Her Silent Cry (Detective Josie Quinn Book 6)(22)

The other women chuckled. Josie raised a brow and Zoey quickly said, “We’re laughing because Amy is way too nice to do anything with an ‘iron fist’.”

“Lucy just takes after her,” Ingrid explained.

Josie asked, “Do you ladies spend much time with Amy?”

Jaime gave an immediate eye-roll, drawing an elbow in her side from Zoey, who said, “Amy is a closed book. She keeps to herself. Her husband? Very sociable but never around.”

“Amy’s nice,” Ingrid said. “Very nice. Just hard to get close to. Our kids have all been in school together since Pre-K. We’ve become close. We always include Amy—”

“But she never takes us up on our invitations,” Jaime said.

“I think she’s lonely, too,” Zoey said.

“I feel like she isolates them,” Ingrid said thoughtfully, garnering more nods. “Even more than they already are with Colin out of town ninety percent of the time.”

“We don’t even know what she does with her time,” Jaime complained. “I mean she’s home all day, and she has a nanny. We don’t even know if she has hobbies—or maybe she’s having an affair.”

Ingrid laughed. “Please, not Amy. She and Colin are still in love with each other.”

“If I only had to see my husband a few days a month, I’d still be in love, too.” Zoey quipped.

Laughter erupted around the countertop. Josie had the feeling that the discussion was about to turn to gossip, so she said, “Would you ladies be willing to talk to your children? Ask them if Lucy ever said anything to them about talking to or being around adults besides her parents and nanny?”

“Of course,” the women murmured.

Josie passed out several business cards. “My cell phone is on there. Don’t hesitate to contact me. Any time—day or night.”

Back in the car, Mettner was still tapping furiously into the note-taking app on his phone. As they pulled away, he said, “None of that sent up any red flags.”

Josie sighed. “No, not in terms of the parents. I still can’t see either Colin or Amy being involved in Lucy’s abduction, but it seems there were enough opportunities when Lucy was with the nanny for a kidnapper to get close to her and prepare her to leave her parents behind.”

“You think the guy who helped her with the skee-ball machine at the funplex was prepping her?” Mettner asked. “Planning this whole thing out?”

“It’s impossible to know. You can call the funplex and see how long their security footage goes back. If it goes back that far, we might be able to get video of the encounter.”

Mettner tapped into his phone. “Here’s the number,” he said, before dialing. Josie listened to Mettner’s end of the conversation with the manager of the funplex. After several minutes, Mettner said, “So you only keep your CCTV footage going back one month? Okay. Yeah. Well, thanks anyway.” He hung up.

“Another dead end,” Josie muttered.

Back at the command tent, Noah continued rechecking the photos and video while Gretchen paced behind him, flipping through her notebook. Josie and Mettner filled them in on what little they’d learned.

“You think someone was approaching her while she was with the nanny or while Amy wasn’t paying attention?” Noah asked. “Getting her ready for this? Talking her into leaving her parents behind?”

Josie nodded. “I think it’s looking more and more that way.”

“She retrieved a sweatshirt from inside the column,” Gretchen said. “Put it on and ran away from both her parents. Getting a seven-year-old to do something like that would require a lot of preparation.”

Mettner said, “This guy could have been talking to her every day while she was at the park with the nanny for all we know.”

“Doing the prep here would make the most sense,” Josie said. “It’s possible he even got onto the carousel with her at some point to show her the door.”

“They would have had to have some sort of signal,” Noah said. “So she would know when to do it.”

Gretchen said, “She had to have seen him when she was on the ride. He had to be here. She saw him. He gave her a signal and she jumped down off her horse, opened the column, put on the sweatshirt and raced out of the park.”

“I’ve been over this footage and these photos at least one hundred times,” Noah said. “I can’t find a damn thing.”

“Maybe we should look again,” Mettner suggested. “None of us—not even the parents—saw Lucy skipping around in the sweatshirt the first dozen times we looked at that one video.”

They gathered around the laptop and Noah took them through every photo and video they had gathered. They combed over them, watching the videos multiple times, but found nothing amiss.

“Maybe we should have another look at the carousel,” Josie said. “From Lucy’s point of view.”

They walked slowly, allowing Noah to keep up with them, although he’d gotten quite fast on his crutches. He stood outside the fence, leaning on his sticks, watching from the approximate position the video they’d been relying on had been shot. Gretchen stood between the two horses that Amy and Lucy had occupied. “This guy could have been anywhere,” Gretchen said. “The ride was spinning. There are portions of the park we can’t see in any of the photos or footage we’ve got.”