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.
A single beep. Access Granted.
The flood of adrenaline makes him dizzy at first, then breathless with elation.
He almost forgets to follow the Savior’s next instruction, which is to pass the code along if he cracks it. He has, and he does. He’s proud of how it looks on the burner phone’s screen next to all the nervous preparatory texts they’ve exchanged over the past few hours. A task completed, a goal met.
In another few seconds, he’s crossed the courtyard and slipped inside the house. She’s left the air-conditioning on, a necessity even in October, and the cool air kisses his skin in an undeniably welcoming way. He’s in. And just as he expected, a few minutes later, the locks all click shut behind him, the sounds a confirmation of his speed and smarts.
Not just that. But his destiny as well. Their destiny.
Now he just needs to find her guns.
4
“Describe them to me,” Dylan says.
“I can’t. The dreams are too vague,” Charlotte answers.
“Can you remember any of them?”
“Not really. It’s more like I wake up with an awareness that they were bad. Or that I was being chased.”
“Dreams are funny things.”
“These dreams aren’t funny. I mean, I don’t wake up laughing.”
“Figure of speech,” he says. “Forgive me. What I mean is that most neuroscientists believe dreams don’t actually have a chronology when we’re in them. When we’re asleep, we’re not tuned in to the type of physical stimuli our bodies use to detect the passage of time.”
“So what does that mean?” she asks.
“It means our brains have been firing a stream of random images at us and our waking minds instinctively place them in a coherent order. A narrative that makes sense to us.”
“So dreams have less to do with our subconscious and more to do with our mental state when we wake up? Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“Actually, I’m trying to get you to describe your dreams over the past two weeks.”
“I can barely remember them. I just wake up sweating and with a sense of anxiety and dread. Like someone’s in the house with me.”
“Is Jason Briffel in them?”
She shoots him dagger eyes before she can stop herself. He shakes his head. “Sorry. Your stalker, is he in any of the—”
“Like I said, they’re vague. They’re more like . . . I don’t know . . . swirls of feelings.”
“Swirls of feelings. That’s an interesting description.”
“Is it?”
“What about the other agreements that you’ve made with yourself? How have those gone?”
“Other agreements?”
“The Mask Maker. It was very upsetting when you first read about it. We agreed you’d make an effort to avoid anything further about the case.”
“Have they found another body?” she asks.
“I feel like this is your way of maybe answering my question.”
“Because if I’d broken my agreement, I’d know whether or not they’d found another body.”
She smiles. He smiles back.
“So maybe you’re answering my question. Or maybe you’re using me to get around the agreement you made with yourself.”
He smiles again. She smiles back.
“Does that mean you’re not going to tell me?”
“Well, if you remember correctly, they didn’t find a body. They found a face.”
“I remember. And if they haven’t found another one, then it’s not a serial.”
“That’s not what you felt when you first read about it. You thought the gruesomeness of the crime, the fact that the face was displayed in public like some kind of mask meant—”
“Maybe it’s a mafia hit. Isn’t there a lot of Russian mafia in LA?”
“The police don’t seem to think so.”
“That it’s a hit, or that there’s a lot of Russian mafia in LA?”
“Charley. We’re off the point.”
“There’s a point?”
“There hasn’t been a high-profile serial predator like this in a while.”
“You mean a good reason for me to avoid all news everywhere.”
“Pretty much, yes.”
“So they did find another face?”
“I’m not answering that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not the point.”
“Again. What is the point, Dylan?”
He bows his head, closes his mouth, as if he’s reconsidering his initial response. For a long while, there’s just silence and the low murmur of the AA meeting downstairs. Occasionally a motorcycle backfires in the street below, probably snarled in the little knot of traffic that always develops around that crosswalk they just installed between the movie theater and the new ice-cream parlor next door to the center.
“So it’s not the movie,” she says, trying to control her anger. “It’s that I’m not over those letters from Jas—my stalker. It’s this Mask Maker psycho. I mean, I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”
“I’m saying it’s all of them. I’m saying the number of potential triggers in your life is expanding by the day, and it’s expanding because you’re on too fragile a foundation. You live in isolation. You have no meaningful friendships—”
“That’s not true. I have Kayla.”
“I’m not including the lawyer who helped you sue your father. That’s a business relationship. And she lives in San Francisco.”
“We talk once a week.”
“You’ve got all your grandmother’s friends back in Altamira, and you’ve been to visit them how many times?”
“That one’s hard.”
“Why?”
“Because my grandmother’s still dead.”
“She’s still dead whether you visit her friends or not.”
“Jesus, Dylan.”
“You need a breath, Charlotte.”
“Well, I’m not going to get it talking to you right now. And what happened to the bridge? I thought I needed a bridge. What? Are we building a whole city here?”
