Come And Find Me Part 13

Below that was a message addressed to USER003 on Volganet. All it contained was: 42.3376501685968471.07173681259155 "I have no idea what those numbers mean," Pam said. "Do you?"

"They're geocodes," Diana said. She pulled up the Web site WhereUAre.com and pasted the numbers into a search box. "s.h.i.t," she said, the back of her neck p.r.i.c.kling as a map of the South End came up with a virtual pushpin on Harrison Avenue in the precise location of Pam's apartment building.

Chapter Nineteen.

"The good news is . . . that message never made it out," Pam said. Diana found that only marginally rea.s.suring.

It didn't take long for Pam to find the program that had launched it. She examined the code. "This is awfully clever. Simple but effective." She looked over at Diana. "But how'd it get here?"

"When did it get here?"

"I can tell you that. Hold on," Pam said. A few clicks later, Pam pointed to the screen. "Just under a year ago."

"No way." Diana had owned the laptop for about that long-since Gamelan started. For that entire time it had been broadcasting her whereabouts to Volganet? She dropped into a chair. With all the fancy security systems that Jake had set up for her, how was that possible?

Diana watched as Pam deleted the program. We have no privacy. She remembered Daniel's rant about how the Internet, which had started out as a haven for freedom, had been co-opted, transformed into a playpen for Big Brother. Every time you're on the Internet somebody knows where you are.

Pam handed the laptop back to her. The tiny circle over the top of the screen, a built-in video camera that she'd never bothered about, seemed to blink at her.

"You got any masking tape?" she asked Pam.

When Pam brought her a roll, she tore off a tiny sc.r.a.p and stuck it over the camera lens.

If her laptop had been sending out information about its whereabouts, maybe there was a GPS chip transmitting from the car too. For that matter, a tracking device could have been sewn into clothing-like the brand-new clothes she'd purchased online and that Ashley had been wearing when she disappeared.

Diana picked the leather jacket off Pam's coatrack where she'd hung it and turned it over in her hands. She wondered how small and well camouflaged a GPS emitter could be. She examined the metal fittings on the jacket. Could it resemble a snap or be embedded in a buckle?

She ran her fingers up inside the lining and rolled the collar and cuffs between her fingers, feeling for any kind of anomaly. Then she examined the jeans and T-shirt that she still had on. Then the red boots that she'd shucked when she came into the apartment.

She pulled out her cell phone. Didn't they come with embedded GPS locators? She'd have to take that risk. It was the only way that Ashley could reach her, and she couldn't turn it off-not until she was sure Ashley was safe.

That night, Diana tried to fall asleep on a blowup mattress on Pam's floor. It was comfortable enough and she was warm under a down comforter, but her insides were tied up in knots. She timed her morning tranquillity pill so it would be at full strength for the trip to Copley Square. It was only ten blocks away, but just looking out the window to the street below gave Diana the jitters. Even with Daniel's walking stick, she'd never make it on foot. Driving the Hummer into the congested downtown and finding a parking spot near Spontaneous Combustion's office-how likely was that?

She needn't have worried. Pam offered to drive.

They rode down in the elevator together. Pam went outside, her wheelchair easily navigating the steps down to the sidewalk and off the curb. Pam's silver van was parked in a handicapped spot in front of the building. She used a remote to open the van's door. A platform slid out and Pam rolled onto it and waited for it to rise. When it was level with the van, she rolled inside and positioned her chair where the driver's seat had been removed.

The pa.s.senger door slid open and Diana got in, holding Daniel's walking stick. She sat back, barely aware of the door sliding shut, of Pam whirring up and back, positioning the wheelchair and locking it in behind the steering wheel. The van was so much like the one Diana had been driving home from college when she had her first full-blown panic attack. So high off the ground, the windshield so close to the car in front of them. That first time, she'd been ambushed. This time she saw it coming.

