Chapter 18 #3
Trenton is already standing. I didn't see him get up. He's just suddenly on his feet, his chair pushed back, and his eyes locked on the screen with the particular flatness that means he's already past the processing stage and into the response stage.
The room has gone completely silent except for the TV.
"Authorities are urging residents in surrounding areas to remain indoors while they conduct a manhunt. Harris is considered armed and extremely dangerous."
I look at Trenton. He looks at me.
"Morgan," I say.
The word comes out before I've finished the thought, because the thought completes itself in the half second between his eyes finding mine and my mouth opening. Morgan went to the bathroom. Morgan hasn't come back. Morgan has been gone for—
How long? My mind reaches for the number and finds nothing. Ten minutes? Fifteen? I didn't track it. Why didn't I track it? We've been careful for a month with cameras and perimeter checks and never letting her walk to the car alone, and tonight—tonight of all nights—I stopped tracking.
"Where is she?" Trenton's voice is low. Controlled.
"Bathroom." I'm already moving. "She went to the bathroom."
Carter and Kane are on their feet. The scrape of chairs and the low, urgent sound of multiple people standing at once fills the private room behind me as I push through the door into the main restaurant.
The hallway is narrow and bright and completely normal. A server passes me with a tray and looks startled by my expression.
I hit the bathroom door with my palm. "Morgan."
Nothing.
I push it open. Empty. Two stalls, both doors open. The tap dripping. The paper towel dispenser half unrolled on the counter.
The smell of her perfume, faint, already fading.
She was here.
But she's not here now.
I back out into the hallway. Trenton is right behind me.
"Not there," I say.
His jaw tightens. One small movement, barely visible, and then it's gone and his face is back to that controlled flatness. "Her phone."
Right. The app. The one we set up after the cabin, after the safe room, after the night three hired men came through our perimeter and Harris left a severed deer head on our porch. The one Morgan rolled her eyes at and then admitted, two days later, made her feel better.
I pull out my phone. My hands are steady. I notice that with a kind of detached awareness, the same awareness that kicks in when everything goes wrong and the body decides that shaking is a luxury it can't afford right now.
The app loads. Her dot appears.
Stationary. Behind the restaurant. Not moving.
"Back door," I say.
We move fast, not running yet, because running means panic and panic means mistakes, but we're fast, with Carter and Kane flanking us as we push through the emergency exit at the end of the hallway.
The cold air hits me first. The loading area is dim, lit only by the red glow of the exit sign overhead and the distant orange wash of the parking lot lights beyond the dumpsters.
I see it immediately.
The crack in the screen catches the light. Her phone, faced down on the concrete, a spiderweb fracture spreading from one corner. Lying exactly where it fell, or exactly where it was dropped, three feet from the dumpster.
I crouch and pick it up. The screen is still illuminated.
A text from Trixie's number: Back entrance. Let me in? Surprise! Couldn't miss this after all.
The cold in my chest has nothing to do with the November air.
I read it again. The punctuation is wrong. Trixie texts in fragments and capital letters and strings of emojis. She once sent me seventeen consecutive exclamation points to express her feelings about a parking ticket. This message is clean. Measured. Every word placed.
"It's not from Trixie," I say. My voice sounds far away. "He has her phone."
Trenton is already on his own phone, moving away from the door. I hear him say Greyson's name, hear the clipped efficiency of a man issuing orders, hear the word perimeter and the word now.
Kane crouches near the edge of the loading area, examining the ground. "Tire marks. Fresh. They went east."
I look at the tire marks. Then I look at the text again. Then I look at the door we just came through, the door Morgan pushed open without hesitation because she thought her friend needed her, because that's who she is, and Harris knew that and built this entire thing around it.
He planned this.
Not impulsively. Not desperately. He escaped from a prison transport, acquired a vehicle, located Trixie, drugged her, took her phone, drove to this restaurant, and waited in a loading area with a gun while we celebrated inside.
He planned us. He planned our celebration. He knew about the adoption.
The thought lands and stays.
I stand up. Carter is beside me, his face the color of the concrete, his eyes fixed on the tire marks like he can follow them by sheer force of will.
"Trixie," he says. It's not a question.
"He used her to get Morgan out here." I watch his face as the full weight of it reaches him. "She never made it to her shift."
The muscle in his jaw goes rigid. His hands, hanging at his sides, curl slowly into fists.
We go back inside.
The private room has transformed in the three minutes we were gone.
The celebration is over. The table is covered in phones and maps.
My father has his arm around my mother, who is pressing her fingers to her mouth.
Greyson is in the corner with two other club members, his voice low and rapid.
Charlie is in the far corner with Sydney, her face small and pale, Princess Sparklehoof pressed against her chest like a shield.
She looks at me when I come through the door.
I hold her gaze for one second. I try to make my face say we're handling it instead of what I'm actually feeling, which is a cold, grinding terror that I haven't felt since the worst nights overseas, the nights when the mission went sideways and the people you were responsible for were somewhere you couldn't reach them.
Then I look away, because I can't afford to feel it yet.
Trenton is already at the table, spreading a map. The manager brought it from the office without being asked. Someone has marked the restaurant's location in red.
"He's heading northeast," Trenton says when I reach him.
His finger traces a route on the map. The old highway, the one that cuts through farmland and forest before splitting into a dozen smaller roads that feed into the mountains.
"That's where the transport van was ambushed.
He had help getting out. He'll have help out there. "
I look at the route. I think about the cabin. The quarry. The way Harris moved through that terrain like he'd been born in it, like he'd been planning his exits for months.
"He's not improvising," I say.
"No." Trenton's finger stops on a stretch of highway, where the road curves away from town and the last streetlight marks the edge of the city limits. "He's been planning this since the moment they put him in a cell."
God help Harris when I find him.
Isaac is pale as a ghost sitting in a chair like he is in total shock. Then he sits up straight before pointing at us. "She is wearing the earrings you got her after you came home from a visit."
The grin could split my face at the realization, and Trenton does the same thing.
We make a call to Techy.