“Did you—” Benji starts.
“Yes,” DJ says.
“Hey there, Casper,” Griffin says, leaning over the steering wheel. “Where did you come from?”
Did we somehow miss Morrow slipping into Henley as he walked from his house to his car? Was Morrow already in the car?
Is that the cold feeling I picked up when the car drove by?
I watch people come and go through the supermarket entrance—a mom with two kids hanging off the cart, an elderly man shuffling with a cane, a teenager in a work vest taking a smoke break by the dumpster. I know we can’t tail him in there because we can’t do an extraction in the middle of a grocery store, but it feels wrong just to sit here.
I’m starting to wonder if Henley forgot where all the produce is and had to search the entire store for everything on his list when he emerges with no shopping bags.
Gone is the hunch in Henley’s shoulders. His strides are long, eating up ground the same way they did in the abandoned building when he was walking toward Nico and me.
DJ draws in a short breath. Morrow climbs into the car and drives slowly out of the parking lot.
We follow him past a strip mall, a gas station, a row of fast-food restaurants. He signals right. Griffin follows, but there’s a car between us now, and then another merges into our lane.
“Don’t lose him,” DJ urges.
“That’s so helpful, Deej, thank you,” Griffin says.
“He’s turning,” Benji says, twisting in his seat to keep looking at the car.
Griffin follows, but when we round the corner, there’s just an empty street stretching ahead.
“Where’d he go?” DJ cranes her neck, scanning both sides of the road.
“I don’t know where hecouldgo,” Griffin says. “He was right there.”
We cruise down the street at a crawl. Everyone’s eyes search parking lots and side streets, but there’s nothing.
Griffin slams his palm against the steering wheel. “Damnit.”
“Pull over,” Zoey says, tucking her hair behind her ears. “I can find him, but you’ve got to give me a minute.”
Griffin yanks the van into a bank parking lot. Bob shifts in my lap, pressing his warm body against my ribs like he can sense how badly I need him.
The clicking of Zoey’s keyboard fills the van, each stroke making my pulse spike higher. A minute turns out to be optimistic.
“If Henley had his phone in the car, it’ll be broadcasting his location to nearby cell towers,” Zoey says to me.
“We tried to find you and Nico that way,” DJ says, “but yours was in the van, and Morrow destroyed Nico’s.”
“It took a surprisingly short amount of time for Morrow to figure out we can track him through the phone,” Benji says.
“Henley wasn’t possessed when he left the house—hopefully he has his phone on him and hasn’t turned it off yet,” DJ says.
The laptop screen casts a blue glow across Zoey’s face as a sophisticated program loads.
Comeon.
A grid of streets loads pixel by pixel. A little yellow dot blinks into existence, smack dab in the middle of a grid of roads.
Zoey zooms in. “Last ping came in four minutes ago. A block away from the highway.”
The highway he’d need to take to get to the abandoned hospital.
