Christina said something under her breath he was glad he couldn’t hear.
They barreled down a dirt road just on the edge of the county line. A trailer sat at the end of the drive, its roof was covered in bits of tarp and one of its front windows was held together with duct tape. Even by Montana standards, the place was a crap hole.
For a passing moment, he wondered if Alli had brought Winnie to this rat-infested place. He had to brush the thought aside. He needed to treat this case like it was just any other missing person—and not his daughter. If he let this be personal, he wouldn’t have the control required to do the job that needed to be done.
He pulled in behind the big rig parked beside the trailer. Now that they were close, he could see the place listed a bit to the left, almost as though it, too, was ashamed of the wreckage it had become.
He got out and came around to open Christina’s door for her. It was a feeble gesture, but hopefully she would see it as the peace offering he intended.
“If you think you’re going to tell me to sit here and wait, you’ve got another think coming,” she said, pushing out of the truck. She didn’t even look back as she made her way toward the front door of the house.
He rushed to catch up. “I’m not the kind of guy who would ever ask you to stand by and watch as a man does the work. Do you really think I’m a jerk?” He instantly wished he could reel the words back in. He wasn’t sure he wanted her to answer.
She snorted slightly, but then as she turned to face him, she stopped. “You are not a jerk.” She stared at him for a moment, and some of the iciness of her gaze melted away. “You just need to do everything in your power to save my niece.” She turned back away and took the steps leading to the door two at a time. She knocked on the door; the sound was hollow and echoed through the house as though it was made of nothing more than cheap particleboard and spackle.
The cheap blinds rattled, as someone must have looked out at them from the living room.
“Daryl! Daryl Bucket?” she yelled. “We know you’re inside. Answer the damned door!”
Waylon could hear heavy footfalls as the man made his way down the hall. Daryl opened the door just far enough that Waylon could see one of the man’s eyes. His cheeks were covered with a day’s worth of stubble, and from what Waylon could make out from the array of stains on the man’s white shirt, he must have eaten a week’s worth of Cheetos and used his T-shirt as a rag.
“What the hell do you want?” Daryl’s voice was hoarse from lack of use and, from the tarry scent of the trailer, a hefty addiction to cigarettes.
“I’m not sure if you recognize us, but—” Waylon started.
“I know who you are. Why are you here?”
“We just wanted to ask you a few questions. No big deal, man, but we would appreciate your help,” he said, trying to act as chummy as possible, though every cell of his being wanted to reach through the crack in the door, take the man by the throat and make him answer every one of his questions to his satisfaction.
“Hmm.” Daryl ran his fingers through his greasy hair. “All right, army boy. You can come in, but I got stuff to do.” He opened the door, and in his right hand once again was his trusty bat.
They followed him down the narrow hall. It was covered in old grainy photographs of green-clad marines posing with antiquated tanks and helicopters in what looked like the jungles of Vietnam. Daryl rubbed the bat on the wall, making an unsettling sound as he walked into the living room.
He flopped down in a threadbare recliner and set his bat across his lap as he looked up at them.
Waylon couldn’t help but wonder what kind of life the old marine had lived that he thought he always needed a weapon. Though they were in different branches, he had a certain level of understanding of the world outside the United States.
When a person had experienced the brutal reality of combat, there was no going back to a life in which they could ever really feel at peace. Safety was merely an illusion—an illusion he had perpetuated by telling Christina that Winnie was safe. How could he have been so stupid? How could he have looked past the lessons that had been drilled into him—the lesson that the only person he could really trust was himself?
He stared at Daryl and his bat. The only real difference between him and that man was Waylon wasn’t carrying a bat—they were both equally a mess by the hand life had dealt them. Daryl just had the luxury of trying to forget.
“What kind of stuff do you have to do?” Christina asked, nearly spitting the words.
“That ain’t none of your business, eh,” the guy said, his warm Canadian accent in juxtaposition to his harsh words.
“I know, man. We don’t have any business coming here and buggin’ you when you got places to be. I get it.” Waylon tried his best to overcome the jagged edge of Christina’s tone. “We just had reason to believe that you might know a thing or two that could come in handy in helping us.”
“Helping you all with what?” Daryl asked.
“We heard a little rumor that you sold some things to a pawnshop last night. Is that correct?”
Daryl didn’t say anything; he simply spun the bat around in his hands.
“There’s nothing wrong with pawning a couple of things to make an extra buck here or there,” Waylon said. “Heaven knows I’ve needed a couple extra bucks now and then.”
“You’re still active. You don’t got a clue. You would have thought my going to fight for your country woulda proved my allegiance and set me up for retirement, but that ain’t happening. Ya know?”
“What do you mean? Isn’t the VA treating you right?”
Daryl twisted the bat again. “As a former Canadian, I was only ever eligible for jobs that didn’t require security clearance. You know what I mean, eh? The only good thing to come of my enlistment was my citizenship, but now that I been in the States most of my life and saw what a mess your political system is, I may just have to turn around and go back up north.” He laughed.
“I wouldn’t blame you, man.” Waylon stepped over to the window and turned slightly so the guy could be a little more comfortable. “So you sold the ring. No problem.” He glanced over at Christina, who slipped her hands behind her back in an effort to hide the ring from view.
“Then what’s the problem?” Daryl asked. “What brought you all the way up here to my door?”
“We were just wondering where exactly you got that ring. Do you remember?”
“Did she steal it?” Daryl asked, staring at the bat in his hands.
“She did,” Waylon said. “Do you know where we can find her?”
