Chapter Text
Saturday, July 20, ???
“Six-forty-seven h. Disorderly conduct through means of peeking into—” she cuts herself off with a yelp when her boot slides across some scree, the loose pebbles tumbling down the steep hillside behind her, “— an inhabited building.”
Hauling herself up and around a boulder, Lucy collapses back onto it and tries to catch her breath, but the fuzzy, lightheaded feeling doesn’t abate. Though she ascended only a hundred feet, she feels the same as when Tim and she hiked that trail in Cucamonga that gained almost twenty times as much elevation.
“Two-oh-seven,” she recites as she waits for the black spots to clear from her vision. “Every person who forcibly takes, holds, or detains any person in this state and carries the person into another country, state, or county is guilty of kidnapping.”
When Lucy was six years old, she flew to Albuquerque with her parents to attend the hot air balloon festival. It was a bright, sunny day, and the crowds moved in all different directions with their eyes on the sky. Lucy spent so long looking up with them that when she reached for her father’s hand, she realized her parents were gone. She was all alone.
The memory of what came next was lost to time. The moments she could recall were odd, like the greasy smell of funnel cakes or the way her jelly sandals hurt her feet or the comforting voice of an older woman as she soothed Lucy’s fears. Then: her father’s arms and her mother’s hands as they berated and scolded and clung to her, Lucy’s sobs heaving her shoulders at the relief, the safety of being found.
She thinks about that day as she makes the slow, grueling scramble across more scorching sand. Finally reaching the summit, she shades her eyes with her good hand and scours the desert for any signs of life.
Nothing. From every direction, nothing. No sights or sounds of people, no houses or cars or fences, not even a barren stretch of land that could be considered a road. Defeat tears through her like a shot to the gut, draining her of whatever optimism she has left. She truly is on her own out here. Who knew what clues, if any, Kipling left behind? If the team apprehended her, did she even tell them the truth? Or were they searching some other section of desert hundreds of miles away?
Her eyes burn with tears that can’t form; her throat aches around sobs that send her down onto her knees. She feels all of six years old again. After all those hours of walking and nothing to show for it, she is no closer to saving herself than she was when she pulled herself from that sinking car. She’s injured and exhausted and dehydrated and there is no end to her suffering in sight. Weary and frightened, Lucy allows herself a few minutes to accept the emotions as they come, to wade through them and circle right back to rage.
“Get up,” she growls, smacking the rock below her. “You’re not dying out here, so get up.”
Forcing herself to stand through the pain and blurry vision, she steps down from the rock— and a section of scree under her boots gives way. She slips and lands hard on her thigh, then her shoulder. Clawing at the ground to slow her fall is hopeless; she can’t find purchase in the loose sand and tumbles down the hill.
Saturday, July 20, 2:11 p.m.
With his gaze trained on the path in front of them, it takes Tim a few seconds to notice the stones. Off in the distance, maybe forty yards from their position, is a cairn — just four rocks stacked haphazardly in the middle of the trail. Not an ideal location for an official marker, so he points out the find to Angela as he snatches the radio off his hip.
“Do you use cairns to mark the OHV trails?”
“No, we don’t,” Brenshaw radios back. “Those would get run over in a heartbeat. All of our trails are marked with steel posts and signs. Why?”
“We might’ve found a trail,” Tim says, reading their coordinates off Angela's satellite phone. “We’ll radio back when we know more.”
Hope floods through him when they find another stack a few hundred feet away, then another in an eighth of a mile. Ushering Angela to a stop, Tim cups his hands beside his mouth and calls out Lucy’s name. The only response is the shrill cry of a red-tailed hawk as it circles the air above them and heads for the nearby cliffs. Undeterred, they continue to find more cairns placed sporadically about the land.
“What the hell is she doing out this far?” Tim wonders. “We’ve gone almost five and a half miles.”
Shrugging, Angela stops to take a drink and yells out Lucy’s name. Like the past few times, they’re met with the desert’s eerie quiet. To the east, the jagged ridges of the badlands pierce into the bright, blue sky. This far out of the canyon, it hardly looks like a storm passed through at all. Whatever puddles left behind have long since dried.
“She’s been out in the heat all day. She’s probably not thinking straight.”
Guilt chokes at him. Tim saw firsthand in the army what a hot stretch of desert could do to a person. The idea of finding Lucy like that was difficult — but he had been here before, with that same hopeless ache of searching the earth for any sign of her, and he knows that not finding her at all is the worst possible outcome.
“Airship to ground,” comes Grey’s voice over their radio. “Nolan and Juarez are closing in on Kipling’s last known location.”
Radioing back their acknowledgment, they continue for another half-mile without spotting any more cairns. Feeling that flare of hope dwindle, Tim climbs up onto a rock formation to gain a better vantage point. He scans across the landscape with the binoculars, but no movement draws him in. Just as he starts to make his way back down, though, Angela shouts his name. She takes off across the ground, radioing her discovery and sprinting towards a cluster of brush nearby. Even without the binoculars, his heart drops at the cause of her alarm: a dark boot sole and head protruding out of the dirt.
