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  She turned on the TV and called her babysitter again.

  Still no answer.

  By the time Jim returned to the hotel room, she had piled up her dirty clothes in one corner and snuggled into the bed. He found her covered by blankets, wrapped in towels, eyes on the TV. “You were gone a while,” she said, once he closed the door. “What did you get?”

  “Here.” He handed her one of the bags and put the other on the empty bed. “Everything a girl on the run needs.”

  Without getting up, she sifted through the large bag. “Two pairs of jeans?”

  “Different sizes,” he answered. “Hedging my bets.”

  Careful not to let the towel slip or reveal more than her legs, she got out of bed and took the clothes into the bathroom.

  The movie had ended. HBO was now showing its original program Boardwalk Empire. Jim sat down beside the second shopping bag and watched while he waited for her to come back. He recognized the show. He’d seen it a couple times, but the plot was hard to follow.

  “You’re lucky one of them fits,” she shouted from the bathroom.

  When she opened the door, she was dressed in the smaller pair of jeans and a long-sleeved gray sweatshirt. There was nothing about the outfit that appealed to her sense of style, but there was also nothing that would make her stand out.

  “How do I look?”

  “You look like the last girl I’d notice in a crowd.”

  “I guess you did well, then.” She glanced at the other bag. “Can I see the shoes?”

  They were white tennis shoes.

  “How do your feet feel?” he asked, after she put them on.

  She frowned. “They hurt. Not from the shoes, though. Those are good.” She nodded toward the other bag. “What else did you get?”

  First he showed her the cell phone. “Disposable.”

  “Nice choice.”

  Then he showed her the electric screwdriver.

  “What’s that for?” she asked.

  “Nothing now.”

  “Why did you buy it, then?”

  “I didn’t want us getting tracked down by my license plate,” he answered.

  He explained that after he had left the Walmart, he had driven through the surrounding neighborhoods looking for another Honda Civic. Most people weren’t awake at three-something in the morning, so the streets were quiet.

  Although both his car and its color were popular, it took him almost half an hour to find one that matched, and even then he considered the find lucky. He parked along the curb two houses down. Using the electric screwdriver, he removed the license plate from his car in seconds. Trading it for another didn’t take much longer. He moved fast, but discretely. He was sure nobody saw him.

  “Okay,” Sarah said, surprised both that the potential problem hadn’t occurred to her and by his solution. She wasn’t sure what she would have suggested they do once she had thought of it. Probably not that. But since the problem was solved, she asked, “So, what do we do now?”

  “Now you sleep.”

  “Sleep! Are you crazy? I can’t sleep. We have to find Brandon!”

  “We will.”

  “We have to do something.”

  “We will.”

  “We have to do something now!”

  “It’s late. There’s nothing we can do right now.”

  “We can keep calling Megan.”

  Jim moved from one bed to the other and put his arms around her. “We’re going to go to the school tomorrow. We’re going to find out what she knows. We’re going to get Brandon back. But right now, you need to get some sleep. You won’t be any good to Brandon if you’re running on fumes tomorrow.”

  She didn’t answer. Her bottom lip started to tremble. She put her head on his shoulder.

  “Can you sleep?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you try?”

  With her head still against his shoulder, she nodded.

  “We’re going to get him back.”

  But she couldn’t sleep. After Jim turned off the TV and the lights, she lied in bed staring at the ceiling. Once in a while, she heard a car drive through the motel’s parking lot. Every time, she was sure it was a cop. Her muscles tensed. Sometimes she held her breath. But nobody knocked on their door.

  Chapter 17

  BRANDON AWOKE. HE WAS SURPRISED to find himself on the bed instead of the floor. He was also surprised the lights were out. Had he gotten into bed sometime after he’d passed out and forgotten about it? Maybe. And turned off the lights? No. That seemed too farfetched. The only thing that made sense was that the bad man had come in, moved him, and turned off the lights.

  He felt sick at the thought of the bad man touching him, cradling him. Worse than that, though, he didn’t like being here in the dark.

  He sat up and rubbed the back of his head, which ached from where it had hit the wood. As his body finished powering on, he realized he was also hungry and had to pee. He didn’t know how he was going handle either of those issues, yet. But first things first, and the first thing was turning the bedroom light back on.

  He reached over to the floor lamp beside the bed, felt for a switch around the light bulb, and clicked it several times. Nothing happened. Maybe instead of the bad man coming in the room, he’d gotten himself in the bed, as he first thought, and the bulb had burned out. A quiet alarm rose in him at the thought of being stuck in the dark.

  But then he reminded himself that his mom had lamps in their house that had to be turned on from a switch on the wall. These might work the same way.

  He got out of bed and crossed the room, being careful not to step on the shadow-drenched toys or shards of porcelain on the floor. He didn’t like getting so close to the door. He imagined as he approached that it would fly open and the bad man would grab him and break his neck.

  Left foot forward.

  Was that the doorknob turning?

  Right foot forward.

  It definitely turned that time.

  Pause.

  No, it didn’t.

  Left foot forward.

  It’s your imagination.

  Right foot forward.

