If he’s as smart as she thinks he is, if he’s researched the arrivals schedule like she has, he’ll know this is his golden hour. Another hour and too many passengers will start pouring off the shuttles at once for him to make a quick, clean grab. An hour after that and arrivals traffic goes down to a trickle. Hunting will be poor, and any wrong move could draw the attention of the bored graveyard shift. And this guy doesn’t call attention to himself—not until it’s time to leave one of his creations in public. So far he’s been about balance, precision, a true surgeon in all his affairs.
Why reject her? Luke writes. Is he just scoping?
Thinking . . . she writes.
She’s imagining the steps Luke described.
Woman emerges from bus.
He starts for her.
Approaches her from the front, not the back.
And then she says hi, and he says hi, and he keeps walking.
Another one, Luke types.
Her shuttle’s left the terminal. They’re cresting Aviation Boulevard, angling for the canyon of airport hotels—bus bouncing, passengers chatting excitedly now that they’re picking up speed.
Another shuttle? she asks.
No. Another woman. She just parked. Alone. Heading for the shuttle stop. He’s seen her.
A few seats away, the pug yips, obviously regaining strength after its drug-induced nap.
Same deal, he writes. Coming up on her from the front.
The shuttle turns a corner; she figures they’ve got about another ten minutes until she reaches the lot.
Luke. What’s happening?
They’re talking.
What???
She’s asking him where the shuttle goes, and he’s answering.
Watch them. And draw your weapon.
Can’t text with a gun in my hand : )
This isn’t fucking funny, she wants to say, but she also needs to trust him. If he’s joking, it’s because he doesn’t see or sense danger.
She’s headed off now. He’s not following. WTF? Two easy targets. Doesn’t go for either. I don’t get it.
Charlotte takes a deep breath. Tries to clear her head. Runs through his script again in his head.
Approaches from the front, not the back.
First one smiles, says hi. He says hi back; lets her go.
Another one approaches him, asking questions.
Letting him know she doesn’t know where she’s going. Letting him know she’s vulnerable. A target of opportunity if there ever was one.
And he doesn’t take her.
Why?
Is he hunting for a physical attribute?
She and Luke have spent days now studying everything they could find about the victims, including Elle Schaeffer, even though her connection isn’t definitive yet.
Sarah Pratt, Kelley Sumter, Elle Schaeffer. All three midtwenties and white.
At five six, Sarah Pratt was the tallest of the bunch, with Kelley and Elle coming in right behind her, at five two and five four, respectively. The physical similarities end there. Hair color, eye color, facial features—they’re all wildly different. Kelley Sumter was a stick figure with a great mane of bottle-blonde hair and a love of cheap, flashy jewelry; Sarah Pratt, a svelte fitness nut and redhead who kept her hair military-grade short and wore halter tops that proudly flashed a tattoo on her shoulder inspired by a series of vampire romance novels she loved. As for Elle, she was a full-figured tomboy who eschewed dresses and had trouble smiling in pictures; the jog that might have ended her life was, according to her work friends, one of her first.
It’s not about them, she realizes. It’s about him. He approaches them from the front so they can see him.
The bus makes a dramatic left turn.
It’s time to text Luke.
Coming into the lot, she writes.
OK. He’s getting out of the Camry.
The bus is slowing down.
I need to put the phone away, she writes.
OK.
She’s already deleted all the text messages from earlier that week. Now it’s time to delete the ones from Luke. But her finger hesitates, and another one pops through just as the breaks hiss, and the shuttle slows to a gradual halt.
Charley?
Yeah.
Whatever happens, knock him dead ; )
Hey Luke, she types back.
Yeah.
Thanks for doing right by me.
A few seconds tick by, and then, XO.
