The whereabouts of Cynthia Moreland, 48, a technical design specialist for Progress Energy, is still a mystery despite six days of dawn-to-dusk searching.

Antonio Chance, 29, a sex offender from Garner, has been charged with kidnapping Moreland from a Progress Energy parking garage at daybreak Tuesday. Police say Moreland didn't know Chance and never had occasion to meet him.

Over the weekend, state Highway Patrol helicopters buzzed across swaths of Wake County, officers riding horseback searched rural terrain, canines sniffed for clues and police canvassed neighborhoods, said Jim Sughrue, spokesman for the Raleigh Police Department. They had no luck by late Sunday evening.

Moreland's family also has been searching for her, roaming streets in Southeast Raleigh where tipsters say they spotted the middle-aged woman walking, her husband Walter Moreland said. He can't eat or sleep. Sunday, Walter Moreland began to suspect these sightings were women who just looked like his wife.

"I'm still hoping it all turns out like the storybooks," said Walter Moreland, a surgical technician at WakeMed-Raleigh Campus. "But I'm losing hope. I've got to leave it in God's hands."

Moreland's church family appealed to God on Sunday to bring their sister home safely, said J. Vincent Terry Sr., pastor of Mount Peace Baptist Church in Raleigh. They passed a collection plate during worship services to help augment a $10,000 reward Progress Energy is offering to help locate Moreland. So far, church members have collected more than $5,000. They hope to double that, Terry said.

Members of Moreland's church family, which swelled from a mere 100 several years ago to now nearly 1,400, gathered for a prayer meeting Sunday night at their Martin Luther King Boulevard church.

"When one of us hurts, we all hurt," Terry said. "It's so important to lift Cynthia and her family up in prayer."

Police have narrowed their search predominantly to Wake County, Sughrue said. They believe this is where Chance spent most of the five hours in which they say he held Moreland captive. Moreland's Toyota Camry turned up about midday Tuesday on a dead-end street in Southeast Raleigh, just a few blocks from her church.

Police tracked down Chance through a grainy picture captured on a surveillance camera video at a Dollar General store. Police say he popped into the store Tuesday morning and bought toiletries with Moreland's ATM card.

Chance served more than four years in prison in the 1990s after being convicted of beating and sexually assaulting a man twice his age.

Chance's family members either could not be reached or declined to comment Sunday.

(News researcher Brooke Cain contributed to this report.)