“Well, why should this be easy?” Kovac muttered. “Have you had any cars towed out of here in the last few days? We’re looking for a black Toyota Camry.”

The manager shook his head. “We’ve had a few dead batteries with the cold and all, but they all left under their own steam. Nothing a good jump start didn’t fix.”

“How many cameras do you have inside?” Liska asked.

“One in the entrance, one in the bowling alley, one in the arcade, one on the dance floor.”

“Are they digital or do they record to tape?”

“Tape. It’s an old system. Like I said, we run a nice business. We don’t have a lot of trouble here. There hasn’t been any need to worry about upgrading the security system.”

“We’ll need to see everything from the night of the thirtieth,” Kovac said. “And if you don’t mind, I’d like to look at them right here, right now.”

“Don’t you need a warrant or something?” the manager asked.

Kovac gave him a hard look. “Are you fucking kidding me? We have a missing sixteen-year-old girl, last seen at the Rock & Bowl, and you’re gonna tell me I need to go downtown, write an affidavit, find a judge, and waste hours while this girl is being tortured or Christ knows what?”

“No! No, no, no,” the manager said hastily, holding his hands up in front of him as if he might need to fend off an attack. “I just, um, watch too much television.”

“It’s okay,” Liska intervened. “People coming here have no legal expectation of privacy. The tapes belong to the Rock & Bowl. You can do whatever you want with them.”

“Good. That’s great. Have at it,” he said, going to a cupboard and pulling out VHS tape cassettes. “Make yourselves at home. Whatever you need.”

“We need a minor miracle,” Kovac said. “But I’ll settle for a cup of coffee if you have any.”

The manager scurried away and they settled in front of an ancient thirteen-inch television with a built-in VCR. The quality of the tapes was grainy and bad. They had probably been taped over many times. The cameras were wall mounted and stationary, giving only one view of the area they covered. The people who moved through the outer reaches of the frame were blurry and ghostlike. Those closer to the camera were washed-out and distorted.

“This is shit,” Liska complained. Her eyes had begun to burn from staring at the small screen. When she looked away from it, she continued to see black and white pixels like a swarm of gnats on the surface of her eyes. “I wouldn’t recognize my own kid looking at this.”

As she said it, Kovac went on point, his eyes narrowing as he looked at the screen. “Really?” he said. “Because there he is.”

“What?”

Liska grabbed the remote, froze the picture, backed it up, ran it forward again. She repeated the process twice, hoping against hope that the picture would change, that the angle was bad, that she wasn’t seeing what she thought she was seeing.

The figures on the screen scurried backward, walked forward, scurried back, walked ahead. The view was a wedge of space in the entrance of the building, people coming in, going out, stopping at the front counter to purchase tokens. And there was Kyle, walking toward the door, his head slightly bent, his hands jammed in the pockets of his father’s old letterman’s jacket.

“That’s your boy, Tinks,” Kovac said.

She stopped the tape and ran it backward again and punched the Play button. A moment before Kyle came into the picture, another figure moved through the area, heading for the door. A white female with half a head of dark hair.

Liska felt the bottom drop out of her stomach.

“And that’s our girl.”

22

Fitz sat in his car watching the parking lot of the apartment building across the street, eating a ham sandwich and listening to a call-in radio show about alien abductions. Living in the moment, he came to two conclusions simultaneously: There is nothing quite as tasty as Miracle Whip on a ham sandwich, and the world is just chock-full of lunatics.

The caller was going on at length about the aliens sticking a probe up his ass like they were digging for buried treasure. What the hell? If there were beings out there in the universe with the brainpower to build these elaborate spaceships, what could they possibly want from the intestinal tract of a moron?

Well, it passed the time to listen to this craziness. He had to stay awake because there was always a very good chance that the next caller would be even crazier than the last. He didn’t want to miss anything, and he didn’t want to fall asleep. Dana Nolan would be coming out of her apartment soon.

The female callers always talked about the aliens strapping them down on examination tables and experimenting on them sexually. That he could get into. He cast himself in the role of the Alien in those fantasies. He knew what it felt like to stand over a helpless woman. The sense of omnipotence that filled him was intoxicating. To look into the terrified eyes of a victim, knowing that everything about her life—and death—was his choice to make was like no other power in the world.

A woman in that position—naked, immobilized, helpless, exposed—was completely at his mercy. A woman in that position realized his power. A woman in that position never mocked him, never scorned him. In that scenario he was God and the devil all in one—which made him more powerful than either entity individually.

A woman in that position didn’t care that he was short or that he had a potbelly. She didn’t care that he was losing his hair or that he looked more like a cartoon hobo than a matinee idol.

A woman in that position cared only that he had the power to give pain or take it away, to give life or take it away.

A woman in that position had to accept him. In every sense of the word.

Fitz knew exactly what he was, and he knew exactly why, and he was good with it. He had arranged his life to suit his hobbies. He traveled the highways and back roads of America, buying and reselling antiques and junk. His trails were his hunting grounds. He was a lucky man. He would never be the kind of loser who called a radio show in the middle of the night to make up shit about aliens sticking a probe up his ass.

Dana Nolan came out of her apartment building at 3:07 A.M. The people who worked the early news programs on local television had terrible hours—and terrible pay, he imagined. The apartment building she lived in was as basic and unimaginative as possible—a square, blond brick box in a row of square, blond brick boxes built in the seventies. There was no kind of doorman or security.

Fitz had followed her home from the TV station earlier in the day and scoped it all out. He then had gone home, done some work on a couple of antique motorcycles he had found on a pick in Illinois, then took a nap. Around two A.M. he stuck hand warmers in his boots and coat pockets and drove here in his nondescript panel van to watch and wait.

This wasn’t his usual MO. He preferred to hunt on the road, snatch a victim of opportunity, and keep moving. He had his routine down to a smooth science. But he had a point to prove now. He had decided to up his game, to show people exactly who they were dealing with.

The parking lot for the apartment buildings was not well lit. There was no one around at this time of night. This was a quiet middle-income neighborhood. People here worked hard and went to bed early. They got up early and watched their cute neighbor girl on the news.

Dana Nolan was twenty-four (according to the station’s website and her own Facebook page), still with a breath of that fresh-from-college scent on her. Pretty and petite, no doubt preoccupied with her first big job at a television station, she walked out of her building in the middle of every night and crossed this lonely parking lot by herself.