And hanging from the ceiling above the counter was a video surveillance camera.
Bingo.
According to my Google map search, this was the closest McDonald's to Maddie's last known address - the same address where I had found the working meth lab and the not-so-working dead man.
I headed over to the counter, where a teenage Hispanic girl smiled at me blankly from behind a cash register. Instead of ordering, I asked to see the McManager.
* * *
Now I was sitting in the McDonald manager's office. It wasn't much of an office. It was just a desk at one end of a narrow room. At the other end was the employee's time clock and the drive-thru window.
"We have to make this quick," he said. He was a very short, oddly shaped man with a bad limp. So bad, in fact, that I think his right leg might have been a prosthetic.
"Or the clown gets pissed," I said.
He grinned. "Something like that."
He didn't bother introducing himself. I guess when you're wearing name tags, introducing yourself is redundant. Anyway, according to his shiny black and silver tag, his name was Bill, and he was the general manager.
He listened to my story attentively. As he listened, he leaned a little to the right. He seemed to be mildly in pain. I would be, too, if I was sitting on half an ass. I concluded my story with my request to view the surveillance video.
"And you're working with the police?"
I gave him Detective Hanner's card. "Call her if you'd like."
He took it from me, studied it. "I'll do that. But I'll have to get approval from my district manager before I release the surveillance video."
"Of course."
"It's not that I don't want to help you."
"I understand."
"We just have procedure."
"Of course you do."
"Awe, fuck it. There's a missing girl. Hang on, and I'll get you set up in here. I'm not exactly sure how to run some of these electronic gizmos, though."
"I'm pretty handy with electronic gizmos."
"Of course you are. A regular James Bond."
"Minus the babes and the goofy English accent."
He grinned again. "Hang on."
He got up and limped out of the office. As I waited for him to return, I thought of my son and the black aura, and a crushing despair unlike anything I had ever felt took hold of me right there. All thought escaped me. Rational thought, that is. I had an image of myself grabbing him and jumping through the hospital window. Of me running off into the night with my son in my arms. Where I would go, I didn't know, but I had an image of us together, somewhere, alone, while I willed him to perfect health. The image was strong. The image was real, and I wondered if it was perhaps precognitive.
Could I now see into the future?
I didn't know, but more than likely it was just an image of a helpless mother doing something, anything, to help her sick son.
Bill came back with a remote control and a small three-ring binder. He sat back at his desk, easing himself down slowly. As he did so, gasping and wincing, a wrecked motorcycle briefly flashed before me. I saw it steaming and twisted on the asphalt.
"You were in a motorcycle accident," I said suddenly and without thinking.
Bill snapped his head up. He had been flipping through the binder. Now his hand paused in mid-flip. His eyes narrowed. "How did you know?"
I could have pointed to the Harley-Davidson picture frame or the Harley-Davidson coffee mug, both of which were sitting on his desk. I could have told him that it had been a lucky conjecture. But I didn't. I was too mentally exhausted for lies and half-truths.
"I had a vision of you crashing. I saw the twisted wreck of your bike. I saw the twisted wreck of your leg."
He continued looking at me, and then finally nodded. "Yeah, I crashed it. Took a right turn too wide. Head on into a minivan. How I'm alive to this day, I have no clue."
"You still ride, though," I said.
He nodded. "It's the only thing that keeps me sane. How did you know?"
"Lucky guess."
"You're a freaky lady."
"You have no idea."
"And this little girl," he said.
"She was here." I said. "I know it."
"There's a lot of tape here. I was just looking through the instructions on how to - "
"Video surveillance 101," I said. "I can manage."
He pushed the folder over to me. "Here's the passwords to access the program. It's all stored on remote hard drives, but we can access it from here, and elsewhere, too. We have a lot of shit that goes down in our parking lots. Cops are always here checking out our video feeds."
"Thank you," I said. "I'll be fine."
"Do you know what day she was here?"
"No clue."
"Do you know what the girl looks like?"
"No clue."
"Do you know what the bad guys look like?"
"I have an idea," I said, thinking of the big black man in Maddie's memory. "I do have a picture of the mother."
"It's a start," he said.
The strong smell of French fries seemed to eddy in his back office. I said, "You ever get sick of the smell of French fries?"
"Honestly?" he said. "It turns my stomach."
Chapter Twenty-seven
The surveillance program was one I was familiar with. The images recorded were stored on a Cisco Video Surveillance Storage System, which permitted the authorized user, yours truly, to access any point in time over the past five years.
So where to begin? Admittedly, using my apparently increasing psychic powers could help here, but I wasn't sure how to harness such extrasensory perceptions to an actual date. Maybe someday I would get to the point where if I sat quietly enough, an actual date would just appear in my thoughts. I wasn't quite there yet, and I somehow doubted my gifts could be that accurate.
So I went about this as any investigator would. Deduction, deduction, deduction.
According to official accounts, Madison and her mother had gone missing about three months ago. According to Bill, the "My Little Pony" Happy Meal theme had concluded nearly four months ago. Those timelines nearly coincided.
I removed the police file from my handbag, opened it, and looked again at the only picture of Maddie's mother on record. The woman was probably twenty-two but she looked fifty. She also looked like a typical user: skeletal, pallid, lost. Meth eats away at the brain like a tapeworm from undercooked pork, and the results are typically the same: extreme paranoia, loss of motor control, and a disinterest in anything that isn't meth. Even your kids. The woman in the picture - a mug shot taken of her years before - wouldn't have cared about her daughter's health. Or anyone's health. She cared only for getting high and it had gotten her killed. And put her daughter in harm's way.