The House Near the Water Tower
Chapter 07 - The House Near the Water Tower
The postal code covered six small towns and miles of farmland.
Detectives compared Sophie’s drawing to satellite images and found a white church standing near an abandoned water tower outside Millstone. A property two roads away had been purchased through another Rourke company.
Mara joined the search team at dawn.
The farmhouse appeared empty. Curtains covered every window. No vehicles stood outside, but fresh tire tracks cut through the mud behind the barn.
Inside, officers found children’s books, canned food, and three bedrooms painted in different colors. Each door locked from the outside.
The purple room contained strands of blond hair.
In the kitchen, a mug was still warm.
Someone had left minutes earlier.
A drone followed the tire tracks toward a wooded service road. Two miles away, officers discovered a van abandoned beside a creek. The rear doors were open.
A child’s shoe lay in the mud.
Search dogs followed the scent uphill to an old storm shelter. Danner was inside with a handgun placed on the floor several feet away. Lucy crouched behind him, crying but alive.
Danner shouted that he wanted a lawyer.
Mara ordered him to step away from the child.
“He’ll kill me,” Danner said.
“Rourke?”
Danner nodded. “You have no idea how many people he owns.”
Lucy saw Mara’s uniform and screamed. Danner had taught her that police returned children to the people who bought them.
Mara slowly removed her badge and placed it on the ground.
“My name is Mara,” she said. “Sophie sent me.”
Lucy stopped crying.
“Sophie?”
“She remembered your purple coat.”
Danner glanced toward the shelter entrance, calculating whether he could run. Reed moved behind him and secured his hands.
Lucy refused to walk past Danner, so Mara wrapped her in a rescue blanket and carried her outside.
As they reached the trees, a rifle shot cracked across the valley.
The bullet struck the shelter door.
Officers pulled Mara and Lucy behind an armored vehicle while teams searched the ridge.
They found a shell casing, footprints, and an empty motorcycle hidden beneath branches.
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Rourke had been watching.
And he had just shown that he would rather kill his own protector than allow the network to be exposed.
