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Noah’s phone buzzed. He answered it, turning away from them momentarily as he carried on a murmured conversation.
Josie continued the questioning. “Does Brody ever come out here, to this area?”
Again, the lines appeared on Pam’s forehead. “Here? You mean the school?”
Josie motioned toward the woods. “Behind the football field, back there, is a place called the Stacks. Do you know it?”
Still, she looked confused.
“Did you grow up here in Denton?”
A slow shake of her head.
Noah came back, pocketing his phone. “Last place it pinged was over by the Stacks.”
“What is the Stacks?” asked Pam.
“There’s an area in the woods where a number of large, flat rocks fell, stacked on top of one another,” Noah explained. “Looks like a giant stack of jagged pancakes. East Denton high-schoolers have been hanging out there for decades.”
“For what?” asked Pam, eyes wide.
Josie and Noah exchanged a look. She said, “Usually to drink, Mrs. Hicks. Does Brody drink, that you know of?”
Her fingers twitched over the top two buttons of her blouse. “What? No! He’s sixteen!”
When they didn’t respond, she added, “He’s on the football team. He’s an A student. He wouldn’t do that.”
“Okay,” Noah said, not bothering to argue with her. “We’re still going to have a look back there since dispatch told me his phone pinged in that area last night.”
“I’ll come with you!” Pam said, lunging forward and clutching Noah’s arm.
Without missing a beat, he patted one of her hands and steered her toward a uniformed officer. “Mrs. Hicks, I’m going to ask you to go inside with one of my colleagues so they can get some more information from you for our reports.”
Before she could protest, the uniformed officers stepped forward. One of them began guiding her toward the school building. Josie called the other one back. His name tag readConlen.Josie had met him last year when he joined the Denton PD in his rookie year. He was young, earnest, and very thorough. “Go to the main office,” Josie said. “They’ll have a list of every student who did not show up for school today. Get them to call each student’s family until they find the student who isn’t at home.”
“You think this Hicks kid went into the woods with a friend,” Conlen said.
Josie nodded. “We’ll need to contact that friend’s parents and get their cell phone number so we can use it to try to locate them. If Hicks is out here, so are they.”
I hope,she added silently.
“Consider it done,” said Conlen.
Noah stood beside her as she watched Conlen jog toward the school building. “You think this is another one,” he said. “These kids doing this stupid Woodsman challenge. Two go in and only one comes out.”
“I hope it’s not,” Josie said. “But if it is, we need to be prepared. If there is another kid out here we should be searching for, I want to know sooner rather than later.”
“We’ve had a unit outside Henry Thomas’s driveway since Sunday.”
“But we don’t have eyes on his cabin,” Josie pointed out. “He could easily have left his cabin and come here on foot. How would we even know?”
“Shit,” Noah said. “The reports said that he’s only left to go to work at the city park. He leaves his house at sixthirtya.m. and gets home around threethirtyp.m. He’s probably at work now, but I can get someone to go talk to him.”
“You can,” Josie said, thinking of Thomas’s smug demeanor in the interrogation room the night after Kayleigh Patchett was abducted. “But if he’s behind this, whatever damage he meant to do is already done.”
Noah made the call anyway. Hanging up, he said, “It’s still a hike from his place to down here. Miles. In the dark.”
“But not impossible,” Josie said. “If this is what we think it is and if it was Thomas.”
