Unspoken

by Dee Henderson

  “You could try pink roses. Those worked for Paul with me.”

  He half smiled. “Charlotte might be the flowers type, but I don’t know her well enough to know for certain. Bad mistake on my part.”

  “Have you called her?”

  “She’s on the road somewhere and turns off her phone when she’s driving. I’m thinking I’ll start with ‘I’m sorry,’ work my way to flowers and maybe a hot fudge sundae.”

  “That would work for me,” Ann offered with a smile.

  “Problem is, the conversation isn’t over,” Bryce said.

  “Important subjects take time. I’m not going to ask which nerve you touched. The fact of the matter is you’ll touch them all if the relationship is going to have a chance to become something serious.”

  “I’d like it to.”

  “Really?” Ann thought about that. “I’m surprised.”

  “So am I. She’s not my type, Ann. But I’d like her to be.” He pondered the why of that and didn’t have an answer. “We’ve spent several evenings together now—dinner, work through some giving ideas, watch a game—share a pleasant evening. She’s even accepted those topics she would have preferred I never started. But she leaves at the end of the evening and it feels like I had only half her attention. She’s preoccupied. I don’t know if it’s me or something else is going on.”

  “You haven’t asked her?”

  Bryce shook his head. “I’ve meddled enough in this woman’s life. I’d rather not go pushing around into more corners of it for a while. I just want to apologize for the one I crossed into last night. I did it deliberately, I knew it would be painful, but I thought it would help. Instead it simply hurt her.”

  “Flowers. The I’m sorry will be better in person than on the phone.”

  “Yeah.” He finished the coffee and wondered, not for the first time, if he was simply complicating his life. Charlotte wasn’t the kind of woman to think in terms of a serious relationship. For her, a friendship was where this ended. But he couldn’t move away from the fact he found her interesting. No one else had crossed that line before, and he wasn’t willing to step back until he could see where this might go.

  SIXTEEN

  Paul pulled into the area where baby Connor’s remains had been found and parked. Ann pulled out the pictures of the park from that day and offered them. “Doesn’t look like it’s changed much.”

  Paul studied the surroundings. “Trees have nineteen years more of growth, but the buildings are the same. A good place to bury a child if you had to select a spot. You could approach from any direction. They chose to move two stepping stones and bury the child, return the stones. It rained that next morning and most of the day, a steady drizzle, so before the pub call was made, Mother Nature had already returned the spot to unchanged. Had the man not called, it’s doubtful anyone would have discovered the body for a good number of years.”

  Ann pulled out the picture of the missing cat from the pub’s bulletin board, compared the hand-drawn map on the back to the surroundings. “The sketch is to scale. It had to be drawn from memory—someone doesn’t bring a photo of a missing cat to this park, draw a map, and return it to the pub. Whoever drew the map and made the call had been here many times, knew exactly where the child was buried.”

  “Someone from the neighborhood, I think. When they thought ‘We’ve got to bury this child without being noticed,’ they thought of this park. This is familiar territory to them.”

  Ann picked up the street map. “The shopping center where baby Connor was snatched looks a good distance away, but when you see the routes in and out of this neighborhood, it’s nearly a direct line to that upscale shopping area.”

  “A target of opportunity. Simply go hunt in a rich area of the city,” Paul agreed.

  “Paul, think about that. They pick a baby at random, they dash to the van and drive away. How do they know who to contact for the ransom demand? How do they know the name of the parents, the phone number, the address where they live? They have no idea who this child is; they know only that it’s a baby boy.”

  Paul pondered the implications of that observation. “If this is truly a random abduction, they’d have to wait for the media to tell them who the child is and who the parents are.”

  Ann nodded. “So part of the delay in sending a ransom demand is waiting to see who’s desperate to get their child back.”

  “Or they get proactive. They leave someone at the shopping center to watch the mother react to the fact the baby’s gone, to listen to the information she’s giving the officers, to listen to the questions they’re asking shoppers,” Paul suggested.

  Ann wrote that down. “You know, it fits with the assumption a woman was somewhere involved in this. Leave her behind initially to gather information about the baby. She’ll blend in as a concerned shopper at the scene. The investigators likely already pursued this idea, but it’s worth reviewing the file again to see what they noted down about the people at the scene.”

  Ann studied the case summary. “The father made a televised appeal for the child that evening, so maybe identification takes part of the first day, but I’m still puzzled as to why they didn’t provide that ransom demand in the three days when the baby was alive. In most abductions of an infant, the call with the ransom demand is within twenty-four hours, unless the child was taken for other reasons, such as replacing a child who died. The note in the stroller suggests money was the object from the beginning.”

  “They aren’t sure how to pick up their ransom without getting caught retrieving the money,” Paul guessed. “The shopping center is close to this neighborhood. Maybe closer than they realized. The cops fan out with road blocks and a canvass, their presence is going to be felt here. The abductors freeze up. They had a plan for getting their ransom money, but now they have to rethink it. So another two days go by. The snatch itself and getaway from the area suggests good planning. The burial was quickly planned but executed well. I think retrieving the ransom money is what got them hung up.”

