In Broad Daylight

by Marie Ferrarella

  She paused before her classroom before turning the doorknob. Dax could see the tension skimming up and down her back. Apprehension? Guilt? It was still too soon to tell.

  The classroom was empty.

  The children who normally occupied it had temporarily been moved to the school library until the smell of smoke could be eradicated from the room.

  As if of like mind, Dax and Nathan went straight to the wastepaper basket beside the desk.

  Knowing they probably preferred to have her hang back, Brenda still joined them. Even looking at the basket, burnt and misshapen, the fact that the fire had started here still amazed her. She was so careful. How could this have happened? The metal container was completely blackened, as was the side of the desk closest to the basket.

  "Looks like this is the only place the fire damaged," Harwood noted.

  Nathan looked around and nodded. "Lucky."

  "Controlled," Dax countered. He raised his eyes to Brenda. "Whoever set this did it after the alarm went off."

  Why was he looking at her like that? Did he expect her to suddenly fall to her knees and confess? "How can you tell?" Brenda asked.

  He'd already made the calculations. "Because it took the firefighters less than ten minutes to get here. Ten minutes would have been enough time for the fire to have spread throughout the whole room if it had started first. The alarm was tripped and the firefighters were already on their way when the fire was set. Someone wanted to be sure that no one was hurt during all this." Dax paused as he looked at her. "Do you have any matches in the classroom?"

  So much for thinking she was being paranoid. "As a matter of fact, I do."

  There was no smoking allowed on the premises. Besides, he doubted if she was a smoker. There were no nicotine stains between her middle and index fingers and her teeth were blazing white. Which begged the question, "Why?"

  "We have a science project going." She gestured toward the cone-shaped papier-mâché structure sitting in the middle of a table in the far corner. It looked like a child's version of a tropical island. "The children and I are making a volcano."

  Plausible, he thought, nodding. "Can I see the matches?"

  Nerves were skittering through her as she opened the top drawer to her desk. She didn't know whether to be furious or to search for the name of a good lawyer. Reaching for the box where she kept her matches, she stopped.

  "They're not here." There wasn't much to move around in the drawer, but she went through the motions with no success. "I keep them in a metal box, but it's not in here."

  The taller of the two detectives said nothing, only nodded, but by now she was convinced that he thought she was involved in this more than just peripherally. Closer scrutiny into her life might only convince him of the fact. Recently widowed, her finances were not in the best of shape. Maybe he'd think that she decided to supplement it by ransoming Annie.

  The very thought moved a cold shiver up and down her spine. The nausea that she had been struggling to keep at bay threatened to overpower her.

  She blew out an annoyed breath as she slammed the drawer shut harder than she'd intended. "Look, I can take a lie-detector test."

  Guilty people didn't usually volunteer to do that—unless they were very, very good, Dax thought. Lie detectors were not infallible and had been known to be fooled. Still, he decided to pass—for now. "That won't be necessary."

  She surprised him by not grasping at the truce he offered her. "I think it is just to get that look out of your eyes. I want you to understand that I love Annie Tyler, maybe because no one else seems to, but I think that she is a wonderful little girl who has been given a raw deal from the day she was born."

  He decided to play devil's advocate just to see her reaction. "Having parents who can buy you anything you want doesn't seem like such a raw deal to me."

  "Anything but their time," she pointed out evenly.

  He looked at her with renewed interest. Not all kidnappings were about ransoms. Sometimes children were taken because the kidnapper thought they were rescuing the child from an unhappy life. "Maybe you could give her a better life."

  "I know I could—" Brenda stopped abruptly. "I didn't take Annie. I wouldn't traumatize her like that. Besides, I was right out there in plain sight all the time," she pointed out.

  That didn't constitute an ironclad alibi. "Accomplices aren't unheard of."

  She'd had just about enough of this. "Detective Cavanaugh, I want a lie-detector test," she repeated. "I insist."

  "We'll see what we can do to accommodate you later," Dax told her before turning toward Harwood. "Right now, I'd like to talk to some of the other teachers, see if they saw anything. And while you're at it, I'd like the address and phone number of those prospective parents Mrs. York was showing around."

  "Of course," Harwood agreed quickly. "It's in my office. I'll go back and get it. Mrs. York can help you with the other teachers."

  Right now, Dax thought, Mrs. York looked as if she'd rather hand his head to him on a platter.

  * * *

  Chapter 3

  « ^ »

  "You really suspect her?"

  Nathan was leaning back against the desk at the front of the room, his attention diverted toward Brenda York. He glanced at his partner. To his left a stocky, pleasant-faced teacher was leading a gaggle of second-graders out of the art room, which had been set aside to conduct questioning.

  Dax was looking at Annie Tyler's teacher from across the room. She was saying something to one of the kids who looked concerned. The boy smiled at her and nodded. She had a way about her, he thought. Made people trust her. Put them at their ease.

  And at her mercy?

  He glanced at his partner. "We're supposed to suspect everyone, Nathan, you know that."

  Nathan gave a little shrug. His small pad inside his jacket pocket rustled against his shirt. The pages, thick with notes, were no longer smooth. "Yeah, but she seems so upset about it."

