That was true. There hadn’t been much publicity about it at all. Something occurred to Matt. “How did you know about it, then?”
“It’s my business to know.”
But how did you know that nothing bad ever happening to me? Matt thought, but didn’t say. To his surprise, Snyder answered him anyway.
“Getting through life unscathed is a kind of privilege, just like being born wealthy, or white, or male. You won the jackpot on all of those.”
“Yes, sir,” Matt said.
“Now you’ve committed yourself to giving back by helping people who haven’t been so fortunate. That’s good. It’s the definition of what ‘good’ is.” Snyder’s voice softened. “Tracy Collier is alive—because you found her. If Bannon had caught up with her, he most certainly would have killed her.”
Matt felt something like a concrete band around his chest suddenly dissolving to liquid and pouring away from him. A concrete band he hadn’t even known was there.
Snyder nodded, and paged through the file, absently. “When you went back, that night. What made you go there? To that exact place?”
Matt tightened up again. He’d told the story a hundred times by now. He’d thought he was done with this part. “I must’ve seen something down there in the valley, when I was on the trail that day. A flash of—movement, or light. Or maybe I heard her calling, back when I was searching earlier in the day and it registered on some level. So I went back.”
“Probably,” Snyder said. But he didn’t sound like he believed it.
“She started screaming for help when he left her. Maybe she was easier to hear at night.”
This time Snyder said nothing. He just sat, waiting.
For what?
Matt had told the story, and he was sticking to it. Just like he had the first time he’d told it and the hundred times since. He definitely wasn’t going to say anything stupid like, “I just wanted to find her so bad that I did.”
But he had the weirdest feeling Snyder was trying to get him to say that.
After a time, the older man said, “You don’t like the word ‘intuition’?”
“I wouldn’t say it aloud,” Matt answered before he could stop himself.
Snyder laughed again. “Fair enough. But you can say it to me. In fact, if you’re going to work with me, I might even require it.”
Blood was suddenly pounding in Matt’s head. Work with him? Is that what this is? He had to focus hard to bring himself back to Snyder’s words.
“I’m teaching a seminar here this summer. But an urgent case has come up in the Richmond area and I’ve been asked to provide investigative support. I’ll need an assistant, as it were. Interested?”
Interested? Matt could barely breathe.
“Yes, sir!”
“Then get some sleep tonight. We’ve got work to do tomorrow.”
And so Matt’s real training began.
Chapter 19
Portland – present
Singh and Snyder
Agent Snyder pauses. He stands at the window, looking out on the fountain in his garden. He seems quite as if he is immersed in another time.
Singh herself is gripped with internal turmoil.
On the surface, Agent Snyder’s narrative so far seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with the Street Hunter, or Idaho, or anything in the immediate present.
But if Singh’s research is correct, it has everything to do with everything.
Agent Snyder turns away from the window. “I apologize, Agent Singh. I didn’t sleep last night and I seem to have lost my train of thought.”
She prompts him quickly. “You took ASAC Roarke out on this domestic violence case in Richmond…”
Agent Snyder looks at her, a sharp, strange look. He speaks softly. “That’s interesting. I didn’t say it was a domestic violence case. How would you know that?”
Singh doesn’t know how to answer. She doesn’t know anything. And yet, she has the strongest feeling that she does.
Because there are two halves to the story he is telling.
Chapter 20
Wilmington, North Carolina - June 2005
Cara
She stands on the beach in Wilmington, looking out at the Atlantic.
She’s done it. Ocean to ocean. A complete trip across the entire country.
A miracle, really.
It is a startling ocean, with none of the stark rumbling violence of the Pacific. Calm, with barely any surf at all, and warm as bathwater.
Everything is warmer. And the air is beyond moist. She is used to desert heat, as dry as bone. Here the humidity is so dense she can lean into the air and feel it push back.
She wades into the surf, losing herself in the softness, the soothing blues and beiges, washing the trip away.
The Grand Canyon could have been the end of everything. It almost was.
Somehow, after the Encounter at the falls, she’d made it up to the Rim, to the car she left at the parking lot. She has a vague sense memory of the baking heat of the sun drying the water of the falls from her skin and clothes…
But truthfully, she does not remember anything else of the upward hike. She only remembers finding herself behind the wheel, on the road again. Her survival instinct, which she thinks of vaguely like the locomotive of the freight trains she keeps passing, had kicked into high gear and kept her moving.
She drives all night in a stupor, knowing she needs to cross another border before she can rest. Back to Interstate 40, through the rest of Arizona and across the state line to New Mexico.
The obvious suspect for the hiker’s murder will be the hiker’s companion. His name will be on the backcountry pass of his murdered friend. He will have to account for his whereabouts, while there is no record of her anywhere. No name on the shuttle bus. No backcountry pass in her name. She is an eighteen-year old girl. There is no reason for anyone to suspect her.
Other fragments of the Encounter come back as she speeds on the highway. She remembers the vile power of It under her body as she scrambled to cut Its throat. She remembers blood on her face, the shock of stepping into rushing cold water….
And she remembers a moment of thinking of using the knife on herself.