  Paul started the car. “Anything else you’d like to see?”

  “Let’s drive around the neighborhood a bit just to see the area.”

  Paul took them on a slow tour of the streets. “I don’t think the neighborhood has changed much in the last nineteen years,” he said. “The Meadow Park neighborhood is what I’d call a borderline struggling community surrounded by more wealthy areas. It’s got potential—middle school, high school, park. It’s prosperous enough that the houses have grass, the kids have wide streets to play on, neighborhood businesses dot the community.”

  He pointed to the older home on the corner. “But houses need painting, some need repairs, a few streets show abandoned properties. It’s not urban poor, nor is it city wealthy. It hasn’t been gentrified and fixed up yet. It’s just existing. If you were born here, it’s the kind of neighborhood where your family continues to live, where you might also work and raise a family. People will have lived here twenty years and remember the baby Connor case well. We’ll be lucky that way. If this were the comfort zone of those who abducted baby Connor, there are people still here who know the people we’re looking for. People will talk to us. The question is, where do we want to begin and what do we want to ask?”

  “Baby Connor is news in this neighborhood,” Ann agreed, “and it’s their news, the baby was found here. Memories of that day will still be fresh, handed down by the constant retelling.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I think we start at the park, then the pub. Then we find the community center or wherever folks hang out to share stories and coffee and play dominoes, and we start listening. People who were living here twenty years ago—the list can’t be that long. We’ll likely need to talk to all of them to form our own impressions of the neighborhood.”

  “It will make for some interesting weekend excursions,” Paul said. “We can bring Black along as an icebreaker. Anything else you want to see while we’re here?”

  �
�I’ve got enough to make the baby Connor case tangible. We’ll carve out some time next weekend to begin having those conversations.” Ann stored her notes. “While we’re in this area, let’s see if the house where Charlotte was held still exists. I’m curious.”

  “Sure, I think I can find it.” Paul pulled to the curb and went online, searched the archive file to confirm the property information and address. He turned to the north and drove along one-way streets paralleling the railroad tracks to a crossing point. He entered an older part of the city along the river.

  He eventually pulled to the curb and pointed to a two-story house with attic dormers set back in a lot. The shrubs had overgrown the land, and the yard needed mowing. The house had weathered poorly, tan paint peeling in the sun, and the roof looked like it would leak with even a mild rain. “The uncle of the two men who were killed still owns the property. It was rented to an older couple last time the file had been updated, but it looks to be vacant now.”

  Paul rested his arm across the back of the seat, studied the house, studied his wife. He understood why she’d been curious to see this place. He had read the full Bazoni file now, the classified sections included, and he knew why Ann had encouraged him to look at how it had ended.

  He had a kidnap victim skittish to the point she hasn’t said a word about what happened. He had the two guys holding her shot and killed during the rescue. And he had ransom money found in a cop’s possession.

  Ann had known that fact and not warned him. Not entirely a surprise since her security clearance was higher than his, and he had enough on his plate. But she had known. He wondered who had told her and when. “She doesn’t talk about what happened with good reason,” he said.

  His wife glanced over at him, realized he knew, and nodded. “I’m not sure I wouldn’t have made the same decision in her place. Howard Benson, my boss when I worked with the Chicago PD, had history with this case and used to talk about it when we were traveling. I don’t think he was ever comfortable with the outcome.”

  “I can understand why. It’s not any cop. It’s the hero cop of the story. Chicago cop, thirty years on the job, clean record. He gets a tip, he’s the first guy through the door when they get to the house, he shoots and kills the two men holding Ruth, rescues her. He’s the hero of the city. He dies in a car crash on the way to a television interview the next morning. A friend of his who goes from the hospital to the house to take charge of the dog finds twenty-five thousand from the third ransom in the pantry, in the dog food sack, wrapped in plastic. Was the cop framed or was he involved?”

  Ann nodded. “The question. There’s no way to tell if the money was there before or after the cop died. The house locks might have been picked. No prints on the money, and the cop had a solid alibi for the abduction itself. He could have been framed. Someone angry the cop shot the two men—possibly the uncle—decided to trash the cop’s reputation after he died.”

  “Or just as likely, the cop was involved, and he made sure to be first through the door so he could kill his accomplices under cover of the law,” Paul said. “He thought he was free and clear—instead a car wreck sends him to the hospital where he dies. The cop was either innocent and framed or he was guilty and we can’t prove it.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t think we should to tackle the Bazoni cold case,” Ann mentioned. “Baby Conner is difficult enough.”

  “Given the size of the task force, if there was a lead to chase in the Bazoni one, it was followed. The men involved in the case are dead. Unless Charlotte is willing to talk with us, there’s nothing else that can be done. And even then, the best we likely could do is fill in some of the corners.”

  “Maybe if she gets comfortable with Bryce,” Ann offered, “if she stays around, there will be a day she decides to talk about it.”

