Bryce sat down on a bleacher and changed into his running shoes.
Paul jogged over from the track, finishing his warm-up. “You look like you had a bad night.”
Bryce glanced up, but he wasn’t going to touch that comment. “Just things on my mind.” He stretched in preparation for their run, jogged part of the track and back.
“Ann and I,” Paul said as he capped his water bottle, “and a couple of people I trust have been looking over the Bazoni case file on the off chance Charlotte might like to have a conversation one day.”
Bryce nodded. It seemed years since he had hinted to Paul there was a third person still out there.
“Bryce, can you give me something to work with?”
“I can’t. Let’s do six miles today.” Bryce took to the track and set the pace. He appreciated the feel of the track under his feet. And as he ran, he felt his mind begin to clear. For the first time in days he pushed away the problems he was wrestling with, the pain his wife was in, and simply ran. He didn’t want the six miles to end, even though they were both pulling in air and fighting quivering muscles as they passed the last lap.
They cooled down with a half-mile jog, then walked.
Bryce offered a water bottle to Paul, drank down much of a second one himself. “How’s it going with that cold case you and Ann were working on?”
“Baby Connor?”
“Yes.”
“It’s coming along.”
“Good. You should solve that case.” Bryce pushed his water bottle into his gym bag. “I appreciate the run. Give me a call when you want to meet again.”
Ann paused from icing a cookie. Her husband had retrieved a soda from the refrigerator but was simply standing, holding it, the refrigerator door still open, his attention obviously far away. “What is it, Paul?”
“I can’t be one hundred percent sure,” he said thoughtfully as he closed the refrigerator, “but I think Bryce implied this morning that the Bazoni case and baby Connor case are linked. It was deliberate, the way he said it. A six-mile run between my question and his comment, but he was responding to me. I heard him make the connection.”
She put down the knife.
Paul opened the soda. “I mentioned the Bazoni case and asked if Bryce could give me something to work with. He said he couldn’t. A six-mile run later, he told me I should solve the baby Connor case. It’s just hit me—it was deliberate, the way he said it. The way he paused, looked over. It wasn’t a casual comment.”
Ann trusted Paul’s instincts. “Then we pursue it as if they are connected and see where it leads us.” Ann put down the cookie and reached for paper, quickly graphed out the details she remembered on each case. “They were in the same general area, and the time frames overlap.”
Paul leaned against the counter to watch the outline develop. “The baby Connor case gives us a possibility of two men. The Bazoni case gives us two men shot dead. If they are connected, it’s the same two men.”
Ann connected them on the sketch.
“Bryce told her not to talk to us about what happened, which suggests there is someone out there Charlotte is still worried about today. We’ve got a caller never identified in the baby Connor case. Same person?”
“The simplest answer is typically the right one. The same person. Someone Charlotte is worried about, and we have his voice on tape.”
“If the cases are linked, we know more about him now. We know he was friends with the cousins who were killed. If Charlotte is afraid of him, he was in the area during those four years. He had information about where baby Connor was buried. He likely had, and eventually spent, some of the Bazoni ransom money. He received ten thousand from Henry Hewitt.”
“Someone the original cops had on their list and passed over. Or more likely someone the original cops did not have on their list,” Ann guessed. “It’s now a process of finding names and eliminating names.”
Paul drank his soda and looked at the diagram. “Two cases. One group of guys behind both.”
“At least three guys, two of them now dead,” Ann agreed. “We are looking for a man in his forties or fifties now, who knew the two men who held Ruth Bazoni well enough to be involved in that crime, who was considered a local resident to the customers at the Dublin Pub, and who may or may not be a cop. We have his voice on tape, know he probably left the area about the time the Bazoni case ended.”
“A good, workable summary,” Paul said. He tapped the page. “We passed over an obvious point. Charlotte can identify the voice on the Dublin Pub tape. Maybe not his name, maybe not his face, but she can say ‘I know that voice.’ It’s interesting that she hasn’t said that in nineteen years.”
“She needs cops to be looking for that man, can’t risk saying ‘I think he’s a cop,’ so she doesn’t say anything. That leaves the baby Connor case open. Nice tactics when you think about it. She has the cops looking for the man without saying she needs us to find him.”
Paul thought about it. “I’ll buy that.”
Ann studied the picture and sighed. “Paul, it’s Charlotte’s butterfly pin on the blanket. She was the woman involved. It has to be. Her medical records—she broke her wrist about a year before she was rescued. It healed wrong. She tried to protect the baby from being shaken to death. The timeline on the injury fits too.” She bit her lip. “This is more than you catching a hint of something from Bryce. I think Bryce knows they are linked. I think she told him what happened. We need to talk with her.”
“We ask, she’ll give us a variation of no comment,” Paul replied. “Better to have the conversation when we have something to offer that’s more than speculation. First we identify the voice on that tape. Then we talk to Charlotte about baby Connor.”
“Bishop. Come see the sunset.”
Bryce set aside a letter and went to join Charlotte. She made a point to sit on the front steps and watch the sunset nearly every evening. He took a seat beside her, braced with his hands behind him, and stretched out his legs. Thin lines of clouds cut across a wide swath of the blue sky, and the angle of the setting sun had begun to change them to pink. “It’s pretty tonight.”
