by Alex Gates
“This is going to call for more coffee, London.” He checked his watch. “You have twenty minutes to find me something before the media makes up their own version of events. Give me anything so I didn’t waste fifteen hundred dollars with my thumb up my ass, trying to earn a promotion from the Esposto and Senator Pretty Boy—I mean, Grant Harding.”
I assumed he hadn’t flushed his heart with his hard-earned paycheck down the toilet tonight. “And so I can help the mother before she puts herself in any more danger?”
“Yeah. Because she’s the one we should worry about.”
Absolutely. No doubt existed in my mind.
I scrolled through security footage, poking around the available angles and sides. The store had more than enough cameras over the registers, but the woman hadn’t bought anything. I needed the entrance and exit, the parking lots. And though they were in color, they didn’t offer much detail in a sea of potential women hurrying through the store.
But no pregnant woman had waddled into the Giant Eagle. I slowed the tape and studied the entrance footage again—marking my arrival and making a mental note to buy a nicer pair of jeans and a top. It wasn’t bad enough that I looked exhausted. I walked through the store like it was a dark alley, scanning the aisles, the exits, the staff and the faces of the men who’d crossed my path. That wasn’t my self-defense training or the lessons learned on situational awareness kicking in. My reaction was pure paranoia. Not healthy.
I’d deal with that existential crisis later, in bed, as always.
I reversed the footage about an hour and a half, paying particular attention to anyone who didn’t immediately beeline for a buggy or have their nose pushed into a phone. Five minutes of meticulous scrolling and I had her.
A woman shuffled into the store, hidden beneath an oversized hoodie. She paused inside the doors, pretending to read the sale flyer. But she gripped the display of flowers, nearly keeling over into a bouquet of roses. I couldn’t see her face, but this was my girl. She bent in two before rubbing her abdomen.
Then she limped towards the bathrooms.
Bingo.
I swapped the footage and followed her, taking note of how long she’d stayed in the bathroom and whether or not anyone else happened to go in as well. The store wasn’t busy, and she’d had the place to herself. An hour passed. Hour-fifteen. Hour-twenty before she emerged. Hoodie up. Walking slow and disjointed.
But her eyes. She saw everything. Her head swiveled back and forth, searching and studying the store. Not a guilty look, but the frantic, jerky movements of someone trying to blend into the shadows and become invisible.
I knew that look. I’d felt that terror. Those weren’t the actions of a woman guilty about her crime. That was the gut-clenching, spine-shattering fear of a person desperate for survival.
“Bruce!”
He answered my impatient call only after refilling and chugging most of his coffee with yet another antacid. “Find her?”
“I got her. She goes into the parking lot after giving birth.”
“Driving home?”
“No, she’d have gone to the parking garage if that were the case.” I slowed the footage as she almost walked out of the frame. “She’s looking for someone…”
“Waiting for her ride?”
Oh no.
The woman stumbled forward, flailing as she fell to the ground. A pair of hands captured her. Within seconds, a man had yanked her from the cement and dragged her beyond the camera’s vision.
I stood, every muscle in my body tensing. “Did you see that?”
Adamski rewound the footage twice. “She tripped. Someone helped her up.”
“No!” I pointed to the mystery arms seizing her around the waist. “No, you don’t help someone up that way. Look at the arms. That’s a man. He grabbed her!”
“He helped her, London.”
“Watch it again!” I pushed him out of the way, desperate to find another angle, any second camera that might have been pointed toward the scene. “That man hauled her off the ground and jerked her away. He abducted her!”
Adamski rubbed his eyes. “She’d just given birth. She’s unsteady. In pain. She stumbled, and someone in the lot stopped to help.”
Absolutely not. “You didn’t see the way she left the bathroom—how scared she was.”
“For Christ’s sake, she abandoned her baby. She was afraid of getting caught!”
“Not by us. She was afraid of getting caught…” I tapped the screen. “By that man.”
Adamski groaned as I grabbed my badge and purse. I pulled the location on my phone and checked to see which stores were next to the Giant Eagle. The parking lot wasn’t large, only a few rows before intersecting Centre Avenue. Someone along the street must have had additional footage. The parking garage. Maybe the apartments nearby. The Subway in the next complex over.
Adamski’s office line rang, and he hollered for me to wait while he answered it. I’d never listened before, and I wasn’t starting now. I hurried to the door, promising to call as soon as I found more footage.
“London. Don’t.” Adamski sighed, the resignation in his voice weary with the command he loathed to give. “Don’t waste your time. It’s not a kidnapping.”
“You don’t know that.”
“The woman was a junkie. She gave birth and left the note because she was afraid CPS would take the baby.”
“Or she’s in danger right now,” I said. “Bruce, I can feel it. Something is very, very wrong about this. The woman needs our help.”
“The woman needs counseling. That was the neonatal unit at the hospital.”
The world tumbled under my feet. His words, the refusal to look at me.
Something had gone wrong.
“The baby?” I whispered.
“She’s okay…for now. The mother was stoned out of her mind. She wasn’t running. She was looking to score her next high.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because the baby was born addicted to heroin.”
3
“Don’t pretend.
