“True,” Luke conceded.
“And Sean Messina disappeared before midnight too. The movie started at nine.” He frowned. “Why on earth did I decide a midnight curfew was early enough?”
Sam said, “The downtown area is practically deserted now, and it’s barely nine. You don’t have to be psychic to feel the tension and fear; once it gets dark, most people are very obviously going to stay home.”
“Yeah, you’re right. But all this time I’ve been thinking the dangerous hours were after midnight. Now, all we really know is that it’s either likely or certain that these six people disappeared sometime after it got dark, and before dawn.”
Robbie said, “In the dark. The dark can be a friend, if you’re bent on stealthy. Easier to hide. Easier to watch. And easier to make off, without attracting notice, with someone you’ve grabbed.”
“After first knocking them out?” Sam asked with obvious interest.
“Sure. I mean, lots of options. Just because we haven’t found a weapon doesn’t mean he didn’t have one. The traditional blunt instrument, something heavy he could easily carry. A Taser. Some drug in a hypodermic he could inject before they realized what he was doing. Even a choke hold, assuming he’s strong enough and quick enough and has the knowledge. We can’t check any possibility off our list as far as I can see.”
Dante said rather plaintively, “Aren’t we getting further and further away from finding things these people actually have in common?”
“We seem to be,” Sam agreed.
“What does that mean?” Robbie asked, adding, “I haven’t taken any of the profiler courses yet, remember?”
“As profilers, we need to ask the basic questions first,” Luke said.
Samantha said, “Why these particular people in these particular places at these particular times. Even if we haven’t figured it out yet, they have to share a common characteristic. Something that made each one of them a target.”
Brooding, Jonah said, “Two teenagers eloping, a judge doing some night fishing, a young wife and mother going to borrow baby food from a neighbor, a car salesman out on a movie date with his girlfriend, and a ten-year-old girl who got up sometime during the night to get herself a drink of water.”
“Are we sure about that?” Dante asked suddenly.
Jonah looked at him. “That she got up to get herself a drink?”
“Yeah.”
“Well . . . it was apparently a habit with her. The fridge in the kitchen dispenses cold water and ice, and that’s what she likes. The stuffed bear she always slept with was on the kitchen island, beside a glass half full of water, with her fingerprints on them.”
“She’s been printed?” Luke asked.
“No, the kids aren’t usually printed until they hit high school. Process of elimination. We dusted her room, eliminated prints belonging to her parents, and concentrated on objects they said she handled a lot. Pulled a clear set of kid-sized prints from a lacquered music box she apparently loved. The prints on the glass in the kitchen were a match.”
“Sounds like you have a solid crime scene unit,” Dante ventured.
“It’s a two-person team. And they are, unfortunately, getting better with practice.”
SEVEN
Nobody commented on Jonah’s grim statement. There was a moment of silence, and then Lucas spoke again.
“You’ve already checked into missings for a couple hundred miles all around Serenity, haven’t you?”
Jonah nodded. “Yeah. When Sean Messina was taken. I looked for missings that were in any way like those here. Came up dry. Within a five-hundred-mile radius, there were about a dozen reported missing. A few turned up as bodies, killed accidentally or otherwise; a few are still missing but didn’t just vanish into thin air, and the rest turned up more pissed than grateful that someone had reported them missing and gone looking for them.”
With a sigh, Sam crossed through some of her notes.
“Sorry,” Jonah told her.
“Don’t be. You’ve saved us needless work. And based on that, plus other indicators, we have to assume the guy is here in Serenity, probably grew up here or at least has lived here quite a while, long enough to not stand out as being a newcomer, and that he has a personal reason for taking these people. If you’re abducting people in or close to home, you aren’t taking strangers. It’s too high risk to take people who have or might have a connection to you, especially not just for the sake of taking someone.”
Dante said, “You also aren’t an experienced predator, right? Experienced predators never hunt where they live.”
Sam was nodding. “Almost always the case, yeah. If they’re stranger abductions, we’re dealing with a whole different kind of bad guy.”
“I just . . . I just can’t believe anyone local could be doing this,” Jonah said, still resisting. “How could somebody be this disturbed and go unnoticed? By family, friends, neighbors. By me. How could I not see it?”
“Evil hides,” Sam reminded him. “More often than not, behind something familiar, something nonthreatening. That’s its ace, being able to hide. And . . . most people don’t believe in monsters. So they aren’t looking for one, especially close to home.”
There was a brief silence, with Jonah obviously pondering the existence of human monsters while the feds looked at him with varying degrees of sympathy.
It wasn’t an easy thing to accept, that a monster could walk around in your town looking and acting just like everybody else.
Not an easy thing at all.
Finally, Lucas said, “Your people did very thorough interviews of anyone connected in any way with the missing people, right up to the latest abduction. I assume they’ve been working just as hard on Nessa Tyler’s abduction?”
“Yeah. Everybody I could spare canvassed the neighborhood all day and talked to as many people as we could find who even knew the family. Her teachers and other students at school, every parent who ever had her in their home for a play date. We even checked alibis on the out-of-town relatives who joined the family for support. No flags, no suspicions. Once it got dark, I didn’t want my people out knocking on doors, so they’ve been doing phone interviews all evening. So far, still no red flags. At all.”
Dante asked, “Besides those family members, are there any strangers in town?”
“The four of you. That’s pretty much it.”
Luke asked, “What about Mrs. Lang’s husband? Did family come to Serenity to support him?”
“His family lives in Serenity. His parents, brother, and sister-in-law have been trading off time so he’s never alone and has help with the baby. Neighbors have helped out too. Dave and Luna have always been a very well-liked couple.”
Samantha leaned her chair back, laced her fingers together over her middle, and turned her head to gaze steadily at her husband and partner. “Strike three.”
“What?” Jonah asked, baffled.
Luke said, “Everything we’re hearing, learning, just increases the probability that someone in this town is behind the abductions.”
“How is that possible?” Jonah asked after a moment, still struggling against a reality too painful to readily accept. “One of my neighbors just suddenly decides to abduct people? Someone smart enough or with some kind of weird ability to circumvent security systems, including cameras? And—the weird energy, the missing time, people vanishing into thin air. Plus the strangeness of those photographs Sarah took at the scene where Amy and Simon disappeared.”
He had shared those very odd photographs, and their bafflement over the open car doors not showing, the footprints not showing: seen by their eyes, but not by the lens of a camera.
Samantha said, “No way to explain any of that yet.” But her tone was just a bit elusive.
Jonah looked at her. “All of you looked at those pictures, and all of you seemed as baffled as Sarah and me. Have you come up with a theory or something since?”