Page 82 of Return of the Spider

I said, “He could easily have been standing right there, hidden.”

“Depending on how he was dressed, she wouldn’t have been able to see him before he grabbed her,” Girard said. “Hold on, I’m going to photograph this.” She hurried back to her car.

Sampson pulled out a mini-flashlight and shone it into the foliage, low behind the broken branches and vines where we believed the kidnapper had stood.

The Goochland County detective came back carrying a Nikon camera with a big flash attachment and a tape measure. John was inspecting the vegetation at roughly waist height when he said, “I got something here. Reddish.”

Girard took out her own flashlight and trained it where Sampson had his focused. “Looks like fabric got caught up on the thorns there.” She methodically photographed the broken vines and crushed plants using the tape measure to give scale and perspective to the pictures. Each time she moved something, she took another photograph to ensure that the recovery would be well documented.

“Probably won’t be admissible because so much time has passed since Bunny disappeared, but it’s still good to try,” she said. “Wish I’d picked up on it sooner.”

About ten minutes later, Sampson and I held back the foliage as Girard reached in with a long pair of tweezers. She got hold of the fabric and gently pulled it from the thorns.

The detective held it up for us. “Looks like flannel. Old, faded flannel.”

Sampson said, “Like maybe his shirt got hung up in there on the thorns while he was hiding, waiting for Bunny, and it tore when he stepped out.”

I grinned as Girard slipped the fabric into a plastic sleeve.

John said, “You’re suddenly the happy guy, Alex.”

“I am the happy guy,” I said. “I think our perp has made a real mistake for the first time since we started chasing him.”

CHAPTER

67

Detective kelsey girard hadto leave for a court appearance in Richmond that afternoon, but she left us with a promise to keep in close touch, and we all shared the certainty that the kidnapper had screwed up.

Before returning to DC, Sampson and I decided to track Bunny Maddox’s known whereabouts backward from the time her brother saw her car lights.

At the Winn-Dixie, where she’d bought fried chicken and potato salad for dinner, we were able to review security footage from the night of her disappearance. We picked the stripper up on both interior and parking-lot security cams.

We also spotted a white van enter the far end of the supermarket lot and park in the shadows several minutes before Bunny’sarrival and leave eight minutes before she did. We couldn’t know if this was the same white van, but it seemed likely.

“More than enough time for him to set up his ambush,” Sampson said, “if he knew where Bunny was going. And he sure does seem to anticipate her routine.”

“But still no good look at the driver or the license plate,” I said.

“Yeah, but we can have stills from this blown up. The more we can say about the exterior of that van, the more likely we are to match it.”

“True that,” I said, and thanked the guard who’d given us access to the footage.

We were also able to review the feeds from the security cameras outside the Virginia state liquor store and Tillie’s, the bar where Bunny danced.

An exterior liquor-store camera facing the parking lot and the highway picked up a white van passing slowly as the stripper exited her vehicle and then rolling out of frame without giving a clear view of the driver or the plates.

At the strip club, a camera facing diagonally across the parking lot to the road picked up Bunny Maddox leaving work the day of her disappearance and heading north toward the liquor store roughly two miles away; a white van pulled out of an overflow lot across the street and followed her.

We got lucky. The camera caught the van just as the headlights of a pickup truck coming from the south lit it up from behind for several seconds.

“Definitely Pennsylvania plates,” Sampson said. “And that third letter is aZor anS.”

I nodded, feeling like we were breaking through. “DefinitelyTNZorTNS. And then maybe a three or an eight after it?”

“We’re going to get this guy now,” John said, grinning as we left the club with the security footage.

“I feel like it’s only a matter of time.”