Page 50 of The Wolves Come at Night
She pulled up her scarf against the chill and stalked into the night. The city sheltered her; murderers winding through the darkness with cruel secrets were, if not commonplace, not entirely unusual.
It was time for Sònia Masot-Mallofré to check out of The Willard and go about her life, and a new woman to make an appearance. She would go track Game, find where he’d stashed the child, take him out. And then, then, she would face her nemesis, and they would settle things, once and for all.
Part Two
“Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.”
* * *
—Arthur Miller
Twenty-Four
Nashville
They searched.
They combed through the meager online offerings Carson left behind. They put in warrants for the data, tracked the IMEI identification number on her phone to the most recent cell tower ping—unfortunately, that tower provided service to the campus. They opened a tip line, which was flooded with nothing of use. They watched her social media feeds, talked to her professors, her dorm mates, her friends. Carson’s terrified roommate was making noises about pulling out of school for the semester. Frantic groups of students turned out to hike around campus and the outlying parks. Media trucks lined the streets around campus, reporters interviewing anyone who would come near their cameras. Dr. Conway had done a magnificent plea for her daughter’s safety, which was being aired on a loop on all the cable news networks, and the hashtags #FindCarson #missingcoed #nashvillestudent were trending across the socials. So was #JusticeforGeorgia, just to confuse things further.
Nothing.
Carson Conway had vanished into thin air.
The cut-and-dried murder-suicide of Georgia Wray was blowing up, too, and though the connections between the two cases were murky, Taylor was grateful for the confirmation of her gut feeling something else was up. They hadn’t found Georgia’s burner phone, and the warrant for the records on the number was taking longer than she’d like. Lincoln had done a deep dive into Travis Bloom and was preparing a briefing. Apparently, it was a doozy. They’d have some answers, at least.
Taylor kept hoping they’d recover the Conway girl in the meantime. They needed a win. Every sunset that passed, the morale dropped.
It took forty-eight precious hours to get the task force officially into place, not to mention the weekend hampering their plans, so the first official meeting was on Monday, five days after Carson had gone missing. Task forces were usually a major pain in Taylor’s ass, but right now, she was happy for the help. She needed all the input she could get to find Carson Conway alive. Missing Vanderbilt co-eds made her nervous; witnesses to crimes going missing made her sick to her stomach. And it had been too long with no word. She was so afraid they were too late.
In the old CJC offices, the conference room down the hall from the murder squad’s offices would be the hive of the task force, but this was a new world, a new Nashville, with new government-mandated rules about who could meet when, and where, and for how long, so they circumvented the whole thing and, with Huston’s taciturn blessing, quickly set up shop downtown on the nineteenth floor of a co-working building right around the corner from Taylor’s new condo. It had a great view north to the Cumberland River through floor-to-ceiling glass walls that gave almost everyone a little vertigo the first time they stepped off the elevator. Not Taylor—she and Baldwin were on the forty-fourth floor of their building, and she was used to living in the sky—but most everyone else had a moment of sheer whoa when they entered the reception area.
The space itself was luxe in comparison to everyone else’s home offices: the high-end coffee makers were a major upgrade, there were refrigerators stocked with Greek yogurt and LaCroix, bowls with nuts and candy in small packages, and two previously bored office attendants who were thrilled to have so many new people in their co-working space and something to do for them.
Though after giving the tour and handing over the keycards, the two were summarily dismissed to the eighteenth floor. Task forces were private things.
It was too big, too unwieldy, she knew that from the get-go. Despite her best efforts to respect Avery Conway’s wishes and keep it small, there were representatives from Metro Violent Crimes, the TBI, the Connecticut Criminal Investigations Division, the New Haven FBI, Vanderbilt Police, Tennessee Highway Patrol, and a curious woman with white-blond hair and inky black eyebrows who was “representing” a private investigator who’d managed to get involved. After a perfunctory fist bump, the woman stayed silent and out of the way, drinking a cup of coffee through a rocking red lip, staring out the window, and humming what sounded suspiciously like The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah.” She looked familiar, though Taylor couldn’t place her.
In their first meeting, it took half an hour for the group to sort out who was going to be on top. Taylor let them squabble. She didn’t care at all about who got credit, she just wanted to find the girl and return her to the normally safe enclave of her college.
When they’d all established their places and had gone around the room with brief introductions and decisions on who was handling what, Taylor put a name to the face of the woman by the window. Schuyler Abbott. Sky. She’d briefly been a cop with Metro before she switched sides and went to work for her aunt’s private investigation firm. Taylor made a note to talk to her separately afterward. If she was going to bail on working for Metro, Sky Abbott might give her some insights on what it was like working in law enforcement from the outside.
Finally, it was Taylor’s turn. “I want to run through everything we know so everyone is on the same page. Even if you feel it’s repeated information.” She had precious few images, but at least it was something to share. Lincoln had popped them onto her laptop. She hit the button and the first image came on their screens.
“Carson Conway didn’t come home from the library Wednesday evening. Cameras in the quad caught her at 8:11 p.m., walking past the Student Center. This is not the path back to her dorm.”
“Meeting someone?” one of the Connecticut cops said, and Taylor shrugged.
“Maybe. Or getting a late-night snack. Or picking up a newspaper. Or heading to St. Augustine’s to have a sit-down with the Reverend Stevens. Who knows? The point is, there’s no sign of her after this moment. She never entered the Student Center, and no cameras caught her anywhere else in the vicinity. Her phone pinged the Vandy tower at 8:14 p.m. and hasn’t shown up since.”
The screen flipped, and a blurred image of a car came up. “This Jeep was idling near the Student Center. No image of the plates, and no idea if this is related, but it’s all we’ve got to go on.” Click. “You can see the driver is a male Caucasian, but that’s it.”
One of the Vandy cops interjected, “We can get you a listing of every Jeep registered on campus.”
“That would be great,” Taylor said. “Assuming this is a student, he’s the closest thing we have to a witness. Let’s talk about the mom. I met her, she seems very believable. You’ve all seen her on the news, I’m sure. She came here immediately but got a tip her daughter was back home, bailed on us, and has been acting odd. Is there any chance she’s involved somehow?”
The Connecticut cop—Jeremy Turley—shook his head. Taylor assessed him quickly: good suit, salty hair, and round-cheeked, leather portfolio in front of him, well worn and slick with age, a thick notebook resting inside. He seemed solid.
“Avery Conway is the most attentive mom I’ve ever met. She’s a widow, a well-known, well-liked doctor, and has serious community ties. No way she hurt her kid.”
