"At last he dreamt one night that he found a blood-red flower, in the middle of which was a beautiful large pearl; that he picked the flower and went with it to the castle, and that everything he touched with the flower was freed from enchantment; he also dreamt that by means of it he recovered his Jorinde."

-Jorinde and Joringel

Rain drops trembled against the tinted window of the car, the places where the droplets had rolled down the window leaving zigzagging lines through the opaque field of condescension that had built up on the glass. The drizzling downpour turned the parking lot into a slick lake, the surface of it only disrupted by darker patches where cracks had been mended. The flower shop sat as a squat sentinel against the rain, red reflection of its neon sign broken up in puddles where water had become trapped by dips in the ground.

Red drummed his fingers against the leather skin of the seat, his tapping an echo to the steady rhythm of rain against the car roof. With minimal effort, he'd been able to press Aram to give him his own copy of the surveillance footage in order to personally comb through it. Donald and Samar had talked to the cashier that had been working at the flower shop that night, but evidently it had been packed, and in between simpering apologies, the cashier said that he had not seen the face of the old woman from the footage, but he did at least remember the woman following Lizzie out.

He was not about to let that be the end of that. The FBI must have missed something, he'd thought. They always did.

And while he was going through the footage for the umpteenth time, lo and be hold, just as he had predicted, there were a few seconds of video that perhaps represented a sliver of hope. Admittedly, the action in those several seconds would have been easy to miss. Heads and shoulders bobbed and writhed around shelves of greenery, bumping and jostling into each other. But for a moment there had been a small gap in the human herd, and he'd seen it:

The back of the same little, thin woman briefly stopping a female store employee and saying something to her before walking away back into the crowd. Someone had seen her face to face.

So now he sat in the darkness waiting for the employee to arrive on her shift. He exhaled and ran the pad of his thumb over the bottom of his lip. Leather squeaked as Dembe's head shifted against the headrest of the driver's seat to glance at him.

Red's gaze flicked up to the rear view mirror.

Patience, Dembe's eyes said.

"I am doing the best I can to remain patient given the circumstances," he said. It wasn't a necessary thing to voice, and they both knew that. He was saying it for his own benefit. If he reminded himself that he had to remain careful, perhaps that would do something to quell the animal in his breast that urged him to act without forethought.

"She's here." Dembe turned his head, profile washed artificial crimson by the neon sign.

Across the parking lot, a medium-built girl walked toward the flower shop, dressed in the green vest that seemed to be required for all shop employees. Her footsteps kicked up shimmering arcs of dark water. She pushed her shoulder against the shop door, sending out a wavering slash of light across the ground.

His thumb slipped down from his mouth to rest on the handle of the car door, hand hot against the metal. But despite his urge to shove the door open immediately, he let ten minutes pass. He couldn't frighten her by making her think he was following her in.

His eyes were affixed to the watch on his wrist as each second of time that was swept away by the thin, ticking clock hands.

He pushed the door open and slid out of the car, rain now a glittering curtain around him as it thundered against his hat and slid off the sides of its brim. As he walked to the great, glowing box of the flower shop, Dembe followed slowly behind him.

When he entered, he saw why Lizzie had wanted to come. It was a mess of colors and scents. The smell of every flower had combined to create a heady aroma that was overpowering in its sweetness-it was made of the promise of a vibrant, glowing spring field, so perfect that it could only be seen in heavily doctored travel brochures.

It was chaotic and energetic, full of unconcealed life, just like Lizzie. If she had made it home with an item from the shop, it likely would've been out of place in her dull little apartment, but it would have perfectly matched the owner of the plant.

But she hadn't made it home, because someone had snatched her.

And they had taken her because he had urged her to leave the apartment.

If she hadn't listened to him encouraging her to go buy something, she'd probably still be in her apartment burning her dinner, eating its ashen carcass while she bobbed her head and hummed along to a kitschy tune from the 80s.

