Chapter 6 - A Song From the Dark
At 2:16 a.m. my phone received an audio file.
I made Ellison listen before I did because I couldn't bear the possibility that it was Lily screaming.
Instead, my daughter was singing the opening line of the lullaby I used when her father was deployed.
Her voice shook on the final note.
Then an adult said, "That's enough."
The recording stopped.
I pressed the phone against my chest and tried to breathe through the pressure that had nothing to do with the surgery.
Ellison asked whether the song had special meaning.
It did.
My late husband, Ben Brennan, had written the silly words on the back of a postcard before his final deployment.
Only three people knew the second verse: Lily, my mother, and me.
The recording contained a faint chime after the adult voice.
Dom played it twice.
"That isn't a clock," he said.
He recognized a harbor warning signal used at certain maintenance piers near the bay.
Ellison cautioned that audio could be manipulated.
She was right.
We couldn't treat a sound as a location.
But the file carried an embedded production timestamp only five minutes before it arrived.
Lily had been alive at 2:11 a.m.
I repeated the fact until it felt stable enough to hold.
Ellison requested a technical comparison while a separate team checked waterfront cameras.
A restricted pier camera had gone offline during the same eleven-minute interval as the recording.
The outage was logged as scheduled maintenance, authorized by Mercer's office.
Dom traced a finger over the schedule.
"If we storm the pier because someone wants us there, we could lose her."
"And if we don't?"
He had no answer.
That morning I received another image: a child's blue paper star laid on a metal table beside a shipping manifest.
Across the manifest someone had circled a destination code.
Lily had given us a clue, or the kidnapper wanted us to follow one.
When Ellison enlarged the code, she went still.
The destination was not a pier.
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It was the hospital where I lay recovering.
