by C. J. Lyons
“Transportation?”
“Xander said she called a cab. Want me to go after her? I saw which repair shop her car’s at when Burroughs gave her the paperwork.”
“No. She’s a grown woman, can make up her own mind.”
“But her stalker—”
“If there is a stalker. Plus, if we don’t know where she’s going, odds are a stalker won’t either.”
Which could be exactly what Sarah had planned. Someone who traveled as light as she did was probably used to making fresh starts.
“I feel responsible,” TK admitted. “At least let me and Wash keep tracing her past. If we find anything helpful, Burroughs can track her down and let her know.” After all, Sarah had never asked them to babysit her, only to help her find her previous life.
“Go ahead,” Lucy said. “I’ll be in the field most of the day.”
“Are you with the staties? Did they find anything?”
“No, they wouldn’t let a civilian like me anywhere near the crime scene.” A wistful hint of regret shaded Lucy’s voice.
“Where are you going?”
“To walk in a dead woman’s shoes.”
<><><>
TOMMY STARED, MESMERIZED by the tiny bracelet that sparkled in the sunlight. Then the crime scene tech turned away, taking Charlotte’s bracelet with him.
“I have no idea how that got there,” he stammered, acutely aware that he sounded like any stupid criminal from any reality police show. “Burroughs. What the hell is going on here?”
But the detective had turned aside to make a phone call. He pulled his phone away from his ear for a moment. “Wait for me inside, Dr. Worth. I’ll be with you in a moment.”
“No. I deserve to know—”
The detective walked away, his back to Tommy’s protests. Tommy raised his head to see that a small crowd had gathered where the news trucks were parked down the road. Lips tight as he held back his anger and frustration, he stalked back into the house.
Only to be confronted with Gloria and Peter. “What was all that about? What were they looking for?” Gloria asked.
“What did they find?” Peter added, his tone low and laced with a touch of menace.
“They asked to look at the cars, so I let them.” Tommy tried to make light of his apprehension. How the hell had that bracelet gotten there? And what did his tire iron have to do with anything?
Worst of all was Burroughs’ reaction. Forensic tests or not, the detective seemed certain it was Charlotte dead up on that mountain.
Tommy walked away from his in-laws, desperate to marshal his emotions. “I think… I don’t know, but I think… that body they found is Charlotte.”
Gloria’s sudden choked sob wrenched through him. She fled up the stairs, leaving Tommy alone with Peter.
“Tell me you had nothing to do with this.”
Tommy whirled to face Charlotte’s father. “What? No, Peter, I swear—”
“No. Say the words. I need to hear you say them.”
Tommy usually forgot that Peter was taller than him, and despite the older man’s sedentary occupation, he was in good shape. Now, with Peter leaning in, fists raised level with his heart, eyes blazing with pain, there was no mistaking who would win any physical encounter between the two of them.
Tommy met Peter’s stare head on. He was so sick and tired of people assuming the worst—and being helpless to disprove them. But he’d thought he was past it with Gloria and Peter. “I had nothing to do with Charlotte’s disappearance. I have no idea what happened to her.” He stepped forward, chin jutting up. “Does that satisfy you?”
Peter held his gaze for a long moment. “No. Not at all.”
The door opened. Burroughs. “Dr. Worth, we’re getting a search warrant for your vehicle. In the meantime, I’d appreciate it if you accompanied me to the station for an interview.”
With Burroughs on one side, blocking any escape, and Peter on the other, blocking access to the stairs and Nellie, a sudden wave of claustrophobia hit Tommy. Trapped. He was trapped, inside his own home.
“I didn’t do anything,” he protested. “Why would I let you search the cars if I had?”
His attempt at reason failed miserably. “What choice did you have with your in-laws right here, listening?” Burroughs countered. “And if you refused, it wouldn’t have mattered. Based on what we found at the scene, we would have sat on the car until I had enough probable cause for a warrant.”
