“That’s not fair, Elle. When you’re in your element, you are one of the most natural investigators I’ve ever seen. But this is different. This case does something to you, clouds your instincts.”
Elle threw her hands up. “Okay, then, what’s your grand theory? Who do you think took Amanda? Some neighbor that none of the kids recognized, somehow? Because it’s been three days, which means if I’m right, he’s going to start poisoning her, and if I’m wrong, statistically, she’s dead already.”
“Even if she hasn’t been killed yet, that doesn’t mean it was TCK.” Ayaan’s voice did not rise to match hers, which just made Elle feel worse. “Leads have been coming in since they aired that little girl’s sketch on the news last night. We might not have a slam dunk yet, but we will find her.”
Elle shook her head, looking at the papers on her desk. “I can’t get him out of my head.”
“Maybe that’s the problem.”
“No, you don’t understand. I haven’t had a feeling like this, ever. It’s like . . . it’s like he’s taunting me with this, showing me he’s back, reminding me what he can do.”
“That’s not entirely true.”
“What?”
Ayaan sat back against her desk and folded her arms. “You’ve done this before. You’ve felt this before.”
Elle’s mouth went dry. She looked away, but Ayaan kept talking.
“Five and a half years ago. Maddie Black’s case, before you quit CPS? You were sure of it then.”
Elle stared at the notes and pictures, pulse hammering. “That was different. That was a long time ago.”
“You were convinced it was TCK. I even believed you for a while—you almost cost that girl her life.”
Clenching her hands into fists, Elle whispered, “I did not.”
Ayaan shook her head. “Why do you think it took me so long to get back to you about Jair Brown two years ago, Elle? I had to get clearance from the chief himself to be allowed to work with you. Even after your help, he was still hesitant to let you on another case. Maybe he was right.”
“I made one mistake.”
“You tried to convince us to ignore the witnesses who came forward about her father.”
“Stop.”
“We only just made it in time. She would have died.”
“I wasn’t as sure then as I am now.” Even as she said it, Elle wasn’t convinced that was true.
“I’m calling Martín to come get you,” Ayaan said. “You can’t drive like this.” She pushed away from the desk and stood between Elle and the pictures and notes until Elle met her gaze. Ayaan’s eyes were kind, but determined. “I’m not sure this is a good idea anymore.”
* * *
When Elle got in his car, Martín asked only one question: “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
They rode home in silence.
She had never been very good at talking about what was bothering her. She should be, after years of therapy, but historically, things hadn’t gone well for her when she spilled her guts. Her parents could never accept what had happened to Elle when she was a child. After a while, she started to believe them—that it wasn’t as bad as she had built up in her head, that the things she remembered weren’t true. By the time she became a teenager, she had pushed all the memories of that incident down so far that it would take more than a decade for them to resurface.
Then she met Martín.
Elle glanced at him; his eyes were trained on the road, and he leaned slightly forward as if he was watching for something to jump out at him. Martín hated driving in Minnesota winters, even though he should have gotten used to them by now. He was born in Mexico, but he’d lived in the land of ten thousand lakes for seventeen years, since he moved here at eighteen to go to college. Still, he had never gotten used to all the snow and ice.
The Castillos were the opposite of Elle’s family in every possible way. He had four siblings, each of them married, and eleven nieces and nephews. Every other year, Elle and Martín rented a big van, picked up Angelica’s family in Wisconsin, and drove down to meet up with their brothers at his parents’ place in Mexico. There was not a moment’s silence for two weeks. Crying babies and screams of laughter and dishes of food passed around and around until you felt like you would burst. Elle absorbed their potent energy and unguarded love like parched soil in the rain. His mother had taught her to cook—a skill she’d never learned from her own mom, who worked every day of her life and relied on food that came from a box. In some ways, that was one of the things Elle respected most about her mom: she refused to give up hours every day to put food on the table just because her husband wouldn’t.
It had been more than a decade since Elle cut her parents out of her life, but sometimes she imagined her mom the way she must look now: a bit grayer, the hollows of her cheeks more pronounced, still standing over the stove with a box of Hamburger Helper in one hand and a glass of Cabernet in the other. Maybe now that she was retired, she’d learned to cook for real. Elle doubted it.
At a stoplight, Martín turned the dial on the car stereo until his favorite talk radio show came on. He wasn’t a music guy, not while he was driving, anyway. Comedic drive-time kept him alert. He met her gaze for a minute, offering a small smile. Too exhausted to force a smile of her own, she looked back out the passenger window. Soon the light turned green again, and he moved forward.
The Maddie Black case Ayaan had referred to was a complex sort of salvation. On the one hand, Elle wouldn’t have been doing the Justice Delayed podcast without it. On the other, she had nearly cost the girl her life and shown she could have blinders on when looking at certain kinds of cases. But that was more than five years ago, and even though she had recorded a monologue about it, Elle hadn’t found the right episode of the TCK case to include it in yet. If she was being honest with herself, she probably never would. It didn’t fit the narrative.
She put her elbow up on the car door and rested her forehead in her hand, squeezing her temples with thumb and middle finger. Her pulse throbbed against her fingertips.
