Her Silent Cry

Forty-Eight

Josie tried to focus on Oaks’s words, but her mind was calculating. It was nearly four already. They were losing valuable time. There was so much to be done. There was no way they were going to send either one of the Ross parents to the drop sites alone, which meant they’d need to hide law enforcement personnel very carefully at each location. There was no time to strategize—no time for anything. The kidnapper had done this on purpose, leaving them almost no time to prepare and making sure that Violet Young’s fate was unknown so that their resources would be spread far and wide.

“Detective Quinn,” Oaks said, breaking through her thoughts. “Are you listening to me?”

Josie managed a tight smile. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Please, go on.”

“I was saying that the phone is Violet Young’s,” Oaks told her. “One of my guys got a woman to talk to him. She said she saw a guy matching our suspect’s description—brown hair, ballcap, mid-twenties, Caucasian—standing near the water, talking on the phone before tossing it into the mud. She remembered because the phone was purple, and she said she doesn’t see many men with purple phone cases.”

Josie told Oaks what Noah and Gretchen had found out about Violet’s disappearance.

“You think Violet Young saw him from the schoolyard and recognized him?” Oaks asked.

Josie shrugged. “Either that or he lured her out of the schoolyard with Lucy. He had to have been in a vehicle. Maybe he drove up, let her see that Lucy was in the car, and then she ran out. If she’d simply seen him, I think she would have called the police. But if Lucy was there, right in front of her, she probably would have gone over.”

“So, he abducts her from right in front of the school with Lucy in the car, kills her, dumps her body, then drives out here to call Amy.” Oaks turned and scanned the group of agents milling around the area. “He changed his MO. Normally he kills them in their home. What’s he doing?”

“He knows we have to locate Violet. He’s taking up our time and resources, keeping us off balance in the hopes we won’t be fully ready by the time the drop comes.”

“Screw that,” Oaks muttered. “I’m leaving two guys here to search up and down the riverbank two miles in each direction for Violet Young’s body. The rest of us will regroup at mobile command in twenty minutes. I’m going to need your people.”

“You’ve got them,” Josie said.

“We’re going to need four teams—one at this Lover’s Cave—do you know where that is?”

“Yes,” Josie said. “It’s in the city park, in the woods.”

“Okay. You’ll show me on a map when we get back to command. Anyway, we’ll need a team there, one at the football field, one to transport Colin Ross and one to transport Amy Ross.”

“Five teams,” Josie said. “You need a team to locate Violet Young.”

“Violet Young is dead,” Oaks said. “We need to prioritize and get Lucy Ross home.”

Josie put a hand on her hip. “You don’t know that Violet Young is dead.”

“Based on this suspect’s prior behavior, I know she’s dead. If Violet Young was still alive, wouldn’t she have made herself known by now?”

“Not if she’s tied up or incapacitated,” Josie answered. “What if she’s seriously injured? We can’t take the chance of waiting to locate her.”

Oaks said, “Detective Quinn, I’ve been in this business a long time. You can’t save everyone. Based on the information available to me, there is a high probability that Violet Young is dead. As far as we know, Lucy Ross is still alive. I need to devote my resources to rescuing her.”

“I never suggested you shouldn’t,” Josie said.

“We don’t have the manpower for a full-out search for Violet Young right now.”

“All I need from you is one thing,” Josie said. “Do you have someone who can download the GPS history from Violet’s phone?”

“Of course,” Oaks said. “I’ve already instructed them to do that, and they are working on it, but the GPS history on her phone only updates each hour which means that if this guy took her and dumped her during the time period between the updates, we’re not going to find her that way.”

“But what if her GPS updated… let’s say, a half hour before she was abducted. In that case, it would update a half hour after she was abducted. The killer had her for longer than a half hour. We know that because he abducted her around one-thirty and he didn’t call Amy Ross until almost three o’clock. There is a slim chance the GPS history could lead us to Violet Young.”

“Okay,” Oaks conceded. “But again, I don’t have the manpower for this right now. Not with the drop only a few hours away.”

“I’ve got people who can look for Violet,” Josie said.

“I need your people in the field on this, too,” Oaks complained.

“I won’t have to take anyone off the Ross case,” she told him.

He threw his hands in the air. “Fine. Let’s just go. We’re running out of time.”