She quickly slid down in the chair and turned her head to the side so he wouldn’t see her.
What is he doing here!
He was following her. He had to be following her!
She unpocketed her cell to call Patrick, but before she could speed-dial him, she had a thought.
Paul thinks Patrick has an anger problem… that he’s violent. ..
If Paul was following her-which obviously he was -then he would definitely have seen Patrick enter the hotel with her. So he would know that her stepfather was close by…
What is Paul trying to do?
There was no way to know for sure, but she didn’t trust him, and considering the custody suit, she couldn’t shake the thought that he was here to somehow ruin her chances of staying with Patrick.
She looked around for a sneak-off route, but as she did, Paul somehow picked out her face from all the others in the crowded lobby and started toward her.
No, no, no!
She put the phone away, grabbed her purse, and was picking up her laptop so she could leave, but as she did, she thought of a way to turn the tables on Paul, especially if he was trying to set up Patrick-if that was his little plan after all.
She left her laptop open.
Tapped at the keys.
Chelsea Traye had covered the shooting six years ago, and it hadn’t taken her long to help Marianne find the right raw footage. Now she was sitting on one side of me, Marianne on the other. Nick stood behind her, taking in the room, obviously impressed.
Marianne was downloading the network’s archived video footage, sending it through her system’s audio recognition program, flagging references to the words “Mollie Fischer,” “Lincoln Towers,” “Gunderson,” “primate,” “metacognition” and a dozen other keywords I’d given her.
“This program tags spoken words,” Marianne explained to us, “then grabs twenty seconds of audio on both sides of them so you can listen to the phrase in context.”
The files and video clips were piling up by the second. I was astonished by the amount of material the station had, and I realized most law enforcement agencies don’t even have the capability for this depth and breadth of research.
I certainly wouldn’t have time to listen to all of this audio right now. “Can you transcribe the audio files into text files?” I noticed Nick holding his cell in his right hand, tapping at the keys with the other. “You need to put that away in here,” I said. “Or you’ll have to leave.”
He looked embarrassed. “Sorry.”
He pocketed the phone, and Marianne said to me, “Sure, I can get you text files.”
She let her fingers loose on the keyboard, and a string of text messages appeared on the screen before me, hyperlinked to place markers in the video footage. And I began scrolling through the hundreds of snippets of text, looking for anything that might relate to Mollie Fischer’s abduction.