Chapter One
They were dead, all of them dead, and so was she.
As the brilliant flare faded from Annie O’Brien’s eyes, and the roar faded, and the hail of debris tapered off, all she could think was that her father had always told her to look for the silver lining, and while for her that lining often turned out to be aluminum foil, cheap and easily torn, this time she was able to console herself with the realization that there was indeed silver, polished and pure: at least the bomb had taken care of her Christmas shopping predicament.
The date was the 19th of December. Annie and four fellow cops were closing in on a murder suspect (Annie’s case; the dirtbag had killed two high school girls, and she had been working it for a couple of weeks with their pictures taped up over her desk at work and on her bathroom mirror at home), having ascertained that he had holed up in a third-rate trailer park near Buckeye and 43rd. One of the four cops was Ryan Ellis, with whom she was sleeping, in spite of both the Phoenix Police Department’s regulations and her better judgment. He was so gorgeous and so good in bed that she couldn’t help herself.
She had been looking for a way to break it off, but maybe not looking as hard as she might have. It was, after all, almost Christmas, and it seemed heartless to break up with someone at the holidays. But she had to get it done. Ryan seemed to be falling hard. She knew he had shopped for her. He had already mentioned making plans for next summer. She hadn’t shopped for him because she’d had every intention of being broken up by the holiday, and why go to the trouble if she knew she’d be returning whatever she bought on December 26?
But she hadn’t managed to let him know her intention, and he hadn’t picked up on her subtle hints. Too subtle, she supposed, too nuanced. He was gorgeous, but not that smart. The best present for a guy like him would be a clue. Or maybe a full-length mirror, because he was all surface, with nothing inside.
When she had learned where Trey Fairhaven was hiding out—he had ordered digital cable in his own name, dumb even for a criminal, a class of people not generally known for feats of intellect—she told Lieutenant Carson and Carson assigned Ryan, two uniformed officers, and Will Matson, a detective who had just transferred over from Vice, to check out the place with her. Annie drove, Ryan riding shotgun, Matson in the back. The two unis took a squad car.
“Annie O’Brien?” Matson said on the way. “With that red hair and those emerald eyes? You must be pure Irish.”
“No cigar for you, Matson. My dad was a mutt, but mostly a British Isles mutt—Irish, Scottish, English. But Mom was French. Not French American, French. They met when Dad was stationed in Frankfurt and vacationing in Paris. I’m not sure what they saw in each other, but they stayed together long enough to have me, and then for her to get really tired of living in the States. She’s back where she belongs now, a stone’s throw from the Seine. If you’ve got a good arm.”
“And your dad?”
“Gone. Five years now, I’m used to the idea. He was on the job.”
“I’m sorry, Annie.”
“Don’t be. And it isn’t really even Annie. It’s Annicka. I just go by Annie because it’s easier for the cops and other Neanderthals I usually hang around with.”
“I know I have a hard time with more than two syllables,” Ryan said.
How I wish you were joking, Annie thought. But they were pulling into the Frontier Town RV Resort, her unmarked Explorer in front, the squad car behind, so she shut up and focused on scanning the trailers for any sign of Fairhaven. If the trailer park had ever resembled a resort in any way, it didn’t now. The road was paved but crumbling like dried-out cookie dough. The trailers were sun-bleached to the point that everything had a kind of pale grayness to it, including the ceramic gnomes and deer and rabbits standing sentinel around some of them. A few spindly ocotillos and a half-dead saguaro cactus, spines drooping from a split up one side, passed for natural beauty. “Last Resort” might have been a more appropriate name for the dump.
“Pretty place,” Ryan said. “Maybe I should move my grandma here.”
“What, and lose her spot under the freeway?” Annie said. “Look for space fifty-seven.”
Curtains fluttered in the window of a mobile home that slanted awkwardly toward one corner, where the cinder blocks that supported it seemed to have disintegrated. The curtains had daisies on them and moth holes lacing them, and the hand that Annie glimpsed holding them back, then releasing them, was brown, pudgy, and female. Trey Fairhaven was a white guy, thirty-three years old—a year younger than Annie—and built like a tweaker, as if he hadn’t eaten a solid meal in a month.
“We’re being watched,” Matson said.
“Since the second we pulled in the driveway,” Annie said.
“You’d almost think there were lawbreakers about.”
So far she liked Matson. He wasn’t as attractive as Ryan, so she wouldn’t feel compelled to sleep with him. And he seemed smarter. Not hard to achieve, but still … bonus.
