Read Touched by Lightning [Dreams of You] (Romantic Suspense) Online
Authors: Tina Wainscott
Awareness prickled over him. “Had she been inside the store?”
“No. She came from over there somewhere,” he said, gesturing vaguely to the right. “But here’s the weird part: when she told us this, the kid hadn’t been reported missing yet.”
“Wait a minute,” Max said. “Why didn’t you say anything about this before?”
“We did. We told the first guy who was questioning the employees, and he told us to hang tight until you could talk to us.”
Max tamped down his annoyance. “Did she say she’d seen the girl being taken? Like maybe she’d been by the back exit?”
The second guard was stringy; only his scarred face gave him any menace. “I don’t think she could see anything. She looked…blind. She had one of those guide dogs, and her eyes didn’t focus on anything.”
The first guard said, “But she said she saw things, like in a psychic way.”
A cold chill snaked down Max’s spine despite the fact that a blind woman wasn’t a good lead. Unless she wasn’t blind, or she was trying to create a diversion for someone else to get the girl out of the store. He wasn’t even going to delve into the psychic claim.
“Callahan!” Sam was waving him upstairs. “They have the security video ready.”
Max nodded to the two guards. “Come up.” He headed up the stairs and met Sam at the top. Max gestured for the guards to stay put and walked into the manager’s office with Sam. “You got anything?”
The grooves running from Sam’s nose to his mouth deepened as he frowned. “Nothing yet. Mrs. Burns had been talking to a friend when Phaedra went into the remote control room.”
Max had interviewed the employees on the first floor while Sam had taken the customers who had been nearby. Max asked, “No one saw anything? None of the other kids in the remote control room even?”
Sam leaned against the desk. “One boy said he saw a man who looked like a maintenance worker go into the room, but didn’t pay much attention to what he looked like other than he was about my age and wearing a gray uniform. He was too entranced by the Super Hot Rod Buggy, which he was able to describe in excruciating detail. Another kid thinks he saw Phaedra Burns chasing one of the cars, but didn’t see her leave the room. There were several kids, but they were all too busy playing to notice anything unusual.”
The only other exit out of that room led to a storage area where the suspect apparently lured the girl and then took her outside from there. Exactly where the blind woman said the girl would be.
Sam said, “There isn’t a camera at the back door. They figured with the door wired for the alarm, they didn’t need it. The suspect knew what he was doing. He knew the layout of the store and how to cut the wiring on the door without tripping the alarm.”
Max said, “Could be someone on the inside. An employee or former employee. The manager is pulling all employee records for us now. We’ll start by running background checks, see if anyone has any priors. We’re also pulling the records of all recently convicted child molesters in Palomera. We’ve got Sarasota doing the same, and they’re putting out a bulletin on the girl over there, too. Fliers are being made now, and they’ll be distributed all over the region.”
“Hopefully we’ll see something on the security video,” Sam said as he led the way into a small conference room.
Max waved the guards in, and they gathered around the television with the Toyland’s chief of security. Bob Thornton was a tall, thin man whose balding head reflected the overhead fluorescent glare. “We rewound the tape to when the store opened. This is the one facing the entrance. We have another camera pointed toward people leaving the store.”
Max said, “Fast forward it to right before lockdown.” He turned to Sam. “There’s something I want you to see.”
Everyone in the room leaned forward as the grainy black and white film sped ahead in fast motion.
“Who’s that?” Sam asked when someone in a Santa costume walked in.
“That’s our Santa, Claude Fernley.”
Max nodded. “We’ve verified that he was upstairs doing his Santa gig when the girl was taken.” He glanced at Thornton. “Keep going.”
The people coming and going seemed perfectly normal…until the woman ran into view. “Stop and rewind a little,” Max said. “This is it.”
The woman approached from the north and gestured crazily, but unerringly toward the rear of the store. The guards spoke with her, one putting his hand on her arm.
Max said, “This woman came in warning the guards about the missing girl. Get this, before anyone knew she was gone.”
Sam leaned forward. “Whoa, that’s something. What’s she saying?”
As the guards relayed the woman’s words, Max watched her movements. She had long, dark hair that swung with her frantic gestures. He couldn’t see her face clearly, but she looked attractive and well dressed. Her dog, tethered on a leash by a harness, cowered. They watched the guards escort her outside.
The beefy guard said, “She tried to get someone outside to help her. You have to understand, we just thought she was crazy. Holidays bring that out sometimes. We didn’t know a girl was missing yet. We watched, ready to subdue her if necessary. Then she left.”
The thinner guard said, “A minute later, the girl was reported missing, and the store went into lockdown mode.”
Max watched the woman walk away when no one would help her. “Where did she go?”
“I think she crossed the street,” the other guard said.
“You ever see her before?” Max asked.
“Not that I remember, though I just moved here,” one guard said.
“I’ve never seen her.”
Max ran his hand over his face. He turned to the officer who was in the room with them. “Okay, let’s get both tapes down to the station and have our people analyze it. Have them look at everyone who came in and match them up with everyone who came out. The one who never came out is our man—or woman. Odds are, the suspect’s a guy and went in alone. I want a print of the woman’s face, as close as we can get. We’ve got to find out who she is.”
One of the officers knocked on the open door. “Got someone you should talk to.” He brought in a lanky young man wearing a green smock with the bookstore’s logo on it. “Tell them what you just told me.”
“When the officer asked if we’d seen anything unusual, well, this definitely fell into that category. It’d be kinda cool if she was involved, and I had the missing piece that got her.”
“All right, let’s hear it,” Max said.
“I was helping this blind woman buy a book, and she kind of freaked out at the counter.”
“A blind woman?” Max repeated, getting out of his chair at the same time Sam did. “What’d she look like?”
“Medium height, long, dark brown hair. Nice-looking, too, probably in her late twenties.”
Sam was already instructing Thornton to put in the tape again. “Is this her?” he asked a moment later.
“Yeah, that’s her all right.”
Adrenaline shot through Max like intravenous caffeine.
The kid said, “When she was checking out, she got all weird and slumped against the counter.”
“Did she say or do anything just prior to, er, freaking out?” Sam asked.
“We were talking about stuff, you know, just normal stuff. I was asking her how she knew what bills were what, that kind of thing. She seemed real nice about it. Then she checked her watch by pressing a button, and it said the time. It was right after eleven, I remember, because I was thinking, cool, it’s only an hour before my lunch break.”
Max and Sam traded looks. She was sounding exactly like a planned distraction, checking the time, getting ready for a rendezvous. Sam asked, “Then what happened?”
“That’s one of the weird things.” The kid made sure he had their attention. “She said, ‘He’s got her. Oh, God, he’s got her.’ Like she was in pain or something. Then she said she had to get to the toy store.” He smiled triumphantly when the officer lifted the bag he’d been holding. “That’s the book she bought. She left it.”
Sam took it and pulled out a book—and a receipt. “Credit card. Smith, run a trace on it and take the security tapes back to the station with you.”
The officer carefully took the bag and the tapes and left.
All right, maybe this case wasn’t going to be so hard after all. Then Max remembered something the kid had said. “You said ‘one of the weird things.’ What was the other one?”
“Well, she’s blind, right? Has the dog, had me lead her to the book section and describe what was in the book. When she was freaking out, wanting me to tell her how to get out of the store…she called me by my name.” He touched the nametag pinned to his apron. “And I’m sure I never told her.”
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