“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.