Yes, the -couple’s solid alibis spared them the unique hell Sully and Stockton have encountered many times in the past. Parents often fall under the umbrella of suspicion in a child’s disappearance, and it’s a challenge to stride the fine line between compassion and skepticism when investigating a case like that.
“It’s just incredible that in this age of overcommunication, the system failed so spectacularly,” Sully says with a sigh, giving up on the bagel and shoving the remains into Barnes’s coffee cup parked in the console.
“Hey!”
“It’s empty. This is garbage.”
“I thought you were starved.”
“I was. But even I have to draw the line somewhere. Like I said, that’s garbage. You can’t get a good bagel north of the George Washington Bridge.”
She brushes the crumbs from her hands and pulls out her notes, going over the facts of the case.
When Brianna didn’t show up at school yesterday morning, the attendance office assumed she was out sick and followed procedure, which was to leave a message at the house to confirm the absence. No one was home.
After school, her younger brother was wearing gaming headphones and parked in front of the Xbox console in his room, too engrossed to notice that his sister hadn’t come home as usual. When the parents arrived later that night, they found nothing amiss and assumed their daughter had come and gone to her waitressing job. It turned out she’d never arrived there, either, but when the restaurant called looking for her, the twelve--year--old video game junkie never heard the phone ring.
“The thing that gets me is that the parents never checked their voice mail when they got home,” Barnes comments, shaking his head.
“I don’t bother to do that very often, either,” Sully tells him. “If -people want to reach me, they call my cell. Lately, only the telemarketers bother calling my landline.”
“But you don’t have kids.”
“True. But I can imagine these -people are probably like every other working parent we’ve ever met. Overextended, overwhelmed, overtired from a long day, long commute . . .”
“You’re right. And they really didn’t have any reason to think anything was wrong until they realized their daughter hadn’t come home from work.”
She nods. It was well past ten o’clock when the Armbrusters began to worry, belatedly discovering the messages from the school and the restaurant. They panicked and called the police.
The village is small enough that the police chief lives a few blocks away and was once their daughter’s soccer coach. He wasted no time in ruling out a runaway scenario. That conclusion seems based not just on assumption and emotion but on intuition, and Sully has been in this business long enough to respect that.
“If our perp is escalating,” she muses, “then he’s not holding off until he has a weather--related reason to travel farther from home. He either found himself up here for a different reason, or he singled out the girl because she crossed his path somewhere else and he hunted her down.”
“Maybe online. Hey, what’s the exit number? These mountains are messing with the GPS signal.”
She quickly opens a search engine on her phone and Googles the name of the village, Mundy’s Landing.
“That’s why it sounded familiar,” she says, more to herself than Barnes.
“What? Why?”
“It’s that town where they have that big murder festival every summer.”
“Murder festival? What?”
“Unofficially known as Mundypalooza,” she reads off her phone. “Crime buffs gather from around the world in an attempt to solve the Sleeping Beauty murders of 1916.”
“Oh, right.” Barnes nods. “That’s the case where -people were waking up in the morning to find dead girls in their beds. It doesn’t get much creepier than that.”
“No, it doesn’t. Do you think what happened to this Armbruster girl has anything to do with it? Maybe it’s a copycat killer. Next summer is the hundredth anniversary of the murders and the three--hundred--fiftieth anniversary of the town, and they’re already gearing up for a media circus.”