Page 12 of Bring Them Home

“Great job. Bag it and tag it, and please get it over to Detective Briggs in Digital Forensics.”

“Will do.” Leo was gone, and a second after, Amanda’s phone pinged with a text message.

She filled Trent in on the call and opened the text. It was the image of Brooke’s lock screen. From the broad smiles on the girls’ faces, they were tight friends. She shared this with Trent.

“Is there anything else you need from me?” Danny asked, splitting his gaze between the two of them.

“Yes, we’ll need the license number on that black van,” Amanda said.

“Let me see what I can do.” Danny spent the next several minutes zooming in on the front and rear plates with no luck. “I’m going to say they have covers that block them out.”

“You and me both.” A smart move from one perspective, stupid from another. It would attract attention, and they risked being pulled over, but it was likely they removed them once out of sight of the mall’s cameras. “Could you send a copy of this video to me?”

“Sure, though I’d prefer to clear that by my boss. He told me to show you whatever you wanted. We didn’t get into handing over the footage.”

“As soon as you can.” She plucked out her business card and handed it to him. “For now, could we track that teen’s movements backward to inside the mall?”

“You got it. Just holler if you want me to stop at any time.” Danny proceeded to switch from camera to camera, tracking Brooke back through the mall. Not long before she stepped outside, she stood by a garbage can with her phone in hand. She tapped something into it before tossing it into the bin.

“See her shoulders, and the way she’s looking around?” Trent asked her.

“Whoever is behind this made contact before here. Danny…?” she prompted.

He nodded. “I’ll keep going back.”

A few minutes before Brooke ditched her phone, she was with a couple of girls who appeared irritated by something she told them. “Pause.” She brought up the photo on her phone of Brooke’s lock screen, and held it for Trent to refer to again.

“It’s the same girls,” Trent said. “So she was at the mall with them, but her leaving seemed unexpected. It looks like it caught the girls off guard.”

Amanda nodded. Whatever had Brooke leaving had ruined whatever the girls had planned. “Please keep going backward,” she told Danny.

Minutes before talking with her friends, Brooke had stepped into the restroom alone.

“Could someone have gotten to her in there?” Trent suggested.

“It’s possible or through her phone.” Amanda turned to Danny. “Thank you for all your help. Please send over all the videos we just watched as soon as possible. If your boss has a problem with you doing that, have him call me.” Watching who went in and out of the restroom wouldn’t be of any use right now. They had no idea who they were looking for anyway. And that was even assuming they were right that someone got to her inside. It might help to have the video to refer to once they had more information to go on though.

“Will do. I just hope everything turns out all right.”

“Us too,” Trent told him as he led the way out of the security office.

As they walked to the car, she turned to him. “If only there were some way to track the van after it left the mall’s parking lot.”

“That would be great.”

It was unfortunate that the Virginia Department of Transportation didn’t record footage. The cameras were only there to monitor the flow of traffic. “We aren’t left without a clue altogether though.”

“The last location of the husband’s phone?”

“What I was thinking. Not that it gets us far.”

“So these people in the van… I think it’s safe to assume there’s at least two. A driver and someone in the back. They pick up the daughter and mother, the husband before or after that, and head out of town.”

“Or just the daughter and mother were taken, if the husband’s behind this.” There wasn’t any reason to dismiss him as a person of interest yet. Not in her mind. “There’s no more dancing around this, though. We saw it with our own eyes. Valerie and Brooke Archer were abducted. We’ll need to get a BOLO issued on Paul Archer and his vehicle.”

“No argument from me there.”

“Get us over to the Archer residence, and I’ll call Malone to bring him up to speed.”