“Are you okay?” Martín asked as he pulled into their driveway. Once the car was in park, he reached across the center console and put his gloved hand on hers. “Hey, Elle? What’s wrong?”
She shook her head, blinking again. “Nothing. Let’s just go inside. I need to sleep.”
“What happened at the station, querida? Tell me.”
“Nothing.” Opening the door, she stepped out onto the icy driveway and made her way to the front door.
Once inside, Elle hung up her scarf and coat, knocking her boots on the rug before taking them off.
Martín kept his on but handed her the keys to his car. “I’ll get a taxi in so you can have the car. We’ll pick yours up later.”
“Thanks. Sorry for making you late,” she said.
“It’s okay, I told them I would be. I knew it must be serious if Ayaan called me.” He reached up and cupped her face with his warm hands. “Your eyes are red.”
“I haven’t slept.”
He looked like he wanted to say more, but after a moment, he nodded. “Okay. Go to bed, amor. The case will still be here after a few hours of rest, and you can’t help that little girl if you can’t think.”
She blinked away a fresh batch of tears. “Are we good?”
Rather than answer, he tilted his head and pressed his mouth softly against hers.
“Good,” she murmured, too exhausted to say anything more. She started up the stairs to their bedroom.
“Elle,” he said.
“What?” She looked down at him.
Martín folded his arms across his chest, gazing up at her with the crease between his eyes that he got when he was stressed. “I believe you.”
“What?” she said again, this time in a whisper.
“I can tell there’s something you’re not telling me, and I don’t know why. But I need you to know that I have your back, no matter what.” Martín
took two steps up to get closer to her. “No matter how outrageous it sounds, remember that I will always believe you first.” He leaned in, kissed her cheek, and then walked back down the stairs and out the door.
21
Elle
January 17, 2020
She was in the room again. The gray sheets were rough under her fingertips as she lay flat on her back, blinking at the mold patches on the ceiling. He hadn’t come to get her for more than a day. All her water was gone, and her stomach cramped with hunger. It made her . . . want to see him. Even though she knew what he’d make her do when he came back.
She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, it was getting dark, the scrap of weak sunlight that came through her one small window disappearing like a dying flashlight. She could barely see the ceiling anymore.
Then he was in the room with her, thick arms and torso making a striking silhouette in the fading light.
The man sat on the bed, but her limbs were pinned down, frozen, as he leaned over her. He moved the thin blanket off her, examined her scabbed knees. She wanted to tell him to stop. She wanted to beg him for a drink of water. She wanted him to leave her alone.
She didn’t want to be alone.
In the gloaming, his face was a blur of indistinguishable features.
His fingers trailed up from her navel, across her sternum, and then landed on her throat. He pressed down, and this was new, this pain, this force he hadn’t used before that made it hard to breathe. She gasped, and it was tight against his palms, limited in a way her breathing had never been, and her chest clenched painfully.
“Please.” Her whisper was ragged in the cold air of the room. “Please.”
Elle jerked awake and sat up, her fingers throbbing against a pillow she had in a stranglehold. She dropped it as if it was on fire, pushing herself out of bed onto unsteady feet. The room was dark, and it took a moment to place where she was in time. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep, but something felt off. Something had happened.
And then it hit her with a sudden shiver of anxiety: she was supposed to pick up Natalie from piano lessons today. The black clock with big red numbers on Martín’s nightstand told her it was 5:22.
“Shit!” Her phone was nowhere to be seen. She ran down and rifled through her purse—sure enough, she’d missed seven calls from various numbers and had three texts from Natalie asking where she was. Even though Elle was only twenty minutes late, the first message from Natalie was from nearly an hour ago, just after she would have gotten off the bus in front of Ms. Turner’s house.
Something was wrong.
After shoving her feet into her boots and grabbing the nearest winter coat, Elle ran out to Martín’s car. She didn’t have time to let the engine warm up, and the car screeched in protest as she reversed out of the driveway. As she drove toward Ms. Turner’s house and the setting sun, Elle called Natalie’s phone. It went straight to voicemail. Once she got to a stoplight, she sent her a text.
ON MY WAY. I’M SO SORRY.
The light turned green, and she gunned the engine, tires skidding on the road salt and ice.
Ms. Turner’s house was only ten blocks away, and every time Elle had been there to pick Natalie up before, the whole two-story had been ablaze with light. The elderly woman lived alone and was afraid of the dark, so she kept all the lights on, no matter which room she was in. When Elle pulled up outside, a stab of foreboding knocked the breath out of her. The house was gray in the fading sun, the shades drawn, as if the place was abandoned. She ran up the path and knocked anyway, but she wasn’t surprised when no one came to the door. The phone rang inside the house when Elle called from her cell, but no one answered. After ten rings, she finally gave up.
She tried to imagine what had happened. Maybe Ms. Turner went out of town and forgot to tell Sash. Then Natalie came for her lesson and called Elle when she realized Ms. Turner wasn’t home, which was why the missed calls and texts started sooner than they should have. Maybe Ms. Turner had taken Natalie someplace special, and the calls were just to let her know about the change of plans. But that didn’t explain Natalie’s frantic where-are-you messages.
