by Ninie Hammon
Francine Ferrigliano shook her head; Jeanette Campbell continued to cry. Norm Campbell came back into the room and handed a file to Agent Arya, who opened it immediately, sat down with it and began flipping through the papers, making notes on his laptop.
"We were asking your wife if you know the second child who was taken — Christi Strickland?" Brice said.
"No, I don't think … I don't recognize the name."
"She's not someone Riley played with, or maybe you know the parents?" Trimboli said. "Perhaps you were together with the parents somewhere and the children would have met."
Brice pulled up the little girl's picture on his phone and handed it to Norm Campbell. He passed it to his wife to look. Both of them shook their heads.
A large man came into the room then. He was older, his gray hair cut military short, his eyes deep set and intense above a nose that had clearly been broken multiple times.
"This is my husband, Tony," Francine said. To him, she said, "They say another child is missing, a little girl named Christi Strickland."
"I was asking the Campbells if they knew the little girl," Brice said and handed the picture to Tony. "Do you?"
"No, I'm afraid I …" He stopped. "Wait a minute. Isn't there a family at church named Strickland?"
"I don't remember anybody—" Francine began.
"Yes, now that you — I think the name was Strickland," Norm said, recognition lighting his face. "I met him when I was working the welcome center. They were attending for the first time. Let me think … yes Russell and Claire … no, Claudette Strickland. And I think they had a little girl, but I'm not sure."
"What church is that?" Brice asked.
"We go to Covenant Community Church on Haverton Drive," Norm said. "It's a big church. We have a service on Saturday night and two on Sunday and with that many people, you just don't know everybody."
Brice messaged the information about the church to Nakamura, who at that moment was talking to the Stricklands, then he and the two agents continued with more questions, picking and prodding, looking for any time the Campbells might have crossed paths with the Stricklands or their children might have met. Karate lessons, maybe. Swimming lessons. Sports — baseball, tee ball, soccer, gymnastics?
Were the fathers on the same bowling league? The mothers in the same book club? Did they meet at the country club or maybe at a social event, a party at the home of some mutual acquaintance? Russell Strickland was a bricklayer — had he maybe worked on a project, built a patio for them or for a neighbor, worked on a retaining wall? Claudette Strickland worked at the Kavanaugh County Savings and Loan. Did they maybe meet there?
At the end of all the questions, the only possible link Brice could find was that both couples attended the same church, though they clearly weren't friends there.
Finally, Brice flipped his notepad closed.
"Thank you for your time—"
"Wait — what can you tell us about Riley?" Norm Campbell demanded. "We ask and ask, but nobody knows anything. They just tell us they're investigating or they're doing everything they can, or … or …"
"My little boy is gone!" Jeanette Campbell cried. "His little sister wanders around the house looking for him, wondering what happened to him. Please, you have to find him, you have to—"
She broke down then, wrenching sobs shaking her whole body. As her husband and Francine tried to comfort her, Brice glanced out through the bay windows and saw a lone little girl in the back yard, about five, swinging slowly back and forth in the swing.
He caught Trimboli's eye and motioned with his chin toward the child. The agent got it and nodded. She'd keep the parents occupied to give Brice a chance to talk to the little girl.
Brice went out into the back yard, closing the door quietly behind him, and approached the little girl.
"Hi Holly, I'm Sheriff McGreggor."
The little girl had red "strawberry blonde" hair almost the same color as her mother's. Riley's hair had been deeper, more wine-colored, but then he wasn't Jeanette Campbell's biological son, either. With the red hair, Brice was sure nobody'd ever questioned his heritage.
She stopped swinging and looked up at him with huge gray eyes.
"Are you helping them find Riley?"
"I'm trying."
"Find him. I'm scared of the dark. Sometimes at night, I go get in bed with Riley, but he's not there and I'm all by myself."
Brice settled on one knee in front of the child so he wasn't so imposing a figure.
"We're doing everything we can to find him. Is there anything you know about him that might tell us where he is?"
"What kind of thing?"
"Oh, I don't know … some … secret maybe he told you, about somewhere he went or someone he knew."
The little girl froze, instantly closed up. He could almost hear the doors banging shut inside her.
"I don't know any secrets. Secrets are for grownups and little kids don't get to keep secrets. Mommy said."
"But you and Riley had secrets, didn't you?"
"Secrets are for grownups. I don't know any secrets."
She hopped down off the swing and ran toward the house. Brice watched her cross the yard and go in the back door.
That child knew something she wasn't telling, something Riley had confided to her, some secret they shared. It probably had absolutely nothing to do with the boy's disappearance, still … Brice didn't want to push, though. That would drive the little girl further away. He'd let it go for now, come back to it later.
Chapter Twenty-One
When Brice returned to the courthouse, he found Nakamura in the conference room command center where he and agents Gomez and Hardesty were peering into a large computer monitor. Deputy Tackett had obviously sweet-talked the librarian into letting him borrow it. Nakamura caught Brice's eye, glanced toward the monitor and actually smiled. That was probably as close as Brice would ever get to earning the man's approval.