Pam started the van and, using one of the hand controls attached to the steering wheel to accelerate, pulled out into traffic. Diana grasped the door. Her heart sped and the walls of the van threatened to fold in on her, but a part of her seemed to remain on the outside, watching and monitoring her response, observing pedestrians darting across the streets or making their way up and down the sidewalks. That detachment-it was her pill doing its work.

"Take your time. Control it," Pam said as she crossed over the highway and into downtown Boston.

Diana looked over at her, startled. She understood.

Pam rolled down the windows on both sides of the van and cold air filled the interior. "Just breathe."

Diana sat back. The vise that gripped her slowly loosened.

Minutes later, Pam parked the van in a handicapped spot alongside Trinity Church, its steps and arched front now in deep morning shadow, its central tower and two side towers looming overhead.

Only about a dozen pedestrians were in Copley Square. Like a holographic image, Diana envisioned Ashley standing there in the middle of the plaza, barely fifty feet from where they'd parked, wearing the same clothes Diana had on now and offering a cell-phone salute to the Fairmont Copley.

Across the street was the pillared front of the library where the improv partic.i.p.ants had a.s.sembled. Behind her was the Copley Plaza Hotel, where Superman had been launched from a top-floor window.

"Spontaneous Combustion is in that building over there," Pam said, pointing past the plaza, across Boylston. Diana recognized the building with the decorative ironwork at the roofline. "You ready?"

Pam waited until Diana nodded before rolling up the windows and opening the van doors. Holding Daniel's walking stick, Diana got out. She raised her jacket collar and folded her arms. With Pam rolling along beside her, Diana walked to the spot in the center of the plaza where Ashley had stood. She was right here. Diana looked around, envisioning what it had been like with the plaza crowded with pedestrians. She looked across the street and imagined a glowering Aaron Pritchard, standing at the light watching her. But then what happened?

The offices of Spontaneous Combustion were across the street, on the top floor of a building tucked between a CVS and a Starbucks. Eddie, who'd talked to her on the phone, set up Diana and Pam in a small, windowless video editing room. The walls were painted black, and three computer monitors were set on a shelf over a worktable with a single keyboard and mouse and banks of control panels. Eddie showed them the basics of how to work the system and left them to it.

There were six video files. The first one started with Eddie, standing on the library steps, wearing a director's cap and addressing the crowd through a bullhorn. The camera stayed with him. Diana slowed to half speed whenever the camera zoomed out to take in any of the crowd.

A few minutes in, Diana thought she spotted Ashley. She paused the video and backed up. Sure enough, there she was, standing at the back of the crowd listening to the director's instructions.

Diana replayed the video, more slowly. The camera caught Ashley throwing a look behind her, then stepping into the crowd and getting swallowed up. Diana backed up again and froze the screen on Ashley's face as she looked over her shoulder and in the direction of the camera. She zoomed in.

"A little blurry, but what do you make of that expression?" Pam asked.

"She looks-" Diana searched for the right word.

"p.i.s.sed off?"

"Exactly right. And I'm guessing she sees Aaron, the guy she'd just dumped." So where was the other man Aaron had claimed he'd seen Ashley talking to?

Diana grabbed a pencil from the table and a piece of paper from the trash. On the blank back, she drew a crude map of Copley Square and the surrounding area. She jotted an A at the approximate spot on the plaza where Ashley stood, and the 6:03:25 time stamp from the video.

Diana pushed play and the view shifted back to the director, and stayed with him except for cutting away once to capture the brief drama of Superman getting snagged on the spire, and once again lingering on the unfurling banner at the end.

The first camera's video contained only one Ashley sighting. Diana prayed the others would yield better results.

The video from the second camera had been taken from the roof of the building they were now in. The angles were all long shots across Copley. Individual people looked small and insignificant. It was slow going, backing up and inching ahead, zooming in to examine the crowd. There might have been another Ashley sighting. And another. Both were near where she'd been spotted earlier. Diana penciled in more As and time stamps on her map.

