Chapter 8 - AVA’S MESSAGE
Sam Mercer met us at the station the next morning. He looked like a man who had kept himself going on coffee and small pieces of hope.
“Ava sent that photo to an old email address I gave her,” he said. “I tried replying. Nothing.”
Ruiz enlarged the photograph. Behind Ava was a motel sign with two letters missing. A road marker stood at the edge of the frame.
Sam pointed to Ava’s left wrist. “That bracelet is mine. I gave it to her when she turned seven.”
At my request, Ruiz showed him a still from Nora’s video. He pressed his fingers to his eyes.
“Nora believed Ava,” he said. “She was the only one who did.”
A deputy matched the road marker to a motel outside St. Louis. Officers went there, but Celia and Ava had checked out that morning.
“They’re running,” Sam said.
Ruiz pulled up the motel’s security footage. Celia drove away in a blue sedan. Ava sat in the back seat. A gray SUV followed them out of the lot.
Vale.
That afternoon, Diane called me from a blocked number.
“I know you’ve been talking to the detective,” she said.
“Where is Ava?”
A sharp breath. “You don’t understand the family you’re getting involved with.”
“I understand Emma is afraid of you.”
“Emma needs care you can’t give her while you’re chasing Nora’s mistakes.”
I looked at Ruiz, who was recording the call beside me.
“Did you put the tracker on her rabbit?” I asked.
“I put it there to make sure she was safe.”
“You hid it.”
“Because Nora would have thrown it away. She never listened to me.”
“And Ava? Did she know you were tracking her too?”
Diane went silent. I heard a car door close on her end.
“When Nora found Ava’s camera,” Diane said at last, “she should have brought it to me.”
“Instead, she made copies.”
“She always thought one recording told the whole story.”
The call ended.
Ruiz traced it to a gas station west of the city. Diane was heading in the same direction as Celia and Vale.
“Why?” I asked.
“Maybe she’s meeting them. Maybe she wants the evidence before they disappear.”
Sam stood up. “I’m going.”
Ruiz blocked the door. “You’ll stay where we can reach you. Officers are already following the car.”
At the witness apartment, Emma was coloring with Caleb. When I came in, she showed me a drawing of three girls beneath a yellow sun.
“That’s me,” she said, pointing. “That’s Ava. And that’s the girl Ava talked about.”
I knelt beside her. “What girl?”
“The one who took her picture.”
May you like
On the corner of Emma’s drawing, she had written a name as best she could.
MADDIE.
