Chapter 10 - A NAME AT THE DESK
Ellis called the station before Grant could finish reading the words.
Claire and Lily were in a guarded interview room. Atlas lay across the doorway. An officer confirmed they were safe.
Then Ellis asked for the names of everyone who had entered that wing in the last hour.
A desk sergeant. Two officers. A woman from child services.
Claire stood up. “What woman?”
She had arrived twenty minutes earlier, saying she needed to confirm Lily’s welfare after the attack at the estate. She had not entered the interview room. She was sitting at the front desk, waiting to speak with Claire.
Ellis checked her name. No one from child services had been sent.
The woman was gone by the time officers reached the lobby. A camera showed her leaving with a man in a delivery jacket. She had not taken Lily. She had taken a folder from the desk sergeant’s station: copies of Claire’s original statement and the photograph of Owen.
“They need something in that folder,” Ellis said.
Grant thought of the altered signature. “Proof the statement was changed.”
At the station, Claire sat on the floor beside Lily. Atlas rested his head on her daughter’s shoe.
“You’re upset,” Lily said.
“Just tired.”
“Atlas gets tired too.”
Claire pulled her close. Lily had been brave because she did not understand how close those men had come to taking her. Claire hoped she never would.
The desk sergeant reviewed what the woman had touched. She had opened the folder and photographed several pages. One page was missing: a handwritten note from the detective who had interviewed Claire three years earlier.
Ellis found a scanned copy in an older system.
The note read: WITNESS REPORTS SEEING VICTOR HALE WITH OWEN PRICE. FOLLOW UP BEFORE CONTACTING ROURKE.
Victor had not been working for Grant at the time. Grant had hired him the following year, after an extensive background check.
“He got close to you on purpose,” Claire said when Ellis showed her.
Grant read the note again. Victor had been there the night Owen disappeared. He had hidden Owen, then worked his way into the estate to find the records Grant kept.
Ellis’s phone rang. Officers had located the woman’s car near a closed diner. The driver had fled on foot, but the woman was still inside.
Her first words after arrest were, “Victor said the little girl would be safe if I got the page.”
Ellis leaned closer. “Safe from whom?”
May you like
The woman shook her head.
“Victor isn’t running this,” she whispered. “He’s scared of what Owen knows about him.”