The shuttle stops. The other passengers get to their feet. She hangs back, letting them wrestle their suitcases out from the racks on either side of the middle exit door. She deletes all of Luke’s messages from that night. First the mother and her two sons head out into the dark, then the couple with their now-energetic pug. She feels a twinge of guilt, as if she’s allowing these unsuspecting travelers to swim out into waters where a shark lies in wait. But this shark doesn’t have a taste for people like them.
Will he have a taste for me?
Amazing, that this is what’s occupying her mind in this moment, that her life has brought her to this point—desperate to snare the attention of a human monster. But if he passes her by like he did the other two, they’ll have to start over. Once he’s laid eyes on her, assessed her, and for some reason judged her wanting, her hopes of baiting him will be forever dashed.
Luke’s left the Jeep empty, and she’s got a key to it if she has to walk that far. But for now she walks slowly, with a bowed head. Eye contact seems enough to drive the guy away. Eye contact and engagement. But still, he approaches the women from the front.
He’s got a trigger, just like Zypraxon does, she thinks. He’s not rejecting these women because of what they are, but because of something they do. Or something they don’t do.
She hears footsteps approaching her through the dark.
She grabs the straps of her backpack, keeps staring at the ground, lifts her view just enough that she can see a man’s legs approaching. And the sight of his legs reminds her of the way he moved through the gym the other day. Of his perfectly muscled body—his perfectly muscled body contrasting with his imbalanced, slightly altered mess of a face.
With a surge of excitement that borders on giddiness, it comes to her.
He rejected them because they were nice.
They’re paces from each other now.
He rejected them because they didn’t reject him.
She looks at his face, looks right into his eyes. He’s watching her with an intensity that belies his quick, confident steps.
And that’s when she winces and quickly looks away as if repulsed by what she sees.
They pass each other, and then she hears his footsteps stop.
I got him, she thinks. I fucking got him.
Too late she realizes what she forgot to do.
She forgot to be afraid.
The impact is swift, instant, and skull rattling. Suddenly her torso, neck, and head seem to weigh nothing at all. The next thing she knows, she’s kissing asphalt with no memory of the face-plant itself.
Her mind grabs for terror. Nothing is there. She’s hollow, vacant. Never in her life has she been truly stunned in the most literal and physical definition of the word. Terror seems like a rational thought process her body can’t accommodate, and the more she tries to summon it, the more she pushes it away. As if she were trying to meditate on the calm in the middle of a thunderstorm.
It’s like she’s breathing through a straw. Her knees scrape the asphalt. He’s dragging her in between two parked cars. A sudden rush of fumes makes her eyes water. He stuffs something in her mouth; something soaked in a noxious chemical. She feels it the way you feel your bedsheets when you’re first coming to in the morning.
And then the prick of a needle.
My neck, fuck. My neck. He just . . .
And when the darkness closes in around her, she realizes he beat it. He beat the Zypraxon, and whatever he’s injected her with is flooding her system. He bea
t it because she was too busy playing detective and psychologist. She forgot her most important role: victim.
Luke knew this part would be hard.
They discussed it multiple times. What it would mean to watch her go limp and not react. What it would take to just sit there and watch her give herself to the guy so he’d feel safe stuffing her into his trunk.
But the hardest part is watching Pemberton’s speed and efficiency. It would be easier if he growled or snarled like a monster, but for him this is just routine, jamming a woman in his trunk like luggage. Even the way he brought the blackjack down across the back of her head was clean, precise. Now he’s placing her carry-on in the back seat as if it’s his.
The Camry’s headlights wink on.
To Marty, Brasher, Rucker, and the two guys on watch in Temecula, Luke texts: We’re a go. En route.
Luke waits for the Camry to head for the exit, then brings up the brightness on both tablets affixed to the dash. A few seconds later, there’s a knock at the window. It’s Marty and his boys. Luke unlocks the doors. The boys slide in back, Marty in the front.
“Motherfuck, man,” Marty growls. “Motherfuck. I mean, this better—”
“Easy,” Luke says. “I know, I know. I watched it, too.”
