Chapter 56
Chapter
Fifty-Six
Five minutes later, Wren saw Luke and Nash stride back inside.
She sat up straighter, praying they had an update.
Luke found a chair, pulled it around, and sat in front of her and Cody. “I know you want an update, but we haven’t got much right now. In the meantime, I want you both to go home and get some rest. I’ll call you the second anything moves.”
Wren swung her head back and forth. “No, absolutely not.”
“Wren, you’ve been here since before three o’clock,” Luke said. “Cody, you came just a little later.”
“I’m not leaving either.” Cody’s voice hardened.
Luke didn’t argue. He glanced over at Nash instead before finally saying, “All right. I figured you’d both say that, but I had to try.”
Wren stared at Luke. “I need something to do. Please don’t tell me to rest. I can’t sit in this building one more hour with my hands in my lap.”
Luke rubbed his thumb along his jaw. “Let me ask you this first: You haven’t received any calls, have you?”
“No.” Wren’s throat closed. “Why? What does that mean?”
Silence stretched for a moment.
Finally, Nash said, “It means we’re not looking at somebody who wants money.”
Wren squeezed her eyes shut, even though she’d already thought about that. “There wasn’t a ransom call with Christian either.”
Another moment of quiet passed. There was no good response to that. Reality was grim right now, and no one could deny it.
She finally drew in a deep breath and asked, “Do you know if Prine went to talk to Coach Ferris?”
“She’s been trying to locate him,” Luke said. “He’s not at home. But we’re still looking. I promise you that.”
“Thank you.”
Luke handed her a legal pad. “You said you wanted something to do? I need you to write down everybody in Mason’s life.
Not just people you might suspect. Everybody.
Teachers, coaches, friends. People from church, from the salon.
The man who might have fixed your porch or raked your leaves.
I don’t care how long you’ve known them, and I don’t care how much you love them. I need their names.”
Faces of everyone in her life raced through her mind at lightning speed. “That’s going to be a lot of people.”
“That’s okay.”
Wren’s hand closed around the pen. “I can do that. I’ll get started.”
“I suppose you want me to do this also?” Cody asked.
“That’s correct,” Luke said. “But before you do that, one of our volunteers stepped off the curb wrong and hurt his ankle. Would you mind looking at him?”
Cody stood. “Not at all.”
She knew what Luke was doing. He was giving them something to do.
She was grateful. Because doing something was better than just sitting around and worrying.
While Wren wrote her list, Nash stepped away.
Prine was on a phone call nearby and, based on her responses, she had an update of some kind. Nash lingered, hoping she’d share.
Finally, she lowered the phone and walked toward him.
“They printed him. Your man in the cellar.” She kept her voice low and discrete. “His name was Dewey Hicks. Fifty-eight years old. He did eleven years at Brushy Mountain for arson.”
“Arson?” Nash hadn’t expected to hear that.
“Two churches in Morgan County in the late nineties.” She put the phone in her pocket. “He was paroled about fourteen years ago. Nobody’s had an address on him since 2020.”
“Did he have any affiliation with Voss?” he asked.
“Not that we can find right now. We’re going to keep digging.”
“And what about Voss himself?” Nash asked. “Any updates on him?”
“That’s the other part.” Prine glanced around quickly. “Voss renewed a Tennessee driver’s license in March. But the address he listed is no longer valid. I sent one of my guys to visit him, and they found out he hasn’t lived there in years.”
“Interesting.” For a moment, it had almost sounded like a good lead. “The man who came into the school earlier . . . his height doesn’t match Voss’s. The man on that video isn’t six foot two. I’d say five ten, five eleven. It’s probably not him.”
“I agree. Which leaves us at square one.”
Just then, the front doors opened, and Tate Ferris walked inside.
Maybe this man would have some answers.