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‘We’d have found her by now,’ I say. ‘Half the hotel staff is out looking for her. We’ve got a hundred wedding guests searching the beach. She’s only three, she couldn’t get very far on her own.’
‘Could she be with another family member?’
My frustration intensifies. Time is not my friend. With every second that passes, whoever has taken my daughter is moving further away, and the area that must be searched, the diameter of possibility, exponentially expands.
‘There’s no other family here. I’m telling you, someone hasstolenher!’
‘What about the father, ma’am? Is it possible she’s with him?’
‘He’s dead,’ I say shortly.
‘He was killed in the Genoa bridge collapse last August,’ Zealy says.
‘Sorry to hear that, ma’am.’
One of those random, when-your-number’s-up, pointless deaths. Luca was visiting his parents in Genoa, following his mother’s recent diagnosis with dementia. He just happened to be driving across the Ponte Morandi, the main bridge across the city, when the cables in its southern stays broke. He was one of forty-three people killed that day. His body was crushed beyond recovery, but his beautiful face was unmarked, except for a small, deep cut above his right eye.
When I saw him lying in his coffin before the altar in the same church where we’d married, near his mother’s home village in Sicily, I remember thinking he looked like he was sleeping. Any moment now, he’d open his beautiful eyes and smile at all the fuss he’d caused.
I couldn’t tear my eyes from his broken parents, hollowed out with grief. To lose a child. It is beyond imagining.
‘Please,’ I beg. ‘Lottie hasn’t wandered off or got lost. Someone’stakenher.’
Graves gives me a searching stare and then rejoins the female officer. I watch them confer for a few minutes, my agitation escalating. It’s clear they think I’m overreacting. Another hysterical mother convinced her daughter has been kidnapped, when the child has just fallen asleep in a corner somewhere. The rational part of my brain doesn’t blame them: ninety-nine times out of a hundred they’d be right.
The female officer’s radio crackles and she goes back outside.
‘I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about,’ Graves says, returning to me. ‘These cases, most every kid turns up safe and sound. But your daughter’s pretty young. It’s kinda late for her to be out on her own, so we’re gonna call in back-up from the CAC.’
She’sthree, I want to scream.She’s too young to be on her own whether it’s late or not!
I suppress the urge to tear the hotel apart with my bare hands, to run back out to the beach and turn over every grain of sand. I have to wait,wait, for the slow wheels of procedure to turn.
Zealy refuses to leave me, but I insist Paul goes back out and keeps searching with the others. Every pair of eyes matters. I can’t shake the fear we’re doing everything wrong. This is the time I will look back on, the crucial minutes when I had the chance to save my daughter but instead let her slip through my fingers.
It’s close to midnight when two new detectives arrive. They throw acronyms at me and then, when Zealy demands clarity, explain longhand that they’re from the Crimes Against Children division of the Investigative Operations Bureau at the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. Once again, they’re a male/female pairing, but this time, a fortysomething woman is the ranking officer, a Lieutenant Bamby Bates. It’s a ridiculous name, a stripper’s name, but she looks shrewd and efficient, with sharp black eyes that miss nothing, and I feel someone is finally taking me seriously.
‘We’re issuing an Amber alert,’ she tells me. ‘We’ve notified the FDLE – the Florida Department of Law Enforcement,’ she adds. ‘It should go out within minutes.’
‘What’s an Amber alert?’ I ask.
‘It means Lottie’s details will go out to the media,’ she says. ‘They’ll be broadcast on radio and TV, and via text messagealert. They’ll also be up on the interstate electronic gantry system. This isn’t Portugal,’ she adds. ‘Lottie isn’t going to disappear through the cracks here.’
She knows my child’s name. She knows what happened to Madeleine McCann, and where. She’s telling me she’s experienced and well-informed; she knows what she’s doing. Her department won’t trample vital clues into the ground or let the trail go cold.
‘Do you got a recent photo of Lottie on your cell?’ the lieutenant asks. ‘We can embed it in the Amber alert.’
I pull up the picture Zealy texted me this afternoon, the one I made my screensaver, and forward it to Bates. Lottie is wearing the pink dress she was last seen in and glaring at the camera with her customary ferocity, her unruly blonde hair already escaping from its French plait. It’s not a flattering photo, but it’s Lottie, the very essence of her.
‘What about the media?’ I ask. ‘Should I do an appeal?’
‘We’re not there yet,’ Bates says. ‘I know this is real hard, Alexa, but you gotta trust me. I’m going to find your daughter.’
Nothing is comforting. Nothing makes me feel any less frantic. But I recognise that this woman is Lottie’s lifeline, and she knows what she’s doing.
‘You’re not going to be able to sleep,’ Bates says, her voice softening. ‘And I know you want to be out there, looking. But you have to let us do our job.’
There is a sudden commotion from the courtyard. Marc’s elderly father, Eric, is rushing towards us as fast as he can manage. He’s holding something, but I can’t see what it is until he’s almost upon us.
A small, pink shoe.
