The Night Killer

rubbed his hands together. “Progress.”
    “Do you think the no-account son could be the grandson of Cora Nell Dickson?” asked Diane. “Liam, what did you find out last night about Cora?”
    “Nothing. She never applied for a Social Security number. It’s automatic now when children are born, but back then you applied for it when you went to work. Not everyone worked. Not everyone applied for a card. Her income is her husband’s retirement income. I might as well not have gone, and if I’d stayed here, Andie wouldn’t have gotten in harm’s way,” he said.
    “Whoever it was, was stalking Andie,” said Diane. “You couldn’t be with her all the time.”
    “How are we going to approach this?” said Diane. “Maud and Earl won’t talk with me. If their son is involved, I don’t want to alert them. I thought one of you could do it, and complain about me—get them talking.”
    “I can do that,” said Izzy.
    Diane smiled. “Good,” she said.
    “No, really. I have an idea. Evie and I spoke with them at the church and we got along okay. I think I can approach it right.” Izzy headed for one of the private workstations.
    Frank turned back to the video made by Andie’s kidnapper. Diane saw him go to the beginning and watch it again. He’d done it several times. Stopping, looking, examining, writing down. At one point he measured something on the screen. She watched him for several moments. He could focus so well and with such intensity. She wanted to ask him what he was doing, but she didn’t want to break his focus. She knew he would know every pixel, or whatever unit the image was in, in the video of Andie.
    Diane went to another computer and called up the security video and looked at it several more times—sometimes watching for vehicles, sometimes people, sometimes both. Writing them down, looking for a pattern. Useless, probably. She was willing to bet he never ventured into the museum parking lot, but stayed out of sight. She looked at all the people again, looking for someone who didn’t belong, or someone who looked like a gardener, someone wearing a hoodie or some other clothing that might conceal his identity.
    She looked again at the video with Andie in it. She looked to see if anyone was watching Andie as she said good-bye to Liam. She watched her turn and run after the puppy. Diane searched the woods. The resolution wasn’t clear enough to see deep into the woods, but she thought . . . if she could just catch a glimpse of someone. She took a breath, rubbed her eyes, and started all over again. She noticed that David was doing the same thing at another computer.
    Jin came back with more stuff than Diane thought he would. Her groundskeepers were pretty good about keeping the museum woods cleaned out and free of litter, but Jin managed to find quite a bit. He went into one of the workrooms with a long table and put the bags down. Diane followed him in. Jin’s short black hair was in disarray, probably from going through the woods, but the spiky, messy style looked trendy on him. Jin was usually the happiest of her crew, always a bundle of barely contained enthusiasm. But he was subdued now. They all were.
    “Hey, boss,” said Jin, “I don’t think any of this will be any good. Mostly picnic junk from museum visitors. I took pictures of the tire tracks and did the measurements of a vehicle on the dirt road. It was an SUV. I’ll look up the make and model before I start on this stuff, but . . .”
    “But what?” asked Diane, though she knew what he was going to say. They usually did all this for a dead body—and they did a good job—but the detailed work normally was to catch the perps and convict them in court. That wasn’t the goal this time. This time the goal was to get Andie back.
    “Nothing, boss.” Jin grinned. “We’re getting a lot of evidence here. We’ll find Andie.”
    Jin went to the computer to fit the tires and wheelbase measurements to the vehicles in the database. It didn’t take him long. “It’s a 1997 Chevrolet Blazer, dark green metallic.”
    “You got the color from the wheelbase?” said Diane.
    Jin grinned. “There weren’t any other tracks. There was only one vehicle. You closed off the road and nobody uses it. He took it off-road to get around the barrier. I checked the trees. I knew he sideswiped at least one. I’ll have to put it in the machine to be sure, but that’s what it looks like.”
    “It sounds like the same vehicle that