The car sat facing down the slope of the ravine north of Glendora, sunken on melted tyres, the empty, glassless windows like dark eyes that absorbed nothing of the daylight. Molten metal had made a shiny skirt for the front of the scorched vehicle, silver rivulets dried into tendrils in the sand. Jessica ducked under the police tape surrounding the car and held it up for Diggy. Her friend was surprisingly unsteady on the loose ground for a big man with wide, flat feet. He stumbled over a rock and had to right himself against the car, brushing cactus needles from the hem of his jeans.
‘Do we know this is the car?’ Diggy asked.
‘It’s a Honda, so that’s a start,’ Jessica said, checking the notes on her phone. ‘Some rangers reported it just four days ago, so the timing’s good. Urgh, the smell.’
The air tasted of burned rubber, petrol and leather. She looked out over the Glendora Mountain ranges around them, rolling, scrubby slopes. Cactus and mesquite on some of the mountainsides was chest high and so tangled it was impenetrable. Though she could see no movement, Jessica knew the sheer hillsides would come alive at night with howls and screams and squawks, mountain cats and coyotes digging rodents and rabbits out of tunnels, owls waiting for those brave little souls that escaped the paws and claws to venture out onto the rocky flats. This was a place of danger, of hunting, of feet scrabbling in sand and thorns hooking into flesh and blood spilling on stone. Whatever stage this had been in Dayly’s downfall, Jessica sensed that the girl had been chased here, up against the rocks and cliffs, cornered by some predatory thing.
Diggy was sweating as he jimmied open the back door of the car with a crowbar. The trunk was ajar and empty. That was how burned-out cars were treated by the LAPD. After the initial report, the vehicle was searched for bodies, drugs or weapons, then taped off and left to bake.
While Diggy checked the car, Jessica looked at the sand around the vehicle. There were the telltale footprints of rangers, police officers and perhaps a couple of looky-loos. But there were two trails that led off between the creosote bushes away from the car, away from the road, into the hills.
Stepping carefully, Jessica followed the trail to its conclusion, knelt and looked at the marks in the sand and gravel. There were scrapings she recognised from similar crime scenes she had seen in the past. The soft, wide indentations of a pair of buttocks and shoulders. Below them, maybe two or three feet down, sharp, curved semicircles: the heels of shoes digging in, trying to find traction. Someone on their back, struggling. There was no blood here, but the moons in the sand made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.
‘This doesn’t look good,’ Diggy said when she arrived back at the car.
‘I was about to say those exact words,’ she said. ‘I’ve got signs of a struggle over here.’
‘I’ve got this.’ He tossed her a tiny shred of metal. Jessica looked at the blackened, L-shaped piece in the light.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s part of a sim tray from an iPhone,’ Diggy said. ‘It pops out the side so you can put your sim card in the device. There’s a little door with a hole in it you have to open with a key. When I was in college I worked in a phone repair shop. I’d know that shape anywhere.’
‘So where’s the rest of the phone?’
‘Exactly,’ Diggy said. ‘That minuscule shred of the phone is all that I can find. The rest was probably consumed in the fire. We also have this.’ He placed a flat shard of burned metal on the bonnet of the car. Jessica had to peer closely at the object to discern what it was.
‘A laptop?’ she asked.
‘Just the base,’ Diggy said. ‘The screen has melted away. The extreme heat scorched the outside to a crisp. This was the keyboard.’
She watched him run his finger across a slash of burned black plastic melted to the top of the shard.
‘Laptop and phone in a burned-out car,’ Jessica said. ‘This is bad news. Blair Harbour said Dayly didn’t have anything on her when she robbed the gas station. Just a gun. No laptop. And if she’d had the phone with her, why would she have called Sneak from a payphone? Doesn’t make any sense that both should be here right now, with the car we know she was in.’
‘So, what . . .’ Diggy thought. ‘She’s stolen Blair’s car, gone back to her apartment and retrieved her phone and laptop?’
‘Possible,’ Jessica said. ‘Unlikely. Would she go back to the place where she was attacked just to retrieve these items? Or is it more likely she was attacked again here, and whoever had her phone and laptop brought them along and disposed of them in the car fire?’
‘The latter sounds more likely.’ Diggy gave a rueful sigh. ‘Will you tell the mother or keep it to yourself for now?’
‘I don’t know. Not much point. We won’t learn anything solid from this. The phone’s gone, and if this was Dayly’s laptop, any chances we have of searching it for clues are well and truly fried.’
‘Don’t lose heart.’ Diggy gave a shifty smile. ‘I’ve actually seen a laptop come back from a worse state than this.’
‘Come back?’
‘Yes, come back, return from the other side, be resurrected,’ he said. ‘Become the undead. Zombie tech.’
‘You think you could still get something readable off this?’ Jessica picked up the shard of laptop and watched chips of ash fall from it to the bonnet of the car. ‘It looks like burned tree bark.’
‘Stranger things have happened.’ Diggy took the remains of the laptop from her carefully. ‘First we have to figure out if it had a hard disk drive or a solid state drive. If a hard drive is exposed to contaminants, like soot or smoke, it damages the metal that holds the actual data. An SSD drive isn’t affected by particulate matter, though. The components might still hold some recoverable data inside the protective casing. Hard drive cases are generally sealed with an industrial-strength rubber gasket that can withstand temperatures of 620 degrees Fahrenheit.’
