Signal (15 page)

Marnie took note of the car absently, her mind working through the decision in front of her.

“Why don’t I go ahead and set up the warrant,” Sumner said. “And instead of you making the arrest, I’ll give Dryden’s current location to police dispatch and let them take him down. That’s a better approach, given his background—he’s potentially dangerous. He’d still be yours to question, either way.”

Marnie thought about it, still idly staring at the Fusion. The men inside were just sitting there, talking about something.

Marnie returned her gaze to Dryden, who was still staring off at the ocean.

“It’s your call, Marnie,” Sumner said.

*   *   *

Dryden heard a commercial flit through the static. Something about a pizza place where kids’ meals were half off on Fridays. The signal cleared for five or six seconds, then washed out.

He finished the last hash brown patty and stuffed the wrapper into the bag everything had come in. He rolled the bag down into a compact shape and set it on the floor in front of the passenger seat. He was reaching for his coffee again when another signal began to fade in. For a second he thought it was a weather report, or maybe a station identification—it was a man’s voice, still too choppy to make out.

Then the static cleared entirely.

“… death toll is confirmed at twelve, but with nine critically injured, it’s likely to go higher, Katelyn.”

Dryden turned toward the machine.

*   *   *

“Yes or no,” Sumner said. “It’s not a hard question.”

Marnie barely heard him. Her attention had suddenly locked on to Dryden.

There was something going on.

Dryden had turned his head and was now focused intently on something on his passenger seat.

*   *   *

Dryden studied the tablet computer’s screen, filled by the application that ran the machine. He hadn’t tried recording with it yet, but there was no question about how to do it. The four buttons could not have been simpler:
ON, OFF, RECORD,
and
STOP
.

He pressed
RECORD
as the news report continued.

“With an incident like this,”
the male reporter said,
“we know we’re going to hear lots of questions in hindsight. Was the construction site as safe as it could have been? Any time you’ve got heavy equipment, with people milling around, folks are going to be asking whether all the guidelines were followed—”

“Are there guidelines that could have prevented this type of accident?”
a woman, presumably Katelyn, asked.
“Has there been any statement from the construction firm managing the site?”

“There’s been no statement all day, and nothing from the developer except the press release earlier, offering thoughts and prayers.”

*   *   *

Watching Dryden, Marnie was only dimly aware of the men in the dark green car getting out. The driver opened the back door on his side and leaned in, reaching for something out of view in the rear seats.

“Let’s give his information to the cops, Marnie,” Sumner said. “You want to question him, so let’s just do it.”

She chewed her lip, thinking. Felt herself leaning in Sumner’s direction.

*   *   *

“It’s possible the developer is worried about the legal risks of saying anything public right now,”
the male reporter said.
“Certainly the equipment failed, but of course there were extenuating circumstances, so—”

“Right,”
Katelyn said,
“and the project itself was considered controversial even before today. Mission Tower has gotten a lot of pushback from Santa Maria residents just for its size. It’s really not the type of building you expect in a town like that—”

“That’s absolutely right—”

Static began to edge back in, distorting the man’s words.

“—but obviously on a day like this, all we’re hearing from the community is consolation for those killed and their—”

The signal dropped away into the hiss.

Dryden stared at the tablet’s screen a second longer.

Santa Maria. An hour’s drive north of here, he thought—he had been there before but couldn’t remember the exact directions to reach it. It was definitely not along the route he’d planned to take to Avenal, but it couldn’t be far off of it, either.

There was some amount of time to spare—not a hell of a lot, but probably enough, depending on what had happened in Santa Maria. What
would
happen.

Death toll is confirmed at twelve.

Likely to go higher.

Dryden swore under his breath and reached for the glove box, where he kept a small road atlas.

*   *   *

Even with naked eyes, Marnie saw Dryden lean over in the telltale movement of someone opening a glove compartment. A second later he had a booklet in his hands, flipping through its pages rapidly.

Thirty yards behind him, the driver of the dark Fusion was still leaning into his backseat. The passenger was just standing there on his own side of the car, staring forward in Dryden’s direction.

“I need an answer, Marnie,” Sumner said. “Let’s set up the warrant. Let’s bring him in.”

She opened her mouth to say yes—

Then stopped herself.

Dryden had the booklet braced on his steering wheel, tracing a hand over one of its pages, like someone following a route on a—

“He’s going somewhere,” she said.

“What?”

“He’s got an atlas out. He’s about to go somewhere.”

“He was on the freeway. He was already going somewhere.”

“Something just changed, though,” Marnie said. “He looks amped up for some reason.”

“And?”

“And I want to know why,” Marnie said. “I’m going to see where he’s going. So no warrant, okay? Not yet.”

Over the speakerphone, Sumner exhaled. “Fine.”

Thirty yards behind Dryden, the man leaning into the Fusion drew back and straightened up. He had a toddler in his arms. A baby girl in a pink outfit. He bounced her gently in the crook of his elbow, which made her laugh. He shut the door, and he and the passenger headed toward the Albertson’s.

By then Dryden had set the atlas aside. A second later he started the Explorer. He pulled out of his space and accelerated across the lot to the nearest exit.

Marnie put the Crown Vic back in drive and followed.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The atlas had confirmed what Dryden had already guessed: The 101 was the fastest route. Along the coast through Santa Barbara, then inland through the mountains. Total drive time would be just over an hour, at the speed limit. A bit less, if he pushed it.

The lack of a timeline was maddening. For all the details he’d heard in the broadcast, there had been nothing to say when the accident would happen.

Well, there had been a hint.

Has there been any statement from the construction firm managing the site?

There’s been no statement all day …

All day.

Dryden had heard the broadcast around 10:40 in the morning. That put the actual time of the broadcast around 9:04 tonight.

