"Understood, sir." A pause. "Sir, is this about—"
"It is about my daughter," Cameron said. "She is alive, Mason."
The silence on the line was the honest kind. It went on long enough that Cameron was grateful for it.
"Then give me the word," Mason said, and his voice had changed, roughened. "Give me the word and I'll bring her home by tonight. I swear it to you. I have the men. Nobody will even know we were there."
"I know you would," Cameron said. "That's why I'm not giving it."
He ended the call and stood with the phone in his hand, looking at the mantel photograph, and he thought about what kind of man found his stolen daughter and sent soldiers for her. A man whose daughter then learned, on the first day of her new life, that her father answered fear with force. That the powerful man she had been hidden from was exactly the man she had been told to hide from.
"No," he said aloud.
"Cameron?" Margaret said.
He turned. "For ten years this family has treated the law like a private arrangement. False records. Forged signatures. A fake body in a coffin, and God knows whose signature bought that. My father ran all of it the way he ran the company: quietly, internally, nobody's business." He shook his head slowly. "If I do this the same way—quiet, private, with my own people and my own money—then I am just the next Hale man moving a child around in the dark, deciding the truth is whatever I can afford. I will not do it. Not even to get her back. Especially not to get her back."
"What are you going to do?" Naomi asked.
Cameron crossed the room, picked up the worn leather medical bag with both hands, and held it for a moment like something holy. Photographs. Admission copies. A dead woman's forged name. Proof, carried for seven years by a nurse who earned a nurse's wages and asked for nothing.
"I'm going to call the police," he said. "I'm going to report a missing child—my child—and falsified medical records, and a fraudulent burial, and I am going to put these documents in the hands of detectives in the light of day, with names and dates and no private understandings. And when they ask me what I want, I am going to tell them the truth."
"Which is?" Margaret asked.
"I want my daughter back," Cameron said. "Not a war."
Naomi's eyes filled. "They'll move slowly. You know that. Slowly and carefully and with forms."
"Then they will move slowly with the whole city watching instead of one man in the dark," Cameron said. "And Thomas will know that the age of handling this quietly inside the family is finished. He has run from exposure for ten years. Let him run from the truth in daylight for a change."
He made the call. It took eleven minutes, most of it hold music, and Cameron stood at the window forty floors above Manhattan and said the words in a voice that only broke once, on her name. A missing child. Sophie Hale. Four years old at the time of the report that said she was dead, and the report was a lie. Yes, he had evidence. Yes, he would bring it himself. Yes, he understood they would need to verify. Yes, he would wait.
When he put the phone down, he looked at Naomi.
"They'll meet us," he said. "Not here. There's a precinct between here and nowhere, and they don't move until they're ready—but they agreed to one thing. When we go to your mother's house, we do not go alone, and we do not go first. They clear it. Nobody kicks a door. Nobody surrounds anything. They were very clear, and I agreed to every word, because if that girl hears sirens and shouting she will run, and she will be right to run."
"And if she's not there?" Naomi asked.
"Then we will have begun," Cameron said, "the way honest people begin. And where she actually is, we'll go the same way. On her terms, Naomi. From here on, everything is on her terms."
Chapter 17: The House in Queens
Judith Brooks's house stood at the end of a quiet Queens street, and it looked like the least dangerous place on earth.
Blue shutters. A small porch with two chairs angled toward each other, as if the people who sat in them liked to talk. A basil plant in a chipped pot in the front window, green and flourishing and absurdly domestic. Cameron stood on the sidewalk between Naomi and Margaret and stared at it, this ordinary house, and understood that he had spent ten years imagining prisons—institutions, compounds, locked facilities—when the truth was a porch and a basil plant and a woman who made soup.
"The front door's unlocked," the detective said quietly, coming back down the path. "We're going in first. You three stay on the sidewalk until I call you. Mr. Hale—" She was young, or seemed young, with the exhausted competence of someone who had done this in every kind of weather. "I know what this house might be to you. It's a scene until I say otherwise. You touch nothing. Are we clear?"
"We're clear," Cameron said.
It took four minutes. They seemed longer than the previous ten years. Cameron counted the windows on the upper floor. Five. Behind one of them, for three years, his daughter had slept. He watched Naomi beside him holding Sofie against her hip, the child's legs wrapped around her, both of them looking at the house the way you look at a place that has kept your whole life in it and may now give it up.
"Clear," the detective said from the porch. "Empty. Come in. Mr. Hale, the room is upstairs, first on the left. Go slow."