She did seem to be driving him a little crazy. Why else would his usually calm, laid-back partner be so worked up about what she wanted? Yeah, it was off the wall. But this was Savannah, where law firm porters walked invisible dogs for twenty years after the canines had died, if you believed that Kevin Spacey movie. They weren’t talking about her getting some kind of sick thrills off seeing a fresh body—most people wouldn’t know the bones were human if the skull weren’t there. Besides, all he had to do was say no. But it was as if Gabe were personally upset about the request having been made. Interesting. Very interesting.
“Hey, Cooper, you make a date with that foxy redhead?” a smarmy voice asked. Kinney.
Ty frowned in distaste. The patrolman tried to watch his tongue whenever the company was mixed, but Ty had no doubt the n word flew left, right and center when the man left here. Not to mention lots of crass names for women. He was an equal opportunity piece of shit.
“She came in with some information on a case,” Gabe said, his tone hard. Ty suspected his partner didn’t like the other cop any more than he did, though they’d never discussed it.
“Well, if you decide to bring her in again and need some help friskin’ her, be sure to let me know, y’ hear?” the man said, laughing at his own dim wit as he turned and left.
“Slimeball,” Gabe muttered under his breath.
Ty nodded, then said, in complete solemnity, “About as useless as tits on a boar hog.”
Surprised into laughter, Gabe gave Ty a thumbs-up. “You nailed that one, son.”
Ty grinned. He was so getting the hang of this Southern thing. “Now, what’s the plan? Sit here and pretend you never met her, or are you gonna get back to work?” he prodded.
Gabe’s amusement died, and he shot Ty a quick glare as Ty had expected him to. He had begun to suspect his partner was a little more personally interested in this witness than he should be after just meeting her today. And that it was his interest making him react so strongly to what might otherwise have just come across as a strange request from an eccentric local.
“I’m getting to it,” Gabe said with a sigh. Then he muttered, “She sure is ballsy.”
Admiration. He heard it in the other man’s voice as loud and clear as he heard the irritation. Ty wanted to laugh. All the shit he’d taken from Gabe about his own dating record, and his partner was the one who’d gotten all hot ’n’ bothered by a witness.
From where Ty was sitting, he figured Gabe oughta just ask the woman out and be done with it. Doubting his partner would appreciate that advice, however, he wisely kept his mouth shut. Finally, though, Cooper pushed his chair back and rose to his feet.
“You going to call her and bring her back in?” Ty asked.
“Nope,” Gabe said, glancing at the business card. “I guess I’m gonna get in touch with this FBI agent and then try to decide whether I need to call somebody from the nearest mental hospital to see if they’re missing a patient.”
Gabe wasn’t too keen on calling up some FBI agent, asking him questions about Olivia Wainwright. Not when he’d felt pretty sure he had all the answers he needed about the woman—that is, right up until she’d blindsided him with her request to spend a few minutes alone in a room with the remains of some poor murdered kid.
What he didn’t know about women would fill an encyclopedia, but he sure thought he would know a crazy one when he met her.
You’re not being fair. That little voice in his head, the one he liked to call his backup detective, wasn’t going to let him get away with that. With reason; he wasn’t being fair.
Because he was skeptical? Because he believed in evidence he could see, examine and process? Because he definitely did not believe in people who sold otherworldly services to the gullible and the grief-stricken the way huckster funeral home directors sold them fifty-thousand-dollar mahogany caskets? Or because he had found Olivia Wainwright to be a damned attractive, interesting woman—right up until she’d gone all Bellatrix Lestrange death eater on him?
Shoving that thought out of his head and deciding he’d been watching too many Harry Potter movies on cable, he punched in the number on the business card. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed when he got a recording.
He left a detailed message and his contact information, then disconnected, wondering what to do next. Wait for a response? Talk to his lieutenant about the whole mess? Or just wait for a call from the senator’s chief of staff or the chief of police?
He groaned, each alternative sounding worse than the last. He didn’t like to think she had walked out of there and started calling every number in her address book to line up an army of bigwigs demanding that he give her what she wanted, but it wasn’t impossible.
Almost against his own will, he flipped the business card over and looked at the address and phone number scrawled on the back of it—Olivia’s. She’d asked him to get in touch after he’d had a chance to think about her request. Now he just needed to figure out what he was going to do and how to do it tactfully.
Thank her for her assistance and never see her again?
Thank her for her assistance and refer her to a psychiatrist?
Thank her for her assistance and ask her to dinner?
Or simply say yes, she could see the skeleton and see what happened?
Decisions, decisions.
Before he had to decide anything, however, he overheard a woman’s high-pitched, persistent voice. “You don’t understand. I need to see that detective from the TV!”
The voice had come from the outer vestibule, which was open to the public. There was nothing threatening about the tone or the words, but he’d swear he heard a hint of desperation.
“Trouble?” Ty asked.
“Seems par for the course today,” he said. He got up and followed the sound of the voices, Ty right behind him.
“It’s about the boy, the one they found after the fire.”
“Ma’am, like I told you,” explained the desk sergeant, looking a little exasperated, “Detective Cooper is in a meeting. If you’d like to speak to . . .”