She nodded, her chin on her crossed arms as she watched the clouds change colors. She hadn’t brought her sketchbook out this evening, which was a bit unusual.
“God’s an artist,” Charlotte said quietly. “He makes sunsets change every evening, created everything from a walrus to a zebra to a parrot, designed dozens of different breeds of horses and dogs, even the leaves on trees and shrubs are in hundreds of different shapes. God is creative and artistic. That’s the one reason I am still willing to wrestle with figuring Him out. He does beautiful work. He doesn’t have failed designs.”
Bryce realized she was opening a door to a topic she rarely discussed. She was right. God didn’t have failed designs. “You’re seeing glimpses of Him through His work all around you. I think you’re an artist because He wanted to share that joy of creating something with you, and He specifically gave you art as a gift so you could share something with Him that those of us who aren’t artists don’t understand.”
“Probably.” She was silent for a minute. “I can’t believe He created me and then blew the design by letting evil tear it up. I still hold out hope that He can pick up the pieces of me and make something beautiful one day.”
Bryce sat up and rested his hand on her back, rubbing his thumb lightly along her shoulder blade. “You’re still His masterpiece, Charlotte. God’s been fixing broken people ever since sin came into the world. Give Him time. He’s not done. God promises He will work for the good in all things. What happened to you isn’t beyond His ability to recover.”
“I know you keep praying for me, but I don’t find it easy to reconcile what I see about God all around me with what He let happen.”
Bryce understood her dilemma. “Christianity is hard, Charlotte. Men have free will. Men choose to do evil, from Adam and Eve on through time. I know God loves you. Trust what you see.
God’s designs are all around you. This is who God is. The fact evil exists speaks far more about man than about God. The Bible says God hates sin. He did not want you to get hurt.”
She nodded and didn’t say anything more. Bryce didn’t know how to help her. She was asked to accept and reconcile a nearly impossible set of two facts—God was good, and she had been badly hurt.
It seemed like the flaw in life, that God had given men the freedom to do good or evil. And yet that freedom, a true free will, was at the heart of what he believed about life. Driven by love, God had created people with a free will, had given people the freedom to decide what they wanted to do, so God could know who wanted to freely love Him back. Most people rejected God and the world turned evil. But in the midst of that, God was still good, He still acted in love in every situation.
Jesus, is there anything else I can say right now that will help? The prayer circled through his thoughts, but as hard as he listened—hoping for a Scripture to come to mind, some words that might comfort—he heard only silence. Old hurts, as deep as this one, were the kind mere words didn’t reach. Help Charlotte feel the fact you love her. The only way she heals is if she gets held by you until the pain fades.
Bryce slid his arm around her shoulders and sat with her until the sunset faded and the breeze picked up. He reached for her hand. “Let’s get some dinner.”
She let him pull her to her feet. “I was thinking I might like to go to the zoo with you sometime. I always get a kick out of watching the kids when they see a giraffe for the first time or when a goat at the petting zoo bumps them to get fed.”
Bryce smiled. “We’ll plan a day of it. I’d love to see the sketches that come out of that excursion. What sounds good to you for dinner?”
“Italian, I think. Maybe spaghetti and meatballs.”
She set the table while he fixed the meal.
“It smells good.” She paused beside him. “Why do you cook for me like you do?”
He blinked at the unexpected question, hesitated before saying what he had guessed some time ago. “Because they made you cook for them.”
She held his gaze for a long moment, then softly smiled and moved to get out the loaf of French bread. “You’re a very nice man, Bryce Bishop.”
“Bryce.”
“Hmm?” Charlotte was curled up on the couch, her feet pulled up under her, with two pillows and his shoulder for a cushion. He pulled his attention away from his book. The movie she’d turned on after dinner had gone to commercial.
“Do you miss life as it was before?”
He thought about it because she asked it as a serious question. “Not a bit, actually.”
“Not even Bishop Chicago?”
“Devon has it well in hand. I used to have ten people depending on me to make good decisions. Now I’ve got around ten million. Using the money wisely matters. I enjoy the job.” He studied her, curious. “Why the question? Are you missing Graham Enterprises?”
“No. I just realized I’m not. I needed the studio. I didn’t realize how big that hole was until I was at the drawing board again. It feels good to be working on the intricate drawings.”
He waited to see if she’d offer another comment, but she fell silent. She was turning her wedding rings. He was learning to read that small tell. “I don’t regret marrying you,” he said quietly.
Her hand on her rings stilled. “We’re simply living together.”
“We live together very well.” He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Do you want us to be doing something more than that?” He knew the answer, but found it interesting she didn’t respond right away.
She finally shook her head.
He dropped a kiss on her hair. “Relax. We made a deal, Charlotte. You can try baby steps before you decide what you want. Hugs and kisses are free gifts. No expectations they repeat. No questions about how they are. They just get to be good moments.”
She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him. “I married a really good guy,” she whispered.
She didn’t pull back from the hug. He could feel the nerves in her and ran his hands lightly down her back. “I like the perfume. You smell good.”
