Red Web

by Ninie Hammon

  "The people who were in the store—" Nakamura began.

  "Kept them all here," Fletcher said, pointing out a group of people standing with a police officer on the other side of the store's glass front doors. "The thing is, Mrs. Ewing said she would have sworn she was the only person looking at clothes. She didn't see anybody else. And in the women's section, you'd think if the kidnapper is a man, she'd have noticed him."

  Brice looked around.

  "A man would stick out like a bump on a pickle in a place like Victoria's Secret, but a father could have been going through this area on his way to look at children's shoes." Brice turned back toward the front entrance to the store. "To get to the men's department from the entrance, the most direct route is right through here."

  "Nobody else in the store noticed Mrs. Ewing or who might have been standing near her. The woman who runs the jewelry kiosk said there were several men and boys in the store at the time. She was helping one pick out a watch when the mother started screaming."

  A youngish man wearing a stylish men's-store suit, a baby blue shirt and pink tie approached them.

  "I'm Donald Bridger, the mall manager," he said to Brice. Brice directed his attention to the diminutive FBI agent and pointed out he was in charge of the investigation. But the man still addressed Brice when he spoke. "We have the security video cued up for you to watch. If you will follow me, please."

  As they walked out of the store, Brice examined the stores to the left and right. The front of the shoe store was solid glass. The shelves were low, the view unimpeded. Only the clearance sale shoes in the back of the store were on racks tall enough to hide anything from view, and they were placed at right angles to the door so you could see down them all the way to the end.

  On the left, the double doors into the pizza parlor were glass, but there were no windows that looked from the restaurant into the mall. Instead of following Fletcher, Nakamura and the mall manager, Brice walked toward the big mall doors, stepped back out onto the portico in front of them, looking at the pizza parlor to his right. The business didn't have an outside entrance. But there was a drive-through window that opened on that part of the building in the back, and a lane of traffic peeled off in that direction from the street in front of the mall. No cars were going through there now, but a car right in front of the mall entrance would appear to be waiting in line to pick up a pizza.

  Brice turned and went back into the building, examining the jewelry store and the bookstore. Both had all-glass fronts. The jewelry store was wide open, with glass cases and nothing tall enough to hide behind. The bookstore was the opposite. Though the front was glass, the bookshelves lining the store were in no particular configuration. Some sat at right angles to the front windows. Some didn't. It was an intentionally cozy rabbit warren in there, plenty of cubby holes where sight lines were blocked all around.

  He caught up to Fletcher and Nakamura at the end of a hallway in front of a door marked "Security." A gray-uniformed mall security officer sat at a desk in the small room beyond in front of a big monitor on which were displayed the views from every camera in the building, on both ends of each side of the main hallways.

  Some of the screens were blank.

  "What's up with that?" Brice asked.

  "Those cameras are … non-functional," the security officer said.

  Each view was identified with lettering on the bottom of the image. Only one of the North Hallway cameras was working — the one on the Your Style Your Way side of the hall. It faced the jewelry store and the bookstore, displayed an area in front of them all the way to the middle of the main hallway. But the fronts of the department store, the shoe store and the pizza parlor were not visible.

  "The jewelry store and Billions a'Books have their own security camera systems," the mall manager said. "They might have caught something on those that wouldn't show up on the mall hallway cameras."

  Brice turned to Fletcher and told him quietly to get the managers of both businesses to cue up what their cameras had recorded, that he'd be by in a little while to take a look at it.

  All the video would be studied thoroughly, frame by frame, by FBI forensics experts, but Brice and Nakamura wanted to get a look now to see what they could turn up. Together they studied the big multi-framed screen, scrutinizing the videos from fifteen minutes before the child was reported missing until fifteen minutes after. The security guard fast-forwarded the images to 1.5 speed but stopped them as directed.

