by Pamela Crane
“Can I hold him?” Kat whispered.
“Sure. I’ll carry you out.”
But Kat wasn’t so sure it was a good idea.
“I can’t. I’ll get in trouble.”
“I promise you won’t get in trouble. Your mom already said it was okay. Just for a little bit, though.”
“Okay,” Kat agreed warily.
Together they clambered out of the window, Kat held firmly under her arms as they angled themselves through the opening, then dropped down like two bags of flour on the wet ground. Picking up the kitten, she held him to her chest, planting kisses all up and down his head and belly while he purred contentedly.
“Time to go,” the voice said. She felt the strong arms picking her back up. “You can bring your little friend with you.”
And the fun ended there. As he swung her up under his arms, Kat squeezing the kitten and the man squeezing Kat, the hand resumed its firm grip against her mouth, the other arm hauling her sideways as she dangled helplessly, soundlessly, until they disappeared into the dark. As Kat clung to her furry companion, she wondered where they were going, why he held her so tightly that it hurt ... and then a single thought that grew bigger and larger and more frightening by the second: would she ever see her mom again?
No amount of kicking or flailing would free her. No amount of pleading would save her. As the man hauled her across the empty dirt road, no one saw their shadows slipping through the night.
Chapter 21 Ari
The guilt trip I had taken myself on was a bumpy ride. Every hour that I stayed silent was a tightening noose around my neck. Keeping secrets had never been my thing, eventually causing rifts that I’d spent a lifetime trying to mend. But sometimes the price of truth felt too high.
I hadn’t yet told Tina about Giana. It wasn’t like I wanted to hide it from her, or that I felt she shouldn’t get her baby back, but I just couldn’t push the image of that happy, perfect Baxter family from my head. It was the life every child dreamed of, all the love and affection in the world at her fingertips, not to mention the beautiful home and endless toy supply and probably a pony in her future, and she’d be exchanging it for a pale imitation—someone who couldn’t even love herself. The question lingered, like a vulture lazily circling in the sky: how could Tina take care of a child when she couldn’t even take care of herself?
Was it my call to hold back this dream of reuniting with her daughter from the only real friend I had?
Could I even call myself a friend at this point?
What was more important: a mother’s justice or a child’s well-being?
The questions volleyed in my head, making me dizzy and nauseous.
It was too grueling to think about right now. My eyelids blinked heavily, but my brain buzzed too much to sleep. For some reason a little girl named Kat Brannigan wandered into my thoughts, alone and abandoned, a cold case apparition. It wasn’t my place to investigate her disappearance—I’d been warned to stay away—but I couldn’t help it. Maybe the broken child inside of me urged me to keep searching for answers. Maybe it was losing Carli that motivated my empathy for the poor girl. Or maybe I just needed to see a child victim be avenged and her family given closure. It was why I went into this field anyway, wasn’t it? I knew what a lack of closure felt like. No one deserved that.
How could Tristan ask me to sit by while this girl—alive or dead, no one knew for sure, though by now the worst-case scenario seemed most likely—continued to stay missing? She needed a final goodbye from the mother who still referred to her in the present tense. “We call her Kat.” Helen still clung desperately to hope. After two years of no news, what harm could it possibly cause if I did a little research, put on my big-girl investigator pants?
I was smart. I was capable. I’d survived on my own despite a life of hell; its fire had tempered me, molded me into someone stronger, more durable. Able to handle a little cold-case missing child investigation.
Grabbing my handy-dandy case file notepad and pencil, I sat on my sofa scribbling notes of everything I knew after my talk with Helen. Kat had disappeared without a sound—no screams or cries. Helen had been asleep in bed with Scott, and sometime during the night Tempest had slipped in between them. It was only when Helen awoke that she found Kat’s bed empty, window screen slit open, and no sign of her daughter. Her first call was to Cody, the most likely suspect. The second call was to the police.