  Finally, he reached the door and felt the wall around it for a switch. When he found one, he flipped it up. Yellow light flooded the room, breaking the toys out of their shadow cocoons and transforming the gray murk around the bed into the long dark tentacles formed from the bed’s four oak posts.

  Brandon took stock of his surroundings. Everything was exactly as he expected it to be, but with the addition of the bedpan and the food that had been left for him. That answered his questions of where he was going to pee and what he was going to eat.

  Before addressing either of those needs, though, he decided to see if the door was unlocked. Just as the light had chased away the shadows, it had also chased away his fear that the bad man was about to come in. Without that fear clouding his thoughts, he actually sensed the bad man had gone to bed.

  He turned the knob. The door didn’t open. That’s all right. He’d expected it. He’d get back to work on mastering his new skill and, if his mom didn’t rescue him first, he’d get out of here on his own. He had to. He had a feeling that if he didn’t escape tonight, he wouldn’t get out at all.

  He used his foot to push the bedpan into a corner. After he’d finished peeing, he looked the sandwich over. His stomach growled. He didn’t know how long it had been since he last ate, but he remembered his mom warning him many times not to take candy from strangers and decided that probably applied to food, too.

  Then he saw it: the piece of porcelain on the floor which he had tried so hard to crack by will was cracked. The bad man had probably stepped on it when he came into the room, but that wasn’t the only possibility.

  It could have cracked when the ghosts of ghosts broke his concentration. Or maybe it was the last thing he managed to do before his head hit the floor.

  This third theory seemed the least likely, yet felt the truest. His wild
-eyed science teacher would never buy it. However, his wild-eyed science teacher didn’t see ghosts of ghosts.

  Having decided to forgo the food, Brandon returned to the door and peeked through the barrel keyhole. The hallway outside his room was dark. He decided to try his new trick on the lock instead of the cracked pieces of porcelain.

  He sat down on the floor and stared at the keyhole. He committed its shape to memory. He tried to picture the lock inside turning. He tried to relax.

  Chapter 18

  SARAH WORRIED AND TOSSED AND WORRIED and turned and finally slept. She was in and out for a couple hours. What little sleep she got came in dark, dreamless waves.

  Twenty-two miles away, Les Armstrong put out an APB on Jim’s car, then went home to see her family. They were all asleep, of course, but she wanted to be there when they woke up.

  Mark Hammond wished her goodnight and hung around for another half an hour before heading home for a beer. Resisting his body’s need to rest, he paced the room, occasionally glancing at the city through the bay windows that ran along one side of the building. He hoped that Jim’s car would be spotted before he left.

  They never show you that a cop needs to eat or pee or sleep in the movies. They just load up on coffee and work the case until it’s solved. Nobody wanted to think about a detective sleeping while his loved one was missing... or worse. Beneath all the other excuses Hammond told himself, that was the main reason he hated TV, and cop shows in particular. It wasn’t that TV shows wasted your time or rotted your brain. It wasn’t that shows like Opera or The View fired up women like his wife to get their men to stop smoking (though that certainly didn’t help). It wasn’t the cool gadgets on all those CSI programs. It was the unrealistic expectations cop shows instilled in the minds of the public.

  Any detective could stay awake for two or three days and feverishly work a crime, if all crimes could be solved that fast and if detectives had the luxury of long breaks between each case. But many cases took more time than that and detectives didn’t have the luxury of long breaks. There was a new crime with a new suspect and a new victim every few days.

  And so the world turns. And so evil persists. And so Hammond said to hell with his wife and Les and bought a pack of cigarettes on the way home. He had no idea how close the police would come to finding Jim and Sarah that night. Nor did anybody else—not even the two uniformed officers who rolled through the Sunshine Rooms’ parking lot looking for Jim’s car.

  They stopped behind the silver Honda. The driver called in the plate. “Not it,” the dispatcher said.

  “Just your average sleaze-ball cheating on his wife,” his partner added. Then they moved on.

  Chapter 19

  MIKE PALLOW WAS AN ACCOUNTANT AT MILLS, Samson & Swannie. His firm was not well known by the general public, since they specialized in large corporate accounts. They didn’t run ads; they didn’t need to. He was proud of their discretion.

  His alarm sounded at six AM. He turned it off and got out of bed without disturbing his wife. Like every morning, he showered, dressed in a suit, and poured a cup of coffee from the time-activated coffee maker into his Starbucks to-go mug and hurried out the door.

  He lived his life by the clock. The drive to work would take between twenty-two and twenty-seven minutes, depending on traffic. His lunch break was at twelve-fifteen, never twelve o’clock or twelve-thirty. He knew every appointment he had without having to look at his calendar, but he obsessively checked it anyway, referring to Outlook when at his desk and the synced version on his iPhone when up and about. Sometimes, on the way into the office, he would look over his day’s appointments three or four times to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything.

  But today his drive wasn’t going as planned. A water main had broken during the night and road construction around Piedmont Park had brought everyone to a crawl. Fifteen minutes from his Midtown home, he was still bumper-to-bumper on the surface streets.

