We walked out together, and I took the curtain-wrapped paint scraper from the back seat of the Volvo and handed it to Grimaldi. I also showed her the photograph I had taken, of the footprint on the stairs. She wanted a copy of that, as well, so I forwarded it to her phone.
“I’ll get this checked tonight.” She lifted the bundle. “I’ll let you know what I find out tomorrow morning.”
“I’ll be there,” I said. It would take effort to drag myself out of bed early enough to be at the office by nine, but I’d manage. And anyway, there was a good chance Brittany wouldn’t make it in to work again. I’d probably have to handle the front desk tomorrow, too.
Grimaldi said she’d see me then. She got into her car and took off. We got into ours and did the same.
“Where are we going?” I asked Rafe, after a few minutes’ silence.
He glanced over. “I’m gonna take you home. Then I’ll probably go back down to Antioch and check in with the boys.”
“I can come with you,” I said.
He shook his head. “No offense, darlin’. I know you wanna help. But there’s nothing nobody can do right now. We’re all just sitting around, waiting for something to happen. And while we do that, I’m driving you crazy.”
It seemed to me it was the other way around, if he wanted to take me home and leave me there. I must be the one driving him crazy if he wanted to get rid of me.
As he often did, he read my mind. “I gotta find that baby. I gotta find Carmen and Doc Seaver and get’em behind bars again, too. But that baby’s out there with two women who wouldn’t think twice about dropping it off a bridge if it was slowing’em down.”
I put a hand on my stomach. “I’m sure Carmen wouldn’t do that.”
Rafe arched a brow.
“I realize I don’t know her...”
“No, you don’t.”
“But she’s been carrying that baby around inside her for nine months. If she didn’t want it, why not just have an abortion?” A thought struck me, and I added, “Don’t women in prison have the right to have abortions?”
“They do. But when you’re in prison, things don’t always work the way they should.”
Imagine that. And since he’d spent a couple of years behind bars himself, I figured he knew what he was talking about. “So she might have wanted an abortion but not gotten one?”
“She might could. Somebody coulda blocked it. They’re not supposed to, but things happen. Or her mama coulda refused to pay for it. Somebody woulda had to. The prison ain’t gonna pay. Not for something like that. And if her mama said no...”
I nodded. There’d be nothing Carmen could do about it.
“I gotta find that baby,” Rafe said again. “Before something can happen to it. I don’t trust either of’em with it. And if I’m too late...”
I winced. He glanced at me. “I don’t want you there if I am.”
Finding a dead baby that might be his own would be worse for him than for me. But I understood that he was trying to protect me. I nodded. “I’ll go home. You’ll call me if you hear anything, right?”
“Sure,” Rafe said, and that’s when the phone rang.
He fished it out if his pocket and glanced at the display. And put it to his ear. “Collier.”
Someone on the other end spoke for a second.
“Where?” Rafe said.
The person on the other end spoke again.
“I’m on my way.” He dropped the phone to make a highly illegal U-turn before stepping on the gas. The car jumped forward with a squeal.
I braced myself with both hands on the dashboard. “What happened?”
He shot me a look. “They found her.”
FOURTEEN
‘Her’ turned out to be Carmen. It also turned out that she and Denise Seaver hadn’t flagged down a car after they escaped from the DOC van. They’d walked off the road and into the woods instead.
Rafe didn’t tell me any of that. I let him concentrate on driving, while I concentrated on hanging on. We got to mile marker 22 in record time. He’d probably managed to shave seven or eight minutes off the time it had taken me to get there. And we pulled off the road with a squeal of tires that kicked gravel in a thirty yard radius, and left the air smelling like burning rubber.
No one was around. The van was gone, and so was the crime scene crew and the young cop who had been directing traffic. Rafe turned off the car and got out. “C’mon. We gotta go on foot from here.”
I made my own way out of the car. “Is that what Carmen and Doctor Seaver did?”
He nodded. “The cops tracked them up the hill. They said it ain’t far. Half a mile, no more.”
