scooted in from the other side and sat down.
“Feet hurt?” I asked with a snicker.
“My daughter is worth every penny.”
“How many pennies would that be?”
“Shut up.”
For the next ten minutes, my brother and I chatted-actually, he bragged about how many operations he had performed in the past week and I scanned for Uniworld terrorists. When people began to stream back to their seats, Jordan left, and I turned to watch for Marco and Tara until I got a crick in my neck. After another ten minutes, my cell phone vibrated. I saw Jordan’s name on the screen. “Where are they?” I whispered into the phone. “The show’s about to start.”
“Don’t know. I’m going to the lobby to see what the holdup is.”
I slumped down in my seat, feeling suddenly vulnerable, as the BBs resumed their places onstage. They began to play, and still there was no sign of Marco and Tara. And now my brother was gone, as well.
When the band went into their second song, I started to panic. Surely the line for the ladies’ room wasn’t that long. I tried to call Marco, but it went to voice mail, so I texted:
My cell phone vibrated just as I reached the heavy exit doors. Marco’s name was on the screen but I couldn’t hear what he was saying because of the loud music. “Hold on,” I called.
I pushed open the door, hurried up the hallway into the lobby, and saw cops everywhere-not the familiar New Chapel blue-shirted variety, but the brown-and-tan-uniformed sheriff’s police. They were corralling employees and the few concert attendees who’d stayed in the lobby, and as soon as they spotted me, one of them commanded, “Hold it right there.”
I came to a stop. “Marco?” I called into my phone. “Are you there?”
“I’m here, Abby. Where are you?”
“In the lobby. What’s going on?”
“Wait. I’ll hold up my hand.”
In the midst of all the confusion, I finally saw Marco gesturing for me to come toward him as he talked with one of the cops. I caught sight of my brother’s red hair and saw him beside Marco, speaking to another cop. Then my gaze was drawn down to the floor, where Kathy was kneeling, clutching Tara’s shiny pink purse and crying.
Something happened to Tara.
My heart began to hammer so hard I couldn’t breathe. I was so paralyzed, Marco came to get me. I clutched his arms for support. “What happened?”
“Tara is missing.”
I heard the words but couldn’t wrap my mind around them. “Missing?”
“She was kidnapped from the ladies’ room.”
Oh, God!My head swam. “Wasn’t Kathy with her?”
“The ladies’ room was jammed,” Marco explained, “so Kathy told Tara she’d meet her outside when she was finished. I was waiting for them a few feet from the door. When intermission was over and Tara still hadn’t joined us, Kathy went back inside to see what was taking so long, but Tara wasn’t there. An attendant was cleaning, so Kathy showed her the photo she took of the two of you. The attendant hadn’t seen her but recognized Tara’s purse. Apparently, she found it on the floor behind the trash can and was going to turn it over to the lost-and- found department.”
“Someone kidnapped Tara from the washroom right under your noses?”
Marco pointed to people standing near the souvenir booth. “See those girls talking with the cops? They’re Tara’s school friends. They reported seeing a blond woman with a spider tattoo on her neck in the washroom, smoking a cigarette. Before the girls went back to their seats, they noticed the same blonde assisting an old lady in a long, baggy coat and knit hat toward the door, where a man was waiting. They said they noticed her because it was weird for someone to bring an old woman to a Barrow Boys concert.
“They didn’t get a look at the man’s face because he had a hood pulled up over his head, but they were able to give a good description of the woman-long, white blond hair with black tips, tattoo, heavy black eye shadow, black clothing. The cops are guessing the old lady was Tara in a disguise. She must have been Tasered or given an injection of some kind, because she was leaning heavily on the blonde, as though she didn’t have the strength to walk. The police are corroborating the girls’ story now with other witnesses.”
I didn’t know what to say. I felt sick inside. I couldn’t begin to imagine the terror my brother and sister-in-law were feeling. I had chided Jordan for coming along to protect Tara, and none of us had been able to do it.
“The police have issued an Amber Alert and sealed the exits,” Marco continued, “in case the girls are wrong and Tara’s still in the building. They’ve brought in a search dog, and a helicopter will be here soon for an aerial search, in case she’s on foot. They’ll find her, Abby.”
I could hear Kathy keening in grief, and my eyes welled with tears. I pushed through the people around her and knelt at her side, wrapping my arms around her shoulders. “Kathy, I’m so sorry,” I said, the words catching in my throat.
She lifted her head, her eyes sad and frightened. “We have to find her, Abby,” she whispered, clutching one of my hands. “We have to find my baby.”
“We will, I promise.”
One of the cops came to talk to her, so I stepped away. “Marco, I have this horrible feeling that the kidnappers were after me and got Tara by mistake.”
Marco wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close. “I didn’t want to frighten you, Sunshine, but I was thinking the same thing. Still, we can’t rule out that someone had a grudge against your brother. He’s a doctor, and rightly or wrongly, people sometimes take revenge against a doctor when something goes wrong.”
“They sue, Marco. They don’t kidnap the doctor’s kid. Jordan didn’t even decide to come with us until today, so how could a kidnapper have planned it? I must have been their target. Nothing else makes sense except that Tara has the misfortune of looking like me.”
“Okay, if that’s true, think about what happened when they realized their mistake with Jillian. They dropped her off. So they’ll probably do the same with Tara.”
“What if they gave Tara some kind of drug that paralyzed her? She could by lying along the side of the road somewhere, freezing to death.” I handed him his coat and Tara’s jacket so I could put my coat on. “I’m going outside to look for her.”
“Abby, it’s twenty degrees out there. Stay in here where it’s warm. I’ll look.”
“No, Marco. I’m going. If I have to wait around in here, I’ll lose my mind.”
“You won’t get out the door without an okay from the sergeant.”
Crap. Marco was right. I didn’t know the sheriff’s chief officer at all. Why couldn’t the Expo Center be in city jurisdiction instead of county? Reilly hated it when I got involved in police business, but he usually capitulated.
I glanced at the stern face of the sergeant, who had set up a command station on one side of the doors. There was no way he was going to give me the okay to help. But damn it, there was no way he was going to stop me, either. “Create a diversion, Marco. I’m going out.”
“Past that big cop at the door? I don’t think so.” Marco took Tara’s coat from me. “I’ll be back in a moment. The canine handler will need this to establish a scent pad for his dog.”
As Marco strode off with the coat, I wound my scarf around my neck and headed for the exit. Permission or not, I was going to look for my niece.
“Excuse me, I need to leave,” I said to the tall cop guarding the glass doors.
He gazed down at me over the bridge of his nose. “No one leaves.”
“I know those are your orders, but I’m the victim’s aunt and I really need to help search for her. Here. Do you want to see my ID?”
“No one leaves.”
“Look, it’s my fault she was kidnapped, okay? I have to get out there and find her. Wouldn’t you do the same for your niece? Don’t look away. You know you would. Tell you what, just keep looking the other way and I’ll dart out.”
