Having taped and gagged the three guards, Larson finished with the unconscious one outside and moved across the road and higher up the hill in order to see three cars arriving in succession. As Larson finished binding the guard outside, the headlights of arriving cars lit the treetops, the light dancing and shifting as it advanced one crown to the next. Criminal royalty, if Rotem’s information were correct.
Frustrated at having used up time and energy, Larson wondered where Penny could be hidden. A search of the trailer had yielded nothing.
He scrambled out from under some bushes and broke out onto an open fairway, dividing his attention between several things at once. The house. The edges of the fairway. The fairway itself. The possibility of more guards, people, cameras, dogs.
He caught movement well down the fairway and slightly to his left, moving right to left. He lay on the damp grass.
A lone, dark figure-female, he thought, judging by her walk- moved quickly between two large white pools-sand traps, he realized. He rose up slightly onto his hands and, as he did so, caught sight of a massive roof, well out of bounds from the golf course. A barn.
He added this up. A woman, not using any flashlight, heading toward the barn. Nearing midnight… Eccentric at best. Secretive came to mind.
To check on sleeping children? he wondered.
Yet another car pulled up to the lodge, another passenger dropped off. That made five or six just in the past ten minutes.
Then, on the cart path, not thirty feet away, a man’s silhouette. Larson angled his face away from the man, to hide the white of his skin, while he simultaneously hid his hands beneath him. Larson froze.
Judging only by sound, Larson determined the man continued walking a few more yards. Larson braced for his own discovery, plotting a course toward the woods.
“Katie!” the man called out.
Larson saw that the woman in the distance stopped. She seemed to turn but then moved on, continuing down and out of sight, toward the barn.
“Shit.” The man seemed to give up. The soles of his shoes ground sand onto the cart path as he headed back toward the manor house at a brisk pace.
The substitute cell phone vibrated in his pocket. Larson rolled onto his hip to put it completely beneath him, compressed and silent.
The footsteps stopped. “Who’s there?” the man called out toward Larson. But his mobile chirped and he answered it. Over the device’s speakerphone a man announced, “The visitors have all arrived. Assignments, everyone.”
The man’s footfalls faded as he headed away from Larson and back toward the lodge.
Larson scrambled a good forty yards and into some woods. Well concealed, he withdrew the mobile, reading the text message sent from his own phone.
2 men in trees. Police?
He found the message in some ways welcome, but disturbing as well. If she was in the police van, shouldn’t she know if these were police or not?
Torn between the confusion of the message and his instincts that this woman he’d just seen would lead him to Penny, he crept to the edge of the woods and then hurried after her toward the barn.
Such a perfect place to hide a child, he thought. All little girls love horses, and a few errant noises from a barn would not attract attention. Wouldn’t surprise anybody.