The Camry’s tracker is live on one tablet; he’s logged in on the second, as evidenced by the square of lighter darkness in the center of the screen. The contact lenses are live, he’s sure of it. The trunk is just dark.
“Her head man. He hit her in her fucking head, man.”
“Marty,” Luke says firmly. “Take a breath, OK? I get it. But take a breath. This is what was supposed to happen.”
Marty’s lips sputter, and he grips the handle next to his arm and nods.
“We’re good,” Luke says, starting the engine. “Everything’s good. We’re rolling, and we’ll have him soon.”
Luke pulls out of the parking spot. As the exit booth comes into view, he sees the Camry’s taillights swing out onto the service road.
“Something’s wrong.”
It’s Ed Baker who says it first, but they’re all feeling it. The entire crew sitting in front of the bank of computer screens. The warehouse is air-conditioned, thank God, otherwise their combined sweat would be stinking up the place. And if there’s anything Cole hates more than waiting, it’s body odor.
They were able to watch most of Charley’s walk through the terminals on hacked airport surveillance cams as well as through her TruGlass. But only once she made it to the parking lot did Cole stop pacing. It’s not just the suspense of watching. He’s never worked this closely with these team members before, and that makes Ed nervous. And Ed getting nervous makes him nervous. No compartmentalization means no plausible deniability if things go wrong, if certain hacks are discovered.
An airport, he kept thinking. Why did all of this have to focus on an airport? No way can he launch microdrones yards away from two major active runways.
Now they’re staring at the hazy black square offered up by Charlotte’s TruGlass.
“We sure it’s live?” Ed asks.
One of the computer techs says, “It shows as live, and I don’t see any interruption in the signal since she left the terminal.”
“The center of the screen’s lighter than everything around it,” Cole says. “She’s live—she’s just keeping her eyes closed for some reason.”
“Why?” Ed asks. “Why is she keeping her eyes closed? She’s in the fucking trunk. He can’t see her.”
“Maybe she’s opening them and there’s no light source?” another tech asks.
“Something’s wrong,” Ed growls.
Cole’s phone rings. He expects it to be another call from Dylan, another call he plans to ignore. But it’s not. It’s a call he should have prepared for, but he’s had a lot to prepare for over the last few days, so this particular possibility didn’t get a dress rehearsal.
Julia Crispin says, “Tell me you have teams in place.” No doubt she’s been sitting in front of her laptop in her mirrored basement office in Rancho Santa Fe, sipping her drink of choice while tending to paperwork and occasionally glancing over at Charlotte’s feed like it’s a nostalgic TV rerun.
From the tone of her voice, it sounds like she’s just realized this won’t be an episode of The Golden Girls.
“So you’ve been checking in on us?” Cole asks.
“It’s my technology. I’ll do whatever I want with it. Tell me you’ve prepared for this, Cole.”
“A lot has gone into this night, Julia, and it’s better if I don’t tell you about any of it. That way if something doesn’t go exactly as planned, then—”
“Cole.”
Her voice is frosty enough to silence him.
“If something happens to that woman, there will be consequences.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but something is happening to that woman, and it’s the result of a series of choices she’s made.”
“Choices forced on her by Dylan Cody, and now you. If you don’t have teams in place, get them in place now, Cole. Because if that woman doesn’t make it out of this, I will fucking ruin you and your family’s company and every last member of your family. Do you understand me?”
But it must be a rhetorical question because she hangs up before Cole can answer, and before he can point out the potential self-inflicted wounds inherent in such an endeavor.
When he turns back to the monitor bank, Ed’s studying him.
Cole waves his concern away.
“Do we have real-time traffic?” he asks.
The web tech says, “Yeah. They’re forty-five minutes out.”
“Good. My bird’s gassed up, right?”
Ed nods.
“Good,” Cole says, as if everything’s going to plan.
“Get closer,” Marty says for what must be the tenth time.