She giggled a little shakily. “You’re a very solid man.”
“Mostly bone. Like a big old fossil.”
She laughed and turned her head to rest it against his chest, sighed. “I like not being alone.”
“So do I. I love sharing my life with you, Charlotte.”
She toyed with a button on his shirt. “Would you kiss me, Bryce?”
He shifted how he held her and kissed her, the one he’d had planned for their wedding, the one he’d thought about when he watched her laugh with his family, and wished for when he told her good-night. He let the kiss linger. Nothing overwhelming, just her, and the feel of her, and the perfume he liked.
She had closed her eyes. He waited until she opened them, smiled.
Her hands slid up toward his shoulders. “I’m going to tuck that into the think-about-it part of my brain and finish my movie,” she whispered.
“Okay.”
She didn’t move away. He simply waited. She leaned forward and kissed him back. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure,” he replied softly, and let himself add the word beloved only in his thoughts.
She moved back, but not far. He returned her pillows, picked up his book, found his page, started to read, but nothing registered. The emotions were still shifting on him. If he said I love you, she would freeze up on him, but the words were waiting to be said. He settled his arm around her again. They needed time, measured in weeks and months. An untimely step, moving too quickly, could easily put them all the way back to the beginning. He gently hugged her, then turned the page in his book. Patience was turning into a very good friend.
Paul nudged his wife to the side of the whiteboard so he could read the notes she’d added on the case that day, look at the map. “You’ve been busy.” He settled his hands on the back of her shoulders, felt the tension, and rubbed out the knots in her muscles, gently worked his thumbs along the back of her neck.
“That feels wonderful.” Ann sighed with the pleasure of it and tipped her head forward. When his hands finally stilled, she laid aside the marker and turned to wrap her arms around him with a soft smile. “Welcome home. Workday go okay?”
Paul thought of the meetings, the headache he had fought all day, and simply rested his head against hers. “I’ve had better. Another political bribery case bubbled up to the surface, this time in the department of transportation. I’m losing two key guys who specialize in counterfeit drug imports to a multistate task force. We’ve got a credible lead on where to find Carol Boxx and her daughter, Tina. It will be nice to have that case off our plate. Best part of the day was leaving to come home.”
“You need some dinner. Want me to cook?”
He kissed her for making the offer. “Tell me where you’re at first,” he said. “Then we’ll eat and maybe go out for ice cream, have a mini-date.”
“I’m in favor.” Ann turned to look at the whiteboard. “When you overlap the Bazoni and baby Connor cases, you get a much bigger geographical footprint as the focal point. It encompasses where the Bazoni girls lived, the house where Charlotte was held, to the park where baby Connor was found buried. It’s a three-mile area. We’ve been focusing on Meadow Park. The three miles now include Meadow Park, Sterling Heights, the private high school and private college near where the Bazoni girls lived, then northwest to the river and the Lakeview neighborhood.”
“Our caller was farther out than we were expecting.”
Ann nodded. “I think so. The Dublin Pub guys considered him local, so maybe someone with family in Meadow Park, but he lives in this outer circle. We can talk about how to broaden use of the tape—maybe start identifying business owners who have been at their location twenty years, see if someone in that larger group recognizes the voice.”
She marked two items off the list. “I’ve
given up trying to trace the ransom money in the Bazoni case since the two cousins liked to gamble. The holes I’m finding in the recovered money could be another partner getting his cut of the money or could simply be bad wagers. The four unidentified fingerprints are still a mystery—none generated a match in the current database. Did you bring home the yearbooks?”
“The box with my briefcase. Have an idea?”
“Rita suggested we work on a list based on who went to school the longest with the cousins. You do a crime like this only with someone you seriously trust not to give you up to the cops for some reward money. I’m thinking someone they knew from grade school through high school would fit the bill.”
“The cousins were into sports in general, football in particular, cars. Look at sports first. It’s the most common way bonds get built.”
“I’ll start there. Let’s find some dinner while I tell you the rest of it.” Ann headed to the kitchen. “Jackie’s lasagna okay with you? I was just trying to scare you with the cooking offer.”
“Sounds wonderful.”
Ann pulled out the dish to reheat. “I had an interesting conversation with Gage this afternoon. A couple of things. The uncle of the two men who abducted Charlotte died recently. His sister went to the house, saw the porn magazines and videos the man had, and doesn’t want to be the one to clean it all out. Gage made a deal with the family. He will throw out the offensive materials he finds, and in return he can search the house and business for anything related to the cousins. We know the two men spent time at the uncle’s home during the four years Charlotte was held.”
“Long odds something is still there, but it will be useful to have it searched. The uncle was always a wild card about what he knew. What’s the second thing?”
Ann got out the salad and held up salad dressing options. At Paul’s nod she set out French dressing. “The house where Charlotte was held is going to be sold, as no one in the family wants to touch it. Gage thinks John is going to step in, buy it, and demolish it.”
Paul got out glasses and filled them with ice water. “That’s the best news I’ve heard in a while. I wonder if he’ll tell Charlotte before or after he takes a bulldozer to it.”
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