Page 28 of Catching Fire

Kalan had waited on the porch, and she looked up to find him scanning the yard for intruders or evidence or something. She shrugged at him and shook her head. He seemed to have heard the verdict, too.

Still, she wasn’t certain they were in the clear. Sure enough, it came too soon.

“Fuck,” she heard one of the agents mutter, then again, “Fuck!”

Seline ducked down automatically and looked inside. There was enough light to see Verner grabbing the phone at her waist. She spoke into it. “We have the tracker … No. Just the tracker.”

“Son of a bitch.” Seline heard it faintly through the line the agents both had open.

Confused and still standing in the flower bed, the gravel poking at her bare feet, the cool night air making her wish she'd put on a sweater, Seline stood back upright and held the trellis. She turned her brain off, a handy skill when she didn’t like what she was learning.

But the agents weren’t ready to get out from under the house. Instead, they duck-walked the entire space, checking every corner and around each support beam. Their flashlights shined ovals on the ground, and Seline told herself not to look.

At last, they must have declared themselves finished because they emerged with their knees dirty from crawling. Hands and faces were smudged.

“No,” Verner said into her phone. “There's nothing else here. Just the tracker.”

“What does it look like?” Seline heard Watson over the line and thought what an odd question that was.Why wouldn’t she know what the tracker looked like?

But Rossi’s answer cleared that up. “It’s bloody.”

Bon sang!Seline thought. The FBI had embedded a tracker in Marina Balero and the Blue River Killer had physically removed it.

“Why is it here?” Seline fought and failed to keep the tremor out of her voice.

“My guess is that he’s leading us to your house because it was fully believable that Marina Balero came to your home of her own volition several hours ago.” Rossi looked to Verner who nodded as the three of them stood in the cold air of the backyard. She motioned Seline up the porch steps and inside the house, the agents trailing behind.

Verner added, “When it arrived here, no one thought anything of it. But when it failed to move for several hours, the system pinged us.”

Seline felt her shoulders slump. Her hand went slack, nearly dropping the gun she still held—the one the agents hadn’t asked her to set aside. That might be the most telling thing of the evening.

They headed into the living room where she saw Kalan, now standing guard. She let go of a little of the tension. Would she feel this way each time she saw one of her friends was safe? Or was this reserved just for him?

But even as that layer of tension went away, it revealed the violation that Maggie must have felt when Merrit Geller had repeatedly entered her home. “He was here,” she told Kalan, then jumped when Watson replied over the still open phone line.

“Maybe, maybe not. He was close enough—or someone was—to get the tracker into the crawlspace under your home,” the agent explained, though Seline wasn’t sure whether it was what Watson actually thought or just typical law enforcement refusal to speculate on anything that didn’t have full evidence behind it.

“However,” Watson kept going. “It appears the tracker was placed relatively in the center of the footprint of the home. So my guess is that yes, someone entered the crawlspace to get it there.”

“When?”

Watson had said they believed Marina had arrived earlier in the evening. “Just before nine-thirty pm.”

Seline would have swallowed hard if not for the constriction of her chest. She and Kalan had been sitting on the couch watching a television show at nine-thirty. She’d heard nothing, had no idea that someone—probably Sanders himself—had shown up and placed a device he’d pulled from Marina’s skin under her home.

She was not squeamish, but she wanted to vomit.

Only then did her stunned brain put the pieces together. “The tracker is here. But where is Marina?”

“That's the problem,” Watson replied, and Seline could almost hear the agent grinding her teeth. “He has her. And we only know wherenotto look.”

Chapter Eighteen

“We should eat something,” Maggie announced, though there was no gusto behind it. Clearly, none of them were actually hungry, Maggie was just tending to a need.

Seline agreed, if only for the fact that she wouldn’t help Marina by passing out.

The sun had come up almost an hour ago. She had gotten dressed in the middle of the night in a warm sweater, despite the disturbingly sunny day. She still felt cold down to her bones.

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