He sat with his back to the door, waiting, listening, and in the wait, impatience grew and time became the enemy. He was tired. Tired of not sleeping. Tired of running. Tired of spending nights in chairs and bus seats and on cold garage floors.

Thirty minutes passed, forty. He debated letting himself in and handling the whole thing here and now, but prudence and planning warned him against it.

The security men didn’t concern him much.

Ten seconds or less was all it’d take to remove that threat. He could haul Liv Wilson off, use her own car to spirit her away. But as soon as she failed to turn up for work, the whole world would start chasing. They needed more time than that.

Timing was everything. Timing was why he’d routed Jill and Holden by train and why their journey required a ten-hour drive after reaching Chicago.

Traveling by rail had allowed him to erase Kara’s trail and gave his sister the time and space for mental games while on the move, but that had been a bonus. What he’d really purchased was the time to get ahead of them, to hunt from a parallel path, and to conjure the bridge beneath their feet.

He was a magician raising bricks before each step touched ground.

Inside the house, a doorbell rang.

The security system chimed, signaling an open door.

Voices carried low and distant, and then the system chimed again, intoning the countdown of a house alarm arming, and the same thirty- to ninety-second grace period that allowed owners to come back in for a forgotten item if needed allowed someone like him to slip in through an unlocked door unannounced.

He let himself into a mudroom that had never seen mud, and scanned the ceiling and floor in a search for motion detectors. In keeping with the neighborhood’s sense of quiet safety, the security system seemed limited to door and window sensors.

He stole into the kitchen, checking corners and niches.

The cameras were here, somewhere, wireless devices to capture the goings-on while the homeowners were away. They had to be. Every other home had them these days, and even in a household without kids or pets, they’d exist to keep track of whatever domestic help kept the vast inside dust free and sparkling. He kept his head down, moved quickly up the stairs, found the master bedroom and, from there, the master closet. Unless someone watched in real time, that’s all they’d have of him, a record.