He glanced up.

He saw the laptop computer on the desk.

Children.

Jeffrey swallowed the bile that swirled up his throat. He swiveled his eyes around the room. Cheap plastic blind on the window. The closet door was missing. Clothes were piled onto the floor. The bed was a mattress on the carpet. A dirty white gym sock was crumpled on the floor.

“Chief!” Matt was at the end of the hall. Brad was taking up his rear. They started busting open doors.

Lena whispered, “Jeffrey?”

The world slowed down as he turned back toward her.

She had never called him by his name before. There was something so intimate about the way she said it. Lena’s arm was raised. Her hand was wavering from the effort.

She was pointing to the window. The plastic slats clicked in the breeze.

“Shit!” Jeffrey ripped away the blinds. The window had guillotined, the top panel sliding down behind the bottom. Daryl Nesbitt was inches away, standing on the overhang above the kitchen door.

As Jeffrey watched, the man ran and jumped. Daryl’s arms were out. His legs bicycled through the air. He landed with a thump on the roof of the shed.

Jeffrey didn’t stop to think.

He kicked out the window. He stepped onto the overhang, which gave him no more than five feet. Ten more feet to the shed. The roof sloped just the way Matt had said, like a ski jump.

Jeffrey took a running start and hurled his body through the air.

His arms flailed. He tried to line up his feet for landing. He found himself calculating all the things that could go wrong. He could miss the roof. Break through the plywood. Land sideways. Break his leg, his arm, his fucking neck.

Jeffrey landed on the toes of his right foot. He felt his body twist on impact, his spine painfully torquing. He caught himself on his left foot, stuttered back onto his right, then tumbled down the back side of the slope. He landed flat on his ass on the ground.

He had to shake the stars out of his eyes. The wind was knocked out of him. He looked around.

Daryl was running through the backyard. He glanced over his shoulder at Jeffrey as he hurdled the fence to his neighbor’s yard.

Jeffrey was up and running after him, gasping for breath as he jumped the fence. His foot slipped on the grass. His skull was pounding. He felt like something had ripped in his back. He gained his footing as he ran around the side of the house.

He saw Daryl sprinting toward the street. His arms started windmilling as he took a sharp turn onto Valley Ridge. His bare feet skipped across the asphalt. By the time Jeffrey made the turn, the man was thirty yards away.

“No-no-no,” Jeffrey begged.

He couldn’t close the gap. The kid was too fast. Jeffrey looked down the street, searching for Dawson. The patrol car was a football field away. Dawson had seen Daryl. He was out of his car, running toward the action.

Jeffrey’s sense of relief was cut off by a woman’s piercing scream.

Again, the world slowed down to a crawl, the blur of houses and trees in Jeffrey’s periphery stuttering into freeze-frame.

The woman had been walking to her car. Jeffrey saw her mouth open. He watched Daryl’s fist swing back.

Jeffrey tried, “No!”

It was too late. The woman collapsed to the ground. Daryl scooped up her car keys.

Jeffrey kept running.

He earned fifteen hard feet while Daryl fumbled with the door of the woman’s red station wagon.

Another five feet while Daryl tried to crank the engine.

Another five while he shifted the gear into reverse.

Jeffrey squeezed out the last ounce of adrenaline in his body and lunged toward the open car window.

His hand grabbed the first thing he could reach, a fistful of Daryl’s greasy hair.

“Motherfu—” Daryl punched at him, his foot still on the gas.

Jeffrey’s head snapped back. His shoes skipped along the road. Daryl punched him again, then again. All at once, Jeffrey’s muscles gave in to exhaustion. Daryl’s hair slid through his fingers.

Jeffrey hit the pavement. His head cracked against the asphalt. Something told him to get back on his feet as quickly as possible. He pushed his hands against the pavement. He looked up.

From behind the windshield, Daryl’s mouth twisted into a smirk. He was going to run Jeffrey over. The kid stood on the gas pedal.

Jeffrey scrambled.