He shoved the thought aside and searched the shop for the girl. It wasn't as busy as the night captured on surveillance, but there were still about ten other people shuffling around and pausing in front of plants and frowning at price tags. After another moment of glancing about, he finally found the girl standing behind a corner counter fluffing an arrangement, eyes narrowed on the flowers spilling out of a thin vase. Her frizzy brunette hair was pulled back into a quick, sloppy braid probably done in a rush before work, and her nails were decorated with a polka dotted pattern.

Shifting his face into a smile, he stepped up to the counter. "What lovely flowers," he said to her, watching as her fingers smoothed a leaf. "Alstroemeria, aren't they?"

"Most people would just call them Peruvian lilies, but you're right. Plant aficionado, huh?" She paused in her arrangement duties to give him a practiced smile. No doubt she wanted to finish what she was doing, but her customer service training was urging her to do otherwise.

"Oh, no. I just had a friend go on and on about these particular flowers. She was going to have them for her wedding arrangement, you see. Somehow, I'm not sick of them even though she had enough at the reception for a tiny botanical garden. Gosh, her poor bridesmaid Clarice, though." He screwed his lips to the side. "Horrible allergies, but she didn't say anything about it because she didn't want to upset her friend."

"They are very popular for weddings, though this arrangement isn't for that occasion. Um-" the girl paused, laying her hands flat on the counter. "Did you want some? There's more in the back if you want me to show you."

"Oh yes, that would be nice." Red threw a glance over his shoulder. Dembe was a few feet away, pretending to look particularly interested in a tiny cactus in a pot. They met eyes for a moment and nodded at each other.

"Thank you very much for doing this," he said, glancing at her name tag, "Mary Ann."

"It's no problem at all." She said, leading him to the backroom, tossing her braid over her shoulder.

It was a thin, narrow room lined with shelves that went up almost to the ceiling. It was a wall of the same eclectic greenery that was in the front of the shop, just pressed together in closer quarters.

Mary Ann took several steps to the right and pushed aside a squat plant with jade leaves to pull over a pot of Alstromeria. "Do you have any questions about what exactly you're looking for?"

"Actually, I do. I'm afraid I haven't been completely honest. I am interested in the lilies-they would be a lovely accent to a coffee table that I possess-but I'm sure you're aware by now that the general vicinity of your flower shop is the scene of a high profile disappearance."

"You mean that ex-FBI agent that was taken? Listen, Dave already told the authorities everything he knew." She was shifting nervously and glancing toward the back room door that was only open a sliver. It shuddered back an inch with a sudden gust of air as the front door chimed and announced the arrival of a new customer.

"Yes, but you weren't questioned. This will only take a moment of your time," he said, voice lowering. She was only an innocent caught in the middle of this investigation, but he needed any description of the woman that she had. He didn't want to threaten any more than was necessary, but she wasn't going to give him information if he didn't push for it.

"They told me not to answer any questions about it unless I knew for sure I'm talking to the right authorities." She swallowed and pressed a hand to the shelf behind her. Her hand curled around a flower pot, the muscles in her arm tensing as she readied herself to throw it.

He shifted his hand in his jacket pocket so that the material of it flapped open, revealing the glint of a gun at his side. Her face went white, skin suddenly slick with sweat that glistened beneath the glowing bars of the overhead lights. "You're not gonna...?" she couldn't make herself finish the sentence. Her pupils were pinpricks.

"I just want to ask a question." He shifted his jacket closed.

Her hand slid off of the pot and slapped against her leg. She rubbed her fingers together. "Okay, just please don't do anything to hurt me, okay? I'll answer your question."

"There was a thin, older woman that talked to you the night that the disappearance occurred. She was short and would have come up to your chin, I believe. Would you be able to describe her face to me?" he asked, tone shifting to something that was almost gentle.

"I can actually draw her if you want. I mean, that might help you, since they do those sketches of suspects on cop shows. That would be better than just a verbal description, right?" She seemed to be making the offer in order to keep herself safe. He took little pleasure in the fear he saw in her eyes, but a sketch would be helpful.

"That would actually be very helpful. Thank you, Mary Ann."

