She looked pleased.
“And I hate to impose on you further at a time like this,” I said, “but I need you to go into another room and make an evidentiary compilation for me.”
“An… evidentiary…?”
“Sorry, that’s the technical term for an exhaustive description of all potential evidence that might help lead to her whereabouts,” I said. I’d made it up on the spot, but it sounded plausible.
“What sort of evidence?”
“Everything. I mean, what was Alexa wearing when she left. The make and size of her shoes and each item of clothing, her purse, anything she might have been carrying in her purse. You’re far more observant than Marshall, and men never pay attention to that kind of thing anyway. I know it seems tedious, but it’s extremely important, and there’s no one else who can do it. And we need it right away. Within the next hour, if at all possible.”
“Y’all want me to use a computer or a typewriter?”
“Whatever’s fastest for you,” I said.
I went back in. Dorothy had positioned herself in front of Marshall’s computer, standing. She tapped, moved the mouse, and after a minute she said, “Okay, open the hyperlink.”
In a few seconds a new window had opened. It showed a cheesy-looking website with a banner across the top: CAMFRIENDZ-THE LIVE COMMUNITY!
Within it were lots of moving video windows. In some of them were second-tier celebs like Paris Hilton. In others, teenage girls wearing low-cut tank tops and a lot of eye makeup were making provocative poses, and doing suggestive things with their tongues. Some of them had pierced lips.
“What is this?” Marcus said. “Some kind of pornography site?”
“Teenage girls and guys sit in front of the camera on their computer and talk to each other,” Dorothy said. “Sometimes more than talk.”
Dorothy tapped and moused again, entered some text, scrolled down, clicked and clicked some more.
And then a still photo of Alexa popped up.
A school portrait, it looked like, from when she was younger. Her blond hair cut into bangs, a white headband, wearing a plaid jumper, probably a school uniform. Very sweet and innocent. Before the trouble started.
“Oh, my God,” Marcus moaned. “Oh, my God. They put her picture up here where anyone can see it? What-what are they trying to do?”
Green letters at the top of Alexa’s photo said ENTER CHAT.
“Chat?” Marcus said. “What’s this-who am I chatting with? What the hell?”
Dorothy clicked on it, and a log-in window appeared. She entered the user name and password they’d supplied. For a while nothing happened. She sidled over to her laptop, and Marshall and I came closer to the screen to watch.
Then a big window popped up with another still photo of Alexa.
Only this looked like it had been taken recently.
She appeared to be sleeping. Her eyes were closed, with dark smudges of eye makeup that made her look like a raccoon. Her hair was scraggly. She looked terrible.
Then I realized this wasn’t a still photo at all. It was live video.
You could see slight motion as she shifted in her sleep. The streaming video had all the production values of a snuff film: the camera too close to her face, the image grainy and the focus tight, and the light strange, green-saturated, as if taken with an infrared camera.
Indicating that she was in the dark.
A loud metallic voice: “Alexa, wake up! It’s time to say hello to your father.” A man’s voice. A pronounced accent: Eastern European, maybe.
Alexa’s eyes came open, her eyes staring wide, her mouth agape.
Marcus gasped. “That’s her!” he said, probably because he couldn’t think of anything else. Then: “She’s alive. God almighty, she’s alive.”
Alexa’s eyes were shifting back and forth.
Unsettled. Panicky.
Something about her face looked different, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
She said, “Dad?”
Marcus stood up, shouted, “Lexie. Baby! I’m here!”
“She can’t hear you,” Dorothy said.
“Dad?” Alexa said again.
The amplified voice said, “You may speak, Alexa.”
Her words came all in a rush, a high-pitched shriek. “Dad, oh God, please, they’ve got me in this-”
The sound of her voice abruptly cut out and the accented voice said, “Follow the script exactly, Alexa, or you will never talk to your father, or anyone else, again.”
Now she was screaming, her eyes bulging, face flushed, head moving side to side, but there was no sound, and after ten more seconds the window went black.
Marcus said, “No!” and he catapulted himself out of his chair, touching the screen with his stubby fingers. “My baby! My baby!”
“The link’s gone down,” Dorothy said. The video image had once again become Alexa’s school portrait. The sweet little girl with headband and bangs. “She didn’t cooperate. She was trying to tell us something-maybe her location.”
Marcus seemed to bob and weave, unsteady on his feet. Terror rilled his forehead.
“I doubt it,” I said. “Everything about this says professional. They’d never have let her see where they took her.” I glanced over at Dorothy’s laptop, saw a column of white numbers whizzing by on a black background, way too fast to read. “What’d you get?” I asked her. “Can you tell where the signal’s coming from?”
She shook her head. “Looks like CamFriendz is based in the Philippines, believe it or not. That’s where the video feed originated. So that’s a dead end too. These guys probably have a free account. They could be anywhere in the world.”
Marcus began to teeter, and I caught him before he sank to the floor. He hadn’t passed out, not quite. I set him down gently in the chair.
“They killed her,” he said. He stared dully into some middle distance.
“No,” I said. “That’s not in their interest. They need her for ransom.”
He moaned, covered his face with his hands.
Dorothy got up and excused herself and said she wanted to give us some privacy to talk. She took a second laptop from her Gucci bag and went to work in the sitting area off the kitchen to try tracing the IP address.
“YOU WERE expecting something like this, weren’t you?” I said.
“Every day, Nick,” he said sadly.
“After what happened to Alexa at the Chestnut Hill Mall that time.”
“Right,” he said softly.
“What do you think they want?”
He didn’t reply.
“You’d pay any amount of money to get her back, wouldn’t you?”
Now he just stared straight ahead, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
I leaned forward in my chair and spoke quietly to him. “Don’t. If they contact you and demand money wired to some offshore account, I know you’d do it in a heartbeat. I know you. But I need you to promise me you won’t. Not until you consult with me and we make sure it’s done the right way. If you want to get your daughter back alive.”
He kept staring, his eyes focusing on something that wasn’t in the room.
“Marshall?” I said. “I want your word on this.”
“Fine.”
“You never did call the police, did you?” I said.
“I-”
I interrupted him before he could go on. “You need to know something about me,” I said. “I don’t like being lied to by my clients. I took this job because of Alexa, but if I find out you’re lying, or holding anything back, I’ll walk away. Simple as that. Got it?”
He looked at me for a long time, blinking fast.
“I’ll give you amnesty for anything you did or said up till now,” I said. “But from here on out, any lie, and I’m off the case. So let’s try again: Did you call the police?”
He paused. Then, eyes closed, he shook his head. “No.”
“Okay. This is a start. Why not?”
“Because I knew they’d just bring in the FBI.”