Chapter 5 - The Man in the Security Jacket
The car was found beneath an elevated highway near the East River. An officer met us beside the tow truck, its lights turning the wet pavement blue.
"The blood's not much," he said. "Could be from a cut. We're processing the vehicle."
"Has Victor Shaw been located?" Gideon asked.
"Not yet."
I showed the officer my mother's transfer form. He wrote down the center's name and called it in. Five minutes later his expression changed.
"Harbor Rest is a real facility," he said, "but nobody by your mother's name was admitted today."
My knees felt loose. Gideon put a hand near my elbow, waiting until I nodded before touching me.
"There's someone at the hotel who can help," he said. "Our banquet chef knows every service entrance in this city."
"Why would a chef know that?"
"Caleb Torres delivered meals for a neighborhood shelter before he worked for me. And unlike my executive staff, he calls people back."
Caleb met us outside the hotel twenty minutes later, still wearing his kitchen whites. He was broad-shouldered, forty-something, with a flour mark on his sleeve and the worried eyes of someone who'd seen more emergencies than he wanted.
"Mara," he said, "your mother used to bring us hot soup when the ovens broke. I'm sorry I didn't know she was in trouble."
He laid a crumpled printout across his hood. Someone had booked the hotel's private service van at 6:11 p.m. under a false maintenance order. The driver had signed with the initials O.P.
"Owen Pike," Gideon said. "Head of outside security. He worked for Conrad before I hired him."
Caleb pointed to a delivery address in Brooklyn. "That's not a nursing center. It's a warehouse that used to belong to Arden Freight."
Gideon was already reaching for his keys when I stopped him. "We go with the police."
He looked surprised.
"If we're right," I said, "they have my mother. If we're wrong, we trespass on some warehouse and hand them an excuse to arrest us. I'm tired of making their work easy."
Caleb gave a faint, approving smile. Gideon called the detective assigned to the missing-person report.
Her name was Iris Chen. She listened, asked for the photographs, and told us not to enter the building until her team arrived.
We drove there anyway, stopping across the street. Every loading bay was dark. Then, on the third floor, a single window lit up.
A woman's silhouette appeared behind the blinds.
May you like
Even from that distance I recognized my mother's small, curved shoulders.
Then someone pulled her away from the window.
