I was outside with the two women in the Mercedes, running the air-conditioning and cooling them down. Rachel was still inside on the bar's phone talking to Cherie Dei and coordinating the arrival of backup. My guess was that agents would soon drop out of the sky in helicopters and descend on Clear, Nevada, in force. The trail was fresh. They were close.
I tried to talk to the two girls-it was hard to think of them as women despite what they did for a living and even though they were old enough. They probably knew everything there was to know about men but they didn't seem to know anything about the world. In my mind they were just girls who had taken wrong turns or been kidnapped and taken away from womanhood. I was beginning to understand what Rachel had said earner.
"Did Tom Walling ever come into the trailer and hire any of the girls?" I asked.
"Not that I seen," Tammy said. "Somebody said he was probably queer or something," Mecca added.
"Why did they say that?"
"'Cause he lived like a hermit or something," Mecca replied. "An' he never wanted no pussy even though Tawny would' ve thrown him some on the house like with the other drivers."
"Are there a lot of drivers?"
"He was the only one from around here," Tammy said quickly, apparently not liking Mecca in the lead. "The others come up from Vegas. Some of 'em work for the casinos."
"If there are drivers down there, how come somebody would hire Tom to go all the way down and get them?"
"They didn't," Mecca said.
"Sometimes they did," Tammy corrected.
"Well, sometimes. The dummies. But mostly we called for Tom if somebody got dropped off and stayed awhile or rented one of Old Billings's trailers and then needed a ride back 'cause bis ride was long gone. The casino rides don't wait around too long. Unless you're one of those high rollers and then probably…"
"And then what?"
"Then you wouldn't come to Clear in the first place."
"They got prettier girls in Pahrump," Tammy said matter-of-factly, as if it was strictly a business disadvantage and not something that bothered her personally.
"An' it's a bit closer an' the pussy costs more," Mecca said. "So what we get up in Clear is your cost-conscious consumer." Spoken like a true marketing expert. I tried to get the conversation back on track.
"So, for the most part, Tom Walling came over and drove customers back to Las Vegas or wherever they came from."
"Right."
"Right."
"And these guys-these customers-could have been totally anonymous. You don't check IDs, right? The customers could use whatever name they wanted when they came in there."
"Uh-huh. Unless they look like maybe they ain't twenty-one yet."
"Right. We check the ID of the young ones."
I could see how it could be done, how Backus could have sized up brothel customers as his victims. If it appeared they had taken measures to guard their identities and hide that they had made the trip to Clear, then they had inadvertently made themselves perfect victims. It also played into what was known about the demons that drove his killing spree. The profile work in the Poet file indicated that Backus's pathology was wrapped up in his relationship with his father, a man who on the outside held the vaunted image of FBI agent, hero and good man, but on the inside was a man who abused his wife and son to the extent that one fled the home because she could, while the one who couldn't get away was left to retreat into a world of fantasies involving the killing of his abuser.
I realized there was something missing. Lloyd Rockland, the victim who had rented a car. How did he fit in if he didn't need a driver? I opened the file Rachel had left in the car and pulled out the photo of Rockland. I showed it to the women.
"This guy, do either of you recognize him? His name was Lloyd."
"Was?" Mecca asked.
"Yeah, that's right, was. Lloyd Rockland. He's dead. Do you recognize him?"
Neither of them did. I knew it was a long shot. Rockland disappeared in 2002.1 tried to think of an explanation that would allow Rockland to fit into the theory.
"You serve alcohol in there, right?"
"If the customer wants it we can provide it," Mecca said. "We got a license."
"Okay, what happens when a guy drives all the way up from Vegas and gets too drunk to drive home?"
"He can sleep it off," she responded. "He can take a room if he pays for it."
"What if he wants to get back? What if he needs to get back?"
"He can call over here and the mayor will take care of it. The driver will take him back in his car and then the driver just catches a ride back like with one of the casino cars or something. It works out."
I nodded. It worked out for my theory as well. Rockland could have gotten drunk and had to be driven back by the driver, Backus. Only he wasn't driven back to Vegas. I knew I would have to ask Rachel to check the remains identified as Rockland's for a high alcohol level. It would be another confirmation.
"Mister, are we gonna have to stay here all day?" Mecca asked. "I don't know," I said as I looked up at the trailer door.
Rachel tried to keep her voice low because Billings Rett was at the other end of the bar acting like he was doing a crossword puzzle, when she knew he was trying to listen to and understand everything she was saying and that could be heard from the phone.
"What's the ETA?" she asked.
