by Matt Lincoln
“It’s alright,” she assured him. “Might be for the best. Sometimes these guys come back to scope out the crime scene after the fact.”
“I’ve heard that,” the redheaded man said, scratching the back of his head. “Doesn’t make much sense to me, though. They have to know that we’ll be here.”
Nina bit her lip. Yeah, if they didn’t know even the basics of criminal psychology here, she was pretty sure that she was in for a ride if she didn’t find this kid soon.
“Yeah, but it’s not supposed to be logical,” she said, letting out a small huff of frustration that she quickly tried to cover up as the other guy’s ears grew even redder. “They can’t resist. They’re either proud of getting away with it—or so they think, anyway—or they’re so nervous about getting caught that they go to the crime scene to try to get some sense of control over the police investigation. Same reason kidnappers show up at vigils or even volunteer to help look for the kid they took.”
The police officers both stared blankly back at her, looking like a pair of deer caught in the headlights.
“Look, what are your names?” she asked them with a small sigh.
“Uh, I’m Officer Barrow, and this is Officer Kurt,” the big-eared man said, gesturing at his colleague. His ears were getting slightly less tomato colored, at least.
“Have you noticed anyone suspicious or out of the ordinary? Or fitting the description from the security tapes?” Nina asked them.
Even if these men weren’t used to big cases like this, they were still police officers, and they knew their own community better than anyone. They could still have some valuable input into the community.
“There’ve been a few weirdos,” the redhead, Kurt, said, exchanging a wary look with his partner.
“Weirdos?” Nina repeated, furrowing her brow and taking a step closer to him in anticipation of his answer. “How so?”
“Guys with cameras and stuff from out of town,” he clarified, looking uneasily back at the crowd. “I think they’re some kind of true crime enthusiasts or something. Is that a thing?”
Nina sighed again. More good news.
“Yeah, it can be,” she said, and she wasn’t exactly surprised to hear about this. “High-profile cases like this, especially kidnappings and serial murders, can attract a weird crowd. Where did they come from? What were they doing? They got here pretty fast.”
It had only been about five or six hours since the kidnapping took place. Nina was mildly surprised that the crazies were already flowing in, though she wasn’t shocked. At this point in her career, she’d seen pretty much everything, though she found that whenever she thought that, something ended up surprising her after all—like a weird new zombie drug straight out of a horror film in New Orleans.
“There were a couple of guys from Durham,” Barrow said. “They were taking pictures of the crime scene and stuff. Said they had some blog. I told them to beat it, but I wrote down the name of the blog. Here.”
Barrow pulled a small notebook out of a pocket on his shirt, flipped to a page about halfway through, and tore it out to hand to Nina. The paper’s edges were worn, crinkled, and frayed from being carried around for so long. The notebook itself looked water-damaged. But Nina could read the words, so it did the trick. It was probably nothing but worth passing on to someone to look into if she didn’t have the time herself.
“Then there was this other guy. He was pretty old,” Kurt continued for his partner. “He was a real weirdo. He had a whole list of all the stranger kidnappings in the state of North Carolina. Said this was the first one we’d ever seen in Edenton.”
“Are we certain that it’s a stranger situation?” Nina asked, as her boss hadn’t told her anything definitive, just that the parents didn’t seem to know the men involved. “Nine times out of ten in these cases, it’s someone the child knows or people hired by someone the child knows.”
“They seemed like a pretty tight-knit family to me,” Barrow said, shaking his head. “I doubt anything like that was going on. Both parents had to take drugs to calm down.”
“Interesting,” Nina said. That really was unusual, that a stranger would just take a child in plain sight like that. So rare that it was almost a statistical anomaly, which was part of why such crimes gained a cult following of sorts.
“Isn’t his mom some kind of government person?” Kurt asked. “Could it be some retaliation for something she did?”
“She works for some random agency,” Nina said, shaking her head dismissively. “It’s not like she’s the mayor or governor or something. She’s just a desk worker. I doubt she gets many enemies that way. Besides, I’d expect something a little more sophisticated in a case like that.”
“That makes sense,” Kurt said, looking a little defeated.
“What about the guys from the security footage?” she asked. “Have you seen anyone fitting either of their descriptions?”
The two officers exchanged another, almost uncomfortable look.
“We haven’t actually been able to look at the footage yet,” Barrow admitted, his ears going scarlet again. “We’ve been pretty tied up here.” He gave the crowd behind him a dirty look.
“Okay, but you have their descriptions, right?” Nina asked, an edge returning to her voice. Were these guys serious? No weirdos with Internet blogs were more important than seeing a video of the actual crime taking place.
“Well, yeah, but that was pretty vague,” Kurt shrugged. “An average height guy in blue jeans and a t-shirt with brown hair? And another white guy who’s just kind of stocky? That could be anybody.”
Nina turned her attention back to the crowd with another huff. The officers’ usefulness seemed to have passed, though as she surveyed the crowd, she realized that they were right. About a third of the crowd could fit that description.
