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  For my daughter, Rianne, the young Queen of Hidden Things, who is not Carly, but made Carly real for me.

  And for all the fine hidden things that make all of us who we are.

  Try to put well in practice what you already know, and in so doing, you will in good time discover the hidden things you now inquire about.

  —Rembrandt

  CHAPTER ONE

  * * *

  The video had been watched only forty-four times before Carly Liddell’s attacker was identified to the police. Viewer number forty-four was the prize tipster, and it was a good thing it was all resolved quickly. The young man in the video had killed a turtle over a span of hours one dull Saturday a decade earlier, at the age of nine, in the early weeks of the same summer he’d set his first fire. Since then, matches, rocks, the heel of his shoe, the long drop over the railing of a bridge, and other weapons of juvenile destruction had been urgently fascinating to him in ways that got him into trouble when he was a boy, in ways he’d learned to hide over the years.

  He’d been stealing things, lately. And watching women.

  He always would have made the news.

  The video, a sloppy edit of footage from a home-security system, went on to become something of a phenomenon. It had been cut together in a hurry by a tech-savvy officer in the cybercrimes unit who was good with that sort of thing. It went up on the police website less than twenty minutes after the flash drive, loaded with the raw recordings from the home’s monitoring surveillance, had been plugged into his computer. Backslaps and high fives all around for that one.

  The local news stations had rushed to repost it. It was a civic duty, of course. But at least as good as all that, it was irresistible: a heart-stopper in three acts that clocked in at under half a minute.

  By the end of the next day, it had been uploaded to more than a dozen YouTube accounts.

  In seventy-two hours, nearly a quarter of a million people had seen fourteen-year-old Carly Liddell come into the frame from the top right, her face pixelated to anonymity in every shot.

  The view in the opening clip is admirably long-range, the camera pointing down a concrete driveway, clearly covering the near intersection and eventually fuzzing out of focus a block up the far sidewalk. The feed is tagged in the lower left-hand corner as Exterior_3, which would indicate at least two other cameras are outside scanning the bland green agreeableness of the minivan-and-hybrid neighborhood.

  Carly comes down the stretch of pavement covered by Exterior 3 in the last yards of her return trip from school, backpack on one shoulder, crossing the screen on a slight diagonal, right to left. She moves with a loping, coltish gait that already shows signs of being reined in. She’s so close to grown.

  Even with her head high, and with only one reflexive glance at the phone in her hand, she doesn’t appear to react at all to the young man slouching beside the hedge on the retaining wall as she passes him.

  But even in the grainy farthest reach of the lens, his notice of her is unmistakable. He leans forward, watching, hesitates for a beat, then checks the walkway behind them. It’s deserted. He slides into her wake.

  If there were only one frame of the video to see—Carly in front, the young man a few long steps behind—in just that single still image it would be clear that one of the people in the scene belongs there and one doesn’t.

  Her posture is soft, easy in a pleasant end-of-the-day fatigue. She’s all but home. It’s in the flutter of the flannel shirt tied around her waist. It’s in the tilt of her head and the bend of her knee.

  But he’s rigid, chin down, every bit of his stance just a degree off a natural bearing. Some switch in him has been tripped, and he’s not entirely what he was a few seconds before when he was only loitering on an empty suburban block. Now he’s a mannequin, a robot, an approximation made of impulse wired through him like opposing magnets strung together. The surging current has pushed his arms away from his sides, pulled his legs slightly bent, the omen of a reflex to come, the windup to a sprint or a spring.

  Then the edited video cuts to a different camera, labeled Exterior_2, this one mounted on the back side of a decorative column, one of two pillars flanking the front door. Carly and the young man are facing each other. There’s no audio, but he’s closed the gap and seems to have invented something to talk about, something to keep her poised between being rude and being on the safe side of that door.

  The young man’s back is to us, still taut and awkward, but now Carly is also rigid. Her key is in the lock, but that’s as far as she’d gotten. He’s walked all the way up onto the stoop and set his body close to the door’s handle, though not quite blocking it—a threat with a built-in plausible deniability that buys time with her doubt.

  She’s backed away a little to preserve a cushion of personal space, though it meant giving up the easy reach to the door. She’d have to nearly touch him now to finish getting inside. She plucks at the hem of her T-shirt, shedding nervous energy in the repetition. His shoulder twitches. He says something. She shakes her head and glances at the empty intersection, so close and useless to her.

  The young man looks down and shuffles back a half step, and Carly either misinterprets the maneuver or takes the only chance she can count on. She dives for the key and the threshold. He lets her get past him. He also looks to the intersection. It’s still empty. He doesn’t even have to hurry to stop the door as she scrabbles to slam it closed behind her.

  The last part of the video is shot from the back of the foyer, by a camera marked Interior_1. The light off the paint gives a vague green hue to the indoor footage. Carly is slapping at a control panel on the wall. He pushes her away from it. They both trip and scuffle over her fallen backpack. She shoves with all her woefully inadequate might and gains less than an arm’s length from him.

