Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(77)


It’s time. He can feel it. His cock can feel it. He’s desperately hard.

The light is fading, lacing the shade from the branches overhead with threads of true darkness. The brush on either side of the trail is as thick as he needs it to be. And it’s quiet, save for their twin, interposed footfalls. Another minute or two and she’ll notice him.

Another few minutes after that and the trail will rise, and the brush will thin out.

It’s now or never. Or more accurately, it’s now or start over. And he doesn’t want to start over. He can’t start over.

She failed the test. It’s decided.

After a deep, steadying breath, the man they call the Mask Maker accelerates.

He pulls the Talon air-weight baton from the thigh holster hidden underneath his running pants.

With the press of a button, he extends the baton to its full length.

Before she notices him inches behind her, he brings it down across the woman’s upper back with enough force to send her face-first into the dirt, her breath coming out of her in a desperate, ineffectual wheeze that sounds nothing like a scream.





27

When Julia Crispin was nineteen years old, she was raped at knifepoint inside her parked car after leaving a bonfire party on Mission Bay. It was the summer before her sophomore year at Yale, and when she returned to school a few months later, she brought with her a long, slender scar that snakes along her jugular vein to a spot an inch or two beneath her collarbone on her left side.

Julia is fifty-seven now and the CEO of Crispin Corp, one of the most successful surveillance technology companies in the world. Like Cole, she inherited her business from her father. Unlike Cole, she has considerably more experience in the CEO position, a fact of which she never fails to remind him. She’s a handsome woman with a long, fine-boned face, pale, freckled skin, deep-set blue eyes, and dark eyebrows that always make her appear as if she’s finishing up a frown. For as long as Cole’s known her, she’s worn her hair in a platinum Jackie-O bob. The scar’s still with her, and it has a tendency to peek above the collars of the lustrous silk blouses she favors. She’s never made an effort to conceal it with makeup. It’s like she’s daring people to ask her about it. Or better yet, reminding them of what she’s survived.

Cole can see the top half of it now, and he’d rather focus on it than the stoic expression on her face as she watches the microdrone surveillance footage of Charlotte Rowe and Luke Prescott taken that afternoon.

She’s watching the footage on a tablet he brought her, which his tech team assured him was air gapped, meaning never connected to the Internet. It’s also been stripped of any drive or device that could support a cellular or Wi-Fi connection. They transferred the footage onto it the old-fashioned way, with a portable hard drive.

Julia’s office is carved out of the earth underneath her sprawling glass-and-steel mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, which means it offers no view of the horses she keeps in the stable or the snaking front drive lined with willows and precisely placed beds of wildflowers. Down here, an ignorant visitor might assume the glass walls are designed simply to make the banks of television screens behind them disappear once they’re turned off. But the glass hides more than the televisions; behind them is another set of walls, steel encased, with enough electromagnetic shielding to deflect the surveillance efforts of the NSA.

It saddens him a bit that Julia’s office bears no photographic evidence of her accomplishments. No framed photos of her shaking hands with presidents or other CEOs. Just dark-glass walls; recessed, pinpoint track lights that can be made bright enough to simulate sunlight; spindly steel-and-glass furniture like the uncomfortable chair he’s sitting in now; and the persistent flicker of CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and Bloomberg News. But when your life’s work is developing cameras and recording devices that are all but invisible, maybe it’s bad form to broadcast your accomplishments.

“Is that a tree?” Julia asks without looking up from the tablet.

“Yes,” Cole answers.

“She’s kicking over a tree. With one foot.”

“It’s not a very big tree.”

“I can see how big it is. And the man watching her?”

“A police officer with the Altamira Sheriff’s Department. His name’s Luke Prescott. They were high school classmates.”

“And she’s showing him what she can do,” Julia says. “Lovely.”

When she reaches the end of the video, she sets the tablet down faceup. A tiny gesture, but one that seems to challenge the veracity, or at least the importance, of what she’s just seen.

“Microdrones took these?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Not ours, I presume.”

“If they were yours, I wouldn’t have lost four of them when the wind picked up, and I’d still be able to see her after dark.”

“I’m flattered. It is hard to find good help these days, isn’t it?”

“Why do you think I’m here?”

“Better microdrones?”

“Let’s talk about the footage.”

“I’m supposed to believe this woman is on Zypraxon?”

“I think it’s worth taking a closer look. Don’t you?”

“Where’s Dylan now?”

“He’s got a hideout in Arizona. A little tract house outside Tucson. I’m sure the neighbors don’t know who he is or what he’s done.”

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