by Erin Healy
The sheriff took a step toward Lexi, appearing to encourage her to leave with him. Grant thought he wanted to eavesdrop, though, so he didn’t say anything.
“What were you doing?” she asked.
“I needed some money,” he lied, then chanced a look into Lexi’s eyes. He’d always believed she was smarter than he was, and he hoped this moment was no exception. They could be of more help to Molly if they were out there together. Would she acknowledge that? Would she believe he loved Molly more than his own life?
She said so the sheriff could hear, “But I gave you a key.”
His heart rose into his throat. “I lost it.”
“You didn’t say anything about a key,” the sheriff said.
“Would you have believed me?”
Lexi looked at the law man. “You told me you had a drug tip.”
The man nodded once.
“Did they find anything?” she asked.
“Not yet,” he said, still studying Grant.
Lexi’s grip on the bars eased enough for her fingertips to turn pink again. She returned her gaze to Grant, and her lips parted. Something like stunned understanding passed between them. Had she known Warden had planted merchandise in her home?
“Of course they didn’t find anything,” she said. “Where did your tip come from? Warden Pavo himself? Doesn’t the timing of all this seem strange to you, Dawson?”
“More than you know.”
The innuendo shocked Grant.
“You don’t think I had something to do with Molly’s disappearance?” Lexi said.
“Anything’s possible right now.”
“Anything but that,” Grant said.
“I’ll bet that sighting of Ward’s truck isn’t legitimate,” she blurted. “He wants you to think—”
“Lexi, let us do our job,” he said.
She pursed her lips, and Grant knew she didn’t care what the sheriff planned to do.
“I don’t want to press charges against Grant.”
“That might not matter.”
“He could help us find Molly.”
“Us?”
“You can’t stop me from going to the Blue Devil.”
“Don’t hamper my investigation, young lady, or I’ll lock you up too.” But he smiled at her.
“Let my husband go.” My husband. Grant took a deep, hopeful breath. “I promise you he won’t leave town while Molly’s missing.”
“Or after we find her,” Grant said.
“There’s paperwork to be done first,” Dawson said.
“Do it later!” she said. “Our daughter’s out there!”
“I’m by the book. How do you think I keep getting reelected?”
“We need him! He knows where this guy goes! How he thinks! We have to check everywhere.”
“And we will. But we’ve got limited manpower and limited time. We chase the hottest leads first.”
“You’ve called the FBI, right?” Grant asked. “How long will it take them to get here?”
“Couple hours.”
“What did you mean by limited time?” Lexi asked.
The sheriff frowned.
“He means every minute counts,” Grant said to Lexi, fearing he meant something else.
“He meant something else,” she said, looking at Dawson. “How much time?”
He held her eyes. “Statistically, abductors who intend to kill do it within three hours,” he said. The air left the room. “You coming?” he asked Lexi.
“Go,” Grant told her. “I’ll come as soon as I can.” He grabbed her hand as she pulled away. “Don’t go to the Blue Devil by yourself. Let the sheriff do what he has to do, but I don’t want you there alone. Wait for him.”
“I can’t wait,” she said.
“Then at least get Angelo. Take him with you.”
She nodded.
“Lexi, I’m so sorry. For everything. If I could change it all . . .”
Her arm fell to her side. “I forgive you,” she said.
“I love you.”
She didn’t answer.
{ chapter 32 }
Lexi wouldn’t have taken the time to fetch Angelo except that Grant’s warning scared her. The Residence was located directly between the sheriff’s office and Porter Avenue. If Warden was disinclined to surrender Molly on request, Angelo’s brute strength would be more convincing.
She pulled in at the facility as she had at Molly’s school, taking a handicapped spot instead of a piece of lawn this time. She flew over the cobblestone walk into the stunning lobby—the only portion of the building that had been built to impress with its skylighted indoor garden, fountains, and solid oak furniture.
Her feet sprinted past the reception desk and down the north wing toward the nurse’s office. They would know where Angelo was.
Lexi yanked open a glass door embellished with frosted peacocks and pounced on the closest nurse, who was carrying a cup of coffee to her desk.
“Where’s Angelo? It’s an emergency!”
Her eyes went wide. “With one of our residents? We have proced—”
“No! I need him for something else.”
A man in scrubs who was typing at a computer spoke without looking away from what he was doing. “Angelo went to lunch more than an hour ago. He should have been back by now.”
“Where would he be?”
He looked at a door in the rear of the office and pointed. “Check the dining room. Third shift is passing through about now. Downstairs, second door on the right.”
Lexi pushed the door open before he finished, hit the stairs in five strides, and clattered down to the lower level making as much ruckus as a basketball team on a shiny arena court.
Please be there, please be there . . .
There were plenty of people in the dining hall, which reminded her of a high-school cafeteria.
No Angelo. Could he be sitting down?
There were only three rows of tables, and two aisles. Lexi speed-walked through, looking for the broad crown of white-blond locks.
She was out of time. If only Grant could have come with her!
Lexi spotted her mother. The sight of Alice hit her like a car.
Here?
