“The product worked great for a while, and then about a month ago the damn thing crapped out and stopped transmitting data. The company is working around the clock to resolve the problem before the whole world realizes LyfeTracker can’t track shit.”
“But whoever took her didn’t know that,” Kylie said.
McMaster shook his head. “If they did, they’d have known they didn’t have to cut her up. We never could have tracked her.”
Kylie turned to Chuck. “Thanks. Do you have anything else?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I told you I’m not quite ready, but if I’m right, I may have hit the mother lode.” He paused, waiting for a reaction. Forensic foreplay.
“What’s that?” Kylie asked.
“I think we have the entire abduction on video.”
CHAPTER 6
SHE WAS SHOOTING a video when she was abducted,” Dryden said. He held up a smartphone. An excellent likeness of Erin’s face was etched into the metallic rose-gold case.
“That’s her phone,” McMaster said. “Now you really know she was taken against her will. She doesn’t even go to the bathroom without it.”
“We found it under her dressing table attached to a selfie stick when we got here,” Dryden said. “The video was still recording. Once we’d dusted and photographed everything, I turned off the camera, removed the phone from the stick, and hooked it up to this laptop so you could view it on a larger screen.”
He hit the Play button, and the picture popped on. It was a shot of Erin wearing a low-cut glittery pink top, and from the background details, it was clear that she was sitting at her dressing table looking into both the camera and the mirror as she spoke.
“The deed is done,” she said with a giggle. “I am now officially Mrs. Jamie Gibbs.” She held up her left hand and flashed a diamond-encrusted wedding band. “I wish I could have invited every single one of you to my wedding, but I couldn’t, so I decided to do the next best thing. You all know that ZTV is shooting everything, and we’re putting together a fantastic show that the whole world can watch in September. But this little private video is exclusively for my Twitter followers. I’m in my dressing room, getting ready to sing for my new husband and some of the coolest people in—”
A latex-gloved hand clamped over her mouth, and the picture scrambled as she dropped the selfie stick, leaving the camera pointed at the ceiling. Dryden paused the video.
“From here on in the picture doesn’t change until my team arrived and retrieved the camera,” he said. “When I get back to the lab I’ll be able to analyze the audio track, but for now, you’ll have to rely on your own ears.”
“Let me drive,” Kylie said, putting her fingers on the laptop’s trackpad. She hit Rewind and backed the video up about fifteen seconds. As soon as Erin said “coolest people,” Kylie froze the picture and then advanced it frame by frame so we could study the hand that came from behind.
It appeared to be male, which came as no surprise. The latex glove was an opaque light blue, which made it impossible to determine his race.
She hit Play, and I closed my eyes so I could focus on the sound. I heard a muffled cry from Erin as the man covered her mouth. It was followed by a yelp. Kylie backed it up and replayed it.
“That was more pain than fear,” Kylie said. “I think that’s when he stuck her with the needle.”
I could make out some faint guttural noises coming from Erin, then the man saying, “Shh, shh, shh, shh, shh,” half a dozen times.
“He’s trying to keep her calm till the drug knocks her out,” I said.
It didn’t take long. In less than ten seconds, Erin was completely silent.
For the next three minutes, the sounds were indistinct. Her abductor was doing something, but I didn’t know what.
“Declan,” Kylie said, letting the tape keep running, “where was that chip implanted?”
“Right about here,” he said, tapping a spot under his arm. “It’s practically invisible.”
“I think what we’re listening to is him cutting it out,” Kylie said.
Then we heard wheels rolling, followed by the snap of clasps opening. You didn’t need to be a detective to put it together. He was getting her out of the building in a trunk.
There were some grunts as he loaded her into the box, then clasps snapping closed, wheels rolling and fading into the distance, and finally the door shutting.
Dryden stopped the video. “I’ve watched it already,” he said. “There’s nothing more for about fifteen minutes, and then you can hear the guard outside the door talking to someone. It’s followed by loud knocking, and someone yelling … wait, I have an exact quote.” He checked his notepad. “‘Come on, Erin. Your public is waiting. Time for you to knock ’em dead.’ ”
“That was Brockway, the network exec,” McMaster said. “He came and got me, I unlocked the door, and Kylie was right behind me. How’d you even get on the scene so fast?”
“Your security team was stoic all evening,” she said. “All of a sudden, three out of the four of them started running in the same direction. I followed.”
“Chuck, do you have a time stamp on the video?” I asked.
His eyes went back to the notepad. “She turned the camera on at seven twenty-eight. The rear door shut at seven thirty-four. End of story.”
“Maybe not,” Kylie said. “With any luck, the story continues at seven thirty-five on camera six.”
CHAPTER 7
I WAS HAPPY that Benny Diaz had caught our case. Of all the computer cops in TARU, Benny is the user-friendliest.
We found him in a room about the size of a Turkish prison cell. There was no sweeping console, no bank of servers, no wall of CCTV screens, just a large wooden table, two racks of DVRs, and a couple of Acer monitors.
“Welcome to the nerve center of your entire case,” Benny said. “This security system is everything you could hope for—if you still lived in the second half of the twentieth century.” He smiled. “And yet I think I can still tell you the exact minute that Elvis left the building.”
“Seven thirty-five,” Kylie said.
He looked up at me. “She’s not only beautiful, she’s clairvoyant.”
He plugged a thumb drive into the back of his laptop. “You were spot-on about camera six. I downloaded this. The quality is on par with your average convenience-store videocam.”
A picture popped on the screen, and it took me a few seconds to realize it was the loading dock captured from two stories up by a low-tech camera under the worst possible lighting conditions.
“This is when it all starts,” Benny said. He hit Play, and a white box truck came into view and backed up to the dock. The image was so fuzzy, I knew we didn’t have a prayer of making out the license plate or the driver’s face.
“Hold on,” Kylie said. “The time stamp says six twenty-six p.m. Zach and I just saw a video where he grabbed her at seven twenty-eight. Are you telling me he hung around for an hour before he went in?”