There was always the possibility that Helen and Scott were behind Kat’s disappearance. Framed the whole thing by slicing through the screen, staging every last detail. From the boot prints outside the house, to the smeared muddy tracks in Kat’s room. It happened more often than not—children killed or sold by the parents’ own hand. Just like Tina was.
Tristan had said much the same thing to me. But after questioning the couple, the police ended up letting them go, along with the search for answers. There simply wasn’t enough manpower to hunt down the countless kids that went missing each day. Without evidence of—or witnesses to—an actual crime, they had to, as if the justice system shrugged its shoulders and moved on to the next victim.
I tried to visualize how the events unfolded. I didn’t know who to believe, who to trust. Were there holes in Helen’s testimony that I could chip at to get to the truth? While Tempest was supposedly sleeping in Helen’s bed, where in the house was Mikey during Kat’s abduction? After all, she’d said he was living with them too. With four other people in the house, wouldn’t someone have seen something? Heard something? But the bigger question was would Helen or Scott really go to such efforts to stage the scene, to the point of actually climbing in through the window? And if so, and Helen knew Kat was dead, why would she refer to her as if she was still alive?
Unless there was another end game. If Helen sold her to sex traffickers, she’d still be alive somewhere out there ... hopefully. That is, if Kat hadn’t become another Marla Rivers.
Many rural low-income neighborhoods were known for being abduction hot-spots. Close to Interstate 95, a kidnapper could easily hop on the highway that led down the east coast, all the way to Florida. He could have crossed two state lines before Kat had woken up. That is, assuming he hadn’t killed her first.
The warnings to keep a close eye on your kids, lock your doors at night, inform your children about stranger danger—they weren’t for nothing. Evil was real. So prevalent, in fact, that drugged-up abductors were now venturing out in broad daylight in public areas for their snatch-and-runs. While Mom loaded groceries into her minivan in the grocery store parking lot, kidnappers were stealing children from their car seats before Mom knew what happened. It was a scary world, but my job was to make it a little bit safer by putting one villain at a time behind bars. Give ’em something to be afraid of—that’s what I wanted to do. Scare those bastards straight.
My parents had often said I loved a challenge as a child. Some things never change.
Having solved the mystery of Giana’s location—without Battan’s help—I felt invigorated, confident in my PI skills, and was left with a Kat-Brannigan-size hole to pour my energy into, other than filing paperwork at the precinct. My hands were tied from working the connection between Battan and Marla’s death; Tristan had everything he needed, now that he’d gotten his hands on the ledger, and with Tina’s witness testimony, he was a few interrogations away from finding out who N. Bledsoe was, the name behind the $10,000 payment around the time of Marla’s death. Maybe finding out what happened to Kat, giving her family closure, was exactly what I needed to do to satiate my craving to save the world.
What could it hurt if I poked around a little bit?
Chapter 22 Ari
Learning the fine art of interrogation techniques was on next semester’s course load. But it didn’t mean I couldn’t practice now.
Besides Kat’s mother Helen, and the murdered stepfather Scott, who obviously would be of no use, the next best person to talk to was Kat’s father, Cody Brannigan. If anyone had his own ange
r-fueled suspect list—or in my theory should be on it—it was the bio-dad. Tristan had mentioned his domestic violence history. All with the same woman, his then-wife Helen. I hadn’t expected his arrest record to be two pages long, a grade A wife-beating douche bag. Certainly he’d been one of Tristan’s prime suspects, but after several uneventful interrogations and surveillance that led nowhere, he became a dead end as far as the captain was concerned. After checking the database at work for his last known address and poring over the case file notes, I clocked out for the day and headed straight to Cody Brannigan’s house on the outskirts of Raleigh.
The townhouse he lived in sat in the middle of a line of average homes on an average street. All matching gray aluminum siding; the only difference from one to another was the color of the front door or faux shutters, all dismally bland shades of blue, black, and brown, with the occasional burgundy. Clearly the Home Owner’s Association ruled with an iron fist in this neighborhood.
