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“Isn’t it a little past your bedtime, buddy?” Clay asked.
“Maybe,” Joe said and smiled. “But don’t tell my mom. I think she forgot. She’s been waiting for you to get here. I’ve got a whole bunch of new games I haven’t even played yet and I want to stay up as long as I can.”
Clay sat and watched as the kid closed the kangaroo game and opened another. After the game designer logos appeared and dissolved, a scroll flopped down. On its surface werecartoon body parts. Joe started building an avatar, fitting a little girl’s head onto a petite body. Clay watched him add a blond wig, a dress, Mary Jane shoes. When the game demanded “Name your character!” Joe tapped three letters.
ZOE.
Clay felt tingles roll over the surface of his scalp.
“They weren’t there,” April said as she reappeared at the door. Clay watched her cross to the bed, looking defeated, and curl up there again, taking the paperback novel she’d been reading from the nightstand.
With almost mechanical movements, Clay went to her, kissed her, and issued his goodbyes. He walked stiffly to his cruiser and sat in the driver’s seat, tapping his fingers on the bottom of the steering wheel.
It was with a dread so heavy and so aching in his chest that he turned his head and looked at the Mobile Digital Terminal mounted to the center console of the squad car. The monitor was turned toward the front passenger seat, the way it had been the last time April was in the car. He hadn’t left it like that. Clay turned it back. He awakened the machine, tapped through to the search history, and squinted at the top of the list where the most recent search was positioned. He put a finger on the screen and found the time of the last search.
11:47 p.m.
He looked at his watch.
It was 11:52 p.m.
Clay hit the search record and opened it up. The file related to a man named Thomas Oscar Savage. One conviction, four years earlier, for speeding. That was it. But there was a red alert on the name and a license plate linked to it. Clay clicked the alert.
WANTED—SUSPECTED HOMICIDE—POSSIBLE ARMED/HOSTILE
Clay took out his phone and googled the name Thomas Oscar Savage.
His phone screen filled with headlines.
OMAHA POLICE APPEAL FOR INFORMATION IN MISSING CHILD CASE
SEARCH FOR MISSING OMAHA GIRL SUSPENDED
MISSING ZOE SAVAGE PRESUMED MURDERED
SAVAGE PARENTS INTERROGATED OVER MISSING DAUGHTER
REGINA SAVAGE ARRESTED, HUSBAND THOMAS STILL AT LARGE
Clay opened up one of the articles. He scrolled down to a shot of a terrified-looking couple sitting at a press conference table, surrounded by police. Thomas and Regina Savage. Thomas was crying, wiping his exhausted eyes. Regina was holding up a picture of a small child.
Clay recognized that child.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-THREE
EVERYTHING EVAPORATED FROM his mind. The multiple crime scenes in and around his own home. The killer fugitive in the area that he personally had failed to keep contained. His three housemates in the local hospital, two of them fighting for their lives. Sheriff Clayton Spears even set aside his romantic disappointment, the most crushing letdown he’d experienced since his wife’s departure. He could think of one thing only, which was that the little boy in the motel named Joe Leeler was, in fact, actually a little girl named Zoe Savage who had been kidnapped from her parents in Omaha and had somehow ended up here. All the stupid ideas Clay had been building up for years about what kind of hero he wanted to be in life went up in smoke instantly.
He had to be a different kind of hero now.
Clay felt the muscles in his shoulders bunching, his hands balling into fists, and his jaw locking tight. He got out of his squad car, slammed the door shut, and strode the six paces tothe motel room door like a death machine lumbering robotically toward human prey. The lock smashed out of the doorframe as his boot hit the wood, the hinges popping, the whole door falling flat on the carpet with a breathywhump. Zoe screamed in shock and dropped her iPad, leaping up and scrambling to the bed beside April.
The woman wrapped an arm around the child. Clay felt his lip twist in fury. When he spoke, every word came out with a struggle, the syllables wrapped in pure, white-hot anger.
“Zoe,” Clay said. He put out a hand. “Come here.”
The child looked at April. April’s hand tightened on the kid’s shoulder.
“I’m going to take you home,” Clay said. He put a hand on the butt of the pistol on his hip. “We’re going to stay real calm. All of us. Nice and calm and quiet. You’re going to come over here and stand by me, and I’m going to take you home to your real parents.”