She sat next to Lexi’s father and stared at his plate of food, her head tilted as if to hear him better in this noisy place, her hands folded in her lap. His face was rosy beneath his glasses, and his food was untouched. He beamed and talked, animated as Lexi had never seen him since before . . .
Alice looked up and saw her daughter, then attempted a dim smile.
Questions were popping out of Lexi as she hurried to their table, but she couldn’t linger. Even if she could, she’d ruin their moment.
“Have you seen Angelo?” Lexi asked them, bending over the bench seat.
Alice turned to her purse and lifted the flap. “After he brought your father in from his walk. Yes.”
She wouldn’t look Lexi in the eye. Still angry about her confession, Lexi thought. She withdrew a folded piece of paper from the side pocket.
“Angelina Jolie took me for a walk today,” Barrett said. “Pretty day. Pretty as your mother.”
“Mom, I have to talk to you.”
“It can wait.”
“It’s Molly, Mom. Ward took her.”
Now Alice looked at her.
“I need to find Angelo. He can help me look for her.”
“He had to go.” She handed Lexi the page from her purse. “Asked me to give this to you.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t read it. What is the sheriff doing?”
“Looking for her, of course.”
Lexi unfolded the paper. A handwritten note.
Lexi, I will not be here when you need me most, but all this will make sense later. Listen: when I said the other night that you need to consult love about Molly, I don’t think you understood what I meant. Love always protects, always hopes, always perseveres. Love will never fail you.
Don’t listen to Warden Pavo. Listen to love, which keeps no record of wrongs. Choose love, and it will save you even now. Molly too.
Angelo
Barrett said, “I told you to watch out for that jailer,” and shoved his spoon under a mountain of mashed potatoes.
Lexi’s eyes snapped to him. She’d forgotten her dad’s babbling during their last visit. “Did he get your little sister?” he asked. “She’s lost.”
“Dad, are you talking about Molly?”
How was it possible that Angelo and Dad could have known about her abduction before it happened?
“Course not! Silly girl. Molly is your niece. I’ve been saying plain as day that I mean your little sister. Lexi, baby. Did he get Lexi?”
She slowly shook her head, wondering if she should be nodding. Barrett mirrored her movement. They were a picture of solemn worry.
“Well, he’ll get her soon enough. She’s lost, you know, and no one’s looking for her.”
Alice placed her hand over his, and her eyes glistened.
Before leaving the Residence, Lexi told her mom about Grant and made Alice promise to go hold Sheriff Dawson’s feet to the fire until that paperwork was finished and Grant could be released. Alice had pressed her cell phone into Lexi’s palm and insisted she take it. She said she’d buy a prepaid one and would call as soon as she had news about Grant. Lexi told her where she was going and promised to call every twenty minutes.
Sitting in her car, she tried to call Angelo’s cell phone three times. He did not answer.
Lexi had sacrificed fifteen minutes by the time she drove away from the residence with Angelo’s note crumpled between her palm and the steering wheel. She’d read it four times and still didn’t understand it. Couldn’t he say anything plainly?
For the first time, she was angry at him. Her daughter’s life depended on speed and clarity. Was that so much to ask for?
She needed her husband out and helping as soon as possible.
Her husband.
It had been years since she’d thought of him that way. It had been years since he’d acted like one. Until today. Lexi knew she would not be out looking for Molly if Grant hadn’t intervened in Ward’s attempt to frame her as a dealer.
She had so many questions: how Grant had known there was trouble, why he’d bothered to get her out of it, how he knew where to look for whatever Ward had stashed, how he’d gotten rid of it. It would have cost him dearly to be caught in possession of those things!
When he said he was sorry, when he said he loved her, it was so easy to believe him. The things that had prevented her from forgiving him before seemed like nothing compared to what they faced with the potential loss of their daughter.
She did forgive him, because she had to. She had to cut herself loose of her anger toward Grant because it took too much energy to stay attached to it. It zapped her heart and her mind of the agility she was going to need to save Molly. She couldn’t afford a grudge right now.
Did that make forgiving Grant an act of selfishness? Maybe. Just maybe.
She pushed her rattling Volvo to its limits and made it to the Blue Devil by ten after one. The parking lot was empty.
The flat-roofed building, low and long, had a steep wood-shingle roof and poorly applied brown clapboard siding. No windows. Ads spray painted directly onto the walls of the nightclub advertised Girls! Girls! Girls! and two-for-one drinks on Tuesday Ladies’ Night. The plastic D in the electric sign was shattered, exposing the broken bulbs.
Grant had instructed them to look in the back of the building. Lexi drove around to the rear, looking for stairs. Cement steps and an iron rail, he’d said, going down.
When she didn’t see any, she pulled the car into a U-turn and drove back, close to the building, leaning over the passenger seat.
Nothing.
Lexi felt sick to her stomach. Would Grant have lied?
She got out of the car. There was a door in the back of the club with no knob on the outside. A Dumpster sat by itself ten feet from the door. She found a pile of whiskey bottle boxes and a lot of sticky stains on the asphalt that ran the length of the building. No stairs.
