see from where I stood. I watched for a minute or so, waiting for the drivers to show up. They didn’t.
Catherine crept up beside me and peered around the trunk of a tree. I wished I knew the hand signals TV commandos use. I leaned close to her and whispered: “Let me check it out. If no one shoots me, you follow.”
The reflected headlights illuminated Catherine’s face clearly. I saw her nod gratefully.
I rubbed the tattoos Annalise had put on my chest and forearms, but I couldn’t feel anything. That was how they worked: where the marks covered my skin I was numb, but those marks could bounce bullets.
It wasn’t much. My neck, my face and head, my back, my legs, and a couple of other places I didn’t like to think about were not bulletproof, but it was more than most people had.
I darted from one tree to the next. The headlights lit the accident scene pretty well, but anyone who might be standing guard was well hidden. Or there was nothing to guard. To hell with this. I climbed down the embankment and walked along the shoulder.
The BMW was an xDrive 50i in a lovely burgundy. An X6. It was also empty. The license plate holder showed it belonged to a “luxury” rental agency. Out of habit, I checked the ignition. No keys. The driver’s door was unlocked, though. I had always liked stealing BMWs. They were fun to drive and valuable enough to ship out of the country. That wasn’t my life anymore, of course.
I jogged toward the toppled panel truck. I was too close to creep around in shadows, and it would have looked suspicious if I’d tried. Instead, I strode directly through the headlights, trying to make my body language say
The truck was lying on the passenger side, with the cab partly blocking the driveway. The mud beside it was smeared with footprints.
Standing by the roof, I pulled myself up and peered into the open driver’s window. There was blood on the steering wheel and a bloody handprint on the side of the door.
Then I noticed the front driver’s-side tire. It was dead flat, and there was a finger-poke hole in the metal rim.
A skid mark stretched from the middle of the road to just a few feet away. Uphill was a long, gentle slope, very unlike the terrain we’d passed on the estate so far. The trees were scant on that part of the hill, and at the far top I could see the lights of a house.
I walked around the front. There were no dents in the grille, so it was clear there’d been no collision. At the bottom of the truck, I could feel the drive train still giving off heat. Gas dripped out of a small rupture in the plastic gas tank.
Catherine jogged up beside me. “This accident just happened,” I said.
“Did you notice the color on the roof?” she asked.
I followed her around the truck. Now that she’d told me it was there, I saw it immediately—there was a dark circle just under two feet in diameter on the part of the roof next to the ground. I knelt close to it. The blue paint of the truck was nearly black there, although it was difficult to judge color accurately in the moonlight.
Was this circle fresh paint? I picked up a stick and poked it.
“Don’t—” Catherine said, but she was too late. One tap against the circle caused the whole area to crumble to dust, leaving a hole in the roof.
I jumped back, careful not to get any dust on me. “Holy shit,” Catherine said. “What did that?”
“I was going to ask you,” I said.
She took a flashlight from her bag and shined it down onto the pile of dust. It looked like fine metal filings. She turned the beam of light into the truck. “I can’t tell what I’m seeing in there.”
I walked to the back. The third car parked behind it wasn’t a BMW. Something about it caught my attention, but the headlights were bright and I was too focused on the truck to think about it. The truck’s double doors were unlatched. One door hung across the opening. Half of a bakery logo was visible on it. The other door lay open on the uneven ground. It would have been convenient if the headlights of the third car had lit the interior of the truck, but it had been parked at the wrong angle for that.
Catherine joined me but kept well back from the open door. She knelt and shined her flashlight into the darkness of the truck. Right beside the opening was a car battery. Beyond that, I couldn’t see much detail.
I didn’t see or hear anything moving inside. I stepped onto the open door. It groaned and bent under my weight. I knelt below the other door, not wanting to touch it in case it made more noise, and I crawled inside.
Catherine followed. Her flashlight illuminated the contents well enough. Beside me was the car battery. Only one lead was still attached.
At the far end of the truck bed was a Plexiglas cube, three feet on each side. It was still bolted to the floor, which meant it was now midway up the side of the tipped-over truck. There was a broken battery mount on it, and each corner of the cube had a floodlight aimed toward its center. With the battery broken off, presumably by the accident, the lights had gone out.
“What the hell is this?” Catherine asked. Her voice echoed off the metal panels.
“A cage,” I said. I remembered something Annalise had once told me:
“Don’t touch that, please,” Catherine said. “I have to breathe the air in here, and I don’t want a lot of plastic dust floating around.”
“Good idea.”
“It looks like we’re too late,” she added. “It looks like the owner of this truck won the auction, then had an accident while they were driving away. The battery mount broke, the lights went off, and whatever was inside escaped. Seem right to you?”
“Sure, except about the accident. That left front tire was shot out. You can see the bullet hole on the metal
