Signal (16 page)

Mangouste had searched anyway. And had seen what he expected: a police report about a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy stopping in the desert to investigate two vehicles, only to be killed seconds later by rifle fire from unseen assailants. By the time police reinforcements descended on the remote site, more than twenty minutes later, there were no other people in the vicinity. Just a wrecked Land Rover, eventually traceable to Claire Dunham by way of the same trick with the oil filter. No identity for any second person at the scene. No other info at all.

Mangouste hadn’t minded seeing that report. It told him enough. It told him the attack would work: that his men would capture Claire and her friend and escape the scene. Good news, all around.

And the attack
had
worked. His men followed protocol and kept their phones switched off while they were in the desert, so that authorities couldn’t later check the cell network and see that multiple unknown parties had been out there. Burner phones were untraceable, in theory, but why give the cops anything more than you had to?

Mangouste had watched the clock, starting from the point when his men would carry out the attack. He guessed it would be another half hour after that before they would reach the crowded safety of a freeway, switch on their phones, and report in.

Two of them had. They had Claire and were en route to the interrogation site. They said the other team was bringing the stray machine home, along with Claire’s companion—a man in his thirties, by their description, which told Mangouste it was most certainly not Dale Whitcomb. Who the hell was he, then?

Mangouste waited for the second team to report in and tell him the rest of the story. They never did. Neither did they respond to calls made to their cells, even long after they should have reached the interstate.

There was no pleasant way to interpret that set of facts. No way to fill in the blanks without assuming the two men were dead and the stranger was loose out there somewhere. With the machine.

Mangouste had set his people to work using the system, scouring the future for news reports of unidentified bodies. Assuming the worst—that the stranger had left the dead men someplace remote—it might be weeks before they were found. By that point their fingertips would be too decomposed to identify them, and they had no official ID on their bodies.

The system had found a result right away—and then about three dozen more. As it turned out, Southern California produced a fair number of unidentified corpses in a given month or two. Even when you narrowed by age range and race, it was information overload. It occurred to Mangouste that it wouldn’t help much anyway to find where the mystery man had left the bodies. That moment must have already come and gone.

Even as that search had begun to prove pointless, other news reports started filtering in—ordinary news on TV, in the present time. Reports about the miraculous rescue of four little girls at a trailer in the Mojave, by a man and woman who had shown up just in time to prevent a tragedy. Authorities seemed baffled as to how the two, who had quickly fled the scene, had known to show up there at all.

Into the phone, Mangouste said, “Tell me what you’ve got on the trailer. Tell me the cops eventually have a name for this guy.”

“In a way, they do,” the caller said. “Two days from now, a man named Clay Reynolds comes forward claiming he and his girlfriend were the ones who saved those kids.”

Mangouste’s eyes narrowed. “He identifies
himself
?”

“Proudly, according to the articles we’ve seen. But later the same day, a second couple speaks to reporters and says Reynolds is lying—claiming
they
saved the kids, not him. By the next afternoon there are two other couples taking credit.”

Mangouste pressed a hand to his forehead, shutting his eyes hard. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“It ends up being a real sideshow for the next month or more. Something like fifty different people swear they were the ones—anyone who even loosely matches police sketches the girls provide. It’s like that time all the Z-list celebrities ran for governor of California. We found a
Newsweek
rundown of Jimmy Fallon and Conan O’Brien’s best jokes about it, dated six weeks from now.”

“There have to be real leads the police end up following. There must be something.”

“We’re still working on it. It’s just … kind of a busy haystack to sift through.”

Mangouste didn’t reply. He stood there, gripping the phone, thinking it all over.

Hours earlier, everything had seemed to be in the bag. Three targets, three apparent leads. Now two of those had come up empty. There was no sign of Dale Whitcomb, and even Curtis Wynn had slipped away, somehow taking the stakeout team with him. There had been a final check-in from those men, tailing the kid down the Pacific Coast Highway around 6:00 in the morning, but that was the last contact. They had vanished as completely as the guys who’d been transporting the stranger from the Mojave. Even a search using the system had proved fruitless: There was no record of their vehicle being found anywhere, at any point in the foreseeable future.

“What is this?” Mangouste asked softly.

“Sir?” the caller said.

Mangouste opened his eyes. “Keep working on the trailer,” he said. “Call me when you have something.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Dryden took the first exit for Santa Maria at 11:35. He could already see the building.

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.

From the elevated exit ramp, the whole city appeared spread out like a carpet; Mission Tower could not have looked more out of place in the sprawl if it were a pyramid with a sphinx guarding it. Standing at least twenty stories tall, it was probably the only structure in the city that topped out above forty feet.

Structure
seemed like the right word for it—not so much a building as the skeleton of one, a framework of steel uprights and concrete slab floors, like a parking structure without perimeter walls.

Dryden put its distance at just over a mile. He could see a tower crane braced to the north side. The crane’s mast, standing three hundred feet tall, looked as delicate as a vertical truss of glued-together toothpicks. The long horizontal jib and counterjib, balanced atop the mast, swung slowly around as the operator lowered some kind of load onto the building’s rooftop. Dryden couldn’t see the workmen from this distance, but they had to be there.

He turned off the exit ramp onto the surface street.

*   *   *

Marnie managed to stay one light behind him, all the way across town. She watched Dryden turn onto the main drag that ran east-west through the city, at the far end of which stood a huge building under construction. Two minutes and three stoplights later, she saw the Explorer pull to the curb twenty yards from the build site, its boundary protected by orange mesh fencing and
NO TRESPASSING
signs.

Marnie pulled over half a block behind him. She killed her engine and sank down a little in her seat.

