Page 118 of Veil of Silence

He’d called them school assessment pages. She remembered glimpsing some of the doodles while Zack gathered the completed worksheets at the kitchen table. The boy had slid it beneath the others almost as soon as Nora noticed.

A steep roof. A chimney. Dark rectangles that might have been windows.

She’d thought he was doodling. Now she remembered a dark pencil line on the corner of the papers he’d tried to burn.

Nora hurried to the foot of the stairs.

“What is it?” Marlowe asked from the kitchen.

“I remembered something he drew.” Nora looked toward the room where the technician was working. “And I think it might be a clue.”

Chapter

Forty-Eight

Austin spotted Cross’s cruiser around the next curve.

It sat at the far end of the gravel turnout, its lights off and its nose angled toward the trees. An old service road disappeared into the darkness behind it.

Prine stopped fifty yards away. “Cross knows police procedure. Assume he chose this location for a reason.”

Austin climbed out behind her. Raindrops touched his face as a second sheriff’s unit approached from the opposite direction. Two deputies emerged with weapons drawn.

“The plate matches,” Luke said. “No response from Cross.”

Prine sent the deputies to clear the tree line. They swept the surrounding woods and found no one.

Austin approached the cruiser. Cross’s department phone lay in the cup holder, his personal cell on the passenger seat. The keys remained in the ignition.

Luke looked beneath the dashboard. “GPS cable was pulled.”

“He left behind everything we could track.” Prine shone her flashlight across the back seat. “Any sign the boy was inside?”

A damp smear marked the vinyl, but nothing proved who had been there. Austin searched for blood or evidence that the boy had resisted. He found none.

“He may have gone willingly,” Nash said.

“That doesn’t mean he had a choice.”

Luke stared at Cross’s abandoned phones. “I hired him three months ago.”

Austin looked at him. “What did he tell you about his background?”

“He’d worked four years as a deputy in two small counties west of Nashville. His certification was current, his references checked out, and there were no disciplinary complaints.”

“If Cross is Zander Dalton, the identity is fabricated,” Prine said.

“I spoke to both departments myself.”

“The employment may be real,” she said. “That doesn’t mean the name beneath it is. Someone could have built the Cross identity years ago and let him establish a legitimate work history.”

Luke’s expression hardened. Cross hadn’t merely fooled the Loveless family. He had fooled the department that trusted him with a badge.

Austin moved around the passenger side. Fresh tire tracks cut through the wet gravel toward the pavement, where they disappeared. He crouched beside them.

“Another vehicle parked here.”

Prine joined him. “Recent?”