“Understood,” Frost said, but he thought the safer play for this guy was to drive a stolen car into the ramp, rather than risk being spotted by one of the security or ATM cameras out on the street. The Night Bird wasn’t a fool.

“I’m going to write down a few other dates this month,” Frost added, “and I need the morning files for those dates, too.”

Christie had already been to this parking garage several times this month, according to the tickets he’d found in her Civic. Maybe her stalker had been right behind her one of those days, and maybe he hadn’t been so careful when he was following her.

After he gave the information to Arne, Frost walked to the stairwell at the back of the ramp. He headed down two flights to the parking level where Christie had been abducted. The structure was well lit with overhead fluorescents, but it was still a parking garage. There were plenty of shadows, and every car offered hiding places.

He walked slowly. The ceiling was low, and he smelled exhaust and gasoline. He spotted the webcam mounted on the wall and guessed that Christie’s stalker had scouted the positions of every camera in the ramp. To do that, he would have been visible, but he would also have been one person among thousands in the garage every day. A needle in a haystack.

Frost counted the support columns to the spot that Christie was passing when she was snatched. When he got there, he stopped. He was only ten feet from the garage wall. It would have been easy to hide, easy to wait for her. Maybe he used chloroform on a rag or a fast-acting sedative injection. Pull her back, hold her, count the seconds until she was unconscious. Then drag her along the wall back to her own car.

He followed the wall and used his flashlight to illuminate the shadows. At each parked car, he squatted and shined the light underneath. Three feet under the chassis of a white SUV, something glinted in the beam of light. He squirmed toward it and saw that it was a brass button, the kind men wore on their suit coats.

Frost slipped a plastic evidence bag from his pocket and swept the button inside it. Maybe it had come from one of the businessmen who parked here every day. Or maybe Christie had yanked it off during a struggle, and it had rolled here. There wouldn’t have been time for the attacker to retrieve it.

Maybe.

He reached the spot where Christie had parked her Civic. The spot was empty now. She’d been dragged here, unconscious, and her assailant had used her keys to pop the trunk and deposit her body inside. And then he drove her—where?

Where did he operate on their minds?