I could manage half a mile, even in heels. But my determination to start considering sensible shoes grew stronger.
We hopped the guard rail—or Rafe hopped, while I clambered, with a little help—and then we started off into the trees.
It felt a lot longer than half a mile. It could be the gathering dark. The sun hadn’t set yet, but it was behind the hill, and I couldn’t really see where I was going. The ground was uneven, and I kept running into bushes and trees.
Rafe had no such problems. He could see in the dark, and was wearing boots with heavy soles. Even so, he managed to walk quietly. I was the one stumbling through the trees like a heroine in a horror movie. I’m sure I frustrated Rafe. I’m sure he wanted to get to where we were going as quickly as possible, and I was slowing him down. After a couple of minutes, he reached back and took my hand. “You doing all right?”
“I’m fine,” I panted. “But maybe I shouldn’t have come.”
“I didn’t give you a chance to say no. And I want you here.” He squeezed my hand.
I pushed on, feeling a little better.
Eventually—and it felt like a small eternity—we got to the other side of the hill, where there was a little holler. Too small to be a valley, but a depression between two other small hills. A track led up through the middle of it.
“C’mon.” He pulled me through the tall grass onto the dirt surface. “This’ll make it a little easier.”
It did. However— “You know, I’m only six months pregnant.”
Rafe nodded.
“Carmen was a lot farther along. And a lot smaller than me. And in labor. This must have been agony for her.”
“That’s prob’ly why they didn’t get farther,” Rafe said, and pointed.
Up ahead, on the side of the road, sat a little shack. It looked like it was at least a hundred years old, and on its last leg. I could see it pretty clearly, since it was lit up like a bonfire. The crime scene van from earlier was parked outside, along with a squad car, and a gray sedan. People were milling around in the glare of flood lights. The crime scene techs in their white coveralls, a patrolman in uniform, with the light reflecting off his badge, the gold lettering on his patch, and his name tag.
As we got closer, they all turned to look at us. The young patrolman—the same one from earlier—took a few steps forward, and then seemed to recognize us. “Sir.” He came quite close to saluting Rafe, or so it seemed.
“I appreciate you calling me,” my husband said.
“Yessir.” The cop nodded multiple times. “I told Detective Mendoza you’d asked to be notified, and he said it’d be OK.”
“Is this Detective Mendoza’s case?”
The young cop turned to me. “Yes, ma’am.”
Rafe turned to me too, with a scowl. I hid a smile.
Jaime Mendoza is a colleague of Grimaldi’s, and from what I had seen, he’s a good detective. He was also one of the best looking men I had ever seen, and let me assure you, after Rafe, that takes some doing.
In addition to that, he was the man my mother—jokingly, or so I told myself—had suggested should marry me, on the very day Rafe didn’t show up at the courthouse for our wedding.
Mendoza, bless him, had handled Mother beautifully. He had turned me down without making me feel bad, and without making Mother feel lik
e he didn’t appreciate the offer of her daughter’s hand in marriage. However, since Grimaldi had wasted no time in telling Rafe what had happened, my husband was—understandably—a little miffed. And prone to scowling whenever Mendoza’s name came up.
“Is he inside?”
The cop nodded. “You can go in. Just don’t touch anything.”
We headed for the door to the shack.
Up close, it turned out to be a small log structure with weather-beaten plank walls. It looked like someone had put it up long before the Great Depression, and like no one had done a lick of work to it since. The plank walls had gaps in them big enough to fit my hand through, and I’m sure the roof leaked.
If Carmen and Denise Seaver had stopped here, it had to be because Carmen couldn’t walk any farther.
The door was low. I had to duck my head to fit through, and Rafe had to bend almost double. The inside was garishly lit, even more so than the outside, where the surrounding woods seemed to absorb some of the light. I had to blink a few times before my eyes adjusted. Then I wished they hadn’t.
I hadn’t asked. I had suspected, but I hadn’t asked, because I had wanted Rafe to be able to concentrate on driving. But part of me already knew what we’d find. I’m sure he did, too.
