She dabbed her cheeks as fresh tears spilled down.
“Where was Nevea then?” I asked.
“She was . . . she was across the street. This strange man was carrying her like she was asleep, her hair hanging down over his arm and swinging. I just froze for a second when I saw that. My brain jammed up. I knew it wasn’t her dad but my brain wanted it to be her dad, taking her home to bed. But this guy was taking Nevea the wrong way. Away from the complex, so it couldn’t be her dad. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Then I screamed. I screamed and dropped the stuff I had all over the ground.”
“What did he do?”
“He saw me and started to run. And I remembered my Aunt Sasha telling me . . .” Amber sniffled. Halloran gave her more tissues and she blew her nose. “Aunt Sasha teaches at the junior college extension in Darby, this class for women on how to fight if a guy tries to abduct you. You scream and scratch and kick and swear and don’t let them drag you into a car or house or anything. You might not ever come out. Most guys like that want it to be easy. So you don’t make it easy. Give them hell and give yourself a chance to get away. That’s what Aunt Sasha says. She practiced with me in the backyard over the summer on a mat. She was wearing padding all over and I’d attack her when she grabbed me. It was . . . it wasn’t real when we practiced. Like it was serious, but it was still just my backyard and my mom was there reading a book and everything was okay. That’s why people can freeze up, ’cause it doesn’t feel real when it happens.”
She mangled the tissues in her hand. “But last night, it was real. And I heard my aunt’s voice telling me not to freeze. Picture a hammer breaking all that ice that’s keeping you still. So I broke through it and I ran after him. ’Cause if I didn’t, Nevea was going to get kidnapped and killed or molested or something. I didn’t want that to happen to her. There wasn’t time to call 911 or get her parents.”
This girl had guts to go after a grown man, and that choice saved Nevea’s life. A nurse looked into the room, saw us sitting with Amber, and said she would come back later.
“So you ran after him,” I prompted.
“Yeah. I ran across the street.” Her tears stopping, Amber began to look angry. “He couldn’t run too fast since he was carrying Nevea, and I’m real fast, the fastest in my whole PE class. I caught up to him near the corner and I punched him in the back. I was yelling at him to put her down, yelling for someone to call the police, and hitting him the whole time. Total crazy hitting.”
She balled up her fists and spun her arms in a frantic pinwheel to show us how she’d beaten on the man, her brow set in a ferocious glare. “It wasn’t how my aunt taught me, but my body had taken over from my brain. I wasn’t thinking. Just hitting. I tried to scratch his arm, but he was wearing a jacket. And I tried to claw at his face. I screamed what the fuck are you doing? I screamed so loud it hurt my ears. I couldn’t see him very well. He didn’t say anything. He never said anything. But he grabbed me.”
She touched her left shoulder. “I jerked away. I don’t know if that was before or after I scratched him. All of it happened so fast. Like a dream, almost. But moments stick out, like my ears throbbing from that scream. I think I called him a shithead and a pervert, too.”
“What happened next?” I asked.
“He dropped Nevea on someone’s lawn. And he shoved me off the curb real hard. I hit my head on the cement. When I looked up, he was running around the corner. Then a car started.”
“Did you see the car?”
“No. I just heard it starting up and driving away real fast. I couldn’t see it from where I was. I crawled back to Nevea on the lawn. She was on her side and kind of propped up on her elbow. She was awake and staring at me, but she wasn’t saying anything. Like no one was home. I kept asking if she was okay and she didn’t answer. Once it looked like she was really trying to answer me, but she couldn’t.”
“How long were you gone to get the food from your house?” Halloran asked.
“Twenty minutes? It takes about eight minutes going back and forth at a walk, and then I needed a few minutes once I was in the house to collect the food. I had to be real quiet.”
It stretched credulity to believe the killer had just chanced upon Nevea in those twenty minutes. Darby was not a small city. And he would have had to do it right as Amber left, since Quell needed time to go to work.
