Finally the screen flared to life, and then Nora’s keyboard strokes became more focused. First she opened NamUs.gov, because she might get lucky. If she could nail down a missing victim without calling in any favors, then so much the better. She refined her search and scrolled as fast as she dared, but the sheer volume of missing young people turned her stomach, and there had been no relevant new additions in the last couple of days.
Of course, NamUs wasn’t always swift to update; they were good about making sure all the listed cases were verified. It was helpful for weeding out false positives, but a pain in the ass if you wanted to find someone who’d gone missing quite recently.
What about the cops, then? They’d notice anyone missing or endangered before the national database got wind of anything. But she sure as hell wasn’t going to contact Mayhew, the lead detective on these child murders. Not when the woman’s incompetence had made the criminal case against the Newells unwinnable.
Nora’s pass code for the precinct’s caseload log-in wasn’t working, so either someone was onto her or someone had jiggered the settings. The two possibilities were equally likely. She’d score another log-in in a few days, but the Children of Phonos wouldn’t wait that long, so she couldn’t, either.
Good thing she knew a cop in the right department and he owed her.
It was also a good thing that Harry Beale worked early. She scanned the contacts on her phone, tapped to call him, and dove right in.
“Harry, I need a lead on a missing person. Probably a kid. Probably taken in the last twenty-four hours. Maybe less than that.”
After some hemming and hawing, Harry admitted that she’d have to be more specific. “We’ve got seven new ones on deck since yesterday afternoon.”
“Seven?” Nora felt sick.
“Busy night.”
“All of them minors?”
“Five of them are.”
“Can you run them down real quick? Brief descriptions?”
“Two gangbangers, one probably dead, one probably in hiding—if you ask me. One girl who might be a runaway—she has a history of that sort of thing, so it wouldn’t be the first time. The other two are boys—neither with any known gang affiliations or behavioral problems. None on record, as far as I can tell.”
Nora chewed on her thumbnail and tapped her boot on the coffee-table leg. “The two boys, where were they last seen?”
“One of them at school,” Harry said vaguely. Maybe he didn’t have the particulars right in front of him, or maybe the report was incomplete. “The other one … his friends said he’d been down by the Whitestone Bridge on his skateboard.”
She popped her nail out of her mouth. “That one!”
“What’s he to you?”
The bridge was close to Castle Point, and the boy could’ve been a grab of opportunity. It wasn’t much to go on, so she didn’t share it with Harry, who was probably still on his first cup of coffee—and surely didn’t care about the answer. All she said was “I’ve got a feeling, that’s all. Working an angle on something I’ve been poking into. What’s his name?”
The cop sighed. He probably wasn’t supposed to tell her, but that wouldn’t stop him. She wouldn’t let it. “Luis Gallardo. Age sixteen. No record, no history of truancy or petty crime. Reported missing yesterday afternoon, when he didn’t come home for dinner.”
“Gallardo. Sixteen. Whitestone Bridge. Got it. Thanks.” She almost closed by saying she owed him one, except she wasn’t sure it was true. Luis might not be the next victim, and even if her gut was right and he was the kid in question … then Indigo might not be able to save him.
She hung up fast and checked her phone before stuffing it into her pocket. It was quarter to eight in the morning. The shadows would be long and sharp, but shallow in the Bronx. They would carry her anyway.
She glanced at the nearest patch, one studiously avoided by all three cats—a dark place between the refrigerator and the undersize cupboard that served as a pantry. Her throat was dry. She swallowed. It didn’t help.
Indigo was raring to go, but Nora was afraid.
“This is stupid,” she declared to herself and the cats. She rose to her feet and rolled her neck from left to right—cracking it loudly. “It’s time to get to work,” she announced, but she didn’t move. Her boots were stuck to the floor. A lump was stuck in her throat. The shadow was stuck to the wall, to the cheap vinyl, to the side of the refrigerator.
“Luis is counting on me,” she whispered.
And if it wasn’t Luis, it was someone else who needed her help just as badly. Several someones, if Bullington’s intel was good.
Steeling herself with this certainty, she took two long steps and slipped into the blackness that pooled in the kitchenette. It swallowed her whole and the world went dim. Then it went cool, and comfortable.
Indigo was back, and Indigo wasn’t afraid.
Indigo was in charge.
Her strength had returned, and her confidence along with it—as she moved through the margins of the world, ducking in and out of the crevices no one but her ever noticed.
Neither Nora nor Indigo knew the Castle Hill area of the Bronx well, so she hopscotched a few blocks at a time—popping out of a doorway here and emerging from an underpass there, getting her bearings.
She rolled out from under a stationary cargo car in the railyard, then tumbled underneath one parked beside it, only to hesitate in the murk, trying to remember how this end of the city was shaped. When she thought of the bridge, she mostly though of the toll lines, and the long metal cables that stretched toward the sky; she had to think of it another way, from underneath—where the skater kids ground their boards on the cement and scraped their wheels along the curbs.
Was she close enough to touch it with her powers? She shut her eyes and used the billowing dark to feel around—the tentacles of gloom working like fingers, prying apart the nooks and crannies until she found what she was looking for.
There.
A smooth place, where three young people huddled together and whispered about a friend nobody’d seen in too many hours.
She sighed, exhaled, and clung to a dark place behind a jumbled pile of concrete dividers discarded by the city. They made a crude stack with thick shadows, thick enough to let Indigo hide and watch, and listen, and draw her conclusions.
Two girls and a boy. None of them older than eighteen, and all of them still awake from the night before. They’d been scouring the streets looking for Luis, so they were way ahead of her—except they didn’t know there was a cult, and a warehouse, and a place where Luis or someone very much like him would certainly die before long, if Indigo couldn’t find him first.
She darted away again, letting the shadows whisk her to the old sanitation plant. She hid herself in the gloom of its thick brick walls and the spires of its three spindly towers—then she found an alley behind an apartment block. She had to find the Children of Phonos, but she had so little to go on … a warehouse on the point, somewhere in Castle Hill. If Bullington’s last words could even be believed.
There wasn’t much industrial work in the area anymore, but she knew of a few old places along Zerega Avenue, beside Westchester Creek. She’d find warehouses there. A handful of them, maybe more. Her phone said it was almost eight thirty, so workers would be arriving for their jobs.