Eve crossed Mulholland Highway and glanced to the east, where everything was aflame against a dark sky of billowing ash. There was a terrifying beauty to the flaming landscape—the snow-flurry of embers, trees turned into towers of fire, the little bonfires everywhere. It was like Christmas in Hell.

The first house on her list was off of Lake Vista, though there was no lake to be seen today. It was a Spanish-Mediterranean McMansion with a four-car garage, a cobblestone motor court, and a row of pine trees ringing the property that were fully engulfed in flames, bombarding the house with embers.

She put on her LASD baseball cap, the pair of goggles, and a dust mask, grabbed the crowbar, and dashed up to the house. It was like running through a storm of hot needles. The front door was ajar. She pushed it open the rest of the way, rushed across the two-story foyer and into a large open-concept kitchen and family room. It was immediately clear to her that the house had been recently occupied by a large family. The marble-topped island in the kitchen was the center of the family’s life and was covered with the day’s mail, the morning newspapers, and cereal boxes. There were children’s toys scattered on the family room floor. Coyle couldn’t have been using this house to hold Caitlin captive. It was occupied. Whoever lived here had just left in a hurry.

It took Eve less than sixty seconds to make that determination and then run back outside. But in that short time, the fire had reached the house, igniting the wood under the eaves and the dried pine needles in the rain gutters.

She jumped back into her car, made a fast three-point turn, and sped out onto the road to hit the next house on her list—located on a private lane off of Lake Vista, only a quarter of a mile away.

The smoke was even thicker now, swirling around her car, making it difficult to see. She caught a movement out of the corner of her eye and slammed on her brakes, nearly hitting a deer on fire, the shrieking animal charging across the road directly in front of her. The blazing deer tripped in a culvert, tumbled into the brush, and instantly ignited it.

Eve couldn’t allow herself to be distracted by the horrific sight and drove on as fast as she could given her limited visibility. It was so hard to see that she almost passed the road she was looking for and would have if not for the cluster of mailboxes on the corner. She made a sharp left onto the narrow, poorly maintained road, bouncing hard into every pothole and over every bump, through a tunnel of flames, embers, and smoke.