The Discarded (28 page)

As soon as she hung up, she opened an app that would track the location of the woman’s phone. “She’s definitely not home.”

“How far away?”

“Ten point three miles, and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.”

“Okay,” Quinn said. “Daeng, think you can drive?”

“I’ll manage.”

“Hopefully you won’t have to go anywhere, but I want you behind the wheel just in case.” Quinn turned to Abraham. “You’re staying with him.”

“I am not,” Abraham said.

“You are, and it’s not open for discussion.”

“But—”

“No.”

The retired op leaned back and sulked.

Orlando pulled out a leather bag from her pack and removed several sets of comm gear. “I only have four. I’m sorry, Abraham, you’ll have to go without.”

“Of course I will,” he said. “Maybe I should have just stayed in Florida.”

Nate looked like he was going to throw in a quip, but a withering glance from Quinn nipped that in the bud.

As soon as they had the receivers in their ears and the mics attached to their collars, Quinn said, “Let’s go.”

It wasn’t quite as cold outside as it had been when they’d stepped out of the airport, but that wasn’t saying much. Anything below sixty-five degrees was unacceptable in Quinn’s book.

He checked Google Maps’ satellite image of the area and then pointed at the trees to his left. “We go back about one hundred and fifty feet, then head right until we’re behind her house. Should be able to stay in the woods all the way.”

Nate took point, with Orlando in the middle and Quinn a few steps behind her. In most places the snow wasn’t more than a foot deep, but there were a few drifts where they sank in to above their knees, soaking their pants. When they finally arrived behind Nadine’s house, they crouched and surveyed the scene. There was a shed in the yard and a wooden swing set near the back. As for the house, it had a single door along the rear, accessed up a short set of brick steps, and five windows, three on the first floor and two more dormers up top. Overall, the place seemed quiet.

Quinn scanned the neighboring houses and noted that the curtains were drawn on the house to the right, while the view from the place on the left was blocked by the shed and the back of the garage.

“Any change in her position?” Quinn whispered.

Orlando looked at her phone. “Same relative area as before.”

“Okay. Up the left side and over to the garage.”

Staying low, they hustled across the yard.

When they reached the garage, Orlando said, “Did either of you get a good look at the swing set?”

Nate nodded. “Couldn’t be more than a few years old.”

“Grandkids from another child?” Quinn asked.

“The obit said Desirae was it.”

They moved up to the door at the back of the house, where Orlando used the detector to check for an alarm.

Her eyebrow rose when she viewed the results. “Same system we’ve got at my place.”

“Are you sure?” Quinn asked.

She nodded.

A Garber Sentry 231 was way more firepower than a person like Nadine Chastain, or most any civilian, needed. It was marketed only to high-end clients who wanted a more secure environment than what conventional systems offered. Most interesting was that the Sentry 231 had been around only about eighteen months. So who had helped Nadine make that choice?

The system took Orlando three times as long to disarm as the system at Eli’s place. Once she did, she picked the lock and they stepped inside. The only light came from the early afternoon sun streaming through the windows. That and the silence was more than enough to confirm no one else was there.

“Fifteen minutes and we’re out,” Quinn said.

They checked their watches and split up—Nate hitting the basement, Quinn taking the ground floor, and Orlando upstairs. Though Quinn had the largest area to search, he was able to quickly clear the entryways, guest bathroom, and dining room, leaving him with the kitchen and the living room.

It was amazing how many people hid secrets in kitchens, sometimes in plain sight in an old-fashioned address book, sometimes wrapped in plastic then frozen in a block of ice in the freezer, and sometimes taped to the bottom of a drawer. Quinn rapidly worked his way around the room, checking for all these possibilities and more, but if Nadine was hiding secrets about her daughter, she did it somewhere else.

He moved into the living room and did a quick scan. An old green cloth couch, a matching recliner, a coffee table, an entertainment stand with TV, a stand-up piano against the wall, a bookcase stuffed with glass figurines and other knickknacks, and a fireplace. He sensed something was missing, but it took him a moment before he realized what it was.

