Chapter 14 - The Other Prisoner
State investigators searched the mill's surviving basement, using the floor plan while a safety engineer checked the burned structure. I watched from behind the taped perimeter, next to Vivian.
She'd come with a lawyer and handed over every message Daniel had sent her. Her hands shook as she held Evan's photograph.
“I should've called the police the first time he threatened him,” she said.
“You should've opened the coffin,” I answered.
“I know.”
That was all I could give her.
In the basement, officers found a steel door secured from the outside. They cut it open. Evan stumbled into the light, thin and dehydrated but walking.
Vivian ran to him. He flinched when she touched his shoulder.
“You told him where I lived,” he said.
She stopped. The truth hurt more than any accusation I could have made.
“I thought giving him the address would keep him from coming,” she whispered.
Evan looked past her at me. “He made your mom listen while he told her he was going to bury you next.”
“Where is she?”
“He took her out yesterday. I heard him say there was one place left to clean up.”
Before medics led him away, Evan described a locked maintenance room beside the old river intake. Through a pipe, he'd heard a woman humming a lullaby.
Mom used to hum that tune whenever the power went out and Elise got scared.
Mara checked the intake maps. A service tunnel ran beneath the river road toward the original mill foundation, a part not included on the plan Daniel had sent.
“That's where she's been,” I said.
Mara's radio crackled. An officer at the river road reported a truck reversing toward the tunnel gate.
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Its cargo container was marked DEMOLITION MATERIALS.
And the driver had already cut the padlock.
