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.”