Teresa pulled back. “There’s nothing here to say where she went. Just mother-daughter chitchat.”
“You never know what might spark an idea.”
Teresa looked at the phone, bit her lip, and thrust it at Ellery. “Do you have kids?”
“No.” Coben had ruined that chance, according to the doctors. They’d repaired the damage and cured the infections, but the scar tissue remained.
“I do. One daughter.” Reed smiled and inclined his head. “She’s seven going on seventeen, I think.” Teresa flashed a brief, relieved smile, so Ellery let him take the lead in questioning as she paged through the texts between Teresa and Chloe.
Hi, sweetie. How did your math test go?
Fine.
Fine … is there a numerical value attached to that assessment?
3.1415926 … you want me to keep going?
Pi, Teresa wrote back. Very funny.
Ellery hid her smile. She would’ve punked her mother with some similar non-answer at Chloe’s age.
“They teach you the facts of life in school and warn you not to get pregnant,” Teresa said to Reed. “They make it sound like if a boy even looks at you wrong, you’ll get knocked up. I used to break out in a cold sweat when my date tried to hold my hand. Then I took a serious biology course in college and found out how supremely difficult the whole thing is. It’s such a narrow window of conception each month. The egg can get lost. The sperm basically start dying the minute they’re released. Then, even if it takes, that cell has to divide and divide, each new cell knowing where to go and how to form a body with hands and feet and lungs and a brain.” She shook her head. “It’s a wonder it ever works at all. A miracle, really. With Trevor, we weren’t trying. I was in med school. Not a convenient time to be pregnant. Later, with Chloe, I was older. It wasn’t so easy then. She was high-risk, even from the start.” A tremor crept into her voice at those last words.
Look. Snuffles is going to be a social media influencer. Chloe had sent a picture of a white froufrou dog posing for the camera in a pink scarf and sunglasses.
Are those my sunglasses? Teresa had texted back.
She has 111 followers already. How many do you have?
No social media for you OR the dog. Not until you’re thirteen.
Snuffles is 55 in dog years. Practically a grandma.
Do you know how old I am?
Chloe had texted an emoji batting its eyelashes. No. We haven’t studied how to date fossils yet.
“She’s a good kid,” Teresa said, her voice cracking. “Smart. Funny. Oh, she was a beautiful baby. Strangers would bend over the carriage and gasp out loud when they saw her huge blue-green eyes and tiny dimples. She had smiles for everyone back then. I could hardly believe she was mine, that I got this lucky after … after what happened before.”
“To Trevor,” Reed said, his voice gentle.
She answered with a tight nod. “He wasn’t supposed to be home alone,” she replied, just above a whisper. “I got called in on an emergency cabbage.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Ellery slid the phone back to her and returned to taking notes.
“Sorry. It’s a coronary artery bypass graft procedure—CABG. Trevor would be home alone after school, which wasn’t usual but also wasn’t something we thought would be a problem. He was in the seventh grade, like Chloe. He never got into trouble. He’d do his homework and then play video games or watch TV. We’d left him on his own for a few hours many times before this and nothing ever happened. We lived in Spring Garden, one of the safest areas of the city.”
She stressed this last part, her palm flat against the table. “Go on,” Ellery said.
“The police, afterward, kept pressing us on what was unusual about that day, but it was all minor stuff. I got called to the hospital because there was a flu going through the unit and they were short staffed. Not normal, but not out of the ordinary, either. Our housekeeper, Carol, came by that afternoon when usually she didn’t come on Tuesdays. She’d been with us for years—not live-in, but helping out a couple of times per week. Ethan, my husband at the time, was teaching at Penn as he typically did.”
“So, Martin Lockhart wasn’t Trevor’s father?” Ellery asked, taking notes.
“No. My marriage to Ethan … well, it didn’t survive. I met Martin later.”
“Where is Ethan now?” Reed asked.
“Still at Penn, the last I heard. We don’t keep in touch.”
“Understandably,” Reed replied. “Please tell us more about what happened to Trevor.”
“Well, that’s the worst part,” she said, blinking rapidly as tears threatened again. “No one knows for sure. They tell me he was suffocated in his bedroom with a plastic bag. The back door was unlocked, but it usually was. Nothing was stolen that we could see. It’s like the person came to the house that day specifically to hurt Trevor. Whoever it was, Carol tried to fight him off. He threw her over the stairway railing in his effort to get to Trevor’s room. She was still breathing when Ethan came home and found them, but she died before regaining consciousness. We hoped she might be able to tell us who … or why.”
Reed pushed a box of tissues toward her. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
She took another fistful but didn’t use them, merely clutching them into a ball. “Thank you. When I got the message that Chloe’s missing, I felt like I traveled back in time right to that moment. You have to find her. You have to.”
“That’s what we’re trying to do,” Ellery said. “The police must have investigated Trevor’s death.”
“They tried, yes. They looked for sex predators and grieving families of patients who died on my table. They even interviewed students dissatisfied with the grade Ethan gave them. Can you imagine? Murdering a little boy because you failed an economics class?”
Ellery had nearly died for the sin of being out alone on the street at night. “They had no leads at all?”
