Kid

54

Mary was kneeling down in front of a coffee table, she was drawing on some paper. Jason and Harold remained sitting in on the lounge or an armchair. Each either sipping at some coffee or tea, momentarily stopping to mumble to one another or to be reading their books. But other than the occasional mummer, everybody remained silent.

Mary knew better than to ask Jason and Harold about this, or to pester for details. She knew they were going to be giving a briefing beforehand soon enough. She continued to scribble onto the page, but... while she was looking at it, she wasn't paying attention to what she was actually drawing. Her mind was wandering to memories and past cases, good ones and bad ones, she didn't really care what she was drawing, but her hands would just keep going. She added details, subconscious ones, based on what she was thinking.

Her hands suddenly started gripping the pencil tightly and she was pressing into the paper and almost ripped right through it and into the table. She managed to catch sight of what she was doing with her hand and lifted her hand from the page to see what she had done.

She had drawn a carnival setting, in the background of the picture there was a giant Ferris Wheel that would've been flickering with colours of great magnitude, closer to the front of the picture were stalls with cute little games like toss a ring or water gun shoot-outs. There were stalls that sold sweetened popcorn, some that sold balloons, and allowed toys to be won by little kids or for them to even be bought.

The whole carnival seemed to be in full swing with several people, each with their own characteristics, ranged of all ages and of all types from little girls to jittering old men. The whole thing was a scene of happiness and fun.But up close, there was a man holding firmly onto a girl's hand, forced her to smile and showed her off to everybody with what she could apparently do. Across the man's face was a dark scribble from her drawing into it too tightly. His face was too scribbled over to know who he could've possibly been/ Mary picked up the corner of the paper and ran her fingers over the girl he was holding. Her arm tingled at the memory of being manhandled as she turned the page over and slammed it against the table.

Jason and Harold each looked up and stared at her, she seemed to be huffing through her nose as she folded her legs and scrunched the paper into a ball and tossed it aside. Jason summoned the paper over to him, it floated through the air, but before he could get it within reach, it stopped.

He felt Mary's own mind tugging on his own trying to stop the Ringleader from looking at her picture.

On the outside, or to Harold, the paper was just floating there and the two looked to it with a blank expression.

This went on for several moments until Mary's mind gave way and Jason got the paper. He untangled it up and looked at the picture, after one moment of looking, he too scrunched it up.

"Let's get down to business, shall we?" he asked as he tossed the paper ball behind his shoulder, it burnt into pieces and the ashes dissipated into the air.

Harold nodded as he stretched his arms, "sure," he pulled out what looked like a USB and seemed to click it into the coffee table.

Mary pushed all of her artsy stuff off the table and it clattered onto the ground. The whole table seemed to turn into 3D hologram as tabs and icons popped up in mid-air.

"So... this is the list of the girls who we thought had originally been taken," Harold informed as a list came up, each name had a tiny profile photo of the girls, "all female, most suspected to be alive, and most being high profile girls," he explained as he flicked through several of them. "These are the ones who have died," he explained, he made another smaller group of the girls who had died. "Now... from what we've figured out from Charles and his band of goons," he opened another tab and a square of video came to mind of them interrogating Joel, the youngest. From what Mary knew, they had gone at him pretty hard with psychological torture and physical torture for the older men."I've managed to isolate the girls who were part of their scams and the girls that belong to another." He seemed to separate some of the names and a slightly smaller group of girls' names appeared, so small in fact the names were side by side with a blow up picture of their names instead of being lost in a pool of names. Despite the pool of girls slightly smaller, seven girls was still considered too big of a number for Mary to be happy with, and there were probably more that haven't been found.