Chapter Twenty
“Sure looks like the hat your sister had on,” Pam said when Diana had enlarged the frame even more.
Diana stared closely at the image. The hat seemed to be the right shape, and it might have been red, but really it was just a blur. The woman wearing it was definitely not Ashley.
“Even if it is, it doesn’t get us anywhere,” Diana said. “Better to focus on what we know.”
She flattened the hand-drawn map on which she’d noted the times and places they’d spotted Ashley. “She starts out here.” She poked the map at the first A at 6:03:25 on the library’s front steps. “Then she’s here and here.” She moved her finger to the A still on the steps at 6:11:02 and on to the one in the middle of Dartmouth Street at 6:16:23.
Diana went on, tracing all eleven points in time and space. “So, the last time we see her for sure is at 6:23:05,” she said. “Three minutes later, poof.”
“People don’t just disappear.”
“Right. So, what happened between 6:23 and 6:26? With six video cams going, one of them must have picked up something.” As she said that, Diana felt the prickle of excitement. There had to be clues buried somewhere in all that footage. There just had to be.
Diana used all of the monitors to bring up videos from all six cams. She froze each at 6:23:05, the time of the last Ashley sighting. Each of the cameras had a different view, and in one of them, Ashley was standing in the square, facing away from the camera, her cell phone raised.
Diana started the videos, synchronized to the same time and all running at the same slow speed. Ashley stood in a frozen salute. The camera cut away from her to show a woman pushing a double stroller, stopping to look. Simultaneously, another camera was capturing a cop looking baffled. Another focused on Super Dummy appearing in the hotel window. It started its descent. In the panoramic video shot from the office window, almost every pedestrian in Copley Square was frozen, attentions riveted as Super Dummy flew overhead.
“There!” Diana pointed to a pair of figures walking out of the square, the only two in motion. She froze the video.
From overhead, it was impossible to see their faces, and the man’s body shielded the other figure from view. It was hard to make out details, but it looked like a man wearing a baseball cap with his arm around someone smaller.
Diana started the video again in slow motion and they watched as the couple neared the sidewalk.
“Noooo!” Diana howled when the camera cut away for a close-up of the dummy, impaled on the needle-nose spire of the information kiosk. The glitch was the perfect cover.
It felt like forever until the dummy was tugged free and at last there was finally another long shot across Copley Square. But by then, the man and his companion were gone. Time stamp: 6:26:15.
“Where the hell did they go?” Pam whispered.
By then it was afternoon and Eddie needed the video editing suite back. After extracting a promise that Diana and Pam wouldn’t make copies or post clips from the videos, he gave them a DVD with the footage from all six cameras. If only Diana could combine all the snippets of information into a single stream and project Ashley’s likely trajectory out of there.
But how? The answer didn’t come to her until she was rushing to keep up with Pam’s wheelchair as it sped back across the plaza’s brickwork to her van. First she had to find a version of Copley Square in OtherWorld that was rendered approximately to scale.
As soon as they got back to Pam’s apartment, Diana logged onto OtherWorld and began to look for a reasonably accurate version of that area of downtown Boston. Meanwhile Pam loaded the digital video files from the improv event onto her server.
Diana entered the coordinates of a virtual Copley Square that had drawn the most visitors and had the fewest complaints about griefers. The new location rezzed around Nadia. Diana angled the view—it included all the landmarks she needed, from Trinity Church to the Copley Plaza Hotel to the Boston Public Library. Even the subway station just past the library on Boylston was there. But was it to scale?
She angled the view up, pulling higher and higher until she could see everything on a single screen. From that far away the image was reduced to a schematic. Nadia was the single yellow dot on a rectangle that was Copley Square.
Diana compared the shape and size of the virtual square to a Google map of the actual area. They were close enough for what she needed.
Pam rolled her wheelchair over and stopped beside Diana, holding the little handwritten map that Diana had put together of Ashley sightings.
“Okay. Move Nadia here”—Pam pointed to a spot in the virtual Copley Square that was about a hundred feet in front of the center entrance to Trinity Church where Ashley had stood, cell phone raised—“and set the time to 6:21:15.”
Diana tapped at the arrow keys. She watched the yellow dot move to the location. Then she froze the image and set the clock to 6:21:15. She and Pam continued, placing Nadia in each of the places Ashley had been spotted in the Virtual Copley Square. When they were done, Diana had marked five locations and five times.
“Okay, let’s see what we’ve got,” she said. “Connect the dots.”
Diana ran the clock, and Nadia’s yellow dot moved from spot to spot as the seconds ticked. First the yellow dot appeared in the middle of Copley. A dashed line crept out to what would have been about fifty feet away. The second dot appeared, followed by another dashed line that continued as far as the sidewalk where a third dot appeared. At 6:25:05 the line stopped.
“And less than a minute later, she’s vanished,” Pam said.
“Let’s project her trajectory. How far could she have gotten?” Diana drew a circle around the final point on the sidewalk where they’d seen Ashley. “And if she started to run—” She drew a second wider circle around the first. She groaned when she saw how much territory that took in. Ashley could have gotten as far as the entrance to the T, or gone into the library.
“Let’s assume for the moment that she didn’t tear ass out of there,” Pam said. “And she sure as hell didn’t levitate. So her most likely path would have been to continue this way . . .” She traced her finger across what would have been sidewalk to the curb. She tapped the spot. “So what was going on over here?”
On her laptop screen, she brought up the video footage that had been taken from the office window. She froze it on a 6:21 view and pointed to the row of vehicles pulled up at the curb near that exact spot. There were two light-colored vans, one behind the other, then a police cruiser, behind that a light-colored compact car, and behind that a much larger black sedan.
She fast-forwarded to 6:26, when Ashley vanished. The same vehicles were still parked there.
“Can you come in closer on that black one,” Diana said.
“You’re not going to try and read those plates,” Pam said as she zoomed in. “There’s no technology in the world that will do that.”
“I know, I know. But”—Diana pointed to the black sedan—“back up, just a little bit. Good, good. Now zoom in even closer right here and run it very slow.”
Images blurred as Pam ran the video back, then forward at about half speed. Two figures crept toward the black car. The rear door opened. One person got in and the other crouched by the open door. Because of the camera angle and distance, it was impossible to make out much detail.
“We’re just assuming your sister is in the backseat,” Pam said. “But you really can’t see squat.”
“What about that?” Diana said, pointing to a misshapen object lying on the sidewalk by the open car door.
Pam squinted at it, then rolled her eyes at Diana. “A shadow? A puddle?”
“It’s my hat. I know it is.”