Daphne’s smile fell as she looked from Izzie to Joyce and back.
“What kid?” she asked. “He wasn’t here when I got back from the Kiev, and I assumed he was still out teaching the neighborhood kids how to clean the marks.”
Joyce sat bolt upright on the couch. “You mean he’s not back yet?”
“No.” Daphne shook her head. “I’ve been here on my own the last few hours.”
Izzie and Joyce exchanged a worried glance.
“He should have gotten back by now,” Joyce said, her brow furrowed with worry lines. She fished in the pocket of her jacket for her phone.
Izzie already had her phone out, and after thumbing it on checked to see if she had any text messages or missed calls from Patrick’s number. She was already starting to thumb out a quick text to him when Joyce held her own phone to her ear.
“I’m getting his voice mail.” Joyce scowled, and stabbed the screen with her fingertip to end the call.
Izzie finished typing out “WHERE ARE YOU?” and then added “911” for safe measure. She would have added some suitable emoji for urgency if she had any idea which one to use.
As she watched the phone’s screen, the text was marked as “delivered,” and shortly after as “read.” But at no point did the scrolling ellipse show that Patrick was composing a response on the other end.
“He read it, but he’s not answering.” Izzie chewed her lower lip, thinking through the possibilities.
“Or someone read it,” Daphne said ominously.
Izzie knew that she wasn’t wrong. There was no way of knowing for sure.
“Where is he?” Joyce sounded increasingly worried.
“Hang on, I have an idea.” Izzie punched the home button on her phone, and then scrolled through pages until she found the icon for the “Find Friends” app that she and Patrick had used five years before. When Izzie had gotten to town earlier that week, Patrick had used it to know where to pick her up, so she knew that it was still installed on his phone. Provided he hadn’t uninstalled it in the last few days, which seemed unlikely.
Joyce levered herself up off the couch and came over to stand beside Izzie, while Daphne stepped closer on her other side. All three women watched as the app zeroed in on the location of Patrick’s phone, a broad blue circle gradually shrinking over a map of the city as it triangulated his position via cell towers.
“There,” Izzie said, pointing at the tight blue dot that had come to rest at the corner of Gold Street and Northside Boulevard.
“Pinnacle Tower.” Joyce covered her mouth with her hand, her voice breathless.
“The goddamned belly of the goddamned beast,” Daphne said through clenched teeth, uncharacteristically swearing.
“They must have snatched him up,” Izzie said, still staring at the screen of her phone, as if she could will that little blue dot to migrate to a safer spot on the map. “He wouldn’t have gone on his own without telling us.”
“Maybe the RPD is doing a raid?” Joyce lowered her hand from her mouth, a note of pleading optimism to her voice, a flicker of hope in her face. “They’ve established a link from the Ink suppliers to Parasol, and Patrick said that the taskforce was gearing up for a big push. Maybe this is it?”
Izzie shook her head. “Do you really think that Patrick would go off on a police raid in the middle of all of this—a raid on the Pinnacle Tower of all places—and not tell us first? He called you just to let you know he was checking on some neighborhood kid, do you think he wouldn’t call you about something as important as this?”
The fleeting expression of hope bled from Joyce’s face. “No,” she said, in a quiet voice. “Damn it.”
“So we’ve got to operate under the assumption that Patrick is not there of his own free will,” Izzie went on, “and that someone is holding him there.”
“Martin Zotovic, do you think?” Daphne asked.
Izzie stabbed the power button on her phone and jammed it back into her pocket.
“Probably,” she answered, after considering the possibilities for a moment. “Or else someone high enough up in the chain that they report directly to him.”
“Um . . .” Daphne held up her hand, like a student in a classroom not sure that they want to voice the question they’ve got in mind. “Do we need to consider the possibility that Patrick’s phone is there, but that he’s somewhere else? I mean, I’m not saying that they left him in a ditch somewhere, but . . .” She trailed off, seeing the stricken look on Joyce’s face.
“No.” Joyce shook her head quickly, as if to knock loose an unwanted mental image. “Patrick has thumbprint ID set up on his phone. And that text message that Izzie just sent was marked read. So he had to be there to unlock it.”
“Or someone unlocked it using his thumb.” Daphne stopped, and then seemed to consider how that might sound. “I don’t mean they cut off his thumb and took it with them, or anything,” she hastened to add, “just that they might have forced him to . . .”
“It’s okay,” Izzie interrupted, and put a hand on Daphne’s shoulder. “I think we both knew what you meant.”
Joyce gripped the handle of her cane in both hands, shoulders hunched defensively, a dark cloud of worry and anxiety on her face. Izzie got the impression that she was considering all of the worst-case scenarios, up to and including the idea of Patrick’s phone and his thumb being in a different location than the rest of him.
“We . . .” Joyce started, her voice like brittle glass. “We should call in the police. Maybe Patrick’s commanding officer, or the other detectives on the Ink squad. Get them to move now on that big push that
