Devoted in Death (In Death #41)(65)

“What would he have been wearing?”

Jackie let out a long breath. “I looked, to be sure. I got him a new coat and new boots. His birthday, Christmas. Brown Trailblazer boots – the real leather ones. It was his twenty-first birthday, and he really wanted them. And the coat, it’s a Moose brand parka. Hunter green. I think he’d be wearing black pants, a black sweater. It’s a band thing.”

“A girlfriend?”

“He’s half seeing this girl – Maddy – and I checked with her, woke her up. She hasn’t seen him for a couple days. He’s got the hots for Roxie. I can see it. Hell, she can see it, but he hasn’t moved on it yet. I’d know. So he’s half seeing Maddy, but it’s not serious, and she hasn’t seen him since they grabbed a pizza the other night.”

Eve asked more questions, got a sense of a happy-go-lucky sort of guy, earning a living, helping his mother with the rent, sliding along, and dreaming of fame and fortune rocking it out for millions.

As her own closest friend did just that, Eve knew it could actually happen.

She got the contact information on the bandmates, the half-a-girlfriend, some coworkers.

“You’re going to look for him, right?”

“Yes, we’re going to look for him.”

“I know he’s of age, but he’s mostly still a boy. And he’s pretty.” She pressed her lips together. “I know there are people out there, people who prey on boys, even boys of age.”

Yes, there are, Eve thought, but she said, “We’re going to look for him.”

The minute she stepped out, she turned to Roarke. “Your building.”

“Apparently it is.”

“Then getting the security discs shouldn’t be a problem. Cam on the door. It would show him leaving.”

“I’ve already contacted the security company who handles this property. The system’s in the basement utility. I have the codes.”

“Can you get me copies? I want to get his description out. It’ll hit the morning reports. Maybe somebody saw him.”

“Five minutes,” he told her, and took the basement exit.

He was back in four, handed her the copy. “I ran it from nineteen hundred through oh-one-hundred. Just to cover the ground.”

“That’ll do it.”

She ran it through her PPC, zipping forward until she saw Reed.

“Straight up midnight, and dressed just like his mother said. Hood up. It’s cold.”

She stood where she was, ran it straight through until she saw Jackie Mulligan walk to the door and key in.

“Three people out, two in between. No couples. And no reason to think they’d grabbed the kid, then bopped over here.”

“But now you’re sure.”

“Yeah. You up for a walk?”

“A walk in the cold and dark? Sounds just lovely.”

“He’d walk west,” she said as they stepped outside. “West to Seventh, turn south. “Ten-minute walk – probably a little less as he’d be walking fast in the cold. And somewhere along the route, he ran into them. Between midnight and ten after – if he didn’t detour. It’s a good, narrow window.”

She scanned as they walked, looking for more security cameras, for lighted windows, for shadowy spots where LCs or dealers or muggers might lurk.

But her gut told her Reed hadn’t run afoul of a mugger, or a junkie, or some random street deal. So she looked for potential stretches where someone could get a vehicle close enough to the curb to —

“Shit.” She stopped by a loading zone, checked the time. “Right about six minutes in. Broken streetlight, right there. And glass on the sidewalk from it.”

“They broke one of the lights for cover, pulled right into the loading zone.”

“Used the woman to lure him. ‘Hey, honey, can you help me out a second?’   ” She studied the buildings, the storefronts as she spoke. “No bars right here, and that’s a damn shame. Retail, café, residential, accounting firm. Nothing that would be bustling at midnight on a ball-freezing night. But some traffic had to come by. So they had to be quick with him.”

She tipped her face up. “Yeah, they had to be quick. And that’s a mistake. Loading zones have cams. Crap cams, and a lot of them don’t work at all, but we’ve got a shot here.”

She pulled out her communicator. “We’ve got a shot,” she repeated.

14

It would take some time, but she arranged to have the feed from the loading zone cam sent to her office unit, her home unit, even her PPC just to cover every base.

And while she waited for Traffic to pull that one off, they walked the rest of the way to Benj Fribbet’s basement unit, roused him and his roommates.

She watched their attitude go from pissy, to smirky, then to genuine concern.

“Come on. Nothing happened to him.” Benj, muscular, mixed-race, handsome, scratched his chest through a T-shirt where Mavis Freestone’s face sent out a flirtatious, come-along-boy smile.

It wigged Eve a little to see her friend over some guy’s torso.

“He’s okay. You sure he’s not home?”

“I wouldn’t be here if he was home. When did you last see or speak to him?”

“I saw him yesterday, went by his work, just to chew a minute, and we made the plans to work here tonight – last night, I mean. I talked to him – I don’t know, about midnight – few after – I guess. He was on his way here. Said he was almost here, and…”