She nodded rapidly and stepped backwards, only taking her eyes off of him to glance at a small table that was pressed against the wall that had one chair shoved against it. A note pad and pen sat on the top of table, the margins decorated with scribbles. As she walked to the table he followed her, hovering back a bit to give her enough of a buffer between the two of them in order to keep her mind on the necessary task at hand.

She flipped to the next page and the pen slid off the desk, clattered across the floor and landed at the pointed tip of his shoe. He bent down and picked up the pen, offering it to her. Her wide eyes met his and she swallowed again before reaching out to pinch the end of the pen between two fingers. He gave her a reassuring nod and she slid the pen out of his grip.

Turning back around in the chair she lowered her head and scooted forward, chair legs whining against the slick floor. Then she began to draw-slowly at first, with hesitant, scratchy lines. But then, her shoulder blades lowered and her lines became less sharp and frantic and began to take on flowing, organic shapes.

He let her draw in silence for a few moments before speaking. "So, you're an artist?"

"Art major, yeah." She nodded, flicking the pen to turn a line into a crease near the woman's eye.

"You're quite good. I quite like how you've made her eyes wider in the reflection of her glasses." Red traced an index finger in the air in the shape of the aforementioned glasses and shuffled to the side, tilting his head to watch the drawing take form beneath the scratch of the pen.

"Um, thanks," Mary Ann said, glancing at him from the corner of her eyes.

Clearly, she wasn't in a particularly talkative mood after being vaguely threatened. And uncharacteristically, he wasn't feeling particularly chatty either, so they simply existed in silence for several minutes as she completed the drawing. Once she was done, she pushed a hand down onto the corner of the page as she carefully tore the paper from the notebook. She turned in the chair and lifted the paper up in the air for him to take.

"Hey, listen," she said when his hands touched the paper. "I hope you find your FBI friend."

He kept his face still and didn't let the tips of his fingers dent the fragile, thin paper. "Thank you."

The only sound in Lizzie's apartment was the desperate buzz of a fly's wings as it uselessly hurled itself against the window. The entire living space was permeated by the funk of slowly rotting garbage that had no one to take it out for the past day and a half.

When he had eaten dinner with her, it had bothered him how the apartment had been devoid of her personality, but even her presence had considerably brightened the drab living quarters. Now without her the entire living room felt like a place that had been suddenly and unexpectedly abandoned, a life put on pause. Her moving boxes were still scattered about with items spilling out of their cardboard prisons, and a chair at the kitchen table was pulled out crookedly after she had stood up and forgot to push it in. A plate with the greasy memory of her dinner still smeared across it sat in the sink, a fork laid upside down against the dish's indentation. The fly paused in its suicidal mission to make a lazy path over to the sink, but Red waved a hand to smack before it could drift down to land on the plate. Its body landed, a lifeless black speck in the middle of the carpet.

"Her research is here," Dembe said, standing beside the kitchen table, shifting a newspaper off the stack of information that was paper clipped together.

In the examination Red had made of her apartment, he hadn't found any outward indications that someone had been stalking her, so he hoped that her research into the six other abductions might reveal further insight into the identity of the kidnapper that he hadn't been able to uncover.

He walked to the table and as he sat down in a chair in front of the stack, he began to leaf through it. The first page had a blotchy half-circle of coffee, the edges of the circle smudged where Lizzie must have suddenly dragged the mug off of the papers the moment she realized she was staining sensitive information. A faint smile ghosted across his face at thought.

As he shuffled through the papers, the information he saw was what already told him or what he had found on his own-scant details, barely any evidence at the crime scene. From what he understood, the victims had always been alone before and during the kidnapping-that was one of the things that made Lizzie's capture an anomaly. A large amount of people had seen her before she was snatched. He flipped to another page.

The page was a small, local newspaper article that had been scanned and printed out. As he flicked his eyes over the words, he realized that the information was new. There were some of the same basic details he already knew, of course. The article concerned Amelia Turner, the woman who had been dating a thief that was somewhat notorious to the area. What the article mentioned that other sources seemed to have neglected was that though the bar was not the scene of her kidnapping, that was the last place she had been seen.