“Nothing that they told us.”
“We’ll look into it.” The cops often withheld theories and developments from the family prior to an arrest. Philly PD would be able to give them the background on the case. Rich white family, murdered kid. Ellery would bet they’d need a truck to bring in the case files.
“Whoever did it, they’re still out there.” Teresa’s voice took on a renewed desperation. “That’s why we’ve been so careful with Chloe, why we told Margery never to let her out of her sight, not even for a moment.”
“Maybe Chloe gave her the slip,” Reed suggested.
“No, never. She knew what happened to Trevor. She knew to be careful.”
“Kids don’t think the way we do,” he countered. “The risk of something remote, which they have no personal experience of, may seem trivial compared to daily concerns like a schoolyard bully or not making the soccer team.”
“Chloe was on the soccer team and she wasn’t bullied.”
“Still, it would be helpful to think of where she might go if given the opportunity. Most often in these cases, kids just aren’t considering how worried their parents might be. They head out for some fun and then maybe get into a sticky situation if they can’t figure out how to get home again.”
“Where would she go? She can’t drive. She doesn’t even have a bicycle.”
“There’s the T,” Ellery pointed out. “Her phone was recovered near one of the stops.”
“She doesn’t take the T. We pay for a car service to take her and Margery anywhere they want to go. Please, I’m telling you. I know my daughter. She makes straight A’s and has never given us an ounce of real trouble. She’s a good kid who wouldn’t disappear like this without telling us or Margery where she was going. Someone must have taken her or lured her away.”
“We’re interviewing possible witnesses near the intersection where we found Chloe’s phone. We’re also asking nearby shops to share any security video they might have from this afternoon, so we’ll hopefully have an idea soon of where Chloe went. In the meantime, it w
ould be helpful if you could take this paper and write down a list of all of her friends, relatives, teachers, tutors—anyone she has contact with—so we can start running them down.”
Teresa wiped her eyes with her fistful of tissues and took the paper Ellery offered her. “None of the people we know would hurt Chloe. We ran background checks on all of them.”
Reed gave her an encouraging nod. “That’s exactly why we’re hoping she’s with one of them. Thank you for helping us quicken our search.”
“We’ll be back in a second, okay?” Ellery rose to leave and Reed followed suit.
“Wait,” Teresa blurted. Ellery turned around. “The man who … who took you.” She broke off and swallowed. “You weren’t the first one. The others … they didn’t get away.”
“No.”
“But you survived,” Teresa persisted steadily. “How?”
The woman’s searching, anguished stare held Ellery prisoner again, trapped by the question she could never answer. The world demanded a reason, she knew. Why did this one live and not the others? She’d survived in Coben’s closet longer than the girls before her. Coben had been decompensating, becoming erratic as the net closed in; her body’s immune system fought the blood loss and the infections just long enough for help to arrive; her sheer refusal to die when her mother was already poised to lose Ellery’s brother to cancer may have helped, even if it was hard to say how. Finally, of course, there was Reed. For most people, his arrival in the nick of time was a thrilling, satisfying end to the story. For Teresa Lockhart, Ellery could see it would not be enough.
“I wanted to see my mother again.”
She could see it was the reply Teresa needed when she sagged with relief in her chair. She took up the pen to begin writing, and Ellery made her escape. Outside in the hall, Reed looked her over, his brown eyes shrewdly assessing. “Politic move there, not telling her the postscript about how you and your mother barely speak now.”
“Teresa’s writing out the list for us, isn’t she?” Ellery would do or say whatever it took to find this girl. “What do you make of that story about Trevor?”
Reed pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s horrific. It’s hard to speculate too much without knowing more of the details, but I’d say we’re talking about either a deranged psychopath, someone who targeted the boy for reasons that made sense only in their own mind, or a revenge killing for something the adults in his life had done.”
“Like she said—relatives of people who died on her operating table.”
“Exactly.”
Ellery considered. “Doesn’t the fact that they haven’t solved it yet make the stranger angle more likely?”
“I’d be concerned so, yes.”
She didn’t want to say the next part aloud. “And if Trevor’s killer had their own motives, reasons no one else could understand, couldn’t they also have tracked down Teresa and taken Chloe as well?”
Reed’s mouth thinned to a grim line. “Let’s hope not.” He checked his watch. “Listen, I’ve got to get Tula out of here. If you like, I can pull information on the earlier case and give it a close read.”
“That would be great.”
“I can also take Bump with us to get some dinner.”
“Even better.”
He looked at her. “This means you’d have to give me your keys.”
Her hand went protectively to her pocket. He’d stayed at her apartment a few times now, and given the upgrade in their social relationship, it would make sense for her to give him his own keys. She just couldn’t bring herself to do it.
Reed read her hesitation. “Don’t you trust me?”
More than anyone in the world. This was part of the problem. Reed was enormous on her landscape, even before she’d started sleeping with him. He came accompanied with a daughter, an ex-wife, three loud sisters, two mothers, and an opinionated ass of a father. Ellery had a one-bedroom loft and a basset hound, a small life that could easily be swallowed up inside his larger one. Behind her apartment walls, she had no one to judge her or ask her questions about her past. No one to stare at her scars. Reed treated her as normal, so she’d let him inside her sanctum. But whenever they ventured out, she was reminded that, to the rest of the universe, she was the victim and he was the hero.
