Damn it, partner, you don’t go wavin’ a red cape if you’re not a professional matador.
“Olivia’s working on a rough case, and her sister got worried and wanted to spend time with her. That’s it. So how about taking things down a notch?”
The man sniffed, drew himself upright. “Well, why didn’t she tell me that?”
Gabe suspected she had tried. This man didn’t seem like his ears were open much of the time. Just his mouth. Wanting to keep things on a friendly basis, however, he didn’t say that. “I’m sure she intended to fill you in.”
Buckman nodded. “Fine. Whatever. Now, am I free to go, officers?”
“Of course,” Gabe said.
His wounded dignity pushing his head high, the man turned and walked to his car without another word.
As Buckman drove away, Ty lifted a hand and waved goodbye. “Gee, what a nice guy.” Raising his voice, he called, “Nice to have met you. Have fun storming the castle!”
Gabe had to laugh, recognizing the movie reference. He’d been a little unsure about his new partner at first, thinking he was too young, maybe a bit too lighthearted. Now he found that was one of the things he liked best about the other man. A great sense of humor was a rare quality in a cop.
Mick, who’d remained silent during the confrontation, cleared his throat. “Okay, so now that Douchey Mc-Doucheface is gone, somebody want to tell me what the game plan is?”
Ty dug his keys out of his pocket. “I’m outta here. Going back to the station to dig back into those missing persons cases.”
“I’ll be right behind you,” Gabe said, knowing his partner had been dying to do that since Olivia had come up with the missing boy’s real name. “I need to see what I can find out about the rest of the people on this list I got from Agent Ames. Mick, why don’t you wait here and serve as point of contact? I’ll call and let you all know what I find. Then we can regroup.”
Ty had already walked back to his car and gotten in, waving goodbye as he pulled away from the curb, and Mick turned toward the entrance of the building. Gabe was about to go to his own car when his cell phone rang. “Cooper,” he answered.
“Detective Cooper? It’s Julia Harrington. Where are you?”
“I’m about to get into my car to go to the station.”
“Well,” she said, “I think you’re going to want to take a detour.”
“Why?”
She told him. And Gabe realized she was right.
He was definitely going to be taking a detour.
Chapter 11
Working alone at his desk late Sunday afternoon, Ty wondered, not for the first time, what had drawn his partner out to the woods to meet up with Julia and Derek. Gabe had been sketchy on the phone, as if he, himself, wasn’t exactly sure what he would find out there. Ty had offered to go, too, though he hadn’t wanted to since he’d been itching to get back to the missing persons files. Gabe, probably realizing that, had told him to just keep doing what he was doing.
So far, Ty had scoured every possible resource—the FBI’s NCIC database, NCMEC, all the state records—and he was still coming up empty. Oh, there were a few boys in the right age group and time period who’d disappeared and had never been found. But adding the name Zachary to the search parameters did nothing but eliminate those who were left. He’d tried mixing things up, wondering if Zachary was perhaps a middle name the boy had gone by, and still got nowhere.
So maybe his name wasn’t really Zachary. You ever think of that? Yeah. Maybe Gabe’s new best friend had had a close encounter of the I-should-be-institutionalized kind.
He couldn’t deny that everything Olivia Wainwright had said seemed possible, despite the fact that the way she got the information sounded totally off the wall. Plus he’d seen the stuff Mick could do. And it wasn’t like he didn’t know anybody else who believed in ghosts. To this day, his grandmother kept up a running conversation with his grandfather, who’d died when Ty was a baby. She always said Grandpa was sticking around to make sure she didn’t marry somebody who’d spend his hardearned money. Now that he was considering Olivia Wainwright’s story to be a plausible one, he suddenly felt a little bad for all the times he’d wondered if his dear old granny was succumbing to Old Timer’s disease.
Still, to be basing an entire murder/potential missingchild investigation on the word of a woman who had gotten her information right from a ghost’s mouth?
“What the hell are we thinking?” he mumbled, pretty sure he knew the answer. Gabe was thinking about Olivia, and Ty was thinking about Brooke. And both of them were probably thinking with their Southern brains—the ones below their belts—rather than their Northern ones.
Brooke sure was a pretty one—sweet and quiet, hair as bright as sunshine and a smile to match. Damn, did he wish he’d met her before she’d let that lawyer slide a ring onto her finger.
It isn’t a wedding ring yet. Which was definitely something to keep in mind.
“What are you doing here? Aren’t you off today?” a voice asked.
Looking up and seeing one of the other detectives, Bill Waczinski, he admitted, “I should be, but I was following up a lead. But it looks like I came in on a wildgoose chase.” Knowing the older man had been on the job a long time, and figuring he might have some fresh ideas, he asked, “You got any experience with kidnapping cases?”
Waczinski lifted a brow. “You catch a kidnapping?”
“I’m working on that cold case, the kid whose bones were found at the Fast Eddie’s fire.”
“Trying to ID him, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“You go through NCIS?”
“Of course. And every other damn database I can think of. Figuring out the age of the skeleton and the time it was there, I’ve narrowed it down to a kidnapping in the late nineties, but I haven’t found squat. None of these stranger-kidnapping records seems to fit.”
