Eve stepped back from the board, studied it.
“A pretty young girl walks the half mile home from school—same route every day. That makes a snatch easy. But the nice neighborhood makes it stickier. Somebody took some time, to watch, to plan. Had transportation. I’m betting somebody’s done this before. Maybe selling the kids he snatches. For sex, for underground porn sites.
“It has to be worth it, to keep her for months, to keep her clean and healthy, closed in or drugged, or convinced she’s living the high life. Has to pay off. Has to pay enough to transport her out of state.”
“Maybe that just happened,” Peabody suggested. “And something went wrong there, and she got away.”
“Could be. Could very well be. You’ve had her all this time, you maybe get a little careless, and she tries to bolt.”
She looked at the picture from the crime scene.
“Where the hell did that weapon come from? Close to where she bolted, if so?”
She went back to her desk to open the murder book on Mina. “Check with McNab, and let’s put together a list of known pedophiles—in and around Devon, in New York.”
“Holy shit, that’s going to be a long list.”
“Girls—eleven to fourteen. Younger won’t work, older’s beyond that scope of sick. No brutality—unless Morris turns some up. He kept her school uniform,” Eve murmured. “The pants. But the shirt? Roe said long sleeves when she was snatched—we need to verify that absolutely, because she had on short, cuffed sleeves when she was killed. Maybe we can track the shirt.”
“They could change the pants, but not the shirt,” Peabody concluded. “But why keep the pants?”
“Maybe he has a collection. That’s the file from Devon coming through. Go.”
Eve read the files from the initial incident report through the steps and stages of the investigation, the interviews, statements, the timeline the investigators put together. She studied the map of the neighborhood, the location of the house to the school, both to the grove of trees.
Thorough, she decided. The Devon detectives weren’t morons or slackers. They’d worked it, and hard, covered the ground, then covered it again.
And attached to the file, she found a list of known pedophiles that included nearby Philadelphia.
She’d go through those interviews, too, but first she entered the list, then ordered a new search narrowing it to her parameters.
Females between eleven and fourteen.
She did the same for New York, restricting it—for now—to Manhattan.
Then, testing her tech skills, ordered one more for any connections between the narrowed Pennsylvania list and New York’s.
While the computer worked, she put her boots on her desk, picked up what was left of her coffee, and studied the board.
Pampered hands and feet, no signs of restraints, no outward signs of malnutrition, violence.
Morris would confirm or refute that, but for now …
What kept a thirteen-year-old girl with an abductor for months?
Someone she knew, trusted. But nothing in Driver’s report indicated anything like that, and she and her partner hadn’t missed a trick that Eve could see.
No physical restraints didn’t mean she hadn’t been locked up, or fed drugs to make her compliant. Brainwashed, threatened.
School uniform pants and a plain white shirt. The necklace. Odd, really, they’d allowed her to keep the necklace but not the earrings.
Because it sure as hell hadn’t been a standard botched mugging.
“You got outside, didn’t you, Mina? And you fought back when they caught you. Died for it. Maybe you still had those pants, or maybe they put them on you to make you look like a runaway. Left your necklace with a broken chain to make it look like a mugging or fight.”
Just another kid, Eve thought, who takes off and comes to a bad end.
“But that’s not you. Look at that face. Pretty girl with skin like white rose petals. And a body just barely past the first bud. Whoever took you kept you pretty and prime for a reason.”
When her computer announced the completion of her first search, she dropped her feet to the floor, swiveled back.
She’d find the reason.
3
Peabody came back in while Eve worked another series of cross-checks.
“McNab gave me a contact, Detective Willowby. She just transferred to Central from the four-oh-six. She’s in SVU, mostly on crimes against minors. I reached out.”
Because Peabody knew the perils of Eve’s ass-biting visitor’s chair, she perched warily on the very edge. “She’ll run Mina’s picture against any of the vids or photos they’ve got. And there are dark web chat rooms—sharing sites. They—”