Monday Mourning

These geniuses are now suggesting she and Pomerleau just pulled on their panties and waltzed out?”

“The head nurse thinks they may have split during a shift change. Or during the night.”

“They didn’t have clothes!”

“Two coats and two pair of boots are missing from the staff lounge. Along with seventeen dollars from the coffee fund.”

“Where would two disoriented, homeless women go?”

“Calm down.”

I closed my eyes and willed the adrenaline back to its myriad sources.

“They may not have gone anywhere. General’s a warren of tunnels and crannies, the basement’s some kind of medieval maze.

“And then?”

“When the McGees arrive I’ll find out if Tawny knew anyone in Montreal.”

“Jesus Christ, Ryan. That poor woman loses her child, probably gives her up for dead, then finally gets word her daughter is alive. Now we have to tell her the kid’s missing again?”

“We’ll find her.” Ryan’s voice was tempered steel.

“I’ll call the women’s shelters,” I said.

“Worth a try.”

It was a dead end. No one had seen or admitted any woman fitting either of the descriptions I provided.

I went back to my research, but it was worse than before. I couldn’t sit. Couldn’t read. I was charged with enough energy to blast through granite.

These women had been kidnapped years ago, Angela Robinson in 1985, Anique Pomerleau in 1990, Tawny McGee in 1999. Their abductor was now dead.

So why this growing sense of dread?

Had we blown it? Was Catts the sole abductor? Had Stephen Menard been Neal Wesley Catts’s accomplice in his twisted little game, or vice versa? Was Menard still out there?

Were Pomerleau and McGee again in Menard’s hands? Had he forced them from the hospital? Had the women gone willingly, still under his spell?

Had Catts killed Menard? When? Why?

Catts should have had gunpowder on his hands.

I remembered McGee’s pleas to be taken from the hospital.

Had McGee persuaded Pomerleau to leave? Had the women simply fled? Had the unaccustomed environment frightened them into flight? But flight to where?

Why this intense feeling that McGee and Pomerleau were in danger? That I could rescue them if I was just clever enough to sort things out?

Why didn’t Ryan call?

I’d squeezed every detail I could from the bones. I’d gone over and over the MP lists. What else could I do?

The videos.