“So then why—”
“More I see you in action, Dr. Worth, the more chance you have to trip up.”
Tommy was silent after that. Last time Tommy had gone through this, after days of interviews, Peter had insisted he get an attorney. And the attorney had told him he was a fool to answer any questions.
At least ten separate police officers, state police troopers, detectives, and investigators, and one FBI agent who had been called in to assist, had all questioned Tommy. And despite the attorney’s admonishments, he’d told them everything he knew—or didn’t know—certain that this was the best way to get them to take their focus off him and instead concentrate on the search for Charlotte.
Tommy noticed that this time Peter didn’t offer to provide an attorney. Instead, Charlotte’s father moved up the steps, calling to his wife. “Gloria, get Nellie’s things. We’re leaving. Now!”
Halfway up, he paused and turned back, looking down at Tommy. “We’re taking Nellie. You’ll stay here until this is cleared up. She’s better off not seeing you, not like this.”
“No,” Tommy said. “You can’t—”
“It might be the best way to protect her,” Burroughs said in a voice that sounded almost human.
Tommy closed his eyes, wishing he could open them again and he’d have his life back. No such luck.
“Let me say goodbye.” He turned to Burroughs. “Then I’ll go with you, tell you anything you want.” The sooner he finished with the police, the sooner he could rejoin Nellie.
He didn’t feel safe being away from her. Yes, Peter and Gloria would shield her from the reporters, but it wasn’t the same. They didn’t know how to quiet her night terrors or where they were in the book he was reading to her or which socks she liked to wear with which outfit. She needed him. Even more, he needed her. Needed to know she was safe.
Burroughs nodded his assent, and Tommy rushed up the steps, ignoring Peter’s glare. Nellie’s room was the first one at the top of the stairs and he barged through the door, startling Gloria, who stepped in front of Nellie as if to block Tommy’s access to his daughter. As if he might hurt Nellie. The thought stopped him dead—that and the obvious fear in Gloria’s eyes.
Peter and Burroughs crowded the doorway behind him while Nellie bounced off her bed and rushed into his arms. “Daddy, I don’t want to go. Can’t we stay here?”
Tommy crouched down to her level and bundled her tight, his face pressed against hers. “You need to go with Papa and Gramma now, sweetie. I’ll be along later.”
She shook her head violently, almost breaking free of his grasp. “No. I want to stay with you. Don’t make me go, Daddy!”
Her voice rose, not in the tantrum screeches she’d been using all too often lately, but in pure terror. She grasped his arm with both of her hands. “Stay with me, Daddy. I’m scared. I don’t want you to go. You need to stay with me.”
Gloria approached Nellie from behind and rested a palm on her shoulder. “Everything will be all right, Nellie. Your father just needs to help the policemen out. But we’ll go to the farm, play with the horses, roast marshmallows, and make s’mores. We’ll have fun.”
Nellie whirled on her grandmother. “No! You can’t make me. I won’t go. I want to stay with Daddy.”
What little control Tommy had left was fast escaping. “Eleanor Rose Worth,” he said sternly. “You do not speak to your grandmother like that. She loves you very much and only wants to take care of you.”
“But don’t you want to take care of me, Daddy? Or I c
an take care of you. Just please don’t go.” Her voice held a tremor that pierced his heart.
He stood and gently pulled her hands, one finger at a time, away from his arm. He nodded to Gloria, who rushed in to wrap her own arms around Nellie, giving Tommy space. “I love you, sweetheart.”
As Peter and Gloria fought in vain to comfort Nellie, her cries followed Tommy down the stairs until he and Burroughs closed the front door behind them.
He couldn’t help it; he glanced back at the house one last time. He couldn’t shake the feeling that nothing would ever be the same again.
Chapter 30
LUCY DIDN’T BOTHER driving all the way out to where Charlotte Worth’s vehicle had been found abandoned along the banks of the Youghiogheny. The police would have covered all the routes in and out of the secluded overlook using better tools than she had at hand. Instead, she drove to the last place Charlotte had been seen alive, the same convenience store where Sarah Brown had stopped the day before she went up Fiddler’s Knob and came down without her memory. No matter what anyone told her, it still felt like an unnatural coincidence.
