And then nothing.
Sarah swore under her breath. “There wasn’t a blind spot. Not until she moved those cameras. How could we have missed that? How could the security guards have missed it?”
Dante answered readily, even though he still sounded a bit preoccupied. “On the original video there was some static, just a few seconds of it, not uncommon enough to worry the guards at the time. And one section of that walkway looks pretty much like any other section. But once Mrs. Lang disappeared . . . that’s why Jonah had it sent out for enhancement. This is what the enhancement uncovered.”
The two women exchanged looks, and it was Robbie who said steadily, “He was controlling her. Somehow, he controlled her, made her change the angle of those cameras. Maybe even made her come to him.”
Sarah straightened slowly. “She sure as hell wasn’t herself. I knew—know—Luna Lang. She’s very expressive, always has been. But this . . . I’ve never seen a human face so blank. Even the dead have more expression.”
Robbie said, “If that’s his psychic ability, mind control, then it’s definitely unique. Human minds just aren’t that easily controlled. I mean, magicians and mentalists make it look easy, and the reality of hypnosis has convinced more than one person that it must be easy to actually control another mind just by suggestion—but they’re wrong. Almost no one can be hypnotized against their will, and even those that want to and can be can’t be forced to do anything their conscious minds would reject. And psychics can’t be hypnotized at all.”
“Really?”
“There are more psychics in the world than you might expect, and the SCU has studied a good number of them. Enough to conclude with fair certainty that psychics can’t be hypnotized.”
“Even by another psychic?”
“Especially by another psychic.”
“But you said he was in your head. Earlier, before you guys went out and found Annie.”
“Yeah, that’s what’s bugging me. I still don’t believe I was hypnotized, but he was definitely in my mind. Maybe trying to find out how much control he did have.”
“And it was enough to scramble your memories?”
“Not scramble, exactly. Everything made sense, it was just . . . it played out a different way, and I knew that wasn’t right.” She scowled. “Damn, this is difficult to explain. Especially when I haven’t figured it out myself.”
Dante said steadily, “Want another puzzle piece to add to the rest?”
“Not really,” Robbie said, but leaned down again to look at the other side of the paused split-screen. “Nessa?”
“Yeah. Watch.” He set the video in motion.
The camera was placed up high so that it covered the entire large kitchen as well as the space beside it, what designers called “keeping rooms” but which were basically just open dens with fireplaces and TVs.
“That light over the island stays on all night. And there are night-lights along the hallways and stairs, mostly because it’s a habit of Nessa’s to get up. I asked,” Dante said. “The cameras can go to infrared if the rooms go totally dark, that’s how the system’s programmed, but—well, just watch.”
There was no movement for a few seconds, and then a little girl in print pajamas, her long hair hanging down her back and her favorite stuffed animal under her arm, came barefoot into the kitchen. She put her toy on the center island, used a strategically placed kitchen stool to climb high enough to reach an upper cabinet, and got a glass for herself.
She filled the glass from the refrigerator’s dispenser, then stood sipping for a moment or two.
Then she went completely still.
“Shit,” Robbie breathed.
“Wait for it,” Dante said, still steady.
The little girl’s head tilted slightly, as if she were listening to someone. Then she put her glass on the island, walked around the island and to a distant corner—and appeared on a different camera, this one in what looked like a mudroom.
“The light isn’t normally kept on in there at two in the morning,” Dante said. “Which is when this recording was time-stamped.”
They could all see the door that probably led to the garage, see the security keypad beside it—
And then everything went black.
“She didn’t go near a light switch,” Sarah said. “How long—”
“Ten seconds,” Dante said. “The room stays totally dark for ten seconds, and then—”
And then the lights in the room came back on. Nothing looked disturbed. The door was still closed. The security keypad was still blinking the red light that indicated it was active.
Nessa was nowhere to be seen.
“I reviewed recordings from all the other cameras,” Dante told them. “Inside and outside the house. The only cameras that record Nessa when she gets up are in the great room and the mudroom. You don’t even see her in the hallway outside her bedroom, or on the stairs. You see her come into the kitchen, and you see her in the mudroom heading for the door. And then she vanishes.”
“You don’t see her in the garage?”
“No. Infrared recordings for out there during the night: two cameras, one trained on the door to the mudroom, the other trained on the double garage doors. No motion at all recorded out there. No sign of Nessa once she leaves. However she leaves.”
Robbie straightened and then moved restlessly away from the computer. “Well, it had to be the same, somehow. The same as Luna Lang. He got her to do whatever it took to make herself mysteriously vanish. Sarah, you guys printed the security keypad?”
“All of them.” Sarah had also straightened. “Nessa knew the code, but Caroline and Matt said she almost never touched the keypad. Still, we checked. Smudges mostly, what you’d expect from keypads touched two or three times a day by at least two people. And the smudges were only on the numbers that are part of the code.”
“I guess the cameras were out of her reach.”
“Very much so. And the nearest ladder was in the garage, high on a rack. A ladder much too heavy and unwieldy for a ten-year-old girl to manage.”
“Even if she’d had time.” Her frown deepening, Robbie swung around to look at the other two. “Time. Jonah said none of the clocks were affected in the Tyler house.”
“The videos are time-stamped,” Dante said. “That was something else I checked to make sure. No missing time on the recordings. When the mudroom goes dark for ten seconds, the camera’s clock keeps time. It doesn’t stop or slow down. Neither do any of the other clocks.”
“So,” Sarah said, “whether Nessa got herself out of the house or he got her out, it was managed without somehow tampering with any of the cameras.”
“Or maybe,” Jonah said from the front doorway, “that’s exactly how he got her out. By tampering with the cameras.”
ELEVEN
Robbie stared at him, still frowning. Then her frown cleared, and she swore under her breath. “We’ve been missing the obvious, haven’t we?”
“I think we were meant to,” Jonah said, closing the door and coming the rest of the way into the big room. He still looked tired, but it was clear his mind was working just fine. “Want to spook an entire town, have people disappear seemingly into thin air. Which any decent magician can do.”
“No mirrors or trap doors,” Sarah offered, still frowning.
“Who needs mirrors or trap doors when he can hack into a security system?” Jonah said.
“Goddammit,” Dante muttered. “You’re right; at the Tyler house, that’s the only thing that makes sense. And all he had to do at the condo complex was insert a line of code for a few seconds of static and then have Mrs. Lang move a couple of cameras a few inches.”
“Just about any computer geek could have done that,” Jonah said. “It’s a basic system, and even though it’s hardwired in, there aren’t exactly dozens of firewalls. It’s an apartment complex, not a bank. And not a theater; those cameras would have had to be hacked for Sean Messina to get out of the theater unseen. And they were installed a good ten years ago.”