Footage from the third camera yielded nothing new. The fourth camera focused on bystander reactions. Diana spotted the red hat again. Ashley had her back to the camera, her arm raised. Diana jotted an additional A on her map with a new time. As the camera meandered through the crowd, its operator seemed particularly enamored of a young woman whose abundant cleavage overflowed her low-cut top as she raised her arm in a cell-phone salute to the hotel.

A fifth camera also caught the proceedings from sidewalk level. This one had caught Ashley crossing the street, from the library to Copley, and later in mid-pivot as Superman crossed overhead.

The sixth video file was much smaller than the others. It had in it only five minutes of footage, shot from Spontaneous Combustion's office window. It began at 6:53 A.M. the next morning and showed a gray, deserted Copley Square with a single pedestrian moving slowly across it. Traffic was spa.r.s.e, and the headlights of about half of the cars were turned on.

Diana sat back. By then Ashley had vanished, gone off the grid as Jake would have put it.

"Hey!" Pam said. She was pointing to a figure sitting at the edge of the fountain.

Diana blinked, unsure of what she was seeing. She froze the video and zoomed in. Wrapped in a blanket beside the fountain alongside Copley Church sat what looked like a homeless woman with a wheeled cart stuffed with clothing. On her head, she wore a newsboy-style cap.

Chapter Twenty.

"Sure looks like the hat your sister had on," Pam said when Diana had enlarged the frame even more.

Diana stared closely at the image. The hat seemed to be the right shape, and it might have been red, but really it was just a blur. The woman wearing it was definitely not Ashley.

"Even if it is, it doesn't get us anywhere," Diana said. "Better to focus on what we know."

She flattened the hand-drawn map on which she'd noted the times and places they'd spotted Ashley. "She starts out here." She poked the map at the first A at 6:03:25 on the library's front steps. "Then she's here and here." She moved her finger to the A still on the steps at 6:11:02 and on to the one in the middle of Dartmouth Street at 6:16:23.

Diana went on, tracing all eleven points in time and s.p.a.ce. "So, the last time we see her for sure is at 6:23:05," she said. "Three minutes later, poof."

"People don't just disappear."

"Right. So, what happened between 6:23 and 6:26? With six video cams going, one of them must have picked up something." As she said that, Diana felt the p.r.i.c.kle of excitement. There had to be clues buried somewhere in all that footage. There just had to be.

Diana used all of the monitors to bring up videos from all six cams. She froze each at 6:23:05, the time of the last Ashley sighting. Each of the cameras had a different view, and in one of them, Ashley was standing in the square, facing away from the camera, her cell phone raised.

Diana started the videos, synchronized to the same time and all running at the same slow speed. Ashley stood in a frozen salute. The camera cut away from her to show a woman pushing a double stroller, stopping to look. Simultaneously, another camera was capturing a cop looking baffled. Another focused on Super Dummy appearing in the hotel window. It started its descent. In the panoramic video shot from the office window, almost every pedestrian in Copley Square was frozen, attentions riveted as Super Dummy flew overhead.

"There!" Diana pointed to a pair of figures walking out of the square, the only two in motion. She froze the video.

From overhead, it was impossible to see their faces, and the man's body shielded the other figure from view. It was hard to make out details, but it looked like a man wearing a baseball cap with his arm around someone smaller.

Diana started the video again in slow motion and they watched as the couple neared the sidewalk.

"Noooo!" Diana howled when the camera cut away for a close-up of the dummy, impaled on the needle-nose spire of the information kiosk. The glitch was the perfect cover.

It felt like forever until the dummy was tugged free and at last there was finally another long shot across Copley Square. But by then, the man and his companion were gone. Time stamp: 6:26:15.

"Where the h.e.l.l did they go?" Pam whispered.

By then it was afternoon and Eddie needed the video editing suite back. After extracting a promise that Diana and Pam wouldn't make copies or post clips from the videos, he gave them a DVD with the footage from all six cameras. If only Diana could combine all the snippets of information into a single stream and project Ashley's likely trajectory out of there.