“Marty, we talked about this.” Luke’s trying to focus, even relax himself a bit. They’re traveling the reverse of the route Pemberton took on the night of the Camry stash, and that’s good. That means he’s behaving as expected, taking them to the Temecula house. This is the time to focus, get their breath. But Marty’s decided it’s time for a freak-out.
In the back seat, the boys are quiet, but in the rearview mirror, Luke catches glimpses of their eyes moving back and forth between him and Marty like dogs following a tennis ball.
“We can’t see her, for fuck’s sake,” Marty barks.
“We can see her right there,” Luke says, pointing to the GPS tablet. “Marty, I’ve been tailing him for days, if he recognizes the Jeep and panics when he’s got her in the trunk, we’re in uncharted territory. That’s what the tracker’s for.”
“Why’s it dark, though?” Marty points to the contact lens feed. “Why’s it so damn dark? Shouldn’t she be blinking? Doing something we can see?”
“If he’s moving bodies in that trunk, he’s going to take out the light sources, if there are any.”
“But not even any cracks, maybe light around the edge of the roof? Come on, Luke.”
For the first time, he thinks Marty’s got a point. But he also thinks Marty’s reactive and maybe not as cut out for this kind of operation as he thought he’d be. Charley’s objective could not be any clearer: make the guy believe she’s a prostrate victim until she can overpower him when he’s surrounded by evidence of his crimes. Any sudden moves before then could blow the whole thing, pitching their operation into a half-assed arrest of Pemberton, a bullshit cover story, and potential evidence lost to rich lawyers and more denied warrants.
But there’s something else’s that nagging at him.
The drive time. If they continue at their current rate, Charley will only have a little less than an hour left on her Zypraxon after they reach the vineyard.
“Your guys at the surveillance point,” Luke says. “What’ll it take to get them close to the house?”
“Not much. We staked out possible positions yesterday. Wasn’t much else to d
o up there.”
“They’re armed?” Luke asks.
“Oh yeah.”
“Tell them to get in place. Just in case.”
Marty sighs, starts typing into his burner. Relieved and calmed some, it seems, just to have something to do.
And he’s relieved that Marty’s not still pressuring him to ride the Camry’s ass.
He sees the sign for CA-79. A short stint on that will bring them to the entrance to Pala Temecula Road. Ahead of them, the tracker takes that very route.
More good signs.
On the GPS map, the mountain road looks like a slender thread laid across an ocean of black, the Camry a flashing blip slowly traveling its length.
“It does look dark.” Luke hasn’t heard Brasher say more than a few words since they met earlier that day; he has to check the rearview mirror to make sure it’s him. “The other screen, I mean. Is that thing working over cell service?”
“Nope,” Luke says.
“You got Wi-Fi in this car?”
“Nope.”
“How’s the signal getting to that thing then?”
“We don’t know,” Marty answers. “We just enter a code.”
A few seconds go by before Brasher says, “Well, shit.”
“Going dark,” Luke says, before killing the headlights.
There’s a collective sphincter clench throughout the Jeep, and then they’re twisting up the road without headlights. Up ahead he sees a brief, teasing glimpse of the Camry’s taillights. But they’re far enough away to seem like the wing lights of a plane at cruising altitude. Later he can brag about how well he memorized the map of this particular stretch of road, but only if this next part goes well.
“How are your guys?” Luke asks.
“Fifteen minutes out.”
More silence, more strained breaths and the plastic creaking sounds of Rucker and Brasher grasping their oh-shit handles in the back seat as the Jeep weaves through the dark.
“His access road’s coming up on the right,” Marty says.
Luke slows, drives right up onto the rock-strewn shoulder. A good distance uphill he catches a glimpse of the Camry’s headlights flashing across an automatic gate sliding to one side. Then the car disappears inside. A few seconds later, what he assumes are motion-activated lights die, and his small glimpse of the gate disappears.
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