“What? How’d you hear that?”
“The game last night,” Ellery explained. “That was us you were talking to.”
He slumped in his chair. “Figures,” he muttered. He picked at his cuticles and his leg started to bounce under the table. “I don’t know much. Just that some older guy, one of her parents’ friends, was bugging her to send him pictures and stuff. He liked to hug her and once he grabbed her butt.”
“Did she tell her parents?”
“Naw, she was scared to. This guy’s been in the family for a long time. I think he’s some kind of lawyer?”
“She never said his name?”
“Not to me. I told her she should knee him in the balls real hard and let him explain how he got that injury.” He smiled to himself, remembering. “I didn’t think he’d really try anything serious with her. I mean, a lawyer messing with a kid like that, he could get in major trouble if she told anyone.”
Ellery looked to Dorie. “Wintour,” she said softly.
Dorie nodded. “I’m on it.” She left to run a background check on Martin Lockhart’s attorney friend, while Ellery returned her attention to Ty. “You’ve been helpful so far, thank you,” she said. “But I need you to think harder. Chloe needs you. Anything else you can tell us about her plans, her fears, her relationships—it could be the key to finding her.”
He looked glumly at the bagged friendship bracelet on the table. “I wish I could help you. On TV, they’re saying that the kidnapper chopped off all her hair. Is that true?”
“We’re not sure. Maybe.”
“I liked to yank her pigtails, just a little bit. It made her laugh.”
“Anything else she may have told you,” Ellery urged, leaning forward.
He searched himself. “She was always pissed at her parents, especially her mom. Her brother got killed, you know, before she was born, and that’s why her mom didn’t want Chloe to go anywhere. She said once, ‘She didn’t even want me. My dad had to make her.’ Which, I dunno, man. How do you make someone have a kid? I told her that her mom was probably just scared after what happened before. Chloe said that didn’t help her now.”
Ellery tamped down her rising frustration. None of this was especially new information. “What about the second cell phone? Did you ever see one?”
“No, she had an iPhone in a Hello Kitty case. That’s all I saw. Wait.” He sat up with a jolt and pulled out his own phone. “She texted me once from a different number. She said it was a friend’s phone, but maybe it wasn’t. I can show you the number—would that help?”
Ellery tried not to grab the phone out of his hands too eagerly. A real break. Finally. “Yes,” she said. “I believe it would.”
* * *
Ellery cursed as she fed her dollar bill into the soda machine for the third time, only to have it spit the bill back out again with an electronic hum. Dorie appeared next to her, took the dollar, flapped it like a waiter might do with a linen napkin before placing it into a woman’s lap, and then gently inserted it into the machine. It took. “Patience, grasshopper,” she said to Ellery.
Ellery hit the button to dispense a Diet Coke. “What did you find out on Wintour?” she asked as she cracked the tab.
“His record is clean. Which may mean he’s not our creeper.”
“Or he’s really good at getting away with it.”
“Yeah, well, here’s a piece of free advice from someone who’s been there before: we don’t want to rattle the cage of a six-hundred-dollar-per-hour lawyer without more evidence than hearsay from a teenager. We’ll have to do a full background and hope something shakes loose.”
“That takes days, often weeks.” A complete background required tracing Wintour back through every address he had ever had, contacting law enforcement in those districts, as well as talking to former friends, relatives, and neighbors.
“We have no choice unless we find something much more incriminating than a rumor.”
“We have her computer data.”
“Just one month’s worth. If there was anything substantive there about Wintour, it’d have been flagged already.”
Ellery chewed her lip and worried the pop-top of her soda can back and forth. “We could tail him, see where he goes.” This was how Reed had caught Coben all those years ago. The detectives had interviewed the serial killer and released him, deciding he was not their guy. Reed had seen Coben’s weird obsession with hands and decided to follow him anyway. He’d been green at the time, barely on the job a few months. He was supposed to be aiding background checks, not surveilling suspects, but he’d played a hunch and it panned out. A few more hours in that hellhole and she would have died from her injuries and the infection that had set in. Chloe had been gone for almost three days now.
“Conroy isn’t going to authorize surveillance based on what we’ve got so far. We need more.”
Ellery’s brain was still whirring. She drained her drink and tossed the can into the nearby recycling bin. “We don’t need more. We just need Wintour to think we have more.”
“Did you not just hear me about the dangers of bluffing a shark in an Armani suit?”
“We won’t be the ones doing the bluffing.” She checked the time on her phone. “Come on, we can meet Conroy at the Lockhart place and run it by him. Teresa’s set to make her next public statement in less than an hour.”
“What about Chloe’s second phone? Did you find out anything from the number?”
“It’s a burner phone purchased from a third-party distributor. He says he sold it at some farmers market in Providence back in May. The buyer paid cash and he doesn’t remember who it was—not a big help.”
Dorie halted in mid-stride. “Did you say Providence?”
Ellery stopped, too. “Yeah, why?”
“Stephen Wintour owns a second home in Narragansett.”
Ellery turned on her heel and doubled her determined pace. This time, Dorie didn’t try to slow her down or make her argue her position. She beat her to the front doors by a nose.
* * *
At the Lockhart mansion, Conroy gave them permission to discuss the idea of confronting Wintour with Martin Lockhart. Ellery reasoned that if anyone could con Wintour into making a slip at this stage, it would be his friend. “But tread lightly,” Conroy said, directing the caution more to Dorie than to Ellery, as though she were the one who would actually heed it. “If he does have the girl, the absolute last thing we want to do is spook him. In the meantime, I’ll put some people on the deep background check. Maybe we get lucky and they’ll find an early hit.”
Ellery and Dorie found Martin Lockhart at the back of the living room, watching as the cameras and microphones were set up around his wife. He gripped the back of an armchair so hard his fingers had turned completely white. “The FBI said she should do it alone this time,” he said to them as they came to stand near his side. “It’s supposed to make her look more vulnerable, which is apparently what this guy wants. He wants to see her fear, they said. I said, why does it have to be just her? Look at me.” He jerked his hand free from the chair and held it out to show them. His fingers trembled as though they were leaves riffling in the breeze.