No statement all day, as of 9:04 tonight.

Whatever was going to happen at Mission Tower, whatever was going to kill twelve people and injure nine more, it would happen early in the day. Anytime now.

Could he just call somebody? Walk into a gas station right now and ask to use their phone for an emergency? It would take only a few phone calls, starting with 4-1-1, to track down whoever was building Mission Tower in Santa Maria, but when he got through to someone, what exactly could he tell them?

Something to make them clear the construction site?

Would that fix the problem?

Maybe. If the accident was going to be caused by some one-off human error, like someone dropping an air-nailer and rupturing a fuel line, or pulling the wrong lever of an earth mover, then simply shuffling the deck might change everything. If it were that simple, then the solution might be as easy as calling in a bomb threat. Shake up the whole day, shut down the site for hours while cops scoured the place. By the time the crew got back to work, the fluke accident would probably never happen.

If it was a fluke.

And if it wasn’t? If the danger was some loose bolt in a machine—say, the pulley of a construction elevator? Something sure to go wrong, given a few more hours of use?

Then a bomb threat would only delay the tragedy—and make it that much harder to address the real problem. How would Dryden call in later and urge someone to inspect all the site hardware, if they’d just gotten a crank bomb threat the same day?

How would he even know whether to make that call? How would he know if the bomb scare had solved the problem or not?

He had the Explorer doing 90, the Saturday morning traffic sparse enough to permit it.

Fifty minutes, give or take, and he could be there to look around for himself.

On the passenger seat, the machine was still on. Maybe he would get lucky and catch another update. Twelve people dead was a big story. Lots of coverage.

He passed a semi and veered back into the right lane.

*   *   *

Marnie stayed half a mile behind him. No need to get close enough to risk him spotting her. On her phone’s display, the little red thumbtack traveled neatly along the 101.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Mangouste had five cell phones on the desk in his den. One was a smartphone he’d had for a year. The other four were burners—throwaway units he replaced daily, whether he ended up using them or not. Every morning at 6:00 he dumped the previous day’s collection into an industrial blender in the basement, grinding them to plastic crumbs, and at 6:15 his courier would arrive with four new ones. Each phone had a white sticker on the back, with a list of names—well, alphanumeric codes that stood for names—of the people who could reach him via that unit.

Caution was like money: More was more.

The third of the four burners rang at 10:55 in the morning. Mangouste got to it on the second ring.

The caller said, “We’re getting some headway on the trailer in the desert. Not sure if any of it’s going to pan out, but we’re trying.”

In the background, over the line, Mangouste could hear a keyboard clicking—his people hard at work, using the system. His jaw tightened at the notion of it: all that numinous power, sidetracked for three days now to play cat-and-mouse. The hunt for Claire Dunham and Dale Whitcomb and Curtis Wynn. Like using an aircraft carrier to dredge for clams.

Until today there had been no leads at all, and then in a span of hours, in the middle of the night, there had been two: A stakeout team had pegged Curtis at a coffee shop, and the system had found Claire in the Mojave—had picked up a police report describing a run-in between her and a patrol unit out there, several hours before the event took place.

That police report, describing the original version of the incident—with no intervention by Mangouste’s people—made it obvious that Claire knew about the system. She knew the danger of having her name and location officially logged by the police.

She had very nearly avoided that outcome.

According to the report, a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy, doing a routine patrol, had spotted two vehicles parked in the darkness, far off of a remote highway in the Mojave. The deputy had stopped to investigate, at which point one of the two vehicles left the scene before the cruiser’s dash cam could resolve its plate number. The other vehicle, a Land Rover, U-turned and rammed head-on into the deputy’s patrol car to disable it.

This crash also crippled the Land Rover, whose female occupant then fired several shots from a handgun toward the deputy’s car, forcing him to take cover behind it. The woman fled the scene on foot and was picked up by the unidentified second vehicle several hundred yards away.

The crashed Land Rover turned out to have stolen license plates on it, and its VIN had been physically removed. Only a fluke had allowed authorities to identify its owner at all: The oil filter had a unit-specific identifier stamped into it, traceable to a point-of-sale record at a service garage in San Jose, where the Land Rover’s owner, Claire Dunham, had gotten an oil change six months before.

All of which had been enough for Mangouste’s purposes. The police report included a time stamp and GPS data for the incident, from the patrol car’s dash computer. It gave Mangouste enough information to send a team to that spot, in advance. Which he had done, immediately.

The report also tantalized him, though. It offered no further information about the person who had been with Claire in the desert—the driver of that second vehicle. The police had not yet identified that suspect at the time the report was filed.

Might it be Dale Whitcomb? Was that too much to hope for?

It couldn’t have been Curtis. He was already accounted for at that moment, being tailed by the stakeout team that had spotted him, hundreds of miles away.

It made good sense, of course, that Claire would be with Whitcomb, and for a while there, when that possibility seemed solid, Mangouste had let himself believe he had all the loose ends in reach. All three strands, right there in front of him, ready to be tied off forever. Curtis, Claire, Whitcomb. Easy as that.

It would have been nice to know for sure, in the moments after first seeing that police report. It would have been helpful to run further searches with the system, and find later reports detailing the police manhunt for Claire Dunham and her unknown friend, in that original version of the future. Maybe some document would eventually name Whitcomb as the second suspect.

Except there was no chance of finding any later reports like that.

No chance at all.

Here was one bona fide weakness the system had, and would always have: Once it showed you a useful piece of the future—some bit of knowledge you were sure to act on—then the future itself changed accordingly. How could it not? From the moment you saw that information—in this case, the time and place at which to attack Claire—then the old future no longer existed. You could run all the searches you wanted, but all you’d find would be information from the
new
future.