The agents were looking at a view from a security camera. Only a portion of the street was visible and it was possible to tell only the color, and in some cases the make or model of the cars driving past.
"This is the camera from the ATM at West Side Bank," Agent Gomez said.
"That's four, no, five blocks from the park," Brice said.
"It's the closest camera, though, on Hickman Street and on the same side of the street as the park. If a car picked Christi up there, it would have been driving north on Hickman."
"And could have turned off at three other streets before it got to the bank," Brice pointed out.
"Your deputies said there are no traffic camera surveillance cameras anywhere other than in downtown," Nakamura said and Brice nodded.
"There are several hundred of them there, on a grid at every other intersection, going from Second through Eleventh Streets east to west and starting at Bartlesville Lane and going ten blocks north of Phelps Street. There's a camera on Parker's Jewelry Store on Marrow Street, but that's five blocks south of the park, and several office buildings have cameras, but they don't show much beyond the entrances and exits. And, of course, the old homes in the Historic District are broke out with security cameras, but that's on the other side of town from the park."
"Starting fifteen minutes before and for an hour after the little girl went missing, more than a hundred cars went by the ATM camera at this bank," Gomez said. "We've compiled a list of colors, makes, models — sixty-one white, nineteen silver or gray, twenty-two black or dark blue, Hondas, Nissans, Fords, Toyotas, four pickup trucks, a UPS truck, a bread truck, a plumbing company service van and four motorcycles."
"That narrows it down," Brice said.
Nakamura sat back and rubbed his eyes.
"Anything promising from the Stricklands?" Brice asked.
"Nothing that leapt out. They don't know the Campbell family. I sent Gascoyne to that church both families attend. He said children's classes there are divided according to sex — little boys in one room, girls in another.
And by age. Since the Strickland girl was eleven and Riley was seven, there's no way they would have been in the same classes."
"I had deputies check with the neighbors up and down the Campbells’ street, trying to find anyone who knew the Stricklands," Brice said. "Maybe had them over for a cookout or something. Other than the Ferriglianos from next door, so far we have found no one in the neighborhood who knew the Stricklands."
"Still working on the Stricklands' neighbors," Nakamura said. "But I'm not hopeful. A working-class neighborhood like that, not the kind of place where people would socialize with a family like the Campbells."
"Anything on Riley Campbell's adoption?"
Nakamura shook his head. "So your son's kidnapped and you don't think it might be a good idea to tell the FBI that he's adopted, that there's maybe a mother, a father … somebody out there who'd be interested in him."
Brice rolled his eyes in agreement.
"We found the attorney and at first blush he appears to be on the up and up — a greedy bloodsucker, but not shady. He's giving us the runaround about producing records on the mother in the adoption. That might have been a promising lead, except …"
Nakamura sat down on the edge of the table and looked up at Brice.
"Two children."
He didn't have to say more. Mrs. Campbell had guessed. Brice knew. The second kidnapping changed everything. Clearly, they weren't dealing with some now-adult teenage girl who'd been pressured into giving up her child for adoption.
Why would a kidnapper take a second child unless he was "finished" with the first one?
What did that mean to the little boy with red hair and a serious face who had walked out onto a school playground two days ago and vanished?
There was a knock at Bailey's door, firm and authoritative. Brice.
She had been able to distinguish Bethany's cries from the cries of other babies in the hospital nursery, too. Why that popped into her head at that moment, she couldn't have said.
"You heard?"
"I heard." The Amber Alert app had gone off on T.J.'s phone as they drove back to Shadow Rock from Ohio.
Brice sat down on the couch, collapsed on it, actually.
"Coffee?"
"If I drink one more cup of coffee …”
"Soft drink then, tea? Glass of water?"
"Water, yeah, that'd be good."
When she returned with the water and he took it, she saw that the back of his right hand was an ugly blue-black, and swollen like he'd stuffed cotton beneath the skin from his knuckles to his wrist.
"What on earth happened to your—?"
He followed her gaze. "Pipe," was all he said, as if that were an explanation. She opened her mouth to ask what he meant, then closed it. He wasn't even aware of the injury, merely sat clinking the ice against the edges of the water glass without taking a drink.
She let the silence linger for a little longer before she spoke.
"Do you have something of the little girl's?"
His thousand-yard star yanked instantly to her face.
"Oh, no, no, no, we're not going there. You're not going there. That's not why I came by. I just … needed a break."
He cast a glance toward the hallway that led to her studio.
"Besides, trying to paint a portrait wasn't exactly a spectacular success last time."
They both fell silent. The only sound was the clinking of ice cubes in Brice's glass.
"What did you find out about the little girl you painted?"
"Nothing that would help you find Riley."
And again, silence.
Then a thought occurred to her.
"Okay, so the painting part isn't working out very well right now, but I made a connection — a psychic connection — when I was in Riley's classroom, which is where he'd been minutes before he disappeared …"
She let the statement dangle.
"And …?"
"Maybe if I was where Christi Strickland had been minutes before she disappeared, I'd connect to … something."
"To what?"
