Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,46

searched for the right word.

“Pissed off?”

“Exactly right. And I’m guessing she sees Aaron, the guy she’d just dumped.” So where was the other man Aaron had claimed he’d seen Ashley talking to?

Diana grabbed a pencil from the table and a piece of paper from the trash. On the blank back, she drew a crude map of Copley Square and the surrounding area. She jotted an A at the approximate spot on the plaza where Ashley stood, and the 6:03:25 time stamp from the video.

Diana pushed play and the view shifted back to the director, and stayed with him except for cutting away once to capture the brief drama of Superman getting snagged on the spire, and once again lingering on the unfurling banner at the end.

The first camera’s video contained only one Ashley sighting. Diana prayed the others would yield better results.

The video from the second camera had been taken from the roof of the building they were now in. The angles were all long shots across Copley. Individual people looked small and insignificant. It was slow going, backing up and inching ahead, zooming in to examine the crowd. There might have been another Ashley sighting. And another. Both were near where she’d been spotted earlier. Diana penciled in more As and time stamps on her map.

Footage from the third camera yielded nothing new. The fourth camera focused on bystander reactions. Diana spotted the red hat again. Ashley had her back to the camera, her arm raised. Diana jotted an additional A on her map with a new time. As the camera meandered through the crowd, its operator seemed particularly enamored of a young woman whose abundant cleavage overflowed her low-cut top as she raised her arm in a cell-phone salute to the hotel.

A fifth camera also caught the proceedings from sidewalk level. This one had caught Ashley crossing the street, from the library to Copley, and later in mid-pivot as Superman crossed overhead.

The sixth video file was much smaller than the others. It had in it only five minutes of footage, shot from Spontaneous Combustion’s office window. It began at 6:53 A.M. the next morning and showed a gray, deserted Copley Square with a single pedestrian moving slowly across it. Traffic was sparse, and the headlights of about half of the cars were turned on.

Diana sat back. By then Ashley had vanished, gone off the grid as Jake would have put it.

“Hey!” Pam said. She was pointing to a figure sitting at the edge of the fountain.

Diana blinked, unsure of what she was seeing. She froze the video and zoomed in. Wrapped in a blanket beside the fountain alongside Copley Church sat what looked like a homeless woman with a wheeled cart stuffed with clothing. On her head, she wore a newsboy-style cap.

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