“The photo one, yes.” Teresa and Ellery joined her at the computer.
Chloe featured many selfies taken in the bedroom in which they stood. She sometimes used an app to add clown hair or a moustache. Snuffles featured heavily on the account as well. There was a video of Chloe trying to teach the dog to jump through a Hula-Hoop and Snuffles just trying to lick the camera instead. Ellery recognized Chloe’s friend McKenna in some shots, the pair of them trying out different hairstyles or making crazy faces. They’d done a video of a makeup tutorial in which they both put on terrible British accents. Teresa identified several other friends from Chloe’s school who appeared in the photos—a dark-eyed boy named Barnaby showed up a few times, as did a Chinese girl named Leah.
“I’ve seen all of these before,” Teresa said. She bit her lip. “Chloe prefers that I not comment, though. I’m not even allowed to click ‘like.’”
Dorie left the photo stream and went to the computer’s main files. “If she’s hooked up her phone to the computer, it may have automatically downloaded other pictures. Ones she didn’t choose to show off.”
Martin entered the room. “Stephen said you needed me?”
Teresa hugged herself. “Our daughter is missing, Martin. Of course I need you.”
“Wow, okay. Looks like we’ll be here awhile.” Dorie located the images folder, which contained more than four thousand items. Ellery held back a groan as Dorie began the painstaking process of clicking through each one. Many more shots of Snuffles, sometimes dressed in diva clothing. Bad selfies that came out wrong. McKenna doing handstands in what must be someone’s backyard. Pool shots. A vacation to the beach somewhere.
“Are you looking for something in particular?” Martin asked.
“Well,” Dorie said. “How about him? Who is this guy?”
They all looked at the photo she’d stopped on, which depicted Chloe and an older boy, their arms around each other, tongues out as they mugged for the camera. The wind blew his large Afro into her hair. She made a peace sign, while he chose the old “hang ten” gesture. There was ink across his knuckles—a tattoo, maybe?—and it spelled out D-E-A-T-H.”
“I—I’ve never seen that boy.” Teresa looked at Martin, a question in her eyes.
“I don’t know him, either.”
“He’s in a couple of other shots,” Dorie said. “This one shows part of a mural in the background. See that orange sun?”
“I don’t recognize that, either.” Fear crept into Teresa’s voice. “Maybe Margery knows?”
“We’ll ask her,” Ellery replied.
Teresa’s phone dinged, signaling the arrival of a text. Eagerly, she pulled it out from her pants, only to drop it with a soft cry when she saw the screen.
“What is it?” Ellery asked as she moved to pick up the phone. Her stomach flipped as she read the text:
U WANT 2 SEE CHLOE AGAIN?
GO ON TV & TELL THE WORLD WUT A SHITTY MOM U ARE.
DO IT 2DAY OR U WON’T BE A MOM ANYMORE.
7
To understand a perpetrator in the present, Reed always had to look to the past. He had to interview relatives and talk to the guy’s third-grade teacher. He had to visit his previous homes and learn his habits, his hobbies, his obsessions, and his hatred. All of this took time, time the victims didn’t have, but there was no shortcut. So, absent any current suspects to investigate, Reed turned to Chloe Lockhart’s ugly family history, specifically her murdered brother, Trevor. He kept one eye on his daughter as she performed acrobatics on the playground and the other eye looking about the Boston Common for the stranger he’d arranged to meet. His research had revealed that Lisa Frick, the grown daughter of murdered housekeeper Carol Frick, was in graduate school at Northeastern University, so he’d phoned her and asked her to speak with him. Lisa had been about Tula’s age when her mother was killed inside the Stones’ home. She had a younger brother, Bobby, and an older sister, Elizabeth, who had died in a car accident about a month before their mother’s murder. Reed had hesitated to ring Lisa and invite the tragedy back into her life, but he suspected it had never left her. A loved one’s unsolved murder, he knew from experience, was a wound that never healed.
