Free 3 Malled to Death by Laura Disilverio Page B

still on my mind, “Are you a big movie fan?”
    Joel’s eyes brightened. “Oh, yeah! I’ve loved movies and television since I was a kid. I probably see forty or fifty movies a year in the theater and a bunch more on Netflix. I like all kinds. Well, I’m not really into documentaries, but sci fi, rom-com, heavy dramas, action flicks, good horror—I like them all. Everyone in my family gives me movie theater gift cards for Christmas and my birthday.”
    “I didn’t know. What’s the best movie you’ve seen lately?”
    He named a film already being called an Oscar contender and seemed prepared to analyze each beat of the script and all the camera work for me. I stopped him with a simple question: “Why?”
    “Why what?”
    “Why do you like movies?” I crumpled my sandwich wrapper and chips bag into a ball and lobbed them into the trash can.
    Giving me a look like I was a simpleton, Joel said, “Because they take you away, don’t they? They create a different world and put you in it for a couple of hours. It’s almost like time travel or falling through a worm hole or apparating.”
    Joel had watched far too much science fiction and fantasy.
    He took a big bite of his sandwich and chewed as if he needed to fuel his thoughts. He swallowed. “I’m not putting it very well, but at movies it’s like I can worry about being eaten by a
T. rex
or crashing my Formula One car or ending up with Jennifer Aniston for a while, instead of worrying about work stuff or if I’ll ever be able to afford new wheels. I hate that van.”
    Joel drove the used family van his parents had given him.
    “You can escape from reality for a while.”
    “Exactly!” He beamed at me as if I were the class dullard who’d finally come up with the right answer.
    I guess I’d known that movies, like books, provide an escape from day-to-day realities, but I wasn’t much of one for ducking out on reality, so I hadn’t really considered that they might offer a welcome, even necessary, break to many people. I bit the inside of my cheek and regretted that I’d taken Ethan’s work for granted for so long and focused on the business end of it, since that’s what I saw at home, rather than the product he created that gave pleasure to so many. Maybe I should see a movie. I tried to think when I’d last seen one and thought it might have been in Afghanistan.
    Time to get back to work. “I know it’s not as fast-paced as the latest Ethan Jarrett movie, but have you looked at the footage from our cameras?”
    Joel shook his head and mumbled around a mouthful of chips, “Waiting for you.”
    I motioned for him to cue up the camera data from last night and we watched it. There were no cameras in the bathrooms, of course, and none in the utility hall where there was nothing to shoplift, so we were reduced to studying the passersby in the main corridor who could have turned into that hall, looking for Zoë.
    “The cops don’t know yet when she was attacked, but I talked to a woman who saw her about six last night, so we can start then,” I said. Joel fast-forwarded and we studied the images. They were black-and-white and they moved jerkily since Fernglen’s cameras only recorded images every few seconds. Still, we could make out shoppers as they passed, schlepping shopping bags, and teens slumping by, killing time.
    “There’s a lot of cops,” Joel observed after we’d been watching for nearly half an hour with the images hurrying past on fast-forward.
    I’d noticed that myself. “Actors,” I clarified. The kicker was that they all looked way too much alike on our recording. With the hats they wore, I couldn’t even tell which were men and which were women. The Vernonville Police Department might have technicians who could determine relative heights, if they did some measurements in our halls or studied shadows or something, but I had trouble telling one from another.
    “Look, there’s Zoë,” I said, pointing to a figure on the