Chapter 6 - THE MOTHERS' CONVOY
I rolled down the window, my heart leaping into my throat. "Ruth! How did you find me?"
"My late husband was a mechanic, honey," Ruth said, resting her elbows on my window frame. "When Thomas Whitaker fired me twenty minutes ago, I knew you'd go looking for Sarah Hayes. I drove past her building on Pine Street, saw Evelyn's silver Mercedes pulling up, and followed your tracks right down the avenue."
She gestured behind her toward the rusty pickup truck and two other beat-up sedans that had just pulled into the lot alongside us.
A tall, broad-shouldered man in a faded denim jacket stepped out of the pickup truck. His eyes were bloodshot, his jaw set like granite.
"I'm Greg Miller," he said, his voice rough with emotion. "Not related to the crooked Deputy Chief. My eight-year-old daughter, Lily, was taken to Crestview two weeks ago after Mrs. Caldwell reported us for neglect over a forty-dollar cafeteria bill. The state social worker told us we couldn't visit her for ninety days during her 'adjustment period.'"
"And when Ruth called us twenty minutes ago and told us what was really in those files," said a woman standing beside him, gripping a heavy tire iron in her gloved hand, "we called the rest of the parents on that list."
I looked around the grocery store parking lot. Five cars were now gathered around my SUV—eleven working-class mothers and fathers who had been bullied, shamed, and robbed of their children by people who thought poverty meant powerlessness.
"They have my husband and Oliver's parents locked in the north wing," I told them, holding up my laptop. "And it's worse than just grant fraud. Evelyn Vance-Morgan is running an illegal pharmaceutical trial on the children in that wing. If we call the local sheriff, Deputy Chief Miller will cover it up and hurt David and Sarah."
Greg's face went pale, then darkened with a terrifying fury. "They're testing drugs on my little girl?"
"Not after today, they aren't," Ruth said firmly. She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out an old flip phone. "My brother-in-law is a captain with the State Police out of Springfield, and his daughter works for the FBI's Chicago field office. I already sent them pictures of my green folder. They're sending state tactical units and federal agents to Crestview right now, but with the highway traffic, they won't be here for forty-five minutes."
I checked the dashboard clock. It was 4:35 PM.
"Evelyn gave me until five o'clock before she hurts David and the others," I said. "If the feds arrive with sirens blazing before five, Evelyn will destroy the medical logs and sedate the hostages."
"Then you keep your five o'clock appointment, Jennifer," Ruth said, her eyes sharp. "You drive up to that service gate like she asked. Get inside and stall her for fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, Greg and the parents will cut through the back woods behind the facility and take down the power generator to the north wing so their electronic locks fail."
"What about Grace and Oliver?" I asked, looking back at the kids. "Evelyn demanded I bring them both. If I show up without them on the gate cameras, she won't let me in."
"Mommy, I want to go," Grace said suddenly.
I turned around in my seat. "Grace, no. Absolutely not."
"Daddy is in there because he was trying to protect me and Oliver," my nine-year-old daughter said, her chin lifted with the exact same stubbornness I saw in the mirror every morning. "And if you don't bring us, that bad lady will hurt him. We can stay in the car with Mrs. Jenkins while you talk to her!"
Oliver nodded fiercely beside her, clutching his mother's cracked ID badge. "I want my mom and dad back, Mrs. Morgan. I'm not scared anymore."
My throat tightened. I looked at Ruth.
"I'll drive your SUV right Behind you through the service gate, honey," Ruth promised, climbing into my passenger seat while one of the mothers took her car. "The windows in the back of your SUV are tinted. Once they open the gate and you walk into the building, I'll lock the doors from the inside with the kids and hold the gate open for Greg's trucks."
We didn't have a better option. And time was running out.
At 4:52 PM, I turned my SUV onto the long, winding gravel road that led up to the Crestview Behavioral Boarding School.
Set deep in the pine woods outside of town, the facility looked like an old stone sanitarium surrounded by a ten-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.
We pulled up to the rear service gate. A black security camera pivoted toward my windshield.
Through the tinted back window, Evelyn could see the silhouettes of two small heads in the back seat.
A buzzer sounded, and the heavy motorized gate slid slowly open.
I drove through into the paved loading dock behind the main building and put the SUV in park, leaving the engine running.
"Keep the doors locked, Ruth," I whispered, slipping the silver USB drive into my jacket pocket—not the real one, which I had handed to Ruth to keep safe with the laptop, but a blank duplicate drive I kept in my medical bag. In my other pocket, I gripped the stun gun I had taken from Julian.
"Give 'em hell, Nurse Morgan," Ruth whispered back.
I stepped out into the cold air just as the heavy steel double doors of the north wing opened.
Principal Whitaker and Julian Morgan—his right wrist heavily wrapped in a white splint from where I had broken it with the skillet—stepped out onto the loading dock.
"Leave the kids in the car for now," Julian snarled, pointing his left hand toward the open doorway. "My mother wants to see the drive first. Inside. Now."
I walked past them into the sterile, white-tiled corridor of the north wing. It smelled like a hospital, cold and metallic.
They marched me down the hallway into a large observation room separated from a ward of small glass-walled cubicles by a giant pane of two-way glass.
Inside the room stood Evelyn Vance-Morgan, Deputy Chief Miller, and Mrs. Caldwell.
And tied to metal chairs in the center of the room were David, Sarah Hayes, and a gaunt, bruised man in factory coveralls—Oliver's father, Robert.
"Jennifer!" David choked out, struggling against the zip-ties cutting into his bleeding wrists. "Why did you come here?! Did you bring Grace?!"
"Quiet, David," Evelyn snapped, holding out her hand to me. "The drive, Jennifer."
I didn't hand it over yet. I looked past Evelyn, through the giant two-way mirror into the dimly lit pediatric ward on the other side of the glass.
Twelve hospital beds were lined up in neat rows. Children—eight, nine, ten years old—were sitting quietly on the mattresses, staring blankly at the walls, dressed in identical gray sweatpants.
Except for the bed nearest the glass.
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Sitting on that bed was a ten-year-old boy with dark curly hair—the boy from the transfer list, Marcus Vance.
And when he looked up toward the glass, I finally understood why Evelyn had forged my husband's name, and why Julian Morgan was looking at the boy with pure, unadulterated hatred.
