Uncaged (9 page)

“Explain that,” Stewart said.

Harmon nodded. “When he makes a call, we can see the point
of origin. We look at where they’ve been, and where they go from each place we know they’ve been, and then we try to predict where they’ll go next. Getting inside their thinking. The more moves we record, the better we get. Eventually, we’ll have a team in the same cell tower range as the kid is. We’ll film everything we can, looking at vans and SUVs and other multiperson vehicles. Sooner or later, we’ll start getting duplicates, and then we’ll know what they’re driving.”

“What about a vehicle tag?” Cartwell asked.

“Don’t have one. If we could get one, we’d be good. We could put out a BOLO.”

“What’s a BOLO?” Stewart asked.

“ ‘Be on the lookout,’ ” Harmon said. “We could put one out in the name of the FBI and have the local cops looking for it. When they spot it, they respond to the FBI. The feds wouldn’t know what they were talking about, but we have ways of monitoring that exchange.… We could be right on top of them.”

“How long is this going to take? To find them?” Cartwell asked.

“Honestly? I don’t know,” Harmon said. “For a bunch of crazies, they’ve got good security procedures, just like they had good technique going into the lab. But we’ll find them. If nothing else, the Davidson kid will call one of the people he’s traveling with, and if that person has a smartphone, that’ll be it. We’ll be able to track them by GPS all day long.”

“We need those drives,” Cartwell said. “The quieter, the better, of course. We have no budget limit on this: spend what you need to.”

He looked at his watch again, and as he did, an intercom on his desk chimed. He turned and said, “Yes?”

A voice said, “Mr. Armie is in the elevator.”

“Thank you, Anna,” Cartwell said. He turned to Harmon. “You’ll have to excuse us, Harmon. Find those thieves.”

Harmon stood up and asked, “Back door?”

Cartwell grinned at him and said, “That would be best. You’re not exactly projecting our corporate image at the moment.”

“More like ‘Ride ’em, cowboy,’ ” Stewart said.

“I yam what I yam,” Harmon said as he headed for the door. Behind him, the intercom chimed again and Anna said, “Mr. Armie’s here.”

The back door to Cartwell’s office, which looked like a closet door, was down a stubby hallway that also led to Cartwell’s private bathroom. Rather than opening into a closet, however, the door led to a long, narrow, thickly carpeted hallway that ran parallel to the main hallway and emerged in an obscure niche near the elevators. Thickly carpeted to kill the sound of footsteps, of somebody coming or going. A sneaky way in and out, in case it was needed.

Harmon went through the door, turned and closed it, then stopped and leaned back against the wall.

He couldn’t hear the words being spoken inside the office, but he could hear that they were being spoken—a friendly rumble as people met, the words getting fainter as Cartwell, Stewart, and Sync walked with Armie back to the conversation area where he’d just been sitting.

When he was sure they were all seated, Harmon quietly cracked open the door he’d just come through. He’d been an intelligence agent most of his life. He’d learned the hard way that the more intelligence you have, the better off you are. The meeting lasted for half an hour, and Harmon never moved. When they finished and he
heard them stirring, he eased the door shut and hurried down the hall to the exit. From there he took the stairs to his own office.

He wasn’t in the office much, and it was simply furnished: a desk, a computer, a good leather chair, and several file cabinets that were actually camouflaged safes. The door lock was the best that money could buy, and the entire office was monitored with equipment that nobody else knew about.

Harmon leaned back in the chair and put his boots up on the desk.

He’d learned more than he’d expected. He’d known the overall outline of the project, but not some of the uglier details.

They were killing people.

He’d have to think about that.

The sun was coming up over the Hollywood Freeway when something made a snuffling noise next to Shay’s head. She unzipped her bivy sack and peered out. A rat the size of a chicken was sniffing at her backpack, looking for her saltines. Odin liked rats. She didn’t. She could handle a nice, clean caged rat, maybe with a little chill running down her spine, but a garbage-eating feral rat was something else.

“Scram!” she screamed. She thumped her constrained legs against the dirt like a grounded mermaid. The rat seemed to be thinking it over. “Seriously! Beat it!”

The rat ambled away.

