It was hard for me to leave the airport.
After dropping Tessa off, I’d sat in the parking garage for nearly fifteen minutes, wondering if I should go back inside to try and talk with her some more. But I finally realized that I was doing the hardest thing, but the best one. If I went back in there, she wouldn’t learn her lesson. I needed to be firm and stand my ground. Over this past year I’ve been learning that being a dad is a much harder job than catching serial killers. Much, much harder.
And sitting there in the parking garage, I began to realize something else: sometimes when you’re a parent, your love has to be tough and uncomfortable, and it has to sting if it’s going to prove to be real and last for the long haul. Love that’s too timid to ache isn’t love at all.
However, as I left the airport, I knew I wasn’t ready to meet with Margaret yet. So, I decided to do the thing I do best-instead of going to police headquarters, I drove back to the site of Austin Hunter’s death to have a look around.
When I arrived, I parked in the same place Lien-hua and I had parked the previous night when we rushed here to try and find-and then to save-Austin Hunter. I stepped out of the car and visually scanned the area, checking sight lines, comparing the scene now to what it had looked like last night.
Why here? Why did Hunter die here?
I closed my eyes and pictured the roads of San Diego, the arteries of the city, intersecting, interconnecting. I knew Hunter’s cognitive map of the city better than anyone, and now, despite my natural tendencies, I tried to climb into his mind, to think like he did.
But I couldn’t do it.
I tried layering in the locations of the fires, and the address of his apartment, and the trolley depots he’d used to leave the scenes; then I mixed in the wind conditions last night, and the most likely place he would have come ashore after swimming across the bay…
But as hard as I tried, I just couldn’t figure out why Austin Hunter had let the police corner him where they did. He was too smart to get trapped in the middle of a road by mistake. This man had spent two years teaching survival and evasion tactics to Navy SEALs, and this location didn’t seem to make any sense. I knew he wouldn’t have led them to the rendezvous point, that much was for sure. So why here?
I opened my eyes and studied the area again.
The device. He wouldn’t have left Building B-14 without the device.
But he didn’t have any kind of device with him, except for the phone, when the police surrounded him. We could certainly analyze it, but when I’d used it, there didn’t seem to be anything unusual about it. I couldn’t imagine that all this fuss was about a prepaid cell phone.
Austin was a pro.
A pro.
I didn’t know what the device was, or exactly what it did, but if Austin was going to steal it, the device would need to be mobile and, if the size of an MEG machine was any indication, the device would have to be at least large enough to be easily seen.
So, if Austin had it with him, where would he have hidden it?
A place it would be safe.
A place he could get to later.
Just before he was killed, he’d tilted his knife at Lien-hua. I walked to the place where I’d been standing; I pictured where Austin and Lien-hua had been.
“It’s over,” he’d said, but I didn’t think he was talking about his life, and I didn’t think he was threatening Lien-hua.
It’s over.
What’s over?
I glanced at the empty stretch of curb beside me. A car had been there last night. The car with the parking tickets, the one Dunn kicked.
The one he’d ordered taken to impound.
It’s over… It’s over…
Could Austin have been talking about the device? The device is over…
Austin pointed. He pointed.
Oh.
The device is over… there.
Austin had put it in the car.
It was time for me to pay a visit to the police impound yard.
When Tessa finally stepped out of the restroom and walked to her departure gate, she heard the poofy-haired airline lady who was working at Gate 24 announce that their departure time was delayed because of mechanical problems.
Great. Just great.
Tessa pulled out her cell phone and slouched into one of the airport chairs, ergonomically designed to cause permanent back problems. She tried not to think about how stupid the TSA rules about soap were, how stupid this whole trip had been, or how much her tattooed arm was hurting. Or her wrist where she’d snapped the rubber bands.
Or any other part of her body, like specifically, maybe, hello, her heart.
So some of it was her fault. So what? Patrick still wasn’t being fair. He wasn’t. He just wasn’t. She pulled out her phone, scrolled through some of her email, and was texting a couple friends to tell them she was coming back two days early when a white-haired woman sitting in the chair beside her said, “Good afternoon, dear.”
Tessa didn’t want to be rude. “Hi.”
“Are you going to Denver too?”
You think? Could that possibly be why I’m sitting at this gate?
“Um, yeah.”
