Chapter Seventy-Five
Quinn parks in the lot of the empty strip mall and jumps out of his car and races to Find Them’s front doors. Through the glass, the only light visible inside is from the glowing exit signs. It takes a moment to find the key on the full ring Lucy gave him.
Inside, he looks around the reception area, which has a desk facing the sitting area with magazines on a small table.
He goes through the door to the back. He’s never been in the back offices before and is surprised at the large space with so many workstations.
No one is here, as one would expect at this time of night.
He listens. The only sound the hum of the refrigerator in the small kitchen.
He slaps on the light and looks around breathlessly. Spotting a side office with Jules’s name on a placard by the door, he runs over, finds a modest office with an orderly desk, framed newspaper stories about Find Them.
But Jules isn’t here. And there’s nothing to suggest she’s returned since the gala. He rushes back into the main office area and is struck by two massive separate walls of photos.
He calls Lucy’s mobile phone. She answers right away.
“She’s not here,” Quinn says. “Any word?”
“No,” Lucy says, distraught. “Jack just got here. He’s called in reinforcements.” Her voice breaks.
Quinn tries to catch his breath, level his thoughts. Then he sees something that snares his attention. The timeline on the wall under the heading MAY DAY KILLER. The photos of missing women and girls linked together by a thread of red string.
He follows the timeline in reverse: 1998, a missing girl from Nebraska City; 1997, a girl from Grand Island; 1996, a girl from Rushville; 1995, Jules’s sister Clare from Monarch; 1994, Carrie; 1993, a girl from Ralston; 1992, Jules herself; it goes on this way until 1987.
Then the string extends to other states, a cluster of women taken on May 1st in Illinois, a few in Missouri and Kansas.
Something is gnawing at him. Then he realizes what it is: the towns where the girls were taken. Nebraska City, Grand Island, Rushville, Omaha.
Those cities, that pattern.
Oh my god.
His mother’s Red Flag file. She listed those very cities on the delivery schedules in the file. The schedules Quinn has pored over and over for years, ultimately determining that they were just Mom’s old work papers mixed in with the real clues about Megan Tucker and “Pearl.”
It’s been in front of him all along.
Lucy’s voice in his ear rattles him out of the thought.
“Quinn. Quinn! What’s going on?”
Quinn stares at the crime wall in disbelief. “This is a hard thing to ask,” Quinn says into the phone. “We’ve never talked about it in any detail. But I need to know what you remember about where he took you. Any clues on where Jules was taken.”
He continues to work the math in his head: What do the towns on the truck delivery schedule have to do with the missing on the crime wall?
Lucy says, “We’ve already told Jack everything. Somewhere far unless he drove around just to throw us off. A structure in an open area, a field maybe.”
“Like a cabin? Or something different?”
“I don’t know. We were blindfolded. But it was quiet inside, like it was sealed up.”
Quinn shivers but not from the cold.
Over the line, Carrie says something in the background he can’t make out.
Lucy repeats it: “Jules keeps her anonymous note in the cabinet behind her desk. Along with my police report and Carrie’s journal. We shared them with each other.”
“What anonymous note, what—?”
“Our descriptions of everything we can remember about what happened.”
“Where?”
She tells him and he runs back to Jules’s office, phone pressed to his ear. Lucy directs him to the built-in cabinet behind Jules’s desk.
Quinn opens the cabinet, sees a leather folder, opens it.
Inside are photocopies of what look like a police report that has Lucy’s name on it, separate pages from diary entries, and a letter handwritten on spiral notepaper.
Quinn reads the heartbreaking letter Jules must’ve written to the police before she told anyone else what happened. An anonymous tip.
And it’s then he has no doubts about his mother’s Red Flag file.
“You tell Jack to go to Ashwell, Nebraska. I think I may know where he took her.”
There’re some sounds of movement. A male voice is on the line now. “How do you—”
“There’s no time! Get to Ashwell! I’ll meet you there, Jack.”
“Where? What’s the address?”
“I don’t know the address, but I can tell you how to get there. I’ll call you on the way to explain.”
Quinn has the memory of a road trip to Ashwell after his father died, visiting his father’s haunts as a boy. That bizarre field with the hundreds of wartime ammunition bunkers dotting the field like anthills that farmers now used to store grain and equipment.
Somewhere he now believes that May Day took his victims.