Instead of lurching forward, the car shot back, bouncing over the curb, slamming into the house across the street.

Not just the house.

The gas meter.

Like every man who had ever started a barbecue grill, Jeffrey had seen fuel catch fire before. The blue-white glow was almost mesmerizing as the fumes ignited into thick flames. The gas meter on the front of the house was filled with nothing but fumes. He watched helplessly as the metal supply line was wrenched apart by 3,000 pounds of steel. There was nothing to enthrall him, just a spark of metal like a match being struck, then the air burned with light.

Jeffrey’s arms flew up to cover his face.

The explosion sent a fireball crashing around his body. Glass shattered. A car alarm wailed. His ears started ringing. He felt like his head was inside of a gong. The heat was like a sauna. Jeffrey tried to stand. He lost his balance. His knee pounded into the asphalt.

“Help!”

Daryl was still in the car. He was stuck. He rammed his shoulder against the door, furiously trying to get out. His screams were like a siren.

“Chief!” Dawson was fifty yards away. His arms pumped as he ran.

“Help!” Daryl yelled. He was halfway out of the car. “Help me!”

Jeffrey stumbled across the road. The heat felt like it was chewing at his face.

“Help!” Daryl screamed. Fire licked at his back. He was folded over the door, clawing at the ground. His leg was caught inside. He couldn’t get out. “Please! Help me!”

Jeffrey dodged the flames. He grabbed Daryl’s wrists and pulled.

“Harder!” Daryl started kicking at the steering wheel with his free leg.

The flames shot higher. The heat was melting the paint off the car. Jeffrey could see the flat metal bottom of the gas tank glowing red.

“Pull!” Daryl begged.

Jeffrey leaned back, using every ounce of weight in his body.

“No!” Daryl screamed. “Oh, God! No!”

Jeffrey felt something pop. The release was like a champagne cork flying across the room. His body fell backward. Daryl Nesbitt collapsed on top of him. Jeffrey tried to shift him off. The gas tank was going to blow.

“Chief!” Dawson grabbed Jeffrey under his arms. He dragged him away from the flames. Someone threw water on his face. Someone else wrapped a jacket around his shoulders.

Jeffrey coughed up a pool of black liquid onto the ground. His eyes were burning. His skin felt singed. The hair had burned off his arms.

“Chief?” Matt said. Brad was with him. Cheshire. Hendricks. Dawson.

Jeffrey rolled over. Blood dripped down his throat. His nose was broken again. He turned his head.

Daryl Nesbitt was flat on his back, arms out, eyes closed, unmoving.

Just like Tommi Humphrey.

Just like Beckey Caterino.

Just like Leslie Truong.

Jeffrey pushed himself up on his elbow. He saw a thick line of blood in the grass that traced all the way back to the burning car. He followed the line to Daryl.

The champagne cork.

The pop had come from Daryl Nesbitt’s ankle joint as his foot had been ripped away from his leg.

Atlanta

26

Will pecked at his keyboard, carefully filling out the last box on the application for a subpoena. He had driven by the One Museum condo complex on the way to work. Callie Zanger’s building superintendent hadn’t appreciated being roused from bed at five in the morning, but the man had been coherent enough to give Will the information that he needed.

There were no two-year-old hard drives lying around. The state-of-the-art building security system was backed up to the cloud. The building’s insurance company required them to store the encrypted data for five years. Will was asking the judge to grant the GBI access to all of the recordings from the three months before and after Callie Zanger’s abduction.

He touched his finger under each word, checking for mistakes before uploading the request to the system. He sat back in his chair. The subpoena could take as long as four hours to get a judge’s approval. Then the lawyers would get involved. Another day might pass before the data was transferred. Streaming through over two thousand hours of video would take more eyes than Will had in his head.

He looked at the time. Amanda had called their meeting for seven sharp. He would ask her to put a rush on the subpoena. For now, he had eight minutes of peace before his day ramped up.

He allotted himself four minutes to worry.