“I’m sorry.” Sarajo—now Sandra Millford—put on an easy smile. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just wondered if you could help me out. My niece is about your size, your coloring, your age. Fifteen?”
Flattered, Darlie lied cheerfully. “Yeah.”
“Do you think she’d like this? I want to get her something special for her birthday next week.” Sarajo held up a pink party dress.
“Oh, wow. I was looking at that before. It’s so, just so. It’s way expensive.”
“She’s my favorite niece. Can I just hold it up against you, to see how she might look?”
“Sure. Oh, it’s just frosted extremely.”
“You think?” Sarajo slid the pressure syringe under the material, shifting as she’d practiced to shield the movement from view. She jabbed it quickly into
the side of Darlie’s throat.
“Ow. What was—”
“Must be a pin in it.”
She watched the girl’s eyes glaze.
“I don’t guess it suits her after all.” Supporting Darlie with one arm, she hung the dress up. “Time to go.” She spoke clearly, smiling, walking the girl out. “School night!”
“No school tomorrow.” The words slurred.
“You’re right about that.”
She walked Darlie toward the south entrance. McQueen picked them up on the way, tucked his arm around Darlie from the other side. “How did the shopping go, ladies?”
“We had fun,” Sarajo said easily. “But our girl’s not feeling very well. Overtired, I guess.”
“Aw, well, we’ll be home soon.”
Looking like a family, they went outside to the lot, McQueen jamming security as they went. Even as Simka came out of the dressing room to show off her outfit, they lifted Darlie into the van.
Eve walked into the shop with Roarke. It was a ground-level shop in a three-level mall. Dozens of ways in, she’d already noted, dozens of ways out.
Bree broke out of a huddle of cops, hurried to her.
“Darlie Morgansten, thirteen, brown and green, five-three, a hundred and ten. She was with her friend.” She gestured toward another girl, sitting on the floor, crying. “The friend was trying something on in the dressing room. When she came out, Darlie was gone. They were to meet Darlie’s mother, Iris Morgansten, at twenty-one forty-five. The mother”—she gestured again to a woman talking rapidly to Bree’s partner—“was shopping elsewhere in the mall.”
Bree took a breath.
“One of the clerks noticed Darlie with a woman, assumed it was her mother. They were looking at a dress. Then they left together. No struggle, no sign of duress. We’ve got people going over the security discs now.”
“Nearly an hour ago,” Eve calculated. “They’re gone. They won’t be anywhere in here. Have them check the logs for the last few days. The partner would have cased the place for him, taken pictures. He’d have to know the best way out, where security is inside and out. Why the hell did it take this long to get out the alert?”
“The other girl looked around for Darlie, then asked one of the clerks. They told her Darlie left with her mother. So Simka—the other kid—went down to the meeting spot to wait. It was nearly thirty minutes before the mother got there, and realized something was wrong.”
“All right. I want to talk to the store employees, the kid, the mother.”
“The father’s here, too, now.”
“I don’t need him if he wasn’t here when it went down. I want—”
She broke off when Nikos came over.
“You were right. You were right about this. I didn’t trust your instincts, went with the percentages. Now that kid’s . . .”