"We'll be in the air within twenty and then another twenty to you," Cherie Dei said. "So sit tight, Rachel."
"Got it."
"And Rachel, I know you. I know what you will want to do. Stay out of the suspect's trailer until we can go in there with an ERT. Let them do their job."
Rachel almost told Dei that the fact was that she didn't know her, that she couldn't begin to understand the first thing about her. But she didn't.
"Got it," she said instead.
"What about Bosch?" Dei asked next.
"What about him?"
"I want him kept away from this."
"That will be sort of hard since he found the place. This is all because of him."
"I understand that but we would have gotten there eventually. We always do. We'll thank him but we have to brush him aside after that."
"Well, you get to tell him that."
"I will. So are we set? I've got to get over to Nellis."
"All set. See you inside the hour." "Rachel, one last thing, why didn't you drive up there?"
"It was Bosch's hunch, he wanted to drive. What's the difference?"
"You were giving him control of the situation, that's all."
"That's second-guessing after the fact. We thought we might get a line on the missing men, not be led right to-"
"That's fine, Rachel. I shouldn't have brought it up. I have to go."
Dei hung up on her end. Rachel couldn't hang up because the phone was stretched from the back wall and over the bar. She held it up to Rett and he put down his pencil and came over. He took the phone and hung it up.
'Thank you, Mr. Rett. In about an hour a couple helicopters are going to land here. Probably right in front of this trailer. Agents will want to talk to you. More formally than I did. They will probably talk to a lot of people in your town."
"Not good for business."
"Probably not, but the faster people cooperate, the faster they'll take off and be out of here."
She didn't mention anything about the horde of media that would also probably descend on the place once it was revealed publicly that the little brothel town in the desert was where the Poet had holed up unnoticed for all of these years and had chosen his latest victims.
"If the agents ask where I am, tell them I went up to Tom Walling's trailer, okay?"
"Sounded like you were getting told not to go up there." "Mr. Rett, just tell them what I asked you to tell them."
"Will do."
"By the way, have you been up there since he came in here and told you he was leaving for a while?"
"No, I haven't managed to get up there. He paid the rent on the place so I didn't think it was my business to snoop around his things. That's not the way we are here in Clear."
Rachel nodded.
"Okay, Mr. Rett, thanks for your cooperation."
He shrugged as if to say he either had no choice or his cooperation was minimal. Rachel turned from the bar and headed for the door. But just as she got there she hesitated. She reached inside her blazer and pulled the extra magazine for her Sig Sauer off her belt. She hefted its weight once in her hand and then slipped it into the pocket of her blazer. She then went out the door and got into the Mercedes next to Bosch.
"So," he said, "is Agent Dei mad?"
"Nope. We just brought in the case break, how could she be mad?"
"I don't know. Some people have the ability to be mad no matter what you bring them."
"Are we just going to sit here all day?" Mecca asked from the backseat.
Rachel turned around to look back at the two women.
"We're going over to the western ridge to check out a trailer. You can go with us and stay in the car or you can go into the bar and wait. More agents are on the way. You'll probably be able to get your interviews over with here and not have to go into Vegas." "Thank God," Mecca said. "I'll wait here."
"Me, too," said Tammy.
Bosch let them out of the car.
"Just wait here," Rachel called to them. "If you go back to your trailer or go anywhere else you won't get far and it will just make them mad."
They didn't acknowledge this cautioning. Rachel watched them walk up the ramp and into the bar. Bosch got back in and put the car into reverse.
"You sure about this?" he asked. "My guess is that Agent Dei told you to sit still until the reinforcements got here."
"She also said one of the first things she was going to do was send you on your way. You want to wait for that or do you want to go see this trailer?"
"Don't worry, I'll go. I'm not the one with the career to worry about."
"Such as it is."
We followed the dirt road Billings Rett had directed us to, and it ranged west from the settlement of Clear and up a sloping landscape for a mile. The road then leveled off and curved behind a reddish-orange outcropping of rock that was exactly as Rett had described it. It looked like the tail-end of the great passenger ship as it drew upward out of the water at a sixty-degree angle and then plunged downward into the sea. According to the movie, anyway. The rock climber Rett mentioned had climbed to the appropriate spot at the top and had used white paint to scrawl "Titanic" across the rock surface. We didn't stop to appraise the rock or the paintwork. I drove the Mercedes around it and we soon came to a clearing where there was a small trailer sitting on concrete blocks. There was a junked car on four flats next to it and an oil drum used to burn trash nearby. On the other side was a large fuel tank and a power generator.