  Dax smiled. "You always did have a weakness for blondes." He turned toward his partner. "The woman had access. By her own admission, she knows the little girl inside and out, that means she'd know exactly how to handle her."

  Shaking his head, Nathan frowned. "What's her motive?"

  She moved like poetry, Dax thought. Flowing into every step. Confident, yet incredibly feminine.

  Abruptly, he wiped the thought from his mind, telling himself he had to get out more. Dax shoved his hands into his pockets. "Money's always a good motive. Most people can't have enough of it."

  "So you do suspect her."

  Dax shrugged. He was thinking out loud, but he and Nathan had that kind of relationship. Half-formed thoughts could be voiced in safety.

  "My gut tells me no, my training tells me to hold off any final judgments."

  As he watched the woman stop to comfort one of the last children in the line, Nathan sighed. "If I were single, my gut would be telling me a whole lot of other things besides hold off."

  Dax laughed but made no comment. Precisely because his gut, or whatever part of him that was instrumental in allowing attraction to set in, was telling him a great deal, none of which included the phrase "hold off." If being a cop, a good cop, wasn't so ingrained in him, he might have followed through on one of any number of instincts.

  As it was, he felt something stirring within him, something beyond the enormous sexual pull that kept harassing him. Harassing him because it couldn't go anywhere. She was part of a case. And she was married.

  She was also human. He saw the strain on her face before she locked it away.

  Leaving Nathan behind him, he crossed to her. "You looked tired. Why don't you take a break?"

  The sound of the detective's voice coming from behind her startled Brenda. She'd been allowing her mind to wander for a second. And grasp onto some awful scenarios. Regaining control over her emotions, she turned around to face him.

  "That won't help Annie."

  The sincerity he heard in her voice cre
pt through the layers of steeliness he'd imposed around himself whenever he was working. He had to admit she impressed him. Someone else in her position would have been looking to distance themselves from the police as they covered their own tail. But she didn't. Her concern was completely centered on the missing child. "You know, about that lie detector test—"

  Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly and she raised her chin again, as if bracing herself for a further confrontation. "Anytime, Detective."

  Anytime.

  If he'd had the luxury right now, he would have allowed his thoughts free rein in a fantasy. But he didn't have that luxury. What he had was a missing child.

  Dax looked into her eyes. Nothing there made him doubt his decision. "I think we can skip it. The department doesn't like having its time wasted."

  Was she finally allowed to get off the hook—or was he just toying with her? The thought that he suspected her of being involved in the kidnapping made her furious, never mind that logically, she knew it was his job to suspect everyone.

  Brenda measured her words out slowly. "Then you finally believe that I didn't have anything to do with this?"

  He knew he was stepping outside the lines, but they paid him for going with instincts, and his professional one told him exactly what Nathan's told him. That Brenda York wasn't involved in this.

  His eyes held hers and something inside him fidgeted. It gave him pause. But commitment was a funny thing. Any kind of commitment, even to a state of mind. It meant boxing himself in and he didn't like to do that either. He liked the freedom that noncommitment represented.

  So, he didn't answer her.

  Instead, he said, "You've been a great help with the kids."

  She'd had a calming effect, putting questions to them that had needed to be answered. They'd asked children from all the grades if any of them had seen anything suspicious. There'd been a few conflicting stories, none of which had amounted to anything. But even that was headway. It meant the kidnappers were very good at their job and that this had all been premeditated.

  "I'm not too good with them myself," he added since the stillness made him uncomfortable.

  "No children of your own?"

  He knew that if his late mother had had her way, he would have been married for years by now, with half a dozen kids. Truthfully, pleasing his mother had been the only reason he'd ever considered the state of matrimony—and very nearly made a fatal mistake he would have regretted, one way or another, for the rest of his life.

  Dax shook his head. "No wife of my own."

  She gave him an amused look. "That doesn't answer the question."

  Dax grinned. Sharp lady. "No, no kids of my own. You?"

  She paused for a moment, as if about to say something, then shook her head. "No, I don't have any children." She nodded toward the last of the children filing out the door. "Those are my kids."

  He had the feeling she'd almost said something else, but let it go. He was guilty of reading too much into everything. "Big family."

  She moved her shoulders in a vague shrug. There was the hint of a longing expression on her face. "I always wanted a big family."

  He looked down at her left hand. Again, he wondered why there was no ring there. "How does your husband feel about that?"

  The question stiffened her slightly. Everything was still raw. There hadn't been enough time for a proper scab to form over things, even though she'd never really loved Wade. Somehow, that seemed to make it all worse. He had deserved better, he'd deserved someone who could have loved him to distraction.

  She looked toward the doorway, away from the detective who stirred up too many things inside of her with his questions. "My husband doesn't feel anything at all. He's dead."

  Dax felt as if he'd just stomped on a delicate structure, breaking it into a hundred pieces. "Oh, I'm sorry."

  In her mind's eyes, she could still see Wade, see his kind face. God, but she had tried to love him, really tried.

