Page 38 of After All The Wreckage
Gage’s entire body stiffened, and his face turned dark. “Monte didn’t run away.”
Lucidia eyed him and then me. She lifted an eyebrow again, but didn’t say anything. She grabbed her smoothie and made her way through the tables with us following her, and led us through an Employee Only entrance into the warren of corridors in the subbasement of the building. She stopped at a door that looked like a storage closet.
Disguised to look like it wasn’t anything important, the control room was the heartbeat of the building’s security. It was similar to several other rooms placed carefully throughout the buildings and tunnels making up the Capitol’s grounds.
Lucidia turned to us and said, “He can’t come in.”
Gage’s jaw ticked.
“Why don’t you touch base with Detective Muloney and whoever you spoke to at Metro PD while Lucidia and I see what we can find?”
Gage didn’t respond. He just turned away, pulling his phone out of his pocket and walking down the hall to lean against the concrete wall.
Inside the room, Lucidia was on me in a flash, dropping into the Spanish of her Puerto Rican homeland. She kept her voice hushed so the other officers in the room wouldn’t hear. “What the hell, Rory? You know I don’t talk to anyone but you.”
“It’s a kid, Lucidia,” I responded in Spanish, grateful to have kept it up in college. “Thirteen-year-old kid who’s gone missing after talking to Congressman Dunn. You think anyone is going to try to find him if something bad went down? No way Dunn and his cohorts want it to get out that he was the last person to see Monte.”
She blanched, swirled around, and pulled out a chair from the desk in the corner. She pounded away at the keyboard, asking, “What time frame are we looking at on Friday?”
I gave her the range, and she pulled up video footage from the enormous steps most of the world associated with the entrance to the Capitol. She zipped through the time range, and I searched the people speeding past for bright red hair.
I’d almost given up hope when Dunn and his chief of staff appeared. Suddenly, there was Monte. He was tall for his age, so from the back he looked like a full-grown man. With his baseball cap lowered and his backpack hanging from one shoulder, I was surprised someone hadn’t stopped him long before he’d gotten close to the congressman.
In the video, Monte was waving his hands, talking animatedly. What had me narrowing my eyes was the way both Dunn and West stopped completely, heads turned, looking very interested in what Monte was saying. West responded to Monte and then started to direct Dunn away, but Dunn stopped and turned back. He asked Monte something. Monte hesitated, a look of shock radiating from his face, but then he nodded. Dunn said something else, and then he and West walked away, traveling down the steps to where a group of reporters was waiting.
When I’d gone online last night, I hadn’t found any recent press statements or interviews with Dunn. Certainly nothing from the Capitol steps on Friday. There actually hadn’t been much about him in the news in quite a while. The most recentfootage had been from this summer when he’d been at a women’s shelter.
“Can you rewind it to the part where Dunn is talking?” I asked.
I wasn’t an expert at reading lips, but years of stakeouts and following people had given me some skill. We watched the footage again. “Can you play it one more time and slow it down?”
Lucidia did her thing, and I watched the screen carefully.
“Did he ask about his mother?” My brows creased, my heartbeat jumping.
Lucidia played it again. Working in her job, she had a lot more experience watching silent footage. “I think so. He said a name. Like is your mom so and so.”
My pulse sped up.Crap. How did Dunn know Gage and Monte’s flighty mom?
Lucidia let the video play out, and this time I watched not Dunn but Monte. He watched the congressman as he went down to the gathered media. Monte’s face was a war of emotions, but desperation was the most prevalent. He pulled his cap down further, hunched his shoulders, and headed toward New Jersey Avenue and Longworth House. His feet moved slowly. My heart sank as he disappeared from the camera’s view.
I needed to dig out other cameras along the street. Ones that weren’t locked down by the government and the different law enforcement agencies all staking a claim in and around the Capitol.
I returned my scrutiny to West. While I’d been watching Monte, he’d stepped away from Dunn and the reporters. He had his phone pressed to his ear, and his head was turned in the direction Monte had gone.
“Back that up a bit again, please,” I said, reaching over Lucidia’s hand as if I were going to do it myself, and she swatted me away.
Right before they got to the reporters, Dunn and West stopped, faces covered by hands as they exchanged a few words. Dunn’s face was absent of his jovial smile for less than a minute, but then it returned as he walked down toward the media.
West was immediately on the phone, watching as Monte walked away.
The hair on my arms curled, goose bumps emerging.
Double fuck.
Upstairs, they’d acted like they’d only half heard what Monte had said, and yet, they had to have known this footage existed.
Just as I had the thought, Lucidia’s screen went black.
