“Agent Calvert?”
A sheriff’s deputy came toward her, out of the glare of the scene. He was fifty, give or take, a stocky guy just going soft. The nameplate above his badge read HILLER. Marnie had spoken to him on the phone.
She shut the door of her Crown Vic and crossed to him. Her shoes crunched on the hardpan.
“The kids are right this way,” Hiller said.
*
The four girls were sitting on a metal bench the paramedics had set up beside one of the ambulances. Each looked dazed, certainly scared, but it was clear at a glance there was no immediate medical trauma. The EMTs were as relaxed as such people could be at a crime scene, crouching beside the girls and simply talking to them. No doubt they’d done some basic physical assessments, and the girls would still be taken to a hospital, but those were formalities.
Marnie crossed the dirt yard and knelt down to eye level with the girl on the left end of the bench. The girl whose face had stared at her from her office bulletin board for six months, back when she’d disappeared. Even in the years since then, Marnie had revisited the case file often.
“Leah?” Marnie said.
The girl had been looking at her own hands in her lap. Now she lifted her gaze and met Marnie’s eyes. She’d been eight the last time Marnie—or anyone else outside this trailer—had seen her. She was eleven now.
Her eyes looked older than that. A lot older. She nodded and said nothing.
“Hi, Leah. My name’s Marnie. I’m an FBI agent.”
“Are my mom and dad coming?”
“They’re going to be at the hospital when you get there, and that’ll be soon. The police are going to drive you there.”
“I don’t want to go to the hospital. I want to go home.”
Leah’s voice cracked, but she kept her composure. She looked practiced at doing so.
“Hey,” Marnie said softly. “You’re going to be home before you know it. And guess what. Pretzel’s still there.”
At the mention of that name, a trace of happiness flickered through the girl’s eyes. The emotion seemed to surprise her.
Pretzel, a golden retriever, had been a three-month-old puppy when Leah Swain disappeared in the summer of 2012. Marnie had seen the dog herself when she’d interviewed the parents back then. Half an hour ago, speaking to Mr. Swain on the phone, Marnie had heard the retriever barking like hell in the background, the wife calling its name and telling it to sit. Dogs were emotional antennas—it was hard to imagine the vibe it must be picking up in that house tonight.
Leah blinked repeatedly. Her eyes were just noticeably moist now.
“I promise I won’t bother you with too many questions,” Marnie said, “but can I ask you just three or four? They might be important.”
Leah nodded.
Off at the far edge of the lit-up scene, Marnie heard men’s voices greeting someone. She turned and saw a man she recognized: the chief of the LAPD, walking in from where the chopper had touched down. She was pretty sure the desert south of Barstow was hell and gone from the guy’s jurisdiction, but this was one of those cases where all the boundaries were sure to get blurred. And it had ended happily, which meant politicians would want their faces associated with it. Marnie wondered whether the guy would have flown out here if the night had turned out differently.
For a moment that image forced itself into her head: the scene she might have rolled up to, if Harold Heely Shannon had gotten his way. The awful picture was unusually vivid in her thoughts.
Marnie pushed it away and turned back to Leah.
“You told the police two people came into the trailer and stopped Mr. Shannon from starting a fire,” Marnie said. “A man and a woman. Is that right?”
Leah nodded.
“Did you ever see those people before?” Marnie asked. “Did Mr. Shannon know them?”
The girl shook her head.
“Did they say anything to you or the other girls?”
Another head shake.
“What about names?” Marnie asked. “Did they call each other anything?”
Leah thought about it. Her eyebrows drew closer together. “I don’t think so.”
“Can you remember anything they did say?”
“They were in a hurry to go. The lady kept saying they had to leave before the police came. So they did.”
The girl thought about it a moment longer, then simply shook her head again. Even through the mask of shock and suppressed emotion on her face, it was clear the girl was keeping nothing back. She had no idea who the man and woman had been, or how they’d managed to arrive at that exact moment, seconds after a 9-1-1 call nobody on earth could have anticipated.
*