“Let me give you my number so you can let me know what you find out.” She recited the number and had him read it back to her. “My sister and her husband paid your school a lot of money to keep their daughter safe, and you’ve utterly failed her—and us. We want answers, and we want them right away, Mr. Young.”

“I want answers, too, Lieutenant, and I will get them for you. I’ll be in touch.”

“I’ll be waiting.” Sam ended the call feeling pleased that she’d ruined his day. It was the least of what he deserved after Brooke managed to somehow escape from the school that Sam had given Tracy twenty thousand hard-earned dollars to pay for.

Sam placed a call to Lieutenant Archelotta, head of the IT department at HQ.

“Hey, Sam, what’s up?”

“I need a favor, Archie.”

“You caught that big case up on MacArthur?”

“Not exactly.”

“Really? What gives?”

“It’s possible my niece might’ve been there before it went down.”

“Oh, shit. No kidding?”

“I wish. Crime scene will be bringing in the cell phones recovered from the house. I think my niece’s is going to be among them.” Sam brought him up to date on what’d happened the night before. “I’m trying to figure out how she got to the District when she was supposed to be at school in Virginia. I was wondering if you could do me a courtesy and let me know if you have her phone and if you do, whether you’d dump it for me.”

He hesitated for a second before he said, “Sure, I can do that—as a courtesy and as long as it’s between us.”

She was asking him to cross lines on her behalf, and they both knew it. As the only other cop Sam had ever dated, they’d crossed lines together before. “You have my word. Let me give you the number.” She recited Brooke’s cell phone number, remembering the thrill of the young girl receiving her first hot-pink flip phone on her twelfth birthday. The memory came with a stab of pain in her chest for the same girl who now lay bruised and battered in the ICU.

“Got it. I assume you want everything?”

These days they had to specify voice, text, data, video and music when requesting warrants for phone dumps. “Yes, please.”

“I’ll let you know as soon as I have anything for you. As you know, smartphones take about eight hours. I assume it’s smart?”

“Yes, it is. Thanks, Archie. I appreciate it.”

“I hope your niece is okay.”

“I hope so too.”

Her next order of business was tracking down the principal of Woodrow Wilson High School on a Saturday.

Chapter Five

Chapter Five