Not what Odin would have done. There’d been a rat phase after the gecko phase, until the rats started multiplying like rats and the clueless foster mother that year—Mrs. Thurman?—finally caught on. She’d called the caseworker at midnight and demanded that the creepy kid, his sister, and the rats be out of there by morning.

Shay checked her watch: six o’clock. She’d been asleep for less than five hours.

She rolled over with a groan. She didn’t want to get up, but a bunch of crows were squawking about food. Overhead, the drone of the morning traffic was picking up and a semitrailer driver leaned on his air horn.

She wriggled out of the bivy, giving up. The Hollywood Starbucks on Gower opened at six. If she hustled over there, she thought, she could get some decent private time in the bathroom to clean up. It was her third day in L.A. and her fourth without a shower.

She smelled bad. She smelled homeless.

A quarter-mile hike from her shrub below the freeway and Shay was back in the land of make-believe. The Starbucks she’d been using was directly across the street from Paramount Studios. Billboards loomed overhead, advertising summer blockbusters she couldn’t afford to go to. In a couple of hours, movie executives in black BMWs, black Mercedeses, and black Range Rovers would be pulling into the studio ramp, and their browbeaten assistants would be racing into the coffee shop, cutting in line for their bosses’ half-caf, no-foam, two-Splenda soy lattes.

The Starbucks day crew was led by the same guy as yesterday, an over caffeinated middle-aged man with full-sleeve tattoos wearing a green apron. Same dumb grin as he checked her out all over again. Shay twiddled her fingers and smiled. Maybe he’d make her another mocha frap “on the house.” She was hungry and had noted, the day
before, that the scones were almost five hundred calories—a third of her daily food requirement, if worst came to worst.

“Hi, Tobias,” she said, reading his name tag. “Can I have the restroom key?”

Locked inside the women’s room, Shay pulled off the bedroll and backpack and rummaged for her toothbrush. Living, and typically vying for just one bathroom, with dozens of different girls in foster care had made her extremely efficient at pulling herself together—and also a bit resentful of all the attention paid to primping. Most days, she was just glad if there was still hot water left for a shower.

If there was a time suck in her routine, it was her hair—and that was nonnegotiable. She’d worn it to her waist since she was a little girl: straight, thick rust-red hair, identical to her mother’s. It wasn’t easy to get a brush through, and it was sort of a pain to wash, but when she looked in the mirror, there was always the private reminder that she’d once been someone’s daughter.

There wasn’t enough headroom under the Starbucks faucet to shampoo, so, same as the day before, she unsnarled her hair and smoothed it back into a scruffy ponytail. Double-checking that the door was locked, she pulled off her clothes, pumped the soap dispenser a dozen times to get a decent amount in the palm of her hand, and sudsed up. She rinsed and dried with paper towels. After pulling on underpants and a T-shirt that she’d dried out on a branch, she gave the overnight T-shirt and underpants a quick wash in the sink and stuffed them into a plastic bag to be dried later.

At least they were clean, and so was she—more or less. She’d have to do something soon about her jeans, and the grungy hoodie
that still smelled of the Greyhound bus she’d taken down from Eugene.

And her hair …

Tobias was waiting for her with the frap. She thanked him as she unwrapped a straw, told him she had a boyfriend when he asked, and took a seat in the far corner to sip her breakfast and go online.

She dropped another Facebook message to Odin, telling him that she was in Los Angeles. Then she began looking for places where he might actually be. There were more animal rights groups in Hollywood than Shay could believe—everything from pit bull rescue specialists to seal enthusiasts. Somewhere in that matrix, she thought, the Storm people were probably talking to allies.

She began saving names and addresses to a separate file, but she was suddenly so sleepy again.… She closed the laptop and then, just for a moment, her eyes.

An hour later, a toddler in a stroller screamed for more juice, and Shay jerked awake and looked around, a little dazed. She’d slumped straight over onto the table like an actual homeless person. When she sat up, a woman with cornrows was giving her a hard stare from the next table.

“What?” Shay asked. She was feeling cranky, and the sleep taste in her mouth didn’t help. “I fell asleep.”

“Yeah, I saw,” the woman said in a Mississippi Delta accent. She had a pile of papers on the table in front of her, and a red pen. “Late night?”

“A little,” Shay said. She tightened the compression straps on her backpack and pulled it on.

