Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,47
salute. The camera cut away from her to show a woman pushing a double stroller, stopping to look. Simultaneously, another camera was capturing a cop looking baffled. Another focused on Super Dummy appearing in the hotel window. It started its descent. In the panoramic video shot from the office window, almost every pedestrian in Copley Square was frozen, attentions riveted as Super Dummy flew overhead.
“There!” Diana pointed to a pair of figures walking out of the square, the only two in motion. She froze the video.
From overhead, it was impossible to see their faces, and the man’s body shielded the other figure from view. It was hard to make out details, but it looked like a man wearing a baseball cap with his arm around someone smaller.
Diana started the video again in slow motion and they watched as the couple neared the sidewalk.
“Noooo!” Diana howled when the camera cut away for a close-up of the dummy, impaled on the needle-nose spire of the information kiosk. The glitch was the perfect cover.
It felt like forever until the dummy was tugged free and at last there was finally another long shot across Copley Square. But by then, the man and his companion were gone. Time stamp: 6:26:15.
“Where the hell did they go?” Pam whispered.
By then it was afternoon and Eddie needed the video editing suite back. After extracting a promise that Diana and Pam wouldn’t make copies or post clips from the videos, he gave them a DVD with the footage from all six cameras. If only Diana could combine all the snippets of information into a single stream and project Ashley’s likely trajectory out of there.
But how? The answer didn’t come to her until she was rushing to keep up with Pam’s wheelchair as it sped back across the plaza’s brickwork to her van. First she had to find a version of Copley Square in OtherWorld that was rendered approximately to scale.
As soon as they got back to Pam’s apartment, Diana logged onto OtherWorld and began to look for a reasonably accurate version of that area of downtown Boston. Meanwhile Pam loaded the digital video files from the improv event onto her server.
Diana entered the coordinates of a virtual Copley Square that had drawn the most visitors and had the fewest complaints about griefers. The new location rezzed around Nadia. Diana angled the view—it included all the landmarks she needed, from Trinity Church to the Copley Plaza Hotel to the Boston Public Library. Even the subway station just past the library on Boylston was there. But was it to scale?
She angled the view up, pulling higher and higher until she could see everything on a single screen. From that far away the image was reduced to a schematic. Nadia was the single yellow dot on a rectangle that was Copley Square.
Diana compared the shape and size of the virtual square to a Google map of the actual area. They were close enough for what she needed.
Pam rolled her wheelchair over and stopped beside Diana, holding the little handwritten map that Diana had put together of Ashley sightings.
“Okay. Move Nadia here”—Pam pointed to a spot in the virtual Copley Square that was about a hundred feet in front of the center entrance to Trinity Church where Ashley had stood, cell phone raised—“and set the time to 6:21:15.”
Diana tapped at the arrow keys. She watched the yellow dot move to the location. Then she froze the image and set the clock to 6:21:15. She and Pam continued, placing Nadia in each of the places Ashley had been spotted in the Virtual Copley Square. When they were done, Diana had marked five locations and five times.
“Okay, let’s see what we’ve got,” she said. “Connect the dots.”
Diana ran the clock, and Nadia’s yellow dot moved from spot to spot as the seconds ticked. First the yellow dot appeared in the middle of Copley. A dashed line crept out to what would have been about fifty feet away. The second dot appeared, followed by another dashed line that continued as far as the sidewalk where a third dot appeared. At 6:25:05 the line stopped.
“And less than a minute later, she’s vanished,” Pam said.
“Let’s project her trajectory. How far could she have gotten?” Diana drew a circle around the final point on the sidewalk where they’d seen Ashley. “And if she started to run—” She drew a second wider circle around the first. She groaned when she saw how much territory that took in. Ashley could have