Photographs.

Usually a house someone had lived in for a long time was brimming with photos. But there were no framed pictures on the piano or in the bookcase or on the walls. Maybe Nadine was one who preferred her photographs in albums or kept them on her phone.

He searched the room, tipping back the couch and the chair, looking under the coffee table, and feeling for secret compartments in the entertainment center. Two figurines were sitting on a crocheted doily on the piano. He moved them to the side, glancing at them only long enough to get the sense they were some kind of Native American totems, and then pulled the doily off and opened the lid.

Strings and hammers and the usual things that were inside a piano. He moved his fingers under the lip that ran across the top, and stopped halfway across. A key was taped against the panel, out of sight.

Leaving it where it was, he activated his mic. “Either of you come across anything that needs unlocking? I have a key here.”

“Haven’t seen anything yet,” Orlando said.

After a few seconds of silence, Quinn said, “Nate?”

More silence.

“Nate, can you hear me?”

Nothing.

“Coming down,” Orlando said.

Quinn grabbed the iron poker from the hearth and hurried to the basement door, reaching it a few seconds before Orlando arrived. Stepping carefully, he went down first, surveying the room as it came into view.

It was an old, unfinished space full of ancient, overstuffed shelves and the smell of earth. Lighting was poor, a few naked incandescent bulbs in fixtures screwed to ceiling beams.

“Nate!” Quinn yelled as soon as he reached the bottom.

The sound of movement deeper in the room, then Nate stepped out from behind one of the units in the back. “What?”

“Why didn’t you answer me?” Quinn asked.

“I just did.”

“I mean a minute ago on the radio.”

“You never called me on the radio.”

Quinn frowned. “Check your battery.”

Nate turned on his mic and said, “Test, test. Can you read me?”

Quinn did, so he turned his own mic back on and said, “How about me?”

“Loud and clear.”

Quinn turned back to the stairway. Orlando was waiting halfway down.

“Go upstairs and shut the door,” he said. Once she did this, he clicked his mic back on. “Orlando, do you read me?”

No answer.

He looked over at Nate. “You got that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You try.”

“Orlando?” Nate said. “You there?”

Not a crackle.

Quinn went up a few steps. “Come back down,” he yelled.

Orlando opened the door and started down. “Did you try me?”

Quinn nodded.

“Didn’t hear a thing,” she said. She pulled out her phone and looked at the screen. “No signal.”

Quinn looked up at the ceiling. “There’s got to be some sort of shielding. The question is why?”

“That, I might be able to answer,” Nate said.

He led them through the basement to the aisle between the last set of shelves and the stone wall at the back. The nearest light was partially blocked by the shelves so the area was dim at best. Nate pulled out a flashlight and flicked it on.

“What are we looking at?” Quinn asked.

“Here,” Nate said, shining his light on the wall where a stone seemed to be missing.

“Check this out.” Nate reached down and picked something up off the ground. “High quality work.”

As he ran the light across it, Quinn saw it was the face of the missing stone. But by the way Nate was handling it, it appeared too lightweight.

“The problem was the grout,” Nate explained. “At first I thought it was a hairline crack running through it, but it was too even. I’d just figured out how to get it open when you came down.”

“So what’s behind it?” Orlando asked.

Nate aimed the light into the recess where the fake stone had been, and Quinn and Orlando crowded in behind him to look. A keyhole.

“I should be able to pick it pretty quickly,” Nate said.

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Quinn said.

He made a quick trip up to the piano to fetch the key and then returned to the others.

“I guess that’ll work, too,” Nate said.

Quinn slipped the key into the lock and turned it as far as it would go. He felt around, found a handhold, and pulled.

The door swung out within an inch of the shelves. This created a temporary wall that blocked the view of the doorway from elsewhere in the room. Behind the fake wall was another door. No lock on this one, so Quinn turned the knob and pushed.

