THE SHADOWS BEHIND THE HOUSE
Gaia could feel eyes on the back of her neck as she came back out to the sidewalk. She didn’t turn around, but she was pretty sure the waitress and the other diner patrons were still watching her.
And the man in the suit.
Gaia wasn’t sure what it was about that man that had caught her attention. And she wasn’t about to go back for another look. She’d had just about enough of Moscone’s Diner and its singularly unhelpful patrons. And all that man had done was sit in the shadows and watch her. Nothing so unusual in that.
Except that she knew better. One thing Gaia had learned from even the rudimentary amount of FBI training she’d had was that you had to pay attention to your instincts. Not trust them necessarily (in fact, that could be a terrible mistake) but at least be aware of them. And something about the tall, gaunt man in the diner was sticking with her. Blue eyes, she told herself. Close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. Not a military cut—a little longer. Needed a shave. Clothes have seen better days—suit a bit wrinkled, white shirt yellowing a bit.
Anything else?
Like Dad, Gaia realized. The thought gave her a strange pang. She hadn’t seen her father since her Stanford graduation—since that unforgettable afternoon when this whole crazy thing had started, the day she’d taken a high dive off a campus roof and saved three hundred people from ten pounds of exploding C-4 plastique. The guy in the diner reminds me of my father, that’s all. Dad, if things had never gone his way—if he’d fallen down on his luck and never quite bounced back.
That was all.
Standing beneath the bleak white sky, Gaia gazed back at the house across the street. It was her next stop, obviously. Her only choice was to go back and give the place a much more thorough search.
Unfortunately, nothing had changed in the few minutes she’d been across the street. The door was still shut tight, and the house was still silent and unmoving.
So is Catherine in there or not?
Craning her neck, Gaia looked straight overhead. Squinting into the sky, she could see the rusted-out wires running from a nearby phone pole and over to an ancient-looking metal box attached right beneath the house’s cracked eaves. The telephone line.
That’s got to be it, she told herself. That’s got to be the line that leads to the mystery modem. She still couldn’t quite believe it, but Lyle had sounded so sure.
Facing the creaky porch steps again, Gaia was very conscious of wasting time. She kept fighting off images of Catherine bound and gagged somewhere in the darkness behind that door, waiting for her to stop playing games and come get her. Looking at the front door’s rusty doorknob, she knew she could break the door down with one good shove, but there was a little problem of federal law—the law that said she couldn’t enter this house without an invitation or a search warrant. And a search warrant was flat-out impossible—it meant a judge, and a hearing, and actual FBI authorization, none of which she had. And it meant time—at least a day’s delay. It was out of the question.
She glanced back over her shoulder. The reflections in the diner window made it impossible to see whether she was being watched—and at this point the last thing she needed was someone calling the bureau and checking up on her. A young blond woman was just here, Gaia imagined the waitress saying into the phone. Claimed to be FBI—waved a badge but didn’t seem to know what she was doing. Then she went across the street and broke into that house.
Casually, as if she was taking a scenic walk, Gaia strolled to the left, heading across the dirt yard and around the side of the house. Her footsteps sank into the soft ground as she walked. Brushing a stray strand of hair away from her face, she sneaked a glance back at the diner and the sidewalk. Nothing. Nobody around. She kept going and, once she was out of view of the street, she reached under her jacket and pulled out her gun.
The weeds got higher as she moved into the shadows behind the house. She could smell the stink of garbage getting stronger. Without looking down, she could tell she was walking on old beer cans and God knows what else in those tall weeds. The garbage smell grew stronger still, and Gaia could see why. Black plastic trash bags were strewn everywhere.
She tried not to think about what could be hidden in this disgusting backyard. It would take a team of five agents most of an afternoon to go through a place like this, carefully bagging and tagging everything and collecting chemical and forensic evidence. Gaia remembered a story Agent Crane had told them about an innocent-looking Idaho housewife who’d had two bodies buried in the icy ground behind her trailer home.
She finally sidled up to the back door, holding her gun straight out. She tried to stick to procedure, looking around for all her “danger spots”—the spots where she was vulnerable to an attack. There was a laundry line strung with bedsheets over a fence behind her—no sniper spots, no danger areas. Good. The other direction, she saw dark overhanging trees and more garbage bags—fine. No danger areas. Raising the gun, she reached with her left hand and rapped on the door.