She would try to find the elevator inside.
Lexi jogged around to the front of the building and tried the main entrance. It opened.
The interior was dark and reeked of unappealing smells. She switched to breathing through her mouth. Loud music from a jukebox that had been pumped through a higher-tech sound system vibrated through her internal organs.
Her eyes adjusted to a pretty typical bar scene. Small tables and chairs. A dance floor. A stage. A neon-lit bar lined with mirrors across the back.
The bartender was drying glasses, eyeing her. The music was too loud for talk. She saw a sign for the restrooms and signaled that she was going to use them, mainly to prevent him from following and asking questions.
Lexi stepped into a narrow hall and banged her elbow on the payphone. The walls were papered floor to ceiling with flyers held in place by staples: posters, advertisements, glossy concert announcements, pictures of scantily clad women scrawled with mustaches and horns and Web site addresses, handwritten for-sale signs, beer ads. Between the men’s and women’s rooms, she looked for one that Grant had described: “E Ticket Rides Didn’t Die with Elvis! Thrill Seekers, Apply Here.”
It covered the elevator call button, Grant had said.
There was too much. Too many sheets of paper separating Lexi from finding her child. She ran her hands over the mess, trying to focus on each flyer.
“Help you find something?”
Her heartbeat stumbled once and then recovered. The bartender was standing close enough to touch her. He was shelling peanuts and letting the skins fall on the floor.
“Someone,” she said, shoving her hand into the pocket with the cell phone. “Warden Pavo.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He and I go way back.”
He talked and chewed at the same time. “Whatever you say.”
“I was told I could find him here. That he runs a sort-of . . . bonus operation downstairs.”
“Ain’t no downstairs in this building.”
“Of course there’s not,” Lexi said, hoping to convey that she could keep a secret.
“So now that the plain-as-day has been firmly established, can I get you a drink?” He held out a peanut to her between his first and second fingers. Lexi turned back to the cluttered wall.
“When I find Ward, I’ll order one for each of us,” she said. She put her hand on the largest poster and jerked it off the wall. It was grimy. The paper tore in half.
The bartender laughed. “You think he’s hiding under that mess? He’ll have a few staples in him.”
Lexi grabbed papers with both fists and pulled off as much as she could at once, hoping he’d get mad enough to show her what she would surely find out by being destructive.
“Let me get you a trash can,” he said.
She followed him back into the main room, her fists full of torn papers. “Please. I really don’t care what you and Ward have going on here. You can trust me to be utterly blind, deaf, and dumb. I’m not police, I’m just a mom. He’s got my little girl and I want her back. That’s all. I swear it. I’ll get her and you’ll never see my face again. You can keep doing whatever it is you do.”
He glanced over his shoulder and kept moving toward the bar. Then he lifted the hinged section of counter that allowed him to pass through, bent over and disappeared beneath the bar top, and came up with a small lined trashcan, which he handed across to her. She stared at it.
“People who talk like that usually need something pretty stiff. Sure I can’t make you reconsider?”
“Talk like what?”
He leaned his elbows on the bar and scooped a few more peanuts out of a bowl in front of him. Lexi shoved the papers into the can.
“I’m a good listener. And you sound like you’ve been through a tough time with your daughter. Maybe
I can help.”
“The only way you can help me is by taking me to Warden Pavo.”
“I honestly have never heard of the guy.”
“I have it on pretty good authority that he’s a regular here.”
“Maybe he goes by another name?”
Lexi closed her eyes and bit her lip to keep herself from falling apart. Then she said, “Scrawny guy. Five nine, five ten. Greasy black hair, a little too long. A hooked jaw.”
“That’s about fifty percent of my clientele.”
“Key ring tattoo on his left arm.”
“Ah.” He looked up without moving his head, like a picture of Ward might be under his brows. “Skeleton keys? Like an old jailer?”
“So he has been here?”
“No.” The word was a hammer. “But you’re not the only one who’s been asking about him.”
“It would have been nice if you’d said so.”
“How was I supposed to have put the name and the tatt together?”
“Who was looking for him?”
“Nasty-ugly dude. Face shaped like an alien, all pinched in the eyes. Bony skull.” The bartender screwed up his face and squinted, hunched his shoulders and drew his hands up like claws. His voice was high and breathy, “‘I hear this is the warden’s playground. Seen the warden? Where’s the warden?’” He returned to his peanut-crunching self and gestured to the end of the counter. “Left half-eaten apple cores all over the place.”
The man who’d attacked her at the Residence. He knew Ward? Had he found him? If she couldn’t find Ward, maybe she could find this guy. She shivered at the prospect of meeting him again.
“When?”
“Sunday. Monday.”
He’d attacked her Tuesday. “Has he been here since?”
“No, just those two nights.”
“He was here twice?”
“Complaining at me the whole time, which is why I know your keyring guy wasn’t here.”
“He mentioned the tattoo.”
“He was blistering mad about something, going on and on about Romeo and Juliet.”
The couple’s name triggered a dim recollection in Lexi’s head that had nothing to do with Shakespeare. “The play?”