“Well, what about the nonstranger ones?”
Ty’s brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Hell, you are new to the job, ain’t ya?” Waczinski said, though he did not sound condescending, merely sad, as if thinking of all the dark, ugly things Ty could look forward to learning in the next twenty years in law enforcement. “Think about it: Out of the hundreds of kids that get snatched every year, how many of them are taken by strangers?”
“Not many,” Ty admitted.
“No shit. So don’t you think it’s time to start with the noncustodials?”
Ty slowly nodded, his mind working frantically. As soon as he’d begun this snipe hunt, he’d pretty much discounted cases of familial kidnapping, because the Bowles and Durkee boys had been taken by strangers—very likely the same stranger. Besides which, the idea was too disturbing, thinking Zachary might have been killed by someone who’d known or been related to his family. But Waczinski was right; noncustodial kidnappings, cases where one biological parent took the child from the other parent who had legal custody were by far the biggest piece of the pie chart when it came to child snatching.
“Worth a shot, isn’t it?” the other detective said. Then he headed for the door. “I’m outta here. See ya tomorrow.”
“Sure, thanks,” Ty replied, his mind already churning with this new possibility. Kicking himself for not broadening his thinking to begin with, he turned to his computer and began keying in new parameters. This time, he added back all the kidnapping cases that had been flagged as likely being familial, which increased the result pool a hundredfold. Then he zoned in on the sex of the child—a boy. His age in 1999—about twelve. His race—Caucasian. Description—brown-haired, small build. And, of course, his name—Zachary.
He pushed “enter” and stared hard at the screen while awaiting the results.
And in seconds, found what he’d been looking for all along.
“Gotcha,” he whispered, a little stunned at how easy it had been once he’d looked in the right place. Because the picture that popped up on the screen, of a Georgia boy who�
�d been kidnapped many years ago, bore a strong resemblance to the forensic drawing that was, right now, sitting on Ty’s desk. The child had been younger, but the similarities could not be denied.
His middle name had been Zachary, not his first. But lots of kids went by their middle names. If Zachary’s what he’d been called throughout his life until he’d been forced to change it to Jack, that’s what he’d whisper with his last breath, wouldn’t he?
Ty pushed the image out of his head, not wanting to think about those sad, final moments Olivia had described. They’d been too real, too vivid. Too damn awful. Not for the first time since he’d heard the story did he think Olivia Wainwright must be the unluckiest person in the entire world for God to have given her an ability like that.
“So maybe He’s making up for it by giving her Gabe,” he mumbled under his breath. Because the two of them did seem to shine with life when they were together. Maybe they were just what each other needed.
Reaching for a pencil and paper, Ty began to make notes about the case as he quickly scanned the record. Then he read something that made him want to howl with frustration. “No way!” he muttered, his theory totally blown to hell with that one entry. Because in the “suspected kidnapper” section of the report was a name and picture, not of a man, but of a woman . . . who was identified as the boy’s own mother.
“Damn, damn, damn,” he muttered, snapping his pencil in half.
It definitely had not been a woman who’d kidnapped Olivia Wainwright all those years ago. Nor had it been a woman she’d seen in her vision of Zachary’s death—if such a vision was to be believed. And hell, he was so deep in this now, he might as well believe it.
So disappointed he could hardly stand it, he sighed, then leaned close to the screen, figuring he’d read the report anyway. It was fairly straightforward, saying this mother had been involved in a bitter custody dispute with her ex-husband. When the court had sided with the father, citing the mother’s inability to provide for the child, she’d allegedly grabbed him and taken off, assisted by one of those secretive groups who helped women hide from their exes.
He tabbed down, continuing to read, checking the updates that had been added over the years, mainly out of curiosity now. Near the bottom of the screen, in one of the final updates on the case, he saw a surprising notation. “Deceased?” he whispered. “She died?”
Zachary told Olivia his mother was dead.
Was this possible? Might he still be on the right track after all?
He couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t see how everything fit together, but each new question only made him more determined to find answers. Truly fascinated now, he dug some more, following links like a mouse after a trail of bread crumbs.
Turned out the mother’s body had been found in a wooded area in Virginia in the summer of 1995. She’d been murdered and had apparently remained a Jane Doe for several months until she was finally ID’d with dental records. Of the boy, there was no further mention.
But they couldn’t have found him, dead or alive, or the case would have been closed. Yet it remained open, active, twenty years after charges had first been leveled against the mother.
One other case remained open: the mother’s murder. The ex-husband had been questioned, of course, but then released, as had a suspicious drifter. But nobody had ever been charged, and the case remained unsolved to this day.
Everything he read was making him think this might not be a dead end. With thoughts whirling in his head, Ty dug out another pencil from his desk drawer and started making notes. A time line seemed a good place to begin.
In 1991, at age three, Zachary had been kidnapped by this mother.
The mother had been murdered five years later.
Her body had remained unidentified for several months.
Being on the run, the woman would have kept a low profile, moving a lot. It was doubtful Zachary would have stayed in one school for long and probably didn’t have friends. So nobody had been close enough to report either the mother or the child missing. Which was why it had been months before anybody even knew Zachary’s mother was the Virginia Jane Doe.
