“Right.” Emily jumped to her feet, feeling as though her heart would pound right out of her chest. Had Desiree made the call after leaving the restaurant? “What did this person say? Did he or she threaten Ryan?”
“No. Oddly enough, the only threat was made toward Mac.”
“What?” Emily couldn’t believe it. This was a new twist. “I don’t understand.”
“Well, despite your protests that you and Mac aren’t involved, I’m guessing Ryan’s biological parent thinks you are. And this doesn’t appear to make him or her very happy.”
“That makes no sense. Even if we were—and we’re not—what does that have to do with Ryan?”
Until now, Tina had remained silent, but now she moved forward and put her hand on Emily’s shoulder. “Maybe it’s the idea that you two are going to make a family with Ryan. Stalkers are usually crazy,” she said. “Most times their actions don’t make much sense.”
Jayne signaled for the check. “She’s right. This guy—or gal—could be convinced that you, as well as your son, belong to him. Any male seen as threatening this fantasy would be considered a danger.”
“Which is why he or she threatened Mac.” Emily’s dull voice mirrored the ache beginning to thrum inside her skull. She fidgeted while Jayne paid the bill, promising to reimburse her friend later.
“The question I have now,” Jayne said as they hurried out to her car, “is what is Mac going to do about it?”
Chapter 8
Staring blankly while Ed relayed in a voice too low for the boys to hear exactly what the caller had said, Mac clenched his jaw. Who was this person claiming to be Ryan’s biological parent? This reminded him yet again that while he was ninety-nine percent certain Ryan was his stolen infant, apparently someone else believed differently. Until a DNA test was run, there’d be no way to know for certain. Gut instinct didn’t count.
“And you didn’t recognize the voice?” Mac asked.
“No. I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman. Whoever it was used some kind of voice-distortion software, like the kind you can get over the internet.”
Mac cursed.
“Jayne and the girls are on their way home,” Ed continued. “I hated to mess up their night, but this is too important to ignore.”
“I agree.” Mac didn’t have to feign his anger. For the first time, he wondered how accurate Joe’s information had been. Was it actually possible someone else was Ryan’s birth parent? Like, as Emily had mentioned, one of Carlos’s mistresses?
If that turned out to be the case, he thought with a weariness that struck deep inside all the way to his soul, that meant his real son was still out there somewhere. And the likelihood Mac would find him five years later was highly improbable.
“I’ve contacted the phone company,” Ed was saying. “They’re running a trace on the call. If we can get an originating number, we’ll know where the perp’s hiding out.”
“Right.” But Mac knew what the trace would yield—a disposable cell phone, a “burn” phone, which was untraceable.
He squinted at Ed. “What did Jayne say?”
“They were going to leave right away and head home.”
“Do you know how much she told Emily?”
Ed stared back. “Probably everything. Why?”
He glanced at the boys, still engrossed in their game. “Just wondering how much interference to run.”
Ed grimaced. “I know what you think, but from what I’ve seen of Emily Gilley, she’ll be cool as ice around her kid. You don’t have to worry about that.”
“I never did get a hold of Tim Keeslar,” Mac groused. “The manager at the parts store he owns said he was on vacation. I checked his house, and no one is there.”
“If he went out of town, he went salmon fishing up in Alaska. He goes every year about this time. But he should be back by now.”
“Good. I’ll try him again tomorrow,” Mac said.
A moment later, the front door opened, and the women rushed into the room. Jayne and Tina immediately crossed to the kitchen to join Ed and Mac. Emily instead walked calmly over to where the boys still sat transfixed in front of the TV.
He watched while she bent over and calmly kissed Ryan’s cheek, murmuring something in his ear.
“I don’t want to go home yet,” Ryan whined.
Straightening up, she crossed her arms. “Now, please.”
Amazingly, Ryan put down the controller and jumped up, following his mother without further protest. She came over to the group of adults, hugging Jayne and Ed and kissing Tina’s cheek.
When she reached Mac, she stopped and held out her hand. “Thank you for your help tonight,” she said, her touch as cool as her polite and distant voice. “Ryan and I are leaving now.”
Before he could even frame a response, she turned her back to them, marching toward the front door. Sensing something was up, but not sure what, Ryan trotted along at her side.
After he cast a quick look of apology at Ed and the others, Mac rushed after her. He caught her just as she yanked the front door open and stepped outside.
“I’m going with you,” he said, his tone leaving no room for argument.
She didn’t even turn around. “Fine,” she said, her voice so emotionless that it told him exactly how frightened she was inside.
His chest squeezed. How he wished he could protect her from this, from all of what was coming.
“Are you okay to drive?” he asked, trying to sound as if he only spoke because of his part-time profession as deputy.
“I only had one margarita,” she said, her back ramrod straight, the line of her neck graceful. “And maybe one sip from my second. Plus I ate. I’m fine.”
“Good. I’ll follow you in my car.”
Her only response was to dip her head in a curt nod.
When they got to her place, the motion-detection lights came on. Parking in front of the garage, he made her wait inside her car while he checked out the perimeter. Everything was still locked up tight, exactly as she’d left it.
He soon returned to her and rapped on the driver’s side window. “All clear.”
