Her eyes adjusted to the dimness after the brightness outside and she saw the photos. They were stacked on tables and taped to the walls and refrigerator. Photos of the victims, alive and dead, tearful, pleading, pitiful. The table in the trailer's kitchen had been turned into a workstation. There was a laptop connected to a printer on one side and three separate stacks of photos. She picked up the largest stack and started to flip through it, again recognizing some of the men in the photos as the missing men whose photos she had carried with them to Clear. But these weren't the sort of family photos she had carried. These were shots of a killer and his victims. Men whose eyes pleaded to the camera, asking forgiveness and mercy. Rachel noticed that all of the shots were at a downward angle, with the shooter-Backus-in the dominant position, focusing down on his victims as they hoped and pleaded for their lives.

When she could look no more at them she put the photos down and took up the second stack. There were fewer photos here and these were mostly focused on a woman and two children as they moved through a shopping mall. She put them down and was about to move the camera weighing down the third stack of photos when Bosch stepped into the trailer.

"Rachel, what are we doing?"

"Don't worry. We have five, maybe ten minutes. We'll back out as soon as we hear the choppers and let the evidence recovery team take over. I just want to see if-"

"I'm not talking about beating other agents to the punch. I don't like this-the door being left open. Something's not-"

He stopped when he caught his first glimpse of the photos.

She turned back to the table and lifted the camera that rested on the last stack of photos. She looked down at a photo of herself. It took her a moment to place it but then realized where she had been photographed.

"He was with me all the way," she said.

"What are you talking about?" Bosch asked.

"This is O'Hare. My layover. Backus was there watching me."

She quickly shuffled through the photos. There were six of them, all shots of her on the day she traveled. The last shot was of Rachel and Cherie Dei greeting each other in baggage claim, Cherie holding a sign down at her side that said bob backus on it. "He's been watching me."

"Like he watched Terry."

Bosch reached to the printer's tray and used a finger from each hand to lift a photo by its edges and without leaving a print. It apparently was the last image Backus had printed here. It showed the front of a two-story house of no particular design. In the driveway was a station wagon. An old man stood next to the driver's door and was looking at a keychain as if searching for the key to unlock the car.

Bosch proffered the photo to Rachel.

"Who is this?"

She looked at it for a long moment.

"I don't know."

"The house?"

"Never seen it before."

Bosch carefully put the photo back in the tray so that it would be found in its original position by the evidence team.

Rachel moved behind him and walked down the hallway toward a closed doorway. Before she reached it she stepped through the open door of a bathroom. It was neat except for the dead flies covering all surfaces. In the bathtub she saw two pillows and a blanket arranged as if for sleeping. She remembered the intelligence gathered on Backus and felt a physical repulsion building in her chest.

She stepped out of the bathroom and went to the closed door at the end of the hallway.

"Is this where you saw it?" she asked.

Bosch turned and watched her approach the door.

"Rachel…" Rachel didn't stop. She turned the knob and pulled the door open. I heard a distinct metallic ching sound that my mind did not associate with any door lock. Rachel stopped her movement and her posture stiffened.

"Harry?"

I started moving toward her.

"What is it?"

"Harry!"

She turned toward me in the close confines of the wood-paneled hallway. I looked past her face and saw the body on the bed. A man on his back, a black cowboy hat canted down on his head to obscure his face. A pistol in his right hand. A bullet wound to the upper left chest.

Flies were buzzing all around us. I heard a louder, hissing sound and pushed further by her and saw the fuse on the floor. I recognized it as a chemical fuse, a braiding of wires treated with chemicals that would burn anywhere under any condition, even underwater.

The fuse was burning fast. We could not stop it. There were maybe four feet of it coiled on the floor and then it disappeared under the bed. Rachel bent down and reached for it to pull it.

"No, don't! That could set it off. There's nothing- we have to get out of here."

"No! We can't lose this scene! We need-"

"Rachel, no time! Go! Run! Now!"

I pushed her back up the hallway and turned my body to block any attempt by her to return. I started moving backward, my eyes fixed on the figure on the bed. When I thought Rachel had given up I turned and she was waiting. She shoved by me. "We need DNA!" she yelled.

I watched her move into the room and leap onto the bed. Her hand came up and grabbed the hat off the dead man's head, revealing a face that was distorted and gray with decomposition. She then backed off the bed and headed toward the doorway.

Even in the moment I admired her thinking and what she had just done. The hat brim would most definitely contain skin cells that would hold the body's DNA. She carried the hat past me and started running for the door. I looked down to see the burn point on the fuse line disappear under the bed. I started to run behind her.

"Was it him?" she yelled over her shoulder.

I knew what she meant. Was the cadaver on the bed the man who showed up on Terry McCaleb's boat? Was it Backus?

"I don't know. Just go! Go! Go!"

I hit the door two seconds behind Rachel. She was already on the ground heading directly away, in the direction of Titanic Rock. I followed her lead. I had taken maybe five strides when the explosion ripped through the air behind me. I was hit with the full force of the deafening concussion and knocked forward to the ground. I remembered the tuck-and-roll maneuver from basic training and it served to give me a few more yards' distance from the explosion.

Time became disjointed and slow. One moment I was running. The next I was on my hands and knees, my eyes open, trying to raise my head. Something momentarily eclipsed the sun and I managed to look up to see the shell of the trailer thirty feet in the air over me. Its walls and roof intact. It seemed to float and almost hang up there. Then it came crashing down ten yards in front of me, its splintered aluminum sides as sharp as razors. It made a sound like a five-car pile-up when it hit the ground.

I checked the sky for more incoming and saw I was clear. I turned to look back at the trailer's original location and saw intense fire and thick black smoke billowing into the sky. Nothing was recognizable on the trailer pad. Everything had been consumed by the blast and fire. The bed and the man in it were gone. Backus had planned this exit perfectly.

I got to my feet but was unsteady because my eardrums were still reacting and my equilibrium was off. It sounded as though I was walking through a tunnel with trains speeding by me on both sides. I wanted to put my hands over my ears but knew that it would do no good. The noise was reverberating from inside.

Rachel had been only a few feet from me before the blast but now I couldn't see her. I stumbled around in the smoke and started to think that maybe she was under the trailer's skin.

But finally I found her on the ground to the left of the trailer debris. She was lying still in the dirt and rocks. The black hat was on the ground next to her, like a sign of death. I moved as quickly as I could to her.