“Jesus,” he whispered as the whole scenario took shape.
Had their perp killed a woman in order to grab her son? And, if so, how fucking lucky could that bastard have gotten? He’d chosen his prey, probably not knowing that the mother, herself, had kidnapped him and had been living in hiding. Nobody to notice, nobody to report the crime, nobody to hunt for the boy.
Zachary had been the utterly perfect victim.
As if that weren’t bad enough, even the authorities had screwed up, nobody bothering to go back in and change the designation on Zachary’s case from a suspected noncustodial kidnapping to a stranger, child-inperil one.
Getting thoroughly disgusted by the whole thing, he went back to his time line.
“Kidnapped again by an unknown subject at age eight,” he said, tapping the tip of his pencil on the pad. “And likely killed four years later, in 1999, at age twelve.”
Just like the Bowles and Durkee boys.
Ty waited for the tingle to start, the excitement of knowing he was on to something big here. He had the feeling he’d solved at least one big mystery—the identity of their Jimmy Doe.
He didn’t tingle. Yeah, his heart was beating fast, but he wasn’t feeling triumphant or proud at having put this much together. This whole story was too damned heartbreaking for that. Instead, he felt a grim determination wash over him.
Gabe had warned him this case would probably affect him like no other, and his partner had been right. Ty wanted to solve this mystery more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. He was going to see this through, get justice for that kid—for all those kids—no matter what it took. He might have found a huge piece of the puzzle, but there was still a bunch missing.
Who had kidnapped Zachary? Who had killed his mother? Who was the mysterious new “Jack” the sicko had now? And, most important, how long did that boy have to live?
Going back to the screen, Ty made a few more notes and another list. This one was of names and contact information. He started with the detective who’d investigated the Virginia murder, then continued right on down to the last known whereabouts of the father and the only other living relative named in the file, the father’s cousin.
Ty didn’t know how he was going to handle those conversations. He sure wasn’t ready to tell a grieving father or another family member that he might have discovered the remains of their loved one. But he needed to talk to them. Still, he figured it would be safer to start with the detective.
Reaching for the phone, he wondered if this detective would remember the case and hoped he wouldn’t mind getting a call about it on a Sunday evening. One more thing that he hoped: that he’d have very good news to share with his partner whenever Gabe got back from doing whatever it was he was doing out in the woods.
Right before he dialed, he made a mental note. He really needed to call his granny and tell her to give his grandpa a big hello from Ty the next time she saw him. Because he now knew spirits could reach out from the land of the dead.
In reaching out to try to help solve his own murder, this lost little boy, Zachary, had made Ty a believer.
Though tired, Olivia didn’t think about getting ready to go to bed Sunday night. Instead, she prowled the house, did a load of laundry, scared Poindexter half to death by deciding to vacuum the den and kept checking the phone to see if Gabe had called with any further updates.
Honestly, she wasn’t sure what was happening. She only knew Derek and Julia had found something out in the woods where she’d been held, and Gabe had been out there with them well into the night. Olivia had offered to come out, too, though she’d felt queasy one second after she’d suggested it. Still, if she could have been of help, she would have done it, which was exactly what she’d told Gabe when she’d left her father’s house several hours ago.
Her father. Ouch. He had been ang
ry at Drew. But he’d also been angry at Olivia and Brooke for keeping him in the dark. While going there in order to get her sister away from her jerk of a fiancé had been a great idea, it had also exposed them to their father’s curiosity, not to mention Sunni’s nosiness. It hadn’t been twenty minutes before Brooke had spilled the beans about exactly why she’d been out of touch with Drew for so long, and then the questions had come hot and heavy. Olivia had felt as if she were being interrogated on a witness stand.
She’d hated to tell her father that all this had come up again. As soon as she had, she’d seen tears in his eyes, tears he tried to pretend he wasn’t shedding. When she’d told him they had found the mysterious Jack and relayed the poor boy’s fate, her father had simply taken her into his arms and held her, like he had so many times after the kidnapping when she’d cried out her memories and her fears. Sunni—always perky and, well, sunny—had seemed a little embarrassed by the raw emotions flying around and had made herself scarce while Brooke and Olivia told him the whole story.
He’d wanted to call someone. Do something. Get the chief of police on the phone and the district attorney, and his lawyer, and Richard, and her mother.
Oh, God, her mother. She’d made him promise not to even think of telling her anything yet. One scared parent was bad enough; two was more than she could deal with right now. Especially if they started turning on each other, playing the blame game they’d taken such delight in playing twelve years ago.
If it weren’t for your money and your name, nobody would have come after our baby.
Well, if you don’t like the money and this life, why did you decide you wanted this house?
I didn’t want the house. You wanted the damn house.
I bought it for you!
And on and on it had gone until the language of tenderness had been wiped out and bitterness and rancor had consumed their entire vocabulary. Yet they still loved each other, despite Sunni, despite Carl. Of that, she had absolutely no doubt. Which just made the whole thing so unbearably sad.
Cold Touch Page 24