'All right?' Harper asked.
'Just a minute.' She checked the opening side, and found the contact: 'No, it's alarmed,' she said. Harper came up, squatted, looked at the light. Anna aimed it at the patch of ceramic insulator set in the post. 'We've got one like it on the farm,' she whispered. 'There's a magnet in the gate and a needle in the post. When you move the gate, the needle goes with the magnet and hits a contact, and that sets off the buzzer inside.'
'Can't even climb over?'
'Nope. That'll push the gate down. Let's look at the fence.'
The barbed-wire fence showed a single strand of electric wire running along the top. 'Bottom should be okay,' Anna said. 'Let's find a low spot, where we can squeeze under.'
They found a spot fifty feet down the road, the desert brush ripping at their jackets as they slid under the wire. Anna stood, pulling pieces of dead brush from her hair.
'You okay?' Harper whispered.
'Yeah. Let's go.'
They jogged the first couple of hundred feet up the hill, but Harper was enough out of shape that he caught her arm and told her to slow down. Impatiently, she walked ahead of him, urging him along.
The hill seemed to go on forever, gently sinuous, always climbing. After ten minutes, they topped the first rise and saw the orange glow of a yard light. Harper caught her arm and said, 'Stop for a minute. We've got to talk.'
They squatted beside the road, looking slightly down at the ranch yard. The house was ahead and to the right, with an open yard further to the right. A light showed in what they knew was the office window, along with the blue glow of a computer monitor or television. Another light showed behind that, but from the same window, adding a slightly warmer glow. There was no movement in the window with the light: and the light had the stillness of an empty room.
To the far left of the house, they could just see the hulk of the barn; between the barn and the house, two buildingsa garage, Anna thought, and what must once have been a machine shed.
A hundred yards behind the house were two long gray-white structures, almost too far out to recognize; but Anna thought that they must once have been chicken coops. Directly behind the house, a hundred feet back, the beginning of the corral complex.
As Anna squatted by the road, picking out the main features of the ranch, she could smell the broken brush beside the road, and the dirt beneath their feet: like Wisconsin on a dry summer's night, but with the special peppery pungency of the desert.
'Don't see your car,' Harper said. 'Maybe he ditched it in town. Wherever he unloaded the kayak.'
'But then he'd have to transfer Pam.'
'Yeah. unless he killed her at your place, and left her in the car.'
Harper said it thoughtlessly, but the image of Pam curled in the trunk of the Toyota struck Anna with a vivid force, and she groaned, a soft exhalation.
'What?'
'God, if she's dead.'
'Let's cross behind the barn, check the out-buildings,' Harper whispered. 'That'll give us cover coming up to the house.'
'All right.'
They slid to the left, staying close to the underbrush as they moved into the opening around the house. Once away from the driveway, the land opened up into sparse pasture, dotted with clumps of brush. Anna used little squirts of light to guide them past the house to the barn, around the barn to the back, and then, crouching, with Harper's rifle hovering over her head, into the barn itself.
The barn was empty, but redolent with the odor of horse manure and hay. They checked the ground floor, found a range of horse-keeping equipment and stacks of feed supplement on a line of pallets.
'All right,' Harper said. 'Machine shed.'
They went out the back of the barn again, around the side, crept across a short open space to the machine shed, knelt by a window, listening. After a minute, Anna put her head up, peeked through the window. Could see nothing at all. Squeezed the flash, caught a quick glimpse of red.
'I think it's there, the car,' she breathed in Harper's ear. 'Something red in there.'
'Jesus.'
They slid to the front corner of the shed. Like the garage, the shed was old, probably pre-World War II, and the sliding doors hung from rusty overhead tracks. Harper reached around the corner and gave one of the doors a shove, and it moved a few inches. He pushed again, and got another foot.
'We can get in. Move slow, stay low,' he said. He went around the corner, and Anna followed, watching the window in the house. When she was inside the garage, Harper slowly pushed the garage door back in place.
Anna turned, wrapped her fist around the head of the flashlight, and turned it on: the beam caught the fender of her Toyota, played down the side. 'That's it,' she said. 'That's mine.' She played the beam across the back, onto the plates: 'Yeah, that's mine,' she said.
'Kill the light.'
Anna killed the light and they both moved toward the car. Harper touched a window, opened the passenger door, slowly, carefully, felt in front and in the back. Nothing.
'Can you pop the trunk?'
'Yeah. We'll have to go around.'
Anna scuttled around the car, felt up the door to the window. The window was down three or four inches, enough to get her arm through the gap. She stretched into the car, trying to reach the dome light.
'What're you doing?' Harper whispered.
'If you open this door an inch, the light comes on,' Anna said. 'I'm trying to shut it off.'
She fumbled with the switch, said, 'I think that's it,' and tried the door. No light. The trunk-opener lever was just in front of the seat, and she pulled it, heard the trunk pop, and crawled behind the car. Harper was pushing the trunk lid up, and Anna shone the flash into it.
The trunk was empty, but Harper ran his fingers the width of it once, twice, then stopped, pressed, and lifted his fingers toward Anna. They were black in the light. He pulled them back, sniffed, and he said, 'Blood. Not much. So she probably was alive when he took her out of here.'
'How do you know?'
'Why take her out if she's dead?'
Anna nodded, and crawled toward a window facing the house. 'So he's here. Now what?'
'I was afraid. What's that?'
Anna looked to the right, saw the splash of light off the brush beside the house.
'Car coming up the hill,' she said. Anna heard the slide of the rifle as Harper jacked a shell into the chamber. She fumbled the pistol from her pocket as the lights grew brighter on the trees.
Ten seconds later, a pickup pulled into the yard, and a woman hopped out and stormed toward the porch. They could see her face when she first opened the truck door, and her figure as she hurried under the yard light to the porch.
'That's Daly,' Harper said.
'Jeez, do you think she knows?' Anna asked.
'She looks mad about something.' The woman fumbled at the door, unlocking it, then pushed inside and flicked on a light. She slammed the door behind her, but before she did, they heard her shout, 'Steve?'
'Wonder what happened?' Harper asked.
'I don't know, but if he's still in the house, and we want to move up, this is the time. If he's in there, it sounds like he'll have his hands full,' Anna said.
They crawled back out through the garage door, circled back around the barn, into the darkness of the brush, and came up behind the house, near the corrals. An animal made a spitting sound as they passed: 'What the hell was that?' Harper whispered.
'I don't know; I hope it doesn't bite.'
They stopped at the side of the corral, and looked across the intervening fifty feet at the house.
'Gonna have to decide something,' Harper said.