She, however, had actually seen the security footage. There were dozens of people who fit the vague description that the police officers had provided. There were none that she could see who fit the more specific description seared in her mind, though—a man with a thin, hallowed face and a series of acne scars on his right cheek.
She approached the crowd and began to sift through it quickly in her mind. Her training and long career enabled her to do this quickly and efficiently while not alerting anyone to the fact that they were being scrutinized.
Her short stature, gender, and unimposing persona enabled her to do this effectively. Though she had a sharp personality and a gruff demeanor, people had a tendency to underestimate her until they got to know her. To this crowd, she was only one random, almost invisible person in a sea of police officers, security guards, and forensics techs.
She wasn’t able to see everyone in the crowd, given its size, but she was able to sift through the first several rows. No one fit the description of the man in the video.
The security footage also showed that there was another man involved in the abduction of the boy. But he was just a shadowed figure in the distance, the only part of him really visible a gloved hand carrying a gun. A break between his glove and his sleeve showed that he was white. Beyond this, all they knew was that he was of medium height and very muscular.
This was unusual, Nina knew from her career and from what the psychologist had told her on the way there. Normally, these stranger kidnappings were lone-wolf operations. A lone perpetrator, almost always male, would take a child for the purpose of abuse. But two men? Two men indicated that this was some kind of wider operation.
That wasn’t necessarily true, Nina knew. It was possible that two lone wolves could pair up to help each other out and make the abduction easier. But it was her fear and her suspicion. The psychologist and her supervisors at the FBI shared her concerns. However, she would expect that if this were part of a wider operation, it would’ve been more sophisticated. These men were caught on camera, and the one whose face could be seen appeared almost panicked at the moment, as if this wasn’t planned. That was more indicative of a lone-wol
f situation.
But even if there were two lone wolves, that wouldn’t make sense. If they were working together, they had to have planned ahead. The other man was disguised and had a weapon. But the second man wasn’t disguised at all.
There were so many contradictions involved that Nina’s head was spinning as she tried to sort through it all. It had been spinning for hours, and most especially since she’d viewed the security footage at the police station. None of this made sense. None of it added up. This crime didn’t fit any guidebook for how it was supposed to go.
And none of this was good news for that little boy. If the rulebook for working such cases had to be thrown out, how was she supposed to find this kid? Nina worried that even she might be out of her depth on this one as she continued to survey the crowd.
She was so lost in thought that she barely registered a woman yelling at her from just behind the caution tape.
“What?” she asked, shaking her head at the woman, who was leaning forward and hollering something at her.
“Are you a reporter?” the woman, who looked to be middle-aged and was wearing a t-shirt and jeans, asked her, speaking the words slowly and annunciating carefully so that Nina would hear this time.
Nina glanced down at her own attire. A t-shirt and jeans of her own, a uniform that she’d become accustomed to wearing during her months undercover in New Orleans, and had opted to continue wearing when on assignment since it allowed her to blend into the environment. Very few people assumed she was a law enforcement officer when she was dressed like this, let alone an FBI agent. Clearly, it worked, though she doubted she looked like a reporter either. Though since she was behind the caution tape, everyone in the crowd must assume she wasn’t an average citizen.
“No. No, I’m not,” she said, approaching the woman. “I’m here looking into what happened here today. Can you tell me why you’re here?”
“I’m just wondering what happened to that poor little boy,” the woman said, her face falling as if she was disappointed that Nina wasn’t who she thought she was. “I was hoping that someone was here to get the word out.”
Nina glanced out across the still growing crowd.
“I’m pretty sure that’s already been accomplished,” she pointed out. “How did you hear about it?”
“Oh, I’ve been here since this morning,” the woman said, jumping at the opportunity to tell her story. “I was in the shoe store when it happened. I just haven’t been able to bear to leave. I want to help.”
“Shoe store?” Nina repeated, craning her neck to try to see over the crowd. “What shoe store?”
“Oh, over here,” the woman said, motioning for Nina to follow her.
Nina ducked under the caution tape and elbowed through the crowd alongside the woman. This didn’t prove all that difficult since most people were trying to press forward instead of back. They seemed surprised that the two women were turning around and parted for them, jumping at the opportunity to take over the spaces at the front that they left open behind them.
“I’m Agent Nina Gosse,” Nina said, holding out her hand to the woman when they were about halfway through the crowd. “And you are?”
“Matilda Smith,” the woman said, scrunching her face at Nina and gazing at her with some skepticism. “Agent? What kind of agent?”
“FBI,” she said, and the woman continued to stare blankly back at her. “I like to blend in.”
“Right,” she said, looking a little shaken by this. “Come on, this way.”
She motioned again for Nina to follow her off to the side now. The crowd was more spread out now since most of the people were packed toward the front near the food court.
Smith led Nina toward a shoe store, which was boarded up and dark inside. The doors were closed and appeared to be locked.
“Is this where it happened?” Nina asked, remembering that the boy had wandered in front of a store before he was taken, though which shop it was hadn’t been clearly visible in the security footage.
