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“So you guys were here when the alarm went off, right?”
“We were. At first, we thought Tristan had triggered it by accident. We heard him messing around with it from the other side of the door. But then it went silent for a minute or two before the alarm went off. It took us another couple of minutes to realize what was going on.”
The color wheel continued to spin. The battery symbol in the top right corner was an angry red. Five percent left.
“Then what happened?”
“That’s when I text the group by accident, thinking I was just texting Tristan if he was alright. When he didn’t answer, Eric and I ran around the house. That’s when we saw the broken window.”
Still loading. Three percent. Fuck.
“Eric jumped the neighbor’s fence and ran through their yard, thinking maybe they went to the street on the other side. I couldn’t just stand there, so I decided to jump into the house.” He looked down at his bandaged hands, some red coloring through a few spots. “I didn’t even realize how badly I cut myself until the cops showed up. That was all about an hour ago, now.”
Somewhere behind the tree, I heard the slam of a car door, followed by the sound of someone running through the grass. It was Yvette and Evan, both of them looking like they had changed plans from going for a jog to helping rescue their friend. Right behind them was Steven, who must have been around the neighborhood. He looked slightly disheveled, with messy hair and a slightly stained and oversized T-shirt.
“What’s going on? Find anything?” Steven asked, hands stuffed in the pockets of his black sweatpants.
“Nothing,” Noah answered. “Tristan’s gone.”
Yvette looked to the house with a hand on her heart, watching the forensics team walking in and out. FBI was here, too. Three agents that stuck to themselves and were likely just as lost as I was.
The photo albums opened to rows and rows of artsy snapshots. They appeared to have been a mix of photos taken on the phone and some with more professional cameras and more intense edits.
Maybe I won’t be lost for much longer.
The number next to the battery read two percent. I didn’t have all that much time left.
I scrolled through the photos, but there were tons. I had them sorted by date and looked through the most recent ones. The last photo he ever took was a stunning shot of a sunset over the Atlanta skyline, likely taken from the hotel he worked at in Downtown. It was probably this night that he’d been picked up and murdered.
But it wasn’t the photo I was looking for. It felt like looking for a needle in a haystack. I scrolled: pictures of the sky, pictures of fancy drinks, pictures of cheese boards and wallpaper and antique lamps.
No pictures of a beat-up home with an old red roof.
Maybe he didn’t take any photos of it. So what if it reminded him of his childhood home? That didn’t make it a requirement to just take random photos and store them in the cloud—wait a second. I scrolled back down.
It was a picture of a cloudless sky, with the spindly branches of a cherry blossom tree creeping into the frame from the left, and from the right, there was the corner of a dirty and saggy roof. A red roof.
This was it. This had to be it. It was taken exactly during the time Grayson had met with the Midnight Chemist. It didn’t show the entire home, but the red roof was there.
It was my only shot at finding Tristan. I clicked on the photo. The number on the corner of the screen dropped to one percent. I tapped on the “more information” button. Someone around me was talking, but I couldn’t register what they were saying to me. All I cared about was the small box of metadata that appeared on the screen.
Phones didn’t just capture whatever image you see on the screen. It also collected a whole shitload of other information. When the photo was taken, what settings it was taken with, how it was saved, and most importantly: where it was taken.
And there it was. An address. A street with a city and a zip code. I immediately pulled out my phone and wrote it down.
The laptop screen blinked off, the battery sparking its last spark. It didn’t matter, though. I gave the laptop to Yvette as I stood. “Hold on to that.”
“What? What did you find?” Steven asked, likely sensing the sudden shift in urgency.
“You found something?” Evan echoed. This was the most expressive I’d seen him, looking worried with his big doe eyes reflecting back a heavy dose of fear.
“I’ve got an address.”
“You do?” Noah shot to his feet. “You know where he is?”
“Possibly. I don’t have time to explain right now.” Every second I wasted felt like a second that took Tristan further into the grave. I had to hurry. I left to go find one of the FBI agents, the friendliest-looking one. The last thing I needed was for one of these suited-up agents to block me with their inflated egos, but I also couldn’t hold this back from them. Not if it was actually the hideout of the Midnight Chemist.
“Go,” Detective Arroyo said to me, turning to her partners. “I’ll explain to them. Go.”
