Chapter 7 MERCY

Chapter 7

MERCY

Late that evening, Mercy joined Evan in a small conference room at the Deschutes County Sheriff's Department.

"I haven't worked in this room before," she said as she walked in. "You've got sofas!" She dropped her bag on an overstuffed gray sofa.

"Don't sit on that one," Evan warned.

Mercy studied the piece of furniture, not seeing a problem. "Why?"

Evan made a sour face. "Trust me."

She removed her bag, joined him at the table, and pulled out her laptop. She was tempted to press for more information about the sofa, but she suspected it had something to do with vomit, semen, or urine. She didn't want to know.

"The senator sent me all his recorded security camera video for the last forty-eight hours," Evan told her. "Ten cameras. They're not motion activated, so they record all the time."

"Four hundred and eighty hours of video. How fast can we fast-forward?"

"I've started, and it's going pretty quick," said Evan. "Most of the time there is no one in the footage, so I only slow it when someone enters."

"Did your deputies find any neighbors that had security cameras with a view of the senator's road?" asked Mercy. The homes were far apart and sat back from the main road, but deputies had been sent to knock on doors.

"I received one that has a distant view. The deputy said a few vehicles go by in the window of time, but license plates and car makes and models aren't clear, so I'm not optimistic. We can watch it after we finish the senator's coverage."

"Did you hear from the wireless carrier about Paige's cell phone records yet?" Mercy asked, reviewing a to-do checklist.

Evan checked his email. "Not yet."

"Paige's laptop and phone are on their way to the lab. I marked them priority."

"But did you slip in a hundred-dollar bill for the lab director? Everyone wants priority."

"No," Mercy admitted, knowing how busy the lab was. "I should have sent Kaylie's lemon bars as a bribe."

Evan immediately eyed her bag. "I thought I smelled something. What'd you bring?"

Her niece, Kaylie, owned a coffee shop known for its baked goods. The day-old leftovers were a hot commodity at Mercy's office and her husband Truman's police department.

"Lemon bars, of course." She took one out of a container and then slid it to Evan, enjoying how his eyes lit up. "Did you ask the senator's team about any issues with constituents or hate mail?" she asked, then bit into a lemony piece of heaven.

"Yes." Evan brushed away the crumbs on his shirt. "Hate mail is a daily thing. I asked if any specifically mentioned Paige, and they showed me some of the most disgusting things I've ever read. What is wrong with people? She's a child."

"She's beautiful and comes from wealth," said Mercy. She Googled the senator's family and studied the photos. "That makes some people very bitter and angry. Especially if they hate the senator's politics." She clicked on a photo of Denise Holcroft, which took her to a women's fitness magazine article about Denise's workout routine. Mercy marveled again at how Paige was a dead ringer for her mother. She scanned the article and immediately felt tired after reading the amount of time Denise spent on fitness.

Mercy was a believer in maintaining fitness and health. Her father had emphasized it as long as she could remember. She had grown up in a family of preppers and survivalists who spent their lives preparing in case the world fell apart. Besides stocking up on food and fuel, taking care of personal health was important. Doctors, hospitals, and medications might not be around if TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it) occurred.

But Denise Holcroft took fitness to a different level.

Mercy browsed her Google results, skimming quickly, looking for anything beyond what would be expected from news outlets. There were several pictures of the family at official events. Dressed up, smiling, and raising their arms in perfect waves. Paige seemed to be enjoying herself in most of the photos. Denise looked happy but slightly stressed, and Finn appeared a little robotic—as if he were only doing what his parents wanted.

That's what I'd expect from a teenage boy.

She continued to scroll, quickly passing through ten pages of results. The websites grew a little more obscure and the posts older as she scanned.

Do I expect to find a personal diatribe against the senator?

Maybe.

"I dug into the family a little bit," said Evan. "There are no records of police calls to the home. I can't even find a traffic ticket. The kids appear to be good students. It's a squeaky-clean family."

"As a senator's family needs to be. Otherwise every wrong move is amplified and dissected in the media. I wonder how much pressure that puts on the kids. They must live with a perpetual fear of screwing up."

"Maybe Paige got fed up with the stress and left."

"Possibly." Mercy thought Paige's friends would have said if she struggled with the constant need to walk a narrow line. "Can we divide up the surveillance videos? Make it go twice as fast?"

"They're on the department's server. You won't be able to access it with your laptop." Evan's gaze was glued to his screen. "Come look at this."

Mercy rolled her chair next to Evan's. He was simultaneously fast-forwarding four video feeds on his screen. In the lower right one, Paige sat at the counter in the kitchen, speedily eating a sandwich, her gaze never leaving her phone. The senator suddenly dashed through the kitchen. Evan halted that feed, backed up, and they watched the senator walk through the kitchen at a normal pace. He said something to Paige, who nodded but didn't look up from her phone. Evan and Mercy continued to watch Paige eat at a normal speed. A minute later Paige put her plate in the sink, took a bottle of water out of the fridge, and left the kitchen. The time on the video showed 12:17. Evan sped it up again.

In the camera view of the driveway, an SUV shot backward out of the garage, reversed, and then sped out of view toward the street. Evan backed it up and they watched the SUV move at a normal pace. The senator wasn't visible, but Denise Holcroft was easy to spot in the front passenger's seat.

In the living room camera, Paige briefly flashed in and out of view in the bottom corner, and Evan backed up and froze on her image. "She changed her clothes," he said.

Paige had been in a tank top and shorts as she ate in the kitchen. Now she wore a little sundress and had a large pink flower behind one ear. Her hair was down instead of the earlier ponytail.