“I wonder…” The woman had tender wrinkles around her eyes and a soft grandmotherly smile. “I wonder if you wouldn’t mind letting me leave my purse and my bag here? If you wouldn’t care to watch them for a few minutes?” Tessa saw a cane resting beside the woman’s leg. “It’s such a task taking them to and from the bathroom.”
“Yeah, no problem.”
The woman handed her a smile. “Thank you. That’s very sweet of you.”
Then the lady, who was starting to remind Tessa of her second grade teacher, stood up slowly. And, using her cane for balance, she left her purse and her carry-on bag beside Tessa’s chair and walked gingerly toward the restroom.
At the impound yard, I learned that a video camera had been found in the abandoned car’s trunk and had been handed over to the evidence room at police headquarters. I had a feeling it was much more than a video camera.
When I arrived at headquarters, I took my laptop with me to the second floor, walked past the infirmary, and found room 211: the evidence room.
At most police stations, everyone calls this facility “the evidence room” rather than “rooms,” but nearly always, the “room” consists of a maze-like series of many narrow rooms, packed with shelves that are piled high with boxes labeled by year, by case, by type of crime. The officer in charge of the evidence room, a bearded man named Riley Kernigan, who appeared to be serving his last stint with the force before retirement, lowered his newspaper and greeted me with a languid smile.
As he glanced halfheartedly at my FBI badge, I asked him if I could see the sign-in sheet for the video camera. “Sure,” he said.
“But it’s empty. You’re the first guy interested in this thing.”
“Can I see the camera then?”
“Camera, yeah,” he said with a touch of sarcasm. “I’ll show you the video camera.” Obviously Kernigan didn’t believe it was a camera either. He pushed himself to his feet and led me past two narrow hallways to the storage room for current, unsolved cases. I saw the device sitting on the table beside a large duffel bag-the same kind of bag I’d seen the man carrying at the site of John Doe’s suicide.
A thick, foam protective wrap lay beside the duffel bag. I figured Kernigan had unwrapped the device when he checked it in.
The device that the impound guys thought was a video camera didn’t look like any video camera I’d ever seen. It had a digital display screen, laser targeting, radioactive stickers. I didn’t know how it worked, or what it did, but someone thought it was important enough to kill to get, and that was enough for me.
Officer Kernigan stood beside me, stared at it, and then shook his head. “Darndest thing I ever saw.”
The facts of the case were folding in on themselves like a great origami figure. I just wished I could guess what the final shape would look like.
“Can I have a few minutes?” I asked him.
“Take as much time as you like. Stay all afternoon if you want.”
He gave the device one last lingering glance and tossed his newspaper onto the table beside it. “I get off at five-thirty, though. Shift change. Just be done by then ‘cause I gotta lock up back here. Do me a favor and stick it back in the bag when you’re through.”
“Thanks, I will.” Then he returned to the front desk.
I needed to make a decision. This device was stolen from a secure military base, but, as far as anyone else knew, it had been destroyed in the fire. The only other person who knew it had been removed from the base was Austin Hunter, and he was dead.
No one else had signed in to look at it yet, but I knew that a lot of people would be looking for this thing. Most likely the military, maybe people from Drake Enterprises.
Maybe the men from Monday night.
And Shade, whoever he was.
It might be good to see who comes searching for it first…
I set my laptop up in the corner of the room, turned on the video chat camera and the computer’s digital video recorder. Even after the screen went to sleep, the built-in camera would continue recording. With the amount of battery life and memory on my computer, I could take six to eight hours of video if I needed to. I didn’t think any visitors would be suspicious of a computer in the corner of the room, nor would they notice the tiny display light indicating that the camera was on.
Before putting the screen to sleep, I changed the computer’s system settings to allow me to remotely access the hard drive through the Internet. This way I’d be able to run any of my programs even if I wasn’t able to retrieve the computer from the evidence room until evening.
Then, so that we wouldn’t lose track of the device again, I decided to hide it in plain sight… so to speak.
Wearing latex gloves, I carefully wrapped it in the newspaper Officer Kernigan had discarded beside me and then slid it behind a dusty box of evidence from a 1984 grand theft auto case. I needed to put something back into the black duffel bag but didn’t want to compromise the evidence from another case, so I rooted around in the drawers and the custodial closet of the evidence room, found a roll of duct tape, and set to work.