“Thank you for calling us,” she said to Mrs. Rosales. “We’ll take it from here.” She bagged the shirt and prepared to go.
“What if he comes back here looking for it?” The woman’s dark brows knit together in concern.
“I wouldn’t worry about that. We’ll be keeping him company for the next while. You have a good night.”
Outside, they gave the shirt to the waiting Officer Owens, who had tagged along in a squad car. “Take it to the lab for processing,” Ellery said. “Tell them it’s a rush.”
She climbed behind the wheel of her SUV while Dorie took the passenger side as usual. This was one aspect to their partnership that fired on all cylinders, so to speak—Ellery liked control and Dorie loathed driving in Boston traffic. It’s the only city where the driver’s manual shows you how to give the finger, she liked to say. To prove her point, a blond driver in a BMW (license plate “BEEMAH”) cut off Ellery as she tried to merge into an open slot. Ellery might have replied with double-barreled fingers except Dorie was sitting right there and Dorie was the one who’d be evaluating Ellery’s temperament in next month’s report to Conroy. When she glanced over, though, Dorie wasn’t watching her. She had her phone out and was scrolling through it.
“We’ve got something back on Frank Brimwood. He’s clean in Massachusetts, but there’s an old record for assault in Providence. Old as in 1988.” She looked at Ellery. “Before your time.”
“I was born in 1988.” Barely.
Dorie laughed in reply. “Yeah, sure, kid. Check it out, though—the victim was a female minor.”
Ellery pressed the pedal closer to the floorboards. “What kind of assault?”
“Doesn’t say here. But there’s no good kind when we’re talking about a grown man and a little girl. Turn right up here; it’s faster.”
Dorie may have hated to drive, but she was a Boston native who knew every back road better than Ellery’s GPS. The car swayed as Ellery took the turn harder than she should. “Margery’s worked for the Lockharts for eight years,” she said. “That’s like three thousand days where Frank could’ve grabbed Chloe and didn’t. Why snatch her in broad daylight in the middle of a street fair after all this time?”
“Some of these guys who like to diddle kids can go years without acting on their impulses. They get by with fantasy and black-market porn until one day it isn’t enough to just think about being with a kid. They need the real thing.”
“I keep thinking about the blood. There was a lot of it on his shirt.”
“That’s the other thing about these guys. When they do grab a kid, it’s usually over with quick.”
“How quick?” Ellery had lived three days.
“Hours. Sometimes before anyone even knows they’re gone.” She stretched toward the windshield and squinted out at a Cape-style house on the right. “That’s the place.”
At twilight, the house looked like a paper lantern, aglow with light from within. It sat next to a line of homes exactly like it, all of them wood-frame one-story houses with a pitched roof, little space between windows and the gutter, and no overhang. The central front door was painted red, with two symmetric windows on each side, like big eyes peering out into the night. Ellery and Dorie walked up the cement path that cut through the patch of front grass. Ellery heard the television playing inside, but it went mute at her loud knock. A tall, balding man with a long face and broad forehead answered. He reminded her of the stone statues on Easter Island. “Yes?” he said, frowning down at them.
They showed off their shields. “Are you Frank Brimwood?” Ellery asked.
“Yes.” His imposing frame blocked the entryway entirely.
“We’re investigating the disappearance of Chloe Lockhart. Can we please come in to talk to you for a few minutes?”
He turned where he stood and hollered behind him, “Margery! There’re two detectives here to see you.” He moved aside to let them enter.
“Actually, sir, we’d like to speak with you,” Ellery explained as Margery appeared, wiping her hands on a dishrag.
“Is there news?” Margery asked, her eyes anxious. “Did you find Chloe?”
“No, ma’am, not yet.” Ellery replied to Margery Brimwood, but her eyes were busy cataloging the room for any signs of trouble. She found only a brown sofa, a coffee table with a beer can sweating on it, and a wall jam-packed with family photos. “We just have a few questions for you. First, though, do you have a gun on the property?”
“I have a Walther PK380,” Frank answered. “Why?”
“Could I see it, please?”
The Brimwoods looked at each other for a beat, but Frank went to retrieve the weapon. He returned with an opened lockbox and handed it to Ellery, who made a perfunctory check of the contents. “Thank you.” As he took his seat, she noted the fiery red scratch on his arm, the one Mrs. Rosales had mentioned.
“I don’t understand. What does my gun have to do with Chloe Lockhart?”
“Did you know Chloe?” Dorie asked.
He looked befuddled. “Not really. I’ve met her a few times here and there. Margery’s like a second mother to her, though. Maybe even a first mother if you want to be honest about it.”
Margery slapped his arm. “Oh, hush now.”
“When is the last time you saw Chloe?” Dorie asked him.
“Jeez, I don’t know. Last winter, I guess. She had some kind of Christmas concert and Margery dragged me along to see it. We ate sugar cookies and drank warm punch.” He sounded bored as he relayed the story, not like a pedophile eager to get close to his prey.
“Mr. Brimwood, you have an old arrest on your record,” Ellery said, laying out her cards. “You assaulted a female minor.”
His cheeks darkened as he caught on to why they were at his home. “Now look here, I didn’t touch that girl.”
“Do you mean Chloe or the one from 1988?” Ellery asked him.
“Both. Neither. That girl from before, her name was Melody Marshall. She was bullying our daughter, Cindy. Roughing her up on the bus and taking her money. The school wouldn’t do anything about it, so I paid Melody a visit one evening. I told her to leave Cindy alone or she’d have me to deal with. She wasn’t impressed, said my kid was a crybaby liar. I said I’d wait to talk to her parents, and she said good luck because her dad went to buy milk fifteen years ago and never came back. Then she, uh…” He broke off with a cough. “She hit on me.”
Pedos always made this claim: the kid started it. “Go on,” Ellery said as neutrally as possible.
“She grabbed my crotch and said she had some ideas about what we could do while we waited for her mother. I shoved her backward away from me, and she fell and cut her arm. She wasn’t crying about it, neither. She thought the whole thing was hilarious. I told her again to leave Cindy the hell alone and I left. Later, I guess her mom came home and filed the complaint.”
“The judge saw Melody had a record for drug use,” Margery said. “So he believed Frank.”
“Uh-huh.” Pedophiles often picked victims no one would believe. “You mind if we look around?”