Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(9)

Can she not see how desperate this is, how it smacks of someone denying the inevitable?

Chances are the system includes smoke detectors that disengage all the locks in case of a fire. But what if something else happened to her out here? What if she had a heart attack or was bitten by a snake and she couldn’t enter the code and so EMS couldn’t get to her?

Stupid. So stupid.

Not stupid, he reminds himself. Just misguided, that’s all.

He scans the words and numbers again.

The meaning of some are clear to him thanks to his study of Lowell Pierce’s book—bluebird, for instance, Joyce Collins, her birth mother’s maiden name—but the others he doesn’t understand. As he reads over them now, he feels a surge of jealousy.

The Savior knows why these words are precious to her. The Savior knows more about her than Jason’s managed to learn in a decade. Whoever the Savior is, they’ve come to the same conclusion Jason did years ago. That Trina was taught the cleansing power of murder at a young age, and with every day she refuses to put this lesson to good use, her soul dies a little bit more.

As evidenced by this secluded prison in which she now lives.

It’s literally in the middle of nowhere, this tiny house, surrounded by parched desert sliced by arroyos and dotted with sparse stands of blue paloverde trees that give only teasers of shade. On his walk in, he’d passed the old fence lines, spotted a few crumbling stakes. His Internet research into the area told him this used to be part of a sprawling housing complex for the workers in the copper mine just up the road, which probably explains its water and electrical lines. But the mine’s been closed for years, and most of the houses were abandoned after a big fire swept through the area. Trina’s is the only one within view.

A courtyard sits between the solid-metal entry door and the front door of the house itself, which he can’t see from where he stands. The wall is eight feet high. She poured a river of concrete along the top and studded it with huge, jagged shards of glass that give off rainbow reflections in the dusk. Did she set each piece by hand? If so, she didn’t do it to keep out snakes; she did it to stop him, and so the sight of all that jagged glass now makes him angry. But if he gets angry, he’ll get distracted, and that’s unacceptable.

BBIRD474

It feels like a wild guess. But it isn’t really.

The code’s the average length of most computer passwords; eight characters, with a mix of letters and numbers.

And how many times did he sit in the audience and listen to her tell the story of how she came to see the bluebird, the one she didn’t kill, as a symbol of her rebirth?

As for the numbers, 474 are the last three digits of her mother’s birthday, if you chop off the month, which is March. And in all her years of signing his books, her handwriting would always place the emphasis on the final letters in her name and not the first, as if her hand always needed a second or two to gather energy before exploding with it at the end. That’s why he’s assumed she would cut off some of the first few letters of the word bluebird and drop the number of the month in the sequence of digits in her mother’s birthday.

And it’s wrong.

Which shouldn’t surprise him. When it comes to Trina’s life story, bluebird isn’t the most secret of passwords. How many times did he sit in the audience and listen to her tell that story about the bird flying out of her hands right as the SWAT team exploded out of the woods?

He’s not willing to jettison the rest of his guess—not yet. He refuses to believe Trina has let go of her birth mother, and that’s part of her problem, her inability to see her mother’s death as a necessary sacrifice, a fundamental aspect of her rebirth. When it comes to the code, he just needs a word, a token, a thing from her more recent, and more secret, past. The life she made for herself after she legally changed her name and disappeared from that town in California where her grandmother’s friends had threatened to beat him to a pulp if he ever came back again.

He consults the list.

Altamira, Luanne (grandmother), Bayard Rock (Altamira landmark, used to visit with grandmother on her walks), Fisher Pit (copper mine near her house, closed 1986).

While he’s sure Bayard Rock is probably the most meaningful item on the list, it’s not exactly secret, a local landmark in a town where she’d lived while she was still Trina. And Fisher Pit, which is just up the road, isn’t exactly the most covert, either.

He should just wait. He should just wait until her headlights appear out of the darkness and then slip in through the reinforced-steel garage door as soon as she opens it. It won’t be the easiest maneuver, but it’s doable.

But where would he hide until then? There are no trees close to the house. There’s pretty much nothing close to the house. The nearest arroyo, where he hid his car, is a fifteen-minute walk if he moves at a clip, way too far for him to make it through the garage door before it closes. And that’s the idea, isn’t it. Nothing but wide-open desert on all sides of the house, no obstructions, easily surveyed with the night vision cameras she’s got attached to her security system.

I have to get in, he tells himself. If this is meant to be, then I’ll be able to get in.

While his gut tells him Fisher Pit is probably the basis of her code, he doubts she used a name that could be easily found on a map of the surrounding area. So he goes for the year it closed and adds it to his previous string of digits; 1986474.