To preserve possible crime scene evidence I stopped just outside the clearing and killed the engine. I noticed that the generator was silent. There was a stillness about the whole scene that seemed ominous in some way. I had a real sense that I had come to the end of the world, a place of darkness. I wondered if this was where Backus had taken his victims, if this was the end of the world for them. Probably, I concluded. It was a place of waiting evil.
Rachel broke the silence.
"Well, are we just going to look at it or are we going to check it out?"
"Just waiting on you to make the move."
She opened her door and then I opened mine. We met at the front of the car. That was when I noticed that the trailer's windows were all open, not what I would expect someone would do if they were leaving their home for a long period of time. After that recognition came the odor.
"You smell that?"
She nodded. Death was in the air. It was much worse, much stronger than at Zzyzx. I instinctively knew that what we would find here would not be the buried secrets of the killer. Not this time. There was a body in that trailer-at least one-that was open to the air and decomposing. "With my last act," Rachel said.
"What?"
"The card. What he wrote on the card."
I nodded. She was thinking suicide.
"You think?"
"I don't know. Let's check."
We walked slowly forward, neither saying a word after that. The smell grew stronger and we both knew that whatever and whoever was dead inside the trailer had been baking in there for a long time.
I broke from her side and walked to a set of windows to the left of the trailer's door. Cupping my hands to the screen I tried to look into the darkness within. My hands hitting the screen set off an alarm of buzzing flies within the trailer. They were bouncing against the screen, looking to get out as if maybe the scene and the smell inside were too much even for them.
There was no curtain across the window but I couldn't see much from the angle I had-at least not a body or an indication of one. It looked like a small sitting area with a couch and a chair. There was a table with two stacks of hardback books on it. Behind the chair was a bookcase with its shelves full of books.
"Nothing," I said.
I stepped back from the window and looked up the length of the trailer. I saw Rachel's eyes focused on the door and then the doorknob. Something came to me then, something that didn't fit.
"Rachel, why did he leave the note for you at the bar?"
"What?" "The note. He left it at the bar. Why there? Why not here?"
"I guess he wanted to make sure I got it."
"If he hadn't left it there you would have still come up here. You would've still found it here."
She shook her head.
"What are you saying? I don't get-"
"Don't try the door, Rachel. Let's wait."
"What are you talking about?"
"I don't like this."
"Why don't you look around the back, see if there is another window you can see in or something."
"Okay, I will. You just wait"
She didn't answer me. I walked around the left side of the trailer, stepped over the hitch and headed toward the other side. But then I stopped and walked out to the trash barrel.
The barrel was one-third full with the charred remains of burned refuse. There was a broom handle on the ground that was charred on one end. I picked it up and dug around in the ashes in the barrel, as I was sure Backus had done while the fire was burning. He had wanted to make sure everything got burned.
It appeared to be mostly paperwork and books that had been burned. There was nothing recognizable until I came across a blackened and melted credit card. There was nothing I recognized on it but I guessed that the forensics experts might be able to connect it to one of the victims. I dug around further and saw pieces of melted black plastic. Then I noticed one book that was burned beyond recognition on the outside but still had some partially intact pages on the inside. With my fin- gers I lifted it out and gingerly opened it. It looked like it was poetry, though it was hard to be sure, since all the pages were partially burned away. Between two of these pages I found a half-burned receipt for the book. At the top it said "Book Car" but the rest was burned away.
"Bosch? Where are you?"
It was Rachel. I was out of her sight. I placed the book back into the barrel and stuck the broom handle in as well. I headed toward the back side of the trailer. I saw another open window.
"Hold on a second."
Rachel waited. She was growing impatient. She was listening for the distant sound of helicopters crossing the desert. She knew as soon as she heard them that her chance would be over. She would be pushed back, possibly even punished for how she had handled Bosch.
She looked back down at the doorknob. She thought about Backus and whether this could be his last play. Was four years here in the desert enough? Did he kill Terry McCaleb and send her the GPS only to lead her eventually to this? She thought about the note he had left, his telling her he had taught her well. An anger welled up inside her, an anger that wanted her to throw open the door and-
"We've got a body!"
It was Bosch, calling from the other side of the trailer.
"What? Where?"
"Come around. I've got a view. There's a bed and I see one body. Two, three days old. I can't see the face." "Okay, anything else?"
She waited. He didn't say anything. She put her hand on the knob. It turned.
"The door's not locked."
"Rachel, don't open it," Bosch called. "I think… I think there is gas. I smell something besides the body. Something besides the obvious. Something underneath."
Rachel hesitated but then turned the knob fully and opened the door an inch.