She was lying on her back on a narrow bunk attached to one of the walls. Her prison top was still on, covering her breasts and most of her upper body, but she was naked from the waist down. Her legs were spread, with one foot resting on the rough plank floor, and between them was a pool of blood. Some of it—a good amount of it—had dripped over the edge of the bed and onto the planks.
I heard Rafe swallow. He couldn’t quite control the tremor in his voice, either. “The baby?”
Carmen’s stomach no longer rose toward the ceiling, but looked flabby and sunken, like a deflated balloon.
Mendoza was standing by the bunk, his elegant designer suit at odds with his surroundings. Now he took a step forward, and managed to put himself between us and Carmen’s body. I couldn’t see the expression on Rafe’s face, but I could imagine, and I was grateful to Mendoza for caring enough to provide a barrier. Even though he’d probably have questions about the necessity for it later. “Not here.”
“Denise Seaver must have taken it,” I said, and he glanced at me. “That’s a good thing, in a way. It’s alive.”
“For now,” Rafe said.
I shook my head. “If she didn’t have a reason, and something she wanted it for, she wouldn’t have bothered. She left Carmen here.”
Rafe turned back to Mendoza, still standing in front of Carmen’s body. “What happened?”
“The M.E. will make the determination. For now, it appears she died from lack of medical care. I’d guess a hemorrhage. If she’d been in a hospital when it happened, they might have saved her.”
Postpartum hemorrhage kills three women in a hundred thousand in the industrial world. In the developing world, that number can be as high as a thousand in a hundred thousand. It was one of the many little pieces of trivia that had stuck with me from my pregnancy reading. And yes, if a woman is in the hospital, they can usually stop the bleeding and save her.
I looked past Mendoza to Carmen. With him standing where he was, all I could see of her was her head. Her hair was lank, lying in sweaty strands around her face, and her eyes were bloodshot. Birth isn’t kind to a woman. Nor is death.
“Can’t you at least close her eyes?”
“The M.E. has to see her first. He’s on his way.” He turned back to Rafe. “What’s your status here?”
Rafe managed to drag his attention off Carmen and back to Mendoza. “Officially I don’t have one. But I was involved in the case.”
Mendoza nodded.
“And my wife was involved in the case against Denise Seaver.”
Mendoza turned his attention to me. “The woman who’s still on the loose?”
I nodded. “She was an OB/GYN in my hometown. Until she started killing people. One of them was my sister-in-law.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Mendoza said.
“Thank you.” Sheila and I had never been close, but Mother had liked her better than both Catherine and me, or so it seemed. She’d been quite upset when it happened. And of course Dix had been devastated. “She ran a baby-selling operation. Illegal adoptions. Newborns whose mothers thought they had been stillborn. At least once she stole a baby out of a baby carriage and gave it to someone else.”
“Detective Grimaldi told me about the case,” Mendoza nodded.
“I’m concerned about this baby. Carmen’s baby.”
“You don’t think she took it because she was afraid it’d die here on its own?”
“I doubt that,” I said. We were less than a mile from the parkway. Chances were the baby would have been safe here for the couple of hours it had taken the police to find this small building. And it would be extra baggage for her. Not because it was all that heavy, but because a woman alone can move a lot faster than a woman carrying a newborn. It would need diapers. It would need food. And while Doctor Seaver might not care if it starved, it would cry if it wasn’t fed and dry. And that would draw attention to her. She wouldn’t want that.
No, she had a reason for taking it. Maybe she thought she could trade it for money.
Rafe’s lips tightened when I said that, and I wished I’d censored my words better. “I could be wrong. When she took someone’s baby away and gave it to someone else, it was always because she thought the baby would be better off. Maybe she’s taking it to a hospital.”
“We’ve already put out an APB,” Mendoza said. “Hospitals, medical clinics, churches, food kitchens, homeless shelters.”
