In her office, Eve pored over search results.
She knew the expression was “finding a needle in a haystack,” but that was bogus. Who the hell would put a needle in a haystack? Plus, she wasn’t entirely sure what a haystack was, exactly.
Still, she accepted trying to find probable, even possible buildings that fit her requirements in the whole of New York equaled the damn needle.
On the other hand, if somebody was stupid enough to toss a needle into a stack of hay, the needle was in the stack of hay. So she adjusted some factors of the search, started another run.
While that worked, she shifted to Peabody’s progress, and McNab’s, and Feeney’s.
Too many girls, she thought. Too many names and faces. But she believed she had a better shot at finding a pattern.
She separated the potentials into two categories. What she thought of as the Mina type—solid family, good neighborhood, no history of trouble. Then the Dorian type—basically the opposite. She added a third category for a mix. The girl from a good home who fell into trouble anyway. The girl with a crappy homelife who kept her head down.
She divided those into subcategories: rural, urban, suburban.
With that, she began the arduous task of picking through the case files, looking for similarities.
And found some.
She looked at her board, considered the size of her office. She thought about the conference room, then grabbed what she needed before walking out to the bullpen.
“I’m pushing an angle,” she told Peabody. “I already see four girls snatched on the way home after a post-school deal. Sports practice, a play rehearsal, a tutoring thing—all regular schedule stuff.”
“That’s a good angle.”
“Maybe. I’m going to take it home, work from there. You can do the same.”
“I think I’ll kick it up to the EDD lab with McNab. Primo equipment there. You know, I kind of thought this was a needle in the haystack, but once you get into it, you can see, with some—like the after-school stuff—a kind of pattern.”
“Right. Why is there a needle in a haystack?”
“I don’t know. Someone dropped it?”
“Seems dumbass to look for it. I mean, a diamond in a haystack, okay, but who can’t get another needle? Anyway, send me whatever needles you find.”
She let it roll around in her head on the way down to the garage. First you have to spot the kid, so—most likely—scouts troll schools. Once you spot the kid, you just spend some time stalking—not even that if an opportunity jumps in your lap.
Snatch the kid, transport the kid, collect your fee. Had to be a sizable fee, Eve thought as she got into her car. Kidnapping a minor would get you a very long stretch.
The scouts had to blend into their hunting ground, she concluded as she swung out of the garage and into snarled traffic.
Good clothes, decent haircut in an upscale area. Or a uniform—delivery person for instance. Repair guy. Cop.
She put more weight on cop. Wouldn’t a kid tend to go with a cop—and not tend to go with some random stranger?
An authority figure anyway.
Or.
She let it roll around a little more as she dealt with the stop-and-go. Why not use another kid—or someone younger? Not so threatening, as Willowby suggested.
She played around with the idea. A teenager, or someone who looked like one. Nonthreatening.
Hadn’t she recently used Jamie Lingstrom—college boy—in a ruse to get a murderer to open the door?
So maybe at least some of the scouts were young—or some worked in pairs.
The runaways or troubled kids made easier targets. You spotted them on the street and grabbed them up. Maybe offer them some Zoner, or a place to flop, whatever. They might possess more canniness than the Mina type, but they wouldn’t stand a chance against an experienced abductor.
Transportation. Had to have it.
A closed van, a fake (or not) cop car. A vehicle trunk if you could work fast enough.
She had dozens of angles, questions, possible answers circling in her head as she battled her way uptown.
On impulse, she detoured, and after a hunt for parking, doubled it on Forty-Ninth off Fifth.
She hiked her way to a stall selling I HEART NY caps and T-shirts and other tourist paraphernalia.
The kid had had one of those growth spurts, she realized as she watched Tiko make a sale. The young entrepreneur still had a baby face, but he now wore his hair in short dreads and sported a pair of the wraparound shades on sale in his stall.
He shot Eve a grin when he spotted her.
“You need these.” He plucked up a pair of the shades—mirrored lenses and black frames.
“I’ve got shades.”
“Why’n you wearing them?”
She’d probably lost them again. No, left them in her desk.
No, in the car.
Shit, who knew?
“I want to show you a couple pictures.”
His grin faded. “You got trouble.”
“Someone does. I’m going to show you, then I’m going to send copies to your ’link so you can show them around.”
