She separated the potentials into two categories. What she thought of as the Mina type—solid family, good neighborhood, no history of trouble. Then the Dorian type—basically the opposite. She added a third category for a mix. The girl from a good home who fell into trouble anyway. The girl with a crappy homelife who kept her head down.
She divided those into subcategories: rural, urban, suburban.
With that, she began the arduous task of picking through the case files, looking for similarities.
And found some.
She looked at her board, considered the size of her office. She thought about the conference room, then grabbed what she needed before walking out to the bullpen.
“I’m pushing an angle,” she told Peabody. “I already see four girls snatched on the way home after a post-school deal. Sports practice, a play rehearsal, a tutoring thing—all regular schedule stuff.”
“That’s a good angle.”
“Maybe. I’m going to take it home, work from there. You can do the same.”
“I think I’ll kick it up to the EDD lab with McNab. Primo equipment there. You know, I kind of thought this was a needle in the haystack, but once you get into it, you can see, with some—like the after-school stuff—a kind of pattern.”
“Right. Why is there a needle in a haystack?”
“I don’t know. Someone dropped it?”
“Seems dumbass to look for it. I mean, a diamond in a haystack, okay, but who can’t get another needle? Anyway, send me whatever needles you find.”
She let it roll around in her head on the way down to the garage. First you have to spot the kid, so—most likely—scouts troll schools. Once you spot the kid, you just spend some time stalking—not even that if an opportunity jumps in your lap.
Snatch the kid, transport the kid, collect your fee. Had to be a sizable fee, Eve thought as she got into her car. Kidnapping a minor would get you a very long stretch.
The scouts had to blend into their hunting ground, she concluded as she swung out of the garage and into snarled traffic.
Good clothes, decent haircut in an upscale area. Or a uniform—delivery person for instance. Repair guy. Cop.
She put more weight on cop. Wouldn’t a kid tend to go with a cop—and not tend to go with some random stranger?
An authority figure anyway.
Or.
She let it roll around a little more as she dealt with the stop-and-go. Why not use another kid—or someone younger? Not so threatening, as Willowby suggested.
She played around with the idea. A teenager, or someone who looked like one. Nonthreatening.
Hadn’t she recently used Jamie Lingstrom—college boy—in a ruse to get a murderer to open the door?
So maybe at least some of the scouts were young—or some worked in pairs.
The runaways or troubled kids made easier targets. You spotted them on the street and grabbed them up. Maybe offer them some Zoner, or a place to flop, whatever. They might possess more canniness than the Mina type, but they wouldn’t stand a chance against an experienced abductor.
Transportation. Had to have it.
A closed van, a fake （or not） cop car. A vehicle trunk if you could work fast enough.
She had dozens of angles, questions, possible answers circling in her head as she battled her way uptown.
On impulse, she detoured, and after a hunt for parking, doubled it on Forty-Ninth off Fifth.
She hiked her way to a stall selling I HEART NY caps and T-shirts and other tourist paraphernalia.
The kid had had one of those growth spurts, she realized as she watched Tiko make a sale. The young entrepreneur still had a baby face, but he now wore his hair in short dreads and sported a pair of the wraparound shades on sale in his stall.
He shot Eve a grin when he spotted her.
“You need these.” He plucked up a pair of the shades—mirrored lenses and black frames.
“I’ve got shades.”
“Why’n you wearing them?”
She’d probably lost them again. No, left them in her desk.
No, in the car.
Shit, who knew?
“I want to show you a couple pictures.”
His grin faded. “You got trouble.”
“Someone does. I’m going to show you, then I’m going to send copies to your ’link so you can show them around.”
“Hold it. Buy three,” he told a potential customer, “you get the third half price. Shorthanded today,” he said to Eve. “Girl who helps me went and sassed her mama, and she got herself house arrested.”
He made the sale, turned back to Eve.