As she parked her Subaru in front of the Sheetz, she had the weird tingling along her spine that her grandmother used to call coffin chills. Someone, somewhere, was walking over Lucy’s grave. At least that was the old wives’ tale her granny had teased her with.
She mixed a coffee at the well-equipped coffee bar and waited until the cashier, a twenty-something who had a nose stud and wispy goatee, had finished with the other customers. As he rang up her coffee, she explained who she was and why she was there.
“You mean the lady from last year?” he asked.
“Yes. I noticed your security cameras and thought—”
“Oh, the cops took all that. Huge manhunt, they looked through everything. Even searched our garbage.”
Given that the first case she’d worked with Burroughs involved a body stuffed into a drum for discarded fast food frying oil, she wasn’t surprised.
“Didn’t find nothing,” he continued. “Lady just vanished.”
“You know it happened again.” She leaned in and dropped her voice to a conspiratorial level. “Just Friday night a lady was in here, and Saturday morning she developed total amnesia.”
“No shit. Like she can’t remember her name, anything?”
“Exactly. We’re working to trace her steps, help her figure out who she is.” She showed him her copy of Sarah’s receipt.
“Friday? Like four days ago?” He shook his head. “Sorry, I wasn’t working.”
“Would you keep the security footage that long?”
His expression brightened. “Hell yeah. It’s all on computer, so it just keeps recording until the drive is full. I think it holds like a month or something. Hang on.” He gestured to a clerk who was mopping the floor near the restrooms. “Hey, take over for me, will you?”
As he escorted Lucy into the manager’s office, she asked, “You sure your manager won’t mind?”
He flashed her a smile. “Lady, I am the manager. Well, assistant day-shift manager. Which means I’m the boss until eleven when the day-shift manager arrives.” He sat down at a desk and began to type at the keyboard. “Do you think they were abducted by aliens or something? I mean, two ladies, one vanished without a trace and one with her mind wiped…” He leaned back and gestured for her to join him behind the desk. “Here we go. Friday. Same time as on the receipt.”
Lucy watched Sarah pay for gas and a soda, then walk out the front door. “Can you follow her on the other cameras? See her car?”
“Sure, hang on.” A few more clicks, and the view changed. “That’s her. Parked at the side of the building. A lot of kids like to park there, think it’s more private because they’re behind the ice machine, they never see the camera. You wouldn’t believe the things it picks up.”
“I’ll bet,” she said absently, leaning forward to get a better look. Sarah was getting into the passenger side of a vehicle, but it was an SUV, not her Prius. “Can you freeze it there?”
He clicked, and the image froze. The car was a silver Jeep Cherokee. And the driver was a man. Caucasian, nothing really to distinguish him. Not for the first time she wished Pennsylvania had front license plates.
“Can you send me that one frame?”
“Sure thing.” She gave him her email as he grabbed a screen capture. “Is he our bad guy?”
“Not sure. Can you see the car’s license plate when it pulls out?”
He forwarded the video, but it was useless. Still, it was more than she’d had when she walked in. He escorted her back through the store and out the front door. “Hope that helps.”
<><><>
AT LEAST BURROUGHS didn’t handcuff him, Tommy thought as they drove past his neighbors. Some of them had their cell phones up, recording his humiliation for posterity—or to make a quick buck with the tabloids. Seems like nowadays everyone was a paparazzo, like the guy he’d caught earlier trying to take pictures through his dining room window with his cell phone. It’d been obvious he wasn’t a reporter. Maybe a neighbor? He’d looked kind of familiar.
Tommy didn’t turn away from the stares; he faced them all. He had nothing to hide, he told himself. Nothing to hide. It became his mantra, his last line of defense.
