And the most devastating.
As Hunter read through it, he felt as if life had lost its logic.
He got up and began pacing the room, trying to put his thoughts in order. What to do next?
The clock on the wall showed 12:59 a.m.
There was no way he could wait until the morning.
Reaching for his cellphone, Hunter placed two calls. The second one was to his partner.
Eighty-one
Garcia had gotten home at around a quarter past nine in the evening. He had called Anna from the office to let her know that, once again, he wouldn’t be home in time for dinner. Like always, Anna had told him that it was OK. She said that she wasn’t planning on going to bed early anyway, so she would keep their dinner in the oven and they could heat it up when he got home, and still dine together.
Garcia and Anna had been together since their senior year in high school, and Garcia couldn’t have asked for a more supportive wife. Anna knew how much he loved his job. She’d seen how hard he’d worked for it and how dedicated he was. She understood the commitment and the sacrifices that came with being a detective in a city like Los Angeles, and she fully accepted them. But despite her incredible psychological strength, it was only natural that Anna felt scared sometimes. Scared that one day she’d get that phone call, or that knock on the door in the middle of the night, telling her that her husband wouldn’t be coming home again.
The truth was, after Hunter and Garcia’s last case, the one that had prompted Captain Blake to demand that they both take a two-week break, Garcia had been ready to quit the RHD Special Section.
Garcia was as fearless as fearless got, but his last investigation had brought Anna to within a whisker of death and that had scared him senseless. She meant everything to him, and if he lost her he would lose himself. He’d told his wife about his decision and Anna had been the one who had made him go back.
Tonight, after dining with his wife, Garcia dragged Anna into the shower with him. It reminded him of how they’d made love for the first time. After that, they both collapsed in bed, feeling completely exhausted.
Garcia thought he was dreaming when he heard a clattering sound coming from his right. He turned his face in that direction but kept his eyes closed.
Brrrrrrrrrrrr.
There it was again.
He let out a confused sigh, opening his eyes just enough to see his cellphone vibrating against the surface of his bedside table. It took another two seconds for his tired and sleepy brain to understand what was happening before he finally reached for it.
‘Hello?’ he answered in a drowsy voice, quickly getting to his feet and making his way out of the bedroom so as not to wake Anna.
Too late, she was already turning in bed.
‘Carlos, it’s Robert.’
‘Umm, Robert?’ Garcia asked, sounding a little unsure as to who Robert was. Suddenly, his brain engaged. ‘Robert.’ His voice urgent. ‘What’s going on? Have we got him? Have we got Mat Hade?’
‘No. Forget about that, Carlos. Nothing is what we thought it was. We were wrong.’
‘Wrong? Wrong about what, Robert?’
‘Everything.’
Eighty-two
Hunter had been driving for almost an hour when he finally spotted the tiny dirt path hidden between bushes to the left of the road he was on. With no signs, no indications of any sort and no illumination whatsoever, even someone who’d been looking for it, like Hunter had, could’ve easily missed it. Like Hunter had. He had driven back and forth along that same stretch of road twice before he at last saw the gap between the bushes.
He stopped and directed his headlights toward it.
‘Is that it?’ he asked himself, leaning forward against the steering wheel. ‘It must be. There’s nothing else out here.’
He left the road and his car disappeared between the bushes as if it’d been swallowed by the night.
The uneven path was full of bumps and holes and that, together with pitch-black darkness, forced Hunter to slow down to a tense crawl. After about three quarters of a mile and two bends, one left, one right, the shrubs and bushes that lined the sides of the dirt road became less dense, giving way to endless fields of nothing at all except dirt, foxtail cactuses and desert marigolds.
Hunter drove on, being as careful as he could to avoid the larger potholes. The smaller ones were inevitable. They practically were the road.
After another half a mile, the road bent left again before going up a small hill. As Hunter drove down the other side, the vegetation changed again. The marigolds were swapped for Joshua trees and desert willows. Dirt and foxtail cactuses were still everywhere. As Hunter drove around a denser concentration of cactuses, he thought he spotted something in the distance. Some sort of massive shadow. He immediately brought his car to a full stop and switched off the head-lights. Reaching for the pair of binoculars he always kept inside his glove compartment, he stepped out of the car.
As luck would have it, it was a cloudy, moonless night. No stars were visible either, which made it all way too dark for him to be able to see anything from where he stood. Looking for higher ground, Hunter climbed up on to the hood of his car, then on to its roof.
Still he saw nothing.
He needed to get closer.
Hunter got back into his Buick and, keeping the head-lights turned off, began moving again, this time even slower than before. He drove for another quarter of a mile before stopping, climbing on to his car and scanning the terrain before him as carefully as he could.
Nothing to his right.
Nothing directly in front of him.
Nothing to his... wait. He paused, leaned forward. There it was. Way up ahead and slightly to his left.
Eighty-three
From that distance, and in almost total darkness, Hunter struggled to understand what he was really looking at. It was some sort of construction. From the size of its shadow, it could be a medium-sized, two-storey house — the only issue was, it didn’t look like a house. The building was square in shape, like a big box, and dusky in color, which on such a dark night, out there in a desert, made it practically invisible. Hunter was surprised that he had managed to spot it, even with a pair of binoculars.
He calculated the distance between the building and where he was standing to be about a quarter of a mile. He got back into his car and reached for his cellphone.
Nothing. Not even half a bar of signal. Moving it about also made no difference. He was slap-bang in the middle of nowhere.
‘Great!’
Hunter decided to leave his car by the side of the dirt road and continue the rest of the way on foot. He’d be a lot quieter, and a lot less visible, that way.
He checked his HK Mark 23 pistol. It had a full clip loaded on to the weapon but Hunter was taking no chances. From the glove compartment, he picked up a flashlight and a second, fully loaded clip.
Despite still being another quarter of a mile away, Hunter moved stealthily, hiding himself as best as he could behind cactuses, trees and willows. He moved about fifteen to twenty yards at a time in a half-crouched position, stopped, got as close to the ground as possible and used his binoculars to check ahead. Everything looked as still as death.
He’d repeated the process five more times before he was able to spot something he hadn’t seen before — a black GMC Yukon parked to the right of the construction.
From his window, Marlon had seen the fake telephone engineer climb into a black GMC Yukon after he’d collected the Wi-Fi camera he had placed high up on the telephone pole.
Hunter breathed in, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and carried on moving forward, getting closer and closer until he was no more than forty yards away from the building. He positioned himself behind a cluster of willows and used his binoculars again. He’d been right. The building looked nothing like a house.