“Hold it. Buy three,” he told a potential customer, “you get the third half price. Shorthanded today,” he said to Eve. “Girl who helps me went and sassed her mama, and she got herself house arrested.”
He made the sale, turned back to Eve.
Then studied the photo of Mina Cabot.
“That’s the girl got dead. Saw about it on-screen. It’s sad.”
“Did you ever see her before that? Before on-screen?”
“Uh-uh. Hard to miss that hair, check it? And the looks with it.”
“Right. How about this one?” Eve swiped to the photo of Dorian Gregg.
Tiko frowned, turned his head side to side. “I remember her.”
Eve felt a lurch in her gut. “Don’t tell me what I want to hear because I want to hear it.”
“Why’d I lie to you? You’re the good cops. I took my granny to see your vid, about the clones? Frosted supreme. I remember her, but it’s back during holiday sale time. Maybe December, maybe November—but late in that, ’cause I had turkey stuff on clearance.”
“Turkey stuff. So after Thanksgiving.”
“For sure after.”
He held up a finger, walked over to a couple fiddling with the shirts and caps, made his pitch.
Damn good pitch, Eve decided, as he sold and bagged three shirts, two caps, some sort of purse thing, and sunshades.
“For sure after,” he said again when he stepped back over to Eve. “And not here. I got a second stall downtown. I expanded.” The grin popped back. “I got five em-ploy-ees.”
Two stalls, five employees, Eve thought, and he was younger than the child in the morgue.
“Do you have any trouble, anyone trying to hassle or hustle you?”
He married a snort with a shrug. “Maybe they try, but I handle that. Plus, I made friends with the beat cops, even the droids. I just show them the card you give me, say Dallas is a friend of mine. They look out for me and my staff.”
She decided the kid would likely give Roarke a run at owning half of New York one of these days.
“Okay. Tell me how you remember the girl from months ago.”
“She is fine,” he said simply. “Gotta look twice at that kind of fine. And she’s staking out the stall. I got scarves and hats—good quality, good prices—gloves and bags. I know a street thief when I see one, check it?”
“Yeah, I check it.”
“So, even if she’s fine, I give her a look that lets her know I know, and she better not try lifting from me. And I think might be she’s cold, so I tell her if she’s got five, I’ve got a few scarves under my table got some flaws, and she can take one for five. I think she’s pissed I made her so easy, but she dug up the five, and took a scarf—an orange-and-black one.”
“Jesus, you remember all that? You’re absolutely sure?”
“Hundred percent. Hold it.”
He dealt with a trio of customers already loaded with shopping bags.
“After Thanksgiving,” Eve said the moment he freed up again. “But before Christmas.”
“Had to be. Scarf she took was like Halloween and Thanksgiving stock, and already on discount, so I could break even selling it to her so low. I had the Santa stuff, and snowflakes, and the good-quality gift scarves and hats and all.”
“Did you see her again, after that?”
“Once, not long after—few days maybe. She had on the scarf and was stalking some tourists. I didn’t say anything to the beat cops.” He shrugged. “I figure she’s just trying to get through, right? That’s different than the bad guys.”
“All right. I’m going to send the pictures to your ’link, and I need the exact location of your downtown stall.”
“She get dead, too?”
“No.”
“She do something you gotta arrest her for?”
“No.”
“In trouble then?”
“Yes, she’s in trouble. I want to find her, get her out of trouble.”
“Anybody can, it’s gonna be you. But you need these shades. They’re badass. I’ll give you a cop discount.”
She bought the shades, got the stall location, transferred the photos to his ’link.
“Thanks for the help.”
He just pointed at the shades she’d slipped on. “Badass.”
“Check it.”
On the way back to her car, she ordered up some uniforms to canvass a four-block radius around the downtown stall location. If Tiko had spotted Dorian twice, someone else must have seen her.
The orange-and-black scarf wouldn’t hurt pinning a sighting.
Tiko added weight to what she already firmly believed. Dorian had been abducted from New York. And now, the most logical conclusion targeted that abduction after Thanksgiving and before Christmas.
Wouldn’t she have roamed the same area? And if so, Tiko—sharp eyes, quick brain—would’ve seen her again.
Either way, she thought, and launched the battle with traffic again, Mina’s abduction came first, and by at least a few weeks.
