I threw my leg over the back of my brother’s bike and wrapped my arms around him. We took off without a second thought, and as my thoughts wandered, I found myself wondering what it would be like to take a ride with Brutus. Would I even be able to hold onto him properly? Where would he take me? Did he have a special place that he went to whenever he rode by himself?
Did he ever ride by himself?
Maybe I’d ask him for a ride one of these days.
Maybe I won’t have to.
The thought of not having to ask for every single little thing from a man tugged a smile across my face. I was used to begging. Well not begging. But with men, I always had to speak up about things. If we were going to eat somewhere, I had to pick. If we were going out to do something, I had to choose what we were doing. If we hung out and watched a movie, I had to pick the movie. And if we went too long without speaking, I had to be the one to reach out first.
It was exhaustive.
Bee didn’t seem to be like that, though.
The bike coming to a halt pulled me out of my trance. The smile slid from my face as I dismounted off the bike and I quickly pulled the helmet off my head. I handed it to King, who in turn handed me the two totes of goodie bags that I had to give out to the homeless.
Hopefully someone saw something.
“Is this where she was taken from?” I asked.
“According to the Chief of Police, she was last seen here,” King said as he pointed to one of the cameras perched in the trees.
I looked up at the red dot in the trees and waved. “Do we have the video?”
“Yep,” my brother said as he thrusted his cell phone into my face.
I looked down while I held the two tote bags and watched the footage. It wasn’t of the kidnapping, but it was of the young woman. She looked up at the camera and waved like so many of the residents of our hometown did. Our part of the state was covered in trees and foliage. We had a lot of green, which meant we had a lot of hiding places for unsavory people and the like. King and his crew had championed the installation of these cameras, not just at stoplights and stop signs, but also off the beaten pathway in trees and in places where people had a tendency to do things like run.
It was clearly what this woman was doing.
“She was just out on a run,” I whispered as I nodded at the phone. “Replay it again.”
“Of course,” my brother said as he restarted the video.
I watched it about half a dozen times, memorizing the woman’s every movement. And then, I handed him the two tote bags. I walked over to where she entered the camera’s view andtook up her body positioning, trotting along through the frame and even going so far as to look up and wave to the camera.
I allowed everything to overwhelm me so that my senses could parse through the information.
I kept walking back to King, watching the video, and then replaying the woman’s movements through the frames we had of her on the camera.
“And she was gone by the time she got to the other cameras?” I asked.
King nodded, continuing to hold out his phone. “She pops up on none of the others. She doesn’t backtrack. She just disappears.”
“No one just disappears,” I muttered as I looked around. But then I turned and looked back up at my brother. “Do we know anything else? Anything at all?”
King, knowing my tactics, knew that was the cue to put his phone away. “We’ve already checked the surrounding woods for two miles in all directions. No footprints. Nothing discarded. Not so much as a fucking shoe left behind.”
“No cell phone recovery?”
“Nope.”
“No wallet? No purse? No ID?”
“Nope, nope, and nada.”
“But we do have her identified since she looked up at the camera?”
King nodded. “Yep. Kelley Arbock, 22. In her last semester at the community college.”
