She didn’t give me her first name, just said that she was “Mrs. Rainey,” and then proceeded to tell me she hadn’t seen anyone leave the alley. “I’m sorry.” She was staring at my arm. “We were going the other way. Shouldn’t you be in a hospital?”
Probably.
I looked at her children. A sleeping baby in the stroller. Twin girls about three or four years old. A boy, maybe six. I knelt beside them. The twins eased back, grabbed the legs of their mother. One of them bit the corner of her lower lip and looked like she was about to cry. I couldn’t hide the blood completely, but I turned to the side to hide it as much as I could.
“I need to get them home,” Mrs. Rainey said.
“Just one moment. I won’t upset your children. I promise.” She looked at me uneasily, then at my arm, then at the alley where more officers had arrived, and then at the police cars screeching to a stop nearby. Though she was clearly reluctant, she must have realized the importance of my request, because at last she nodded. “Okay.”
“Listen,” I said to the kids. “Did you see anyone come out of this alley? Just a little while ago? It’s very important.”
None of them responded.
I held up the phone’s screen with the picture of Aria Petic that Ralph had sent me. “Did this woman come through here?”
The children just stared at me.
I showed them the man pushing the wheelchair. “Or him?”
Silence.
“Go on,” their mother said. “Did any of you see them come out from between those two buildings?”
The girls clung to her. The boy just looked at me suspiciously.
All right, this was going nowhere. I was feeling queasy from the pain, and I was only upsetting the children.
Normally, we’d detain potential witnesses a little longer, have another officer follow up, but I didn’t like it that the kids were here at a time like this.
“I really should go,” Mrs. Rainey said.
I took down her address and phone number so I could follow up, then I handed her one of my cards. “If any of your children remember anything, anything at all, call me.”
She accepted the card, and I headed unsteadily toward a park bench to sit down and catch my breath.
But I hadn’t made it more than three steps when I heard her voice: “Wait.”
I turned and saw one of her daughters pointing.
At a taxicab.