“You need something that’s going to reduce your anxiety levels so that you can start acting contrary to your instincts right now.”
“And what are my instincts right now?”
“To isolate, self-obsess, and convince yourself of things about yourself that aren’t true.”
“Ouch.”
“I’ve been seeing you for months now, so I’m gonna say this with confidence. Unless you initiate a small-scale change in your brain chemistry, you’ll remain incapable of developing the kind of healthy behavioral patterns that will get you out of this place you’re stuck in.”
“I love my house.”
“You live in a ghost town full of snakes.”
“People are stupid about snakes. And ghosts.”
“Maybe so, but neither make very good friends.”
“It’s beautiful out there. Especially
the stars . . . at night, I mean. They’re incredible.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Maybe I’ll ask you to drop by sometime.”
“I doubt it.”
“Is that a no?”
“Does it matter? You’ll never ask.”
“Sorry.”
“You’re not.”
Why is he smiling? Shouldn’t he be pissed? She just stares at him.
“You’re not sorry, Charley, and that’s a good thing. You want to know why? Because it means you’re a fighter.”
“If I’m a fighter, then how come I can’t leave my house?”
“We’ve covered this. You can leave. You just don’t want to. And the more you give in to that urge, the more you’ll come to believe the lies you’re telling yourself about what you are and aren’t capable of. It’s a cycle, Charley. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle of mistaken thinking. And we have to come up with a way for you to break it once and for all.”
Even if it involves pills, she thinks.
Maybe if she weren’t so damn tired, this would be it, the moment she stormed out of his office and never came back. But she is tired.
So tired she wasn’t sure she was in shape to make the drive to town, a drive that’s practically a straight shot across open desert on a flat, two-lane blacktop.
He’s mentioned drugs at least once a session. In the beginning she’d figured this was just his way of reminding her he’s an actual psychiatrist who can prescribe stuff. That he isn’t just some touchy-feely psychologist with a degree he earned online.
But he’s never let up on it. And he hasn’t now even though she told him how her father tried to medicate her into silence when she was ten.
And she’s tired.
She likes these sessions, she needs them, and the sense that he’s getting impatient with her, it’s affecting her more than she wants it to. Maybe more than she thinks it should.
Or I’m feeling worn down because he’s right, she considers. Not just because he went to Harvard, or because he looks like all the actors who’ve ever played Superman run together.
What’s that’s AA saying she’s always liked?
Keep it simple, stupid.
And so what’s the simplest question and the simplest answer here?
Do I need sleep?
Yes. Hell yes. Dear God, yes.
“What do you have in mind?” she hears herself say. “Some kind of sleeping pill?”
He lowers his right leg from where he’s braced the ankle on top of his left knee, setting aside the legal pad on which he’s not taken a single note since they started. “No,” he answers. “Not a sleeping pill.”
He gets to his feet, turns to his desk, and opens the drawer. She expects him to pull out a prescription pad. Instead he removes a square of white cardboard, six bright-orange pills encased inside little plastic bubbles.
“What is that?”
“It’s called Zypraxon.” He takes a seat on the edge of his chair and holds the pill packet in between his thumb and forefinger. He’s gazing into her eyes now, the talk therapist replaced by the medical doctor. “And I think it’s going to be just perfect for you.”
5
The first gun is under the sink.
A Beretta M9 in a holster attached to the cabinet’s ceiling, within easy reach of anyone doing dishes or moving about the compact, tidy kitchen.
Jason slides his backpack off one shoulder and digs out the plastic bags.
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.”
“OK. When should I take it?”
“Now.”
“Now? I need to be able to drive home.”
“It shouldn’t impair your ability to drive or work or anything like that. A lot of central nervous system depressants—Xanax and others—produce a single, powerful tranquilizing effect that becomes addictive. Zypraxon is designed to attack persistent anxiety at a lower dose released consistently throughout the day.”
She’s staring at the pill, and she still hasn’t been able to force herself to sit.
“Look, Charley, there’s stronger stuff out there we can talk about. This is not a wonder cure, by any stretch. But I think it’s well suited for you.”
“And you want me to take it right now?” she asks.
“To be frank, that doesn’t sound like a question for me.”
Is he losing patience with her?
Will he stop seeing her if she doesn’t take the pill?
Is she doing exactly what he just accused her of doing by asking herself these questions—pretending the real issue is how someone else perceives her and not what she needs for herself? After all she’s been through, why is this so scary? It’s a pill, and she can be pulled off it at any time. And while she’s certainly no expert in antidepressants or central nervous system depressants or whatever other class of drugs they give people to stabilize their moods these days, it sounds pretty mild.
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