Lauren didn’t know if the sound came out of her or exploded only in her brain. It didn’t matter. It came from the deepest part of her and brought with it a wave of strength.

She grabbed the hammer as she got to her feet and turned it in her hands.

Not my daughter, she thought. Not again. Never again.

She brought the hammer up with both hands.

His attention was on Leah. He turned too late.

Lauren brought the hammer down, claw side first, with every last ounce of strength she had.

The claw caught him between the temple and the ear, driving into flesh and bone and brain. The force of the blow knocked him sideways away from Leah, away from the van. The look on his face was one of stunned horror.

He stuck out his arms, flailing like a blind man to break his fall as his legs buckled and he went down, the hammer still embedded in the side of his skull.

The look in his eyes was both wild and blank, and the sounds coming from him were guttural alien babble. His body began to jerk and jump as the electrical system of his brain shorted out and seized.

Lauren leaned hard against the van, watching him die even as she felt her own life slipping out of her, running out of her with the blood that flowed from the knife wound in her back.

“Mommy!” Leah cried, hysterical, flinging herself into her mother.

Lauren wrapped her arms around her daughter and held her as tightly as she could.

“It’s over, baby,” she whispered again and again. “It’s over. It’s over.”

It’s over.

At last.

Chapter 61

61

Like flies to carrion, the local media had already begun to arrive on Old Mission Road outside the gates of the home Lauren and her daughter had been taken from.

Mendez had set up a roadblock of two cruisers and four deputies to keep the media well back from the scene.

They were losing daylight. The sun had slipped over the far side of the western ridges, turning them purple and casting the valley into a light that was neither day nor night. In Santa Barbara, tourists would be sitting on the wharf, watching it float like an orange balloon above the Pacific horizon.

The county chopper had gone up to start a grid search above the hills to the west of town. They had already turned on the spotlight, but Mendez knew those hills as well as anyone, and he knew they would be fighting a futile battle as the shadows filled the steep canyons.

For the first time since he and Hicks and Tanner had arrived at the house, he was still, leaning back against the car, trying to quiet his mind and find a useful thought as Dixon addressed the media out on the road.