He clapped loudly as Tula nailed the dismount. His phone rang, and he checked the ID, half-expecting Lisa to be canceling on him. She was already fifteen minutes late. Instead, he saw Ellery’s name on the screen. She’d slipped out early that morning without a word, her pillow cold by the time he awoke, and he had no idea how long she’d been gone. In the gray silence of her bedroom, he’d lain awake and wondered if this was how Sarit had felt when he disappeared into a case.
Still scanning the horizon for Lisa Frick, he answered Ellery’s call. She didn’t give him a chance to say more than, “Hi.”
“I need your help. Someone sent a threatening text to Teresa Lockhart saying she has to go on television and say she’s a terrible mother or she’ll never see Chloe again.”
“What?” He leaped to his feet from the shock. “No ransom request?”
“No, just this weird demand for a ‘bad mom’ confession. I’ll send you the screenshot.” She paused to do just that. “We need some insight here, Reed. Who the hell would do this? Should Teresa go on TV to say what they’re asking? We’ve traced the number and it’s a prepaid phone. We’re trying to get the provider to pinpoint its physical location now.”
Reed turned in a circle, one hand to his head as he tried to think. He’d been with the FBI for twenty years, but he’d never encountered anything like this. “You need to establish proof of life if at all possible. The person texting Teresa may have Chloe or they may be a crank responding to the media reports on Chloe’s disappearance and Trevor’s murder.”
“I thought about that. But I’m wondering how a crank could have gotten Teresa’s private cell phone number.”
“Good point. Okay, assuming for a moment this person does have Chloe, it’s clearly personal. This is someone known to the family, not a stranger.”
“That’s good, right? They’re less likely to hurt her.”
He had a flash of Teresa’s son dead on the floor with a plastic bag over his head. Someone close to the family got that kid, too. “Possibly, but there are no guarantees. We had one case where the kidnapper repeatedly engaged the family with notes and phone calls, always promising that he would return the missing girl when she was free of sin. We eventually apprehended him and discovered that she’d been dead the whole time. He had a recording of her voice from the initial hours that he played to string the family along.” Reed kept churning through old cases in his mind, looking for any similarities that might give a direction on how to proceed.
“So, do we do this TV thing or not? Conroy wanted me to get your opinion. People here are divided.”
Reed looked down at the message again and considered the abbreviated text-speak language. “We know Chloe left the park on her own. We know she’s got a second phone. What if she’s the one who sent this message to Teresa?”
Ellery made a humming noise, pondering. “Yeah, maybe. I mean, who’s more likely to think you’re a shitty mom than your own teenage daughter? But that doesn’t help us with the immediate question: Does she go on TV and do the mea culpa?”
Ticktock, no pressure. Guess wrong and a little girl could die. The closest approximation to this situation that he could come up with was hostage negotiation, which centered on a give-something, get-something exchange. Make the hostage taker feel heard without giving in to every demand. “She should do the television appearance,” Reed said at length. “She should talk about Chloe and how much she loves and misses her, how much she wants her to come home. I recommend she admit generally to making some mistakes, like all parents do and kids included. Make sure to use conciliatory language but stop short of using the exact phraseology of the text. If Chloe’s behind this stunt, she’s probably looking for a safe way to come home. Teresa should signal that she won’t be punished, that all everyone wants is for Chloe to be safe at home a
gain. Meanwhile, she should answer the text and ask for assurances that Chloe is okay.”
“She’s done that already. No reply yet.”
Reed spotted a dark-haired woman in sunglasses making her way across the green toward him. “Okay, let me know how the TV spot goes or if there is any further contact about Chloe.”
“Will do.”
He glanced to where Tula had occupied herself by making a young friend by the swings and turned to greet Lisa Frick. Her hair had purple streaks that he could see now that she was closer, and she wore a small stud in her nose. “You must be Ms. Frick,” he said, extending a hand. She did not take it.
“No offense,” she said, “but could I see some ID?”
“Of course.” He supplied his FBI credentials to her, and she studied them closely before handing them back to him.
“Not like I’d know the difference, I suppose,” she said with a resigned sigh. She took off the glasses to assess him. “You do look like the picture I saw on the internet.”
