by Jenn Vakey
Rilynne and Wilcome both jumped and spun around. She hadn't heard the door open. Joe reached back and pushed it shut, his eyes shifting between the two of them.
“What happened?” There was a panic on his face that matched the one she felt inside. She wanted to look away from it, but she couldn't.
Rilynne opened her mouth, but it was Wilcome who spoke. “A call came in for a female found in the woods,” he said. “We don't know anything at this point. Mr. Davis went out to the scene, and he will let us know as soon as he finds anything.”
Joe gave him a stunned nod and dropped back hard against the wall of the house. He raked his shaking fingers through his long brown hair. She could see there were questions in his eyes, but he didn't ask them. Instead, he just stared blankly out into the yard.
Wilcome placed his hand gently on Joe's shoulder and walked back inside.
As soon as the door shut, Joe looked at Rilynne with an expression somewhere between pleading and helplessness. She knew what he wanted. It was written all over his face.
“I can't,” she said. “Wilcome has ordered me to stay here.” Even as she said it, the words just didn't seem right. She had received a direct order not to go, but as the seconds passed, she cared less and less about following it.
“Please, Rilynne. I can't just sit here. I can't go back in there and look Lori in the eye knowing there's a possibility… I just can't,” he pleaded. “You can go around the side of the house. They'll never know you left. They'll just think we're sitting out here talking. Please.”
She looked through the window at everyone sitting around the dining room table. They were waiting for a call that wouldn't come. While there was a good possibility Wilcome wouldn't go back out, there wasn't a guarantee. If he discovered she left, he would be furious.
She didn't care. Rilynne nodded quickly and ran to the side of the house. She didn't stop running until she made it to her front door. Her keys were in her purse, which was still sitting on Lori's coffee table. It would have been impossible for her to go back in and get them without Wilcome knowing exactly what she was doing. She didn't need them, though.
Rilynne reached in her back pocket and pulled out the lock picking set Ben had given her. It took her just seconds to get the lock open and grab her spare car key.
After climbing in her car and turning it on, she sat in her driveway and tried to remember where the message said the crime scene was. She was just about to give up and call the station when she finally remembered.
The drive to the edge of the woods, though relatively nearby, seemed to take forever. Her heart was drumming in her ears. Rilynne was filled with both anxiousness and dread when she finally pulled off the road and stopped next to the police tape. She turned the car off and reached for the door handle but hesitated. She wanted to run, turn around and never hear what was lying just in front of her.
“Come on,” she said to herself. Her insides felt like they were going to explode by the time she tugged at the handle as she let it out.
Her legs were quaking beneath her as she approached the tape. She could see the crowd surrounding something just twenty feet past it. Her hand trembled as she reached out to grasp the tape, despite her attempts to steady it. As her fingers touched it, she heard footsteps moving toward her.
“You were told not to come,” Ben said. He ran to her, ducking under the tape before he pulled her into his arms.
“Is it…” She couldn't finish her question. Tears built in her throat as she buried her face in his chest.
“No,” he said. The relief in his voice was only eclipsed by the wave that flooded over her. “It's not her.”
She pulled away and looked deep into his eyes. “Are you sure?”
He nodded quickly, causing his shaggy hair to bounce around his still pale face.
“The victim is a teenager, at least fifteen,” he said. “It looks likes she's been out here for a few days. It's definitely a murder, but it's not Kim.”
Rilynne let out a satisfied laugh, but stopped abruptly, horrified with her reaction. The young girl may not be Kim, but she was still someone's daughter. Ben sensed where her mind was, because he pulled her back in and held her tight as he told her it was okay.
“I have to tell Joe,” she said after a few seconds. Ben looked down at her curiously as she reached for her phone. “He walked out and overheard Wilcome and I talking after you left,” she explained. “He's sitting in the backyard waiting for an answer.”
“Wilcome isn't going to be pleased with you,” he said.
Rilynne finished sending her message and looked up at him.
“He doesn't know you left.” It wasn't a question.
“He thinks I'm sitting in the yard with Joe,” she said coyly. She glanced down at her phone as it chimed. “At least until I got a call from you saying it wasn't Kim. Then I went for a walk to clear my head.” She waved her phone as confusion settled over his face. “Well, that's what Joe's telling Wilcome.”
Ben groaned and walked her back to her car. “One of these days you're actually going to listen when you're told to do something.” She smirked at him and raised an eyebrow, causing Ben to reevaluate his statement. “You're right; I think I would actually start to worry about you if that ever happened.”
* * *
Rilynne pulled the car into her driveway and walked back to Lori’s house. Ben was already inside talking to Wilcome when she walked back in. They had both thought it would look too suspicious if they walked back in together, so Ben parked his SUV in front of Lori's house instead of Rilynne's. While she knew Wilcome well enough to know that he wouldn’t call her out even if he suspected the truth, she didn’t want to leave Joe in an awkward position.
Wilcome caught her eye when she walked in and tilted his head toward the kitchen. After tossing a quick glance at Lori to make sure she wasn’t watching, she followed him out of the room.