  He began to get anxious. Being late to the office would wreak havoc on his schedule. His first client, Mr. Barker, was expected at eight o’clock. He had questions about his quarterly filing and Mike still needed time to prepare.

  His chest tightened, making it difficult to breath. He knew a panic attack was coming on. The first time he’d had one, he was sure he was experiencing a cardiac arrest, but a battery of tests had confirmed that he suffered from nothing more serious than anxiety. His doctor wanted him to see a psychiatrist, which he said he didn’t have time for, or to start taking an anti-anxiety like Paxil, which he didn’t want to do, or, for God’s sake, to at least slow down a little, which he promised he would (once he retired).

  Instead of any of those options, he’d decided to muscle through the problem by rationalizing away the symptoms when they came on and using a paper bag if he started to hyperventilate. In keeping with that strategy, he tried to calm down by telling himself he would make up the time on the interstate.

  But when he finally reached I-75, after inching his way along the sea of red taillights, he’d already lost another thirty minutes. That was more time than he could make up, even if he pushed the car to its limit. Still, since he had to try to get back any time he could, he cut across from the onramp to the far-left lane and kicked the speed up to eighty-five. That was faster than he’d normally drive, but not irresponsibly fast, he decided.

  The sun’s soft orange rays had just started to stretch across the city when police lights came on behind him. His anxiety kicked up a notch in response and his hands started to shake. He pulled over to the side of the road.

  An officer, who looked especially tall in his rearview mirror, approached his silver Civic.

  “License and insurance, please,” the cop said as he leaned down. He took a hard look at Mike, then scanned the interior of the car.

  Mike pulled the insurance card from his glove box and his license from his wallet. “Here you go, officer.”

  The cop reviewed them. His nose scrunched up like he smelled something bad. After a period of time that felt much longer than it actually was, the cop’s gaze shifting from the license to Mike and back, he said, “Wait right here.”

  The officer sauntered back to his cruiser.

  Mike sat. He waited. Minutes ticked by. His anxiety grew.

  As the officer returned, easing toward him at that same languid pace, Mike again watched him in his rearview mirror. He saw the officer unsnap the leather strap that held his gun in place. That didn’t seem like normal police procedure. Then he saw the officer’s partner step out from the passenger door. He also unsnapped the strap holding his gun in place. Only then did Mike realize what he had mistaken for a slow walk was actually the kind of cautious approach you’d use when advancing on a wanted man.

  “Could you turn off the engine, please?” the officer said when he got to Mike’s window.

  “What?”

  “Turn off the engine and step out of the car.”

  Mike did as he was told. He was a waif of a man, shorter than most. The cop towered over him.

  “Open the trunk for me.”

  “Why?”

  “Sir...”

  “I’m sorry. Of course.” He pressed a button on his remote and the trunk’s lid popped up.

  While the cop examined the trunk, Mike fidgeted, hands deep in his pockets, kicking the gravel.

  The officer closed the lid and returned. “What’s your relationship to Sarah Winslow and Jim Rossin?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  “Sir, the car you’re driving matches the description of the one owned by a suspect wanted for questioning.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I’ve owned this car since it came off the assembly line.”

  “Think it’s a coincidence the plate matches, too?”

  “Now that’s impossible,” Mike said, as he rounded his car so he could take a look at the license plate. “AEJ 1392” was what he expected to see printed on it. That’s what had been there since he got the plate in the mail three y
ears ago and that’s what had been there the last time he looked at it. But that’s not what was there now. Instead, the license plate read: RMI 7748.

  The world tilted just a little when Mike saw the incorrect plate. His heart rate sped up, making his anxiety worse. He wondered if he’d gotten in the wrong car when he was coming out of Northpoint Mall yesterday. At some point in his life, he remembered hearing that car manufacturers had only so many remote combinations. So it was possible that there was another Honda at the mall parked near his that his remote could unlock—

  Don’t be stupid.

  Even if that fact was true, and he had no reason to believe that it was, the odds of such a mistake actually happening had to be astronomically small. Besides, all the stuff inside this car was his, right down to the doll his daughter had left in the backseat.

  No. This was his car, just not his plate.

  How long ago could it have been switched? When was the last time he’d looked at it? He couldn’t remember. How often do you actually read your license plate?

  He began sweating all over. His efforts to avoid a full-blown panic attack finally failed. He leaned forward, hands on his knees, breathing deeply.

  “Sir, are you all right?”

  He held up a hand to say give me a second, but the words he chose were: “It’s not my plate.”

  The officer pressed the button on the CB strapped to his shoulder. “This is five-five-David, we’re going to need an ambulance—”

  Breathing harder, words slower: “No. I don’t... Glove box... The bag.”

  As cars whizzed past on the interstate, the officer hurried to the passenger side door, flung it open, and riffled through the glove box. He returned with a folded brown paper bag. Mike yanked it from his hand and struggled to open it. Then he held it to his mouth and breathed deeply, one hand still on his knee for support, the bag expanding and contracting.

  When Mike’s breathing slowed, the officer canceled the ambulance. He asked again if Mike was okay.