Come and Find Me by Hallie Ephron

Author:Hallie Ephron [Ephron, Hallie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Suspense, Fiction
ISBN: 9780061857522
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

“Sure looks like the hat your sister had on,” Pam said when Diana had enlarged the frame even more.

Diana stared closely at the image. The hat seemed to be the right shape, and it might have been red, but really it was just a blur. The woman wearing it was definitely not Ashley.

“Even if it is, it doesn’t get us anywhere,” Diana said. “Better to focus on what we know.”

She flattened the hand-drawn map on which she’d noted the times and places they’d spotted Ashley. “She starts out here.” She poked the map at the first A at 6:03:25 on the library’s front steps. “Then she’s here and here.” She moved her finger to the A still on the steps at 6:11:02 and on to the one in the middle of Dartmouth Street at 6:16:23.

Diana went on, tracing all eleven points in time and space. “So, the last time we see her for sure is at 6:23:05,” she said. “Three minutes later, poof.”

“People don’t just disappear.”

“Right. So, what happened between 6:23 and 6:26? With six video cams going, one of them must have picked up something.” As she said that, Diana felt the prickle of excitement. There had to be clues buried somewhere in all that footage. There just had to be.

Diana used all of the monitors to bring up videos from all six cams. She froze each at 6:23:05, the time of the last Ashley sighting. Each of the cameras had a different view, and in one of them, Ashley was standing in the square, facing away from the camera, her cell phone raised.

Diana started the videos, synchronized to the same time and all running at the same slow speed. Ashley stood in a frozen salute. The camera cut away from her to show a woman pushing a double stroller, stopping to look. Simultaneously, another camera was capturing a cop looking baffled. Another focused on Super Dummy appearing in the hotel window. It started its descent. In the panoramic video shot from the office window, almost every pedestrian in Copley Square was frozen, attentions riveted as Super Dummy flew overhead.

“There!” Diana pointed to a pair of figures walking out of the square, the only two in motion. She froze the video.

From overhead, it was impossible to see their faces, and the man’s body shielded the other figure from view. It was hard to make out details, but it looked like a man wearing a baseball cap with his arm around someone smaller.

Diana started the video again in slow motion and they watched as the couple neared the sidewalk.

“Noooo!” Diana howled when the camera cut away for a close-up of the dummy, impaled on the needle-nose spire of the information kiosk. The glitch was the perfect cover.

It felt like forever until the dummy was tugged free and at last there was finally another long shot across Copley Square. But by then, the man and his companion were gone. Time stamp: 6:26:15.

“Where the hell did they go?” Pam whispered.

By then it was afternoon and Eddie needed the video editing suite back.

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