Forgive Me(39)

She ended the call and took a big slurp of her green juice made from kiwi, banana, mango, pineapple, green apple, spinach, and kale. She suspected this “healthy” drink had more sugar than an ice cream sundae, and damn if it didn’t taste as good. She stood up and tossed away her drink.

Back to the hunt. The crowds were as plentiful as locusts. Everywhere Angie looked, she saw targets—young, vulnerable girls—but few roamed alone. Safety in numbers. Smart chicas. She didn’t feel discouraged. She knew this was the place to be. She also knew that before the stakeout was over, she’d run out of clean clothes and have to go shopping after all.





CHAPTER 21



Greg Jessup might have been an absentee father, but he was not skimping on the cash when it came to finding his daughter. It was obvious after a few days that the stakeout at Union Station was going to be a long one. Angie had no other leads, and she felt confident the man on the surveillance video would eventually stalk the place again.

But when?

Angie, Mike, and Bao took shifts spending day after day at the mall, racking up per diem fees for hotel rooms and meals, without success. It was a waiting game, and she had committed to the strategy. Eventually, she would find her mystery man. It was just a matter of time.

Things at home were fine, no radical shifts in the landscape. Gabriel DeRose went to work, and Angie continued to get new cases, some of which she assigned to Mike and Bao while she took the brunt of the surveillance duty. The long-term stakeout had been her idea, so she felt obligated to take on the lion’s share of the suffering. Bao continued to try and crack the code on the back of the photograph without success. Angie remained hopeful and checked in with him every day.

She called Bao after lunch, which she ate in the now dreaded food court. If she never saw another food court again, it would be too soon.

“How’s it going, Bao? Making progress?” Of course, she was referring to the code.

“Working on the Flip 5-0 grind as we speak.”

“Is that a type of cipher?”

“Um, no. It’s kind of a skateboard move. Flip the board up and then the back truck grinds the edge.”

“Hmmm. Sounds difficult.”

“You know I’ve been trying to crack your mom’s code. If I work on it anymore, I think my head is going to explode. I had to get out and skate.”

Angie understood. If she didn’t catch a break soon, her head might explode, as well.





The seventeenth day of the stakeout occurred on a Sunday, and it was going to be the last day of her surveillance effort. Angie was ready to try a new approach, though she had no definite plan for what that might be. Days had stretched into weeks, and the end of April became mid-May. After a dreadful night’s sleep at the new Hilton Garden Inn, a block’s walk from Union Station and her home away from home, she arrived at the mall before the stores opened. Nightmares had plagued her, the kind she hadn’t had since childhood.

As a young girl of four or five, she had experienced night terrors. It wasn’t something people talked openly about. She’d learned of her bloodcurdling screams, intense fear, and flailing limbs only by picking up snippets of conversation from her exhausted parents.

Later, when the episodes finally stopped, her parents were more forthcoming about her sleep disorder. “Remember when . . .” they’d say.

With time, they could even laugh about it.

It wasn’t funny now. Angie couldn’t recall a single image from her dream, but she believed the girl with the deformed ear had been a gloomy presence throughout. Perhaps Nadine had been there, as well. What stuck in Angie’s mind was a feeling of suffocation. A darkness pressing down on her, something pliable and heavy she could claw at but could not clear away. Dirt, perhaps. She felt things creeping over her body, burrowing underneath her skin. It could have been bugs, it could have been fingers, because they were just feelings.

She had screamed, only without a voice. Nothing had come out, not even a hiss of air. The need to scream, to be heard, had felt as imperative as the need to breathe. Her silent yowl was the most helpless feeling she had ever known. She’d awoken with a start in a sterile hotel room and couldn’t stand the thought of falling back asleep.

She’d returned to her stakeout woozy and out of sorts. Her head felt fuzzy, her body ached, and the Advil wasn’t doing nearly enough. She went to the Jamba Juice to suck down an energy boost.

And she saw him. He was in line at the Starbucks, two or three storefronts down from the Jamba Juice. She recognized him by the shape of his head and his build. All of his physical characteristics were etched into her consciousness.

Angie’s malaise fell away with a snap. She was wildly alert, pulse hammering. She placed her order, careful to keep watch on her mark without looking too obvious.

It made sense to her that he’d show up at this hour, when the crowds were thin. It was easier to spot the loners, the vulnerable ones. Maybe he would see a young girl traveling alone, taking an early morning train to some destination, anywhere but where she had been.

Angie’s target ordered a coffee and a bagel. He stood at a counter just inside the Starbucks, leafing through the carcass of a Sunday newspaper someone had left behind. He was there for something other than reading the morning paper.

She found a seat at an Amtrak departure gate with good sight lines and watched him lazily sip from his coffee. Eventually he moved away from the counter, depositing the remains of his breakfast in the trash. Angie let him walk past her before she got up to follow.