‘What temperature do cars burn at?’
‘About fifteen hundred degrees.’
‘Oh.’
‘But you never know. There are variables.’
‘You seem excited,’ Jessica commented.
‘Oh, I am.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve never done this before. There’s something almost archaeological and redemptive about it. As if we’re reassembling the artefacts destroyed by ISIL in Palmyra. All those shattered and burned and busted treasures meticulously put back together. If I hadn’t gone into forensics, I certainly would have pursued a career like that.’
Jessica nodded encouragingly and looked for a numberplate on the car. There was none. She lifted the hood to check the VIN number, took her phone from her back pocket to check it against the stolen car report Harbour had entered at the West LA station. As soon as she looked at the screen, it went dark. Unidentified number calling.
‘Hello?’
‘Is this Jessica Sanchez?’
‘It is.’
‘Listen up, bitch,’ the heavy, male voice said. ‘You need to stay away from Kristi Zea. She doesn’t want to talk to you, and she doesn’t want anything to do with the old case if it’s being reopened. If Kristi—’
‘Who is this?’ Jessica leaned back on the warm car and watched the horizon.
‘Just listen,’ the voice said. ‘Kristi will get a lawyer if she has to. She’ll come after you for harassment and emotional trauma. Psychological, uh, you know. Stress. Point is, you got no right to chase her around, and if she has to, she’ll sue your ass off for doing it.’
‘Oh, really?’ Jessica said.
‘Yeah, really, bitch.’ The man was pacing. Jessica could hear boots on a wooden floor. ‘But we won’t start out that way. The legal route is the nice way. That comes second. First, we start the not-so-nice way.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Jessica asked. ‘Come around my apartment and beat me up? Throw my shit around? Break my thumbs?’
‘If it gets to that,’ the man said.
‘Okay. Understood. Now how about you take a minute to listen, pal,’ Jessica said. ‘Kristi, you listen too.’
‘She’s not—’
‘I know she’s there. You’ve got her on speaker phone because you’re trying to make her feel better. You were hoping she could listen in while I whimper that I’m terrified by your threats and I’ll stay away. I’m guessing you’re a brother or a close friend, maybe someone she met drinking her guilt away at a piece of shit dive bar.’
There was silence on the line.
‘She called you up this morning, right?’ Jessica continued. ‘She spent the night crying and drinking and freaking out about my phone call last night. You said you’d set things straight. Show this bitch cop that Kristi is not alone, that she has people looking out for her. She said it was a bad idea. You demanded the number. Am I close to the truth here?’
Jessica heard an intake of breath but carried on before the man could speak.
‘You’re not going to come to my apartment and heavy me into leaving Kristi alone. Kristi’s not going to get a lawyer to make me go away. Both those options exist in a fantasy land where you, whoever you are, are willing to risk an assault charge for helping your friend, and Kristi is willing to stand in a courtroom in front of a judge while I explain to him why I’m so interested in talking to her. No; in reality, where we live, Kristi is going to sit down with me and answer my questions.’
‘Why would she do that?’
‘Because the kind of harassment you’re threatening to sue me for hasn’t even begun yet,’ Jessica said. ‘I’ve made one phone call so far. From here, I begin turning up unexpectedly in Kristi’s life. Maybe I pop into the bar she frequents and start talking to the local dropouts, poking around, demanding answers. I swing by her workplace and ask to speak to her boss. I knock on her mother’s door and invite myself in for tea. I find out who you are, and I pay a visit to you in the middle of the night, maybe with five SWAT guys and a search warrant. All the while, as I’m touring Kristi’s inner circle, I’m staying eagle-eyed for bullshit charges I can drop on the people in her life. After I’ve got Kristi’s friends in my hand, I start messing with her. I speak to her landlord. I flag her with the tax department. I report her to the ASPCA for kicking her dog.’
There was a scraping noise, and Jessica thought she heard hurried, muffled voices in the background of the call.
‘Tell her she needs to speak to me,’ Jessica insisted. ‘She needs to put things straight.’
The line went dead. Diggy gave an appreciative whistle.
‘You’d really do all that stuff to get Zea to talk?’ he asked.
‘I wouldn’t need to.’ Jessica tapped out a message. ‘I’ve done this a few times. You start with the mother’s house. As soon as you get to the mother, the kid folds.’
Jessica tried to focus. The Harbour case could wait. What she was seeing before her now had sent tingles of nervousness up her spine. Wherever Dayly Lawlor was, she needed help. Jessica sent a message to her forensic technology contact. She had been forced to go two states over to find an investigator who would help her track down the anonymous payer that had sent $800 to Dayly’s bank account. All the police resources she tried in California were either busy, annoyed by the Brentwood house situation or too amused by the video of her at Goren’s house to offer anything but clever quips. It had taken an hour and a half to find the current whereabouts of a woman named Mariana who had shared Jessica’s dorm room at the academy, who was now bunkered down in a basement lab in New Mexico.
You got anything on that anonymous account yet? Jessica asked. Her phone blipped almost instantly with a response.
I’ve got the guy, Mariana said. Sending address. But if you’re going to visit him, I’d suggest you take backup.