In her first days of driving, of wide open road, she had been lulled into a sense of freedom and calm.
The truth is, there is no such thing as safety. It can follow even into a haven like the Canyon. Indeed, It seems to be mocking her, playing a cruel game with her—allowing her to feel safe and then striking so closely, attacking Sierra right under her nose…
She is first empty, then dazed, and then so angry she can barely drive for the shaking.
It is only the landscape that keeps her going. I-40 in New Mexico traces the southern edge of a huge Navajo reservation, at times crossing through it. She knows the wild beauty of the California desert. The New Mexico desert is something even more stunning. The colors are psychedelic. Every possible variation of red. It is staggering beauty, of an entirely different kind from the Grand Canyon, even.
And the state is so sparely populated that she seems alone on the road. Perhaps she has driven off the edge of the world. There is only one station she can find on the radio, a soundtrack of haunting native music, chanting and flute. She turns the radio off and can hear the sound even more clearly in the desert wind.
When she pulls off the road to camp, the sand is blood-red. As the sun sets she seems to be in the midst of a shimmering sphere of molten lava.
In this vast emptiness, she begins to come back to herself.
In the morning, she drives on. And the next day. And the next. She no longer thinks so often about the knife in the glove compartment, and how easy it would be to end this fight.
But now she has her guard up, always. The Encounter in the Grand Canyon has reminded her what she has known since she was five years old. It lurks everywhere. On the road, in the bodies of men who leer at her as she passes, who try to chase her car on the freeway, making obs
cene gestures.
She begins to dress as a boy, to conceal her hair in a cap and her eyes behind sunglasses, to wear loose jeans and bulky flannel shirts as she speeds through the long monotonous stretch of Texas. Again, it is a radical change in landscape, beginning right at the New Mexico border. There is Amarillo, with its garish billboards, the rainbow-painted upended cars of Cadillac Ranch. And then long stretches of flat nothingness. She feels exposed on the wide-open highway and drives without stopping even to sleep, to get through as quickly as possible.
The border of Oklahoma brings on another change in geography and landscape, and she begins to realize that state boundaries are not random imaginary lines, but demarcations of different physical worlds. Oklahoma is as flat as Texas, but its starkness is softened by gentle hills and the half-tree, half-bush greenery lining the road. Parts of the state have a haunting wildness that she has difficulty finding words for. She trades her car for another, leaving the Honda on a downtown street to be stolen, and jacking an old warhorse of a truck, something to fit in on these Southern roads.
She drives Arkansas, the bridge city of Memphis, Tennessee roads meandering through woods and carved granite cliffs. In North Carolina, she traverses mountains shrouded by the hazy mist that gives the Blue Ridge its name. Then on through Asheville, the farmland surrounding Charlotte, Raleigh… and now here.
Wilmington. This beach, the pinks and beiges and powder blues, the warm waves licking at her shins.
For the first time, post-canyon, she feels peace.
But she feels no pull to stay. The long stretch of driving has only made her hungry for more.
Now that she’s made it all the way across, her plan is to cross the country vertically. She will take 95 North to get a taste of the South-North route and the major Eastern cities along it, all the way up to I-90, the northernmost East-West interstate.
She wants the country and its veins and arteries fixed in her mind. She intends to know every mile of the interstate system. Every road leads to every other road, eventually. A whole network of freedom. She wants the grid in her head so she always knows where she is, and where she can escape.
She turns back to the ocean and looks out at the boats on the glistening water. The moon is up in daylight, a pale, almost-full disk in the blue sky.
She’ll start for Virginia tomorrow.
Chapter 21
Portland - present
Singh and Snyder
Agent Snyder sits back in his armchair. Singh can hear her own heart beating in the silence.
Finally he speaks. “Cara Lindstrom was in Virginia when Matthew and I were investigating this militia case.” It is not a question.
“She was in Richmond,” Singh answers.
Snyder glances at her sharply. “How do you know?”
She doesn’t tell him. Instead, she drives him to her hotel.
As he walks into the living room of the suite, she can see the stunned disbelief on his face.
Her wall-sized map of the interstates system has evolved. She has the various routes traced in different colors, with corresponding dates written in the margins of the map. Now the whole country is dotted with push pins of different colors. And beside the map Singh has mounted two rectangular white boards.
At the top of one board she has written simply, ROARKE.
And on the second she has written CARA.
On each board is a timeline, starting in 2001, listing successive years to the present.
At the top of Cara’s timeline Singh has filled in the early murders she knows of from the year Cara was fourteen years old, along with locations and dates. In Palm Desert, California, the group home counselor, Clive Pierson. In the desert outside Las Piedras, California, the serial rapist David Huell.
At the bottom of Cara’s board is a flurry of names, dates and cities, where Singh has listed Cara’s most recent whereabouts and known and suspected murders.
In October of last year, Agent Greer in San Francisco; the trucker, Brent Hartley, at the rest stop in Atascadero; the five traffickers near Blythe, California.
In November, Danny Ramirez in San Francisco. Nathaniel Martin Hughes, aka “The Reaper,” in Lake Arrowhead, California.
