Rhett laughed softly, surprised by the relief of it. "With ordinary things, constantly. He lost screwdrivers, burned toast, forgot where he'd parked at county fairs, and once rode forty miles to buy a part he already had in his jacket pocket." Eli's mouth twitched. "That sounds more like him."
Rhett rested one hand on the workbench. "The report made him sound like a mistake. He was a whole person. Don't let anybody reduce him to the way he died."
Eli looked at the watch on his wrist. "Bring my mom home," he said. Rhett wanted to promise that he would, with all the fierce certainty his friendship with Caleb demanded. But the boy had asked for the truth, and Rhett had already decided that truth was the only gift he would never withhold. "I'll do everything I can to help the people looking for her," he replied. "And I'll come back here to you."
The motorcycles left the compound beneath a sky that had finally cleared. The air was cold and smelled of wet earth, and the lights of the clubhouse receded behind them with every mile. In the workshop window, Eli stood with one hand pressed to the glass, watching until the last headlight disappeared. Rhett carried that image with him as he rode toward the warehouse, because it gave him a reason to return that was larger than revenge.
The road leading toward Hale's riverfront facility was narrow, bordered by fields that lay dark and waterlogged after the storm. Rhett rode with Mara and the others for twelve miles before they separated at a public crossroads and switched to their planned observation positions. From the far side of the highway, the warehouse appeared ordinary: a low commercial building with several loading bays, tall floodlights, and a chain-link perimeter. Nothing about it announced that people were being kept inside against their will.
That ordinariness troubled Rhett. He had imagined evil as a place that would look unmistakably wrong, the kind of abandoned building that children were warned never to approach. Instead he saw a business facility maintained well enough to pass a casual glance, with trucks parked in orderly rows and an employee notice board beside a lit office entrance. Victor Hale had not hidden his operation outside respectable society. He had built it inside the appearance of respectability and trusted everyone else to stop looking after the first explanation.
Mara reported unusual activity at a loading dock shortly after eight. A freight vehicle had been brought forward ahead of the schedule in Eli's notebook, and workers were carrying boxes from an office corridor with conspicuous urgency. Through the window of one vehicle, she saw a passenger standing beside the driver and arguing while holding a phone. She could not hear the words, but the gestures looked more like an emergency than routine distribution.
Rhett called Foley. The investigator answered on the first ring, breathing hard as though he had been moving quickly. "Norah has been identified," he said. "Someone checked her employment history, and the staffing records no longer match. She's been taken away from her desk, and her contact device has gone dark."