“Just tell me one thing,” Burroughs said as he steered the Impala around the throng of onlookers and the news vans. “Is Sarah safe?”
Tommy jerked his head around. “Sarah? What’s she got to do with this?”
“You tell me. I mean, at first when I met her at the hospital and she suggested using you guys to help—”
“Sarah suggested the Beacon Group? I thought it was because you and Oshiro know Lucy.”
“No. The nurses lent her a laptop to surf the web, try to jar her memory. She saw a story about that Texas case you guys’ve been getting a lot of press about.” He gripped the wheel, chin jerking as if he’d just now realized something. “But it wasn’t the Texas case that caught her attention, was it? There was a picture of the entire team in that story—including you. She recognized you, didn’t she? Wow. What must you have thought when she showed up at Beacon Falls yesterday along with me and Oshiro. Tell me, Worth, were you about ready to shit yourself? I mean, the girl who knew your secret shows up at your work?”
“I never saw Sarah before yesterday,” Tommy protested. “And I have no secrets.”
The smile that creased Burroughs’ face was not a kind one. Menacing would be more like it. “Sure you do. We all do.”
“What do you think Sarah knew?”
“For one thing, I’m guessing you attacked her on that mountain. She wasn’t running to the parking lot like everyone else when the car alarms started blaring. She was running away from you. Too bad the smash and grab interrupted things. Would you have bashed her head in like you did your wife’s?”
Fury mixed with pain as he visualized what had happened during Charlotte’s final moments. His mind was filled with the image of her face twisted in agony. “Go to hell, Burroughs.”
“You first, Worth. You first.”
Chapter 31
LUCY’S NEXT STOP was a nearby Eat ’n Park to meet with the director of the domestic violence coalition that ran all the county shelters and the woman in charge of the shelter Charlotte had volunteered at. In the police materials detailing Charlotte’s work as a domestic violence counselor, Lucy had found that all the names and addresses and any other pertinent details about the women Charlotte had helped had been redacted. When she called, the shelter director had refused to meet Lucy anywhere official and insisted that their discussion be “off the record.”
By the time Lucy arrived, the director, Thelma Pierce, and Charlotte’s immediate supervisor, Fran Wainwright, were already sipping coffee and waiting for her. The family-style restaurant was almost empty at this after-breakfast-not-quite-lunch hour, and they had chosen a quiet booth far away from any eavesdroppers.
“We already shared with the
police all that we could about Charlotte’s work with us,” Pierce began as soon as Lucy had placed her order and the waitress had brought her a cup of coffee. Her posture was defensive and her attitude seemed to be that Lucy was wasting her time.
“I saw their notes, scant as they were,” Lucy said. “Am I correct in understanding that since you’re shielded by confidentiality, as are your clients’ identities, that none of Charlotte’s clients were actually interviewed?”
“We spoke to them,” Wainwright answered. She was younger, mid-thirties, and seemed eager to please. “On behalf of the police. With their consent, of course. No one had seen Charlotte since her last shift, a week before she went missing.”
“I saw that in the report.”
“Then the matter is closed.” Pierce set down her cup and seemed ready to leave.
“Not quite. What about any contact with Charlotte outside the shelter? Beyond her regular duties as a volunteer?” Lucy raised her cup and stared at Pierce.
“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about. Our shelters follow the guidelines set forth by the state—”
“I’m sure they do. But we both know that there are occasional clients who require additional services, above and beyond counseling.”
Wainwright jumped in to answer. “Charlotte was more than a counselor. She was a whiz at helping our clients navigate the state bureaucracy. Helped them get official non-residential addresses that the government would recognize but that couldn’t be traced to their real address. A few of them she even walked through changing their name and getting new social security numbers.”
Lucy knew that the tools available to help victims of domestic abuse had come a long way in the past few years, with a greater emphasis on protecting victims’ locations and identity. Ironically, much of the progress had occurred as a result of the epidemic of identity theft, a crime which had left its victims requiring similar governmental procedures.