As she approached, it became clear why she had been led here. Decorative iron bars capped with florets had been bolted over the windows. Behind the glass, a sheet of metal had been affixed from the inside.
They hadn't been there before.
She thought about the couple who owned this house, about their family...a mirror image of her own.
They had been friends.
Something stirred inside of her, an instinct she hadn't felt this strongly in two years.
Suddenly, everything made sense.
The dying child.
Emma's abduction.
Warren's death.
She needed to get inside the house.
Her daughter was in the basement.
And she was still alive.
Trey gave up on reaching his sister on her cell. It was readily apparent she wasn't going to answer. He had settled upon a plan. Jefferson was a small town. He could cruise the length of every street in under half an hour. If Vanessa was out there on foot, he would find her in no time at all. Only the diner stayed open twenty-four hours, and there was nowhere else to go. If he didn't find her by the time he reached South Maple Street at the edge of town, then he would call Dr. Montgomery and make him drag his weary ass out of bed and guide him through the clinic's records, even if he had to do so at gunpoint. But what then? Did he propose reading through every file? It wasn't like there was some kind of search function that would allow him to sort through the entire population by disease. He needed to take a step back and evaluate it from scratch, narrow the field to a manageable number.
What were the facts? Whoever buried the child's body had expected it to be found. Why else go to the trouble of planting the clues that would lead to a false identification? Whoever staged the scene had to have a fairly comprehensive understanding of genetics, had to know that the police would be satisfied with two separate means of identification so they wouldn't need to test the skeletal remains separately. The corpse needed to be displayed in such a manner that there would be no doubt about the mechanism of death, the level of violence so stunning and obvious that there would be no reason to suspect anything else.
So what kind of suspect pool did that create?
A cop would be an easy choice, but all of the sheriff's deputies had been accounted for the night of Emma's disappearance. It was possible that one of them might have been in collusion with an unknown party, however unlikely. Trey had looked each of them in the eye every day in the intervening years and just couldn't imagine how they could have fooled him so completely. He couldn't afford to rule out anyone at this stage, but he needed to consider every potential angle. What about medical professionals? A doctor would have the knowledge base to pull it off and free reign over patient records. Montgomery would have been able to access the correct file, and Emma would have known him well enough to walk away with him without causing a scene. He could have just playfully scooped her up and been on his way before anyone---
Then it hit him.
The dental records.
Trey had recognized that the teeth were part of the setup. All of them had been badly broken, with the exception of the five that were necessary to generate the positive identification. They were chipped and fractured, just to nowhere near the same degree. Anyone could have seen which teeth had been filled. But only one person could have known which ones had cavities that had yet to be filled.
Dr. Carlton Matthews.
What had he said?
Trey jerked the wheel to the right and pinned the gas. The clinic was only three blocks away, and, if he was right, he didn't have the time to waste trying to rouse Montgomery and force him to open the doors.
Buildings flew past. He blew through stop signs without a sideways glance and locked up the brakes in front of the clinic. The office was dark. He could see the reception counter through the twin glass doors, a dozen empty seats, and tables littered with magazines.
He leapt out and raced up to the doors. A tug on the handles confirmed they were locked. If given the proper tools and enough time, he probably could have picked the lock, but he had neither. A quick survey of the seams around the doors revealed no wires or magnetic strips. No alarm. He raised his right foot and kicked the glass. Hard. Once. Twice. It shattered on the third try and he barreled through, nearly slipping on the shards covering the floor. The door beside the registration desk was unlocked, and the computer behind the counter had only been put to sleep. He jostled the mouse and brought the screen to life. There were a dozen icons. He double-clicked the one labeled RECORDS. It asked for a medical records number rather than a name. He closed it and opened the SCHEDULING program. This one allowed him to enter the last name Matthews. He tabbed to the FIRST NAME box, which gave him three options in a drop-down menu: Carlton, Sandra, and Chelsea. Sandra was the wife's name, so he populated the box with Chelsea. The screen filled in with her biographical data: birth date, social security number, address, phone number, insurance code, and a nine digit MR number. He grabbed a pen, scribbled it on his palm, and opened the RECORDS folder again. He typed the number at the prompt and waited.
A string of minimized reports popped up on the left side, labeled by date. The most recent was from twenty- six months ago. He clicked it and saw his brother-in-law's name listed as the treating physician. Several words jumped out at him from the body of the report.
The body they had found belonged to Chelsea Matthews. She'd been six years-old, the same as Emma. Warren had been unable to save her. She had died of her cancer, leaving behind grief-stricken parents unable to rationalize the loss of their only child. Matthews had been Emma's dentist. She would have trusted him well enough to wander off with him. She would have seen him as safe, as a friend.
Did the Matthewses blame Warren for their daughter's death?
Was it possible they had somehow snapped and figured that if they couldn't have their child, then neither could the man who let theirs die?
If that was the case then...
Trey jumped up from the desk and sprinted out of the office.
The Jeep's engine roared and its tires screamed on the asphalt as he sped away from town toward the remote area where the Matthewses lived.
Vanessa pried at the bars over the window, but they didn't budge in the slightest. The windows on the main floor were out of her reach. That meant she either had to use the front or the back door, and surely both were locked. She hadn't thought to bring her cell phone and she was unarmed. She didn't even have a set of keys to hold between her knuckles, but now that she had found Emma, she couldn't bear to leave her here a second longer.
She had come for her daughter, and she wasn't leaving without her.
Vanessa walked right around to the front porch and ascended the short slate staircase. She stood an arm's length from the door. The cicadas scurried away from the door. Heart pounding, she raised her fist and knocked.
The sound echoed hollowly away from her.
She knocked again, harder this time, and listened for approaching footsteps.
Nothing.
She pounded again and again.
The cicadas broke the silence. Their song was deafening. It grew faster, more insistent, raising the hackles