In December, a prison guard in Burlingame, and the Tenderloin and International Boulevard pimp murders in San Francisco and Oakland.
In January, the six hunters who went missing in the Chinle area of New Mexico, hunters Singh suspects set out to rape teenage Navajo girls in Canyon de Chelly—and instead came face to face with Cara’s relentless fury.
In February, three men who brought loaded rifles to a women’s rally in Arizona and ended up corpses stacked in a pile in a side alley. The murder Singh herself was present for in the deserted motel in Salton Sea: Detective Gilbert Ortiz. And the four men who were participants and collateral damage that night.
Between most of those dates on Cara’s board Singh has connected the same dates on Roarke’s board with lengths of red string. Multiple dates, multiple fatal incidents.: Greer’s death, the Tenderloin murders, the desert murders, the murder of the Reaper. Every instance in which Roarke’s and Cara’s paths crossed. Over a dozen deaths, all within the last five months.
The middle of Cara’s board also contains names and dates written in yellow, with question marks beside them. Names from Singh’s list of possible Cara victims, yet to be proven.
Except that parallel to Cara’s murder of Daniel Modine in the Grand Canyon, Singh has noted on Roarke’s board:
June 10, 2005 San Luis Obispo Rescue of Tracy Collier
And she has used a piece of red string to connect Modine’s murder and the rescue of Tracy Collier.
Looking at the map, the boards, the totality of it, Singh has a moment of thinking she must look entirely mad.
Then Snyder turns to her. “Well, Agent Singh, I think you’d better explain yourself.”
She takes a breath. And she becomes an FBI agent again as she talks Snyder through her interstates theory, her conviction that Cara would have traversed the country in this way.
She references the key of dates she has started in the margin of the map: a separate color for each year when she has a guess or a strong indication of the year, each route labeled where possible with the years Singh believes Cara took that route. She points out the pins marking the murders she strongly believes are Cara’s, including the two that she has identified in the past week: Daniel Modine in the Grand Canyon, and Wayne Gilman in Richmond.
It is as if she is back in her office, with her team, in the role that she is meant for.
Agent Snyder walks the length of the map, marveling. “We’ve always thought she’s been killing for years. But this… this is astonishing.”
She feels a quiet thrill of validation at his approval.
He stops to study the two side-by-side timelines, Roarke’s and Cara’s.
“There’s something else here you haven’t explained.” He indicates the red strings she has fastened between points on Roarke’s timeline and Cara’s. The Grand Canyon murder and Roarke’s rescue of Tracy Collier. The massacre of the Lindstrom family and nine-year old Matt Roarke’s letter to the FBI director announcing his intention to become an agent. The connections between timelines with the Tenderloin murders, the murder of the Reaper, and the uncanny death of Agent Greer.
“The correlation of dates I understand,” Agent Snyder says. “But is there a significance to the string?”
This is the part she feels shakiest about. “There is,” she says. “But before I explain, would you finish your story about your work with ASAC Roarke on the Richmond case?”
He frowns, and she adds quickly, “It is crucial to the whole. There is something I must confirm.”
“Very well,” he answers. “Richmond, 2005.”
Chapter 22
Quantico, Virginia - June 2005
Matt
Matt’s alarm rang at five am. It was two full hours before he was to meet Snyder, but he wanted to be completel
y alert for whatever was in store.
He showered and dressed quickly in casual clothes, as instructed. Snyder had advised jeans and “Some kind of concert T-shirt, if you have one here. Preferably black. Preferably heavy metal. And a duckbill cap.”
Matt had left his concert T’s at home. He’d never owned a duckbill cap. So he’d gone room to room until he found an intern who had a Metallica shirt and hat he could borrow.
Dawn was just breaking as he headed for the parking lot.
He was by nature a night owl, but he didn’t mind the early hour. He’d quickly realized early morning was the only bearable time of day, here. As a native Californian, he was accustomed to heat, but he’d never experienced the paralyzing humidity of the South. The air dripped with moisture, and so did he. He’d taken to having multiple showers per day, changing his clothes constantly to keep up with the sweating.
But after his talk—or talking-to—with Snyder, he felt as if a two-ton weight had been lifted from him. And he felt excitement again, the certainty that he was pursuing something greater than himself.
A mission.
This summer it would all—or at least, more of it—be revealed.
Snyder was waiting for him in the parking lot, holding a paper tray with two large cups of coffee in one hand and a plastic bag in the other. He looked over Matt’s clothes. “Not bad,” he said. “Keep the hat. But try this shirt instead.” He tossed Matt the plastic bag and Matt removed a T-shirt with a dragon logo and a band name: Goatwhore.
“More Southern,” Snyder said, straight-faced.
Right, Matt thought, bemused.
“Today we’re going fishing,” Snyder told him, as he started into the parking lot.
Matt pulled the new shirt on as he followed the agent to his vehicle, one of the oversized four-wheel drive SUVs that Matt had noticed were standard on Virginia roads. He didn’t see any fishing gear in the back—the expedition was metaphorical.
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