Astrid played the two-minute-and-fifty-one-second video chronicling Rusty’s death, first the preparation, then footage of him dangling beneath the bridge, clawing uselessly at the rope cinched around his neck, and the voice of her father, her dead father, spoke to her, With each passing second, the young man became less and less animated. Less frantic. More submissive to the inevitable. The final denouement of his ever-shrinking world.
Mollie had stopped trying to scream now and was watching the video with large, terrified, broken eyes.
Predator.
Prey.
The game.
Astrid tapped the space bar to pause the video, then said to Brad, “All right. Let’s send that message to the FBI.”
He went to the duffel bag to pull out the items he would need.
On the way to the control center, I asked Doehring if he’d interviewed anyone named Aria Petic, and he mentally clicked through his list of names. “No, I don’t think so.”
We arrived, and I immediately noted that the hotel had a better security surveillance system than most FBI field offices. Six attendants monitored an array of video screens stretching across the wall, each person’s eyes flickering from one screen to the next as the images changed to show different angles and hallways of the hotel.
Twenty-eight screens.
State of the art.
Adrian Lees introduced us to his head of security. “This is Marianne Keye-Wallace. Used to work for the NSA. She’ll help you. With anything you want.” Platinum blonde. Careful, steady eyes. She couldn’t have been more than thirty, but high-tech security positions rely more on brains and adaptability than either brawn or experience.
Without waiting for our names, she told Lees, “We’ll call you if we need you.” Then she promptly took a seat beside one of the computers turned to us. “Talk to me.”
“Are there any guests here by the name of Aria Petic, Twana Summie, or Mollie Fischer?” I said.
Marianne’s fingers were light and spidery on the keyboard. Lees hovered for a moment, then disappeared. “No,” she said. “What are we looking for here?”
It would take too long to explain. I pulled up the video of Aria Petic that Ralph had just sent me. “Do you have facial recognition on your video surveillance system?”
“Of course. Facial, audio, video.”
I handed her the phone. “Upload this picture. I need to know if this woman is in this hotel.”
The folded-up wheelchair leaned against the wall beside the room door, the duffel bag next to it. The suitcases that Astrid had brought into the hotel last night sat beside that.
Brad was busy with Mollie.
Astrid made the call to the front desk.
No footage of Aria Petic.
“You gotta be kidding me.” Doehring smacked the wall.
“What else?” Marianne asked, fingers poised at the keyboard.
Come on, come on, come on.
“We’re looking for…” I began, but my thoughts distracted me.
The key is Mollie. Everything revolves around her.
“Yes?” Marianne asked.
“Go online. Pull up the AP photo of Mollie Fischer.”
It took seconds.
“Do a search. If she’s here, I want to know what room she’s in. Pull up any video of her entering or leaving the hotel since 7:00 last night.” I figured we’d start there and work backward, if necessary to 4:00, when she was last seen.
A few minutes later Marianne found footage of Mollie in a wheelchair, being pushed into the hotel by an unidentified man wearing a baseball cap that completely hid his face from the camera, which told me he knew the camera’s angle and location before he even approached the building.
Follow up on that. If he knows where the cameras are, he’s likely to have been here before, scouting out the site.
Later, later, later.
Because, for now, we also had footage of them entering a service elevator inside the hotel. “Where do they exit the elevator?” I asked. “Which floor?”
“There’s no way to know. We only have surveillance cameras covering the guest elevators on each floor, not the service elevators.”
“Have they left the building?” Doehring said.
“Let me find out.” Marianne let her fingers loose on the keyboard.
She did another facial recognition search, then shook her head. “Unless they found a way to get past our cameras, they’re still inside.”
But that was enough for Doehring. He was on his radio calling for backup to set up a perimeter around the hotel; in less than five minutes, we would have the area secured.
“Have security seal off all the exit doors,” I said to her. “The suspect transported Mollie into the hotel in a wheelchair, so look for a handicapped-accessible vehicle outside. And go back to the footage of him entering the elevator. I’ve got an idea.”