“But they looked up when they heard a scream and saw Elizabeth Connolly. Two kidnappers, apparently pretty good at it. Man and a woman. They didn’t see our young lovers because they were in the back of a van.”

“And they had their heads down?” I asked. “Otherwise occupied?”

“That too. But when they did come up for air, they saw the man and woman, described as being in their thirties, well-dressed. They were already holding Mrs. Connolly. Took her down very fast. Threw her into the back of her own station wagon. Then they drove off in her car.”

“Why didn’t the kids get out of the van to help?”

Ciaccio shook her head. “They said that it happened very fast, and that they were scared. Seemed ‘unreal’ to them. I think they were also nervous about having it known they were playing around in the back of a van during school hours. They both attend a local prep school in Buckhead. They were skipping classes.”

A team took her, I thought, and knew it was a big break for us. According to what I’d read on the ride down, no team had been spotted at any of the other abductions. A male and a female team? That was interesting. Strange and unexpected.

“You want to answer a question for us now?” Detective Pedi asked.

“If I can. Shoot.”

He looked at his partner. I had a feeling that somewhere along the way Joshua and Irene might have spent some time in the backseat of a car, something about the way they looked at each other. “We’ve been hearing that this might have to do with the Sandra Friedlander case. Is that right? That one’s gone unsolved for, what, two years in D.C.?”

I looked at the detective and shook my head. “Not to my knowledge,” I said. “You’re the first to bring up Sandra Friedlander.”

Which wasn’t exactly the truth. Her name had been in confidential FBI reports I’d read on the ride down from D.C. Sandra Friedlander—and seven others.

Chapter 14

Chapter 14

MY HEAD WAS BUZZING. In a bad way. I knew from my hurried reading of the case notes that there were more than 220 women currently listed as missing in the United States, and that at least seven of the disappearances had been linked by the Bureau to “white slave rings.” That was the nasty twist. White women in their twenties and thirties were in high demand in certain circles. The prices could get exorbitant—if the sales were to the Middle East or to Japan.

Atlanta had been the hub of another kind of sex-slave scandal just a few years back. It had involved Asian and Mexican women smuggled into the U.S., then forced into prostitution in Georgia and the Carolinas. This case had another possible connection to Juanita, Mexico, where hundreds of women had disappeared in the past couple of years.