She contacted Peabody to relay the information.
“Tiko? Jeez! That’s a serious break. I never thought of him as a possible source.”
“I nearly didn’t. We might get lucky, hit more sightings, pinpoint the abduction time and location. At least get closer.”
“And if she got away, maybe she’d go back to the familiar, to that area. Maybe she had a hole downtown, and near enough to Tiko’s stall for him to spot her twice.”
“We’ll see what the uniforms dig up.”
“We’re going to stick in the lab awhile, then take a break and go by the house. We’ll run some auto-searches from home after.”
“Just keep it coming. I’m nearly home. I’ll pick it up from there. If anything pops from the uniforms, we’ll follow up in the morning. I’ll let you know.”
Eve clicked off. It felt like movement, she thought. Maybe a direction.
And when the gates opened for her, she thought of Roarke.
How much did she include him in this one? She had Feeney and EDD all over it, but … He had his own way, and that way proved invaluable time after time.
What felt like movement meant she couldn’t afford to push aside anything or anyone who could inch the movement forward.
She studied the house, the elegance, the fantasy of it against the summer-blue sky. Almost always, just the wonder of it lowered her stress level.
This evening, it lifted it.
Stupid, she admitted. Roarke would deal just as she would. As they would.
But with this, she didn’t bring only death into their house, but the misery of the past with it.
It weighed on her as she went in.
But instead of Summerset and the cat looming in the foyer, she saw Roarke with Galahad.
“It’s a visual illusion. Like a holo.” She peered down at the cat as he jogged to her. “Maybe you’re not you, either.”
“Summerset’s having an early dinner with Ivanna before a night at the theater.” Now he walked over, kissed her.
“Even an illusion or holo tech couldn’t make Summerset do that, like that. I guess you’re you.”
“On the other hand, look at you, Lieutenant, in those shades.”
“Badass, right? That was the sales pitch.”
“Definitely.”
Studying her face, he skimmed a finger down the dent in her chin. “Let’s have a glass of wine on the patio. You can tell me what’s brewing in here.” He tapped a finger to her temple. “Then we’ll go up and deal with it.”
“I didn’t want to bring it home to you.”
“Bring yourself home to me, and anything that comes with you is fine.”
More her problem, she thought, so much more hers than his. So she leaned into him, held on to him. “Let’s just do this for a minute first.”
“Are you hurting?” he murmured.
“I’m not. I promise, I’m not. It’s in there, I know it, but I have a grip on it. It’s different now that I know I can get a grip on it. I’m okay if you are.”
“And I am.”
“Then I’d like to sit outside for a bit. I think, maybe, we caught a break. I don’t know if it’ll open it up, but I think it’s a break. And,” she continued as they began to walk to the back, “I could use your help. I wasn’t going to ask—didn’t want to—because I didn’t want to bring it home.”
“Does it make it easier if I tell you it helps me when you ask?”
“I guess it does.”
She waited until he’d selected a bottle of wine, opened it.
And when they sat together amid the tumbling flowers, she took her first sip of something white and bright.
“I’ll start with the break. I went by Tiko’s Midtown stall.”
Roarke sat back, stretched out his legs. “Tiko. Well now, of course—and explains the sunshades. The boy has the eyes, the ears, the instincts. Did you know he has a second stall downtown?”
“I do now. How do you know?”
“I happened to go by one day a few weeks ago. I told him, when he’s ready for a shop, I’d find him a space and back him on it. Did he see either of the girls?”
“Dorian Gregg.”
She told him, all of it, winding back to Nadine, the ongoing work in EDD, the frustrating and unproductive search on properties.
“You’ve too many variables on buildings, it seems to me.”
“You think?” She blew out a breath, tipped her head back to the sky. “Got nowhere, really. I changed some of those factors, running it again. I’m inclined to think downtown. Not too close to the dump site, but not too far, either. It had to be a rush job, right? ‘Oops, dead kid. How can we get rid of her, and use her?’ But.”
“But she may have escaped from a location farther away. They may have transported her a longer distance in hopes of doing more to cover tracks. Add,” Roarke continued as she scowled and drank wine, “without a solid idea of how many girls might be held, you can’t judge the size of the building. Two girls, three or four, you’d need one thing. A dozen or more, surely you’d need another.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“However, your call on windows, for instance? The lack of them, or minimal number, seems logical. One-way glass as an alternative, shatterproof. The shipping dock or something of the kind seems logical as well.”
