and met Marnie’s eyes. She’d been eight the last time Marnie—or anyone else outside this trailer—had seen her. She was eleven now.

Her eyes looked older than that. A lot older. She nodded and said nothing.

“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.