Nothing happened.
She slowly pulled the door all the way open. Nothing happened. Flies saw the opening and buzzed by her and into the light. She waved them away from her eyes.
"Bosch, I'm going in."
She stepped up into the trailer. More flies. They were everywhere. The smell hit her fully then, invading her and tightening her stomach.
Her eyes adjusted to the dimness after the brightness outside and she saw the photos. They were stacked on tables and taped to the walls and refrigerator. Photos of the victims, alive and dead, tearful, pleading, pitiful. The table in the trailer's kitchen had been turned into a workstation. There was a laptop connected to a printer on one side and three separate stacks of photos. She picked up the largest stack and started to flip through it, again recognizing some of the men in the photos as the missing men whose photos she had carried with them to Clear. But these weren't the sort of family photos she had carried. These were shots of a killer and his victims. Men whose eyes pleaded to the camera, asking forgiveness and mercy. Rachel noticed that all of the shots were at a downward angle, with the shooter-Backus-in the dominant position, focusing down on his victims as they hoped and pleaded for their lives.
When she could look no more at them she put the photos down and took up the second stack. There were fewer photos here and these were mostly focused on a woman and two children as they moved through a shopping mall. She put them down and was about to move the camera weighing down the third stack of photos when Bosch stepped into the trailer.
"Rachel, what are we doing?"
"Don't worry. We have five, maybe ten minutes. We'll back out as soon as we hear the choppers and let the evidence recovery team take over. I just want to see if-"
"I'm not talking about beating other agents to the punch. I don't like this-the door being left open. Something's not-"
He stopped when he caught his first glimpse of the photos.
She turned back to the table and lifted the camera that rested on the last stack of photos. She looked down at a photo of herself. It took her a moment to place it but then realized where she had been photographed.
"He was with me all the way," she said.
"What are you talking about?" Bosch asked.
"This is O'Hare. My layover. Backus was there watching me."
She quickly shuffled through the photos. There were six of them, all shots of her on the day she traveled. The last shot was of Rachel and Cherie Dei greeting each other in baggage claim, Cherie holding a sign down at her side that said bob backus on it. "He's been watching me."
"Like he watched Terry."
Bosch reached to the printer's tray and used a finger from each hand to lift a photo by its edges and without leaving a print. It apparently was the last image Backus had printed here. It showed the front of a two-story house of no particular design. In the driveway was a station wagon. An old man stood next to the driver's door and was looking at a keychain as if searching for the key to unlock the car.
Bosch proffered the photo to Rachel.
"Who is this?"
She looked at it for a long moment.
"I don't know."
"The house?"
"Never seen it before."
Bosch carefully put the photo back in the tray so that it would be found in its original position by the evidence team.
Rachel moved behind him and walked down the hallway toward a closed doorway. Before she reached it she stepped through the open door of a bathroom. It was neat except for the dead flies covering all surfaces. In the bathtub she saw two pillows and a blanket arranged as if for sleeping. She remembered the intelligence gathered on Backus and felt a physical repulsion building in her chest.
She stepped out of the bathroom and went to the closed door at the end of the hallway.
"Is this where you saw it?" she asked.
Bosch turned and watched her approach the door.
"Rachel…" Rachel didn't stop. She turned the knob and pulled the door open. I heard a distinct metallic ching sound that my mind did not associate with any door lock. Rachel stopped her movement and her posture stiffened.
"Harry?"
I started moving toward her.
"What is it?"
"Harry!"
She turned toward me in the close confines of the wood-paneled hallway. I looked past her face and saw the body on the bed. A man on his back, a black cowboy hat canted down on his head to obscure his face. A pistol in his right hand. A bullet wound to the upper left chest.
Flies were buzzing all around us. I heard a louder, hissing sound and pushed further by her and saw the fuse on the floor. I recognized it as a chemical fuse, a braiding of wires treated with chemicals that would burn anywhere under any condition, even underwater.
The fuse was burning fast. We could not stop it. There were maybe four feet of it coiled on the floor and then it disappeared under the bed. Rachel bent down and reached for it to pull it.
"No, don't! That could set it off. There's nothing- we have to get out of here."
"No! We can't lose this scene! We need-"
"Rachel, no time! Go! Run! Now!"
I pushed her back up the hallway and turned my body to block any attempt by her to return. I started moving backward, my eyes fixed on the figure on the bed. When I thought Rachel had given up I turned and she was waiting. She shoved by me. "We need DNA!" she yelled.
