Free A Field of Red by Greg Enslen Page B

arrived and redirected some of the searches, redeploying the volunteers and police officers. Not knowing a thing about Cooper’s Mill and the surrounding terrain, he’d gone by the book and started from the middle, working his way out.
    King didn’t have the heart to tell him he’d already searched all those areas in the first 24 hours after the girls had disappeared. If the Bureau wanted to follow procedure, he didn’t want to confuse the kid with a little thing like logic.
    Ted had also sat with Nick Martin and poured through their finances, but King didn’t think it had helped. The kid was too green to catch anything the CMPD would’ve missed on their investigation. But now that it had gone from a missing persons case to a kidnapping—yesterday’s call to the mother’s cell phone had been brief and to the point—King was wishing they’d sent someone with a little more experience.
    “Will they call?” the mother, Glenda, asked. She was sitting on the couch, one hand gripping a pillow in her lap. The other hand was clenched in a fist at her chest. “They were supposed to call.”
    “They’ll call,” Nick said quietly from the other side of the room. The Chief noticed again that the husband wasn’t sitting next to his wife, comforting her. It was the third or fourth time King had noticed the distance, all during earlier interviews. Interesting. He jotted it down—you never knew—and stood, walking around the room again. It felt like he was spending all of his time in this room, with these people, instead of out working the case.
    He looked around the room—there were many pictures on the walls and expensive stuff sitting around. The entire home was also decorated with stuff for Halloween, down to the pumpkins on the front porch.
     “Where’s the nanny?” the Chief asked.
    Glenda looked up at him. Her eyes were puffy and red.
    “She was really upset,” Glenda said. “We gave her the day off.”
    “Has she called to check in?” the Chief asked.
    “No,” Nick shook his head. “I told her I would call her if we heard anything.”
    That was interesting—the nanny had already been interviewed, of course, but Chief King would have thought the nanny would have wanted to be here for the call. He was making a note of it, when there was a knock at the front door.
    Deputy Peters, one of the patrolmen stationed at the house, left the room to answer it. King heard mumbled voices and then Peters came into the room and called the Chief over.
    “Chief, it’s Ken Meredith.”
    Great, King thought.
    “I got it.” King went to the door and pulled it open.
    Ken ran CM-TV, the local public TV station. People were always confusing it with CMTV, the country music TV station on cable, and Ken could be very sensitive about that, and about the town not supporting the local station enough. He was always trying to put on interesting programming, to no avail.
    CM-TV broadcast out of the third floor of the Monroe Township building downtown, a building that used to hold a downtown theater until it had been converted to offices in the 1970s. Current tenants included the local Chamber of Commerce. The broadcast facilities for CM-TV sit in the old balcony. In fact, there was a particular door, hidden behind the set of their semimonthly local news show, that opened onto the cavernous space above the offices thirty feet below.
     “Hey Chief,” Ken asked quietly, leaning in and almost hitting the Chief with his camera. Ken’s voice was low, conspiratorial. King noticed his face was sweaty. “Can I film the ransom call?”
    Behind him, across the lawn in the driveway, were three satellite trucks from local TV stations. Chief King saw a couple of the reporters talking, including that rotund fellow from Channel 4, Dale Scott. Chief King recognized him from the escort case last year, which had made the local news for almost a week straight. He’d gotten a lot of practice giving press conferences and had gotten to know a lot