I had to parallel park half a mile down the street, which took me over ten minutes as I inched my way back and forth between two huge SUVs that parked so crookedly that they deserved to get dented. I never had the luxury of a father teaching me the nuances of parallel parking as a teen, but coaxing my tiny car between these two would have challenged even the most expert parking valet.
Walking along the tree-lined sidewalk, I passed a young mother—she looked close to my age, in her mid-twenties—pushing a baby in a stroller, and I wondered what it would be like to be her. To have a family. To spend time with my kids. To watch them grow. To come home to a husband and a noisy house.
Maybe that last part was the problem—I’d always want to be the one coming home, not the one someone else was coming home to. Sitting at home all day, entertaining little kids? Fuhgettaboutit. How did mothers do it without losing their sanity? It sounded boring as hell. But then again, what man would want to marry a woman who felt the way I did about domestic life?
Watching the house numbers roll downward, I found the address I was looking for, shiny gold numerals emblazoned against a black door. I pressed a dimly lit doorbell button and heard the chime inside, a standard melody used by millions of other doorbells. A man answered the door, his head so shiny and bald I wanted to rub it for good luck. I noticed the twin eagle claw tattoos on either side of his thick neck, like talons clutching his collar. He had kind brown eyes and a nice smile, which defied what his arrest record told me.
“Good evening, miss. Can I help you?” he asked pleasantly. Was this polite man the same one who beat his wife once upon a time? I supposed the best of killers were the most charming ones. Ones who could easily draw victims in.
“I’m looking for Cody Brannigan.”
“Look no more. You’ve found him.”
“Oh, hi. My name is Ari Wilburn, and I’m with the Durham Police Department. May I come in for a moment?” I didn’t want to mention that my job as a file clerk had absolutely nothing to do with why I was there. I figured sliding around those details was the only way he would speak to me. I’m sure it was illegal impersonating an officer, though was it really impersonation if I didn’t say I was a police officer? The devil was in the details.
His smile faded away. “Oh God. You’ve found my daughter Kat. Is she—?”
Watching my face carefully, he stepped aside for me to slide past him inside the entryway.
“No, sir. I’m informally investigating her disappearance—off the books. The department doesn’t know I’m here.” I needed to cover my ass just in case this conversation ever came up with my boss. “I’ve been going through old files and came across Kat’s. I figured maybe I could offer a fresh look at what happened, if you’re willing to talk to me.”
He turned toward the living room, talking with his back to me. “Yeah, sure. Why not? I’m surprised after all this time they’ve even kept the file. After so much time passes, you kind of give up hope that anyone cares, y’know?”
“The department is doing everything they can to get answers, sir.”
“Cody. You can call me Cody.”
“Okay, thanks, Cody. I’m sorry that we haven’t found your daughter yet, but I’m hoping to change that.”
The living room was unremarkable, save for its messiness. Brown suede matching sofa and loveseat, two end tables covered with random papers and fragments of children’s toys. A coffee table littered with empty plates, mugs, and cereal bowls indicated Cody—and Tempest, when he exercised his visitation rights—took their meals here, before the shrine of a wall-mounted flat-screen TV. The only notable personal effect was a family portrait on the wall of Cody, Helen, Kat, and Tempest in happier days. The picture looked to have been professionally, if rather gaudily, framed. The Olan Mills logo stood out against the black background. I imagined what an event it must have been for the family, dressing up in their Sunday best to get their portrait taken in a “fancy” studio.
“Coffee or anything?” he offered, still standing while I took a seat on one end of the sofa. A sharp object poked at the back pocket of my jeans. Scooting aside, I pulled a Snow White mini-figure out from between the cushions, finding a puzzle piece and a board game token along with it. Sofas tended to hide a trove of childhood treasures, though the days of finding loose change like when I was a kid were long gone since the advent of debit cards.
“No thanks. I won’t stay long. I just need to ask a few questions.”
