EMMA ALLISON’S EYES WENT WIDE AS SHE STEPPED OUT OF THE science lab and into the hall, where I was waiting for her. So was the headmaster.
“Emma, Detective Cross is here to ask you a few questions,” Mr. Skillings told her.
She seemed like a scared little girl to me, but in a fourteen-going-on-thirty kind of way. She had too much dark liner around her eyes and a pair of half-shredded leggings under her school uniform. The thick-soled boots looked just like the red ones Zoe had been wearing the morning she disappeared.
“Did they find Zoe?” she blurted out. “Oh please. Please, please, please.”
“No, I’m sorry, Emma,” I said. “Actually, what I need is to get a look at your phone.”
“My phone? But why? What’s going on?”
“Do you have the phone with you?”
“I hope not,” Skillings said pointedly. “The students aren’t allowed to have any electronics in class. Isn’t that right, Emma?”
“It’s in my locker,” she said.
The headmaster motioned her up the hall, not even trying to hide his impatience. I’d already spent a good fifteen minutes in his office, tracking down Mrs. Allison and getting permission to speak with Emma in the first place.
We followed her outside and across a breezeway, into one of the campus’s several redbrick annex buildings.
Halfway up another hallway, Emma stopped at locker 733 and twirled the combination on the lock.
She reached inside, took out an iPhone in a zebra-striped rubber case, and held it out for me.
Her eyes flared again when I pulled on a pair of latex gloves to take it from her.
“Emma, when we spoke on Saturday, you said that the last time you had any contact with Zoe was the afternoon before the kidnapping. Is that right?” I asked.
“Yeah. We have eighth period social studies.”
She craned her neck, trying to see what I was doing. I’d powered up the phone and navigated over to her Sent messages.
Sure enough, there it was, September 9, 8:05 a.m.
“Z—Quik ciggie b4 assembly? Ditch if you can—pleeeez?? I’ve got major dirt to share…… xoE”
“And there were no calls between you two on the morning she and Ethan disappeared? No texts?” I asked.
“That’s right,” Emma told me. “I got to school, put my phone in my locker, and went to homeroom, like always. Why?”
“You’re positive about that? This is important, Emma. This is extremely important.”
“I swear!” She fiddled nervously with the purple ribbon around her wrist. Most of the students and staff had started wearing them since the kidnapping.
“Am I in trouble?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “But I am going to have to hold onto this phone for a little while.”
A minute later, I was double-timing it back down to the visitors’ lot and my car. Finally, we had some kind of pattern to work with—or at least, the suggestion of one. Could that earlier text from Ryan Townsend’s phone have been a test run of some kind? Were there others?
And most of all, if Emma Allison’s phone was in her locker that morning, and she didn’t send this latest message—who did?
The caller had to be the kidnapper. Who else could it be?