her, based on the clarity of her voice. The party was at the home of” – she checked her notes – “a classmate named Jimmy Connors, and Mr. Henderson said that was only a ten-minute drive from their own home.
“When Allie failed to show after fifteen minutes, the mother called her. After twenty minutes, they called again. After thirty minutes, the father got in his car and drive the route to the Connors place to make sure she hadn’t broken down on the way. He went into the party – still raging, by the way, and full of drunk teenagers, and no parents. He asked several of the other students if Allie had come back. No one had seen her, they said – the last glimpse of her was her leaving, and, according to one girl, very publicly turning Jimmy Connors down for a date on the front lawn.”
Fox started to respond, and she held up a finger.
“Just a moment more. Henderson called the police on the party, and when they arrived, and kids scattered like roaches in the light, he told them about Allie. Technically, it hadn’t been long enough to file a missing person’s report, but the officers knew Henderson, and they said it was a light evening, and offered to drive around and look.
“Her car was found at midnight, on Mill Road. Axelle and I went and scoped the location.”
“Find anything?”
“Lots of broken bottles and old crushed beer cans. Part of a broken taillight – though the police report indicates Allie’s car was intact, so it wasn’t hers.”
“Someone hangs out down there,” Axelle said, twirling spaghetti onto her fork. “There were cigarette butts, and old condoms, and candy wrappers, and all kinds of shit.” She wrinkled her nose. “Fucking disgusting.”
“It’s a dead-end road,” Eden said, nodding. “And aptly-named. There is in fact an old, abandoned saw mill at the end of it.”
“Which I’m assuming you went into,” he said.
She plucked her camera off the table and passed it over.
The sequence of photos he tabbed through looked straight from a horror movie: a hollowed-out gravel bowl of a parking lot, and a two-story, weather-beaten wooden building perched on the edge of a weed-choked stream. A pair of double doors hung haphazardly from busted hinges, and between them, a yawning black cavern of a doorway of the sort that kids would have dared each other to enter, only to come back out shrieking.
Fox checked the urge to ask if she’d been armed; he knew she had been.
The next photo was taken at the doorway, looking inside. A few boards had rotted away, or been pulled off, and sunlight fell in bold, yellow slats across the dirt floor. An open space, with a few bits of old, rusted equipment lying about: a saw, a chisel. The ceiling went all the way up to the second story, with only a narrow gallery to stand on; she’d captured a dove in mid-flight, as it had been startled by their entrance. A few old, warped boards sat propped in a corner, layered with dust.
The next photo was the interesting one: a close-up of a section of wall, and a very fresh symbol spray-painted onto it.
“The paint wasn’t wet, but it’s fairly fresh,” Eden said. “Within the last few weeks, I’d wager.”
The symbol itself was simple: an inverted triangle painted in fluorescent yellow.
Fox glanced up, and met Eden’s serious gaze.
“Yield,” they said together.
“I’ve got a call in to PD to ask if they saw this tag, or if they even searched the mill at all.”
“Send this one to me,” he said. “Or, better yet, come show it to Ghost yourself.”
She nodded, and accepted the camera back. “I was planning on going by Dartmoor in the morning.”
“Okay,” he said, settling back against the cushions, dinner abandoned. The chase was on, and that was way more exciting than lasagna. “Let’s back up a step. Jimmy Connors tried to deface Bell Bar and his dad gave us a line about high school kids having it out for the Dogs because of Allie’s disappearance. But it was Jimmy’s unsupervised party she left right before, and it was Jimmy she was publicly, and no doubt embarrassingly, turning down in front of all their friends.”
“I think Jimmy followed her, killed her, and then tried to stir up a buncha shit about the Dogs to cover his ass,” Axelle said. “The little shitstain.”
“Oh, he’s a shitstain alright,” Fox agreed, “but did the father say Jimmy was at the party when he