  Paul could share the hope, but he knew reality. “She hasn’t said a word in eighteen years. I doubt she ever does.”:

  SEVENTEEN

  Bryce added a band around the boxes on the pallet for extra stability, then marked it as ready to transport. John would be down to the vault around one p.m. with the forklift to haul the pallets out to the truck. Bryce glanced at the time. He had time to find Charlotte. She would probably be unloading a storage unit somewhere on the property, but he would start at Fred’s place and make the circle looking for her truck if she wasn’t at the house. He’d prefer to see her today rather than wait for their next dinner. She’d accepted the flowers and his apology and been embarrassed by both. He wasn’t in the mood to wait to find out how severely he had complicated things with her.

  Charlotte was standing on Fred’s back porch. She’d been playing with the German shepherds, for she still held the tug-of-war rope, but the dogs were now chasing each other along the water’s edge, and she was lost in thought. Bryce walked up the path, not sure if she’d heard him arrive. She glanced over as he came up the steps. He was relieved at the quick, if brief, smile she offered.

  He stopped beside her. “I’ve been toying repeatedly with the idea of asking if you’d like to go out on the lake for an afternoon. Want to skip work and go find boat keys?”

  “I’m afraid of the water.”

  The answered startled him. “Really?”

  She looked over, and he glimpsed something he didn’t understand, an old memory that for a moment was in the present. Then she blinked and it disappeared. “John would be glad for the company if you’d like to join him.”

  “You’re afraid of the water, but you’re going to keep Shadow Lake, some of the family land, when you sell the rest of the business.”

  “Yes.”

  He pushed his hands into his pockets, studied the lake she had drawn so many times in her sketches, the water she so often sat and watched. “You’re going to give it to John.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Unspoken, but you did.” He smiled. “Nice gift.”

  “He likes the water.”

  Charlotte would see it as giving John a peaceful sanctuary, but Bryce also thought it was a way she could honor her family by placing the land in good hands for the long term. It was a smart option.

  Bryce glanced at her, and took a risk. “You like music well enough to put up with a crowd? There’s a concert in St. Louis this weekend. Ann and Paul are flying south for it. She invited us to join them. A private flight, Ann’s the pilot.”

  “Instead of dinner?”

  “Along with. I thought we might live dangerously and do a double this week.”

  She thought about that, half smiled, nodded. “Okay.”

  “Then I’ll see you Friday for dinner and pick you up Saturday at four p.m. at Ellie’s for the concert.” He hesitated. “You okay, Charlotte?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “A lot on your mind. There has been for the last month.”

  “Decisions to make about the estate. I’ll need to fly to New York next week for a few days.”

  “Trouble?”

  “No. Only a raft of details.” She glanced at him. “I’ll probably have another few million to add to the pool of funds to give when they get done.”

  “If I ever get to the point I run out of ideas, you’ll see me wince when you say that. For now the needs seem endless. Do you ever stop to think about how much good you’re doing with these gifts, Charlotte?”

  “Give Fred the credit for having stored his wealth rather than spent it. Being generous with what Tabitha and I don’t need—it seems like common sense to me. God’s going to hold me accountable for what I do with it.”

  “You don’t have to earn His pleasure, Charlotte. But I think your decisions please Him a great deal.”

  “As long as He’s giving you some credit for the work involved. You never say much, but I know the hours involved.”

  “It’s for a good cause. And it gives me a great deal of satisfaction to see the needs being met.”

  “A celebration dinner?” Charlotte hesitated in the kitchen doorway Friday night.

>   Bryce smiled. “Spaghetti, homemade meatballs and sauce, not much of a celebration. But when you sign that stack of checks tonight, you will have crossed ten million, so I found the candles and bought some flowers.”

  “I appreciate the thought.” Charlotte pulled out a chair and picked up the list on top of the stack of checks he’d printed out for her. “You’ve gotten due diligence done for nearly everything I’ve approved. When are you getting time to sleep, Bryce?”

  “I don’t mind the work, Charlotte. It’s for a good purpose.”

  She pulled over the checks to begin signing them.

  Charlotte was more quiet than usual, Bryce thought, as they ate dinner. He picked up the plates and cleared the table, brought back a platter with brownies. She had a sweet tooth, and he was inclined to indulge her.

  “When you were fifteen, before life took its turn,” he asked, curious, “did you see yourself as single or married when you were an adult?”

  She hesitated at the topic change, leaned back in her chair, and smiled as she picked up one of the brownies. “I was married with five kids, living in a chunky two-story house with these beagle dogs and a husband who always had a car in the drive he was working on for someone in the neighborhood. We took care of people because we liked being part of the fabric of the neighborhood, and we’d lived in that same house since we were first married, packed it with memories and fights and backyard barbecues.”

  Bryce smiled. “You dreamed in stories.”

  “The best kind of thinking about the future includes a good picture of what it will look like.”

  “What’s the story become now?”

  She shrugged. “I was going to be an internationally famous artist known for my watercolors, but that collided with the reality of my talent. So it became a different but more realistic dream. Now it’s the freedom to travel, to sketch whatever catches my fancy, to see my life across the years in thousands of sketches of places I went and people I met. I’m not making plans for something else to reach. I’ve got my life. I simply want to keep it.”