Chapter 4 - The Girl at Pier Nine
Rain washed the road as we approached Pier Nine.
I had no intention of turning an endangered witness into a firefight.
We called emergency dispatch from a recorded line, named Ava, and requested officers to meet us.
Marcus stayed in the car to document arrivals and departure times.
Daniel and I walked to the gate.
The padlock hung open.
Inside, a portable generator hummed beside stacked sampling equipment.
Ava sat behind a glass office door, clutching a backpack.
She was terrified but unhurt.
I held up my empty hands.
“I'm Chloe's father.”
She recognized me and began to cry.
“I thought you were the men they sent.”
“Who sent them?”
“I don't know.”
She explained that two campus employees had cornered her outside her apartment and insisted she surrender Chloe's laptop.
She had fled to the pier because Chloe once told her about a hidden locker there.
Inside the locker was a waterproof drive, wrapped in a university laboratory glove.
Ava had not opened it.
“Chloe said if anything happened, I should give this to someone who knew how to read a tide table.”
I did.
A tide table told you which numbers were expected and which numbers meant the sea was doing something unnatural.
I placed the drive in an evidence pouch without accessing it.
A police cruiser arrived at the gate.
The officer who stepped out identified himself as Sergeant Cole.
He appeared relieved to see Ava alive.
Then a black SUV rolled slowly past the gate, and his posture changed.
He told us his supervisor had ordered him to transfer the drive to campus security.
“No,” Ava said.
“It's mine to surrender, and I want a receipt from the district attorney.”
The sergeant looked at me.
I said nothing.
Ava was twenty-one, not a package for men to hand around.
She called Elena herself, and Elena instructed the sergeant to transport her to a protected interview room.
We followed separately.
At the station, Ava finally described the attack.
She had heard Chloe shouting near the university aquarium loading dock.
By the time she reached the stairs, she saw three men getting into a black car.
One of them said, “The drive wasn't on her.”
Ava then heard Chloe moving inside the locked maintenance room.
She called emergency services three times.
Each call rang once and dropped.
Elena documented every word.
When Ava finished, she pulled a folded photograph from her backpack.
It showed Chloe standing beside a man at the pier two days before the assault.
I recognized him immediately.
His name was Hayes.
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And nineteen years earlier, I had watched him die.
