Snatched by Karin Slaughter

before you hit the ground.”
    “That’s different,” Will said. Women were more cautious around children. Especially women like Faith Mitchell, who ran a background check on her mailman because she thought he was too friendly.
    “It’s not different,” Faith said. “You did everything you could, Will. We’re all doing everything we can.”
    He hated the defeated sound in her voice, mostly because it mirrored his own feelings.
    “I want to run through it again,” Will said. Faith nodded, and he started back from the beginning, telling her about sitting in the toilet stall, peeling off the Band-Aid so that the flusher would go off. When he got to the part about waving his arms for the camera in the pedestrian tunnel, he stood up. He told her about finding the shoe, heading out to where they now stood in front of the exit doors.
    Will took her down the sidewalk, continuing the story: The red truck. The Cowboy. The cop pulling up in his cruiser. Will’s attention was diverted for a few seconds. He lost sight of Jenner and the girl.
    Will turned to Faith, remembering, “There was a silver Prius.”
    “Four door?”
    Will nodded. “I heard it pull up behind me.”
    “If you heard it, then it wasn’t going slow,” Faith pointed out. The car was virtually silent at speeds under fifteen miles per hour. “Anything else?”
    “Black interior. White female driver. I saw through to the trunk. The car was empty.” Will tried to remember what the woman looked like. It had all happened so fast. He’d wrenched open the door and scanned the interior of the car. “I scared the shit out of her,” he said. “She drove off like a bat out of hell.”
    “Drove up there?” Faith indicated the steep turn at the end of the breezeway. The four-lane road narrowed to two as it merged into traffic from upstairs. The road then turned back into a six-lane stretch that allowed drivers to either loop back around to the South or North Terminal or jump onto the interstate.
    Will said, “Call it in.”
    Faith already had the radio to her mouth. “Mitchell to Livingston?”
    Vanessa Livingston’s voice came back immediately. “Ten-four?”
    “I need exit tape on a silver Prius leaving the South Terminal breezeway at approximate time of disappearance.”
    “Roger.”
    Faith dropped the radio to her side. “Where was the Prius parked when you opened the door?”
    Will walked a few more feet and gauged his position. “Right here.” He pointed toward the parking garage. “When I saw Jenner again, he was over there.”
    “Was that when you called me on the phone?”
    “Yes.”
    “Okay, back up,” Faith said. “You saw the Prius. You ran up to it?”
    “Yeah,” Will said. “I opened the door and checked it. No one was inside. Just a woman. Dark hair, I think. She put her hands to her face. Like I said, she was scared. Surprised.” He shook his head. There was a reason cops hated eyewitness testimony. Nine times out of ten, it was wrong. So much had been going on when Will was chasing Jenner that he wasn’t even sure the Prius was silver anymore. “Like I said, the car was empty. I could see straight through to …” His voice trailed off. He looked up the road. He could see cars from the upstairs lanes.
    Faith asked, “What is it?”
    Will didn’t answer. Instead, he jogged up the road, taking the same path toward the exit as the Prius.
    There was a bend in the lower road as it rose to meet traffic exiting the main terminal entrance. To discourage pedestrians from walking up the road and possibly getting hit by a car, the garden crew had planted a bunch of black locusts, a pollution-resistant bush that produces a creamy white flower and tiny, razor-sharp thorns at the base of each leaf.
    Will pushed his way into the dense bushes, not caring that his hands were getting torn up. His jacket got caught on a long branch. The material stuck to the thorns like Velcro.
    “What are you doing?”
    Will ripped away his jacket so