The space beyond was pitch-black. Quinn grabbed his own flashlight and pointed it into the darkness. He’d been thinking this was some kind of secret storage room, going back half a dozen feet or so. What he found instead was a set of stairs leading down into another room. He played the beam along the wall next to the doorway until he found a switch. As soon as he clicked it up, warm light filled the stairway and the room below.

“What is this?” Nate said as they moved down the steps and into the room. “A bomb shelter?”

“More like a safe house,” Quinn said.

There was a living area and a kitchen and two other doors that led off to other rooms. Quinn took a quick look inside each—a bedroom and a bathroom.

“This must extend under half the backyard,” Orlando said. “If she’s not Desirae’s mother, then she’s in the business herself.

“Let’s spread out and look around,” Quinn told them.

While Orlando disappeared into the bedroom, Quinn and Nate tackled the main living area. On a credenza near the kitchen, Quinn spotted a couple figurines that were a perfect match for the pair up on the piano. He realized he’d made a mistake earlier as to what they were. Not Native American. Polynesian—maybe Tahitian or Fujian or Hawaiian.

“Quinn, come here,” Orlando called.

He entered the bedroom and found her on the other side of a queen-size bed, wearing her look-what-I-found smile. She beckoned him over, and then leaned down and pulled on what appeared to be a long drawer under the bed. But it was no drawer. It was a single-person trundle bed, the mattress covered by sheets with cartoon princesses.

A young girl’s bed.

Orlando ran her finger over the edge of the bed frame, leaving a trail in the dust. “Don’t think anyone’s been down here for a while.”

They looked at each other, clearly thinking the same thing, but neither wanting to openly speculate about who had slept in the trundle bed.

“Let’s keep looking,” Quinn said. “See if there’s anything else around.”

While the room had no closet, it did have a wardrobe cabinet and matching dresser.

“There’s some shirts and pants here,” Orlando said, looking in the top drawer of the dresser. She pulled out one pair of pants and unfolded it. “Women’s. I’d say for someone around five foot seven or so.” She returned them to where she’d found them and opened another drawer. “Old pair of tennis shoes, a couple of belts.” She closed that and opened the bottom drawer. “Okay, here we go.”

She held up a nightgown. A girl’s, with the picture of a dog on the front. Orlando put it back and hunted through the rest of the drawer.

“Looks like a variety of sizes,” she said. “The older stuff is smaller. Everyone’s different, but I’d say the newest stuff is for a girl somewhere around nine or ten.”

Nate stuck his head into the room. “Found something you’re going to want to see,” he said, and then disappeared as quickly as he’d appeared.

Quinn and Orlando returned to the main room. Nate was standing next to a waist-high cabinet right outside the kitchen area. The top was open, making it look like one of those console record players from the 1950s, but as Quinn drew near, he saw no turntable inside. Instead, there were connectors attached to long wires curled neatly next to a tablet computer inset in the shelf.

“Let me see,” Orlando said, nudging Nate to the side.

She examined the setup for a moment, and then crouched and felt along the sides of the cabinet. After a few seconds, there was a quiet click and the front panel swung open.

Quinn and Nate both leaned down to look over her shoulder.

Three electronic devices took up the lower half of the space, with some wires running between them and the top shelf where the tablet and connectors were.

“Give me a flashlight,” she said.

Quinn handed his over. She moved the beam through the interior, and then leaned into the cabinet as far as she could to get a closer look.

“So, what is it?” Quinn asked when she pulled herself out.

“Just a second and I’ll show you.”

After giving him the flashlight, she stood up, looked into the top half again, and pushed the button that brought the tablet to life. A password screen appeared, asking for four numbers. Instead of punching in any, she retrieved her phone and plugged it into one of the connectors. She then used it to hack into the tablet.

The home screen offered several app icons. She touched one that looked like the handset for an old home phone. Two things happened simultaneously: the screen went black with the exception of the words
STAND BY
in bold white letters across the middle, and the equipment in the lower half of the cabinet began to hum.

The message on the screen then changed from
STAND BY
to
INITIATING
to
CALL
in a matter of a few seconds.