in desperate trouble.”
“What do you know? We’ve got an entire police department ready to mobilize. What did she say?”
“It was impossible to understand her. The words were all slurred. Nothing made sense. She sounded like she’d been doing drugs.”
That would have been the first step in the killer’s routine—more likely to have been administered involuntarily.
“Did you make out anything at all?”
“It was so hard, Alex. I tried to get her to keep talking, but either the cell went dead, or someone grabbed it away from her. She kept telling me she was cold.”
“Cold?”
“Yes, freezing. That’s the clearest thing I could make out.”
“Did Chat say where she was?”
“Believe me, Alex. I asked all the questions I should have. First she said something about a truck. But then she said it was a train. Everything was muddled and confused.”
I was playing with the letters of the words that Max had strung together from the Gersh papers. Train had been one of them. Truck was a longer shot. What would there be to connect the two?
“It will take us about twenty minutes to get up to you, Faith. Are you safe? Are you still at the seminary?”
“Yes. I’ve got two faculty friends with me. They know everything.”
“What number did Chat call on? Your office phone?”
“No, no. My cell.”
“Did she say who was with her? Did you ask her a name?”
“No names. She wasn’t listening to me. She was just trying to talk. A bridge. Chat said something about a bridge. Then a truck and a train.”
“What bridge, Faith? Think.”
We were out of the church now, and I was jogging behind Mike and Mercer as we ran to the car. The island of Manhattan was linked to the rest of America by bridges and tunnels. Picking the right one would be crucial.
“She didn’t say,” Faith said, trying to regain her composure. “There’s something about Chat I didn’t tell you, Alex.”
This was real life. There was almost always something the most well-meaning witness decided not to tell me. In this case, the omission was probably to protect a loved one.
“I know she’s a free spirit, Faith. Don’t worry. If it’s about drugs, it’s not a problem. We’ll find her.”
“It’s not drugs, Alex. That was never one of Chat’s problems.”
“She strikes me as gutsy. Chat had a little attitude going with Mike this morning. If she’s got some fight in her,” I said, hoping to bluff some confidence into our operation, “she’ll hang on till we get her.”
“She’s got fight in her all right,” Faith said. “My sister left Kansas because she killed a man.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
“MURDER’LL make you a black sheep in any town,” Mike said, after we excused Faith’s friends from her suite and closed the door to talk.
We had raced uptown with the siren blaring, Mercer and I fortifying ourselves for the long night ahead eating the sandwiches Max had ordered to the office before we left, while Mike drove.
“It wasn’t murder,” Faith said. “It was self-defense.”
It was my turn to get Mike to push back and let me talk. “Will you tell me what happened?”
“I should have done that this morning. There I was, worried about myself, and all the time it was Chat who was in danger.”
“You can’t go in reverse, Faith. Just tell us everything that might help to find her.”
We couldn’t know whether Chat’s abduction, if that’s what this was, was connected to her past. But if the killer was targeting pariahs, then he might have found another victim to suit his appetite.
“I’ve counseled a lot of women who’d been abused as teens. I should have seen the signals in Chat’s life, but I was too close to the situation.” Faith had dried her eyes and was trying to regain her composure.
While we talked, Mike had put the tech guys to work triangulating the cell activity from Chastity Grant’s phone. We had given them the number as we drove north to Union, and it wouldn’t be long before they could pinpoint the general location—from the signals sent to the closest surrounding cell tower—from which the call had been made.
“It was two years ago, right before Chat turned thirty. She’d been dating a guy she’d known all her life.”
Mike had called the lieutenant on our drive up to Union to ask him to pull Chat’s record—and photograph—from the state system in Kansas and the FBI crime reporting office.
“Did you know him too?”
“Yes.”
“What’s his name?”
“He’s dead, Alex. That hardly matters.”
I grimaced at her. I didn’t want resistance to my questions at this point