Her Silent Cry

Thirty-Five

At home, Josie left Noah in the kitchen with Misty, who had cooked up a large amount of eggplant parmesan—far more than necessary to feed three adults and little Harris. The smell followed Josie to the living room, making her feel sick instead of hungry. She swallowed down bile and dialed Trinity. “Tell me you have something,” she said when her sister answered.

Trinity sighed. “I’ve got competition, is what I’ve got. The FBI just descended on this place like there was some damn national emergency.”

“They do that sometimes.”

“Well, I found the house that used to belong to a Dorothy Walsh. It was sold seventeen years ago by Renita Walsh. I couldn’t get my hands on the old deeds, but it appears as though Renita got the house after the mother died and lived there for a few years before moving on. I haven’t been able to find any Renita Walsh—not here, anyway. I did find information for a woman called Renita Desilva who is about the right age and now lives in Binghamton, New York. I have a call out to her but no response yet. There’s one neighbor, elderly, who remembers them. The story matches up: mom and sister died in a car accident. Renita stayed in the house for a few years and then sold it to a young family.”

“That’s it? Did she remember Amy? Did she have anything to say about her?”

“That she was a nice girl. Very quiet.”

Josie blew out a breath. “Well that just sends up all kinds of red flags, doesn’t it?”

Trinity laughed. “I’m not done. Tomorrow I’m going to go over to the high school and see if I can get some old yearbooks. The elderly neighbor doesn’t remember Amy having any boyfriends, but if the abusive relationship that Amy mentioned was really ‘kid stuff’ then maybe there will be something in the yearbooks. Then I’ll go to the local library and search their database for old news stories in the Fulton Daily News. See if any of the Walsh ladies are mentioned there. Then if I haven’t heard from Renita Desilva, I’ll head down to Binghamton and make a house call.”

“Great,” Josie said. “Thanks. I appreciate this.” Her finger hovered over the End Call icon. Then Trinity’s voice came again. “Josie?”

Josie pressed the phone back to her ear. “Yes?”

“You okay? You don’t sound like yourself lately.”

“I’m fine,” Josie lied, pressing a hand over her belly.

“Sure you are,” Trinity said skeptically.

“Really,” Josie said. “I am.”

“I’ll be the judge of that when I see you. I just need a couple more days. Two, tops.”

The next morning, Josie and Noah reported to the mobile command tent. Gretchen’s warrants had turned up some video footage from various places Amy had gone with Lucy in the weeks before Lucy’s kidnapping. Josie sat beside Noah as he began reviewing the footage. “We’ll start with this,” Noah said. “It’s from the arcade. According to the list that Colin made for us from their bank and credit card statements, Amy took Lucy there three weeks ago just to play some games.”

“Let’s have a look then,” Josie said.

Noah pulled up the footage from the arcade, which had multiple cameras, each one displayed in a box on the screen.

“This is going to take forever,” Noah groused.

“Not necessarily,” Josie said. “You watch the ones on the left, and I’ll watch the ones on the right.”

Fifteen minutes later, Josie said, “Stop. Right there. That camera.” She pointed to one of the squares on the right side of the screen. “Can you pull that one up? Just that one?”

Noah clicked a few times and the small square filled the screen. It was an angled, slightly overhead shot of several games in the corner of the arcade. One featured a large screen and in front of it, on the floor, several panels which lit up in different colors. Josie leaned in and saw that the name of the game was Dance Off. Computerized figures moved on the screen and in front of it, using the panels beneath her feet, a small blonde girl tried to match the figures move for move.

“That’s Lucy Ross, isn’t it?” Noah said.

“I think so,” Josie said.

“Where’s Amy?”

Josie searched the rest of the frame. In the lower, left corner stood a woman with a cell phone pressed to her ear, her back turned toward Lucy. “There,” Josie said. “I think that’s her.”

They had to wait several seconds for the woman to turn around so they could see her face. “That’s definitely her,” Noah said, pausing the footage and zooming in.

“Yes,” Josie agreed.

He zoomed back out and restarted the footage. Amy took a glance at Lucy, who was jumping and dancing on the platform of the Dance Off game. Then she turned away once more. “Who do you think she’s talking to?” Noah asked.