She looked at his outstretched hand a moment longer before thrusting her keys into his palm. “Thanks,” she muttered.
His warm fingers closed over her clammy ones before she could pull away. “Call me if you need anything. And Ellery…” He waited until she looked at him. “You don’t owe Teresa Lockhart anything more than the other detectives here. Don’t let her convince you otherwise.”
She nodded, mute, and he squeezed her hand before making his departure. She leaned against the cold, hard wall and shut her eyes for a long moment, trying to think. Her first move should be to loop Conroy in on the Trevor development, maybe even pulling him out of his interview with Martin Lockhart. She pushed off from the wall and wondered whether she could spare the time to grab a soda. Traipsing all over Boston Common in the hot sun had left her scorched and depleted, a sticky residue of dried sweat all down her back.
All thoughts of a caffeine hit disappeared when she reentered the bullpen area and saw Conroy had emerged from his interview and was in conversation with a silver-haired man with round glasses. Standing nearby was a girl of about thirteen dressed in jean shorts, a pink T-shirt, and glittery sandals. She had her phone out and was poking at it while the men talked. Ellery guessed this had to be McKenna McIntyre, Chloe’s friend.
Ellery approached the group, and Conroy moved to make room for her. “Hathaway, come meet Judge Aaron McIntyre. His daughter McKenna goes to school with Chloe.”
Ellery shook the judge’s large hand. “Thanks for coming in.”
“Of course. We’re all terribly worried about Chloe.”
“Detective Hathaway is the one who recovered Chloe’s cell phone,” Conroy explained.
At this, McKenna looked up. “Which one?”
“Which one what?” Conroy replied.
“Which phone did you find?”
Conroy looked at Ellery. “It’s with the tech guys,” she said. “It had a pink case with the letter C on it.”
“That’s her regular one,” McKenna said. “She’s got another. It’s black and kinda cheap looking.”
“Where did she get this other phone?” Ellery asked her.
McKenna shrugged one thin shoulder. “She said someone gave it to her. I asked who and she wouldn’t tell me. I teased her that she had a secret boyfriend and she turned all red and stopped talking to me for the rest of the day. I didn’t bother asking her after that, but I could see her sometimes at school, texting on it.”
Conroy leaned down. “McKenna, this is very important. Do you know how long Chloe has had this phone?”
“Not for sure. But at least four months.”
He straightened up and looked at Ellery, and she could read the fear in his eyes. Chloe’s abductor, if there was one, didn’t have an afternoon’s head start on the investigation. They had months. “I’m going to put out that alert now,” he said softly, his worried gaze drifting toward the main doors. “We’re going to need to contact the media right away.”
“You don’t need to,” McKenna said, matter-of-fact. She held out her phone to show him a live shot of headquarters where at least one reporter has already set up camp on the steps. “They’re already here.”
4
Popular wisdom said everyone had a twin somewhere, but Chloe Lockhart might as well as have come from a tween blond girl factory pumping out clones of her according to the voluminous tips that came flooding into BPD. Ellery got the thankless job of sorting and prioritizing them as they rolled up to her from the officers manning the phones, email, and social media. A girl playing in the Frog Pond on the Boston Common could be Chloe—except it wasn’t. It also wasn’t her at a gas station in Allston, a video arcade in Watertown, or on a ferry to the Harbor
Islands. Chloe Lockhart, it seemed, was everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. Ellery held a cold can of soda to the back of her neck and slumped in her chair.
“You look like hell.”
Ellery snapped to attention at the sound of Dorie Bennett’s voice behind her. “Hello to you, too,” she replied. Dorie was the senior detective who served as her partner in most cases. So, you’re the one who’s supposed to keep me away from trouble, Ellery had remarked when they’d first been paired up.
I’m supposed to teach you not to go chasing it in the first place, Dorie had replied. Thus far, the training had stuck. Ellery had kept her nose clean for five months, with just thirty days remaining on her probationary period. Dorie liked to give her a cheerful slap on the back at the end of each day. We survived another one, she’d say, and Ellery wasn’t sure whether she meant they’d survived the job or each other.
The only Dory I know is that forgetful blue fish from the movies, Reed had said when Ellery told him of her new assignment.
Well, she’s just like that except imagine that the fish is a middle-aged lesbian with a wife and three Labrador retrievers, Ellery had replied. She can’t remember where she put her coffee cup, her pen, or her glasses, but I swear she knows the name of everyone we pass on the street. Even the guy at the hot dog stand smiles and jokes with her, and he’s a first-rate grouch.
This seemed to be Dorie’s essential trait in landing the dubious pairing with Ellery. When Conroy put them together, he’d told Ellery, I’m sure you’ll get along great. Dorie likes everybody, and Ellery heard the unspoken part: She’ll even like you.
“Sorry about your vacation,” Ellery said as Dorie pulled up a seat next to her. “Was the Cape nice, at least?”
Every Waking Hour Page 3