The window was locked with a vinyl lever sash lock with keeper. Routine security for a second-floor room. Most burglars don’t scale walls to reach second floors. Wilde was, of course, different. He reached into his wallet and plucked out a loid — short for “celluloid” — card. Better than a credit card. More flexible. He slid the loid between the two sash frames and moved the lever into the unlocked position. It was that simple. Five seconds later, he was inside the room.
So now what?
Quick check of the closet revealed the following: a pink Fjällräven Kånken backpack on the top shelf, clothes neatly hung, no bare hangers. Meaning? He wasn’t sure. The backpack was empty. If she’d run away, wouldn’t she have packed it? Wouldn’t there be some signs of missing clothes?
Nothing conclusive, but interesting.
There was a time, Wilde imagined, where it would pay to check the desk drawers or perhaps look under the pillow or mattress for a diary, but nowadays most teens keep their secrets in their tech devices. The phone would be better to search, of course, the place we store our lives, and no, that wasn’t a comment on today’s youth. Adults too. Mankind has surrendered any pretense of privacy to those devices for the sake of... hard to say what. Convenience, he guessed. Artificial connections maybe, which might be better than no connection at all.
But it was not for him. Then again, real connections didn’t seem to be his bag either.
Had the police tried to ping Naomi’s location via her phone?
Maybe. Probably. Either way, he texted Hester to give it a try.
Naomi’s desktop computer had been left running. He moved the mouse, afraid that there might be a password blocking access. There wasn’t. He brought up her web browser. Naomi’s email information — name and password — had been saved for easy access. She was NaomiFlavuh, which seemed sweet and a little sad. He clicked and got in right away. He almost rubbed his hands together, hoping that he had hit the mother lode. He hadn’t. The emails couldn’t have been more innocuous — class assignments, college recruitment spams, coupons and offers from the Gap and Target and retailers unknown to Wilde with names like Forever 21 and PacSun. Kids today, he knew from his interactions with Matthew, text or use some sort of parent-proof app. They don’t email.
He stopped for a moment and listened. Nothing. No one coming up the stairs. He moved the mouse’s cursor up to the top and hit the history button. He hoped that Naomi hadn’t cleared her cache recently.
She hadn’t.
There were searches on eBay for stuffed animals. There were links to forums and Reddits that talked about collecting stuffed animals. Wilde glanced behind him at the bed. The stuffed animals had been laid out with some care. Several animals stared back at him. He thought about that for a second, about this girl who had been bullied all her life, how she must have rushed home after school, fleeing the taunts and abuse, maybe leaping high onto her bed, escaping into this lonely, self-created menagerie.
The thought flooded him with a surprising rage.
People had bullied this girl her whole life. If someone did more to her, if someone went the extra mile or forced her to do something desperate...
He bottled it and turned back to the task at hand. He still had the mask on his face. If by some chance Bernard Pine were to come upstairs or spot him — unlikely, really — Wilde would blow past him and run away. There would be nothing to identify him. His height and build — six feet, one eighty-five — would give them nothing.
Whoa. Pay dirt.
Naomi had been researching her classmates. There were six, maybe seven of them, but two names stuck out right away. One was Matthew’s. The other was Crash Maynard’s. The searches on Matthew — as well as his other classmates — were surface and quick. Did this mean anything? Or did teens Google each other all the time? You meet someone, you search online about them. Of course, Naomi had known these kids forever. She had grown up with them, gone to school with them, been a victim of their taunts and blows.
So why now?
He skimmed down through the rest of her Google searches. Nothing much stood out, except for an odd two-word search followed by an odd three-word search:
challenge game
challenge game missing
He focused on the added word: Missing.
He clicked through the links. As he started reading, his heart sank. He was midway through the pages when he heard a noise that startled him.
Footsteps.
Not close. Not coming up toward him. That was what was odd. There was only one person in the house. The father. Bernard Pine. He was in the kitchen. But these steps weren’t coming from the kitchen. In fact, now that he thought about it, he had not heard a sound coming from downstairs the entire time he had been up here.
The footsteps were faint. They were coming from inside the house, but...
Wilde closed down the browser and slipped across the room and into the corridor. He looked down the stairs. The footsteps were louder. Wilde could hear a voice now. Sounded like Bernard Pine. Who was he talking to? Wilde couldn’t make out the words. He crept closer to the top of the stairs so he could hear better.
The door beneath the stairs flew open.
The basement door.
Wilde jumped back. The voice was clear now, easy to understand.
“It was on the goddamn news! That woman was here too. What do you mean, who? That lawyer from TV, the one who did the report.”
Bernard Pine closed the basement door behind him.
“The cops just came. Yes, the chief, Carmichael, he knocked on the door. They’re probably still...” Wilde had his back pressed against the wall, but he risked a look. Bernard Pine had his mobile phone in one hand. With the other, he pushed aside a curtain and looked out into his front yard.
“I don’t see them right now, no. But I can’t... I mean, Carmichael might be right down the block, watching. There were news vans here too... We are probably being watched.”
We? Wilde thought.
Unless Pine considered himself royalty, “we” meant more than one person. Except that Wilde had cased the house. He had only spotted one person. Bernard Pine. If someone else was here, there was only one place that person could be.
The basement.
“Yeah, Larry, I know you told me not to do this, but I didn’t think I had a choice. I don’t want to get caught. That’s the big thing now.”
Pine hurried up toward the stairwell where Wilde stood on the landing. He was hustling now, jumping the steps two at a time. Relying on reflexes, Wilde dove back into Naomi’s bedroom and rolled toward a corner. Pine passed him on the landing without glancing into his daughter’s room.
The basement, Wilde thought.
He didn’t wait long. The moment Pine was past the door and in his own bedroom, Wilde came out. Moving on the balls of his feet — not the toes, the toes made noise — he padded down the steps. He spun to his right and came to the basement door. He tried the knob. It turned.
He opened the basement door silently, stepped inside, closed it behind him.
There was a faint light below him. Wilde had two choices here. Choice One: Tiptoe down the steps and sneak slowly toward whatever was to be found. Choice Two: Go for it.
Wilde went for Choice Two.
He took off his mask and strolled down the cellar stairs. He didn’t disguise it. He didn’t hurry nor did he dawdle. When Wilde arrived at the bottom, he turned toward the light.
Naomi opened her mouth.
“Don’t scream,” Wilde said to her. “I’m here to help you.”
Chapter Eleven
The basement had been finished on the cheap. The walls were faux wood made of some kind of vinyl, stuck up on the concrete with adhesive. The sofa was a hand-me-down convertible that was right now open into a queen-sized bed.