“A little further down there, by that tree,” Smith said, pointing behind them at a potted plant that Nina wouldn’t quite consider a tree several paces away from the store’s entrance. She recognized the side of the pot from the background of the security footage.
She walked briskly over to the plant and began to sift through the mulch inside with her hands. Sometimes, perps left things in places like this or in garbage cans that they needed to discard quickly. She knew that the police had already looked through the trash, but she wasn’t sure if they’d thought of the tree.
“What… what are you doing?” the woman stammered, giving Nina another skeptical look.
“Looking to see if they left anything here,” she explained gruffly, digging her arms as deep into the pot as she could.
She came up empty-handed, however, except for some dirt. She wasn’t surprised, considering that the security footage didn’t show the perps dropping anything in there, but it was worth a shot considering that the whole plant hadn’t made it into the video’s frame.
“Okay, then,” Smith said slowly, and Nina was pretty sure the woman thought that she was just some crackpot who managed to make it past the caution tape and the security guards.
She pulled out her FBI badge and showed it to her.
“Proof, just in case you think I’m crazy,” Nina said, flashing her a lopsided grin.
Smith blinked at the badge and then nodded, seeming to accept this evidence, though she still seemed a bit put off by Nina, who was clearly not what she would’ve expected. Nina kind of liked this. The way she had a tendency to surprise people was one of her greatest assets.
“Alright, then,” she said, shaking her head and giving a shaky laugh.
“So you were in the store when it happened?” Nina asked, urging her to tell her side of the story.
“Oh, yeah, I was checking out,” she said, her eyes lighting up at the opportunity to talk about it. “My German Shepherd ate my gym shoes. I needed new ones. He’s a good dog, really. He just got left alone for too long that day. My fault, really.”
“I’m sure,” Nina said dryly, motioning for the woman to move it along.
“Right, so, I was buying the shoes, and then I heard someone scream behind me,” she continued. “I thought it was a little girl at first, and then I saw that it was a boy, a little younger than I thought. I’d say he was six or seven. That guy in the brown jacket was carrying him.”
Nina perked up at this. The more visible man in the video had been wearing a brown jacket.
“You saw him?” she asked, a little sharper than she’d intended. “What did you see? What did he look like?”
“Oh, I didn’t get a great look at him,” the woman said, scrunching up her face as if trying to remember. “Just that he was white and pretty thin. His cheek looked kind of weird, the one that was facing me.”
Nina had to admit, she was impressed. She’d thought this woman an attention-seeker, and those types tended not to give the most reliable eyewitness testimony, instead inflating their own memory and giving wildly detailed descriptions that almost always turned out to be inaccurate.
Matilda Smith, however, had minimized her own reliability as a witness while providing a sufficiently detailed description of the perpetrator that matched what Nina herself had seen on the security tape.
“Thank you,” she said honestly, nodding to the woman. “That fits other descriptions. Did you get a look at the other one at all?”
“The other one?” Smith repeated, shaking her head in confusion as her eyes widened. “There was another one?”
“Why don’t you tell me what else you remember seeing?” Nina asked in response, not wanting to give the woman any leading answers that could influence her memory or statement at all.
“Well, there were a bunch of people walking around,” she said slowly with a nod. “No one intervened. They probably thought the man was the kid’s father. That’s what I thought at first. I didn’t even think th
at it could be… well, what it turned out to be.”
The woman looked uncomfortable naming the crime. This wasn’t uncommon in situations such as these. The idea of what could be happening to the child was unmentionable, unspeakable. Nina cringed internally at the thought herself.
“Anything else? When did you realize what had happened?” Nina asked.
“Well, someone mentioned that they saw the man with a gun,” Smith said. “Though she said he was wearing black. I thought I might be misremembering, but now I’m wondering if that was the second guy you mentioned.”
“Who was this other witness?” Nina asked, pulling a notebook and pencil out of her pocket.
“Oh, I don’t know, some lady who worked at the store,” the woman said dismissively. “I didn’t catch her name. I saw her talking to the police earlier, right before I did.”
“Alright, that’s good,” Nina said, scribbling this down in her notebook. She’d get a full report on the witnesses from the police later on.
“I realized what was going on when the parents showed up,” Smith said, her face falling again at the memory. “They weren’t that far away. Just a few feet, ordering food. They didn’t even realize the boy wasn’t next to them anymore. When they realized what had happened, they were both screaming and running around. Then a bunch of us helped them, and the security guards looked for him, but, well, you know…”
“You didn’t see the man in the brown jacket again?” Nina asked.
“No,” Smith sighed, shaking her head. “I looked everywhere, but he was gone.”
“Did you see which direction he went?” Nina asked, knowing the answer already from the footage but wanting to hear the woman’s account for herself.
“Oh, that way,” Smith said, pointing to their left, away from the food court. “They would’ve been stupid to take him past the parents. They must’ve been watching the family. Targeted him. That was my impression, anyway.”
“There’s another entrance down this way?” Nina asked, pointing in that direction as well as a chill ran up and down her spine at the thought of these disgusting men creeping on the family for who knew how long. “How far away is it?”