He had been watching them from somewhere nearby. That was the only possibility.
“The police didn’t come,” Amber said. “I guess no one called. So we just lay there in the grass while I listened for sirens. My head was hurting so bad and she was totally out of it. I thought he must have sneaked up behind her at the sign and hit her on the head, and she had a concussion or something. But then I realized how much trouble we were going to be in. I had to get her back home and in her bed so her parents and mine didn’t find out what we’d been doing. I got up and she didn’t, and then I told her to stand and she did. I told her to walk and she walked. It was like she was a robot. Like a drunk robot, you know, weaving around. She still couldn’t talk to me, but she was doing what I said. It was weird.”
“Did you go to her house?” I asked.
“We made it back to the sign and she fell over. She wasn’t quite awake, she wasn’t quite asleep, I don’t know what she was. I sat with her and held my sweatshirt to my head to stop the bleeding. The sodas and chips were all around us and I knew I should pick them up, but I couldn’t worry about that right then. I was just about to call 911 for her when she started coming around, acting more normal. But her stomach was bugging her. She almost threw up, like dry heaving, but only some spit came out. Then we got ourselves to her house. She flicked the lights on upstairs once she was inside her bedroom, and I headed home. I was still holding my sweatshirt to my forehead since my cut wouldn’t stop bleeding. It hurt a lot so I’d take breaks and sit down on the benches. Then I sneaked back inside and cleaned myself up, hid my sweatshirt in my closet. I went to bed and couldn’t sleep. I wanted to keep it a secret, but what if he came back for Nevea?”
Her voice thickened in agony. “What if he was over there at her house? So I woke up my dad and told him what had happened. He didn’t believe me at first. He thought it was a bad dream and I’d just fallen when I got up.” She bristled with indignation. “I showed him Baddo on my phone and I was crying for him to please, please believe me. He called Nevea’s parents and he drove me over to the sign . . . He saw the chips and soda cans spilled everywhere in the grass like I said they’d be and then he believed me. He called the cops.”
“Can you describe this man who took Nevea?” I said.
“Not really. It was too dark.”
“What color was his skin? Could you tell that much?”
“He was white, I’m pretty sure. Or maybe Hispanic with light skin? He definitely wasn’t black. Not as tall as my dad. Dad is six-two. And this guy was wearing a cap over his hair. It came down over his forehead to his eyebrows. That’s all I saw.”
We needed both of these girls to work with the sketch artist, and Amber could have the perp’s DNA under her nails. After speaking briefly to both sets of parents in the hallway, we were admitted into Nevea’s room to speak with her. She had tested positive for Quell.
Nevea Worther hadn’t had an easy start to life. Born almost two months premature, she suffered a stroke followed by a string of seizures as an infant. Although there were no lasting physical impairments, it had left her with a multitude of learning disabilities. Her schoolwork was modified to accommodate her cognitive delays, her math and reading skills more on par with a third grader than seventh. She didn’t always catch subtle cues, either verbally or relayed through body language. Now that she was in junior high, her parents worried tremendously about older boys taking advantage of her. She was highly gullible, always assuming that other people were good and meant well.
She was a pretty and soft-spoken girl, as guileless as a child years younger. My first name made her smil
e. Eager to please but overwhelmed when taking in more auditory information than her mind could process, I turned it down a few notches to very short and simple questions. Those she answered readily, hugging a stuffed teddy bear to her chest.
She had been sitting on the wall, waiting for Amber to return with soda. The two of them were very thirsty from their long wait. A man came down the sidewalk with a cup and asked what was on her phone that was so funny. Sitting down beside her, they watched a cat video together.
Although she knew not to talk to strangers, the man had been nice to her. He said he lived just across the street, so it wasn’t really like he was a stranger. He asked if she had ever seen him walking his dog around anywhere? His big, dumb brown dog named Brownie? She thought maybe she had.