  Instead of pulling her in, the young man locks his forearm across his body and drives them on, plowing and pinning Carly into the corner next to her own front door. Her back hits the wall hard enough that the edge of the painting in the foreground jumps and quivers on its nail. Her knees let go, and his surprise topples him into the blank space where her body should have been to receive him.

  On elbows and heels, Carly scrambles backward toward the camera, toward the quarter of a million viewers (and each new one, as they come) holding their breath, rooting for her, willing her a way out. She makes it into the sharpest focus yet, her long hair swinging around her shoulder in a sheet of blue-sheened chestnut cascading from the strong side part that’s almost close enough to stroke.

  He runs at the camera, lunges for her, catching her left ankle as it shoots out in her ungainly crab crawl. He drags her, kicking and thrashing, away from the clear focus that felt like safety, back into the open foyer. He pulls her leg up, tilting her onto her back. He leans in, stooping low to make a short fall of the distance left to be on her, to finally catch her under his control. And Carly Liddell, never a dancer, never a gymnast, never any color belt in any martial art—but ever the natural math and science whiz—becomes trigonometry and physics. And she has cool boots.

  Her mind and muscles do the calculations of the arcs and angles as she rises up, torso cocked to the left, then swinging to the right to load momentum into her free leg, which she b
rings back across her body. The knobby tread of her goth-girl combat boot explodes his grip on her ankle.

  In a perfect ballet of Newtonian inevitability, unlearned and unpracticed but as natural as a whirlwind, Carly makes a figure-eight flourish of the follow-through, winding up again, this time to bring her boot crashing into the sweet spot where his jaw meets his ear, dropping him like a bag of gravel.

  She rolls onto her hands and knees. She pushes up from the floor and looks down at her fallen foe. Run! thinks every single person who will ever watch the footage.

  And she does.

  It’s magnificent.

  But short-lived. The video freezes and the cybercrime tech destroys the triumph and tension with a quick electronic red circle, drawn to bring the audience out of the drama and into the lineup. The young man’s face, sideways in forced repose against the foyer tile, is largely in shadow and not terribly in focus, but it’s lit up enough that someone who knows him well might peg him. To the stranger, he still looks rough-hewn and indistinct. But viewer forty-four had already picked up her phone by the shot of him coming off the retaining wall. He was arrested just a few hours after Carly walked past him on the sidewalk.

  It was a good day for Good Samaritans. It was a good day for law enforcement. It was a good day for the local news outlets that vied to make the most appealing special report of the pulse-racing video and happy ending.

  And it would have been a good day for John Cooper. His elaborate security system, which his new wife teased him for, had caught the reckless and newly bold young man who had attacked his stepdaughter, and it got the boy before he’d done all the terrible things he’d been whittling vivid in his mind for years.

  The system had worked just as designed, its clarity and clever placement revealing what had happened and when and how, and most importantly, by whom.

  In the longer reach, the video had captured a moment of heroic self-preservation that would go on to inspire many people in both the abstract and even occasionally in practical application.

  It could have been a good day for John Cooper, but it wasn’t. His wife and stepdaughter knew of the perimeter cameras. They knew about the door chimes and the alarm codes and the motion-detector lighting. But they hadn’t known about, nor would have they agreed to, Interior 1, the camera inside the house. And they didn’t know why he had needed to put it there in the first place.

  CHAPTER TWO

  * * *

  John Cooper’s silenced cell phone shivered against his leg again. The barrage of text alerts from the network of cameras always ramped up around the time Carly came home from school, but this was getting ridiculous.

  Until he’d become a self-taught expert in home security, John had never much noticed the all-hours parade of mundane creatures flitting, scurrying, snuffling, moseying, and waddling all over the 360 degrees he was worried about. On nice days it might crest over into a circus, and occasionally, in some clairvoyance of weird weather, you’d get a full-out episode of Suburban Wild Kingdom—flex-eared cats stalking small things in the grass, hackles-raised dogs making sport of the cats, squirrels losing their minds, and blue jays dive-bombing the whole spectacle. The cameras dutifully reported these scenes to John’s phone in text messages. And they reported. And reported.

  It didn’t relent in the evenings, either, but the cast of the after-hours show became slightly more exotic and leggy, and sometimes even toothy when a curious coyote would venture down out of the hills. The night footage had been fascinating for a while. He’d never realized so much was going on out there. His household winding down into whatever passed for tranquillity at the end of each day didn’t mean all that much to the rhythm of the world. Other creatures still had things to do. Some of them in John Cooper’s yard even.

  When the neighborhood went lights-out in every direction, it was the sort of place made of early-to-bed people. They’d be up productively soon. But if sleep wouldn’t come to you, then at least the ritual quiet was expected of everyone in the tidy darkness, even if you were wide-awake and staring at the shadows on the ceiling.

