It was 6:15 when they came back to Rosewood Hills. Marcus knew the time because he looked at the dashboard clock as Marisol turned onto his street, and because 6:15 was the kind of time you remember when the day has already given you too many times to remember: 8:26, 11:10, 4:38, and now this one, the hour when the investigators followed him home.
Lorraine's SUV was gone. Her curtains were closed, every one of them, in a house that usually kept at least the front windows open to the street. Marcus stared at the closed curtains for a moment too long, and Marisol noticed, because Marisol noticed everything.
"She is not here," Marisol said. It was not a question. It was a note taken aloud.
Neighbors were watching the county vehicles. Marcus saw them in doorways and behind fences, a retired teacher he recognized from the end of the block, a family standing together on a porch, a man holding a garden hose that had gone still in his hand. Nobody called out. Nobody waved. They watched the way people watch when they know something has changed on their street but they do not yet know what it is, or whether it will reach their own yards.
Officer Cole had returned too. Marcus saw her near the rear gate, talking quietly with one of the county people, her notebook open, her posture the same calm posture she had held that morning when she watched the patio video twice. She looked up when Marcus approached, and she nodded, a small acknowledgment that carried more weight than it should have, because it meant she had stayed with the case past the morning, past the garbage, past the point where a patrol officer usually hands a matter off and moves on.
Daniel went straight to the rear fence. He knelt where Marcus's landscaping crew had found the cap weeks earlier, beneath the root cluster where the dead shrubs had been removed, and he brushed the soil away with his hands, carefully, the way a person brushes dirt from something fragile. The cap emerged slowly: circular metal, about four inches wide, stamped with letters and numbers that Marcus already knew by heart. Daniel cleaned it with a cloth, wiping away the soil Lorraine had packed over it, until the stamping stood out clear in the evening light.
P-47C.
Marcus had seen it before, when the crew found it, and he had seen it again in photographs, and he had seen it typed on page two of the agreement. Seeing it now, cleaned and uncovered in the presence of investigators, felt different. It felt like the first time the marker had been allowed to be what it was, instead of being covered up, explained away, or written into a document that did not belong to him.
Marisol placed three temporary markers across the yard. She set them in a line that did not follow the fence, and Marcus watched the line take shape and understood, before she said it, that the reserve ran diagonally. It ran beneath his flower bed, the same flower bed he had spent four months restoring, the same bed Lorraine's garbage had buried that morning, and it continued on, past the rear fence, toward Lorraine's detached garage. The fence, which Marcus had always thought of as the boundary between his property and hers, was not the boundary of the thing underneath. The thing underneath ignored the fence entirely.
A utility specialist arrived with a handheld ground scanner, a device that looked, to Marcus, like a small television on a handle, with a screen that showed shapes in shades of gray. The specialist walked the yard slowly, sweeping the scanner across the soil in overlapping passes, pausing at the markers, pausing at the depression near the fence, pausing where the flower bed had been. Marcus stood back and watched the screen, though he could not read it, and he listened to the specialist speak in short, factual sentences to Daniel.
Six feet below the soil, the scanner showed a flat surface. A floor, or a roof, something made and level, not natural ground. Then, past the edge of that surface, the signal changed. It dropped away into a void, an open space where solid ground should have been. The specialist swept the area again, slower this time, and the void held its shape. It was not a pocket or a dip. It was a room, or the remains of one, and it had never been filled.