You know what happens next.”
-Him
Our rescheduled anniversary night ended the instant I settled in James’s lap.
My cell rang. His fingers dug into my hips, but his groan wasn’t a good one. I bopped my sweaty forehead against his with a sigh.
“I gotta get that.”
He collapsed on the bed, his bare chest slick with sweat. “You’re a workaholic, London.”
And we’d swapped date nights because he had to do an overnight in DC. It was the first time in days I’d seen the doctor’s dimples—on his cheeks and in the tight muscles of his lower back.
Who knew a psychologist could be as relentlessly busy as he was unforgivably handsome?
“Isn’t the pot calling the kettle black, honey?” I asked.
“Nothing’s black here.” He puffed a breath of air and repositioned the part of him that made us both proud. “Just a whole lotta blue…”
I snuck out of the bed, sticking to the shadows even though he had memorized each of my curves and the scars that marred them. Too bad I couldn’t give him one without the other. I could handle the recurrent nightmare every time I looked in the mirror, but I owed the most patient man in the world more than memories of the past. Especially since it’d taken me ten years of resisting his charm before I finally handed him the key to my house.
I recognized the caller’s number but not the hysterical crying on the other end of the line.
“London! I can’t do it!”
Her shrill, pleading cry pitted in my gut. The sobbing wasn’t a sound anyone wanted to hear after midnight, especially when all teenage girls should have been home safe in bed. But Hannah Beaumont wasn’t an average teenage girl, and she hadn’t been home for six months.
She called from Grayson House, a facility specializing in teenage substance abuse recovery. I hadn’t been able to help Hannah before she made the mistakes that h
ad landed her in juvenile court, but I did everything in my power to ensure the judge sentenced her to the best facility in the state.
“Hannah.” I checked the time. Damn. Ten minutes of anniversary celebrations was just enough to leave me and James frustrated. “Are you okay?”
No, was the obvious answer, but her hysterical crying muffled any rational response. “I can’t! I can’t! I can’t! They won’t make me!”
“They can’t make you do what?”
“They won’t take me! I won’t! God, London. I can’t do it anymore!”
My heart sunk. I turned to James with an apologetic shrug and rebound my hair in a ponytail. “Hannah, I want you to calm down. Is someone with you?”
“I told them to leave me alone! They won’t ever leave me alone!”
The facility prided itself on being a drug-free zone, but teenagers locked inside a veritable prison tended to become inventive and entrepreneurial. Oxy was her chosen vice, but that didn’t make her hysterical. Maybe someone had slipped something harder into Grayson House?
Great. Hannah had enough trust issues with her doctors and case workers. If she was this high, she’d not only relapse, she’d flashback. What was worse—addiction or violent PTSD?
She wasn’t my responsibility, but that hadn’t stopped me before. I’d have to go in and see her. Calm her down. Stop her before she violated the facility’s rules and ruined her sobriety and chances to stay in rehab and not in a prison.
I gently spoke her name, but when that didn’t work, I edged my voice with all the authority eight years on the force afforded me.
“Hannah, I’m coming right now. Stay calm.”
I tugged on a pair of jeans in a quiet rush, face flushing as the denim covered my hips.
Why did the simple, everyday ritual of getting dressed expose me more now than on the day James and his partners at the FBI had patched my wounds and helped me into the ambulance? I avoided his gaze while fastening my bra and ducking into a t-shirt. Somehow, our trust, honesty, and the finality of saying those three little words had traumatized me more than a damn kidnapping.
But it wasn’t insensitivity or disloyalty. I’d never feared death then as much as I feared losing James now.
And, one day, I’d be able to tell him that.
“It’s Hannah Beaumont,” I said.
James crossed his arms behind his head, letting the blanket drop over his hardened muscles. That wasn’t fair. I was already a slave to the mocha smoothness of his voice. Add in the slick smile, golden eyes, and touch of distinguished grey at his temples that bothered him more than his vanity dared to reveal, and I regretted not keeping my phone on silent.
“One of your projects?” he asked.
“Did that doctorate in psychology come with sensitivity training?”
He smirked. “Is she one of your friends?”
No, but she needed one. “Hannah was the first sexual assault victim assigned to me. Hell, it was her case that proved I was good enough with the victims to earn my shield.”
“She spring-boarded your career?”
I’d earned my promotion by witnessing the darkest days of people’s lives. Didn’t seem right. “Apparently, I work well with victims.”
“You are running out after midnight to welfare check a girl who lives in a guarded, professional facility specialized in handling this sort of incident.”
But could they handle Hannah? “She’s different.”
“They’re all different.”
“Well, I can’t act like the other detectives. I don’t see a case file instead of a traumatized girl. After we’d arrested Hannah’s father, she was on her own. Moved in with a relative, but she didn’t have anyone there to help her cope with what happened.” The people were different, but the cases seemed so common that the stories started to blend in with one and other. “She started using and fell in with a bad crowd.”
“She got busted for it?”
“Not for the drugs, but for helping her friends rob a convenience store in Homestead. I managed to make a deal with the assistant DA, and we bumped her into family court. Then I talked to Judge Reissing on her behalf. He placed her at Grayson House.”
