It’s Charley. Update?

Luke types, Walked two terminals. Never checked in. Changed outfits in a restroom. Now he’s in the taxi line.

Charley answers, He’s going home.

How do you know?

There’s only four people between Pemberton and the head of the line now. What should he do once Pemberton gets inside a cab and leaves the curb? In this day and age, if you tell a cabdriver to follow another cab, he probably calls the cops on you.

No e-mails from airlines or travel agencies on his computer. And he’s scheduled for surgery tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. He’s going home. Trust me. Come back.

Bailey, he thinks. Someday soon he’ll get used to the fact his brother can see into almost every corner of the world.

You sure? he types. I don’t want all this to be for nothing.

It wasn’t, she answers. We found his next abduction site.

“So all of this was just to plant the getaway car?” Luke asks.

After taking the shuttle back to the parking lot and planting the tracker on the Camry, he and Charley are sitting in his parked Jeep. He wants to be more relaxed than he is, but the fact that Pemberton’s slipped off into the night has left him with a weight in the pit of his stomach. He’s not as convinced as Charley is that the guy went back to Newport Beach.

He’s angled the rearview mirror so he can see part of the Camry’s roof.

“Just?” she asks. “It’s probably the most important part of his plan. Look at it this way, a parking lot like this, same-day entry and exit’s going to be suspicious, and it’ll be the first thing they look for on the cameras once they figure out the abduction happened here. This way, the car stays here for several days like the rest of them, and when he rolls through the exit, presumably with his victim in the trunk, it looks like he’s coming home after a trip.”

“With you in the trunk, you mean. Presumably awake, since twenty milligrams of Xanax has no effect on you.”

“Yep.”

“Why not just fight him off here in the parking lot? Why let him take you all the way back to Temecula?”

“Remember the plan?”

“Overpower him; restrain him. Leave him right next to the evidence of his crimes.”

“Yep. I can’t do that here. Best I can do is scare the shit out of him.”

“Or kill him.”

“Which I’m not interested in doing,” she says sharply.

“I didn’t say you were.”

“I didn’t say you did. This is about stopping him. This is about making sure it’s me he pulls out of this lot and not someone else, not someone who doesn’t have my . . . abilities.”

He remembers a little speech she made the other night about how she wanted to stare into Pemberton’s eyes and enjoy the fear there when the man realizes she’s the end of him, but no sense bringing that up now.

But is there any way to point out to her that, yes, there is an easier way to do this? She could overpower him here in the lot. They could call the cops. Once the cops realized they had an attempted abduction on their hands, they’d haul him in, have cause to search his houses.

You didn’t agree to stop Pemberton, he tells himself. You agreed to help her do whatever she wanted, so here you are, hotshot. Enjoy the ride.

“I don’t know,” he finally says, surprised to hear he’s kept his thoughts from shaking his tone. “You really think this parking lot is where he’s going to strike next?”

“Well, what else was he doing tonight?”

“Setting up his escape plan if he’s about to get caught. I don’t know. It just seems crowded here.”

“Look around. It’s one of the biggest and the cheapest lots. Almost every other light’s burned out, and I haven’t seen a single security patrol since you left. Just a bunch of exhausted people, most of them smelling like cheap airline booze, stumbling off that shuttle bus every time it pulls up and walking to their cars in the dark. This is why he drove clear across SoCal tonight, Luke. It’s why he switched cars, walked half of LAX, changed outfits. Because this is his next abduction site.”

“Maybe. Why go to the terminal at all?”

“Shuttle stop’s got a camera on it. Look.” He follows the direction of her finger; she’s right. “If he pulls in and never boards the shuttle, that looks suspicious. If he hails a taxi close to the airport but not at the airport, that’s also suspicious, and something a cabdriver might remember later. If he goes straight to the taxi line without changing clothes, he’ll stand out when they review the footage. I’m telling you, Luke, tonight we saw firsthand why this guy doesn’t end up on cameras unless he wants to. Everything he’s done is about blending into crowds. Going with the flow. Not popping out later when some cop has to watch thirty-some-odd hours of surveillance footage. And he has to do all this because of his face. It’s distinctive and weird. The nose doesn’t match the rest of it. It’s the kind of thing a lone cabdriver late at night might remember later, especially if the pickup place is odd. But in a crowd, in a cap and glasses, he just blends in.”

“So he ends up on camera. They just don’t notice him when they review the footage.”

“Exactly.”

Neither of them says anything for a while.

“He’s smart. He’s resourceful. He has money and means, which gives him time to plan. And he’s figured out a way to get his message across to the public without escalating his crimes. In other words, he is the worst-case scenario when it comes to a serial killer.”

“And it looks like we’re about to get him,” he says.

Maybe it isn’t the first time he’s seen her smile since they were reunited, but it certainly feels that way.

Their burner phones both buzz at the time.

It’s Bailey.

Finally found something in his computer that might help.

39

He’s on the move.

When Luke’s text message arrives, she starts in the direction of the nearest escalator. Friday night at LAX, just after 9:30 p.m. Traffic oozes through the airport’s U-shaped departures level like a mudflow. The worst of it’s outside Tom Bradley International. There, hordes of passengers are arriving to check in early for their overnight flights to Asia, some pushing carts loaded with enough luggage to provide a family of four with a fresh change of clothes for a month. For the past few minutes she’s been weaving through the crowd outside, taking cues from Pemberton’s stroll through nearby terminals several nights before. Trying not to stand out on security cameras in case she has to make another visit tomorrow night.

Now she moves with more determination.

Even though she hasn’t been anywhere near a plane since they got to the airport hours before, she’s dressed like Luke’s idea of a weary college student: a loose-fitting canvas jacket from a thrift store, a baggy green blouse from T.J. Maxx. The blue jeans she wears are from her own wardrobe, but the Velcro tennis shoes are brand-new, bought for the occasion, easy to take on and off at a security checkpoint she’s never going to pass through. The backpack was new once, but it’s also from a thrift store, handpicked because its straps are tattered and it smells of cigarette smoke. The carry-on she pulls is cheap and plain, bought used from one of those stores near the airport that sells off unclaimed luggage, and she’s divided a passel of her own clothes and toiletries between it and the tobacco-infused backpack.

Once she reaches the arrivals level, she starts for the nearest shuttle stop. She’s memorized the location of each one.

An hour and a half before, at the Westin LAX, Pemberton finished up a talk on how platelet-rich infusions can provide contours during facial surgery. Even though his next conference event isn’t until Sunday at 3:00 p.m.—he’s listed as a “special guest” at the closing night cocktail party—he reserved a room for both nights with a guaranteed late checkout Sunday evening.

Bailey discovered all this in the doctor’s in-box. Initially he’d searched for e-mails from airlines and travel agencies. When he came up short, he moved on to hotel chains; that’s when he found the hotel reservation and registration info for the SoCal Regional Medical Suppliers Conference. As Luke put it, 8:00 p.m. Friday to 2:00 p.m. Sunday is the red zone; the time when the conditions for the doctor to slip off and make his abduction are ideal. Winnow those down to nighttime hours, when arrivals and departures are steady, and they’ve got a nice, tight window to work in.

And now, according to one of the guys Marty’s stationed around the Westin, the doctor’s on the move.

Which exit did he take? Charley types back.