“The ransom wasn’t picked up,” he said quietly. “It’s been an hour now, and no one has so much as showed interest in the bag. We've also been running the plates of everyone in the area, but nothing has popped. Well, we did come across one stolen car, but it turned out to be a group of teenagers on a joyride. Other than that, everything's seemed on the up and up.”
Though she already knew the ransom wasn’t going to be picked up, she didn’t have to fake her reaction when he told her. She couldn’t picture people walking by a large duffle bag under a bench without paying it any mind, even if they weren’t involved in any way. It wasn’t unheard of for a random person to even be curious enough on occasion to look inside of the bags, resulting in not only a trip to the station to be interviewed, but a compromised ransom drop. The park must have been incredibly empty for no one to have even glanced in its direction.
“How long are you going to wait before picking the bag back up?” she asked. “I mean, you can’t leave that much money just sitting out there all night.”
“I told them to give it until midnight before going out and grabbing it,” he explained, rubbing his fingers along a small chip in the countertop. “I’m hoping that our kidnapper is just sitting somewhere watching it, making sure there aren’t any cops ready to swoop in and pick him up. Surely three hours is enough time to give him. Then, at least, it will look like we went out after a call didn’t come in to see if it had been taken.”
Rilynne paused to choose her words carefully. “So you don’t think a call is going to come in?” she asked, trying to seem shaken by the thought. She didn’t need to work hard at it. Although she had known for hours, the thought still left her nauseous.
Wilcome groaned and rubbed his face. “With how much time has passed since the arranged time, I’m starting to think that it’s unlikely. I could see someone staking the scene out early, or watching the area for a little while before moving in, but it’s been over an hour. He had Kim with him when he made the ransom call, which leads me to believe he's keeping her close. It would be difficult to stake out the park with a four year old in tow
, especially one whose face is posted all over town.”
Rilynne shot a glance back over to Lori. She had her elbows pulled up on the table and she was staring at the telephone as if she could will it to ring if she only tried hard enough. Her hair, which had been in loose curls the night of the rehearsal dinner, was now knotted and pulled up haphazardly in an off centered ponytail. Lori was also still wearing the same clothes she had helped her into the day before. Rilynne had a feeling she would stay that way until someone actually forced her to shower and change.
“What do we tell Lori?” she asked, not taking her eyes off of her.
It took several long seconds for Wilcome to answer. Rilynne knew he was just as torn by the situation as she was. There was a fine line between shielding her from the things she didn’t need to know and keeping her completely in the dark. They were flirting with it.
“Nothing tonight,” he said. “We won’t know anything for sure until midnight, anyway. Hopefully she’ll be asleep by then and we’ll have a few hours to figure it out. No matter what we tell her, she isn’t going to take it well.”
Rilynne didn’t even know where to start. She had been trying to think of the best way to break it to Lori, but Ben’s call had distracted her. She was just glad they only needed to explain that the ransom hadn’t been picked up and not that Kim had been found in the woods.
“We just need to make sure the television stays off,” she said. “The news will no doubt report about the girl found tonight, and you know as well as I do that they'll try to connect the two cases.”
Like he always did when his mind was on something else, Wilcome just nodded and walked away without a word. As soon as he rejoined Lori at the table, Ben crossed into the kitchen to meet her. He glanced quickly over his shoulder at Wilcome before leaning in close. “Did he bust you?” he whispered.
Rilynne shook her head. “He informed me that the ransom hadn’t been picked up by the kidnapper,” she said, careful to speak low so Lori wouldn’t hear. “He’s going to wait until midnight before sending someone in to collect the money.”
“Does he have any theories, aside from the ones we’ve already considered?” he asked. Before she could answer, though, they were joined by someone else.
Joe took Rilynne by the arm and led her toward the back door. It startled her for a moment, as it did Ben judging by his fist instinctively tightening, but they both followed without a word.
After glancing back at Lori, who was still hovering over the phone, Joe opened the back door and motioned them out.
“I want to know everything,” he said abruptly as soon as the door closed. Rilynne took a step away when he released his hold on her. She wasn’t afraid of him, but she also wasn’t comfortable with such close contact. As she did, she also saw Ben's body relax.
“I know there are things you're holding back. I want you to tell me everything,” he continued. “Don’t leave me in the dark.”
Rilynne’s eyes shifted to Ben. When he nodded, she sat down on the top step and turned back to Joe.
“The ransom wasn’t picked up,” she said. “That’s why the call hasn’t come in.”
The determined look on Joe’s face disappeared and was replaced by fear. He was regretting his request to know everything; she could see it in his eyes.
“Does that mean...” he couldn’t seem to get any more of the sentence out.
“No,” Rilynne said abruptly. “From everything I’ve seen-” Ben flicked his eyes toward her, stunned by her choice of words, “-he wants Kim. Right now we're just trying to determine why. If we can understand the reasoning behind that, it will help us to find out who this guy is.”
“There, uh...” He ran his fingers through his hair. Rilynne could see he was struggling with more than just his worry.
“What is it, Joe?” she asked. Even with the steady stream of emotions rotating in his expression, she could still see he was hiding something. “If you know something that could be important, you have to tell us.”
He dropped down into the patio chair just to his left and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. A small groan escaped him as he looked down nervously.
