The officer heard it too.
“Step aside.”
“You can’t enter my house because a kid told some story to a bar full of criminals.”
Stone remained beside his truck.
He did not move, but Dean kept staring at him.
The lead officer held up the cracked phone inside an evidence sleeve.
“We have a recording of a woman being threatened and confined inside this residence.”
Dean’s confidence faltered.
Then he recovered.
“That phone belongs to me.
Whatever’s on it was edited.”
“It has been recording continuously for more than half an hour.”
Dean moved backward into the doorway.
The officers ordered him to show his hands.
Instead, he reached toward the small table inside the entrance.
One officer drew a weapon while the other pulled Dean away from the doorway and forced his hands behind his back.
Dean shouted that Anna was unstable, that Lily bruised easily, that everyone was misunderstanding a private family argument.
Then the phone, still playing through the evidence sleeve, reached the part where he had grabbed the child.
His own voice filled the porch.
“If you tell anyone, your mother pays for it.”
Dean stopped shouting.
The officers entered the house.
Stone and Ryder waited near the road.
Every instinct told Ryder to move closer, but Stone kept him back with one hand against his chest.
“Let them do their job,” Stone said.
A few minutes later, firefighters arrived with equipment for the cellar door.
The lock was mounted on the outside.
Dean had taken the key, and when officers searched him, they found it in his pocket.
The door opened.
Anna was sitting on the bottom step, shivering in the unheated cellar.
One side of her face was swollen, and her wrists were scraped, but she was conscious.
Her first word was Lily’s name.
An officer told her that Lily was safe at the Iron Horses Tavern.
Anna closed her eyes and began to cry.
Dean heard her from the patrol vehicle.
He twisted in the back seat and started yelling through the closed window.
He called Anna a liar.
He claimed she had locked herself downstairs to frame him.
He insisted the bruises on Lily came from a fall.
Anna was carried past him on a stretcher.
She did not look in his direction.
Stone approached only after an officer waved him over.
Anna recognized the leather jacket and the Iron Horses patch immediately.
“You found her?” she asked.
“She found us,” Stone said.
“She walked into that bar by herself and told the truth.”
Anna gripped the blanket around her shoulders.
“I told her to stay quiet.”
“You told her how to survive long enough to get help.”
The ambulance took Anna to the same hospital where Lily had been transported.
Stone and Ryder returned to the tavern to tell the others what had happened before following.
At the hospital, Lily sat on a bed with the sleeves of the oversized red coat covering her hands.
When Anna was wheeled through the door, the girl jumped down and ran to her.
They held each other without speaking.
Stone stood in the hallway with the bikers clustered behind him.
Men who had faced deployments, crashes, prison cells, and funerals stared at the floor because none of them trusted their faces.