“I go back to that lunatic Dawber, and the three women he held. We knew, all the arrows pointed to a private residence, single occupancy, probably with a basement, and in a fairly narrow target area. And that wasn’t a snap to run searches on. This? I’m punching at shadows and know it.”
“I could punch at some for you if you like.”
“I didn’t want to bring it home to you,” she repeated. “Are you hurting?”
“I’m not. I’m worried for you, and you shouldn’t expect otherwise. You’ve barely come off another case involving abduction and brutality that brought back hard memories. And this, on top of that, involves children.
“But we’ll get through it. And you’ll find who’s hurt these girls. I have every faith there. In a bit of a while, we’ll have a break, a nice long one in Greece and in Ireland. We’ll get through it.”
Greece and Ireland seemed, at that moment, like some floating fantasy.
“I feel we’ve got some movement with Tiko spotting her. A time frame, a location where she was almost certainly snatched. We know she was taken from here, from New York. For Mina, blocks from home in the Philadelphia ’burbs. And if we can solidify any of the other missings into a pattern, we have something to build on.”
“And now you have Dorian’s face out there through Nadine.”
“Unless she lucks into someone with a vehicle who’ll drive her out, she’s unlikely to get out of New York without being spotted. We’ve covered all the transpo stations. I’ve got them monitoring for her at the bridges and tunnels. She can get out if she’s determined, but I don’t know where she’d want to go or why.”
“Away from her captors.”
“Yeah, there’s that. But where?”
Desperation, Eve thought, could send you rushing into the dark. No plan, no destination, just away.
“She had a window to get out before we ID’d her. If she jumped through it, she’s in the wind. But she’s barely thirteen. I’m thinking her first instinct would be to hide. Tiko made her as a street thief,” Eve added. “And yeah, he’s got the eye for that. Wouldn’t she need a little time to get enough funds to buy a bus or train ticket? Unless she managed to steal some money before they got out, she’d have nothing.”
“Why not be optimistic at this point, assume she’s still in New York?”
“Optimism likes to kick you in the ass, and panic could’ve shot her straight out of New York into anywhere else. But we find her, we find them. Otherwise, we punch at shadows until we hit something solid.”
“Why don’t we go up and get started on that?” He rose, held out a hand to her.
“You know what?” She took his hand, pushed up. “I’ve got these badass shades. If optimism tries to kick this badass, I’m kicking back.”
“I’m not at all sure how that works, but we’ll go with it. Why don’t you send me your property search results,” he said as they went back inside. “I’ll take a look, see how I might refine them.”
“Yeah, good luck with that.”
“She said, optimistically.”
She gave him an elbow jab as he called for one of the elevators she’d forgotten they had.
“I’ll get something started while you do your updates. We’ll have some dinner while all that brews.”
“I need to look over what EDD’s come up with. I need that pattern. And I want to check in with Willowby if she hasn’t sent me anything.”
“We’ll start and see where it takes us.”
When they stepped into her office, he walked over, opened her terrace doors while she went to her command center. Galahad, sprawled over her sleep chair, yawned.
“Do you want the search results in your office or here?” she asked Roarke.
“My office for now. You take the room. Let’s try for an hour.”
She sat, sent Roarke the whole damn mess, then remembered to take off the sunshades. Before she started her updates, she pounced on a report from Harvo.
And optimism kicked her in the ass.
No exact matches on the underwear from any outlet. Similar designs with the same or similar materials? What Harvo rightfully called a “slew.”
She’d keep working it, but opined the products had been designed, manufactured, and sold off-book.
“Yeah, so dead end there, or close to it.”
Hoping for better, she read a quick report from Willowby.
The detective monitored some chatter about upcoming sales, auctions, import, exports. The fact children were nothing more than products to move on the market sat hard in her gut.
And carrying that, she did the initial updates, board and book, before bringing up Peabody’s data.
She added more names and faces and files to her categories.
“Computer, run probability on category one. Highest to lowest with current data, subject abducted by same party or parties as Mina Cabot and Dorian Gregg.”
Current data is insufficient for top-level accuracy …
“Run it anyway.”
