“You’ve too many variables on buildings, it seems to me.”
“You think?” She blew out a breath, tipped her head back to the sky. “Got nowhere, really. I changed some of those factors, running it again. I’m inclined to think downtown. Not too close to the dump site, but not too far, either. It had to be a rush job, right? ‘Oops, dead kid. How can we get rid of her, and use her?’ But.”
“But she may have escaped from a location farther away. They may have transported her a longer distance in hopes of doing more to cover tracks. Add,” Roarke continued as she scowled and drank wine, “without a solid idea of how many girls might be held, you can’t judge the size of the building. Two girls, three or four, you’d need one thing. A dozen or more, surely you’d need another.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“However, your call on windows, for instance? The lack of them, or minimal number, seems logical. One-way glass as an alternative, shatterproof. The shipping dock or something of the kind seems logical as well.”
“I go back to that lunatic Dawber, and the three women he held. We knew, all the arrows pointed to a private residence, single occupancy, probably with a basement, and in a fairly narrow target area. And that wasn’t a snap to run searches on. This? I’m punching at shadows and know it.”
“I could punch at some for you if you like.”
“I didn’t want to bring it home to you,” she repeated. “Are you hurting?”
“I’m not. I’m worried for you, and you shouldn’t expect otherwise. You’ve barely come off another case involving abduction and brutality that brought back hard memories. And this, on top of that, involves children.
“But we’ll get through it. And you’ll find who’s hurt these girls. I have every faith there. In a bit of a while, we’ll have a break, a nice long one in Greece and in Ireland. We’ll get through it.”
Greece and Ireland seemed, at that moment, like some floating fantasy.
“I feel we’ve got some movement with Tiko spotting her. A time frame, a location where she was almost certainly snatched. We know she was taken from here, from New York. For Mina, blocks from home in the Philadelphia ’burbs. And if we can solidify any of the other missings into a pattern, we have something to build on.”
“And now you have Dorian’s face out there through Nadine.”
“Unless she lucks into someone with a vehicle who’ll drive her out, she’s unlikely to get out of New York without being spotted. We’ve covered all the transpo stations. I’ve got them monitoring for her at the bridges and tunnels. She can get out if she’s determined, but I don’t know where she’d want to go or why.”
“Away from her captors.”
“Yeah, there’s that. But where?”
Desperation, Eve thought, could send you rushing into the dark. No plan, no destination, just away.
“She had a window to get out before we ID’d her. If she jumped through it, she’s in the wind. But she’s barely thirteen. I’m thinking her first instinct would be to hide. Tiko made her as a street thief,” Eve added. “And yeah, he’s got the eye for that. Wouldn’t she need a little time to get enough funds to buy a bus or train ticket? Unless she managed to steal some money before they got out, she’d have nothing.”
“Why not be optimistic at this point, assume she’s still in New York?”
“Optimism likes to kick you in the ass, and panic could’ve shot her straight out of New York into anywhere else. But we find her, we find them. Otherwise, we punch at shadows until we hit something solid.”
“Why don’t we go up and get started on that?” He rose, held out a hand to her.
“You know what?” She took his hand, pushed up. “I’ve got these badass shades. If optimism tries to kick this badass, I’m kicking back.”
“I’m not at all sure how that works, but we’ll go with it. Why don’t you send me your property search results,” he said as they went back inside. “I’ll take a look, see how I might refine them.”
“Yeah, good luck with that.”
“She said, optimistically.”
She gave him an elbow jab as he called for one of the elevators she’d forgotten they had.
“I’ll get something started while you do your updates. We’ll have some dinner while all that brews.”
“I need to look over what EDD’s come up with. I need that pattern. And I want to check in with Willowby if she hasn’t sent me anything.”