Chapter 12
The concrete room went deeper than my phone light could reach. Grace and I moved past the shelves and I forced myself to look at everything, because I understood now that looking was the only defense I had.
The shelves held homeowner files in labeled rows β twenty-three of them, I counted later, each with an address from Willow Lane and the streets around it. Below the files were the removed mailboxes, pried clean off front porches, their little doors hanging open. Medication containers lined another shelf, prescription bottles with the labels soaked off, the same kind I had found inside the first bag in my kitchen. A bundle of house keys hung on a single metal ring, each key tagged with a strip of masking tape and an address in careful handwriting.
On the lowest shelf were the photographs. Hundreds of them, in stacks. Photographs taken through bedroom windows, through back doors, across living rooms. I saw my own kitchen again, and my upstairs hallway, and the chair beside my bed where the second bag had been placed. I saw Grace's kitchen. I saw Pauline Marsh's living room. The dates on the back of some of them went back years.
At the far end of the room stood the workbench with the monitors. Six screens in a row, all live. My living room, empty. Grace's kitchen, empty. The street outside my house, where the black SUV still sat. A basement I did not recognize, its walls lined with more shelves. A hallway I did not recognize, narrow and dark, with a child's drawing taped to the wall.
I leaned closer to the photographs on the lowest shelf. My upstairs hallway, taken from the top of the stairs β the exact angle where my camera had gone dark at 2:47. The chair beside my bed. The drawer where I kept my mother's letters, standing open. Someone had been inside my bedroom while I slept in it, and the thought made my hands shake so hard the phone light wavered.
And the third screen from the left.
Officer Paula Reed sat bound to a chair in a small bare room. Her hands were tied to the armrests with what looked like cable ties. There was a dark mark on her sleeve that might have been blood. Her head was down, but I could see she was breathing. Behind her, written on the wall in thick black marker, was an address. I read it twice to be certain.
It was the vacant house formerly owned by Henry Marsh.
"That's Henry's house," I said. "The one across the street. The one where he died."
Grace stared at the screen with her hand over her mouth. "I didn't know they had her," she whispered. "I swear to you, Thomas. She came to collect your evidence and she never came back, and I told myself she was only on leave. I didn't know they had her."
"How long has she been there?"
"I don't know. The text came from her number at 7:20. The department said emergency leave. After that, nobody would explain anything."
I looked at Paula on the screen, at the cable ties, at the address on the wall, and I felt something cold settle in my chest. She had been the one person who believed me β or at least, the one person who had agreed to look. She had told me to hide the evidence outside the house because whoever was entering already knew where my cameras were. She had arranged to collect it the following morning. She had never arrived.
"She's alive," I said, and it sounded like a question.
"She's alive," Grace said. "But I don't know for how long. Your closing is Friday. Everything happens before Friday."
Behind us, metal clanged against concrete. The security men had reached the shelves.
"Then we find a way to get her out," I said. "Whatever it takes."
Grace looked at the monitor, at Paula's bowed head, and nodded slowly.
Grace looked at the monitor, at Paula's bowed head, and nodded. But before either of us could move, a door opened at the far end of the room β a metal door I had not seen, set flush into the concrete like it belonged to a bank vault β and a woman stepped through wearing a county prosecutor's jacket.
I recognized her from television. She had given a press conference last spring, promising to investigate fraudulent property seizures across the county, looking straight into the cameras with her jaw set.
Deputy District Attorney Dana Holloway.