Saturday, July 20, 2:39 p.m.
“This is not what I was expecting,” Celina says as they pull into the driveway, not bothering to hide the awe in her voice. “Are you sure this is the right address?”
From the passenger seat, Nolan flashes a look of disappointment at her, and she scrambles to apologize. “Sorry, sorry, it’s just… when Tina said she dropped Kipling off at her accommodations, I didn’t think it would be an HGTV Dreamhome or something.”
The house is a far cry from the motels where suspects usually hide out. The dark A-frame cabin is perched along the mountainside in Tehachapi, fifty miles from Red Rock Canyon. A spacious, wrap-around deck holds a hot tub and a lounge area. The high, tinted windows reflect the rolling mountains behind them, obscuring the interior.
Gravel crunching heralds the arrival of their backup from the sheriff’s office. Nolan exits the shop and jogs over to the deputy to go over their plan. Before they can group up, though, the cabin’s door opens.
“Oh, good,” Kipling greets them, unfazed by the half a dozen guns pointed in her direction. “I need a ride to the station for my shift.”
She goes willingly into the back of their shop, lamenting that she didn’t get a chance to try out the hot tub before they showed up. While Nolan takes the wheel for the return drive, Celina updates the team on the arrest.
“I can draw you guys a map if you need me to,” Kipling gloats. “I’m sure you don’t want your fellow officers out there too much longer, or they’ll—”
“We found the car.” Nolan glances back at her through the rearview mirror. “Officer Chen escaped.”
He’s glad he’s watching her, too, because he gets to see her smarmy grin falter. At least for a moment, and then it’s back.
“They haven’t found her, though, have they?”
“We will.”
“Eventually, sure,” she says with a shrug. “After the buzzards have been at her. If she didn’t drown in the flood, she’ll die of dehydration out there.” Readjusting in her seat, she crosses one leg over the other and settles in for the long ride with a satisfied smile. “I read up on all of you just because I could. You were out there in the desert when you got that golden ticket, Officer Nolan, down on the border in Tecopa. You experienced firsthand how hot it gets. How desolate it is. She wouldn’t have lasted long without help.”
The car is silent for a few miles before Celina turns around, ignoring Nolan’s warning look.
“Why miniatures?” she asks.
“One of my longtime clients made her career building miniature dollhouses. She has an entire basement filled with every tiny object you can think of. I make them down there when she’s napping, which is most of the time, considering the pain dosage for her MS.”
“Okay, but I asked why. Why do you build them?” Celina reiterates. “You knew that we would use the clues in the last one to find Lucy.”
Kipling stares at her in disbelief for a moment before chuckling. “You’re seriously psychoanalyzing me in the back of a cop car?”
“Yeah, I am. I mean, you’re clearly copying Natalie Davis, but that’s a lot of time and effort to go through.” At Kipling’s silence, Celina pushes again. “Does it have something to do with your sister? Did she like playing—”
“Don’t fucking talk about her,” she hisses. The air of repose is gone as she leans forward, her knee knocking against the metal partition. “She’s dead because of the state you work for. If they cared about her, they would’ve given her to me like I asked. I was her only family. I applied four times so she could live with me, but they denied me every time. When I finally did get approved, the only qualifying place refused to rent to me, and I was stuck out on the streets again. So, I burned the son of a bitch’s apartment down with him inside it, but he survived and went crawling back to his brother. I decided then that none of them deserved to ever feel peace again. Because of them, Astrid died in pain and all alone, in state’s custody.”
“What happened to your sister was awful, but the people you killed had nothing to do with her death,” Nolan points out, unable to stay silent.
“If I killed the people responsible, then their suffering would end. They should have to live every day without their loved ones, just like I do.” Kipling smirks at their lack of a response. “Besides, look how quickly I finished my list before you caught me. Just goes to show that no one pays attention to the hired help. It’s a lot like being homeless, actually. Nobody wants to notice you.”
As if enjoying the tension inside the shop, she leans back again to watch the two officers. “I thought your little murder boards were cute. I loved reading them when I emptied the trash in the meeting room. It’s like an episode of Criminal Minds or something, all that sleuthing just for me.”
“It wasn’t for you. It was for the people you killed,” Nolan says.
“I take pride in my work, too,” Kipling continues, unabated by his correction. “I didn’t only read up on Natalie Davis, you know. The stuff on Rosalind Dyer was a lot easier to come by. And since I wanted to make sure my last miniature was memorable, I studied up on her case.”
Radio chatter bursts through the shop, and Angela’s voice comes across with a 10-54: a possible dead body. Nolan catches Celina’s worried gaze and shakes his head minutely, wanting to comfort her and also keep their suspect in the dark.
“I thought about reusing the barrel idea, but there would’ve been a lack of an immediate payoff.” Her frown almost resembles a pout, as if disappointed by the idea. “You all never would’ve found Officer Chen, and there would always be that little sliver of hope. I didn’t get that with my sister, so neither should Bradford.”