Chapter 6 - the road that closed behind them)
Holt killed the radio and looked through the kitchen window.
“Two county units from the east,” he said. “One city unit from the south. Voss knows this place.”
Ruth grabbed Emily’s coat. “There’s a storm cellar behind the barn.”
“They’ll search it.”
“Not if we aren’t there when they arrive.”
The farmhouse had one road, a narrow strip of gravel bordered by drainage ditches too deep for a car. Holt drove toward the sirens anyway. Ruth sat beside him while Emily lay across the back seat beneath a horse blanket, the baby pressing painfully against her ribs.
At the first bend, Holt stopped behind a rusted farm truck abandoned beneath an oak. He and Ruth pushed it into the road. Its wheels sank into the mud and blocked both lanes.
“That buys us two minutes,” Holt said.
They continued on foot through a cornfield silver with rain. Emily’s shoes filled with mud. Every step pulled at her lower back. Holt offered to carry her, but she refused. She had spent months being told pregnancy made her helpless. She would decide when her body had reached its limit.
Behind them, engines stopped at the barricade. Doors slammed.
Ruth led them to an irrigation culvert beneath the county road. They crawled through darkness while flashlights swept the field above. Halfway through, Emily felt warm liquid run down her leg.
She froze.
“Is it your water?” Ruth whispered.
Emily checked. “No. I don’t think so.”
Blood darkened her palm.
Ruth’s expression changed. “We need a hospital.”
“Hospitals report admissions.”
“The baby may not have time for our plan.”
Holt listened to voices approaching the culvert. “There’s a volunteer rescue station two miles west. My former partner works there. He can examine her.”
They reached the far side and climbed a ridge into the woods. A helicopter appeared above the fields. Its searchlight moved across the treetops.
Emily understood then what it meant to be hunted by an institution rather than a man. Marcus had turned every uniform into a threat, every emergency room into a trap, every road into a question she could not safely answer. He had not merely imprisoned women. He had built a world in which their attempts to escape became evidence against them.
The rescue station looked deserted when they arrived. Holt knocked three times, waited, then twice more. A gray-haired paramedic named Samuel Pike opened the rear door.
“You brought a statewide manhunt to my garage,” Pike said.
“Good to see you too.”
Pike led them inside and lowered the metal shutters. He examined Emily on a narrow cot in the supply room. The bleeding had stopped. The baby’s heartbeat remained strong.
“Stress,” he said. “Maybe early labor. You need monitoring.”
“Can you keep us hidden?” Holt asked.
“For an hour. Not longer.”
While Ruth helped Emily wash the mud from her legs, Holt told Pike about Harbor House, Voss, and the basement. Pike listened without interrupting. When Holt mentioned the body-camera failure, Pike looked away.
“What?” Holt asked.
Pike opened a desk drawer and removed a memory card sealed inside a plastic bag.
“Four years ago, the night your daughter disappeared, you came here after searching Harbor House,” he said. “Your camera was damaged. You asked me to recover the footage.”
Holt stood motionless.
“You told me there was nothing on it.”
“Voss came before I finished. He said you were grieving and needed protection from yourself. He took the camera. I kept the backup because what I saw frightened me.”
Holt’s face lost color. “What did you see?”
Pike inserted the card into an old laptop.
The video shook with Holt’s movement through a dark hall at Harbor House. Four years younger, he called his daughter’s name. At the end of the corridor, a steel door stood open. A woman in a white coat stepped through it.
She was holding a clipboard. Her face appeared for less than two seconds before she turned away.
Emily recognized her.
“Dr. Patel,” she said.
Her obstetrician.
On the recording, another figure entered the frame and shut the door. Marcus wore no suit. He wore medical scrubs.
The video ended.
Holt leaned both hands on the desk. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Voss threatened my family.”
“Your silence cost other women their lives.”
“I know.” Pike’s voice broke. “I know every day.”
Ruth copied the video to three devices. Emily wanted to send it immediately to every newspaper in the state, but Holt stopped her.
“It proves they were at Harbor House,” he said. “Not what happened there. If Marcus sees this now, he kills Anna or moves her.”
“If Anna is even alive.”
“Do you believe she is?”
Emily thought of Marcus’s tone. He had sounded confident, but beneath it she had heard urgency. He needed her to return for more than the trust.
“Yes,” she said. “He has something he can’t get without me.”
An alarm sounded at the front of the rescue station. Pike looked at the security screen. Two police cruisers had entered the parking lot.
“How?” Ruth asked.
Pike stared at his phone. “They tracked the emergency heartbeat monitor. It transmitted when I turned it on.”
Holt took the memory card and gave one copy to Emily. “I’ll draw them away.”
“They’ll arrest you.”
“That is what I need them to do.”
He gave Pike his weapon and walked into the garage with his hands raised. Before opening the main door, he removed his body camera and pressed it into Emily’s hand.
“The battery lasts six hours,” he said. “Whatever happens, keep it recording.”
“Why?”
“Because Marcus isn’t afraid of accusations. He’s afraid of witnesses he can’t buy.”
The garage door rose. Floodlights filled the station. Officers shouted commands, forced Holt to his knees, and cuffed his hands behind him.
Voss stepped from the second cruiser.
He looked directly toward the dark supply room where Emily was hiding, as if he could see through the wall.
May you like
Then he smiled and tapped his own body camera.
Its red light was blinking.