Dryden was out of his vehicle within seconds of stopping. He had something in his hand—a hard plastic case of some kind.

Without so much as looking around, Dryden crossed the distance to the construction zone, shoved down the mesh fence, and stepped over it into the site.

Marnie stared after him, as confused as she had been at any point since arriving in the Mojave at four in the morning.

She got out of her Crown Vic and followed.

*   *   *

Twelve dead. Nine injured.

None of that was going to happen on the ground floor of the tower, Dryden saw. There was nobody at all on the first level. Not inside, anyway. He could hear men shouting to each other outside the structure, way on the other side. Crewmen positioning the heavy loads that remained for the tower crane to pick up.

Dryden could see the crane’s reinforced base, midway along the north side of the building. A massive footing of steel and concrete, probably bolted to foundation piles that punched fifty feet down into the earth.

Whatever was going to go wrong, the crane’s base was not going to be a part of it. It looked solid enough. It looked like it would stay right there for five hundred years, even if everyone went away and left it to the elements.

Certainly the equipment failed, but of course there were extenuating circumstances …

What sort of equipment—and what extenuating circumstances?

And why
of course
?

Something in that phrasing had troubled Dryden since he’d first heard it.

He came to an exposed stairwell—there were no walls yet boxing it in; it was wide open to the surrounding space of each floor. The stair treads were bare steel that would someday hold ceramic tile or padded carpet. He stopped at the bottom and cocked his head. From high above came the sound of voices echoing down through the vertical space. All of them seemed to come from way up in the building, closer to the top than the bottom.

Distracting him from the sound was the static coming from the plastic hardcase in his hand. He had cranked the tablet computer’s volume to its highest setting, loud enough that he could hear it even with the case shut.

He started up the stairwell.

*   *   *

Marnie waited for him to disappear up the stairs before crossing the orange fencing outside the site. She walked softly on the concrete, her footfalls all but silent.

She started toward the stairwell Dryden had gone into, then saw another, twenty yards to the left. She made her way across to it and climbed to the first landing. She stopped and listened, and found she could hear Dryden easily. He was making no attempt to be quiet as he climbed through the structure.

She kept thinking about the hard plastic case.

What the hell was in it?

Obvious possibilities came to mind. Drugs. Money.

Other scenarios were less likely, but uglier. Like a bomb.

None of those things made any sense at all, but neither did anything else about Sam Dryden.

Marnie started up the next flight, unsnapping the safety harness of the Glock 17 holstered beneath her jacket.

*   *   *

For the first fifteen stories, Dryden saw nothing that could pose a threat to anyone. Just one empty floor after another, each one a wide-open concrete space running out to its edges. Beyond was blue sky and the spread of Santa Maria planing away to the mountains that encircled it.

Equipment failure.

Extenuating circumstances.

Of course.

No equipment on any of these floors. No people around to be killed by it, even if there had been; the voices were all still above him.

He was turning to start up to the sixteenth level when the static from inside the case guttered. He stopped, knelt down, and cracked the case open an inch.

He heard the Red Hot Chili Peppers singing about a girl named Dani California. He clicked the case back shut and kept climbing.

*   *   *

The first floor that wasn’t empty was Level 22, the one directly below the rooftop. On this floor there were still no people, but there were stacks of building materials everywhere: plywood and granite slabs and huge volumes of Sheetrock, which were plastic-wrapped against exposure to moisture.

And here at last was the equipment. Giant air compressors with tanks the size of couches. Table saws of all kinds, only some of which Dryden recognized. These were specialized, heavy-duty tools built for cutting metal and masonry and high-density composites.

None of the equipment looked like it was about to kill anyone. Most of the machines weren’t even plugged in—to electrical power or pneumatic lines.

Maybe one of the big air tanks could go off like a bomb. It seemed plausible until Dryden walked among them and eyeballed each pressure gauge. The tanks were empty. They were about as capable of exploding as the stacks of Sheetrock.

He could hear all the workers on the rooftop above him. Their voices, shouting and sometimes laughing, rang clear in the late morning air.

Atop one of the stacks of granite slabs, a dozen men had left their jackets. Four had left hard hats, and three had left cell phones.

Dryden turned and stared out past the north edge of the floor, into empty space. The crane’s mast was right there, hugging the building, fifty feet from where he stood. At this range it didn’t look like it was made of glued-together toothpicks. The steel members of the truss structure were as big around as Dryden’s leg, and fused together by welds and bolts that looked unlikely to spontaneously come loose.

He walked to the north edge. Put his feet right to the lip, beyond which a drop of two hundred and fifty feet yawned. He’d never had much of an issue with heights. Respect for them, sure. He braced a hand on the nearest corner of the crane’s mast and leaned out over the void, looking up.

A hundred feet above him, the crane’s jib arm stuck out almost straight north, away from the building. The jib’s cable trolley was positioned about a third of the way out on the arm, bearing the pulley system from which the lifting cables extended down—all the way down to the hook, which was currently lowered to ground level. Dryden couldn’t see anyone down there hustling to attach a new load. What he could see were men sitting around, eating from lunch boxes and drinking from thermoses. Break time. The voices he heard just above him, on the roof, suggested it was break time there, too.

Dryden stepped back from the edge. He turned and looked up, as if he could see right through the concrete above him. Could see the men up there, sitting around on stacks of materials like the ones down on this level. Then he imagined he was looking up beyond the men, a hundred feet higher, to what was hanging directly above the building right now. The crane’s counterjib arm. The short arm that balanced out the long one. Balanced it out because it weighed just as much, by way of the counterweight attached to it: a massive concrete block assembled in sections, the whole thing weighing—what? A hundred thousand pounds? More?