"She dressed up," said Mercy. "Definitely going to meet someone. To place the tape over those cameras, she'll need a ladder. I guess she'll climb it in that dress."

"If she's the one who places the tape."

"Run it again."

Evan advanced the living room video bit by bit, stopping for several seconds to study the brief flash of the girl. Neither of her hands were in the video, disappointing Mercy, who wanted to see the nails. The camera in the kitchen had been too far away to see fingernail polish.

Mercy turned her gaze to the driveway and entrance cameras, watching the time, knowing they would go black sometime after one. "What do the other six views show?" she asked Evan.

"Two cameras cover the backyard and patio, and then the other two sides of the home each have one. There's an inside view of the front entrance and foyer, and another is of a long hallway. I'm not sure exactly where that hall is in the house."

"I have the home's floor plan," Mercy said.

Evan's surprised gaze met hers. "How did you get that?"

"I nicely asked one of the senator's assistants." She opened the email. "Looks like there are a couple of long hallways. This one leads to a wing with a huge primary suite. This other hallway leads to four bedrooms. We'll have to view the video to figure out which hallway it is."

The outside entrance camera suddenly went dark. Evan paused the other views, enlarged the entrance one, and backed it up. In slow motion, they watched the scene they'd already seen with the senator.

"Definitely a pink fingernail," said Mercy. "I can't see the color in the other views of her, but it does coordinate with that dress she just put on. And the flower in her hair."

Evan closed out the video and they watched the same thing happen to the driveway view—but no fingernails came into sight. "Assuming it's her, she knew how to approach both cameras without being seen." He closed out the cameras that had gone black and replaced them with two new camera views. One was the hallway and the other was an outdoor view of one of the sides of the home. "I doubt the outside will show much," Evan said. "There's no walkway or doors."

Mercy studied the number of doorways in the hallway view and compared it to her floor plan of the home. "The hall is the one with multiple bedrooms, not the primary suite."

Paige was seen passing through the hall dozens of times. Mercy kept expecting to see Finn until she recalled he'd spent the two previous nights at a friend's home. She made a note to contact the friend and his family. Once the clock passed 1:15, Paige wasn't seen again. The next day near eleven a.m., her mother knocked several times on her door, finally opening it and stepping inside. She then checked the other rooms in the hall. Her husband did the same an hour later. Then Evan showed up in the hall, soon followed by Finn strolling to his bedroom with a backpack, returning from his friend's. Then the view showed Mercy and Evan moving down the hall to check Paige's bedroom.

Something pricked at the back of Mercy's brain as she watched people move through the hallway, but she couldn't put her finger on it. They watched the rest of the views. Denise paced through the living room and kitchen, her phone to her ear, constantly in motion, agitation growing in her expression. The outdoor views of the home's sides showed nothing, but the parents were seen occasionally on the backyard patio, and eventually Mercy and Evan appeared there too.

"Go back to the hallway," said Mercy. "You can speed it up." She watched again as people dashed up and down the hall. She frowned as the realization hit her.

Where's Paige?

"We don't see Paige in her dress," said Mercy. "She walks to her room after her lunch, steps into the bathroom two doors down, and then goes back to her room still wearing shorts. We know she changed her clothes—we saw the dress, but she's not seen coming out of the room in it." She turned to Evan. "Could this feed have been edited?"

He shook his head. "I was watching the clock. Nothing is missing."

Mercy looked at the floor plan. "Oh, I see. Her room has a door that connects to a bonus room. I knew that. I opened the door when we searched her room."

"The room with the pool table and TV," added Evan.

"She must have gone through there after she changed." Mercy studied the floor plan. "But she used the hallway at least a dozen times before that. It's a much longer walk to the living room, where we briefly saw her. She didn't—"

"Want to be on camera in the dress for some reason," Evan finished. "Do you think another person was in the house with her?"

"I don't think so," said Mercy. "All outside doors were covered by cameras. We would have seen someone enter. I think she was alone until she taped over the cameras. She must have misjudged the angle of the camera in the living room, accidentally letting us see that flash of her in a dress. I bet she was also pulling her suitcase and didn't want it seen. Next she could have made it to the garage, opened the rolling doors, brought out a ladder, and covered the cameras—all without being on camera."

"So her parents wouldn't immediately realize that she left on her own? She's a senator's daughter. She had to know that simply vanishing would create a quick law enforcement response."

"Maybe that's what she wanted for some reason." Mercy shrugged. "Let's see the neighbor's coverage of the street. It's about a mile from Paige's house."

Evan made a few clicks and opened a video. Mercy watched an Amazon delivery vehicle go by. The deputy was right. The distance was too far and the angle was wrong to catch any plates. Several minutes passed. Then a smaller SUV and a pickup went by. A driver was visible in each one, but Mercy couldn't even tell if they were male or female.

"Wrong direction anyway," Evan commented. "The street dead-ends just beyond the senator's home. Paige had to go south."

Unless she went to a neighbor's home and never passed this camera.

Could she be that close?

Three vehicles passed in the right direction. Mercy checked the clock. All three were in the time window. Evan managed to zoom in slightly but lost too much clarity. Both watched silently, and Mercy realized the video wouldn't be helpful until they had a vehicle description to compare to the passing vehicles. A sedan drove by. "Back it up," Mercy said, but Evan had already moved to do so.

They leaned closer to the screen as it restarted in slow motion.

Something pink was on the side of the passenger's head.

Paige's flower.