But how? The answer didn't come to her until she was rushing to keep up with Pam's wheelchair as it sped back across the plaza's brickwork to her van. First she had to find a version of Copley Square in OtherWorld that was rendered approximately to scale.

As soon as they got back to Pam's apartment, Diana logged onto OtherWorld and began to look for a reasonably accurate version of that area of downtown Boston. Meanwhile Pam loaded the digital video files from the improv event onto her server.

Diana entered the coordinates of a virtual Copley Square that had drawn the most visitors and had the fewest complaints about griefers. The new location rezzed around Nadia. Diana angled the view-it included all the landmarks she needed, from Trinity Church to the Copley Plaza Hotel to the Boston Public Library. Even the subway station just past the library on Boylston was there. But was it to scale?

She angled the view up, pulling higher and higher until she could see everything on a single screen. From that far away the image was reduced to a schematic. Nadia was the single yellow dot on a rectangle that was Copley Square.

Diana compared the shape and size of the virtual square to a Google map of the actual area. They were close enough for what she needed.

Pam rolled her wheelchair over and stopped beside Diana, holding the little handwritten map that Diana had put together of Ashley sightings.

"Okay. Move Nadia here"-Pam pointed to a spot in the virtual Copley Square that was about a hundred feet in front of the center entrance to Trinity Church where Ashley had stood, cell phone raised-"and set the time to 6:21:15."

Diana tapped at the arrow keys. She watched the yellow dot move to the location. Then she froze the image and set the clock to 6:21:15. She and Pam continued, placing Nadia in each of the places Ashley had been spotted in the Virtual Copley Square. When they were done, Diana had marked five locations and five times.

"Okay, let's see what we've got," she said. "Connect the dots."

Diana ran the clock, and Nadia's yellow dot moved from spot to spot as the seconds ticked. First the yellow dot appeared in the middle of Copley. A dashed line crept out to what would have been about fifty feet away. The second dot appeared, followed by another dashed line that continued as far as the sidewalk where a third dot appeared. At 6:25:05 the line stopped.

"And less than a minute later, she's vanished," Pam said.

"Let's project her trajectory. How far could she have gotten?" Diana drew a circle around the final point on the sidewalk where they'd seen Ashley. "And if she started to run-" She drew a second wider circle around the first. She groaned when she saw how much territory that took in. Ashley could have gotten as far as the entrance to the T, or gone into the library.

"Let's a.s.sume for the moment that she didn't tear a.s.s out of there," Pam said. "And she sure as h.e.l.l didn't levitate. So her most likely path would have been to continue this way . . ." She traced her finger across what would have been sidewalk to the curb. She tapped the spot. "So what was going on over here?"

On her laptop screen, she brought up the video footage that had been taken from the office window. She froze it on a 6:21 view and pointed to the row of vehicles pulled up at the curb near that exact spot. There were two light-colored vans, one behind the other, then a police cruiser, behind that a light-colored compact car, and behind that a much larger black sedan.

She fast-forwarded to 6:26, when Ashley vanished. The same vehicles were still parked there.

"Can you come in closer on that black one," Diana said.

"You're not going to try and read those plates," Pam said as she zoomed in. "There's no technology in the world that will do that."

"I know, I know. But"-Diana pointed to the black sedan-"back up, just a little bit. Good, good. Now zoom in even closer right here and run it very slow."

Images blurred as Pam ran the video back, then forward at about half speed. Two figures crept toward the black car. The rear door opened. One person got in and the other crouched by the open door. Because of the camera angle and distance, it was impossible to make out much detail.

"We're just a.s.suming your sister is in the backseat," Pam said. "But you really can't see squat."

"What about that?" Diana said, pointing to a misshapen object lying on the sidewalk by the open car door.

Pam squinted at it, then rolled her eyes at Diana. "A shadow? A puddle?"

"It's my hat. I know it is."

Chapter Twenty-One.