“We’ll find her.” Ryan’s voice was tempered steel.
“I’ll call the women’s shelters,” I said.
“Worth a try.”
It was a dead end. No one had seen or admitted any woman fitting either of the descriptions I provided.
I went back to my research, but it was worse than before. I couldn’t sit. Couldn’t read. I was charged with enough energy to blast through granite.
These women had been kidnapped years ago, Angela Robinson in 1985, Anique Pomerleau in 1990, Tawny McGee in 1999. Their abductor was now dead.
So why this growing sense of dread?
Had we blown it? Was Catts the sole abductor? Had Stephen Menard been Neal Wesley Catts’s accomplice in his twisted little game, or vice versa? Was Menard still out there?
Were Pomerleau and McGee again in Menard’s hands? Had he forced them from the hospital? Had the women gone willingly, still under his spell?
Had Catts killed Menard? When? Why?
Catts should have had gunpowder on his hands. LaManche found none. Was it the other way around? Had Menard killed Catts?
I remembered McGee’s pleas to be taken from the hospital.
Had McGee persuaded Pomerleau to leave? Had the women simply fled? Had the unaccustomed environment frightened them into flight? But flight to where?
Why this intense feeling that McGee and Pomerleau were in danger? That I could rescue them if I was just clever enough to sort things out?
Why didn’t Ryan call?
I’d squeezed every detail I could from the bones. I’d gone over and over the MP lists. What else could I do?
The videos.
Shoving back from my desk, I hurried across the hall and unlocked the conference room. The tapes lay where Ryan and I had left them the previous afternoon. I hit PLAY and watched scene after scene of hooded young women with goth-white bodies.
By repeatedly rewinding and replaying in slow motion, I was able to distinguish what I thought were three victims. One woman had larger breasts. One had a mole to the left of her navel. One appeared taller in relation to background objects.
The setting never varied, though props came and went. A whip. An electric prod. A glass vial. Occasionally Catts appeared on camera brutalizing or menacing one victim or another.
I was repulsed and sickened. These girls should have been worrying about algebra, falling in love, picking out china. Not hanging by their wrists in a stench-filled basement. This was Canada, not sixteenth-century Transylvania.
Rarely had I felt such overpowering anger.
Be objective, Brennan. Look for associations. Trends.
I began again with the tape marked “1.” As patterns emerged, I made a list.
The women appeared in sequence. The taller of the three could be seen only on the first half of the first tape. The larger-breasted woman showed up in later scenes on that tape, and continued into the tape marked “2.” By tape “3” the larger-breasted woman had been replaced by the woman with the mole.
No scene included audio.
Each scene started and ended abruptly.
Some scenes were smooth, recorded with the camera in a fixed position. Others were jerky, recorded with the camera moving.
Suddenly it hit me.
Was Catts ever in the frame when the footage was jumpy? If so, who was filming?
I’d been viewing tapes for almost three hours when I spotted the scene I was looking for.
The camera cut on and swept the room with a bobbing motion.
A girl lay stretched on Catts’s table, wrists and ankles bound by leather restraints. Behind her someone had placed a mirror, rectangular, approximately twelve by twenty-four inches.
Catts was in the frame, back to the lens.
My scalp tingled.
Rocketing to my feet, I hit REWIND, then PLAY.
As the lens crossed a point in its arc, I could see a murky figure reflected in the glass.
Menard?
Reversing again, I inched the tape forward in slo-mo, froze the frame.
My hopes plummeted.