Acknowledged. Working …
While it worked, she programmed more coffee, put her boots up, and with her eyes and mind on the board, let the whole thing circle.
Slick, sophisticated, structured organization. Considering the quality of Mina’s clothing, well-funded and/or profitable. Multiple employees—had to have multiple employees, had to have a secure property for housing. Almost certainly had to have some sort of studio to generate photos, vids. Had to generate healthy food, the grooming crap. Medicals on board? Highly probable.
Guards—matrons? She thought of her years in state schools. Matrons—they didn’t call them guards, but hell, same deal. But female for the females. They sure as hell didn’t want some perv (though they came in female varieties, too) screwing around with the students.
Or vice versa, she remembered.
Female guards, she decided. Couldn’t have the staff devaluing the product.
Who paid them? Who headed the whole thing up? An individual, a syndicate, a partnership?
Probability complete …
“Results on-screen,” Eve ordered. “Well, son of a bitch.”
She dropped her feet, leaned forward. In the first category run, the Mina category, she had three who hit over ninety percent.
“Computer, run second category.”
Acknowledged. Warning: data insufficient for top-level accuracy. Working …
Eve pulled out the three case files, then held up a hand when Roarke came back in.
“Wait, okay. I might have something. Nydia Lu, age twelve, West Bloomfield, New Jersey. Missing since September 2060. Left school—private—after orchestra practice. Plays the violin. Walked a block with a couple friends, peeled off to walk the next three blocks home. Never made it. No ransom demand, no trace.
“What do you see?”
“A striking young girl. Mixed race, gorgeous, happy eyes, a shy smile.”
Eve ordered a printout. “Put her up on the board, will you?”
She brought up the next.
“Aster McMillian, age thirteen, Potomac, Maryland. Missing since February. Play practice, vanished on the four-block walk from school. Private—exclusive, too, this one looks like. Wealthy family, one older sib, one younger. No ransom demand, no trace. You’d say striking again?”
“I would, yes. Blond hair, blue eyes, bright, confident smile.”
“Got one more who hit over ninety probability. Insufficient data, my ass. Liberty Stone, age eleven—twelve now—Pike Creek, Delaware. Missing since October 2060. Choir practice—school choir. Private. Two fricking blocks from there to her house. Solid family—one sib. No ransom, no trace.”
“Another young beauty,” Roarke said. “Golden brown skin, green eyes, hint of dimples. If these girls were taken by the same people, that’s up to five.”
“It’s going to be more. These are just the over ninety in the Mina category. I’ve got it running the Dorian type. Then I did a mix on a third. Plus, the insufficient data crap. It’s factoring locations, distances. When we open that up?”
She pushed away from the command center, began to pace.
“Coincidence equals bollocks. These three popped because this is the goddamn pattern. For this type. Jesus, we could have a dozen, more, just from the northeast and mid-Atlantic. Toss in Pennsylvania, and what would it be … Ohio? Maybe they have more than one location—West Coast, Midwest, South, Southwest. Or they bring them all here to New York.”
“A port city,” Roarke pointed out. “If I set up a business to smuggle out any sort of illegal product, I’d want port cities. Busy ones,” he added. “Major ones with a variety of transportation hubs.”
She looked back at him. “You did have a smuggling business.”
“We could call it that,” he said easily. “More, I’d say, interests, but it comes to the same for logistics.”
He glanced over as her comp signaled. And Eve pounced.
“It only gives me one over ninety here, Lottie Crug, age twelve, from the Heights. Got a juvie sheet. Truancy, shoplifting, chronic runaway. Comp’s basically matching her up with Dorian. But she fits. Missing since April, suspected runaway. She’s got the looks.”
“She does. You have six in the eighty-percent range.”
“Yeah, I see. I’m going to add the two that hit between eighty-five and ninety. One from Queens, one from Baltimore. Baltimore—foster kid. Queens, abusive father’s how it reads. Mother filed restraining order, blah blah.
“They slide right in from where I’m standing. It’s a goddamn pattern, Roarke. It’s a fucking system.”
“I agree. Run your third. I’ll see to dinner. You’ll eat,” he said before she could object. “Think it through, talk it out. And we’ll talk about how my own search is going.”
“If you’ve got—”
“If I had something definitive, I wouldn’t be programming dinner.” He kissed her forehead. “Run the third.”