“I assure you I am who I say. Special Agent Reed Markham—and that’s my daughter over there, Tula.” He waved and she returned the gesture with typical childish enthusiasm. He indicated the bench behind them. “Thank you for agreeing to talk with me. Shall we sit?”
She still looked unconvinced, whether about him personally or the purpose of this whole venture he couldn’t say. “I’m supposed to be writing an anthropology paper,” she said as she perched on the edge of the wooden bench, poised as if to flee. “But I’ve been watching the news all morning to see if there’s any update on Chloe.”
“Do you know her?”
She seemed surprised by the question. “Why would I?”
“I thought perhaps you’d kept in touch with Teresa Lockhart.”
Lisa’s jaw hardened and she looked out at the playground for a long moment. “I knew her as Dr. Stone, not Lockhart. We only met once or twice in all the years my mom worked for her family and I was just a kid back then. It’s not like we were friends.”
“I’m very sorry about what happened to your mother.” He’d read enough last night about the case to know the outcome for Carol’s children. No father in the picture, two young kids left orphans. Lisa and her brother, Bobby, had ended up in foster care.
Lisa nodded, unmoved by his statement. “Yeah, you’re sorry. Okay.”
“If you looked me up, you may have seen my background,” he offered.
“FBI man. Right.”
“I mean the part where I was adopted after my mother’s murder. I was five months old at the time. The police couldn’t find who did it, and her killer went free for decades.” The case made headlines again this year when he and Ellery had finally solved it—a bittersweet ending that had changed everything he knew about his family. “She was a Latina teenager living on the edge of poverty in Las Vegas at the time of her death. There was no one to advocate for her and so the case file just gathered dust.”
Lisa unclenched for the first time and she looked at him with a kind of hunger. “Then maybe you do know what it’s like,” she said, her voice soft. “Growing up, my friends would complain about their moms giving them chores, snooping in their stuff, asking stupid questions, and that sort of thing. My foster mom was okay, but she had seven other kids besides me. I’d hear my friends run down their moms and think how if I got sick in school, I had to wait at the nurse’s office, sometimes for hours, before my foster mom could come get me. I’d think how they did sports or clubs and how they ate lunches someone packed for them every day. I ate free lunch. I wanted to tell them to shut up, but I never did because then they’d remember what happened to my mom and feel sorry for me and that was worse.”
“And here you are in graduate school. I bet she’d be proud.”
“Maybe.” Lisa almost smiled. “She cheered like crazy for Beth when she graduated high school.”
“Beth … that’s your sister?”
“She was going to Penn that fall on full scholarship. My mom bought all of us T-shirts. Mine was too big, so I used to sleep in it until it fell apart.” She shook her head. “Everything fell apart. Looking back now, it started when Dad died. We just didn’t know it at the time.”
Reed pulled out his notebook. “Your father was Vincent Frick. You must have been very young when he was killed.”
“He died three years before Mom. We were living in Maryland back then. Dad ran a convenience store six blocks from our house, and he’d walk back and forth to work, no matter the time, no matter the weather, so that Mom could have the car for us kids. One night he was covering a late shift at the store and he never came home. There’d been a big thunderstorm that night—I remember crawling into bed with Beth when the thunder rattled our house. I thought we’d blow away like in The Wizard of Oz. The storm spared our roof, but it got our father. One of the trees fell over when he was walking home and killed him right there.”
“I’m sorry.”
“He looked out for us, though.” Her chin rose, daring Reed to defy it. “He had good life insurance and Mom used the money to move us to Philadelphia.”
“That’s when she started working for the Stones.”
Lisa watched the kids playing for a long moment. “I guess maybe we should’ve stayed in Baltimore, huh?”
“Did you know Trevor Stone at all?”
She gave a half shrug. “Days when we had no school, Bobby and I would go with Mom to work. Trevor was there sometimes. He was cool, I guess. He had these remote-controlled fighting robots, and he let us play with them. Once, he wanted to give us a box of toy cars that he didn’t use anymore, but Mom wouldn’t let us take them. She didn’t like it when the Stones tried to unload their stuff on us, even when we could’ve used it. She’d say, ‘They pay me with money, not with old shoes or toys.’”
