The newcomers shouldered their way into the room: first came a big man with short black hair and a beard that went to his collar. Five others pushed in behind him, fanning out—every one of them had the hardass look of high-end private security. They carried MP5 submachine guns, leveled and ready. Their flashlights were mounted under the barrels of the weapons.

“Turn around,” the man with the black hair said. “Both of you, slow, hands out from your sides.”

Dryden looked at Danica. “It’s okay. Do what they say.”

They turned around. Dryden heard someone shuffle forward, felt the M4 unclipped from its sling and taken from his shoulder. Then hands patted him down, fast and thorough. They took his wallet, then the Maglite he held. Finally someone grabbed his wrists, pulled them tightly together and bound them with a zip-tie. Three feet away, the same happened to Danica.

Someone said, “Clear.”

The feet shuffled away again.

“Face forward.”

They turned back toward the gunmen; by then Dryden could hear a final set of footsteps coming. They ticked softly on the concrete outside the room, closer and closer. The woman and the six men parted from the doorway.

The man who stepped through it had to be seventy years old. He was tall and slim, with short-cropped grey hair. The features of his face were severe—

—and familiar.

Dryden recalled the first moments between himself and Danica, in the basement of that house in Thousand Oaks; neither of them had recognized the other. It made sense, he supposed: a lot happened to a face between age twelve and forty-one. The three decades after forty were another matter: there was plenty of wear and tear, but no real structural change.

Not enough, anyway. Not in this case.

Dryden spoke the words even as they surfaced in his head: “Ellis Pierce.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

JULY 1989

In the fractions of a second that followed the gunshot, Sam experienced the same surreal clarity he’d felt earlier—it was the race for the Escort all over again. The space around him suddenly broke itself down into simple things: the ones that mattered.

He saw Lauren’s body drop where she had stood. There was no longer anything telling her limbs what to do. She was gone.

He saw Dani screaming, stumbling backward into the metal shelves behind her, her eyes full of shock and fear.

He saw Ellis Pierce, still holding the gun. Sam could see only an edge of the man’s face, from behind and to the left, but it was enough to see shock there, too. The gun itself hovered in place, shaking in Pierce’s hand, still pointed in the direction it had fired.

There was a second in which it all seemed to hold still—Dani and the fallen body and the outstretched gun—the whole room poised like a teetering vase.

Then everything happened—fast.