Cody sat on the farthest end of the loveseat. His right leg bounced uncontrollably with a nervous tremor he seemed unaware of. “Okay, shoot.”
“I understand you and Helen are divorced. What happened there?”
“Typical marriage problems, I guess. I didn’t like what she did for a living, and I felt she’d be better off staying home with the girls. She disagreed. And we were stuck at an impasse that we couldn’t get past.”
So we were going to start off being evasive ... I’d have my work cut out for me.
“Ah, the bartending, right?” Cody nodded. “I can see your perspective. She probably got hit on a lot, and no husband wants to watch his wife be sexualized by other men—especially when she’s the mother of his children.”
“See? You get it. I don’t know why it was so difficult for her to understand. But it’s water under the bridge now.”
I’d gained his confidence. Time to hit him with a sucker punch. “Full disclosure here—Helen told me violence was common in your marriage.”
“Of course she did.” Cody exhaled loudly and dropped his elbows on his knees, resting his face on his hands. “Yes, Helen and I had our fair share of fights. Though I wasn’t the one who started it. If you look at my record, I have no history of violence before Helen. All my problems started after I married her. The reality? She’d beat on me, and when I tried to defend myself she’d call the cops on me. Of course they always sided with her, the woman. Because the woman’s always the victim. No one ever considers the man a victim.”
“Cody, c’mon now. You’re bigger, stronger, easily able to walk away from a fight. And if she was beating you, why were you so intent on staying married to her?”
“First of all, I love my wife—I’m sorry, my ex-wife. No matter what she did to me, I always loved her. And she was a great mom. So I figured it was better to deal with her breakdowns than to lose her altogether. And as for walking away from a fight, have you met my wife? She’s what you might call a big-boned gal—not fat, just meaty in an attractive way. I like curves on a woman.” He looked my slender frame over appraisingly and added, “No offense.”
“None taken.” Well, maybe a little.
“And she’s taller than a lot of men. Hell, she’s probably stronger than me, too. She doesn’t take any crap from anybody. But walking away was not an option, because she liked the confrontation. To be honest, I think ignoring her would have made her even angrier.”
“Is that why you shaved your head—to appear more menacing?”
“Premature balding, actually. Thanks for questioning my
manhood, by the way.” He grinned, and I couldn’t help but feel bad for him now. “And in case you were wondering, the tattoo isn’t a stick-on. It’s real ... and yes, it makes me feel more manly.”
I laughed. At least all of his suffering—losing his child, his wife, his good-guy image—hadn’t stolen his sense of humor.
“Sorry. I wasn’t trying to emasculate you. It’s just, well, a red flag when a girl goes missing and you find a history of violence from the father—plus a divorce on top of that. Logically it makes the most sense that you would have taken her, considering your wife was seeking primary custody. Run away with her, start a new life, but then why not Tempest too?” I examined him, searched his eyes for the truth, saw the wrinkles of worry and the paleness of sleepless nights. I sensed that he’d lost himself when he lost Kat. “But I’m thinking that’s not what happened.”
Sitting back, he crossed the bouncing leg over the other, hands folded in his lap. “You actually believe I’m innocent. Why? The cops certainly didn’t.”
“Because I know the look of someone who’s lost the other half of their heart. Kat was yours, wasn’t she?”
“Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
“What kind of relationship did you have with her?”
His eyes watered in the wistful, contemplative way when sepia memories come alive again in vibrant color.
“Kat was funny. Oh, her sense of humor was far more advanced even than mine.” He grinned boyishly. “And smart. Whip-smart. By eighteen months she knew her entire alphabet. By two she was spelling words. She would have gone on to do great things if she was still here. And beautiful. Dimpled cheeks, eyes that unveiled your secrets—she was intense, in a good way. That kind of intensity that makes you want to be a better man because you know she deserves so much more than you can offer. And yet she was so perfectly happy with the simple life she was given. She was my everything.”