Reed worked the phones while Ellery drove. “The manager of the Stonewall Quarry is a man named Nga Nall,” he explained to the Providence PD. “We need him to meet us there. Go pick him up immediately—there is a young girl’s life at stake.” His shoulder slammed into the car door as Ellery careened around a tight corner. “We’ll also need a search team and medics on-site.”
“You think we’ll find her there,” Ellery said when he hung up the phone.
“I hope we’ll find her there.” He’d been grasping for motive since Chloe’s abduction, and now it was clear. Bobby Frick’s psychological profile had never matched that of a typical kidnapper; he was more akin to a suicide bomber or a man who shot up a public place before turning the gun on himself. He was going down, but he aimed to inflict as much pain as possible on his way out.
They arrived at the quarry, which was surrounded by a high fence and blocked by a locked gate. Ellery left her headlights on for illumination as she grabbed the fence at the door and yanked with both hands. It swayed slightly, but the lock held fast. Reed checked his phone. “They have Nall. ETA is now fifteen minutes.”
“We can’t wait that long.” Ellery started climbing the fence.
“What are you doing? There’s barbed wire up there.”
“So I’ll get cut.”
Reed looked up and down the deserted road, wishing for backup that wasn’t yet close. Ellery reached the top and cursed as the wire caught her clothes. He heard a rip, followed by another string of cursing. “Are you okay?” he asked as she struggled over the barbs.
“Peachy,” she muttered.
He shone his flashlight at her and saw blood on the palm of her left hand. “You’re hurt.”
“It’s nothing,” she said, slightly breathless as she jumped down on the other side. She found the lockbox and fished out a set of keys. She tried one, then another. “This is bullshit,” she said. “They’ll be here in another few minutes.”
“Yes,” he said reasonably. “They will.”
“Aha,” she said with satisfaction as the key fit and the lock sprang open. She yanked the gate open and Reed slipped inside. Mountains of rocks stood off to the right side. On the left was a long building with few windows, as well as smaller piles of daintier rocks. Reed sneezed as the dust tickled his nose.
Ellery had her flashlight out now and she began prowling the grounds. Reed followed at a distance, eyeing the hulking earthmovers that loomed like mechanical monsters in the dark. His phone buzzed with a message from their old friend Detective Jake Osborne, who was en route with the plant manager. Nall says Bobby Frick hasn’t been to work in a week, the text message read. Reed relayed this news to Ellery as she stood on the edge of a dumpster-like container and peered inside. “He may not be here,” he said to her. “We should be thinking of other possibilities.”
Ellery shone her light on a pile of rough stones, each about the size of a small beach ball. “You see those fieldstones? They’re the same kind we saw in the photo of Chloe. We’re on the right track. Let’s see if we can get into the building.”
“Lead the way.” Reed followed her to the doors, which were, not surprisingly, also locked. The keys she’d acquired didn’t seem to work.
“Maybe we can use one of the rocks to break a window,” she said, standing on tiptoe and cupping her hands around her eyes to try to see inside the building.
“Or we could have him do it.” Reed gestured behind them at the arriving manager, who was accompanied by Detective Osborne and several uniformed officers. Osborne nodded at Reed and Ellery as they approached.
“Any sign of the girl?”
“Not yet,” Ellery replied. She regarded Nga Nall, the manager. “Can you get us inside?”
“Yes, of course.” He produced a completely different set of keys and used one to unlock the door. “But there’s no girl inside here—just offices. I locked it up myself this evening.”
Ellery didn’t answer. She jogged through the open door and began combing the premises. Nall turned up the lights to aid her search. A couple of the uniformed officers joined her while Reed and Osborne hung back to question Nall. “What can you tell me about the operations here?” Reed asked.
“We’re open eight to five, Mondays through Fridays. We’re part of a larger corporation that hauls in stone from several more remote digs and we process it on-site here. There’s a couple dozen people coming in and out of here all day long. If Bobby Frick tried to hide here, or to keep a young girl here, we’d know about it.”
Reed looked at the crude floor. “What’s under here?”
“Dirt.”
“No basement?”
“No, sir. Just the slab cement foundation you’re looking at and then more dirt.”
“What about Bobby Frick? How has his behavior been lately?”