Oh, honey. If she had been my twelve-year-old daughter, I would have been terrified.
The man took a sip of his drink and stuck out his tongue. Having asked for orange juice at the mini-mart, he’d gotten lemonade instead. Gross! He hated lemonade. Did she want it instead? He didn’t want good lemonade to go to waste.
She drank it.
They watched more videos on her phone, laughing. She never told him that her friend was coming back. And then she didn’t remember anything. Not even when the Quell began to wear off and she had a stomachache. She had a fragmented memory of going up to her room, but didn’t remember flicking the light for Amber. A phone rang sometime later, waking her up in bed, and her parents soon came flying into her room to see if she was there. Then she had come to the hospital.
It had to have seemed like the perfect catch to this man, a trusting, developmentally delayed girl alone in the night. But then Amber Neris reappeared and took off after him like a pint-size warrior princess. If she’d been only a few seconds later, she would have missed him altogether.
Nevea was banged up from being dropped, but her injuries were minor. She struggled to describe the man. There had been nothing notable about him. He wasn’t fat. He wasn’t thin. She couldn’t tell his eye color. She remembered that he had had on black gloves, and he had no mustache or beard.
Halloran and I were exceedingly careful not to lead her. She was primed to agree with almost anything at a push. Her clothes from last night were taken into evidence. Although she had not touched him while watching videos, she could have picked something up when he was carrying her away.
We left the hospital, Halloran shooting a text to his daughters that said calm Daddy’s nerves. He only did that when truly troubled, usually in cases involving kids. His girls promptly sent back thumb’s ups to indicate that all was well with them.
Information began to come in. Searching the area where the abduction had taken place, fresh boot prints were found in a yard across the street from the complex sign. It was estimated from the size that we were looking for a man of average weight who was roughly five-eight to five-ten in height. Uniforms blanketed the area to look for the third maze, which had to be set up somewhere close to Shady Days. Quell did not incapacitate long.
Checker and Furbaby Mine handed over their employee information without any of the fuss that Service on Wheels had kicked up. Although Hannah Blatte hadn’t been very helpful with identifying the people she’d allowed to deliver food, her coworker Bonnie Terrazzo had a far better memory. She and I sat at a table in the staff room, Bonnie running down lists of employee names in both stores. She ticked off the people that had been involved and kept up a running commentary of which departments they worked in and approximately how many times they’d covered for Hannah.
Franklin Kim in the men’s department had done it twice before moving to Sacramento at the end of last year. Money wasn’t his primary objective; he’d had a crush on Hannah. Anya Placer in the gardening department didn’t own a car, but she had passed along the chance to earn quick money to her brother Zach, who was unemployed. He ended up getting sick and letting his old high school friend Miles Jenning do it. Casey Smith working the register at Furbaby Mine had gone on a run with her boyfriend James Ainsley. Swiftly, I eliminated one after another for being the wrong race, wrong age, wrong sex, wrong height and weight.
Then we got even better news.
The house at the corner where the man ran away from Nevea and Amber had a surveillance system. It was ghetto-style, as the owner described it, cobbled together by himself after a robbery several years ago. Set to trigger when it sensed motion anywhere in the front or back of his house, it snapped pictures and sent them to his inbox. He didn’t bother to do the same with the sides of his home since the windows were so high off the ground and had thick foliage planted beneath them. He worked from home and didn’t bother to use his system during the day unless he left to run errands. At night he set it up before going to sleep.
Just the night before, he had stayed up late watching television. It was after midnight when he activated his system. Then he put in earplugs so his neighbor’s dogs didn’t wake him up with their typical three a.m. pee-time barking, and went to bed.
Usually the pictures were just of cats and raccoons wandering through his front and backyard in the nighttime hours, but last night his system had captured something different. The lighting was dim, and the view didn’t extend to the sidewalk or road. But a man came around the corner at the approximate time of the attempted abduction. Looking like he was running, he had been captured in two snaps as he cut across the front yard. The first picture was poor from the distance and darkness. In the second, he was nearing a streetlight and much clearer. A cap was pulled down to his eyebrows.
