Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(12)

He removes the gun’s magazine and strips it with one hand, punching the bullets one after the other into the Ziploc he holds open with his other hand. Once the magazine is empty, he seals the bag and drops it inside his backpack. Then he inspects the chamber to make sure he didn’t leave a bullet sitting inside.

He inserts the empty magazine and returns the gun to its hidden holster.

Dark is falling. He needs to work quickly. But the temptation to study his surroundings is almost overwhelming.

The house has two bedrooms along a short, narrow tiled hallway. At the end of the hallway is the door to the small garage. Both bedrooms have only a thin band of clerestory windows; probably to protect them from the heat. The bulletproof glass they’re made of doesn’t have anything to do with the temperature outside. The living room has a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto the small courtyard. The glass here is also bulletproof, and he’s willing to bet it replaced what was once a sliding glass door. Now the only entrance to the courtyard is the house’s front door.

It’s the lawsuit against her father that financed this place. He’s sure of this.

The lawsuit was the last time she’d appeared in the press.

Jason kept all the clippings.

In the last interview Trina ever gave, she’d asserted she was asking for only enough money to start a new life for herself, something that didn’t involve profiting off the memories of the Bannings’ victims.

The message boards devoted to her and the killings had exploded with rage. She was a liar who didn’t give a whit about the victims, they’d claimed. And her lawsuit was just another form of self-promotion.

Under a string of aliases, Jason had tried to defend her, to blame Lowell Pierce for caring only about money and filling her head with junk science and never allowing her to tell her own story. But the other posters assailed him. They claimed his statements implied a personal relationship with Trina he couldn’t prove. And when he told them he would prove them all wrong someday, they’d banned him for violating some policy around threats that wasn’t in the forum’s guidelines. He could barely bring himself to care. He wasn’t like the rest of them. They pretended to weep for the victims so they could pore over the crime scene photos. They pretended to hate the Bannings because, like him, they aspired to their purity and greatness; they just couldn’t admit it.

And now he’s here, inside her house.

So fuck those hypocrites.

He’s hard-pressed to call the front room a living room because it looks more like a comfortable office than a place to relax. The desk and giant computer monitors—three of them, all wide-screen, fanned out across an L-shaped desk so that they almost surround whoever’s sitting at it—look like Hollywood’s idea of a NASA workstation. Her desk chair is coated in worn but soft-looking padding that suggests she spends more time there than anywhere else around the house.

It’s the bedrooms that are calling him, but what’s the sense in going through her belongings if he’s going to burn them all anyway?

She’s going to burn them, he corrects himself, once he manages to convince her of their future together.

Because by then she’ll get it. By then they’ll have had plenty of time out here alone together without the distractions of crowds, birth fathers, or restraining orders.

But for now he’s got the other guns to empty.

One down, two to go.





6

She stood up the minute Dylan handed her the pill.

It was a reflexive move on her part, and she’s not sure why she did it.

Seconds before, Dylan had been leaning toward her, through the several feet of space between his chair and hers. Maybe their proximity became too much for her, or maybe now that she has the pill in hand she wants to run from the office and swallow it in private before she loses her nerve.

At any rate, the fact that she’s now on her feet has left Dylan staring up at her awkwardly. Worse, it suggests she wants to end this meeting, when the truth is quite the opposite. The bright-orange pill burns a hole in her palm, it seems, and she’s full of questions about it.

“A what?” she asks.

“It’s a derivative of a benzodiazepine.”

“What’s that? An antidepressant?”

“No. It’s a very mild central nervous system depressant. It’s designed to be fast acting, but it’s also timed release, so it should remain relatively constant in your bloodstream for the next twenty-four hours. I want you to come back around this time tomorrow so we can assess.”

“Assess what?”

“How you respond to the drug. We can pull you off it right away if you don’t like the side effects.”

“OK. And the positive effects are supposed to be what exactly?”

“A rapid reduction in anxiety and fear-based thinking without the sedation effect of a heavier benzo or Valium. It doesn’t sound like you’re suffering from clinical insomnia, just a sleep disruption caused by conditional anxiety. This will attack the anxiety directly but in a measured and hopefully consistent way.”

“It’s new?”

“Excuse me?”

“This drug. Zyprox . . .”

“Zypraxon, yes. It’s brand-new actually. They’re just rolling it out now. I’ve got enough samples for us to have a little trial run before you decide if a prescription will work for you.”