  In the first weeks that the security system was live and pinging, John had watched a selection of deer, raccoon, opossum, and fox, all careful and walleyed in the night vision, picking their way in singles or sets over the lawn and around the trash bins. Their flat white stares were disturbing in their unblindness, pairs of blank spotlights snapping up out of the grass, alerting to things in the grayscape that John’s cameras didn’t show him.

  He wondered if it was the same animals he saw night after night. He tried a few times to study the videos to see if he could tell one from the other, to recognize a familiar snout or rack of antlers, but he could never be sure. In reviewing the daylight recordings, he easily kept track of the different people he regularly observed on the sidewalks in front of his house, and of the expected neighborhood cars that drove by without slowing.

  His phone buzzed again in his pocket. The cameras’ sensitivities had been lowered to a balance that hit somewhere between vigilance and sanity, and John had turned down the vibration of his phone to barely there. But he still got so many notifications each day that, through sheer repetition, he’d been trained out of startling at most of them. But this time he flinched.

  “John?” His boss for the past three years at BabySafe, Inc. was staring at him with a strange little charged-up look, shocked, as if he’d felt the tingle of the text in his own pocket. Both of the sales managers who relied on John’s projection reports to steer their strategies for rubber spoons and scuff-free safety gates were gaping at him, too. As were the four random worker bees from other departments around the table with them.

  John felt the heat in his face of absorbing a sudden salvo of expectant looks.

  “Huh? No, I’m good. Sorry. Everything’s fine. I just got a text and my phone startled me. That’s all.”

  “No, look,” said his boss.

  All their gazes slid past John, over his shoulder and through the conference room’s glass wall. John turned in his chair to follow their attention.

  His office was one door to the right of dead center of the conference room’s glass. He’d left it open when he’d walked over for the meeting, and now two uniformed police officers were leaning in, searching the empty room for him.

  Every thought evaporated from his head and dragged the roots of his hair to attention as they went. His breath stalled between inhale and exhale, then caught fire in his chest. John watched the police look for him, their starched blue backs filling up his office doorway across the hall. They were only one turn from finding him.

  His heart slammed into a full gallop and he forced himself to blink, and to release his grip on the armrests of his chair.

  He’d had this idea in the abstract plenty of times: cops looking for him. He’d composed scripts to answer any number of questions they might have. He wanted to be ready if they ever came asking. If, though, was the fear, and each day that passed—nearly four years’ worth of them now—was the hope. More days, more hope. But his memory had an unkind habit of now and then pushing back on the progress he’d made into that confidence.

  It had been better lately, with Donna and Carly and all this pretend normal that he played at every day to pass the time. The setup he’d made with them—the house, the routine, and the job he didn’t really need—was more than the sum of its convenient parts. It was nice. They were nice. But still, when his memory kicked up the things that it occasionally did—sounds, images—her blood dried dull on the cuff of my shirt, like coffee or chocolate—

  “John.” A woman’s voice called him back into the moment.

  He looked at the lady beside him and wasn’t certain he’d ever known her name to forget it.

  She touched his arm. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  “Why would it be nothing?”

  Her eyebrows stayed concerned, but her mouth twitched into what was supposed to be a reassuring smile. “I mean, I’m sure it’ll be okay.”
>
  “Okay,” John said. “Thanks,” he added, and felt stupid for it.

  “Go ahead, John. It’s fine. We’ll finish up later.”

  John looked back to see which of the men had said it. Though he’d heard the words, he’d lost the voice in the hum of all the possibilities clamoring in his head. But everyone was nodding at him in a just-said-something kind of way, even whatsername sitting next to him. All in agreement, all of one mind, every one of them eager to let the guy with the cops in his office go on in and collect his disaster while they all sat there and watched it happen through the glass.

  There was nothing for him to do but go. Even the doors out of the office suite were on the far side of the conversation. He’d have to walk past the policemen just to leave.

  Inevitability is gravity’s cousin. It is its own force of nature, one that pulls both the ready and the unwilling along, not toward the earth, but toward consequence. And it can stand in, quite nicely, for a paralyzing lack of resolve. John’s starved lungs dragged in a huge openmouthed breath, and he got out of the chair on autopilot, vaulting the fear in his guts.

  He was standing behind the two officers in less time than he would have liked. The blur of his dash through the hallway sharpened into focus around him, and he was there before he’d figured out what he meant to say.

  “Can I help you?”

  The cops made the turn that John had been dreading and looked at him. He felt their eyes land on him like weight.

  “John Cooper?”

  “Yes?”

  The one on the right, trim and baby-faced, smiled encouragingly. “Don’t worry. Everything’s all right.”

  True or not, it was nice to hear. Hope fluttered in John’s chest.

  The other cop, less trim and less dewy, scowl-smiled. John’s flutter hunkered down.