"I don't know. Barney the purple dinosaur, maybe." She'd made a remark about Barney when she'd awakened in the hospital with a bullet stuck in her brain — and nobody'd appreciated it then, either. "I probably won't connect to anything at all. Or to something as random and unhelpful as a little girl in a wrecked camper. But … there's always a chance …"
Brice said nothing.
"It's not like you're covered up with more reliable leads, you know."
He wouldn't have been sitting helpless in her living room if there were a single, tiny stone anywhere in Kavanaugh County he hadn't already looked under.
As they drove to the park on the other side of town, Bailey filled him in on what she, T.J. and Dobbs had found out about the little girl she had painted — Caitlyn Whitfield.
"If you try to trace her through the state hospital, they'd be violating HIPAA laws to give out any medical information."
"We're not trying to trace her anywhere. Dobbs hired a professional investigator." Minutes after she'd dropped him off, Dobbs had called to tell her he'd found someone. She couldn't remember the name — something Polish, Slavic. "Every time he comes up with a bit of new information, he's going to let us know and then he'll file a full written report when he's finished."
"I'd be interested in seeing that report."
"I'll tell Dobbs to get the guy to send you a copy."
Brice parked the cruiser beneath a streetlight next to an opening in a decorative rock-wall fence that appeared to stretch down that whole side of the park. She saw a closed concession stand with multicolored lights outlining its roof — surely not last Christmas's decorations — and picnic tables painted various crayon colors scattered around beneath trees. They walked along the rock wall as Brice told her that the forensics team that investigated the area found nothing. The neighborhood surveillance cameras were equally unhelpful. The little girl had vanished. Poof. Just like Riley Campbell. No footprints. No dropped cigarette butt. No microscopic fiber. No trace of anything. Nothing.
Brice indicated an area next to the rock wall, enclosed by a lilac bush on one side and some big metal boxes on the other, and told Bailey how the two little girls had been arguing over the Barbie camper when Christi got up and walked away — toward the rock wall next to the street.
He handed her his phone with Christi's picture, then stepped away and waited for Bailey to "work her magic."
Right. Copy that.
Bailey didn't know what to do. It was like … like trying to sneeze. Like deciding, okay, now I'm going to sneeze and then willing all your automatic reflexes to get with the program and produce a sneeze. Nothing. She didn't even know how to try to connect to the little girl. She concentrated, looked hard at the picture of the chubby child on Brice's phone. Stood waiting for lightning to strike, to be catapulted into another reality where she was sure bad things, really bad things were happening.
Nothing. She closed her eyes. Concentrated harder.
She'd known in her heart it was likely to be futile, but was both disappointed and relieved when her suspicions were confirmed. She didn't have that kind of control over whatever it was she could do. She couldn't will herself to paint a picture or to connect to someone she had painted. It happened — without her consent and outside her control. If she connected to Christi Strickland, it would just happen to her, not because of something she did. What little she'd learned about her strange "gift" was that connection had something to do with what the other person had touched. Like Macy Cosgrove and the Adirondack chair.
But with Riley, she had sat in his desk, which he clearly had touched, but instead of connecting to him, she connected to Caitlyn Whitfield the moment she touched … what? Right, what? What had been the connection? The birthday present, maybe. But what had that been? And how could she find out, given that Caitlyn was dead — they hadn't yet tracked down when and where, but the lifespan of a catatonic person was almost always a one-digit numbe
r. And if she were alive, Bailey would know it. No … actually, she would only feel the connection break when the little girl died. But she'd never connected to Caitlyn and surely the child had died long before Bailey had put Oscar in her skull.
"I'm sorry, Brice. I tried, but …"
"It was a long shot, I know."
She knew he hadn't really expected it to work any more than she had. Still … She stepped to the wall. The little girl must have climbed over it. Why? She put both hands on the top of the wall to lean out over it and—
The world vanished. Only it didn't vanish. Bailey wasn't suddenly thrust into another reality entirely, where she might be trapped in a wrecked car or drowning in a flood. She was still here, in this world, standing with Brice in the park. But everything about her surroundings was different and foreign.
All color had drained out of the world — the twinkling of the lights around the concession stand, the picnic tables — all shades of black, white and gray.
And she seemed to be looking at the world through a strange lens, a warping lens that elongated the images. Not just one lens, several lenses. It was like a weird distortion of a Skype call where you can see the person you're talking to and smaller images of other people also on the call.
Bells!
Ringing so loud she couldn't catch her breath. She was so shocked, she wanted to cover her ears with her hands. But the sound was inside her head. Like the tinkling jingle of tiny bells multiplied a thousand times over, so loud she could feel the vibration in her teeth, her bones, her—
She was suddenly overcome with the overwhelming but glorious aroma of roses.
As if she had buried her whole face in a bouquet. As if her nostrils were full of rose petals. The fragrance was sickeningly sweet, cloying, left no unscented air in the world, engulfed her in an aromatic miasma that seemed to penetrate her body through more than just her nose. It seeped into her skin, oozed through her pores.
The smell was almost color it was so strong. The bells were deafening. The ground moved, shook beneath her. She was Jack, running away from the beanstalk with the giant lumbering along behind, jarring the world with every step.
