“You think he could kill a child deliberately?” I ask Dad.

“Make no mistake, son. That is what he did. He was in custody for three days without giving up the location. He knew that kid was going to die and he did nothing to stop it. That means he can do it again. It should only be about the money, but this guy—shit, look at these stories. The men who robbed the bank, maybe they’re all killers, maybe just one or two of them, but if Bracken hired this guy it means none of that crew are capable of killing a child. Church is.”

“Oh Jesus, Dad, what do we do? What the hell do we do?”

“He’s not going to take Sam somewhere she can figure out how to lead the police back to. He’ll have somewhere else. For now, it’s about the money.”

“But there is no money, don’t you get that? There never was! Bracken knew I never had it, he was just playing the game so the others would believe.”

“Then maybe Oliver Church believes it too,” Dad says. “You better hope like hell that he does.”

“It still doesn’t tell us where she is.”

“Criminals return to what they know best,” Dad says. “That I know for a fact. The slaughterhouse has been abandoned a long time,” he says. “Way back when I was a teenager. We used to call it the Laughterhouse.”

“You think she’s there?”

“At this stage we have nothing else.”

It’s a twenty-five minute drive which I cover in about twelve, at times hitting speeds that Santa would be impressed by. Christmas decorations pass us in a blur, turning into streaks of light. We don’t see a single car on the road. I slow down at red lights before blowing right through them. Suburbia ends and the pastures start again like they do in every direction in this city—except for the east; only way you can keep going east in this city is if your car can float. I try the cell phone number from Bracken’s phone again but there’s no joy, which isn’t fair because Christmas is supposed to be a time of joy.

When we reach the slaughterhouse we pull up short of the road leading up to it. I leave all three cell phones—my one, Kingsly’s, and Bracken’s—in the car, and we get out. The ground is cool and damp, as if the ghosts of thousands of animals have drained into the soil. I stash the bag of money in the boot and grab a flashlight from the emergency breakdown kit.

“This prostitute at the probation officer’s house, you get a name?” Dad asks.

“What? Why?”

“Just curious.”

“No. No name.”

The road is ankle-breaking material, cracked and busted from the weight of trucks that once upon a time used to go up and down it, so we walk off to the side where the dirt is hard packed. We have to walk slower because of our wounds, Dad’s and mine. I figure it’s been a long day for him too.

Christmas doesn’t quite reach out here. No tinsel or lights, just a bleak setting with shadows cast only by the moonlight and stars.

“What’d she look like, then?”

“What?”

“The prostitute. What’d she look like?”

“I don’t know. The way they all look.”

“They all look different, son. Trust me. It’s only on the inside they look the same.”

I don’t ask him what he means by that and thankfully he doesn’t elaborate. We keep walking.

“You’re not really going to take me back after all this, are you, son?” he asks.

I don’t answer him.

The slaughterhouse comes into view. It seems to grow out of the earth the closer we get, looming out of the darkness and bearing down on us. The words NORTH CITY SLAUGHTERHOUSE have been stenciled in letters a meter high, big enough to make out in the dark. The smell is still here, even decades after the place has shut down, hanging in the still air. Or maybe the smell is only in my imagination. There’s certainly something here. I wonder how bad it smelled back then. The slaughterhouse was only up and running for two years or so before it was closed down, a victim of expanding suburbia that never did expand. The building was shut down before the road leading up to it could be repaved in thicker cement, the land sold, and then nothing, until somebody came along with a couple of tins of spray paint and blacked out the “S” on the word Slaughterhouse.

Fifteen years ago this building was the scene of a double homicide, and nine years ago it was used to hide a boy who died from fear while a man tried to shave some years off his sentence. Tonight it possibly holds my daughter.

A dark four-door sedan is parked in front of the building. We split up; Dad heads toward the back and I head toward the car. We work well together, not having to talk, only a minimum of hand gestures, as if we’ve done this before. I can tell my dad is enjoying it and I hate him for that. I reach the car and take a look inside before moving on.

The slaughterhouse walls are mostly made up of concrete blocks, with some sections of corrugated iron. The base of it is lined in mold that grows up the walls, darker near the bottom where it grows the thickest, and there are plenty of weeds growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk. I reach a window but can’t see a damn thing inside. The side door leading into an office area is lying on the ground, the top hinge busted, the bottom hinge still attached but twisted ninety degrees. The temperature drops when I step through. I stand still and listen before turning on the flashlight. There’s no furniture anywhere, nothing hanging on the walls, nothing on the concrete floor. The room has been completely stripped. The door to the corridor has been removed. I head through, and another empty doorway later and I’m in the slaughterhouse, a huge, cavernous room that smells of rot. The air is graveyard cold, and the darkness seems to suck at the back of my eyeballs. The flashlight doesn’t even break the dark, just lights up a thin beam of it and is lost. I can sense large hooks hanging from the ceiling ahead of me somewhere, but can’t see them. There’s machinery left here to rust—the tools of the trade that started the animals down the path from living, breathing entities to supermarket specials and hamburgers. No wonder a young boy, tied up and left alone out here, died.

I turn back into the corridor. There’s a bend in it, and once around it I can see a light coming from beneath a door not too far ahead—one of the few doors remaining. It’s a heavy wooden door, the bottom of it lined with vertical scratches, probably from rats. I reach it and put my face against it and listen but can’t hear a thing.

I suck in a couple of deep breaths, tighten my grip on the shotgun, and swing the door open.

chapter fifty-four

The second name on the list, Zach Everest, is a bust. The Armed Offenders Unit ended up breaking into a house that Everest hadn’t set foot in for about two years, and the new residents weren’t thrilled at the intrusion—let alone the kids who, having heard the commotion, were horribly disappointed to see six men in black storming into their home instead of one man dressed in red. There are no other known addresses for Everest, but Schroder knows it’s only a matter of time now—probably less than a day, he guesses—before they have him in custody.

Reports have already come in about the gunshot victim half an hour ago. Tyler Layton was tied to a chair and executed. Witnesses woken by the noise reported two men fleeing the scene in a four-door sedan that certainly doesn’t belong to Edward Hunter, because Hunter’s car got busted up in town, but which might have been his wife’s. At this point there’s nothing to connect Hunter and his dad to the killing, and nothing to connect Tyler Layton to any of the men responsible for the bank robbery or the abduction of Sam Hunter—but Schroder is confident there will be a link somewhere. Layton has a criminal record long enough to pretty much guarantee some interaction with Jack Hunter or the bank robbers—and the way the night is going, Jack Sr. seems to be the catalyst for all the violence around here.