She got out slowly, with an instinctive grace he couldn’t help but admire. Ryan, now sleepy, appeared to be in no hurry to go anywhere. She had to coax him, finally standing aside and letting Mac pick him up and carry him into the house.
“This way,” she said, her voice low, leading the way to Ryan’s room. “Just put him on the bed.”
Once he’d complied, she began the process of getting the groggy five-year-old out of his clothes and into his pajamas. “We’ve still got to brush our teeth and wash our face and hands,” she said. “Come on, Ryan. Help me out here.”
Though Mac ached to assist her, he remained in the doorway, pretty sure she wouldn’t appreciate his help. When she finally remembered him standing there, she flashed him a quick and polite smile.
“Why don’t you go wait in the living room? Help yourself to a drink. I’ll join you in a few minutes.”
Eyeing her bending over the boy who might be his son, jaunty wisps of hair framing her heart-shaped face, he felt a peculiar sort of catch in his chest. Careful to reveal nothing in his expression, he simply nodded and moved away to do as she’d asked.
After rummaging through her refrigerator and locating a diet cola, he prowled around the living area, struck again by how completely at home he felt there. He’d lived in a lot of places since Sarah had died and he’d sold their house, unable to bear living with the memories. Most of them had been temporary, and none of them had ever made him feel at home.
Even the small place he’d purchased here in Anniversary felt like an impersonal mockery of everything he’d hoped it would be. At the end of a winding dirt road the frame house had looked to him like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. He’d felt the impact, the raw wanting in his gut the first time he’d seen the place and known he had to have it. He’d been hopeful that this would finally become his home.
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However, since moving in, he’d only unpacked a few boxes and done absolutely nothing to fix it up. Once again, he felt like a stranger in his own home, which told him this came from within him.
Shaking off the uncharacteristic melancholy, he took a seat on the edge of her couch. Then, restless, he got back to his feet and resumed prowling.
“Hey.” Her soft smile told him she had no idea how sensuous her husky voice sounded. “Thanks for coming with me. He’s asleep now.”
“Does he usually go to bed this early?”
Glancing at her watch, she grimaced. “On school nights, yes. Since tomorrow is Saturday, I normally let him stay up later. He must have been really tired.”
He studied her heart-shaped face and felt the familiar tug of desire. He wanted to kiss her. The urge to taste her lips again came out of nowhere, buffeting him like a sudden storm, taking him completely by surprise. Staring at her, he saw her pupils darken to chocolate and knew she felt it, too.
Their gazes locked. He could have sworn something intense passed between them. Heart pounding, he took a shaky breath, debating. Then her expression locked down and she moved away, answering his question without him even having to ask it.
With her back to him, she spoke, her voice hard and tight. “I saw Desiree and Franco tonight at The Cheesy Pepper. He was walking, not using a wheelchair.”
He froze. “Why didn’t you tell me that earlier?”
Arms crossed, she spun around to face him. “There was too much going on. The phone call...” Her voice broke, and he realized how perilously close to breaking she was.
Desperately trying to distract her, he said the first thing that came to mind. “Your house looks great. This is exactly how I wish my place looked.”
“Thanks.” She gave him a ghost of a smile that wobbled on the edges. “I don’t have a lot of money, so I did the best I could. This is sort of how I imagine a basic suburban family home would look.”
He focused on one word. “Imagine? You don’t know? Where’d you grow up, on a farm?”
Her lush black lashes swept down to cover her eyes. “No, not exactly.” Her tone told him to drop the subject. Feeling as if he were a treasure hunter, he didn’t want to. As distractions went, this was a doozy.
“No farm, no suburbia. Hmm.” Scratching his chin, he pretended to consider other alternatives. “A commune?”
His pitiful attempt at a joke didn’t make her crack even the barest of smiles. Instead, she shook her head. Though her expression was serious, at least she no longer appeared on the verge of collapse.
“If you really want to know, I grew up in an orphanage. I wasn’t lucky enough to be adopted like Ryan.”
He blinked. This floored him. In all the information he and Joe had put together, neither man had seen anything about that. Her husband Carlos must have used his considerable influence to bury that bit of information about his wife’s past, though why, Mac didn’t know.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to bring up old wounds.”
She shrugged. “Don’t be, it was a long time ago, and I’m over it.”
Truly curious, he studied her. “What was that like?”
Something changed in her expression—not a total shutdown but close. “I don’t...”
“Of course you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” he told her, his voice gentle, aching again to touch her. “I’ve never even been inside an orphanage. I can’t even imagine how it must have been.”
Eyeing him, she fingered a silky tendril of hair. “Living there wasn’t that bad. I mean, it was all I knew. The hard part was staying there when a lot of the other kids got adopted or went to foster homes.”
“And you didn’t?”
“No.” She didn’t bother to hide the hurt in her caramel eyes. “I was a sickly child. Rheumatic fever, various infections—you name it, I had it. For that reason, they always passed me over. I didn’t understand. At first, I though it must have been because I was bad, so I was super well behaved. Then, as I grew older, I went the opposite way and rebelled.”
She grimaced. “In retrospect, I’m lucky I didn’t end up in jail or worse.”