“Nobody but the one on the TV!” the woman said.
Wanting to help derail the situation, he walked over and interjected, “It’s okay, Sarge.” Then he turned to the woman. “I’m Detective Cooper. You were looking for me?”
The woman, who looked to be in her midforties, had a long face prematurely wrinkled and gouged with heavy frown lines on the brow. The unmistakable scent of beer wafted from her rumpled clothes, and her lank hair carried the heavy reek of cigarette smoke. She wore the description “rough life” like it was stamped on her skin.
She turned her bloodshot eyes on him, studying him with hope but also with a hint of mistrust. “You’re the one who was on TV?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Gabe pushed his preconceptions away, knowing it probably hadn’t been easy for her to walk into a police station like this. “What is your name?”
“I’m Sue-Ann Bowles. You really are workin’ on that case, ’bout the boy found Monday?”
“Yes, Miz Bowles, I am.” He gestured to Ty. “This is my partner, Detective Wallace.”
She didn’t reply but instead glanced down and opened a large purse that hung at her side. She dug in it, then pulled out a small square picture, ragged, faded, its age etched in every crease. “Here.”
The photo itself was old, though the child depicted in it was not. He was a cute kid, probably in first or second grade, with a gummy gap where his front teeth should have been, brown hair, freckles. If you were to peel off about a decade’s worth of hard living and the bone-deep sorrow from this woman’s face, he’d even say there was a resemblance.
“That’s my Joey.”
He knew what she’d say next. Her Joey was among the missing, and she feared he was the one whose remains had been found at the fire site.
“He was eight when he got took, right outta the playground near our house. I didn’t even notice he was missing until an ho
ur after suppertime.” Her voice drifted away, years of guilt evident in the visible gouges of time and self-loathing she wore on her face. “My husband told me I shouldn’t let him go down there alone, but he begged and begged.”
Lifting a hand, he put it on her bony shoulder, knowing he couldn’t offer her anything else but a hint of human connection. God, he couldn’t even imagine it. What, he wondered, had this woman been like before her child was kidnapped? Had she been on a collision course with the dark side even then? Or had she been a normal, hardworking mom who loved her son, her husband and her home, who’d had no idea she was about to take a hard right turn into the agonizing abyss of lostkid land?
“That was eight years ago,” she whispered. “Eight years he’s been gone.”
Eight years. Probably not the same boy, then. As much as he wished he could help her and could use the help on the case, he had to be honest. “Miz Bowles,” he said, speaking carefully, “I think it’s very unlikely that your son’s remains were the ones we found this week.”
The woman snatched the picture back. “I know that. I ain’t stupid. Joey got found four years back in an old apartment buildin’ up in Augusta.”
Gabe was hit with two strong emotions: sorrow for her, of course, but also confusion.
“He was hidden under some floorboards and hadn’t been dead more’n a few months.”
He and Ty shared a glance, both seeing the commonality that must have driven her here. But, heaven knew, hiding bodies in buildings wasn’t exactly a unique way to dispose of them, though it was a pretty stupid one. Some shrink or FBI profiler would probably have something to say about what it meant—guilty conscience or some such. But as far as he was concerned, it just meant dumbass killer who left more evidence to be used against him later. Which was A-OK with him.
“Afterward, I did some reading on the computer at the library and found out about another case. A boy named Brian Durkee from Marietta. His body was found in 2003.”
Gabe crossed his arms, noting that Ty was leaning closer, getting more interested, in spite of the spiderwebthin connection this woman was making.
“He was white, too, with light brown hair. Had turned twelve a few weeks before he died, just like my Joey.” Her voice grew louder as she spoke. “And he had been kept alive for a while—years even—before he was murdered!”
Interesting. He couldn’t deny that much. But not earth-shattering. Sadly, kids were kidnapped all the time. Statistically, it was usually a custody issue, but there were random psychos who went out trawling for kids. It was a sick fact of life.
“You don’t see it,” she said.
“I do, ma’am. It’s just . . .”
“Two boys,” she snapped, “and with this one you found, that’s three.” She raised her hand, three fingers jutting straight out to illustrate her point. “All from somewhere in the Southeast. All about the same age. All lookin’ alike. All kidnapped, held till they was about twelve, then murdered and their bodies stuffed inside a wall or under a floor or somethin’.”
Startled, he asked, “What?”
She shook her head, hard, as if angry at herself for not mentioning it. “The Durkee boy, he was found inside a compartment in a movie theater in Myrtle Beach.”
It may have been that this grief-stricken woman was seeing coincidences, but, to be honest, Gabe couldn’t help seeing them, too. When she laid it out like that, it was pretty damned surprising. And, strangely, the one thing he kept coming back to was Olivia Wainwright’s face when she mentioned her fear that the man who had attacked her had been working with an accomplice, who’d perhaps gotten away.
What if she’s right? What if he’s still out there and has been since the night she escaped?
“Even the timing adds up to something going on. The first one found in ’03, my Joey in ’07, now this new one. Seems to me some crazy psycho is killing boys every four years and nobody seems to care nothing about it!”