“Joe,” she said softly.
Before she could say anything else, he looked back up at her and nodded. “Before I met Lori, I had been seeing this girl in town. It wasn’t even anything serious, and I broke it off after that first night you introduced me to Lori. She didn’t want to let go, though.”
“Is she stalking you?” Ben asked.
Joe shook his head. “No, nothing like that. I’ve received a few angry phone calls, mostly after she’d been drinking, but that was it. The last one was last month after we announced our engagement. She, um... she blamed Lori for us breaking up. I tried to explain that she didn’t have anything to do with it, that we were already moving in that direction, but she wouldn’t hear of it. I guess I can't really fault her logic when you look at the timing, but meeting Lori was just the last in a long list of reasons why it wouldn't have worked with us.”
“Do you think she could have taken Kim to try to get back at you and Lori?” Rilynne asked.
“No,” he said quickly before pausing to think it over. “I don’t know.”
“I’ll look into it, but I don’t think it’s likely,” Rilynne said. She was toeing the line, risking saying more than she should, but she couldn’t help herself. “We know Kim was taken by a man. He wanted her bad enough to risk grabbing her with dozens of officers around. If your ex was behind this, it wouldn't be likely that she could convince an accomplice to take such a chance. The only reason the abductor would have done so was if he was so blinded by his feelings that he took her at the first available moment.”
Her words appeared to be enough to satisfy the guilt Joe had been feeling, though it only seemed to increase the worry in his eyes. “Well, is there anything else that you haven’t been telling me?”
“No,” Rilynne replied. “The only thing we know right now is that he's still in town and he has no intention of actually picking up the money.”
He nodded and stood up. “I should get back in. Lori will start to suspect something if I keep having private conversations with everyone.”
“Try to get her to sleep, Joe,” suggested Rilynne. “She isn’t going to make it much longer unless she gets some rest.”
“I...” he hesitated as a mischievous smirk appeared on his face. “She’ll hate me for it, but I can put a little something in her tea to help her along.”
Rilynne’s eyes widened, but it was Ben who spoke first. “You’re going to drug her?” It was hard to tell by the tone of his voice if he was more shocked or amused.
“Just a little antihistamine,” he said. “She has a prescription she’s supposed to be taking every night, but she hasn't since Kim was taken. So technically I’ll just be giving her the medicine she’s already supposed to be taking.”
Rilynne groaned and gave him a resigned nod. “Do what you must. She can be mad at us after all this is over. Right now, she can just deal with it and let us take care of her.”
She watched Joe walk back into the house but didn’t move. As she saw him preparing the cup of tea for Lori, she turned to face Ben and said, “If you ever do that to me, I’ll hurt you. I don’t care what the situation is; you aren’t allowed to drug me without my knowledge.”
“Okay, I won’t... anymore.” He was teasing her, but she still wanted to reach over and pop him for his comment. Before she could respond, though, Ben’s eyes moved from her to the window. She turned in time to see Joe set the steaming mug down on the table in front of Lori. As she picked it up and took a sip, Joe placed his hand on her back and gently started rubbing it.
“Oh, he’s good,” Ben said. “If Lori’s anything like you, rubbing her back alone would do the job.”
Sure enough, not half an hour later, Lori’s head started to bob until it finally came to a rest on Joe’s shoulder. When it did, Rilynne and Ben decided it was time to go back
inside.
Though it was getting cooler with every passing moment, Rilynne couldn’t bear to face Lori and the list of questions she was bound to ask.
When they stepped into the dining room, Rilynne watched Joe slide his arms under Lori and lift her from the chair. He carried her with such ease that she wouldn’t have thought she was more than a large pillow.
She and Ben followed them to the bottom of the stairs and waited for Joe to come back down.
“She's asleep,” Joe said softly. He pulled the door closed behind him and followed them to the living room. “Thank you, both of you.” He turned to Ben and gave him a warm smile. “I don't know what we would do without friends like you.”
Rilynne placed her hand gently on his arm. “Let us know if you need anything,” she said. “And try to get some sleep yourself. Lori's going to need you tomorrow. We can only put off telling her the ransom didn't get picked up for so long. She's bound to think the worst.”
“And you don't think that means…” Again, he couldn't finish his sentence.
She shook her head. “No, I don't. He wouldn't have passed on taking the money if anything had happened to her. I honestly think he made the random call as a ruse to keep us distracted or in the hopes that the roadblock would be removed. No part of that makes me think it's his intention to hurt her. That's the point we need to really push tomorrow when we tell Lori.”
He nodded and walked them to the door.
After saying their good nights, Ben took Rilynne by the arm and they walked slowly down the walkway. “Are you going to move your car?” she asked.
He looked at the black SUV for a moment before shaking his head. “Let's walk. Besides, maybe having it parked out front will keep her stalker away, if that's who's been camping out in front of their house.”
“I completely forgot about him,” she said. “With everything that's happened today, I guess he got pushed to the back of my mind.”
“Yeah, today's been eventful,” he said. There was a note of hesitation in his voice. He was bracing himself for where the conversation could turn, she could tell even without looking at him.