The Boy from the Woods(31)
Still, they happened. And that could be the case here.
When the second and third motion detectors kicked in, it became clear that the car had no intention of turning around. That meant that someone was looking for him.
Wilde lived in a customized spheroid-shape pod called an Ecocapsule. The Ecocapsule was a micro smart house or off-the-grid eco-abode or compact mobile home, whatever you wanted to call it, created by a Slovakian friend he met while serving in the Gulf. The structure resembled a giant dinosaur egg, though Wilde, using five different matte colors, had painted it camouflage to keep it hidden from view. The total living space was small, under seventy square feet, one room, but it had all he needed—a kitchenette with a cooking plate and mini fridge, a full bathroom with water-saving faucet and showerhead and an incinerator toilet, which turned waste into ash. The furniture was build-ins—table, cabinets, storage, a folding bed that could be either a twin or double—all made from lightweight honeycomb panels with an ash-wood veneer finish. The egg exterior was made from insulated fiberglass shells overlaid on a steel framework.
The Ecocapsule was—no reason to pretend otherwise—supercool.
There were those who would assume from the dwelling that Wilde must be an “eco-nut” or extremist. He wasn’t. The capsule gave him privacy and protection. It was self-sustainable and thus totally off the grid. There were photovoltaic power cells on the roof and a pole with a wind turbine that could be mounted when he needed more battery charge. The spheroid shape made collecting rainwater easy, but if there was a dry spell, Wilde could add water by any source—lake, stream, a hose, whatever. The water would then be cleaned via reverse-osmosis water filters and UV LED lamp, making it instantly potable. The storage tank and water heater were adequate for one man, though Wilde would confess to enjoying luxuriating under Laila’s jet-propulsion showerhead and seemingly limitless supply of hot water.
There was no washer and dryer, no microwave, no television. He didn’t really care. His electronic needs consisted of a laptop and phone, which were easy enough to power up in the capsule. There were no thermostats or light switches—all of those sorts of functions were performed via the smart-home app.
The pod was also easy to put on a trailer and move, something Wilde did every few weeks or months, even if the move was only fifty or a hundred yards. At this stage of the game, it was probably overkill to move that often, but when his home stayed in one place too long, it felt to him as though the pod (and thus he himself?) were taking root.
He didn’t like that.
Right now, Wilde was standing outside the gull wing door, taunted by that DNA site link. The sensors and cameras, all set up to solar power cells, streamed digital videos to his smart device. He took a look as the car on the screen—a red Audi A6—came to a stop. The driver’s door opened. A man half fell out and took some time to right himself. Wilde recognized him. They had met only once.
Bernard Pine, Naomi’s dad.
“Wilde?”
Wilde heard him through the microphones in place. He was still too far away to hear him without that. He hurried down the familiar path toward the road. The hike was a little more than a quarter mile. He had a weapon in his pod—a standard military-issue Beretta M9—but he saw no reason to pack it. He didn’t like guns and wasn’t a good shot. The night at Maynard Manor, when he’d taken the gun off Thor, he’d been glad that he hadn’t been required to fire it, not so much because he didn’t want to hurt anyone, but because from that distance, Wilde’s marksmanship with a handgun could kindly be described as suspect.
Wilde silently came up behind Bernard Pine.
“What’s up?”
Pine startled and spun toward him. Wilde wondered how he had learned about this spot, but it wasn’t really that much of a secret. This was how you contacted Wilde. People knew that.
“I need your help,” Pine said.
Wilde waited.
“She’s missing again,” Pine said. “Naomi, I mean. She didn’t run away this time.”
“Did you contact the police?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
He rolled his eyes. “What do you think?”
They thought, of course, that she ran away again. Her Challenge game, Pine explained, had been exposed as a hoax, which just fueled the school bullies. The taunts intensified. Naomi had grown even more despondent. For the police, there was also the Boy (or in this case, Girl) Who Cried Wolf aspect of the whole thing too.
“I’ll pay you,” Pine said. “I’ve heard…” He stopped.
“Heard what?”
“That you do stuff like this. That you were a hotshot investigator or something.”
That, too, was an overstatement. He’d been the W in the security firm CRAW, his specialty being overseas protection and defense. Because of his unusual status—and because no one could even find a birth certificate for him—he handled the most sensitive cases that required the greatest amount of secrecy. When he’d made enough money, he quit the daily routine but stayed on as a silent partner at CRAW, officially “retiring” into that murky part of any business called “consulting.”
“She didn’t run away,” Pine repeated.
There was a slur in his speech. Pine had the whole after-work-drinks thing going on—the bloodshot eyes, the wrinkled shirt, the loosened tie.