“Hello?” she called out. “Anybody home?”
Nothing. Her own reflection looked back at her from the cracked glass of the door. She rapped again more loudly
Her shadow on the door suddenly deepened—a cloud bank had shifted and the sky had darkened. Somewhere in that brief gust of wind, as Gaia held her breath, she swore she’d heard the faintest voice coming from inside the house. Catherine? No—it was a male voice. Very indistinct, and very far away. Probably the television.
Now she was using every ounce of her will to fight off the impulse to break in.
Late at night, in their dorm room, Gaia and Catherine had gone through all the books, memorizing the guidelines for criminal investigation and the rules of evidence. Catherine’s memory was impeccable—nearly as good as Gaia’s—so they’d made fast work of it. A federal agent may not enter upon private property, Gaia recited to herself now, unless sufficient evidence exists that a criminal act or acts or the reckless endangerment of civilians is in process within said property, such that the agent’s intervention is necessary to prevent such crime from occurring or concluding.
The blurred, faint male voice kept talking inside the house. She could hear it for sure now. It sounded very much like a television—the rapid-fire delivery of a commercial announcer. Now she could hear a female voice, too, and background music. Definitely a television.
But it could be a crime in progress, she convinced herself. It could be.
“Here goes,” she muttered, sighing heavily. With the complete knowledge that she was crossing a line that she couldn’t uncross, Gaia pulled back and slammed her shoulder into the door.
With a tremendous crack, the door lock fell to the ground and the door swung inward. It gave so quickly that Gaia nearly lost her balance, stumbling forward into the darkness. She kept her grip on the gun, immediately whipping her body to one side, out of the bright doorway where she knew she presented a perfect target.
THE GUN YOU COULDN’T SEE
The smell hit her first—a rank kitchen aroma of stale air, dirty dishes, rotting pizza boxes, and accumulated garbage. As her eyes adjusted, Gaia began to see dimly through the blackness. Dust motes danced in the light from the doorway. Glancing at the door itself, Gaia saw that there would be no way to hide the obvious fact that she’d broken in. The entire edge of the wooden door frame was splintered apart, with shards of splintered wood sticking out in all directions.
I heard a sound, Gaia imagined herself telling a judge and jury. I heard voices—I heard a threatening male voice. I thought I could hear my friend. I knew my friend was in danger.
“Anybody home?” Gaia called out.
No answer. As her eyes continued to adjust, Gaia could see a calendar tacked to the peeling wallpaper above the filthy old-fashioned sink. It was a wildlife calendar. It showed a dark green photograph of a wooded glade, where a single yellow-eyed owl gazed out at the camera. Gala flicked her head back and forth, checking the room’s entrances. There was a narrow, closed door that was probably a broom closet. Moving cat-like toward it, Gala leveled the gun at the door, took a deep breath, and kicked it open. Two long-handled mops leaned on a wall in the gloom within.
To Gaia’s left, a doorway led into another room. Now she could hear the murky voices more clearly, but it was still impossible to make out what they were saying.
“Hello?” Gaia called out. “FBI,” she added—more to herself than to anyone else.
If there was anyone else. Pivoting through the kitchen door, gun raised, Gaia entered a narrow living room with a low ceiling and shag carpeting. A weak light shone through the blinds to the left and right—the blinds she’d been unable to peer through moments before. More cardboard pizza boxes littered the floor. Gaia kicked them out of the way as she walked.
The smell was worse. Somebody has been here, Gaia realized. Recently—that’s what the smell means. Pizza and dirty dishes from a week ago at most; probably more recent.
She suddenly noticed the name on the delivery bills that were taped to the pizza boxes. JAMES ROSSITER.
Suddenly a muffled male voice called out, “Time to bet it all!”
The voice had her raising the gun and whipping her head back and forth, her blond hair flying as she tried to localize its source. “Join host Bobby Shoshone and twelve thousand dollars in cash prizes on everybody’s favorite steeplechase game after these messages!”
A television. Gaia winced, trying to restrain a sneeze caused by the dust. The voices had been coming from a TV. But now, from inside the house, Gaia finally realized the sound was coming from beneath her—from underground.
Finally she noticed the detail she’d missed. In front of her, between two fraying fabric wall coverings, was another closed door—and down at its extreme bottom edge she could see a thread of bright yellow light. There was no question—the television sound had come from there.
