Lupercio walked past. There were two rows of five cabins facing one another across a small patch of trees. The forest grew up behind them. Each unit had a car parked in front. The lights around the fox reflected weakly on the Sentra and advanced slowly across it as Lupercio walked by. He saw the light on in the cabin with the Sentra parked in front, though the shades were drawn. It was the end unit of the uphill row.
Lupercio walked two hundred feet down the road then crouched and trotted into the forest. The trees were fragrant and widely spaced, and he had no trouble navigating his way back to the Gray Fox. The red, white and blue lights winked silently. Lupercio lowered his boots evenly and slowly, and when he came up behind Jones’s cabin, he stood still and stared at the faint orange glow of the drawn shade. The units all had back doors. He heard voices and music and laughter coming from the cabins.
An hour later, still within the trees, he had not moved except to breathe and not once had anyone passed behind the drawn shade of the back window. The music and laughter had ended.
Lupercio shrugged the pry bar off his shoulder and into his hand, then crept lightly to the door. He stepped onto the small concrete landing. A thin line of interior light issued around the door, and Lupercio could see where the line was interrupted by the lock. He hefted the pry bar up and gently worked the tip into the space where the lock was. Then he pushed on it with all of his strength, and the steel lock ripped through the soft old pine of the frame and the door wobbled open.
Lupercio was inside in an instant, his machete held up over his right shoulder in a two-handed grip.
The little dining area where he had entered was clear. He was aware of the empty bathroom as he passed it. On his right was a bedroom with its door open and no one in it.
But ahead of him up the hallway the front bedroom door was closed and the light inside was off, and he knew this was where she would be, so he flung open the door and jumped inside. In the dim light from the hallway Lupercio saw the woman sleeping in the bed, covers turned up against the mountain chill. Then he saw the blade of his machete disappear into the pillow and the severed head jump into the air and land on the floor.
After the flash of white that should have been bone Lupercio saw the foam head rocking to a stop on the cabin floor and the wig caught by his blade in the deep gash in the pillow. He buried the machete in the head, the two halves skittering across the knotty pine floor.
Voices now rose from the unit next door, and he thought he saw movement through the window facing the office.
He saw the index card propped against the lamp on the nightstand.
“I trusted you” was written in a graceful feminine cursive script across it.
Beside it lay some kind of electronic emitter or transponder, likely a vehicle locator.
Lupercio ran back into the forest.
29
Hood knelt beside the bed in Suzanne’s cabin and photographed the transponder with his cell phone.
He was bewildered by Lupercio’s supernatural ability to find Suzanne Jones, but he knew the explanation would be simpler than ESP. There was an odd-looking line of solder on the transponder housing, just below the manufacturer’s etched logo-Assured Surveillance.
A San Bernardino County Sheriff’s detective worked beside him, videotaping the note on the nightstand, the transponder, the wig, the two neatly cleaved halves of the Styrofoam wig stand and the deep, fresh cut in the old wood floor. His name was Pettigrew. Outside a team of investigators waited for the sun to rise.
Pettigrew turned off the recorder and let it hang at his side.
“So this woman is the witness against the badass Salvadoran everybody’s looking for.”
“Lupercio Maygar.”
“Animal.”
“He’s more than that.”
“She’s a schoolteacher, right?”
“Yes, eighth grade.”
“Was that locator on the car out front?”
Hood nodded but said nothing.
“Even with that TV press conference, I still don’t understand how she got mixed up with him,” said Pettigrew. “A schoolteacher and a killer. They have a history?”
“Not that we know.”
Pettigrew shook his head doubtfully. “I don’t see how you do it, day in and day out. I hate going down the hill now. You hit that brown stuff they call air, you just know nothing good can happen.”
Hood said nothing. Lupercio’s black art had left no room in his mind for Pettigrew’s fearful opinions.
“I was L.A. Sheriff’s for eight years,” said Pettigrew. “Mostly East Los Angeles Station. So I know what I’m talking about.”
A few minutes later Hood went down the hallway and looked at the splintered door. Lupercio had used a pry bar. Hood could see where the blade had forced the steel lock assembly through the door frame. By the punky look of the wood, it seemed it wouldn’t have taken great force.
For a moment he stood behind the cabin and watched the sunlit morning vapor drift through the branches of the pine trees. He called Suzanne’s cell number again, but she was, as usual, unavailable.
Then he called Assured Surveillance in Worcester, Massachusetts, and talked to an engineer named Schlinger. Schlinger couldn’t explain the solder line on the AS-210, but he was happy to look at the pictures and gave Hood an e-mail address. Schlinger would call back.
Hood stood outside the cabin in the cool dawn as the pictures raced across the continent. Blue jays flitted in the upper branches of a jack pine and Hood could see Pettigrew’s flash unit popping light against the cabin windows.
Five minutes later Schlinger was back.
“It’s been modified,” he said. “We don’t ship them that way.”
“Modified to do what?”
“Open it. Send more pictures. You’ll need a small cross-tip.”
Hood got Pettigrew to dust the transponder but not a single latent came through. Using a screwdriver from the trunk of the Camaro, he opened the housing. The short screws unseated quickly and he set aside the lid.
Hood looked down at the tightly packed microelectronics, which meant little to him. He shot them with his phone camera and sent them through to Massachusetts.
Another five minutes and Schlinger called again.
“It’s been reworked,” he said. “Cleverly. It’s got a signal splitter with a digital arm switch. That switch can be thrown on and off by remote by an operator who knows the frequency.”
“By whoever added the splitter.”
“Correct.”
“So, two signals,” said Hood. “I can turn yours off and leave mine on. You get nothing and I get signal.”
“Right. You should report this to your superiors.”
Hood thanked him and rang off.
My superiors.
He thought of how Lupercio had shown up at Suzanne’s home in Valley Center, at the Residence Inn in Torrance, at Madeline’s home in Bakersfield. How could he do that? Because he’s clairvoyant or because he was tipped? Who knew that these were the places where Suzanne would likely be?
Hood did. Marlon. Wyte almost certainly.
Marlon or Wyte, running Lupercio? Delivering Suzanne to the killing floor for a handful of diamonds?
But no one had known that she’d drive up to the Gray Fox Cabins in Lake Arrowhead.
So someone tracked her electronically. Someone who could kill one signal coming from her car and pick up another frequency.
And guide Lupercio here.
My superiors, Hood thought, who approved and arranged for the transponder on Suzanne’s car.
Hood began to feel the same sense of unreality that he had felt in Anbar, the sense of entering a world that only outwardly resembled the one he knew. After the murders of Jackson and Ruiz his soul had felt like an open wound that he wanted to hide, but now the wound had grown large enough to be seen on his face and heard in his voice. He could feel the new sunshine on it.