Maggie Shayne - Innocent Prey

I know, I know, but it was my first sighted springtime since age ten. So shoot me. “Come on, get with the program, Detective,” I said. Best defense is a good offense, right? “Daylight’s burning.”

We completed our inspection of the sidewalk where Stevie had obeyed her coach’s orders, tapping her way from the bench to the corner, and didn’t find anything. Well, we didn’t, but Myrtle did. She’d peed on a clump of weeds, chomped the blossom off a stray daffodil and picked up a discarded Pepsi can, which she was still carrying like a prized treasure.

Whatever had happened to Stephanie had happened after she’d gone around the corner. But we’d already known that. So we turned right, just like she had. And then I really slowed down. Mason walked near the inside edge, where sidewalk met park, so I took the curb, where sidewalk met road.

And there in a drain was a cell phone. It had fallen onto the grate, and wedged itself most of the way through. I’d been hanging around cops—well, one cop—long enough to know not to touch it, so I pointed it out, then crouched low, pulled my long sweater over one hand and picked it up with the sleeve while Myrt dropped her soda can and tried to grab it before I could. “Got’cha!”

I won and turned toward Mason, holding up the phone. And then I flashed back to Thanksgiving, when my personal assistant and best-Goth, Amy, had been snatched off the highway by two jerks in a white pickup truck. We’d found her phone at the scene, too.

Weird.

Mason came over with a plastic bag and I dropped the phone in. “Nice find,” he said.

“Wish I still had that damn stylus in my purse so we could tap this thing without leaving a print. I lost it, need to buy another one.” I’d had one at the scene of Amy’s brief abduction. Ms. Smarty-pants had snapped a photo of the pickup, knowing it was trouble, and left it behind to lead us to her. “Mason, do you think this could be related to what happened to Amy?”

“Because of the phone?”

I nodded.

“I don’t think so. Amy threw her phone underneath her car deliberately. She knew she was in danger. Even if Stevie did the same, it would only mean that they think alike.”

“Right. And we have so many women being snatched off the streets of Binghamton that there’s no way it’s connected.” I was being sarcastic.

He gave me a look. “Okay, I’ll give you that one.” He nodded, thinking on it. “Amy’s twenty-five, Stephanie’s twenty. That’s close enough, I guess.”

I thought back to the photo he’d shown me of the missing girl. “Amy’s got dyed black hair and multiple piercings. Stephanie’s a blonde Barbie doll. It can’t be the resemblance. Still,” I said, “the phones.”

“Coincidence. Besides, we don’t even know it’s her phone.”

I made a face while I tried to figure out how to say what I was thinking without sounding like a complete flake. “I’m not saying that us finding the victim’s phone at both scenes is evidence that the two things are connected. I’m just wondering if it’s a more...a more woo-woo clue.”

“A woo-woo clue?” he asked, arching one eyebrow. I loved when he did that. “Is that a technical term?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“You mean, like maybe the phone being here is the universe dropping us a reminder of Amy’s abduction, just to get us thinking along those lines?”

I shrugged and averted my eyes. “If you believe in that sort of thing.”

“You mean the sort of thing you put in your books and then tell me is bullshit, Rachel?”

I shrugged. “You’re the one who keeps trying to convince me it might not be.”

“So you’ve decided to believe me, then?”

Tipping my head to one side, I said, “I was just trying it out. You’re right. It’s bullshit.” Then I took a big breath. “But if that is Stephanie Mattheson’s phone, then it’s probably safe to say she didn’t run away just to ditch her coach and worry her parents.”

“You’re right about that.”

“There’s a drugstore around the corner, and I’ll bet we can find a ten-pack of those styluses.” I frowned. “Styli?”

He was looking at the road near the grate, though, all but ignoring me. So I looked, too. There was a parking meter there. Probably had been a few dozen vehicles in and out since the night before last, when this had gone down.

Or maybe not.

He pulled out his own phone and took a few close-up shots of the area, while I looked up and down the sidewalks and road, wondering how this chick could’ve been snatched against her will without someone seeing something. I mean, it wasn’t a busy place, but it wasn’t deserted, either.

And then I thought of Amy again. Stupid, I know, but there was something bugging me, itching at my brain. I kept feeling just like I’d felt last Thanksgiving morning, when Amy’s mother had called to tell me she’d never made it home, and I had known—just known—that something awful had happened.

We’d tracked Amy down before it had gone from awful to fatal. One of her abductors was still with her when Mason and I caught up. Now he was with the angels. (I know, but I don’t believe in hell, even for jerks like him.) We’d never tracked down the other one.

Mason nudged me with an elbow. “You seeing what I’m seeing?”

I wasn’t, so I looked where he was looking, down the block to the next corner. “There’s a camera on that traffic light at the intersection. Snaps automatically when someone runs the light.”

“Fuckin’ cops. You’re like Big Brother, you know that?”

“Not the point.”

I nodded. “I know it’s not. What is the point is what difference does it make? What are the chances the kidnapper ran the light?”

“If he was going that way? Pretty good, actually. People get all hopped up during the commission of a crime. Adrenaline’s surging, they’re nervous, jumpy, in full-blown fight-or-flight mode.”

“Walking textbook,” I accused.

“What? It’s as good as you wanting to check the phone for photos.”

“I do not want to check the phone for photos. I want to see who she’s been talking to. Blind women do not snap a lot of pictures, Einstein.”

“I knew that.” He picked up the pace as we hustled to the end of the block, and Myrtle jogged along happily for most of the way, then started snuffing at me as if to say, Enough with the running, already. Do I look like a sprinter to you? “I was teasing about that Einstein thing,” I said, slowing my pace to accommodate my bulldog.

“I know you were.”

“Could you get the traffic-light photos without making the case official? I know Judge Howie wants to keep it under the radar.”

“Yeah, except it won’t do any good. Look at the camera.”

“What?” I looked. It had what looked like a bullet hole in its lens. “Shit.”

Mason turned in a slow frustrated circle. “I feel like I’m missing something.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. The judge. Something was off about him.”

I frowned at him. That again, I thought. “So? Elaborate already. In what way was something off?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t ready. He’s an old friend of Chief Sub’s, and I was expecting another power lunch, not an off-the-books case. I didn’t have my game face on, you know? But there was something.” He sighed. “I wish you’d been there.”

Wow. That he’d said it to me twice now told me he meant it in spades. And that made my insides get mushy. My inner idiot acting up, I guess. “Maybe it’s that he wants it off the books at all? ’Cause, damn, Mason, that has my antennae all aquiver.”

“No, I can see him wanting it handled discreetly. They kept her accident and blindness quiet.”