“This is forty-four,” Ryan said, pointing to a wooden sign poking up from the gravel beside a trailer bedecked in those cheap decorative blankets you could buy from guys who parked their vans in vacant lots and hung their wares on poles. Phoenix didn’t get a lot of rain, but these blankets had seen a monsoon season or two; Annie had to work to make out the Diamondbacks logo, an American flag, and the familiar silhouette of a mud-flap girl.
On the other side of the drive, two barefoot toddlers stopped dragging a doll carriage across a patch of dusty artificial turf to gaze solemnly at them. Annie tried on a smile, which drew no reaction at all.
She gave up and stopped beside the blanketed trailer. The squad car braked behind her. She got out and the other four cops met her by the Explorer’s hood. They all wore dark blue windbreakers with gold letters spelling out “POLICE” on the backs and the badge of the Phoenix PD printed over the breast. Annie counted out the remaining trailers, pointing to each one and stopping at the target. “That’s the one,” she said. “Shit-brown stripe along the side, dry birdbath in front.”
The others indicated that they saw it.
“We have a warrant. We’ll go in hard. You guys bring the battering ram?”
One of the unis, a patrol officer named Ruiz, nodded, returned to the squad car’s trunk, and brought back a tactical entry ram. It was about twenty inches long and would knock in most doors. Looking at the trailer in space fifty-seven again, Annie hoped they didn’t knock it into space sixty.
“I don’t know if he’s home, but the cable TV people say his set’s on, so let’s assume he’s there. Ryan and Perry,” she said, reading the name on the other uni’s nameplate, “you two go around to the back. Ruiz, you get to knock on the door. Matson and I will back you.”
They all drew their weapons and approached the hideous box cautiously, keeping other mobile homes between it and them as long as possible. When they were close enough, Ryan and Perry circled around back. Annie gave them ninety seconds, then nodded to the other two and pointed toward the house.
“Let’s do this,” she said.
The December sky was pale blue, cloudless, as flat as if it had been painted on a ceiling. From somewhere, Annie heard “Silver Bells.” That and a scraggly aluminum tree mounted on top of the trailer in space fifty-five were the only reminders that Christmas was nigh.
She swallowed hard as they approached the three peeling wooden steps propped outside the trailer’s front door. Something buzzed in her gut, as if she had swallowed a pump motor. She summoned the images of Kelly Montero and Beth Schreib, the murdered high school girls—Kelly with her throat slashed open by a big knife, Beth with dozens of stab wounds all across her chest and neck—to harden herself against whatever was to come.
At Annie’s signal, Ruiz knocked twice, announced himself, and drove the battering ram through the trailer’s shoddy door, ripping it from its hinges. Matson followed Ruiz in, his weapon extended in front of him. Annie moved in next, feeling the steps sag under her weight.
Inside stood Trey Fairhaven, unshaven and shirtless, jeans hanging loose around gaunt hips. He stared toward the doorway, blinking fast, as if they had awakened him. He had two wires in his hands, leading to a mound of something on a table.
“Down!” Annie screamed. She threw herself off the stairs, rolling and tucking as much as she could underneath the bottom one, fully anticipating that she would never rise again. At the same time Fairhaven’s bomb—because that’s what it was, she had known he had construction experience and should have anticipated this—exploded with a flash as bright as the sun, leaving afterimages burned into her retinas even after she closed her eyes. The booming sound wave hit her at the same time as the concussive wave, while she was falling, parallel to the ground. Heat singed her hair, her flesh. The trailer flew apart. Weeks later, a piece of flashing from an air duct on the roof was found lodged in the V of two tree branches in Falcon Park, more than a mile away.
Annie woke up in a critical care bed at Good Samaritan Medical Center.
After a few moments of disorientation, she figured out that she was in a hospital. There were tubes in her arm and one of those plastic ID bracelets encircling her wrist. One of those tubes must have been delivering morphine or something like it, because the sensation was of lying in a bed of cotton candy. She couldn’t quite feel anything except the dull throbbing of her arm, where the tubes went into it. She remembered the bomb and was surprised to be alive at all. She wondered what had happened to Ryan and the others, and if she had missed Christmas.
And she wondered why it was so quiet. Shouldn’t there be beeping noises, the chuff of an air circulation system, something? All she could hear was the ringing in her ears, as if she had gone to a heavy metal concert and sat in front of the amplifiers—something she had done in tenth grade, and largely regretted.
The lights were low, but there had to be a call button somewhere to summon help. After pawing about, she found it, attached to a cord that ran into the wall behind her bed. She pushed it.
A minute passed. The door opened and a shaft of light fell into the room. Annie blinked. A nurse passed through the light, entered, moved her mouth. She was Hispanic, solidly built, with a sympathetic face.
She carried a pad of paper and a marker.
Annie began to weep.