Chapter 1 - The Call That Lasted Five Hours
At 4:37 on a Tuesday afternoon, my nine-year-old daughter called me and whispered:
“Dad… I can’t hold Miles anymore.”
I was standing beside a training field outside Edmond, Oklahoma, watching a young German Shepherd work an obstacle course.
Everything stopped.
“Tessa, where are you?”
“Kitchen.”
Behind her, my eight-month-old son was crying.
“Sit down if you’re standing. Keep him supported. I’m coming home.”
“I am sitting.”
“You’re doing fine.”
“I tried his bottle.”
“You did enough.”
Her breathing hitched.
“I’m sorry.”
That word frightened me almost as much as the baby crying.
“For what?”
“Mom said not to bother you.”
I ended the training session, handed the dogs to Mason, my assistant, and drove home with Tessa on speaker.
Then she said:
“She told me she’d only be gone seventeen minutes.”
“When?”
“Before lunch.”
I looked at the dashboard clock.
Almost five hours.
When I reached our house, Tessa was on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinets. Her pink shirt was soaked with sweat. Miles was strapped against her chest in the carrier, red-faced and screaming. An empty bottle lay beside her. Two diapers were on the floor.
The second Tessa saw me, she began apologizing.
“I tried, Dad.”
I dropped to my knees.
“You did nothing wrong.”
“I couldn’t make him stop crying.”
“You’re nine.”
She stared at me as if that sentence contained information nobody had given her before.
I lifted Miles from the carrier.
“You were never supposed to be responsible for this.”
Tessa started crying harder.
Not because she had failed.
Because somebody finally told her she was allowed to be a child.
I checked the house.
Lauren was gone.
Her purse was gone.
But her primary phone sat charging beside our bedroom lamp.
Fifteen minutes later, she called me from somewhere else.
“Hey, babe.”
“Where are you?”
“At home.”
I looked around my empty kitchen.
“What?”
She laughed nervously.
“I mean I’m almost home.”
“Where?”
“Target.”
“What did you buy?”
Silence.
Then:
“Why are you interrogating me?”
I ended the call.
Tessa had followed me into the bedroom.
She stood near Lauren’s dresser.
“There’s another phone.”
I looked at her.
“What?”
“Mom says I can never touch it.”
She pulled open the bottom drawer and pointed beneath a stack of sweaters.
A black smartphone.
The screen lit before I touched it.
REID: YOU SAID GRANT WOULDN’T FIND OUT.
Another message appeared.
LEAVE THE KIDS WITH TESSA AND COME NOW.
Then:
DON’T BRING YOUR REAL PHONE. LEAVE IT AT THE HOUSE SO YOUR LOCATION STAYS THERE.
My entire body went cold.
Lauren had not merely left our children.
She had deliberately left her regular phone behind so anyone checking her location would believe she never left.
Then one final notification appeared.
THE INSPECTOR LEAVES AT SIX. IF WE WANT THE KENNEL PROPERTY, TODAY IS THE LAST CHANCE.
I owned twenty-seven acres.
Mercer Working Dogs occupied nearly all of it.
I had spent fifteen years building the place.
Police departments trained there.
Search-and-rescue teams trained there.
Veterans worked with service dogs there.
I thought the property was worth perhaps $1.6 million.
Apparently my wife knew something I did not.
May you like
And whoever Reid was, he was not simply waiting for her in a hotel room.
He wanted my land.
