Forty-some minutes later, Choi was set up in a dark room in the Pratt Police Department with a DVD player hooked up to an old tube TV. While most of his team was down the hall, working their own specialties, he was subjected to your classic Dirty Job But Somebody’s Gotta Do It: going through security video, grainy washed-out footage, looking for even a single frame that showed something it shouldn’t, something off, a person in the wrong place, a car that looked out of place, any damn thing.

Mounted where it met the cross corridor, the camera on the hall from the lobby should reveal anyone coming in that way. Ten rooms were on each side to the left, and ten more to the right. Other cameras gave views of that same corridor in either direction.

Choi started with the hallway with Carmen’s doorway. He would fast-forward until he saw someone, then would slow down, back up, and look from just before the person entered until they went into their room. Shortly after midnight on the video, his teammates made their appearances—Jenny went into her room, Anderson into his, and even Choi himself. The last one to enter a room, at the far end, was Carmen…then nothing.

He fast-forwarded as slowly as possible—unlike the old VHS, DVDs skipped frames rather than skimming over them. Finally, nearly half an hour after Carmen had closed her door, someone came down the hall.

Choi sat up.

With the person’s back to the camera, all Choi could make out was a sweatshirt and jeans and a ball cap.

Choi’s cell seemed to leap into his hand; but he didn’t hit any of the numbers just yet. Instead, he watched as the ball cap–wearing man—at least that much seemed clear, that this was indeed a male—fairly swaggered down the hall, in a gait with purpose and no hesitation.

Someone who knew where he was going….

Ball Cap stopped just short of Carmen’s room, and knocked. A pause while he waited. Then, he lifted the front of the sweatshirt slightly and withdrew from his waistband what, from this angle and distance, appeared to be a gun…but Choi already knew it wasn’t.

When Carmen finally opened the door, Choi somehow managed not to yell, No! at the screen.

Instead, he merely watched in mute rage as the Taser fired, and he caught just a glimpse of Carmen before she tumbled back into her room.

The man went in after her, his face still not visible as he slipped in and shut the door.

After a minute or so, the door opened, and he stepped out with a human-sized shape wrapped in the bedspread over his shoulder, like a carpet hauler making a delivery. The door to the side parking lot was right there, couldn’t have been handier, and the guy disappeared through it.

Choi hadn’t seen anything that would help them identify Carmen’s attacker—all he had accomplished was to confirm that Carmen had indeed been abducted.

He hoped Jenny could work some of her computer voodoo and enhance the picture enough that they’d be able to ID the guy; but he frankly didn’t hold out much hope, from what he’d seen so far.

He gave Harrow a call, and reported.

“So it’s a kidnapping,” Harrow said.

“Yeah. Where does that leave us with the FBI?”

“…I’ll work on that. Keep at that footage. Maybe you’ve seen enough to make him on the convenience store or bank video.”

“Still some motel vid to check, too. Anyway, I’m on it, boss.”

He pocketed his cell and changed discs to check the hallway coming from the lobby. Without a key card, the front door would be the only way the guy could get in at that hour.

He fast-forwarded to just short of the time the man came around the corner into Carmen’s hallway. This camera provided a view from the intersection with the cross-corridor straight to the front door.

The man came in, head down, glanced for a second toward the front desk to his left, then kept coming right at camera, seemingly aware of its presence and not wanting to give it a good look.

How did he know the camera was there?

Had Ball Cap been in a motel of the same chain, laid out identically, or had he been in this particular motel before? Was he a local? A non-local who had cased the place?

When the man disappeared from the shot, Choi reran the disc twice before he decided he hadn’t missed anything. The next disc was the main parking lot, but there was nothing to see. The abductor had probably parked on the side and walked around, staying close to the building. Otherwise, he would have to carry Carmen’s body to the front, and that was unlikely.

This camera, from above the entrance, swept back and forth across the parking lot and revealed no sign of movement after the team’s buses emptied and they’d all come inside.

The camera on the side of the building was mounted above the door too, and similarly swept back and forth. Choi synced up the time for when the kidnapper and his package should have popped out the door, but the investigator saw nothing. Problem with the camera was that it showed the lot and nothing of the sidewalk next to the building, aimed just a few degrees too high.

“Shit,” Choi said.

He kept the video rolling, hoping the guy would come out and cross the parking lot to one of the vehicles…

…but he never did.

Choi was just about to give up when the camera swept left and caught the roof of a vehicle sliding by to the right.

“There,” he said, pointing to the right as if that would make the camera move faster.

Painfully slow, the camera finally swept back to the right, Choi expecting the truck to be long gone. To his surprised delight, the truck sat at the motel entrance, its tail to camera.

Better to be lucky than smart, he thought.

A car passing on the street had forced the truck to wait, and those few seconds were Christmas to Choi.