  Brice concentrated on the half image of the North Hallway, watched the people crossing the centerline of the hallway from the stores on the other side. He was, of course, looking for anybody with a small child in their arms or walking by their sides, but also for anything big enough to put a child into. After more than a half hour of study, and running the tapes back to play again in several places, the smoking gun they were looking for wasn't there. Four people were accompanied by small children. In three of the cases, there was more than one child with one or more adults. In the fourth case, the man and little girl were black.

  Three strollers exited the building by the North Entrance doors, two pushed by women, one by a man. It was impossible to see the children in the strollers, though one was the kind into which an infant car seat fit — too small for a three-year-old. The others, though — they needed to find those.

  A woman wearing a baseball cap with a ponytail sticking out the back and a baggy sweatshirt over black exercise tights crossed the hallway from the department store side and exited the far-left outside door. She was carrying a Planet Fitness gym bag — conceivably big enough to hold a three-year-old, he supposed, if you folded one up and stuffed it in. But the woman was small, and it was clear by the way she casually tossed the bag up onto her shoulder as she pushed open the door that the bag was empty, maybe a pair of socks and some gym shoes.

  A UPS driver hauled out a box big enough to hold a child. From what it was possible to see of him loading the box into the truck, its contents were heavy. Then he returned to the mall and exited again a short time later with an even bigger, even heavier box.

  An old nun, the kind you didn’t see very often, in a long black habit and black headpiece, hobbled with her cane toward the outside entrance beside the pizza parlor.

  Brice asked to see the views from the two outside video cameras that covered the back side of the department store, shoe store and pizza parlor. No one came in or went out the back entrances during the time frame. A garbage truck emptied the four dumpsters in the alleyway, two behind the department store, two on the other side. A stream of cars, fairly steady, passed through the drive-in window of the pizza parlor.

  Nakamura took a call, then turned to Brice.

  "Trimboli says Lucas Ferrigliano hasn't come home from work yet, is out on deliveries. The parents tried calling but didn't reach him. The little Campbell girl, you got her to open up. Go take a crack at the boy."

  As Brice hurried to his cruiser, he acknowledged to himself what he hadn't admitted to the others. He couldn't put his finger on what it was — couldn't identify the niggling itch in his mind, but something about the images from the security cameras set off an alarm, something that was right there but he wasn't seeing it. What it was eluded him, fluttered like a moth around a back porch light. He couldn't shake the feeling, though. He had missed something.

  Chapter Thirty

  As they drove back to Shadow Rock from Huntington, T.J. and Dobbs discussed different possible scenarios and each one of them seemed worse to Bailey than the last.

  T.J. pointed out that since Caitlyn was an adult, and since the Bartleys were not legally related to her, the police could have found out all manner of things about Caitlyn that the couple was never told.

  "Might be her body turned up somewhere three, four years after she went missin'," T.J. said. "Caitlyn was a ward of the state of West Virginia and her records was on file — all that dental work, police coulda identified a Jane Doe with that."

  "So it's possible there
was a murder investigation somewhere, which means maybe the police found clues, evidence, something that'd help Brice."

  "It's a whole lot more likely that if she was kidnapped — and it is if, we just speculatin' here — but if she was snatched by the same person as took Riley Campbell and Christi Strickland, that means he got away with it. Probably 'cause nobody ever found her body."

  "Or if they did, the police investigation didn't turn up anything," Dobbs said as he pulled up to the Watford House.

  T.J. had left his car in the driveway and he went through the gate to get Sparky. He'd left the dog there instead of at home because Sparky liked playing in Bailey's fenced-in back yard. She was making coffee when he came into the kitchen through the back screen door.

  "I'm going to get Sparks a ball," she said, turning to him, "so he can—"

  The look on T.J.'s face stole her breath.

  "What?"

  He held out his phone. "I just seen it … there's another child missin'."

  The coffee mug fell out of her suddenly numb fingers. It was plastic, so it only bounced on the hardwood kitchen floor. She didn't even bother to pick it up.

  "Who? Where?"

