Page 53 of Sawyer
I’m already moving. The tablet on my desk clatters to the floor as I bolt out of the security den, sprinting past the conservatory into hard noon light. My earpiece hums with overlapping voices—Riggs barking for gate freeze, Andersson pivoting K-9 to the south hedge, Rae dumping coordinates to SPPD—but all I hear is the echo of Cam’s laugh this morning and the fact that I am not where I promised I would be.
The south lawn is a smear of emerald and sunlight. The fountain burbles obscenely calm. Beyond the rose arbor, tire dust hangs in the air in a thin, shimmering ribbon. In the service cutout at the curb, faint rubber crescents mark where a van scrubbed hard, reversed, and punched it.
I inhale, and taste diesel.
“White panel, no markings,” Andersson’s voice clips. “Gate six shows outflow. LPR didn’t pop—plate covered.”
“Check the overflow cam,” I rasp, dropping to my knees in the grass. There—by the hedge—two inches of plastic like shark skin, a torn tail of a black zip tie. A silver smear on a blade of grass—duct tape adhesive. A phone case face-down under the lip of the drive—hers. Rage detonates.
“Code Black,” I say flat. “Internal lockdown. Push out BOLO to SPPD: White panel van, 2014 to 2017 body style, high roof. Three male suspects. Last seen south exit, eastbound.”
Rae: “Copy. Dispatch notified. Watch ping got one location before it went dark—jammer kicked in. Last hit is on Dutton near the 115 on-ramp. I’m scraping SP-trans cams.”
Riggs thunders up, breath hard, eyes harder. “Where?”
I point to the grass. He sees what I see—the scuff marks, the heel divot where she fought. He picks up the zip tail, palms the tape scrap with gloved fingers, and bags them fast. “She fought ’em,” he says, like a prayer that doubles as a war cry.
I force my lungs to steady. “Rae, pull the south garden feed for twenty minutes prior. Did we get a face at any approach?”
“Negative—someone blasted it with a narrowband jammer and angled the lens with a hook from the blind spot. They knew the grid.”
“Inside help,” Riggs growls.
“Yeah.” My jaw grinds. We were hunting a mole, and the mole just bared its teeth.
I scan the hedges, the service lane, the angle of sunlight, making a mental model I can walk backward in my mind. I taste metal. I pocket the phone case, and stand. “Rae, pull every van rental contract within a three-mile radius from this morning. Andersson, expand perimeter—check drains, alleys for dropped items. Hartley’s unit?”
“Rolling,” Rae says. “ETA four.”
“Launch the drone,” I say, already running back into the house. “Vector down Dutton and 115—we’ll lose altitude near the freeway, but give me what you can.”
“Bird up in sixty seconds.”
12:12— Command room is ice-cold and humming. I slam the door, yank the Faraday cage panel closed behind me—no phones, no bleed. Rae’s up on four monitors, fingers flying. A dot blinks—Cam’s last watch ping—then dies. A second screen fills with SP-trans feeds: blurs of concrete and steel, streaks of light on asphalt.
“There,” Rae says, stabbing a frame—an overhead lane camera catching the tail of a white van ducking behind a box truck near the on-ramp. Plate smeared with mud or covered. “No hazard triangle visible. Could be it, could be any of twenty lookalikes.”
“Angle me a reflection,” I mutter. “Pull the windshield glare from the truck’s chrome.”
Rae grins—teeth bared. “Now we’re cooking.” She magnifies a six-by-six patch of glare, inverts, filters. The universe cooperates: a spectral smear resolves into the faintest ghost of a van profile with a dent low on the passenger door and a sticker—tiny orange triangle—half peeled. “Gotcha,” she whispers.
I key my throat mic. “All teams, this is One. We have a unique—orange hazard triangle on the back door, passenger-side dent knee-height. Notify CHP. Priority. Van took 115 south. Last ping minute twelve.”
Riggs: “I’ll swing south on the causeway. Andersson keeps the house tight.”
“Negative,” I snap. “We don’t split. We feed the net and we hunt the leak.”
Silence. Then: “Copy,” Riggs says with a clipped tone.
My tablet hums with incoming: CHP acknowledges, BOLO broadcast to patrol units along 115. Hartley chimes in: “We’re on the freeway now. Tell me if your drone gets eyes.”
“Bird is overhead—altitude down to legal. We’ve got twenty white vans. Filtering.”
Out of the corner of my vision, a little pink sticky note flutters on the edge of the console—the one she pinned to my chest last night:Trust your gut.My hand shakes once as I anchor it on the desk.
“Dean?” I say, stabbing the satphone.
He picks up in a breath. “Talk.”
