Closed at Dark

by Rob Blackwell

Ken sat back in his chair and looked at Soren.

  “You really believe that there’s someone else involved?” he asked.

  Soren nodded his head.

  “Strode might be acting alone, but I don’t think so,” Soren said. “Can you at least entertain the notion for a minute? If I’m right, we need to get a bead on the guy quickly before he makes a move against Alex.”

  Ken looked like he wanted to keep arguing, but he stopped himself.

  “Okay,” he said finally.

  “Good,” Soren said, and pointed to the laptop. “Pull up anyone who recently moved into the area from Oregon. There can’t be that many.”

  Ken arched an eyebrow at him.

  “Doesn’t exactly work like that,” he said. “I don’t work for the NSA. Best we’ve got are DMV records.”

  But Ken sat up and leaned over the computer, beginning to pull up some information.

  Soren wanted to get up and pace again, but stayed seated. His theory made sense, but it was incomplete. If Strode had been killed by someone who was kidnapping kids, why didn’t the shade go directly after him? He was a psychic, after all.

  Then again, Strode may have just had precognitive abilities. He might have been able to see visions of a man grabbing those kids without knowing who he was. How he was able to find Alastair and Alex to try and save them was unclear, but there was a lot Soren didn’t understand about psychic phenomena. He knew even less about shades.

  He did know that psychics often had the same weakness, the inability to see their own future. That would explain why Strode didn’t know he was going to get shot in bed. Soren remembered a woman he’d heard of a few years back that appeared to have some genuine psychic talent. She’d called herself “Madame Zora,” and knew a ton about what was happening in Loudoun County. Ultimately, however, she didn’t know enough to foretell that someone would walk into her shop one day and slit her throat.

  “Here’s a crazy idea,” Ken said, still hunched over the computer. “If you’re right about Strode being a victim, is there any way of reaching out to him? It’s possible he knows something that could help us identify the real perp.”

  Soren noticed that the more Ken talked, the more he seemed to be coming around to his theory. Soren shook his head.

  “You can summon shades,” he said, “but it’s incredibly dangerous. He’s liable to see it as an assault and react accordingly.”

  “He’d kill us.”

  “That’s the most likely outcome, yeah.”

  Ken looked thoughtful for a moment and then started typing on the laptop again. Soren leaned over to see that he was looking at traffic violations. He appeared to be searching for anyone pulled over in Virginia who had an Oregon driver’s license. For the first time, Soren was happy Ken was helping him. Without access to the police files, Soren would never have been able to identify the shade. He’d still be stuck.

  Soren shivered involuntarily. He knew the heat was on in his apartment, but for some reason he felt cold.

  “Bingo,” Ken said.

  Soren looked at the screen.

  “We’re in luck,” Ken said. “There aren’t that many matches. Only three.”

  But when Ken pulled them up, Soren was disappointed. One was for a woman pulled over in Virginia Beach, roughly 200 miles from Arlington. Another was for a teenager speeding south of Petersburg on I-95, likely on his way to Florida with his college buddies. Only the third was close by, but disappointingly, it was also for a woman.

  Of course, Soren was just assuming that the person kidnapping children was a man. He supposed he shouldn’t be so sure of that, but he knew the odds favored it being a man.

  “Well, she lives in the right place,” Ken said.

  “She married?” Soren asked.

  Ken shrugged.

  “Again, this isn’t a police state,” he said. “She got pulled over for running a stop sign. We didn’t grill her on her family history.”

  “Try searching her name on social media,” Soren said.

  Ken looked her up on Facebook. While there were several people with the same name, none matched the photo from her license or were in the right location.

  Soren looked again at where she was pulled over. He reached past Ken and pulled up a local map on the Internet, finding the address of where the incident had occurred.

  There was a school nearby. Soren looked at the time of the ticket, noticing it was 8:56 a.m. The woman had almost certainly gotten the ticket while trying to rush her kid to school on time.

  If she had a kid, that probably meant she had a husband. Even if she didn’t, Soren wanted to talk to the woman and anyone else she lived with. He pulled up her home address in the DMV record and pointed at it.

  “Can we go here now?” Soren said. “Maybe it’s a dead end, but it’s a solid lead. We could question the woman.”

  “First of all, we won’t do any questioning,” Ken said. “We’re not in a buddy cop movie. You’ll be lucky if I bring you along. And more importantly, we need probable cause to start banging on people’s doors in the middle of the night — and we don’t have it. All we know for sure is that this woman used to live in Oregon. That’s not exactly a crime — or enough for a warrant.”

  “I’m beginning to wish we did live in a police state,” Soren said.

  “Sometimes we feel the same way,” Ken replied.

  Soren stood up.

  “I’ve got another idea,” he said. “That’s Glebe Elementary. I’m pretty sure that’s where Alex goes. Let’s wake up Sara and see if she’s ever heard of this woman or her kids. That might give you something more concrete to go on.”

  “Let her sleep,” Ken said.

  “Trust me, she’d want to be awake for this,” Soren said. “She only went to bed to stay with Alex.”

  “If you say so,” Ken said.

  Soren walked through his kitchen and to his bedroom door. He opened it slowly, trying to be careful not to wake up Alex.

  As he did so, he felt a draft of cold air. The window along the far wall was standing wide open. Soren looked to the bed, worried he would find Alex missing. But it was even worse than that.

  He ran back to the dining room.

  “Call the cavalry,” Soren said. “Alex and Sara are gone.”

  Chapter Twelve