  "A little girl, name of Marley Ewing. She was took out of a shopping cart in Your Style Your Way while her mama was on the other side of a rack of clothes and couldn't see."

  Bailey sank down into a kitchen chair.

  "She's three years old. And she's deaf."

  "Three!"

  Bailey wanted to cry. She wanted to scream and curse and throw something and— She did none of those things, and even if she had they wouldn't have relieved the agony in her belly. Marley Ewing was Bethany's age! Someone … someone who'd already kidnapped two other children — and likely killed them — had snatched her right out from under her mother's nose.

  It could have been Bethany!

  María could have left Bethany like that — of course, she could have! Her sister loved to shop. She'd get so engrossed in what she was looking at, not paying attention, and somebody could come along and take her, take Bethany.

  "I ain't gone ask if you're alright cause it's clear you ain't. Can I get you some—?"

  Bailey got unsteadily to her feet and brushed wordlessly past him toward the hall, went into the bathroom and closed the door firmly behind her, leaned against it. Then slid down it until her butt hit the floor, wrapped her arms around her knees and rested her forehead against them. She sat like that, not thinking anything and thinking everything, her emotions so tangled up she couldn't even cry, her mind spin—

  Stop it right now!

  She was not going to go there. She was better than this. She was stronger than this. Bethany was just fine. Another mother's child had been ripped away from her and Bailey was sorry, so very sorry. But it wasn't Bethany and Bailey was not entitled to throw a self-indulgent self-pity party just because the child was Bethany's age.

  Get. A. Grip.

  She clenched her jaw and got to her feet. Avoiding looking at her reflection in the mirror, she ran cold water into the sink and splashed it on her face. Then she looked up and her eye fell on the tiny scar on her temple that you could only see if you were looking for it, the scar she'd put there when she shot herself in the head … so she wouldn't have to endure being separated from Bethany on her third birthday.

  "Hello, Oscar," she said to the bullet in her brain Brice had named the day they'd ridden out across Whispering Mountain Lake together on jet skis. "I was a pathetic idiot to put you there. A weak, whiny wimp." There were way, way worse things in life than being separated from your child. Riley Campbell's mother, Christi Strickland's mother and now Marley Ewing's mother could all testify to that.

  She took the hand towel and scrubbed her face with it, then went back into the kitchen, where T.J. was sitting with Sparky at his feet. He'd finished making coffee, she could smell it. She went to the coffeemaker, poured the rich brown liquid into the mug T.J.'d picked up off the floor and took a small sip.

  "You gone be alright now." It wasn't a question, but it was unnerving the way that man could read her like a cheap novel.

  "I have to do something." Her back was still turned to him.

  "And that somethin' would be …?"

  "You know as well as I do what — I have to connect to Caitlyn—" She stopped, froze.

  "What?"

  "The portrait. Maybe I can … oh, I don't know … paint more of it, connect that way."

  "Dobbs stopped you before you was done when you was paintin' Macy Cosgrove, 'fore you painted her face, and you connected when you went back and finished it. But you finished this one all the way to the end, didn't leave a speck of bare canvas."

  She took a big gulp of coffee, set the mug down and turned to face him.

  "Let's go see."

  "You sure this is a good idea?"

  "Oh, I'm sure it's a terrible idea."

  T.J. followed her down the hallway to the studio. The portrait of the catatonic little girl lying on the ceiling of an overturned camper was hard to look at. Bailey only let her eyes skim over it before she went to the shelves by the window and began to prepare a pallet.

  T.J. said nothing, just stood in the doorway watching.

  She moved quickly and efficiently, hurrying to do the thing before her courage abandoned her. She was, after all, attempting to live through Caitlyn Whitfield's murder with her.

  She set the pallet on its stand beside her easel and picked up a brush, dipped it into a gob of white paint and held it out in front of the picture. She took a breath, then resolutely touched the brush to the canvas.

  BAM. She was gone.

