Come and Find Me A Novel of Suspense - By Hallie Ephron Page 0,48

gotten as far as the entrance to the T, or gone into the library.

“Let’s assume for the moment that she didn’t tear ass out of there,” Pam said. “And she sure as hell didn’t levitate. So her most likely path would have been to continue this way . . .” She traced her finger across what would have been sidewalk to the curb. She tapped the spot. “So what was going on over here?”

On her laptop screen, she brought up the video footage that had been taken from the office window. She froze it on a 6:21 view and pointed to the row of vehicles pulled up at the curb near that exact spot. There were two light-colored vans, one behind the other, then a police cruiser, behind that a light-colored compact car, and behind that a much larger black sedan.

She fast-forwarded to 6:26, when Ashley vanished. The same vehicles were still parked there.

“Can you come in closer on that black one,” Diana said.

“You’re not going to try and read those plates,” Pam said as she zoomed in. “There’s no technology in the world that will do that.”

“I know, I know. But”—Diana pointed to the black sedan—“back up, just a little bit. Good, good. Now zoom in even closer right here and run it very slow.”

Images blurred as Pam ran the video back, then forward at about half speed. Two figures crept toward the black car. The rear door opened. One person got in and the other crouched by the open door. Because of the camera angle and distance, it was impossible to make out much detail.

“We’re just assuming your sister is in the backseat,” Pam said. “But you really can’t see squat.”

“What about that?” Diana said, pointing to a misshapen object lying on the sidewalk by the open car door.

Pam squinted at it, then rolled her eyes at Diana. “A shadow? A puddle?”

“It’s my hat. I know it is.”

Chapter Twenty-One

The printer under the table churned as, dot by dot, the freeze-frame image of the person crouched beside the black car took shape. When it was finally finished, Diana pulled the image off and stared at the dark blur on the ground.

“I can’t believe she’d get into a car with someone she didn’t know.” Diana pinned the printout to the bulletin board over Pam’s desk and stood back. “Well, whoever he is, he didn’t come out of nowhere. Where was he before this?”

Pam queued up videos from the four camcorders that had focused on crowd reaction and tiled the windows across her laptop screen. She ran them simultaneously at half speed, starting moments before Ashley disappeared.

The cameras moved through the crowd, showing individuals as they watched Superman’s flight. But Diana was focusing past them.

“There!” she and Pam said simultaneously, spotting a figure in the background, on the move. The brim of a baseball cap completely obscured his face. He wore a jacket zipped up over his chin. He seemed oblivious to the drama going on behind him as he crossed the square, moving steadily in Ashley’s direction with a sense of purpose, a shark cutting through the still crowd.

Then he glanced up. Sunglasses obscured his eyes, but for a split second the lower part of his face was visible and Diana could just make out a mustache and beard.

“You recognize him, don’t you?” Pam said.

“I don’t know if I do.” Diana brought up Aaron Pritchard’s Facebook page. “What do you think?”

Diana called Officer Gruder. She paced up and back as she explained that she’d been combing through the Spontaneous Combustion video. She paused long enough to e-mail him stills—one of the man crouched alongside the black car and the other of the man moving through the crowd toward Ashley—and then went back to pacing as she waited while he opened the files.

“And you think your sister is inside that car, and this man—”

“His name is Aaron Pritchard. And he’s—”

“You recognize him from these?” he said, his voice without affect.

Diana stared at the pictures. Neither one of them showed enough detail to identify anyone. “He told me he was there. And she’d just dumped him, humiliated him in a bar full of patrons. He grabbed her, then he tried to make it look like she’d come back to her apartment. Did you get the surveillance video from my sister’s apartment building? Did you look at it? Did you—”

“I examined the surveillance video,” Gruder said.

Diana stopped pacing.

“I can tell you this,” he went on. “Your sister drove back to her apartment on