The truck was obviously a Ford F-150, gray on the washed-out security video, and the license plate stared right back at him, as did a sticker on the back window. From here, nothing was clear enough to make out, but he felt Jenny Blake and her laptop would see this stuff just fine.

He dialed Harrow, who answered on the second ring.

“I think we’ve got the son of a bitch,” Choi said, then he explained.

“Get Jenny on it,” Harrow said. “Anderson’s been going over the map some more—he thinks whatever the target’s center indicates, it’ll be within Smith County. Probably a town called Lebanon—about a hundred seventy miles north of here, straight up US 281.”

“How soon we leaving?”

“That’s up to Jenny. Get her on this. Once she’s got what she needs at the PD, we’re on our way.”

“You got it, boss.”

Soon, after Jenny Blake had loaded the contents of not only that disc onto her laptop, but all the rest—including the convenience store and bank footage—she told Choi they were set to go.

“Already?”

“Yup. I’ll do the work on the road. You found a good image, Billy. Shouldn’t take long.”

Within half an hour, both buses and the semi-trailer crime lab were rolling up the highway toward Lebanon, Kansas, where three hundred people normally lived. When Crime Seen! showed up, they would add twenty-some to the population of the town, which would represent more growth than the place had seen in a decade.

The team rode in the trailer-cum-crime lab, each working in his or her own way on finding Carmen Garcia. Though the search for her kidnapper and that of the serial killer were almost certainly one in the same, the team was now centered upon getting Carmen back.

No camera or audio personnel were in the crime lab, the camera teams having been ushered to the bus by Harrow. The lab was now off limits for them. The TV show was a secondary concern at present (really, it always had been); but now they were trying to save one of their own, and didn’t care to cater to camera crews underfoot.

In the lab, Harrow sat them down right away, and stood in their midst, working them like an actor doing theater in the round.

“We have a kidnapping,” he said, “and that means FBI.”

Laurene asked, “Have we called them?”

“Chief Walker will be doing that. I asked him to give us, well…what they used to call in old western movies, a head start.”

Chris Anderson was frowning. “Why?”

“Because if we waited for the FBI, we would be stuck back there, Chris, as material witnesses to that crime. We aren’t law enforcement, and we aren’t required to deal with the FBI until or unless they catch up with us.”

Laurene said dryly, “So keep an eye on caller ID.”

Harrow nodded. “We’ll cooperate with them, of course. But right now I think we have a better shot at this bastard than they do.”

Pall said, “No wonder you didn’t let the cameras record this.”

“Michael, would you suggest we wait back there, and turn this over to the FBI?”

“No. Make that, hell no. I never had any use for those stuffed shirts.”

Coming from the well-dressed, fairly formal-of-speech Pall, this was pretty amusing. But nobody laughed or even smiled. Or, for that matter, objected.

“We will of course cooperate fully,” Harrow went on. “The originals of the security-cam discs are back with Chief Walker—the federal investigators will have access to the same evidence as we do. If anyone feels I’m overstepping, or putting the team in any legal jeopardy, say so now. And I won’t try to stop anyone who feels that calling the FBI right now is the thing to do.”

No one did.

They had been on the road for just over an hour now. Jenny Blake was working on enhancing the crappy quality of the security video from the motel. Choi was next to her, at a computer station, checking convenience-store video, Laurene nearby going through bank cam footage. Anderson was at another computer researching Lebanon itself, and Pall was testing the blood from the motel room to make sure it really was Carmen’s. Having seen the security video, Choi already had no doubt.

Harrow was on the phone, and his half of the conversation with network president Dennis Byrnes served as a soundtrack for their labor.

“That’s right, Dennis,” Harrow said. “Abducted. Kidnapped, yes.”

A long pause was followed by the chipmunk sound of someone speaking quickly on the other end of a nearby cell.

Exasperated, Harrow said, “I don’t know what the network’s liability is to her family, Dennis. I’m sure it will be less, if you let us do our work, and get her back alive.”

Another pause.

“Ask the lawyers, Dennis…What? I haven’t really thought about it. Dennis, I have to get back to it.”

And Harrow clicked off and said, “Jesus.”

Choi asked, “What?”

“Byrnes wanted to know if I thought this would make ‘good TV.’”

Nobody said anything for a long time.

“You know what would be a good twist?” Choi asked. “The killer throwing Dennis Byrnes off the rooftop of UBC.”

“Bad taste, Billy,” Harrow said.

Laurene said, “But a good idea.”

“Oh shit,” Jenny said, and they all turned her way.

“What?” Harrow asked.

“Got the license number.”

“And?”

“It’s registered to Herman A. Gibbons of Lebanon, Kansas.”

Choi swung a fist, saying, “We’ve got him!”

But Jenny’s face registered confusion, not jubilation.

“What?” Choi asked.

“When I got the name from the DMV,” Jenny said, “I Googled the guy.”

“And?” Harrow asked.

The little computer expert met her boss’s gaze. “Herman A. Gibbons? He’s the Smith County sheriff.”