“How long did you live there?”
“Until I was eighteen. That’s how the system works. Once you age out, you’re on your own. Luckily, I had a job at a fast-food place, and I’d been smart enough to save up some money, so I was okay.”
The records Joe had dug up had indicated she’d married Carlos at twenty. “And then you met your husband.”
“And then I met my husband.” She sighed. “We were married four years.”
When he only nodded, unsure how to respond, she tilted her head, openly studying him. “How about you? What’s your story?”
Though he usually didn’t talk about his past, he’d opened up. He really couldn’t do any less.
“The usual. I never knew my father. I was raised by my mother in Albany. Became a cop after college. Married fairly young.” Swallowing, he knew his lighthearted tone was all wrong, but using it always helped ease the pain. “My wife died in a car crash a little over five years ago.”
Moving toward him, she squeezed his arm. “I’m sorry.”
He prayed she wouldn’t ask about children.
“What about your mom?” she asked instead.
“She passed away when I was twenty-five. Ovarian cancer.”
“Ouch.” She winced. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” he said and meant it. “But like you said, that was years ago.”
Spreading his hands to keep from touching her, he grimaced. “Enough talking about the past.”
“Tell me how the investigation is going,” she said, the breathy hitch in her voice the only thing that told him she was just as affected as he. “Have you found out anything at all?”
Looking down, he took a moment to gather his thoughts. “On the adoption, no. I’ve got a friend working with the NYPD and a private investigator in Manhattan. But since your former husband was under investigation by the FBI, everything is locked up tight. I’m still working on that.”
“Thank you.” She still wouldn’t look at him. “It’s so weird that I can’t find even the tiniest trail to tell me where my son came from. I know a lot of adoptions are closed and I could understand that, but I can’t even find any record that Ryan even existed.”
Inwardly wincing, his stomach tightened as he debated whether or not to tell her about the newborn baby who had been stolen from Albany Medical Center right around the time she’d adopted Ryan. How would she react, learning the baby she thought of as her own might have actually belonged to him?
Might was the operative word, he reminded himself. He still didn’t know for certain.
His cell phone rang, a welcome distraction. It was Renee. He listened to what she had to say, answered in the affirmative and concluded the call. Emily had turned and watched him silently, her eyes huge.
“That was Renee,” he told her. “While we haven’t had any luck locating Tim Keeslar, who’s apparently out of town on vacation, we have managed to locate the hotel where Desiree and Franco are holed up. I’m on my way to meet Renee there now.”
She nodded. “There’s no point in worrying about Tim. If he’s gone, he couldn’t have broken into my house.”
“True, but we have no idea when he left or if he is even gone. And even if he didn’t break into your house, he could have sent you the letters and made the phone calls.” Her next words made him pause.
“Only if he somehow imagines he’s Ryan’s biological father,” she said, “which I’m sure he does not. So cross him off your list.”
He’d been a cop for so long that her words made him suspicious—almost as if she cared about this guy and didn’t want him to be a suspect. An unfamiliar emotion twisted inside him. Without giving himself time to think, he reacted, crossing the space between them and, hands on her shoulders, pulling her close. “Why do you say this?”
Though s
he shivered, she didn’t pull away. “Because when I went out with him, he wasn’t real happy when he learned I had a son. I got the impression he was only interested in one thing, if you know what I mean.”
Unfortunately, he did. Letting her go, he narrowed his eyes at the thought of another man touching her—any man. “I still want to talk to him.”
She shrugged. “Keep me posted, please,” she said, her tone a clear dismissal.
With a nod, he let himself out.
Driving to the address Renee had given him, glad he had time to calm his unruly body, he tried to push Emily from his thoughts and focus on the task at hand.
When he pulled up in the motel parking lot, the place looked deserted. Parking, he surveyed the area before getting out of his car. Well-lit and clean, this was a far cry from the sleazy place he’d pictured.
Of course, Anniversary was a much smaller town than Albany.
As he walked toward the motel office, a car pulled up. Long, lean and shiny, the older model Cadillac would have looked at home in a classic car show.
His first thought was whoever drove this car wanted to be noticed. And when the front door opened and Chris Pitts, aka Franco DiSorinne, stepped out, the inference was that he had nothing to hide.
Turning, Mac hurried over. When Chris—or Franco—glanced up and saw him, he hesitated just long enough to allow Mac to reach him and draw his gun.
“I’d like to talk to you,” Mac said, weapon up and ready. “Keep your hands in the air.”
Franco didn’t move. “Unless you’re arresting me, I have nothing to say to you.”
“Hands up,” Mac barked. “Where’s Desiree?”
Surprise flashed across Franco’s face. “How do you—never mind. She’s safe, and I’m not letting the likes of you bother her.”
Renee would be here any minute now to provide backup. Mac just needed to keep the other man calm. “Why’d you do it, Franco? Pretend to be someone else so I’d hire you?”
Franco didn’t react. Not even mild surprise showed in his stony expression.
“Come on, man.” Mac tilted his head, though he kept his pistol up and ready. “I really liked you. I’ve done nothing to be treated that way. Why’d you do it?”
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