“My money’s on her husband. She doesn’t have anyone else in her life—that we know of.”

A few seconds later, another figure entered the frame, walking up behind Lucy.

“Look at this guy,” Noah murmured.

It was a man dressed in jeans, boots and a sweatshirt with a ballcap pulled low over his face. From under the back of the cap, Josie could see brown hair. “It’s hard to say, but I think he looks just like the guy from Lucy’s school. The bug expert impersonator.”

“Let me see if I can pull some stills,” Noah said.

“Let’s watch this first. We should also check the other cameras to see if we can get a clearer shot of his face when he was coming in and leaving.”

Noah let the footage play. The man watched Lucy for a few seconds. Then suddenly, she turned, looked up at him and beamed. She moved off the platform, arms raised as though to hug him, but he stepped away from her and motioned with one hand toward her mother.

“My God,” Josie said. “She already knew him.”

“Quite well,” Noah said. “She looks like she was about to run into his arms.”

But on the screen, Lucy froze, then nodded and returned to her game, this time dancing with much less enthusiasm.

“He’s already done a lot of work with her by now,” Josie noted. “All he had to do was give her a small signal—just a little hand movement in Amy’s direction—and she knew to act like she didn’t know him. She knew not to alert her mother.”

“This is scary,” Noah said.

The man let her play for a few more seconds, every so often turning his head slightly to check on where Amy stood. Then he joined Lucy on the platform. They danced together for a few moments—only their backs visible on the camera. Lucy’s movements became more enthusiastic. When fireworks exploded across the screen, the two of them high-fived. Then the man glanced in Amy’s direction again, took something from his pocket and handed it to Lucy. He leaned down and whispered in her ear before rushing off.

“What’s scary is knowing how much work it must have taken for him to gain her trust and have her this well-trained without any adult in her life knowing about it,” Josie said. Without even realizing it, her hand went to her stomach.

On the screen, Amy walked toward the Dance Off game, no longer on the phone but now searching through her purse for something. She never even saw the man.

“Pause it,” Josie said. “What did he give her?”

Noah took a moment to turn the footage back and try to get the best view of the object before zooming in. It was grainy but Josie was fairly certain by the size and red color that it was the ladybug keychain that Lucy had in her butterfly backpack when she went missing.

“That’s the keychain,” Noah said, as if reading her mind.

“Yes. Keep going.”

He zoomed back out and pressed play once more. Lucy watched as her mother walked toward her, clutching the small object to her chest. As Amy came within a few steps of the Dance Off game, Lucy turned away from her and thrust the keychain into her pants pocket. Amy reached her and held out a hand, which Lucy took, skip-walking beside her mother as they walked out of the frame.

“Jesus,” Josie said.

Noah pulled up the rest of the footage, searching for the man. They found him arriving shortly after Amy and Lucy, lingering at one of the change machines without using it, following Lucy until she started playing Dance Off, and then leaving immediately after the interaction.

“He doesn’t appear on camera at any angle where you can see his face well—especially with that hat,” Noah said.

“Of course he doesn’t. He knew what he was doing. Pull as many stills as you can get,” Josie said. “Then let’s look at the other footage.”

“This is unbelievable,” Noah said. He gestured toward the screen where he had paused the video just as the man walked up to Lucy at the Dance Off game. “Amy is right there. Right there and she doesn’t see this guy.”

“She doesn’t register him,” Josie clarified. “Because he blends in. He’s not a threat. She never actually sees him talking to Lucy, and her mind is elsewhere. Just like at the playground on the day that Lucy disappeared. She was in clear view of everyone. No one registered her presence. Every one of us goes through our days looking straight at people and things but not really taking them in.”

“How many times do you think he did this?”

“A lot. Enough that she saw him as a friend. Someone she wanted to run to; someone she was excited to see.”

“Most of the time had to be at the park, don’t you think? While she was with the nanny?”

“Yes, and one of the other mothers said that Jaclyn was often on her phone.”

“And there are no cameras at the park,” Noah said. “And the carousel is there. This guy got to her without anyone ever knowing.”

Josie thought about it, about all the planning that went into it. “The nanny had a mystery guest—a woman—staying with her at some point. That mystery woman’s prints were found in Lucy’s room.”