“Rehab?”
“Everything. Life skills. Tutoring. Addiction counseling. It’s one of the best rehab facilities for teenagers in the country. They should be helping her through this addiction…”
But her panic hadn’t sounded like a desperate relapse. It might have been my lack of sleep, might have been the soul-shredding frustration of not yet locating the mother of Pittsburgh’s newest unintentional reality star, but I’d been flirting with enough stress and paranoia to hear more than a moment of broken weakness in Hannah’s voice.
She sounded…scared.
“I should go.” I tugged on a pair of shoes. James watched me from my bed. Our bed. Three months of living together, and I still wasn’t used to mornings beside him, rolling over to cuddle against him, or hiding the nightmares from him. Easier to slip off into the night and work a case than explain waking in a cold sweat to the one man whose understanding and patience only made my weakness worse. “Will you…be okay?”
“You’re a good lay, London, but it’s not life or death here.”
“Maybe that means I’m not doing my job right.”
“You’ve got no complaints from me, but I’m always available for practice.”
“Always so magnanimous.”
“What can I say? I’m a giver.”
I smirked. “I’ll hold you to that promise.”
I tapped the door frame, but James called to me before I slipped from the room.
“Do you know what I love most about you?”
Those were words that deserved candlelight and romance, not frustration and unwrinkled sheets.
“You do everything you can to help people.” It wasn’t sexy, but honesty seldom was. “It’s a rare selflessness. Not many people can do what you do.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t believe him, but James worked exclusively inside the minds of criminals, sociopaths, and the violently insane. He tracked their thoughts, deciphered their patterns, and profiled the depths of their depravity.
Difference was, he left his work at the office. He probably should have looked a bit deeper into me.
It wasn’t selflessness.
It was obsession. A coping mechanism. I happened to be good at both denial and my job.
“These are girls who never should have been in this sort of trouble,” I said.
“Remind me again who is the pot and kettle?”
Or maybe he saw just enough of me to forgive that darkness.
* * *
Grayson House’s campus featured three grey stone buildings—one male residence, one female residence, and one co-ed center where the students went to classes, counseling, and their recreational events. A wrought-iron fence welcomed visitors with all the subtlety of strict uniforms and security cameras, but at least the program afforded the teenagers some basic privileges and freedoms they wouldn’t have received in a juvenile detention facility. Here, they had a semi-private room, the ability to pick their educational classes, and self-affirming chores that fostered personal responsibility and discipline.
That didn’t mean the kids were always happy, but I’d hoped they’d be safe.
The night guard permitted my entrance only after I flashed my badge and announced my name. The burly man wore a security uniform, but the colors and identification signified nothing that might have postured a sense of law enforcement over the teenagers.
Instead, he forged his own authority with a bristly mustache and dyed, jet black hair dragged through time from the 1970s. Hopefully, he only flexed his piddling muscles at visitors to the facility. Grayson House was a place for the kids to heal and begin a new and reformed life. Too bad he protected that optimism with mace and a side arm.
“I’m Detective McKenna. I’m here for Miss Beaumont.”
The guard’s badge read Sergeant Ha
rmony. I doubted that. “She’s acting up. We’ve called the doctor.”
Damn it. “Where is she?”
“They took her to the common room. Screaming too much. Got the other girls all riled up.”
“They?”
“Couple counselors grabbed her.”
“Grabbed her?”
Oh Christ.
No wonder she was out of control.
I ignored the guard and pushed inside, struggling to remember the facility’s layout from the last time I’d visited Hannah.
Lunch. Four months ago.
Guilt had a bad habit of rearing its unforgiving head after midnight, but I hadn’t even thought about Hannah in the past few days.
Hell. Weeks.
Why lie to myself?
I’d dumped a Christmas present on her in December, stopped by once on my way home from work a week later, and then got so caught up in a dangerous case that I’d left the poor girl to her own vices for months.
But she had been doing so well. What had changed?
The guard scowled, but that didn’t seem like anything new. The worry lines etched so deep into his features his face practically folded along the perforations. He chased, hiking his pants over the roll of his gut.
“This is a secure site, ma’am.”
“Detective.”
“Detective. You will wait back in the entry—”
Not likely. I was exhausted, irritable, and chased from a warm bed full of delightful possibilities. He wouldn’t win this fight. “You want me to pull my badge? Go ahead. I got a call that gives me all the probable cause in the world to investigate what the hell is happening here. Try me.”
“I’ll be speaking to your commanding officer.”
Adamski would love that. “Give him my regards.”
The guard muttered a profanity, but he let me pass.
The residence didn’t seem to sleep at night, just held its breath. The dormitory halls had emptied, but the administration strictly enforced a facility-wide curfew. Usually, the teenagers were confined to their rooms until the morning alarm at six AM. The militaristic efficiency of the program worked. Chore boards decorated the communal walls, designating cleaning crews, cooking divisions, laundry teams, and tutoring assignments. Grayson House encouraged personal responsibility and a pride in their surroundings. That meant not a single scrape of mud dirtied the floor, no a garbage can went unemptied before bed, and no noise echoed in the halls.