The woman said, “Hang on a minute. I’m not the police.”

“Wouldn’t matter if you were. I’m not doing anything illegal,” Shay said.

The woman pushed back in her chair. “You need a place to stay? Look, I’m Rashika Jones, I’m a youth psychologist for the county.”

“Uh-huh,” Shay said. She stepped toward the door. She knew the lingo: Jones decided which abused and neglected kids were a little messed up, and which ones were
really
messed up.

“Let me give you a list of shelters,” Jones said. “There’s a halfway decent one just a few blocks from here.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Shay said.

Shay walked away but Jones followed along, leaving her papers on the table. “You’re too good-looking to last on the streets. A pimp will come along, act like your best friend. He’ll hook you up to something, and that’ll be the end of you. There are two hundred and fifty gangs in this city. More than two hundred murders last year—”

Shay stopped and looked her in the eye. “I appreciate your concern. But I’m fine.”

Jones said, “You’re tough and I appreciate that, but this ain’t Kansas. One of my clients, a girl about your age, tougher than you, was stabbed last year. On the run for nine days, dead on the tenth.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Shay said, and pulled at the door handle.

“Don’t live here without an address,” Jones persisted. “Nothing good can come of it.”

Shay hesitated, then dug in the front pocket of her jeans and pulled out the black business card from the Cat in the Hat. “You ever heard of this guy?”

Jones took the card in her red-lacquered fingernails. “Twist. Okay. He’s different, but if that’s your preference, you’d be safe there. You wouldn’t have to deal with the likes of me.”

“What does that mean?” Shay asked.
“There?”

“He runs a hotel. Or a flophouse. Or a crash pad,” Jones said. “Kids only. Rumor is, he was one of you, until he grew up and got rich. Where’d you get his card?”

Shay hesitated again. “He gave it to me,” she said, and took back the card. “Anyway, I gotta run.” She readjusted her backpack and went out the door.

“Go see Twist,” Jones called to her back.

Shay twiddled her fingers over her shoulder.

Good-bye.

Hollywood, the place, was a letdown, especially during the day. Shay rarely went to the movies because she didn’t have the money, but she hadn’t grown up under a rock. Where were the celebrities, the red carpets, the paparazzi and limos? Okay, she’d seen a bunch of limos, and a strange piggy-looking car that she suspected was a Rolls-Royce.

By midmorning, she was elbow to elbow with hundreds of tourists on the hunt for famous faces. The Hollywood they were looking for didn’t really exist for outsiders.

The stars worked on closed sets and lived behind gates in Beverly Hills or up one of the canyons. This Hollywood was mostly cheesy souvenir shops and fast-food restaurants. Eventually, the tourists would have to settle for a five-dollar Polaroid with one of the hustlers who dressed up as Spider-Man or Shrek.

Shay looked at the map she’d bought from a grumpy Snow White outside the TCL Chinese Theatre and learned that L.A.’s Hollywood neighborhood covers about eight square miles. The seal enthusiasts’ storefront was two miles from the Starbucks where
she’d had breakfast. She’d walked over and found the place, and a sign in the front window that said
CLOSED
. It looked like it had been closed since the millennium, with a layer of dust inside the window.

Finding Odin might take a while. And she’d been thinking about her camp beneath the freeway. Jones, the Child Protection lady, was right. Outdoors, on your own, was too dangerous; there were too many dodgy people around, and sooner or later, one of them would stumble over her.

She couldn’t help Odin if she were dead.

Shay was worried that her cell phone could be tracked. She’d meant to get rid of it, but hadn’t. Now, because she’d run from her foster parents’ home, she was afraid to use it. She’d asked a couple girls on the street and been directed to one of the rare remaining pay phones in Hollywood, one that the locals casually referred to as the “drug phone.”

She needed a hassle-free place to stay …

She called Twist on the drug phone. A boy answered.

“Yeah? Whatta ya want?”

Definitely a boy’s high-pitched voice, not a man’s, and someone who sounded like he didn’t care one way or another what she wanted.

“Is, uh, Mr. Twist there?”

“He’s around somewhere, but Twist don’t talk on the telephone,” the kid said. “So whatta ya want?”

“He gave me a card last night …”