He flicked to the next page. The wall of text curved and bent to make way for a small inset image. For a moment, he hoped that it would be the face of the woman that Mary Ann had drawn for him, but the police sketch inserted into the article was that of a man a few bar patrons said they had seen that seemed to be eyeing Amelia. The face of the man in the sketch was thick in every sense of the word. He had a wide nose and a frowning mouth that curved down into jowls like those of a stern bulldog. A battered newsboy cap sat on his head, shadowing his eyes and the bridge of his nose.

A bar and a possible suspect. It wasn't much, but it was more than he had had several minutes ago. He carefully folded up the article and slid it into his pants pocket.

"Dembe, I'm afraid that we're going to have to venture into the wilds of Virginia at 2 am for some cheap alcohol and an illuminating conversation."

It was convenient that the bar had recently closed by the time their several hours journey to Virginia had concluded. While it perhaps would have been more interesting if the bar still had been open when he confronted the owner, in the end it was preferable that the building was empty of patrons, especially given the sense of urgency that surrounded his quest to discover where Lizzie had been taken. There would be plenty of time in the future to cause a scene in a dismal little bar. This wasn't one of those times.

It hadn't been particularly hard for he and Dembe to get into the backroom through the back door. Not that breaking into buildings was particularly hard for them at all, but the out of date locks certainly had aided in making their intrusion that bit easier.

The owner's car had been parked out front, so it was only a brief matter of time before he heard someone in the backroom and came to investigate. Still, there was no point in letting the opportunity to drink to pass him by. And considering all that had happened in the past day and a half, Red really needed a drink. A stack of clean glasses sat on a small table in the middle of the room across from a shelf of alcohol. He grabbed a glass from the table and surveyed the selection of spirits that had been presented to him.

He wrinkled his nose at the offerings, but decided to make do. He grabbed a bottle of whisky off the shelf and glanced toward Dembe, tilting the bottle in his direction, liquid glittering a sick, yellow-brown. "I don't suppose you want any?" he asked.

Dembe distastefully regarded it. "No thank you."

"Suit yourself," he said with a quick shrug and uncorked the bottle, pouring perhaps a little too much into the glass.

Typically, he would leisurely sip and savor his alcoholic beverage of choice, but he wasn't in the mood for that. He was in the mood for something fast and burning that would erase even an ounce of the fear for Lizzie that twisted inside of him.

And when he knocked it back, it did burn, but it did nothing to ease his burden. It just tasted cheap and a bit sour, but somehow the burn had felt good, so he was about to pour himself another glass when the front door of the backroom slammed open. A man with dark blond hair who looked to be somewhere in his thirties stood there for a moment, eyes as wide as golf balls he glanced between Red and Dembe. His narrow mouth twitched.

"You really should invest in better brands, you know. It might be a bit expensive at first, but in the end it would be worth it as you would attract larger crowds and customers with more expensive taste who would be willing to pay for better brands than what you currently have. I'm sorry to say that your current stock is dreadful." He narrowed his eyes at the bottle in his hand, shook his head at it, and set it down on the counter.

"Who the hell are you?" the owner asked, spitting out each word as if they tasted rotten.

"Evidently you don't watch the news much or you might know. I suppose I can't completely blame you as the media is a terrible mess these days. It might be for the best that you don't get your information from corrupt, entirely biased sources." He swirled the nearly empty glass in his hand, keeping his eyes on the man whose face was growing increasingly scarlet.

"I don't care if you're the president or the queen, I want you to get out of here," the owner snarled, jabbing a finger in the direction of the exit.

Red lifted the glass and swallowed the skim of foul whisky that lay at the bottom of it. "You've made such a compelling argument you have almost convinced me to leave. But only almost. You see, I'm only here to ask you a question or two. And then I'll leave you in peace with your awful booze collection to contemplate your many and varied questionable choices."

"I'm not answering anything." The owner raised his head, jaw jutting forward, arms across his chest.

"I think you are going to." As he set the glass down, it clattered against the small table. In the case of Mary Ann and her initial resistance to answering his questions, he'd felt some regret at having to threaten her in order to get the information he needed. He felt none of that regret now as advanced toward the owner who now was baring his teeth like an angry dog.