“She worked for several other families in the area, is that right?”
“Yeah, she had a regular rotation of about five or six places. Sometimes she’d try to squeeze in a few more, like if it was back-to-school time and we needed new clothes. I liked the Stone place best of all, though. They had a roof garden and a library and the floor when you came in was black and white squares, like a chessboard. I used to wish I could slide down the shiny banister. Now when I think of that floor, I see my mother lying on it with her head bashed in.” She looked sideways at him. “I don’t think this can really be helping you, can it?”
“You never know what might turn out to be important.”
She hunched her shoulders. “No one told me anything back then, but when I realized I could look it up at school on the computer, I saw that the police thought Justin Stone might have done it.”
“What do you think?”
“Kill his brother over some weed or pills? I can’t believe it. But I never met him. Maybe he was crazy or high and didn’t know what he was doing.” She turned to Reed abruptly. “They didn’t come to her funeral, you know.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The Stones. They paid for my mother’s burial, but they didn’t come. It was me, Bobby, and our temporary foster mom—not even one of the ones we ended up staying with. We got split up soon after that. Mom’s friends from church and our neighbors came for the services. Plus, a bunch of strangers who were probably curious about the murders. I didn’t even want to go. We’d been at the cemetery just a month earlier for Beth, and now we were back to put my mom in there with her. It felt like the ground was taking my whole family, one by one.”
“Not your brother,” Reed said, although he wasn’t sure what had become of Bobby.
“No,” she said, her tone turning wry. “But for a while there, I thought Bobby might self-destruct on his own. He drank too much, dropped out of school early. Then a few years ago, I guess he grew up. He got clean, got a GED, and started working. He moved up to this area when I started school because he said we’re all the family each other’s got left. We have dinner every Sunday.” She paused. “I called him when you contacted me and asked if he
wanted to come to this meeting. He said no. He said you’re just here about Chloe anyway and that you don’t care what happened to Mom.”
Reed couldn’t deny this was partly true. He cared, of course, but Chloe was the pressing concern. “If we find out who killed Trevor, that would avenge your mother as well.”
“Bobby sounded jumpy on the phone, almost paranoid. He’s been watching the news, too. It brings back memories for all of us.” She looked at Reed. “You’re not going to try to talk to him, too, are you? I honestly don’t think he could handle it. I don’t want you pushing him off the rails again when there’s nothing he can do to help you anyways.”
“I won’t bother him.” The kid had been six at the time. What could he realistically contribute in any case? “What I’m trying to find out is if there is any connection between what happened to your mother and Chloe’s disappearance.”
Her lips thinned. “Bobby’s right, you know, about how everyone forgot Mom. You’re the only one who’s even asked about her in years. Once everyone decided Trevor was the target, it was like Mom didn’t matter anymore. Even the news stories mostly left her out. She was just ‘the housekeeper’ and they didn’t show her picture or talk to us about her. It was Ethan and Teresa doing the interviews and everyone always crying over Trevor. I’m sorry he’s dead. I am. But my mom died, too, you know? And she was a hero. She tried to stop that guy from getting to Trevor and he killed her for it.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She blinked back tears but failed to hold them, so Reed dug out his handkerchief. She gave a disbelieving, watery laugh as she took it. “You Southern guys are a different breed.” She wiped her eyes and nose and held the white square in her lap. “I just don’t think I can help you. I was only eight years old when it happened.”
“What can you tell me about that day?”
She took a shaky breath. “All I really know is that she wasn’t supposed to be there. It wasn’t her usual day. The Stones must have asked her to come for a particular reason, which they did sometimes like if they were having a party or something. We weren’t home, so I don’t know what they said when they called her. She had us stay at the neighbor’s house for the afternoon because she was cleaning out Beth’s room and she didn’t want us underfoot—at least that’s what she said. I think it’s more that she didn’t want us to see her crying. But after Beth’s funeral, money was tight, so she took all the work she could find. If the Stones said they needed her for the afternoon, she would’ve dropped everything to go over there.”
Every Waking Hour Page 7