Elle growled in frustration and ran back down the icy sidewalk, forgetting to be careful and nearly falling twice on her way to the car. She forced herself to drive toward home at a crawl as her eyes searched the sidewalks for any sign of movement. If Natalie left an hour ago, she should have gotten home way before now, but maybe she was still walking, playing in the snow or something. She liked to climb the large drifts piled up in the gas station parking lot that sat about halfway between Ms. Turner’s house and the Castillos’. Maybe she had stopped there and Elle had just missed her on the drive. Her eyes were so focused out the window as she passed the station, she almost rear-ended a car at the stop sign. She hit the brakes just in time and craned her neck to study the mountains of snow, but Natalie was nowhere to be seen.
“You’re being paranoid,” she said aloud. A long, deep breath did nothing to calm the nerves ricocheting around her body. She remembered the first time she got angry with Natalie. It was about a year ago, and the nine-year-old had been in one of her passion-project modes about homelessness in Minnesota. Without telling anyone, she took the bus to downtown Minneapolis and visited a group of people who camped near the bridge over the Mississippi. Sash had used an app on her phone to track Natalie’s phone’s GPS, and they’d finally found her an hour later. While Sash had been frustrated and concerned, Elle had gone from panicked to irate. She’d screamed at Natalie for the first and only time, and it had taken the girl three weeks to speak to her again.
That was when Elle realized how attached to Natalie she had become—when she started to panic about all the hypothetical scenarios that could play out to take her away. Little things that used to be inconsequential now felt rife with danger. Going to birthday parties. Attending field trips. Walking home.
When Elle was a kid, she and her friends used to roam the neighborhood together, doing stupid things like rollerblading down giant hills and riding their bicycles “no hands.” Growing up, she usually left the house with a couple of the neighbor kids after breakfast in the summer, came back for a quick lunch, and then didn’t return again until the sun went down. She didn’t even remember what they did to pass all that time. Goof around, mostly. Head over to the local park, swing and slide for hours. Climb the jungle gym. Try to be acrobatic on the monkey bars. That was back when playgrounds were a risky adventure, constructed of metal and rubber. Swings were held up by chains that could pinch your fingers, and monkey bars gave you bright red calluses on your palms. Whatever they did, wherever they went, they always knew exactly where those invisible boundary lines were between their neighborhood and Too Far to Hear Mom. Their parents left them alone, and no one cared.
They just couldn’t do that anymore.
It didn’t matter that the danger was no greater now than it was then; the societal pressure was different. People expected you to know where your kids were at all times, to be able to reach them at the push of a button.
Sash gave Natalie a cell phone to use between school and home, and she was always, always supposed to answer when an adult called. Still driving at a crawl, Elle called the number again. No answer.
Her phone lit up and Elle looked at it eagerly. Martín. She answered, but her greeting came out too breathless to be a word.
“Hello, dormilona.”
“Did you pick up Natalie?” Her voice sounded very high.
“Uh, no. I thought you were picking her up.”
“I did.” Elle’s hands were trembling, numb. A sob burst from her lips. “I mean, I tried. I fell asleep, and I was late, Martín. She wasn’t at Ms. Turner’s. No one was. And she’s not answering her phone.”
There was silence on the other end. They had both seen too much to not immediately imagine the worst.
“Where are you?”
Elle wanted the release of crying, but no tears would come
. “I’m just about home. I drove back slowly, but she wasn’t walking next to the road. I didn’t see her on the way to Ms. Turner’s either. It’s only ten blocks. Where could she be?”
“All right, mi vida, cálmate.”
“Do not tell me to calm down. You know how much I hate that.”
“Right. Sorry. Just . . . I don’t know.” There was a shuffling sound on Martín’s end, and then he spoke again. “I’ll come home. Have you gone to her house? Maybe Sash got home early or something.”
“She’s not supposed to—”
“I know, okay? I know. But try anyway. I need to take care of this body and then figure out how to get home.”
When he hung up, she swiped to get to Sash’s name. The call went straight to voicemail. Sash was probably in court.
No one was here when she needed them. Anger coursed through her, however unjustified. Martín was trying to get home to her; Sash would call her back as soon as she could. She knew that, but the rage and fear persisted.
Elle had been freezing two seconds ago, but now felt like she was boiling alive. She parked outside Sash’s house and jumped out of the car with her coat open. The only way past the sheer, blind panic was to be angry with Natalie. She tried to work up the motherly fury because even if she wasn’t a mom, damn it, she could have motherly fury. Because of course, Natalie just walked home when Elle didn’t answer her phone to come pick her up. It was only ten blocks. No big deal.
Except she was nowhere to be seen. The lights were off in her house, but Elle walked up the slippery path and knocked on the door anyway. “Natalie?” she called, fishing in her purse for the spare key. As soon as she found it and opened the door, she knew Natalie wasn’t home. The house was cold, set to the daytime temperature that was just high enough to keep the pipes from freezing.
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