But dogs were not the same things as wolves. Wolves and dogs were related, but they were entirely separate species, distanced by thousands of years of selective breeding to soften out the harsh, wild urges pounding in their canid hearts so that they no longer hungered for wide, pine rich forests. A dog might snarl as ferociously as any wolf, but they were far more likely to threaten than they were to bite.

Red curled back his upper lip. Wolves and dogs were related, but they were not the same.

"First, you're going to move your hand away from the gun under your coat. Second, you are going to sit down in the chair," he jerked his head toward a chair that sat at the table. "Third, you're going to answer what I tell you. Understand?"

The owner just stood there for a moment, not giving an answer one way or the other as he defiantly held Red's gaze. The moment trembled, the outcome of the situation ready to dip one way or the other as the man considered what the wisest course of action was.

"Fine," he said took a step back and hurled himself down into the chair's seat. "What do you want to know? Where I have a secret stash of money or something?"

"Oh, nothing so petty as that, I assure you. I merely have an interest in the Amelia Turner case. I believe you spoke to the police after it happened, and I find it incredibly likely that you were unable to tell them anything useful due to their incompetence in knowing what questions to ask." Whether their incompetence was due to lack of funds or simple laziness, when he had read how poorly the police had pursued investigation centering around the bar, he couldn't help but feel resentful.

"What are you, some kinda P.I.?" the man asked, one arm braced around the back of the chair as he craned his neck to look up at Red.

"Not quite. Now then-about Amelia, do you remember her saying where she was going to go after she left the bar? Or perhaps did she mention where she had been prior to coming to your fine," he gave a withering glance toward the shelf of alcohol once again, "establishment?"

The man sighed, the sleeve of his coat falling over the edges of his knuckles as he ran the ends of his fingers through his hair. "Like I told the police, she said she was gonna go for a walk to clear her head-didn't say where. But-she did said she'd come from restaurant a little while before coming here. She got into an argument with her boyfriend or something, then she came to the bar."

"A restaurant? Do you remember the name of it?" Red put a hand against the table and shifted so that he was face to face with the man.

"I mean, if you give me a minute to think I might remember. Listen, man, it's late-"

"Well, while you have your little think, look at this and tell me if she's a regular or if you remember seeing her there while Amelia was." He reached inside his jacket and pushed Mary Ann's drawing of the old woman over to the owner.

The man's shoulders hunched as he leaned forward, raising to fingers to rub them against the scruff on his chin, several strands of dirty blond hair flopping into his eyes. "Nah, I don't recognize her at all. But there was this guy-"

"I already know about the guy. Unless you can tell me anything about him that you did not tell the police tell me the name of the restaurant," he leaned forward. "Now."

"Hey, come on, cool it. I'm telling you what you want to know. The place had a fancy French name it was le...um...le mon-?"

"Le Monarque?" He pressed his mouth into a thin line.

"Yeah, that was it! You know the place, huh?" The man raised an eyebrow.

"Yes, I do."

In fact, he knew the owner and had stopped there one night several months ago while he and Lizzie were on the run. He was not completely certain that that had any connection to her disappearance, but a twinge inside him told him that it was related. He should never have taken her there. He should have chosen somewhere more secluded. He should have-

He stopped himself. He pressed a wide smile to his face that felt more like a grimace than anything approaching friendliness.

"Your cooperation was much appreciated. I'm afraid I must go now, but please do seriously consider changing your stock." He pressed his hands against the edge of the table and slid himself back, leaving the man to blink at the sudden, abrupt ending to their conversation.

Seeing the end to their visit, Dembe headed toward the door, but paused as he saw that Red was stopping beside the glass and bottle of whisky he'd abandoned earlier.

There was a fine, glimmering sheen against the sides of the bottle where its contents had poured out earlier. He wrapped a hand around the neck of the bottle, tipping a slow stream of amber into the bottom of the glass. Disgusting or not, he needed to obliterate the roiling regret inside of him.

As he took a swallow, the whisky was acid against his tongue.