Chapter 9 - The Empty Ambulance.
For several seconds Ethan could not understand what the officer had said.
Then he looked toward the ambulance.
The blanket Lily had been wearing lay on the wet pavement.
“Lily!”
He ran to the rear doors.
Empty.
One paramedic was unconscious on the ground behind the vehicle with a swelling above his temple.
The second had been sent inside the mansion for supplies moments earlier.
Mercer began shouting orders into his radio.
Rose caught Ethan's sleeve.
“Look at the photograph.”
“What?”
“Hannah taught Lily what to do if someone took her.”
Ethan stared at her.
Rose pointed to the old family photograph still tucked in Lily's abandoned blanket.
On the back, beneath Hannah's warning, a tiny silver sticker reflected the ambulance lights.
Ethan peeled it away.
A tracking tag the size of a coin had been fixed beneath the paper backing.
“Hannah put that there?”
“No.”
Rose shook her head.
“I did, when Lily hugged me.”
For the first time that night, Ethan understood why Hannah had trusted this woman.
Mercer paired the tag with Rose's phone.
A signal appeared half a mile east of the mansion.
Then it moved.
“Carriage road,” Ethan said.
Mercer ordered patrol units to block both exits.
The signal continued through the woods instead of turning toward the highway.
Ethan watched the moving dot and remembered taking Lily to that lake when she was four, before grief made him stop doing almost everything Hannah had loved.
The memory turned the location from a map coordinate into another violation.
Rose's face changed.
“They're going to the boathouse.”
Ethan looked at her.
“What boathouse?”
“The old Carter property on Blackwater Lake.”
The estate had once included thirty acres on the far side of the woods, but Ethan had sold most of it after Hannah's death.
An abandoned boathouse still stood near the lake.
Mercer drove.
Ethan sat beside him while Rose followed with another officer.
The tracking dot stopped near the shoreline.
They killed their headlights two hundred yards away.
Ethan could see a dark SUV beside the boathouse.
Claire's car.
Mercer caught his arm.
“You stay behind me.”
“My daughter is in there.”
“And she needs you alive.”
They approached through wet reeds.
Voices carried from inside.
Claire was crying.
“I did everything you asked.”
A man's voice answered.
“You failed everything I asked.”
Ethan knew that voice.
Victor.
Lily whimpered.
Ethan moved before Mercer could stop him.
He reached the side window and looked through a crack in the boards.
Victor stood beside Claire holding a pistol.
Lily sat in a wooden chair, wrists bound loosely with packing tape.
Claire's makeup had run down her face.
“You said she wouldn't be hurt.”
Victor smiled faintly.
“She won't be, if Ethan gives me the key.”
Ethan's hand closed around the brass key in his pocket.
Claire whispered, “You killed Hannah for that trust.”
Victor's smile vanished.
“I corrected a problem Hannah created.”
Lily looked toward the window.
Her eyes met Ethan's.
She did not cry out.
Instead, she looked down deliberately at the floor beside her chair.
There, half-hidden beneath a coil of rope, was Claire's smartphone.
The screen was recording.
May you like
Claire was not begging Victor.
She was making him confess.
