Page 34 of Our Daughter's Bones
The two monitors lit up with surveillance video from that date. The time stamp was three in the afternoon. One monitor showed Camera One, and the other showed Camera Three. The traffic was usual. They watched cars come and go.
“There’s Abby!” Mackenzie almost jumped. “Camera One gives us a better angle.”
Abby walked past the station. She kept her head down. Her pace wasn’t too slow or too fast. It was the same the next day as well, and the following Monday. Then Clint played the video from September 11—the day she disappeared.
Mackenzie leaned forward. The glow from the screen danced on her face. She didn’t want to miss a single moment or any discrepancy. Abby walked into the frame of the camera. She was wearing a yellow top and blue jeans. She carried her red backpack. This wasafterher last confirmed sighting.
Mackenzie felt her bones tickle. This was it. Maybe they would watch someone approach her. Or see the license plate of the car that snatched her.
Instead, Abby turned.
Mackenzie stiffened as she watched Abby not walk past the gas station but turn into it.
“Where’s she going?”
“Let me pull out Camera Seven, that’ll show us,” Clint said.
Within seconds, the recording from Camera Seven was displayed on one of the monitors. He tuned the time frame, and they watched Abby walk toward the station building. But she didn’t enter. She stood in front of a door beside the entrance—the washroom, according to the plan and the sign on the door. She kept looking around and checking her watch. She paced, restless and twitchy.
“What is she doing?” Justin muttered.
“Meeting someone?” Mackenzie replied. After five minutes, Abby entered the washroom. Thirty seconds later, she came out. She looked around one last time and dashed out of the station. “Play Camera Two.”
The camera monitoring the exit showed Abby. She began walking toward home but suddenly stopped. Another figure appeared on the screen.
Eighteen
Mackenzie’s heart leaped. She leaned forward and squinted at the pixelated video. He was definitely taller and bigger than Abby. She looked up while speaking to him. The camera captured her from behind. Because of the angle, only the man’s lower half was visible. He wore what looked like either black or dark blue jeans and a brown jacket. His hands were shoved in his pockets. He never made any attempt to touch her or get too close. They spoke for one minute and eight seconds, after which Abby took a sharp left turn to go home, while the man stayed in place and pulled something from his pocket and raised it out of shot—a phone, probably.
This was officially the last sighting of Abby Correia before she went missing. There was no surveillance between the gas station and the bank, which they knew Abby hadn’t passed.
“Who the hell did she talk to?” Mackenzie muttered. “Does he come into view or go to the washroom?”
Clint sped up the footage and played it for the entire day. Only two people went to the washroom—a middle-aged woman and an old man. Both acted normally and emerged empty-handed.
It looked like the man knew about the CCTV cameras at the gas station and positioned himself to stay out of the frame. He spoke to Abby for a full minute and eight seconds. He might not have lured her into a car or anything, but he could easily have followed her later. There was no clear sense of which direction he’d gone after their exchange. He had simply slipped out of view.
Mackenzie twirled her pen between her fingers. “Initially, it looked like Abby was there to meet someone, which is why she spent five minutes standing in front of that washroom and looking around.”
“But the person didn’t show up,” Justin said. “Or he did. Maybe it was the man she was talking to?”
“If it was then why didn’t Abby point him to the washroom? He didn’t go to the washroom either. Clint, can you zoom in on the man’s jacket and clear the picture? I think I saw something on the hem.”
“Sure. Do you know this software can remove interferences using Fourier filters?” Clint beamed. When no one reacted, he cleared his throat. “Not that that’s relevant here. A basic unmask sharpening will work.”
The screen zoomed in to the hem of the jacket. There was a white patch visible against the brown cloth. The image flickered and popped up with sharper resolution. The white patch was a picture of a playing card; the sign for clubs was sewn into it. Inside the club shape were the letters “ER.”
There was also a kidney-shaped birthmark on the back of the man’s hand.
“The label looks like a logo for a clothing company. I don’t recognize it.” She bit her lip. “ER’s not a famous brand for sure. Can you fast forward a few frames to when he makes the call?”
Unfortunately, his hand covered most of the phone. The only thing she could make out was the position of the device’s camera lens, which suggested that it was an iPhone.
Did Abby end up bumping into someone she knew before she was taken? It could have been a friendly face, but then why hadn’t he come forward to the police? He could have just been a stranger striking up a conversation, who’d never put the girl he spoke to together with the missing girl from the news. But something was very wrong with this picture. A mysterious man speaking to a young woman who was never seen again? That never ended well.
“Clint, can you try and find out more about that logo? See if it gives a clue to who the man might be.”
“Sure. Give me at least an hour. I’ll have to clean up the image more to be able to run it against a search engine.”