“So we know she was involved,” Noah said. “By the way, Oaks’s team did manage to track down one of Jaclyn’s friends who said she thought someone was staying with her for a while but never met the girl. That friend had asked Jaclyn about it, and Jaclyn said she was just helping someone out that she had met on campus. Said the girl was between apartments. That was five or six months ago.”

“So the mystery woman befriended Jaclyn, manipulated her, got Jaclyn to let her stay there for a while and managed to avoid meeting any of Jaclyn friends. Whoever she is, she’s good,” Josie remarked.

“Yeah,” Noah agreed. “Her job was to gain insight into Lucy and her family.”

“Right—their routines and dynamics, their schedule. Lucy’s likes and dislikes.”

“The mystery woman reports back to this guy. Tells him, among other things, that Lucy is obsessed with butterflies,” Noah said, picking up her line of thought.

“He sees an opportunity to make contact with her at her school by impersonating the bug expert.”

“How did he know Bausch was going to Denton West in the first place?” Noah asked.

“It was on the school website,” Josie said. “The school schedule, including all visitors and special events, is posted there. The public one, not the private one. All he had to do was pull up the site and he would have seen that Bausch was scheduled to come give a presentation there.”

“And either he or his female accomplice could have called the real John Bausch and pretended to be from Denton West, tell him they had to cancel. Wow. This guy is ballsy as hell,” Noah said.

“Yes,” Josie said. “Impersonating Bausch was probably the most ballsy thing he did because he really put himself out in the open, made himself vulnerable. They must have been planning this for a very long time. He might have seen that as his best and maybe only opportunity to gain Lucy’s trust.”

“Cause once she meets him in a safe environment—school—she feels she can trust him.”

“Right. Then when he approaches her outside of school, she already sees him as trustworthy.”

“Then he starts approaching her every chance he gets.”

“Building the rapport, the friendship.”

“But what does he say to her to get her to go with him?” Noah asked.

Josie thought of Lucy’s drawings: herself and a man in a tan suit—like the one the kidnapper had worn to her school when he impersonated John Bausch—both with butterfly nets, chasing the colorful insects. “He’s going to take her to chase butterflies,” Josie said.

“What? That’s absurd.”

“No, it’s not,” Josie said. “Amy told me they took Lucy to the butterfly room at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and that Lucy said it was the best day of her life. The kidnapper would have known about her obsession with butterflies. He would have promised her something magical. Something too magical to resist.”

“What? Like some magical butterfly fairy land or something?” Noah asked. “Do you hear yourself?”

“Lucy is seven. Don’t you remember being seven?”

“I barely remember yesterday,” Noah complained.

“She’s just a child, Noah,” Josie said. “She has a big imagination, a passion for butterflies, and from everything I’ve gathered, she’s both lonely and a people-pleaser. It would be easy for this guy to gain her trust. He paid her special attention. He was her secret friend. She was clearly enamored of him by the way she acted when she saw him. She would have wanted to make him happy. So she did what he said and kept him a secret from her mother.”

“From all the adults in her life.”

“Yes,” Josie agreed. “He probably promised to take her somewhere. Somewhere like the butterfly room at the Academy of Natural Sciences—only he probably made it sound much bigger and more exciting. Not somewhere real because he never intended to take her there. He just wanted to promise her something that would fulfill her seven-year-old heart’s desire. Something that would make her leave with him even though her parents were right there.”

“You think he told her he’d bring her back?”

“Of course he did,” Josie said. “He probably told her they’d go off on their adventure and she’d be back in her own bed that night. Everything this guy has done has been about manipulation.”

“But why?” Noah asked. “Why didn’t he just abduct her? All this preparation—for what? I mean if you’re right, and this guy has a female accomplice who was getting in tight with the nanny six months ago, long before he went to Lucy’s school, that’s a lot of preparation for an abduction. Unnecessary preparation. Especially if all he wants is ransom. If the nanny was on her phone whenever she took Lucy to the playground, he could have taken her from there at any time. Why is he doing all this?”

“He’s playing a game,” Josie said, her mind swirling. “This isn’t about the ransom at all. Not really.”

“Then what’s it about?” Noah asked.

“I don’t know yet, but I need to make a phone call.”