Ten minutes later, the garage door went up, and Eden and Axelle came bustling in from the back door, toting paper bags from Stella’s.
“Oh, good, you’re here,” Eden said, spotting him. She set the bags down on the coffee table and unslung the satchel from across her shoulders. “Will you go get some silverware? I brought pasta.”
“Hello to you, too,” he said, standing, and she swooped in to press a fast kiss to the corner of his mouth, offering a distracted, fleeting smile as she pulled back. She smelled of the hunt. With her hair in a tight bun, dressed in jeans, and Docs, and her favorite black leather jacket, zipped nearly to her chin, he could tell she was fresh off a case, and still thinking about it. If she was glad to see him, then he knew which case it was.
“Oh, and beers for us,” Axelle called to his back as he headed for the kitchen.
“Get your own beer.”
“Charlie,” Eden said, crisply.
He sighed. “Fine.”
When they were all settled, Fox and Eden on the long sofa, Axelle cross-legged in a chair, foam container of noodles balanced in her lap, Eden set her own penne with pesto aside and instead pulled out her notebook, crammed with tidy, handwritten notes.
“Someone’s been busy,” Fox observed.
“Very. We went to talk to Allie Henderson’s parents.” She sat back into the corner of the sofa, angled her body, legs crossed, notepad held up on one thigh. A woman who’d already drawn some conclusions, and looked to them now to flesh out some more. She looked eager, and if Fox didn’t already know better, he would have said he hoped she hadn’t displayed this kind of excitement in front of the poor, distraught parents. But he did know her; his girl was nothing if not professional.
“It’s an all-too-common occurrence,” Eden said. “Allie was a wonderful student, beloved by her friends and the community – at least, according to her parents. All sorts of clubs and extracurriculars. Volunteer work, the whole bit.” She made an encompassing hand gesture. “She’s an only child, and the mother is absolutely distraught because the police haven’t found anything. The father is devastated, to be sure, but he was able to speak with me.
“According to phone records – which he gladly showed me, and apparently showed the police as well – Allie called them at ten-fifteen the night of her disappearance and told them she was leaving the party and coming straight home. She said she hadn’t been drinking, and he believed her, based on the clarity of her voice. The party was at the home of” – she checked her notes – “a classmate named Jimmy Connors, and Mr. Henderson said that was only a ten-minute drive from their own home.
“When Allie failed to show after fifteen minutes, the mother called her. After twenty minutes, they called again. After thirty minutes, the father got in his car and drive the route to the Connors place to make sure she hadn’t broken down on the way. He went into the party – still raging, by the way, and full of drunk teenagers, and no parents. He asked several of the other students if Allie had come back. No one had seen her, they said – the last glimpse of her was her leaving, and, according to one girl, very publicly turning Jimmy Connors down for a date on the front lawn.”
Fox started to respond, and she held up a finger.
“Just a moment more. Henderson called the police on the party, and when they arrived, and kids scattered like roaches in the light, he told them about Allie. Technically, it hadn’t been long enough to file a missing person’s report, but the officers knew Henderson, and they said it was a light evening, and offered to drive around and look.
“Her car was found at midnight, on Mill Road. Axelle and I went and scoped the location.”
“Find anything?”
“Lots of broken bottles and old crushed beer cans. Part of a broken taillight – though the police report indicates Allie’s car was intact, so it wasn’t hers.”
“Someone hangs out down there,” Axelle said, twirling spaghetti onto her fork. “There were cigarette butts, and old condoms, and candy wrappers, and all kinds of shit.” She wrinkled her nose. “Fucking disgusting.”
“It’s a dead-end road,” Eden said, nodding. “And aptly-named. There is in fact an old, abandoned saw mill at the end of it.”
“Which I’m assuming you went into,” he said.
She plucked her camera off the table and passed it over.
The sequence of photos he tabbed through looked straight from a horror movie: a hollowed-out gravel bowl of a parking lot, and a two-story, weather-beaten wooden building perched on the edge of a weed-choked stream. A pair of double doors hung haphazardly from busted hinges, and between them, a yawning black cavern of a doorway of the sort that kids would have dared each other to enter, only to come back out shrieking.
Fox checked the urge to ask if she’d been armed; he knew she had been.
The next photo was taken at the doorway, looking inside. A few boards had rotted away, or been pulled off, and sunlight fell in bold, yellow slats across the dirt floor. An open space, with a few bits of old, rusted equipment lying about: a saw, a chisel. The ceiling went all the way up to the second story, with only a narrow gallery to stand on; she’d captured a dove in mid-flight, as it had been startled by their entrance. A few old, warped boards sat propped in a corner, layered with dust.
The next photo was the interesting one: a close-up of a section of wall, and a very fresh symbol spray-painted onto it.
“The paint wasn’t wet, but it’s fairly fresh,” Eden said. “Within the last few weeks, I’d wager.”
The symbol itself was simple: an inverted triangle painted in fluorescent yellow.
Fox glanced up, and met Eden’s serious gaze.
“Yield,” they said together.
