Finally a man came out and handed Burt a check. I recognized him. I’d watched him through the window of Pastor Reggie Atlas’s office last Sunday, tidying up the Cathedral by the Sea courtyard after the hot dog, burger, and donut extravaganza. Same clothes. Same blond buzz cut, ruddy face, and pit-bull ears. Same black golf shirt and khakis and shiny black duty boots.
Burt examined the check and seemed to be trying to get Pit Bull Ears into a conversation, but no luck. The man looked down at Burt with undisguised amusement and I wondered if things would escalate. Burt hates being treated like he’s short. It’s one of the few things that gets to him.
But the man went back inside without incident, and the front door closed silently. Burt slid the check into his wallet with the bills. The window washers got into their truck.
A moment later the dust and the shimmering waves of heat swallowed that truck whole, and it was gone.
18
Burt’s hard-won pictures jumped to life on the computer monitor in my home office. Seven images in all, counting the mystery freezers. Burt was unhappy that he couldn’t shoot the farmhouse interiors because the house was full of people. And that the barn windows were shuttered.
But he had managed to sneak four shots of the hangar’s interior. Behind the tractors, ATVs, and other work vehicles that had been visible through the roll-up doors stood two long work benches. Hard to tell what kind of work, if any, was done on them. Bench vises, electric sanders/polishers, a drill press, a band saw, coffee cans of what looked like nuts and bolts, soldering guns, toolboxes.
Burt frowned at the screen, scrolled back and forth between the images. “I could only get four shots before the big guy came back in,” he said. “Every time I tried again, there he was. A lion tattoo on one palm. He introduced himself as Connor Donald.”
Connor Donald, I thought. Muscle Blond. My attacker. Leader of the pack.
I booted up my tablet and entered his name in the IvarDuggans.com search field. Then set the dedicated wasp-cam laptop on the desk.
And once again let my eyes roam Burt’s shots of the inside of the Paradise Date Farm hangar.
“What’s that in the background, Burt? It looks like a security-screen door. The perforated steel ones you can see through from inside but not from the outside.”
“That’s exactly what it is. Donald went in and came out four times that I saw. Used a key each time.”
“No one else?”
“Just him.”
How I would have loved to see through that security-screen door.
Burt and I turned our attention to the custom laptop that Dale Clevenger had built and loaned us. It was dedicated to receive the live feeds from his four wasp cameras. It was large for a laptop, very heavy, and encased in red aluminum. I’d opened it and propped it up at one end of the desk.
Clevenger’s four wasp-cams were motion-activated and the batteries were good for eight hours of streaming. The power shut down automatically after thirty seconds of inactivity. You could check the remaining battery life for each camera. Dale had programmed the laptop computer so all four cameras could stream at once, the screen quartering itself to accommodate them. From Dale’s computer, the live video could be sent to other devices, either live or later.
Wasp-cam one was up now, a view of the main house. We watched a silver Expedition roll into a parking place in front of the house and stop on a pillow of dust. Adam Revell and his partner got out and headed into the house.
“On the left is Revell,” I said, “Daley’s acquaintance from Alchemy 101 nightclub. And possibly one of the six helmets who put me in my current condition. The other guy I don’t know.”
A few seconds later, the screen split in half for the camera-one feed — two date pickers trundling from one of the storage sheds with empty wicker baskets in both hands. They were talking. Waves of heat shimmered around them. Dale Clevenger’s video was very clear. As if on cue, camera four came to life on the laptop screen when an authentic wasp landed on it, legs straddling the lens, wings fanning in the sunlight as it checked things out.
By then, my disorganized thoughts were trying to advance, lining up like swells from different directions but headed for the same beach:
Daley Rideout.
Connor Donald.
SNR Security — khakis, black golf shirts, and silver Expeditions.
Uniforms and camouflage. Pistols, boots, and tattoos.
A barn full of schoolchildren and a cache of modified game freezers and protective gear.
An all-white lineup.
“Burt, who are these people and what are they doing?”
“They are Americans, acting out their version of the American Dream.”
“But what does keeping Daley Rideout have to do with the American Dream?”
“It makes sense to somebody,” Burt said.
But none to me. And more important, where was she and what had they done with her? A cool tingle came from the old boxing scar on my forehead. I tried to be open and receptive. I tried to quiet my mind and let the scar do its magic. Then it stopped. No tingle, no warning, no guidance. I’d failed to hear its message. My scar is no parlor trickster and will not perform on cue.
So I stared at my desktop monitor, at Burt’s hard-won picture of the unrevealing interior of the metal hangar, confronting the terrible truth that Daley Rideout had been gone for nearly a week and I had failed to retrieve her. Seven days is statistically disastrous for abducted children. The small candle in this darkness was that she’d been seen alive more recently on the beach at San Onofre, and very early the next morning at a convenience store in San Clemente.
IvarDuggans.com had precious little information on Adam Revell, but an image of his California driver’s license confirmed that I had the right guy.
Connor Donald was another story.
His picture was dated three years ago. Same casually handsome face. Shorter hair then. He was square-jawed, with a focused and present look in his eyes.
“Who would have thought that?” asked Burt. “Dumb-looking beefcake like him?”
Burt had already read the IvarDuggans bio. He reads faster than anybody I’ve ever known. He can absorb and retain the information on a book page or a monitor screen after looking at it for six or eight seconds. He once mentioned a speed-reading program his parents had given him for his fifth birthday, this plastic gadget with a long rectangular window through which phrases would pass as fast as you could push a lever. He said he got so fast it was like reading thoughts. He sold it to a friend and bought cherry bombs. He also claimed that his uncorrected vision was 20/10 and actually improving with age, attributable to homeopathic remedies.
“Give me a minute, Burt, will you?”
“A wet dose of arnica 6C and a daily euphrasia douche would help your vision a lot, Roland.”
“Noted.”
Our Connor Donald was twenty-nine years old, born in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, graduated top of his class from a public high school and got a football ride to Penn State. Quit the team after one season, forfeiting the money to study physics and philosophy. Graduated summa cum laude, hired by JPL, moved on to Aero-Dynamics in Orange County, California; then General Atomics of San Diego.
“A rocket scientist,” I said.
“And more.”
Four years ago, Donald had joined a Christian mission — Lions of the Lord — in Somalia, sponsored by the Western Evangelical Alliance, which, I remembered, was matching the Cathedral by the Sea’s Onward Soldiers Fund donations one-to-one. The adventure had turned into a nightmare when three of the missionaries and six of their armed bodyguards were murdered by Somali rebels. I recalled the gruesome horror, well covered by the press and media. One of the slaughtered ministers was a San Diego woman.