She probably wouldn’t go into a food kitchen or homeless shelter. Nowhere where she’d run the risk of being seen. More likely, if she wanted to get rid of the baby and she actually cared what happened to it, she’d find a convenient church. “It’s Wednesday. A lot of churches have midweek services. That would be a good place to leave a baby. Someone would be sure to find it.”
Mendoza nodded. “If she drops it off somewhere, we’ll find it.”
“She’ll need diapers and formula. The baby will cry if it doesn’t get changed and fed. And she won’t have any milk to give it.”
“I’ll extend that notice to grocery and convenience stores, big box stores, and drugstores.” He brushed past me to get to the door, where he gestured for his minion to approach. The young cop came at a trot. Mendoza relayed directions for how to extend the search while I turned to Rafe.
Mendoza and I had both pretty much just ignored him for the past minute or two. I’d wanted to give him a little time alone to process the fact that Carmen was gone—even though he’d probably already known that when we got here—and that the baby was missing. I don’t know what Mendoza was thinking about the whole thing, but I’m sure he suspected something was going on, in addition to the offered explanation. It wouldn’t take genius to figure out what, since most of the MNPD had been involved in the final assault on the Havana, and they’d all known not to shoot Rafe since he was undercover. Mendoza wasn’t stupid, so he had probably figured out from Rafe’s demeanor that there was more going on here than just a missing prisoner he’d once been a part of arresting.
I slipped my hand into his—it was cold—and leaned my head against his shoulder. “Let’s go. There’s nothing we can do here.”
He looked down at me. For a second, I wasn’t sure he recognized me, but then he nodded. He didn’t move toward the door until I tugged on his arm, though. And when we got to the door, he glanced over his shoulder at Carmen one last time, and shuddered. I practically had to push him through the door and outside, and I wasn’t surprised when he gulped a lungful of air like a man who’d been holding his breath for several minutes.
“Seen enough?” Mendoza said. He was standing just outside the cabin in conversation with the young policeman.
I nodded. “There’s nothing we can do here. We’re goin
g home.”
“I’m gonna go give her family the news,” Rafe added.
I looked at him—we all did—but it was Mendoza who spoke. “You want to do the notifications?”
There was a mixture of surprise and disbelief in his voice. Clearly, this wasn’t something most people volunteered for.
“I told’em she’d escaped. I need to finish it.”
Mendoza hesitated. Rafe had admitted that he had no official standing here. As lead detective, it should be Mendoza notifying the family that Carmen was dead. But he must be busy with all the other aspects of the case—like notifying the family of the dead guard—and being the bearer of bad news is never any fun. “Give me a call tomorrow. I have some questions.”
Rafe nodded, and we trudged back through the woods toward the car. It was darker now than before, so the trip took even longer. Between looking out for obstacles and dealing with the ones we stumbled into, there was no time to talk. By the time we made it out of the trees at the bottom of the hill, and saw the headlights zoom past on the interstate up ahead, I was so glad to be out of the woods—no pun intended—that I could have bent and kissed the blacktop. If I could bend that far, anyway.
Rafe had to drag me the last few feet from the ditch onto the shoulder of the road. “I’ll drive.” He helped me into the car and closed the door before walking around to the driver’s side. We pulled off the shoulder and into traffic, going back toward town.
* * *
IT WAS another mostly silent trip. I think we were both in shock, both by the scene in the cabin, like something out of an Appalachian horror story from a hundred years ago, and by the fact that while we’d found Carmen and she was dead, her baby—maybe Rafe’s baby—was still out there.
Part of me had no desire to go with Rafe to do the notifications. I understood why he felt he had to, but I wasn’t sure I did. At the same time, I wanted to give him what support I could. And finally, there was a part of me that couldn’t wait to get home and go to bed. Both because it had been a long day, and the baby was tired, and so was I, and because oblivion sounded really good. Hopefully the image of Carmen and all the blood would go away eventually, but right now it was all I could see, and I really wanted some peace from it. Selfish of me, no doubt, but there it was.
Scared Money (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 13) Page 15