Nall shrugged one broad shoulder. “Who knows? He hasn’t been here all week. Called in sick Monday and then we heard nothing since then. I told my guys, he’d better be in the hospital or something if he wants back to work after this. I never imagined he was mixed up in a kidnapping.”
“Does he have a locker or a desk of some sort?”
“A locker, yes. This way.”
Ellery rejoined them as they went past the break room with its vending machines and cheap plastic chairs. “I don’t see any sign of her,” she said to Reed.
Nall opened the locker and Reed stepped forward to examine the meager contents. He found a plaid shirt on a hook, a half-empty water bottle, a few toiletries, and a nature photograph tacked to the inside door. “Nothing of note here,” he reported with dismay.
“He’s keeping her somewhere that has a fieldstone foundation,” Ellery said, grabbing the photograph for study. “Maybe an off-site job?”
“We provide materials for construction,” Nall said. “Fieldstone foundations are not common anymore, but sometimes the older ones need repairs.”
“Can you check your work logs?” Ellery asked as she put the photo back in the locker. “See if you have any recent jobs that involve fieldstone?”
“Yes, of course. I just need to boot up the computer.” They followed him to his office and waited while he logged in and searched their records. “Nothing in the past two months,” he told them with regret. “Our last completed job was repair of a fieldstone wall at an estate in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Before that, we did a new wall for one of the city parks.”
“What about the unfinished jobs?” Reed asked.
“They would be ongoing,” Nall explained. “Lots of people in and out. Except…” He stroked his chin, considering. He sat forward again and hit a few more keys. “We had a contract fall through in May. The buyer failed to make payments and the bank seized the property with construction half-finished. Nobody’s been paid yet, so as far as I know, there’s just half a house sitting there.”
“Did Bobby Frick work on that job?” Ellery asked with renewed interest.
Nall turned the monitor around so they could read the address and crew list. “Yes, he did.”
Ellery was in motion the moment the words left Nall’s mouth, and Reed scrambled to keep up. “You want backup?” Osborne called from behind them.
“Yes, please!” Reed yelled back. The dirt kicked up under his feet as he ran.
Ellery started the car just as he reached it and clambered inside, her eyes bright on his. “This is it,” she said. “I can feel it.”
Reed sensed it, too, in the tightening of his gut and the zinging of adrenaline in his veins. “You need to prepare yourself for a potentially bad outcome.” He said it for her benefit and for his own. He began every chase hoping to find the child alive but knowing the odds were not in his favor. The worst part of his job was showing up to meet parents with ashen faces streaked with tears, begging for the return of children Reed knew were already dead. You have to keep hope, he’d tell them, while mentally prepping himself for the opposite. No matter how many times he made this journey, he hadn’t worked out how to harden himself enough. The end crushed him every time.
“She’s alive,” Ellery said with certainty.
He didn’t argue with her. He couldn’t. Sixteen years ago, he’d used a crowbar to open a closet he’d been sure would be a coffin. Every other girl Coben took had been dead by then. “It’s a left up here,” he said.
Ellery turned off the highway onto a more rural road that was framed by tall trees and dangling branches on either side. It reminded him of Woodbury and how quickly civilization could disappear in the rearview mirror. Occasional mailboxes popped up along the sidelines, indicating there were houses set far back behind the woods, hidden in the dark by long, winding driveways and the thick brush of the forest. Ellery turned on the high beams. “I can barely see a thing.”
Movement triggered alarm in his peripheral vision. “Look out!” he hollered just as a deer darted out across the road in front of them. Ellery hit the brakes and swerved to the side, running the right-hand wheels into a ditch. They both breathed unsteadily as a stream of several more deer took a leisurely stroll from one side of the woods to the other. The windows of the SUV began to fog.
Behind them, blue lights appeared as Osborne and his team caught up. Ellery gunned the engine and pulled the car back out onto the road. “It should be up here on the left somewhere,” she said, leaning forward and squinting.
Reed spotted an opening in the trees just as they were nearly past it. “There.”