Basement, Gaia realized. Someone’s in the basement. Rossiter or someone else.
Catherine.
Gaia knew how to walk silently. She moved toward the door, gun held to one side, staring at the thin line of light along the filthy shag carpeting. In her mind, Gaia was already calculating her move—how to open the door and get through it.
Going through a door is maybe the most important skill an FBI agent has to possess, Special Agent Jennifer Bishop had lectured the trainees. It can literally mean life or death. Bishop knew what she was talking about. She went on in graphic detail that day, telling scare stories of top-notch agents who’d been cut down in their prime because they didn’t know how to get through a door or had done it wrong just once and gotten a bullet in the face. Gaia had concentrated very hard on those training exercises. All the martial arts skills in the world couldn’t save you from the gun you couldn’t see.
Jake, Gaia thought sadly. Jake found that out.
She angrily shook the image from her head—which, she was realizing, was becoming easier to do as the months and years went by. She stopped thinking about her dead boyfriend and the bullets in his chest and reached forward to open the door, swinging it open and diving through it. She swung her body back and forth to cover all the angles and crouched at the head of the stairs, the gun held straight out in front of her.
She was in a small, sooty alleyway looking down a flight of narrow wooden stairs. The stairs led down into the darkness, and the television sound was much louder. She could hear the frenzied applause of the studio audience, no doubt welcoming Bobby Shoshone and his twelve thousand dollars in cash prizes.
“Catherine?” Gaia called out. Her voice echoed in the stale air. Her shoes creaked on the wooden steps as she descended. The gun didn’t waver—she could hold its muzzle steady, like Bishop had taught them. She glanced quickly backward as she moved.
“Whoever’s down there,” Gaia called out, reaching the doorway at the foot of the basement stairs, “this is the FBI. Throw down your weapons and put your hands up.”
All according to the book, but there was no response. The shouting of the television crowd continued.
Either nobody’s there, Gaia thought, or I’m going to get a big surprise when I turn the corner.
Being fearless was often synonymous with a lack of good judgment, so Gaia brazenly turned the corner without a second thought. She covered the room with the gun, left, right, center, before she even recognized what she was seeing. She knew some trainees who couldn’t manage to keep their eyes open when they did this—the fear made them wince and shut their eyes, and, as Bishop told them, they were as good as dead. But not Gaia. Her eyes were wide open now.
THIS TWILIGHT LONE HOUSE
The basement was dark, wide, and badly lit. The ceiling was obscured by hanging pipes. Some of them were leaking. The floor was dark gray cement, covered in dust. The dust revealed several sets of footprints, and Gaia forced herself to stay in one place, midway through the doorway, so she wouldn’t smudge the footprints before she could read them.
A large worktable stood near the center of the cluttered room. A large, humming fluorescent light hung above it from a pair of new-looking chains. The table, Gaia realized, was made from an old Ping-Pong table whose net had been removed. The table was swept clean, its pale green surface reflecting the harsh light. A small portable television stood in the corner of the table, showing a flickering, blurry image of the famous Mr. Shoshone, holding a microphone and joking with his studio audience. As she came into the room, Gaia reached over, covering her fingers with her sleeve, and flicked off the TV.
The silence was shocking. Now she could hear the clicks and hums of the house’s heating pipes and the ticking of a small digital clock on the worktable. She couldn’t hear anything else. She kept the gun drawn.
Opposite the worktable was an old-fashioned wooden desk. It was covered in papers and loose-leaf binders. A large, fairly new computer monitor stood in the center of the desk behind a computer keyboard and a mouse.
The computer, Gaia saw, was connected to a phone line that looked recently installed. A fresh new phone cable ran up the wall, stapled every two feet, and disappeared into a hole in the ceiling. Gaia knew the procedure to test the line for a phone number ID, but she already knew what the number was. This was the computer that had accessed Catherine’s program. There was no doubt about it.
At that moment, however, the computer was turned off. Its screen was dead black, a dark glass eye.
Gaia looked at the worktable. Her eyes grazed along its smooth hardboard surface. There was nothing to see but little snips of wire, each about an inch long, in different colors. No big deal—but there was something about the image that nagged at her: those snips and that digital clock near the stained cement wall somehow looked familiar.
