As evidenced by this secluded prison in which she now lives.

It’s literally in the middle of nowhere, this tiny house, surrounded by parched desert sliced by arroyos and dotted with sparse stands of blue paloverde trees that give only teasers of shade. On his walk in, he’d passed the old fence lines, spotted a few crumbling stakes. His Internet research into the area told him this used to be part of a sprawling housing complex for the workers in the copper mine just up the road, which probably explains its water and electrical lines. But the mine’s been closed for years, and most of the houses were abandoned after a big fire swept through the area. Trina’s is the only one within view.

A courtyard sits between the solid-metal entry door and the front door of the house itself, which he can’t see from where he stands. The wall is eight feet high. She poured a river of concrete along the top and studded it with huge, jagged shards of glass that give off rainbow reflections in the dusk. Did she set each piece by hand? If so, she didn’t do it to keep out snakes; she did it to stop him, and so the sight of all that jagged glass now makes him angry. But if he gets angry, he’ll get distracted, and that’s unacceptable.

BBIRD474

It feels like a wild guess. But it isn’t really.

The code’s the average length of most computer passwords; eight characters, with a mix of letters and numbers.

And how many times did he sit in the audience and listen to her tell the story of how she came to see the bluebird, the one she didn’t kill, as a symbol of her rebirth?

As for the numbers, 474 are the last three digits of her mother’s birthday, if you chop off the month, which is March. And in all her years of signing his books, her handwriting would always place the emphasis on the final letters in her name and not the first, as if her hand always needed a second or two to gather energy before exploding with it at the end. That’s why he’s assumed she would cut off some of the first few letters of the word bluebird and drop the number of the month in the sequence of digits in her mother’s birthday.

And it’s wrong.

Which shouldn’t surprise him. When it comes to Trina’s life story, bluebird isn’t the most secret of passwords. How many times did he sit in the audience and listen to her tell that story about the bird flying out of her hands right as the SWAT team exploded out of the woods?

He’s not willing to jettison the rest of his guess—not yet. He refuses to believe Trina has let go of her birth mother, and that’s part of her problem, her inability to see her mother’s death as a necessary sacrifice, a fundamental aspect of her rebirth. When it comes to the code, he just needs a word, a token, a thing from her more recent, and more secret, past. The life she made for herself after she legally changed her name and disappeared from that town in California where her grandmother’s friends had threatened to beat him to a pulp if he ever came back again.

He consults the list.

Altamira, Luanne (grandmother), Bayard Rock (Altamira landmark, used to visit with grandmother on her walks), Fisher Pit (copper mine near her house, closed 1986).

While he’s sure Bayard Rock is probably the most meaningful item on the list, it’s not exactly secret, a local landmark in a town where she’d lived while she was still Trina. And Fisher Pit, which is just up the road, isn’t exactly the most covert, either.

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?”