I watched her move into the room and leap onto the bed. Her hand came up and grabbed the hat off the dead man's head, revealing a face that was distorted and gray with decomposition. She then backed off the bed and headed toward the doorway.
Even in the moment I admired her thinking and what she had just done. The hat brim would most definitely contain skin cells that would hold the body's DNA. She carried the hat past me and started running for the door. I looked down to see the burn point on the fuse line disappear under the bed. I started to run behind her.
"Was it him?" she yelled over her shoulder.
I knew what she meant. Was the cadaver on the bed the man who showed up on Terry McCaleb's boat? Was it Backus?
"I don't know. Just go! Go! Go!"
I hit the door two seconds behind Rachel. She was already on the ground heading directly away, in the direction of Titanic Rock. I followed her lead. I had taken maybe five strides when the explosion ripped through the air behind me. I was hit with the full force of the deafening concussion and knocked forward to the ground. I remembered the tuck-and-roll maneuver from basic training and it served to give me a few more yards' distance from the explosion.
Time became disjointed and slow. One moment I was running. The next I was on my hands and knees, my eyes open, trying to raise my head. Something momentarily eclipsed the sun and I managed to look up to see the shell of the trailer thirty feet in the air over me. Its walls and roof intact. It seemed to float and almost hang up there. Then it came crashing down ten yards in front of me, its splintered aluminum sides as sharp as razors. It made a sound like a five-car pile-up when it hit the ground.
I checked the sky for more incoming and saw I was clear. I turned to look back at the trailer's original location and saw intense fire and thick black smoke billowing into the sky. Nothing was recognizable on the trailer pad. Everything had been consumed by the blast and fire. The bed and the man in it were gone. Backus had planned this exit perfectly.
I got to my feet but was unsteady because my eardrums were still reacting and my equilibrium was off. It sounded as though I was walking through a tunnel with trains speeding by me on both sides. I wanted to put my hands over my ears but knew that it would do no good. The noise was reverberating from inside.
Rachel had been only a few feet from me before the blast but now I couldn't see her. I stumbled around in the smoke and started to think that maybe she was under the trailer's skin.
But finally I found her on the ground to the left of the trailer debris. She was lying still in the dirt and rocks. The black hat was on the ground next to her, like a sign of death. I moved as quickly as I could to her.
"Rachel?"
I got down on my hands and knees and first examined her without touching her. She was lying facedown and her hair had fallen forward to further hide her eyes from my view. I was suddenly reminded of my daughter as I used a hand to gently pull the hair back. As I did this I noticed blood on the back of my palm and for the first time realized I was wounded in some minor way. I decided I would worry about that later.
"Rachel?"
I couldn't tell if she was breathing or not. It seemed that my senses were working on the domino theory. With my hearing gone at least temporarily, the coordination of the other senses was gone as well. I patted her cheek lightly.
"Come on, Rachel, wake up."
I didn't want to turn her over in case there were unseen injuries that I might aggravate. I patted her cheek again, this time harder. I put my hand on her back, hoping that I would feel the rise and fall of breath as I could with my daughter.
Nothing. I put my ear to her back but this was laughable considering my condition. It was just instinct moving ahead of logic. I was thinking that I had no choice and had to turn her over when I saw the fingers of her right hand twitch and then form a fist.
Rachel suddenly lifted her head off the ground and groaned. It was loud enough that I could hear it.
"Rachel, are you all right?"
"I-I'm… there's evidence in the trailer. We need it"
"Rachel there is no trailer anymore. It's gone."
She struggled to turn over and sit up. Her eyes opened wide at the sight of the burning debris of what had been the trailer. I could see that her pupils were dilated. She had a concussion.
"What did you do?" she asked in an accusatory tone.
"It wasn't me. The place was rigged to go up. When you opened the bedroom door…"
"Oh." She turned her head back and forth as if working a kink out of her neck. She saw the black cowboy hat on the ground next to her.
"What is this?"
"His hat. You grabbed it on the way out."
"DNA?"
"Hopefully, though I'm not sure what good it will be."
She looked back at the flaming trailer bed. We were too close. I could feel the heat of the fire. But I still wasn't sure she should be moving.
"Rachel, why don't you lie back down? I think you have a concussion. You might have other injuries."
"Yeah, I think that's a good idea."
She put her head down on the ground and just looked up at the sky. I decided that wasn't a bad position and did the same. It was like we were at the beach or something. If it had been night we could have counted the stars.
Before I could hear them coming, I felt the approach of the helicopters. A deep vibration in my chest made me look to the southern sky and I saw the two air force choppers coming over the top of Titanic Rock. I weakly raised an arm and waved them in.