Derek Hughes and Tamara Wells reached Hilltop Elementary in four minutes, and the man in the ball cap at the front counter turned around with a smile and said he was there to pick up his stepdaughter.
She is not your stepdaughter, Tamara said. From behind the nurses door, Avas small voice rang out. That is him. That is the man.
Gary Lomax kept smiling and said he was the only one who knew where Avas mother was. He was wrong about being the only one, but he did know, and that was the thread the detectives pulled.
Jessica Moore was alive. Gary had drugged her after her night shift and left her locked in a storage unit he had rented across town, meaning to be three states away with Ava before anyone thought to look. He had emptied the apartment, packed a childs clothes into garbage bags, bought a one-way bus ticket in a little girls name, and told a school she was transferring. He had planned everything except a seven-year-old who remembered what her mother taught her. If you are ever scared, call 911. They will come.
A pinky promise and a 911 call from a bathroom stall were all that stood between a little girl and a man who had planned every other thing.
They found Jessica within the hour, dehydrated and terrified but alive, and the officer who opened that storage unit said she asked for her daughter before she could even sit up.
Gary was arrested at the school and charged with kidnapping, false imprisonment, and more. The principal, who had very nearly signed a child over to him on a forged transfer form, broke down in the office when she understood how close it had been.
Ava and her mother went home together that night. Jessica stopped working herself to the bone on overnight shifts with a stranger in the house. And the stuffed unicorn Gary once bought to win a little girl over went in the trash, replaced by one Ava picked herself, that keeps watch now from a bed in an apartment where Mommy always, always comes home.