Cole

Dr. Gold

"Oh thank you! I really appreciate it. Thanks!"

I felt a little better, but I was so low that it only helped a little.

Barska made a call to one of his janitorial staff members that apparently also handled technology in the building. He then turned back to me.

"Cole, I was told we can go see the tapes now. It's not hard to do. Come with me and I'll show you."

Barska told his secretaries that he would be gone for about thirty minutes in the electrical control room and to have his appointments wait or reschedule in the meantime. He motioned for me to follow him out the door.

"Cole, we are very busy right now with graduation coming up. There is all kind of testing going on and the parents are on my back about how their kid's are doing. They all want their kids to get awards and scholarships. Some of the kids and their parents are very competitive and there are others that don't care at all. It's weird. It's like the school has to halves to it. The challenge is to get the kids and parents that don't care to care, but I find that many of the problems start at home and there is not a lot we can do about that. Some parents only want their kids doing good in academic subjects and other parents only care about how their kids do in sports. I think maybe they think they can get a sports scholarship or something. Who knows?"

"Yeah", I said and listened, but I only cared about Manda.

"Alright, here it is," said Barska as we approached a mysterious door next to a classroom on the second floor and opened it with a key.

When we entered it I noticed a lot of circuit breakers and stored audio video equipment. The place was a bit dusty. A guy was sitting at a work bench playing with a video recorder system and looking at a monitor. He spoke to me.

"The system only records events if there is motion in the scene. Very little is recorded at night in terms of events, but it records at night just as fine as during the day because there are infrared lights and infrared sensitivities to the camera. During the night there just is not a lot of motion to activate a recording incident."

"But I want to know what happened during the day between when school started and lunch. That is when Amanda Westbrook disappeared," I said.

Principle Barska jumped in.

"Parker, we are trying to track a particular student, Amanda Westbrook," he said.

"That's not easy to do.", said Parker. "We don't have cameras everywhere in the building. Some hallways are covered as well as outdoor cameras, but it's not everywhere. We do have time stamps, though, so we should be able to know when something happened if we find something. Let's check the outside cameras first. If she left the building she should be on that. The stuff that happens inside the building is kind of confusing to follow."

We started with the morning cameras. It was easy to find Manda and I arriving from the bus. I am 6 foot 2 inches tall, big and muscular, and am easy to spot and my petite girl was right with me. We did plenty of kissing before we separated. That was a little embarrassing to watch. I never saw myself kissing my girl before, but it was completely obvious how attached I am to her. We arrived at 8:15AM.

After that we scanned through the events that occurred at the different doors using the door cameras. At 9:30 we found Manda on an outside camera exiting the building. She was being led by Rick and did not appear to be that enthusiastic about leaving. She also kept looking at her watch. Very quickly she was out of view of the camera.

"Do you have any other cameras outside further from the building?," asked Barska

"We have a few on poles in the parking lot out front of the school, but it did not look like they were walking in that direction."