It was him.
The camera hadn’t caught his vehicle, but we had a face.
Still in the employee room at Checker, I stared at the picture. He was in his late twenties, early thirties at most. A narrow frame and a weak chin, he had pronounced cheekbones. Neither ugly nor handsome, he was the kind of guy that eyes slipped past.
“What are you looking at?” someone asked over my shoulder, scaring me.
A Checker employee had crept up. She hardly looked old enough to work here. Almost snapping at her for startling me, I asked, “Do you recognize this man? Does he work at this store?”
The girl gave the guy in the picture a swift once-over. She shook her head and said authoritatively, “No, I’ve never seen him before and I know everybody in every department.”
At the table, Bonnie checked another name and said with barely restrained impatience, “You’ve been here a whole month, Reena! I’ve been here nine years. Let me see.”
I showed her the picture.
Bonnie stared at it for several seconds, her forehead furrowing. My heart fell.
“Oh,” she said all of a sudden. “That looks like John.”
Chapter Seventeen
John Elliot Macdonald.
Twenty-eight. Caucasian. An address in Darby, 114B Brae Street. He had been employed at Checker for only three months the year before, working as a stocker from September through late November. After that, he simply stopped showing up for his shifts. Described as quiet, he caused no problems while at work and most of the staff didn’t even remember him. Then again, the turnover at Checker was quite high, so over a third of the current employees had not been his contemporaries in their time at the box store. Even the manager was new as of the spring. The last one had been fired for theft and general incompetence.
Thank God for Bonnie in Electronics, who had excellent recall with names and faces, and said she had almost ten years of pointless store gossip filling her gray matter. I did not doubt her claim. None of that gossip involved Macdonald, however, and she had never engaged him in a conversation beyond hello. That was because she worked on the main floor with the customers while he worked primarily in the back. Their only encounters occurred sporadically while clocking in at the same time, and then he disappeared after Thanksgiving.
When I was done speaking with her, she flung open the door to the storeroom and bellowed for someone named Rogelio. “He should talk to you; he worked back here with Joh
n,” she said.
A guy appeared within seconds. Rogelio Sanchez was about twenty-one or twenty-two, and he had worked at the store for three years. Wiping sweat from his brow as he took a break to speak to me, Rogelio said the man in the picture could be John Macdonald. “But I’m only seventy to eighty percent sure, ma’am,” he said. “That’s not a good picture, and I haven’t seen him in almost a year.”
“What was John like to work with?” I asked.
“We called him Macdonald. We go by last names in the storeroom. He just worked, Macdonald did. Clocked in, worked, clocked out. Didn’t talk to anyone.” After a hesitation, the young man said, “He didn’t seem to want us talking to him. It was like you were interrupting his thoughts and he just wanted to get away and go back to them. But he didn’t cause trouble like some of the others do. He wasn’t lazy or coming in late or drunk, sneaking out to smoke or stuff like that. Just unfriendly. So we kind of ignored each other and that worked out fine for everyone. He never came to the break room, never hung out at lunch, just vanished.”
“What kind of vehicle did he drive?”
Rogelio shook his head. “There are so many cars out there I never saw. He could have been walking or riding a bike, too, some people here do that. But . . .”
“Something else you remember?”
“It was just a weird little thing I saw him doing once.”
“That’s fine.”
“We had a spill one afternoon. It was this huge bag of popcorn peanuts someone dumped in an aisle back here to be funny. Macdonald had to sweep it up. I walked past that aisle, probably for the bathroom, I don’t remember, but I saw him sweeping. One-two-three sweep, pivot to the other side, one-two-three sweep, pivot back to the first side. It was strange, kind of an OCD dance, but whatever.”
Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery Page 13