She turned at the last minute, sending him up against the door again. He righted himself as she took them through the tunnel of trees and down the pitch-black dirt road. The SUV rose and fell like a Martian rover over the bumpy terrain, rattling his brain inside his skull. He wanted to tell her to slow down but knew the words would be futile. At last, the trees parted to reveal the husk of a house—frame and walls in place, the roof partly done, but no front steps or windows. “This is it,” Ellery said, eyeing the fieldstone foundation. She grabbed her flashlight and leaped from the car. Reed took his own light and followed close behind as the remaining cars rolled up the road.
Ellery climbed through the opening that would have been the front door. Reed shone his flashlight in and saw that there was a subfloor in place. He climbed up as well while Ellery pushed deeper into the house. He heard only the sounds of her moving up ahead of him. “Here!” she called out, and he followed her voice to the top of the basement stairs.
“Careful,” he murmured as she started down the rickety temporary steps that were only half-formed. He tested the first one and the thin piece of wood bowed under his weight. When they reached the bottom, Ellery went left while he took the right.
“Chloe?” she called. Silence.
Reed shone his light around, picking up cobwebs and dead leaves accumulated in the corners. He saw a muddy boot print on the floor, but he couldn’t say when it had been left there. At the back, he found an actual wooden door. It might have led to the furnace room. He tugged, but it held fast. Not locked, he realized, but swollen shut from the humidity. “I’ve got something,” he said to Ellery. She appeared at his side to help him tug on the door. With both their weight, it lurched free, sending them stumbling backward.
The scent of urine coming from the room hit him hard. Ellery grabbed up her flashlight and he blurted, “Wait.” Just a few more seconds and there would be no denying what was on the other side.
Ellery reached the threshold and let out a horrified gasp. He braced himself as he looked over her shoulder. There in the corner was the cage from the picture, the door hanging open. Inside on the floor lay a small figure with blond hair, curled up and motionless. She had a plastic bag over her head. “Chloe,” Ellery called as she rushed over to her. “Oh God, no.” She fell to her knees, the flashlight going off-kilter as she grabbed up the girl from the cage. “It’s not real,” she said with utter relief. “It’s a mannequin.”
“What?”
“It’s a doll. Look.” She hauled out the mannequin to show him and he could see the face was painted on.
“What’s that?” Reed used his flashlight beam to point out another white card on the floor of the cage. Ellery pushed aside the doll to snatch it up. There was no name attached.
She opened the envelope to reveal a plain white index card inside. “‘Tell Teresa she’s too late.’”
Detective Osborne came thundering down the stairs with a pair of officers hot on his heels. “What’ve you got?”
“She’s not here!” Reed called out.
Osborne stuck his head into the room and made a face at the smell. “What’s that?” he asked, shining his light on the mannequin. Reed noticed for the first time that the doll was dressed in the pink shirt and denim shorts Chloe had been wearing when she disappeared.
“It’s a doll made up to look like Chloe,” Ellery said.
“Jeez, he’s a crazy fucker, isn’t he?”
“We’re going to need another forensic team to go through this place,” said Reed. “Maybe we can find something to indicate where he’s taken her next.”
“What, like a scavenger hunt?” Osborne asked, incredulous. “Follow the clues, find the prize?”
Ellery jumped to her feet at his words. “Yes,” she said. “Exactly.” She dashed out of the room without further explanation, so Reed had to chase after her.
“Where are you going?” he asked as she went back out of the house toward her SUV. It was still running with its lights on.
“I’m going to find Bobby Frick.”
“He could be anywhere.” Lisa had listed three usual locations for him: his home, his work, and the great outdoors. New England had thousands of acres of forest and mountain territory in which to disappear.
“That picture he had in his locker—I recognize the rock bridge. It’s the same one that’s visible in the shot he took with Lisa back at his apartment. That means the place must have special meaning for him, right?”
“Probable, yes,” he said, admiring her insight. “We could ask Lisa where the picture was taken.”
“We don’t have to. I know it. It’s Marble Arch Park out in western Massachusetts. Bump and I used to go hiking there sometimes when I lived in Woodbury.” She climbed into the car and waved him along impatiently. “Are you coming?”
He glanced back at the house, torn. “We should take backup.”
“Not them. Someone has to stay here for the forensic team. We can radio for more help on the road.”
Convinced, he climbed in with her. “Then let’s go.”