Gabe froze, doing the math rapidly in his head. The woman had come here thinking the remains they’d found had been of a boy killed recently. She apparently hadn’t listened closely to the news report and didn’t realize those remains were roughly . . . twelve years old. Which put that murder somewhere around 1999. Four years before the Durkee boy. Her son’s had been four years after that. The final piece of the puzzle was infinitely more worrying.
Because it had been four years since.
“Jesus,” Ty whispered. Apparently he’d been hit with the same awful implication.
If this convoluted tale was true—a big if—the timing couldn’t be worse. Because if some psycho really was kidnapping boys, aging them, then killing them every four years, he might be out there, right now, with another victim. A victim who might not have very long to live.
And he suddenly had to wonder: Despite her unusual methods, might Olivia Wainwright be the key to finding him?
Olivia hadn’t known what to expect when she’d asked to examine the remains found after the bar fire. It hadn’t, however, been that the lead detective on the case would practically pick her up and push her out of the interview room in his rush to get away from her, like she was contagious, her madness catching. Yet that’s what he’d done.
“You could have given me the benefit of the doubt,” she muttered, still bothered by his reaction, hours later. He hadn’t even asked her why, hadn’t demanded an explanation. He’d heard her proposal, decided she was—what had he called her?—a whack job, and said goodbye.
After leaving the police station, she’d been so bothered by the whole thing, she hadn’t even thought about going in to the office for a while. That, despite the fact that Julia had called and left two worried messages on her voice mail this afternoon. She had called her boss back, assuring her she was fine and would tell her what was going on soon. Then Liv had come home and busied herself doing laundry and washing her kitchen floor—anything to avoid thinking for a while.
It hadn’t helped. She’d thought. A lot. Mainly about him.
Why she’d been so upset about the good-looking detective’s reaction, she couldn’t say. It had felt almost personal. She’d expected suspicion, perhaps. Disbelief. Not dismay. But dismay was what she’d swear she saw in Cooper’s eyes before he’d launched himself out of his chair, thanking her for her time and saying he’d be in touch.
Digging out Steven Ames’s business card had been an impulsive act. She hadn’t seen or spoken to the FBI agent in at least two years, though he used to call to check up on her once every six months or so. She honestly didn’t know why she still had the man’s card in her wallet. Or why she’d thought of him when she realized Detective Cooper might need some outside convincing to let her do what she knew she had to. Now, though, she decided the impulse had been the right one. If there was anybody who would want to know for sure whether Dwight Collier had had an accomplice, it was Special Agent Ames.
She used to think Ames had taken a fatherly interest in her. Now, though, she had to wonder. Had he ever really, fully believed it was over? Or had those phone calls, that tenuous connection, been maintained because, deep down, he feared it wasn’t?
Ames had thought from the time he’d come to Georgia to work on her case that the man responsible for her kidnapping had committed that kind of crime before. Not just with Jack, but other for-ransom jobs on the southeast coast. Kidnappings of people with wealthy family members, all of which had ended in murder. Except hers.
Not for lack of trying.
Looking back, she remembered how surprised he’d been when he’d read the profile of Dwight Collier, the man Savannah police had killed that night twelve years ago, when he’d come to pick up the ransom money. The agent had acted as if he just couldn’t believe the petty thug/drifter could have been working his kidnapping schemes for several years, staying ahead of the police and the FBI. Ames, more than anyone, had wanted her to study pictures of the man, to see if there was anything at all familiar about him.
She’d agreed, but it hadn
’t helped. There hadn’t been anything familiar. Nothing to rule him in or out, actually, as the monster who’d taken her from her bed. Having heard but not seen him, she’d had no way of knowing for sure without hearing his voice. Even that might not have been enough, since she’d heard him say so little and then only when she was terrified.
Not that he’d been alive to say a word.
Of course, that had all been before she’d known about the dark ability she’d acquired during the last night of her captivity, so she had never considered examining Collier’s remains, just to be sure. By the time she had discovered what she could do, a year after the kidnapping—God, Grandmother, I’m so sorry I got hysterical at your funeral—Collier had been cremated, his ashes spread who knew where.
For years, she’d accepted what the police and her family and almost everyone else had told her: Her attacker was dead. Now, though, she kept thinking about those small remains, entombed in a wall. She kept considering that night. The locations. The time line. And she had to wonder if Ames had been on to something all along.
Deep in thought, she hadn’t even heard anyone approaching the front door of her house until the doorbell rang. Poindexter, who’d been delicately licking his paw as he watched her clean, hopped down from the top of the entertainment center and sauntered toward the door, putting on that feline I’m-not-up-to-anything air.
“Forget it, cat,” she muttered, knowing he would love to dart outside. During his last joyful romp out of the house, he’d found himself a comfy spot right on top of the cage housing a rabbit owned by the little girl next door. Hearing his plaintive, hungry meows from all the way up on the balcony off her bedroom, she had raced into their backyard to retrieve him. She’d been caught red-handed by Lenny, the lawn guy, who’d eyed her in shocked disapproval from behind his push mower.
Wonderful. Just what she needed to enhance her reputation: the pale, secretive redhead with a bunny-stalking black cat who trespassed in other people’s backyards.
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