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CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

It’s not an Amazon warehouse. Keller realizes this after she passes truck after truck with the purple-and-orange FedEx logo on their sides.

She stops at a security checkpoint outside the fenced facility. The guard perks up when he sees her FBI credentials. He speaks into a phone with someone and Keller is quickly granted entry.

She’s met by a man in a short-sleeve button-up shirt. He wears one of those pocket protectors, like nerds in eighties movies.

“George G. Peacoat,” he says, sticking out his hand. He has a Southern accent. She can’t place it, but it reminds her of something. The voice of a character from one of those Pixar movies the kids used to watch over and over.

“What can I do you for, Special Agent…?”

“Keller,” she replies.

She explains that she’s working the missing SCU student investigation. He’s of course heard of it like everyone else.

“Do you have any cameras at the facility that could reach out to the service road?”

“We do not,” he says with law enforcement efficiency.

Keller sighs.

“I can do you one better,” he adds with a grin.

She stares at him, waits.

“Six hundred and fifty-two vehicles leave this facility every day, departing on the hour, twenty-four-seven, each with state-of-the-art dash and interior cams to ensure the safety of our drivers and the communities we serve.”

He says this like it’s a promotional video for FedEx, but she’s liking this guy and his intensity. The pride in his work.

“Do you know where and what time we’re talking about?” he asks.

She tells him.

“Come with me.”

Keller follows as he treks down a corridor, and they stop in a room that has lockers. He opens one, hands her a hard hat and a safety vest.

She doesn’t question it, and slips on the vest, dons the helmet.

Wearing the same gear himself, Peacoat pushes through two large swinging doors, and Keller marvels at the massive warehouse. It’s loud with the roar of a maze of conveyor belts and industrial fans and other machinery as employees in purple jumpsuits unload, sort, and inspect thousands of boxes and packages that make their way along the complex lines.

“Impressive,” Keller says over the noise.

Peacoat gives her a satisfied nod.

On the other side of the facility, they pass through another set of doors and back into an office space. Keller is surprised at how quiet it is, given the deafening rumble on the other side of the doors.

“We have video from all the trucks leaving the facility,” Peacoat says as they continue walking at a fast clip. “Maybe they caught something in your timeframe.”

“That would be great. But we don’t have time for a lot of paperwork and—”

“When Corporate assigned me here,” Peacoat interrupts, “I said, ‘This is my domain.’” He looks intently at Keller. “Kids are missing. We don’t need no darn paperwork.”

He leads her to a security center where a woman sits at a workstation in front of an array of monitors.

“Everybody thinks we’re just glorified mail carriers,” Peacoat says. “But we are one of the most efficient operations in the U.S. of A., including our great armed forces.” He instructs the tech to pull up the truck video recordings from Friday night.

As they wait, Peacoat speaks into a walkie-talkie, responding to questions from the floor.

“I appreciate you doing this,” Keller says. “I know this is out of the ordinary.”

Peacoat shakes his head in disagreement. “If you could see the things I’ve seen.”

Keller tries not to smile. It’s driving her crazy, the guy’s voice. She’s thinking it’s a character from the movie Cars .

“We get weapons, venomous snakes, drugs, and that was just last week. And we have a good relationship with the Bureau. You know Trudy Banks at the San Francisco field office?”

Keller shakes her head. “I’m from the New York office, here on temporary assignment.”

“Brought in the big guns because of the missing kids,” he speculates.

“Something like that,” she says.

Soon, the woman working the computer has pulled up video from the trucks that left the facility last Friday between 7 and 9 p.m., before and after the missing students’ phones went dead.

“We had some hazmat last month, had to clear the entire facility. Thought it was ricin powder. Turned out to be flour. Some special type from Italy.” Peacoat smiles, shows his crooked teeth. “Being shipped to a baker shop. I told my team: Always do the legwork before you waste the feds’ time.”

He’s interrupted when the tech calls out that she’s found something. Keller and Peacoat watch the screen.

At 8:07 p.m., the Mystery Machine passes the intersection, its image caught by a FedEx truck. The video is clear, but the van is driving fast, racing toward the park.

“Can you slow that down?” Keller asks.

The tech nods like she’s already on it and plays back the video in slow motion.

In the driver’s seat is a familiar face: Blane Roosevelt. Next to him on the passenger side, Mark Wong. The video doesn’t show the rest of the interior. Are the other students in back?

Keller gets closer to the monitor, examines the two young men. They’re stone-faced, serious. Did someone in the back of the van have a gun on them, forcing them to drive to Rancho San Antonio? Or were they heading there of their own volition? The two boys were known as pranksters, party guys, so their serious expressions seem out of character.

“This is about twenty minutes before their phones last pinged. Can you find other trucks that were at that same intersection, say, a little after the phones went dead?”

The woman at the workstation nods, starts tapping on the keyboard.

This is a break, Keller knows. And with—what did Peacoat say?—some six hundred trucks leaving this facility every day, they’re going to need a team to come here and go through a massive amount of video data.

“What in tarnation…” Peacoat says, breaking Keller’s thoughts.

She looks at the screen. It’s the Mystery Machine, racing away from the park.

The tech has zoomed in on the driver again. But it’s not Blane and Mark in the front seats. Now it’s a single person whose face is concealed by a mask—one of those pullover Halloween masks made of plastic with eyeholes.

Peacoat continues: “Is that a…”

“Yeah, it’s a Smurf mask.”