‘You need to get here. Pronto,’ Beth told Chang.
She cut off his protests. ‘Yeah, I know it’s seven thirty a.m. and you’re gulping your cereal in One PP. However, you and your partner need to get your asses here. Now.’
She tossed her phone at her desk and looked at her twin. Meghan still wore a shell shocked expression. She was still looking at her phone, not touching it, as if it would explode.
Beth groaned in exasperation and snapped her fingers in her sister’s face. ‘Wake up. Get over it. Start working.’
She went to the kitchen, brewed two cups of coffee and when she had returned, Meghan was alert.
‘Identical messages?’ she asked Beth after taking a grateful sip.
‘Yes.’
She dialed the number, held the phone to her ear and grimaced immediately.
‘It’s dead. Probably sent from a burner phone. The sim card’s trashed.’
She stared at the picture again as if it could tell a story. ‘How did he or whoever sent that, get our numbers?’
Beth frowned. ‘That’s one part of the puzzle. However, have you looked at that picture properly?’
Meghan connected her phone to Werner and transferred the image to her computer.
She brought it up on the larger screen and sucked in her breath when she saw it in greater detail.
‘Where the heck is Toccoa?’ Pizaka paced their office.
Chang and he had reached the Columbus Avenue office in the ‘shortest time ever taken by the NYPD,’ according to Chang.
They had hurried up and as soon as they had stepped out of the elevator and taken a step, Beth had hit them with the picture.
Maddie was posed on a train station platform, with the building behind her. It seemed to be a wooden frame structure, its walls yellow with a red brick skirting at the bottom. Its sloping roof was tiled.
Behind Maddie’s smiling face, beyond her right shoulder, a signboard was visible.
It had blue lettering on white and a distinctive logo on the left. It had been defaced by graffiti; however, the name was legible.
The board read Toccoa, GA.
‘It’s in Georgia, obviously,’ Chang wore a bemused expression on his face as he watched his partner pace.
Chang was relaxed, sprawled on a couch, a coffee mug in his hand. It was the twins’ office. They would do the work for a change. A NYPD cop needed to grab his rest wherever he could find it.
‘It’s northeast of Atlanta. Ninety miles from it. About eight thousand people. In Stephens County.’ Beth read from a screen.
‘When was the photograph sent?’ Pizaka again. Still pacing. Shades glaring at nothing in particular.
‘We got it at six forty-five a.m. We saw it at seven-fifteen. We called you at seven-thirty.’
Pizaka glanced involuntarily at Mickey Mouse. Eight-thirty.
‘When was it taken? Who sent it?’
‘The who is easy. From a throw away phone. Werner is working on it.’
‘The when is more difficult.’ Meghan this time, curling a tendril of hair behind her ear. She was at another screen, giving instructions to the supercomputer. ‘Werner will try some algorithms.’
‘Send it to –’
‘Done,’ Beth interrupted Pizaka. ‘I have forwarded the message to your team.’
Chang wriggled on the couch and settled more comfortably. ‘Maybe we should move here,’ he directed a hopeful glance at his partner.
The shades turned on him. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Watching you at work. Very inspiring.’
Werner came back with an approximate time. It had looked up light readings in Toccoa, compared the light in the photograph, and checked out angles, distances, brightness, and presented a time.
Six-thirty a.m.
‘When?’
Pizaka stopped pacing for the first time.
‘No clue.’ Beth curbed her irritation at the cop’s staccato questioning.
It’s the first break we have. All of us are buzzing. Cut him some slack.
‘The sim card was bought at a Best Buy in New York, two days ago.’ Meghan called out and ratcheted the buzz further.
‘Who bought it?’
‘Werner’s got the where. For the who, it’ll have to hack their system.’
Chang burst into a coughing fit and when he had finished, he sat straight, wiped his face and wheezed. ‘No hacking. We’re New York’s finest. We can get the details.’
He spoke softly in his cell phone, and when he had finished, Meghan had a further update.
‘There’s an Amtrak train, the Crescent, that arrives Toccoa at six fifteen a.m. Every day service. It originates from Penn Station. New Orleans is last stop.’
‘Check –’
‘On to it.’
Chang spoke in his phone again, giving further instructions. A team of cops would check out ticket purchases, would look up CCTV images at Penn.
Beth looked up a number, dialed it, and put the phone on speaker.
It rang several times and then a voice came on. ‘This is Toccoa Police Department. If you have an emergency –’
Beth hung up.
‘We do have an emergency.’ Meghan raised her head from her screen.
Something in her voice made them look at her.
She turned the screen toward them, highlighted a section of the photograph, and enlarged it.
It was a newspaper on a bench behind Maddie, a local one.
She enlarged the newspaper. ‘Today. The photograph was taken today.’
‘No other trains to or from Toccoa, other than the Crescent.’
Beth was rising even before she had finished. She grabbed her jacket, tossed Meghan’s to her, and by the time they reached the elevator, the cops were behind them.
No other trains meant the chances were high that Maddie was either in or near Toccoa.
Fifteen minutes later they were speeding toward JFK where their Gulfstream was, Chang and Pizaka busy on their phones.
Beth waited for the cops to finish and then asked a question which stumped them all.
‘Why send it to us?’