“That morning when I thought they left,” Dani said, “that was four days before I met you. Which is two days ago now. So six days. That’s how long ago they disappeared. Six days I thought she was off in her new life, starting over, my phone number already in the trash. But she wasn’t. She isn’t. She’s in trouble somewhere right now, and what am I supposed to do?”

Even as he watched her try to hold it together, Sam found his thoughts locking onto the underlying idea: that someone had abducted Lauren and her father on the very day they were planning to leave. He couldn’t help but recognize the genius of it: nobody would have noticed them missing right away. It could have been a day or more before anyone realized something was wrong—the time it would have taken them to reach their new home, wherever it was.

A smart move on the part of whoever had grabbed them. Damned smart.

“I should have known something might happen to her,” Dani said.

Sam looked up. “Why? How were you supposed to know?”

She turned away from the dresser, crossed to her bed and sat on the edge.

“There were things she wasn’t telling me,” Dani said. “For the last month, at least. I suspected it at first, and later I was pretty sure.”

“What made you think that?”

“She was just … dodgy about certain things. Things she would ask me about, but then she didn’t want to say why they mattered to her.”

“What kind of things?”

Dani nodded to the yellow legal pad next to the recorder. “Stuff I heard on the tapes, and wrote down.”

“Like what?”

“A place called Station Nine,” she said. “One of the abandoned ones.”

“Like Station Fourteen? The one we went to?”

“I don’t know if it’s like that one,” Dani said. “I mean, I know it’s abandoned, but I’ve never seen it. Station Fourteen is the only one Lauren and I ever actually found. There are half a dozen others somewhere around here. We’ve heard them mentioned in these recordings, but never anything about where they are.”

“And Lauren was interested in Station Nine?” Sam asked.

Dani nodded. “She said she overheard her father talking about it, on the phone in his den. She eavesdropped on him like that, whenever she could. He didn’t have a briefcase for us to hide a recorder inside. Anyway, Lauren said she heard him talking about Station Nine. She said he mentioned its location—that the entrance to it was ‘inside the baron’s,’ whatever the hell that means.”

“Baron’s, like the Red Baron?”