Where Are You Now?

35

H e couldn’t get enough of the new media stories about the other three girls, Emily, Rosemarie, and Virginia. He remembered them all so clearly. Emily had been the first. The newspapers hadn’t made too much of her disappearance at the beginning. She had been a runaway, so when she once again didn’t come home to Trenton, New Jersey, even her parents conceded it was possible she had simply chosen to disappear.

But when Rosemarie went missing three years later, they began to think it was possible Emily had been abducted. Then, when Virginia vanished four years ago, the media had a field day connecting the three of them.

Of course, it didn’t last. Every so often some would-be Pulitzer Prize winner would write a feature story linking the three young women, but with nothing new to report, the public’s interest dropped to zero.

Leesey had changed all that. “Mack, where are you now?” was the question on everyone’s lips.

Dressed in a hooded running suit and wearing dark glasses, he was jogging on Sutton Place. As he expected, it was crowded with media vans. Wonderful, he thought, wonderful. He removed the small metal box from his pocket, unsnapped it, and took out Leesey’s cell phone. Now when he dialed, they’d be able to pinpoint his location as being around here. But that’s what I want, isn’t it? he asked himself with a smile, as he dialed the phone number of the apartment, waited to hear Carolyn answer the call, then disconnected. Then, quickening his pace, he disappeared into the brisk pedestrian traffic on Fifty-seventh Street.