  "Yes, so am I." She knotted her hands together before her. "Wade was a good man. He was killed in a freak accident during maneuvers." She looked at him, gauging her words, doling them out slowly only after examining them. She wasn't used to being overly cautious. She liked to be open; it was a freedom she'd embraced wholeheartedly after leaving home. But this detective put her on her guard. "He was a marine." She shifted her weight, impatient to leave the subject, impatient to get on with the pressing job of finding Annie. "That was the last of them. Anyone else you want to question?"

  He'd called in backup. Several uniformed patrolmen had searched the building from top to bottom as well as the surrounding grounds. No sign of the missing girl had turned up. No handy clues, no lost hair ribbons like in the movies. Annie Tyler didn't wear hair ribbons. And she seemed to have vanished into thin air.

  In addition, the phone number the headmaster had produced as the one given by the couple Brenda had taken on the tour of the building had turned out to be bogus. No big surprise there. Dax had expected as much.

  There were times he hated being right.

  "No, no more questions right now. Except for you." He saw the wariness creep into her eyes. What was she waiting for him to say? "Can you describe the couple?" He looked from her to Harwood, hoping that one of them had retained enough detail to create a half-decent sketch. Most people, he knew, weren't good with details.

  "I can do better than that," Brenda told him. She took a pad from the easel and picked up a newly sharpened pencil from the desk. "I can sketch them for you."

  That would have been the next step, putting one or both of them together with a sketch artist. Exchanging looks with Nathan—Nathan's had unabashed admiration clearly registering in his—Dax turned back to the woman. "You can do that?"

  "Drawing is my hobby," she told him. "It relaxes me." And these days, she thought, she had to work really hard at relaxing. Decisions had to be made, events had to be faced up to.

  Because her time was running out.

  "Great, see what you can whip up for us." As Brenda sat down and got busy, Dax looked at Harwood. "We're going to need the little girl's address. Her parents have to be notified."

  He'd held off doing that, hoping against hope to find the child without alarming her parents. He knew what his own parents had gone through the time his brother Troy had been lost in the woods while hiking with his friends. He'd been fifteen at the time and no one had taken him, but it had been harrowing nonetheless. "Missing" was one of the most pain-evoking words in the English language. It had been the worst twenty-eight hours his parents had ever gone through.

  Obviously anticipating the request, Harwood produced a folded piece of paper from his pocket and surrendered it to him. On it was the Tylers' address and phone number. "Annie's father is on location in Europe. Her mother's in New York, I believe, visiting friends."

  Brenda looked up from the image that was forming beneath her pencil on the sketch pad.

  "I already put calls through to them," she informed Dax. "Her mother's catching the first flight out of Kennedy. Her father's taking his private jet. But neither of them will be home for several hours."

  She'd jumped ahead of him again. There was no end to the surprises this diminutive blonde delivered, Dax thought. "So if there's a ransom call—"

  She'd thought of that as well. "There's a housekeeper at the house, a Martha Danridge. She's been with them for several years. I told Annie's mother it might be wise to give Ms. Danridge instructions on what she wanted her to say if the kidnappers called."

  Nathan shook his head. Admiration shone in his eyes as he looked at the young woman. "You ever stop being a teacher, Mrs. York, we could certainly use you on the force."

  She smiled at him, dismissing the compliment with grace. "Just covering bases."

  The woman was clearheaded, Dax thought. He liked that. The women he came in contact with outside his own family tended to be a little foggy when it came to that department.

  It was actually something he though
t of as a plus. That way, he wouldn't be tempted to make a mistake and get involved with any of them on more than just a passing, superficial level.

  He came up behind her and looked over her shoulder at the sketch she was completing. It was of the woman. Her face was gaunt and there was a slight edge to it, a sharpness that made the viewer wary. "You really can draw."

  Brenda looked up at him. "I told you I could."

  "So you did." He extrapolated on what she'd just told him. "You know the Tyler's housekeeper?"

  "Only by sight."

  She'd been to the house once, to talk to Annie's parents about Annie. Martha Danridge had let her in and brought her to Annie's mother. Annie's father was away, which seemed par for the course, and her mother, completely forgetting about the appointment that had been made to discuss Annie's painful shyness, had been on her way out. Perforce, the conversation had been brief. Rebecca Allen-Tyler had thanked her for her concern and dismissed her the way she might a waiter who'd brought the wrong order to her table.

  Brenda's heart had gone out to the little girl, knowing her mother undoubtedly treated her with the same regard: as something to be suffered, but not necessarily with patience. People like that, she thought, didn't deserve having a bright, sensitive little girl like Annie.

  Dax made a judgment call. "Close enough," he told her.

  She didn't understand. "For what?"

  He had a feeling she could smooth the way for them with the housekeeper faster than they could manage themselves. Badges tended to rattle people and the situation was already stressful enough. He'd seen her in action with both jittery teachers and anxious children. Her calming effect would be welcomed.

  "I'd like you to come with us," he explained. He could feel Nathan staring at him. "You can finish the second sketch on the way there."

  Brenda nodded. Her mouth curved. She was eager to do what she could. Being suddenly cast adrift while the detectives went on with the investigation would have made her insane.

  "All right. I just need to stop by my room to get my things. I'll meet you outside."