  The world doesn't look right, only she isn't outside this time, like the last time she saw the world distorted this way, yesterday in the park.

  As before, what is in front of her is oversized, out of proportion. She can make no sense of what she sees because somehow she is able to see to the right, the left, above and below, too.

  There is no color. The world is striated. Not one world, multiple views of the world and it looks like it has been cut apart, torn apart and the frayed edges don't quite meet.

  She feels a weight, like she's carrying something but it's not heavy. The thing she is carrying … it's white, shiny.

  All she can see is multiple views of a colorless world with dim sparkles of light.

  Hissing. She hears that strange hissing sound she had heard the other day. This hissing doesn't sound like steam from a pot, or even a snake. The hissing is almost a rasping sound.

  And then it was over. The world of the studio began to reform around her and she felt her hands relax and heard a clatter as the paintbrush she'd been using fell to the floor.

  "You back now, sugar," T.J. said from behind her and only then did she feel his steadying hands on her upper arms. "You need to sit."

  But she didn't want to move, stood searching the canvas, examining the portrait. Looking for—

  "It's the same," she bleated, bewildered. "I know I painted something."

  She looked down at the paintbrush that lay at the floor at her feet, smearing white paint on the hardwood. Given that she dropped paint-loaded brushes on a fairly regular basis now, she really ought to put a drop cloth under her easel.

  She noted then that it was a single paintbrush. She'd only used one.

  "Nothing's changed."

  "Yeah, it is. Look there. That's what you was working on."

  A small space in the upper right corner of the portrait was shiny with wet paint. It was a portion of a broken window, out of which you could see the woods beyond. And you still could see the woods, just not quite as clearly. Obscuring the view was an overlay of white spots, no, silver spots. Twinkling.

  The spots hung suspended in the air on this side of the broken pane of glass. They sparkled, not just because the paint was wet. They'd been artfully crafted to look like shimmering dots, twinkling like Christmas lights and Bailey had no idea what they were.

  "It's dew." T.J.'s vo
ice was soft beside her. "I get up every morning early, before sunrise." Clearly, he wore that as a badge of honor. "And that's when they's dew, sparklin' like diamonds on everything, little blades of grass, each with a single drip of water on them, all shiny."

  "Dew doesn't hang suspended in the air."

  "No, but I s'pect they's a screen over that window up there. I doubt that even Sophia Watford in the flesh coulda painted the tiny squares of a mesh screen in" — he looked at his watch — "maybe a minute and a half."

  That felt right. She hadn't been in the "alternate reality" long at all, not nearly as long as when she was watching Macy Cosgrove feed carrots to her baby brother. But unlike what she'd seen then, this little foray into the Twilight Zone had provided no clues at all — certainly nothing as illustrative as the reflective side of a shiny toaster in the background.

  "Well this was a colossal waste of time." She started to reach down and pick up the brush off the floor, but T.J. wouldn't let her.

  "I said, you need to sit." Gently but firmly, T.J. guided her to the overstuffed chair in front of the shelves by the door and she collapsed into it.

  "Where'd you go? What'd you see?"

  "I don't know and I don't know. It was more … more a hallucination than a vision."

  She told T.J. what she'd seen, how it was vastly distorted reality.

  "It was like I was connecting to someone who was taking drugs, or dreaming some horrible black-and-white nightmare. What's happening to me?"

  "I don't know, but I got a pretty good guess. Seth Cosgrove's daughter was a normal, happy little girl." He gestured to the portrait with still-wet paint. "Caitlyn Whitfield ain't. She's insane, and when you connect to a mind that's all tore up like hers, ain't no telling what kind of random images, nightmares, garbled memories you gonna stumble over."

  Bailey thought about how she'd felt when she first awoke with Oscar in her skull, like someone had taken her box of crayons and turned them upside down on the floor. All the crayons were still there, but it took her a while to find everything, and to put the crayons back into the box in the right spots. Caitlyn's crayons had been dropped into a blender.