“Whatever you see, file it away,” Agent Crane had lectured back in Quantico. “It doesn’t have to make sense or be important. If you don’t understand what it means, just file it away in your mind—and keep those mental files organized because you never know what you’ll need to know later on. It’s impossible to predict which detail will crack the case.”
Gaia doggedly filed away the multicolored wire snips—and suddenly she forgot all about the worktable and its contents. Now that she had moved near the center of the room, she saw something she’d missed before.
Behind the desk, in the shadows against the wall, was a cot—a low-slung, canvas-and-steel camp cot, the kind you’d find at an army/navy surplus store. The cot was covered in a dark, plaid wool blanket that didn’t look particularly clean. As she got closer to the cot, she saw that the blanket was turned down, revealing surprisingly clean-looking white sheets and a white cotton pillow.
Carefully, making sure not to touch anything, Gaia leaned her face close to the pillow and took a deep breath. She wrinkled her nose in advance at the rank smell of the room, which seemed to penetrate everywhere. But through the stale air and the decaying aromas of pine cleanser and old food, there was another smell.
Shampoo, Gaia realized. Suddenly her eyes were nearly watering. It wasn’t just the pungent, citrus aroma of the Neutrogena hair care product. It was the fact that it was so familiar. It was a smell she’d know anywhere. That was the thing about smells—she never forgot them, even years later, even if she thought she had. Her mother’s spicy lilac perfume or the faint smell of Tide and ivory soap on Ed Fargo’s shirt collars—when she smelled them again, the years melted away like fog and she was back in time, just like that. And, this was a much more vivid and recent smell. It wasn—t hard for her to remember her roommate—s shampoo—she had smelled it every day.
Snap out of it, Gaia told herself angrily. Don’t cry.
But it was a near thing. She could feel her eyes stinging as her face moved toward the Neutrogena-scented bed—and she saw, distinctly, two short black hairs on the pillow.
Catherine.
It was all true then. She had been here—in this filthy basement, in this twilight zone house on this random Baltimore street, miles from Quantico or anything else.
When? When were you here, Catherine? And where the hell did you go?
Gaia forced herself to blink back the tears as she stood up, brushing her hair from her face. Had James Rossiter held her here, terrified, screaming fruitlessly in this dark basement? Had Catherine awakened in the middle of the night, blind with fear as she remembered where she was? Did she cry into this white pillow, wondering what would happen to her?
And what did happen to her?
Come on, come on, Gaia told herself impatiently. Be professional. You’re FBI—don’t forget it.
But she didn’t feel professional right then. Her throat was aching and her eyes were stinging with the lingering smell of the shampoo. How many times had she lounged on her dorm bed on a Sunday morning, the one day they could relax and not worry about calisthenics and training drills, flipping through a magazine while Catherine sailed into the room in a towel, her face looking naked without its tortoiseshell glasses, her wet hair brushed back in black rivulets from her pretty face, filling the room with that Neutrogena smell? Come on, Moore, she’d say, her toothbrush dangling from her mouth and distorting her voice. I think it’s pancakes today. You’re coming with me. A twenty-year-old girl cannot live on Froot Loops alone.
Gaia stood motionless in the center of the basement, her hand gripping the Waither automatic, gazing down at the cheap, narrow cot, holding back tears. If she had been in a better mood, she might have allowed herself a moment of pride at successfully getting this far into the investigation. But she felt too helpless. What investigation? Gaia told herself angrily. The duffel bag with the blood, Lyle’s phone trace, this address—she had no idea what it all meant.
I may not be able to save her, Gaia realized. She may already be dead.
No. Gaia firmly shook her head. She was going to find Catherine, and she was going to save her. There was absolutely no question about it. She just had to pull herself together and start thinking like a field agent.
Tearing her eyes away from the cot, Gaia stared at the desk. She wondered if she should risk turning on the computer. Some machines had passwords or detectors that protected them from prying eyes—Gaia had heard stories from her instructors about criminal data that were lost forever because some overzealous agent had flipped computers on, causing them to self-erase. If this was a legitimate investigation, Gaia would already be on a police radio, demanding that an electronics team come recover the computer and bring it to the crime lab’s digital investigation center. But she couldn’t do anything like that now. She was on her own.
Gaia wasn’t sure what to do about the computer—it was the strongest link to Catherine and, maybe, the key to what she had been brought here for.