Anarchy by James Treadwell Read Free Book Online

gave herself was that she didn’t know anyone up here yet. No visitors meant no need to unpack or tidy up or make the place look like a home. Her domestic life had come down to the essentials: soap, clothes, and the Internet. She thought about Skyping Annie just to take a break, but it was one a.m. in Toronto and Annie would either be out or asleep.
    There were other places she could go on the Internet for a break, of course. She could go anywhere. That was why you didn’t really need a home once you’d unpacked the laptop. Just a private space with a reasonably fast line. You didn’t need to know anyone either. She could go on the Internet and log in as scrumgrrl , who could be anyone, anywhere, and talk and stuff with girls she didn’t know at all.
    She scowled at the scatterings on her bed. There was nothing in the file, nothing she didn’t already know. If there was a secret accomplice, some school friend of the kid’s maybe or some sympathetic adult who’d been waiting quietly all this time for a chance to bust her free, they’d left no traces in the paperwork.
    Besides, the accomplice theory was nonsense anyway. Cope and Jonas were both right. No one could walk into the station, even when it was unmanned, and unlock a cell. No one except her colleagues could unlock the front door of the station, come to that. The only thing that could have happened was that she’d left both doors open by mistake; but she hadn’t.
    Jennifer knew what had actually happened, of course. But she’d never tell, even if Goose could find her.
    Goose wondered whether anyone had tried making her talk. It must have been awfully tempting to squeeze a little too hard, push something back a bit farther than it was supposed to go. Just to get some kind of reaction, even if it was no more than a whispered ouch —
    Goose froze midstretch, a curious thought occurring to her. Where had she heard that rumor about the girl singing on CCTV? It must have been something in the news, which meant it could have come from anywhere; but of all the places Jennifer had gone, the only one with CCTV in the rooms was surely the big facility in Nanaimo.
    She sat down again and flipped through the relevant folders and disks. It took ten minutes to find the reference, a brief sentence at the bottom of the kind of one-page sheet that nurses left clipped to the foot of hospital beds. Beneath ticked boxes and blood pressure numbers it read: Security reports patient seen dancing overnight. No footage. Uncorroborated. The scrawl wouldn’t have caught her eye if someone hadn’t circled it with a different color pen and added in the margin SF 12/1 . She spent another ten minutes hunting for further details, without success.
    She tried to remember the story. The security guard must have said something to the press, was that it? In which case . . .
    She realized she’d been waiting for an excuse to plug in the ethernet cable. Well, why not. She’d been going through files for nearly three hours. She’d tried. She should have known it was useless anyway. Jennifer had vanished and she wasn’t going to find her, any more than any of the people who wanted answers from the girl were going to get them. She might as well relax for a bit, try to get some sleep, be ready to face Cope with her failure tomorrow.
    She did at least Google the story first thing after connecting the laptop. There were pages and pages about Jennifer Knox, covering the usual spectrum from responsible to deranged. Sticking to the news sites, she found archived articles. A guy who monitored the CCTV overnight had indeed claimed that he’d seen Jennifer get out of bed and shuffle around the ward, mouth moving, but once it turned out there was no sign of anything of the sort in the recorded footage, everyone just assumed he’d been trying to get a buck or two from a gullible reporter. Goose must have only remembered half the