Chapter 48
Chapter
Forty-Eight
Austin spotted Cross’s cruiser around the next curve.
It sat at the far end of the gravel turnout, its lights off and its nose angled toward the trees. An old service road disappeared into the darkness behind it.
Prine stopped fifty yards away. “Cross knows police procedure. Assume he chose this location for a reason.”
Austin climbed out behind her. Raindrops touched his face as a second sheriff’s unit approached from the opposite direction. Two deputies emerged with weapons drawn.
“The plate matches,” Luke said. “No response from Cross.”
Prine sent the deputies to clear the tree line. They swept the surrounding woods and found no one.
Austin approached the cruiser. Cross’s department phone lay in the cup holder, his personal cell on the passenger seat. The keys remained in the ignition.
Luke looked beneath the dashboard. “GPS cable was pulled.”
“He left behind everything we could track.” Prine shone her flashlight across the back seat. “Any sign the boy was inside?”
A damp smear marked the vinyl, but nothing proved who had been there. Austin searched for blood or evidence that the boy had resisted. He found none.
“He may have gone willingly,” Nash said.
“That doesn’t mean he had a choice.”
Luke stared at Cross’s abandoned phones. “I hired him three months ago.”
Austin looked at him. “What did he tell you about his background?”
“He’d worked four years as a deputy in two small counties west of Nashville. His certification was current, his references checked out, and there were no disciplinary complaints.”
“If Cross is Zander Dalton, the identity is fabricated,” Prine said.
“I spoke to both departments myself.”
“The employment may be real,” she said. “That doesn’t mean the name beneath it is. Someone could have built the Cross identity years ago and let him establish a legitimate work history.”
Luke’s expression hardened. Cross hadn’t merely fooled the Loveless family. He had fooled the department that trusted him with a badge.
Austin moved around the passenger side. Fresh tire tracks cut through the wet gravel toward the pavement, where they disappeared. He crouched beside them.
“Another vehicle parked here.”
Prine joined him. “Recent?”
“These tracks are on top of the marks the rain washed out.” Austin stood. “Cross could have transferred to it.”
Prine photographed the tracks while Luke requested a crime-scene unit. No cameras watched the turnout, and the pavement held no trace of which way the second vehicle had gone.
Austin looked toward the service road. His father would have walked this place until he found the detail everyone else had missed.
Austin forced himself to slow down.
Cross had left the phones and cruiser where law enforcement would find them. Every minute they spent here gave him more time to disappear.
“We need a dog,” Austin said.
“I’ve requested one,” Luke replied. “Twenty minutes.”
Prine asked him to have the technician at the Loveless house bag one of the boy’s recently worn shirts for the handler. They could also use an item from Cross’s locker to establish his scent if necessary.
Austin looked again at the tire tracks. If Cross had driven away in another vehicle, both trails might end right there.
Rain fell across the gravel, softening the tracks as he watched.
The crime-scene technician finished photographing the boy’s room twenty minutes after Austin left.
“I’ve documented everything,” she told Nora. “You can look through the folder, but handle the pages by the edges.”
Nora carried the folder to the desk and opened it. She found several pages covered with scribbles and examined them one at a time.
One held a drawing of a house.
A steep roof rose above a row of narrow windows. A stone chimney stood along one side. Nora had glimpsed part of the drawing while Zack gathered the worksheets, just before the boy slid the page beneath the others.
She searched the remaining papers.
Another sketch showed a weathered barn with a circular window beneath its peak. Two piles of rocks stood in the clearing between the barn and the house.
Nora remembered finding him outside after midnight, barefoot and moving stones from one pile to another.
The third drawing showed a road curving between two stone pillars.
She spread the pages across the desk. Together, they showed the same property from different angles.
And she had seen it before.
A bus engine strained in her memory. Dad muttering as the tires spun against wet gravel.
Her family had stayed at a farmhouse between concerts. The first time they arrived, they learned the tour bus couldn’t fit between the pillars at the front entrance. Dad had circled around and found a narrower road that came in behind the barn.
They had used the rear entrance every time they stayed there afterward.
Nora photographed the drawings and carried the folder downstairs.
Dad turned from the window. “Did you find something?”
She spread the pages across the coffee table. “We stayed here. Remember the place where you couldn’t get the bus through the front entrance?”
Dad studied the drawing of the pillars. Mom leaned forward from the couch.
“The place with all the bedrooms upstairs?” Mom asked.
Nora looked at her. “You remember it?”
“They hosted traveling groups. We stayed there more than once.”
“It was outside Harriman,” Dad said. “We usually stopped there if we had concerts around Knoxville.”
“The bus got stuck in the mud the first time,” Marlowe added.
Dad tapped the drawing. “This looks like the place.”
Nora’s pulse quickened. “Who owned it?”
“I don’t remember,” Dad said. “Roy arranged the stays. He said using the house would save the cost of hotel rooms.”
Mom touched the edge of the drawing. “The Daltons were there one of those nights. They were the other family staying at the house.”
Nora stared at her. “Zander was there?”
“Yes. He would have been fifteen or so.”
Two years before he disappeared.
Dad studied the pictures again. “Roy booked both families there.”
The connections aligned with sickening clarity. A farmhouse that hosted traveling Gospel groups. The Lovelesses and Daltons staying there. Two boys from those families disappearing. Roy asking questions about unexplained money before his death.
And now the boy who had lived in Christian’s room had drawn that same farmhouse three times.
The property wasn’t a random hiding place.
It was part of whatever had begun on the Southern Gospel circuit years ago.
Nora gathered the drawings. “We need to find that house.”
Now.