Daryl shook his head. “Truth be told, I don’t even know how she found me, but she musta searched my name or something. Anyways, she showed up on my doorstep in what I now gotta assume was a stolen car and asked me if I could help her out by taking a few things off her hands. In my defense, she didn’t tell me they were stolen. I wouldn’t have bought none of it if I’d known for sure they were hot.”
“Yet you gave the pawnshop owner a fake name and address when you sold him the stuff?”
Daryl twitched. “Is someone on the way here to arrest me? I swear I didn’t know for sure. I just had a feeling. And I needed the money. She gave everything to me for a real good price. It was a good investment. That was all,” he rambled.
“You’re not in trouble, and the cops don’t have a reason to come on out here and bother you, if you give us the answers we need.”
“Look, army boy, I really would love to help you all, but I don’t know nothing.” He glanced back down at the bat in his hands, but not before Waylon noticed the faint redness in his cheeks—a color that told him there was far more to the story than the man wanted to admit, especially in front of a woman.
Waylon turned to Christina. “You mind if I talk to him alone for a minute?” He felt
bad for asking, especially since he had just told her he wasn’t the kind of guy to push a woman to the side, but there was no getting around it with the retired marine.
Christina opened her mouth to say something but stopped as she looked at him. “Daryl, do you have anything to drink in the kitchen?”
He pointed farther down the hall. “There’s some coffee from earlier this morning. And there might be a few beers left in the fridge. Help yourself.”
Christina frowned but made her way out of the room and toward the kitchen.
Waylon turned back to Daryl. “So was she good? You know, the girl who you bought the ring from.”
Daryl jerked as he looked up at him, and the way the man’s mouth opened and closed—like he was searching for air—told Waylon he’d hit the nail on the head.
“A man has needs. You’re fine,” Waylon said with a shrug. “Not to mention that Alli is a beautiful woman. I don’t blame you for making a move on her.” Actually, he hated the thought of the things Alli had done and continued to do, but that was hardly the man’s fault.
“Alli? Who’s Alli?” Daryl frowned. “She said her name was Sharon. At least I think that’s what she said.”
It didn’t surprise him that Alli would have given the guy a fake name. There seemed to be a lot of that going around. In fact, it might even have been where Daryl had gotten the idea, but he didn’t bother to ask.
“What did Sharon look like?”
“I told you before, dark haired, about five foot six, skinny—though she looked like she’d lost weight from the last time I’d saw her. It’s another reason I wanted to help her out.”
Daryl could try to make it sound like he was helping the woman out of the goodness of his heart, but he’d already admitted to letting her exchange sex for favors and profiting from a stolen item. He was no saint.
“Is there anything else you can tell me?”
Daryl shook his head.
“You saw her naked. Did she have any kind of birthmarks? Tattoos?”
The guy’s face pinched as he thought. “There was... She had a strawberry birthmark on her inner thigh.” He wiped the sweat from his brow as he looked over his shoulder toward the kitchen, checking to make sure that Christina wasn’t within earshot.
Alli didn’t have a birthmark.
“Is it possible that the birthmark was a bruise or some other kind of mark?” Waylon asked, trying to make sense of exactly what the man was saying.
“No. It was a port-wine mark,” Daryl said, making a circle with his fingers on his thigh. “It was about this big. Dark red. She said she had it as a child. She never liked to wear shorts.”
Alli lived in shorts in the summertime, or at least she had. It was possible that she could have been lying to the man about the story, but there was little to no way to replicate a birthmark like that. Yet Alli did have a tattoo of a small lightning bolt on her ankle.
“Did Sharon,” Waylon said, the name sounding as foreign as the woman Daryl was describing, “have any tattoos?”
The guy looked up toward the ceiling as though he was trying to find memories on the tiles. “No. Not that I can remember. To be honest, she didn’t seem the type. She was a bit by the book—if you know what I mean.” He gave him a look that told him Daryl wasn’t talking about tattoos.
Alli had always been anything but by the book. There was no possible way that the woman Daryl was talking about could have been Waylon’s ex-wife. But if it wasn’t her, he had no idea who else would have had the ring and the paintings. Maybe it was possible that Alli had given this other woman the items to sell, but something about it all just didn’t fit.
He was missing something. He had to be. But what was it that he wasn’t seeing?
“And you said that the woman who came to your door was, without a doubt, the same woman you picked up on the side of the road and brought back to Mystery?”
Daryl nodded. “Yep.”
“And where did you drop this woman off? Did you bring her back here the first time you met her?”
The sweat dripped on Daryl’s brow, and he tried to wipe it away, but it returned just as quickly. “I didn’t bring her back here then. She didn’t seem like the type who wanted...you know...at least not with me.”
“So where did you take her?”
Daryl looked away and tapped his fingers on the bat in his hands. Everything about his body language screamed that he was trying to come up with a convenient lie, and it made the hairs on the back of Waylon’s neck rise. The man hadn’t seemed like he really had anything major to hide, but the way he was acting now made him think otherwise.
“Don’t bother lying to me,” Waylon said, not waiting for the man to answer. “If you do, I will have the police here within minutes.”
Daryl gripped the bat and looked back up at him. “I don’t want her to get in trouble. I don’t want anyone to get in trouble. She seemed like a nice-enough woman.”
“She’s not nice enough,” Waylon spat, finally losing his patience with the man’s game. “Trust me. We have a reason to believe she may be involved with the kidnapping of a little girl. It’s why she needed the money. Why she came to you. So the faster you can give me answers, the faster we can get to that little girl. If you just tell me what you know, maybe we can even save the little girl’s life.”
“She made me drop her off on the frontage road—about a mile from anything on the north end of town. I don’t think she wanted me to know where she was going. She was good at keeping her secrets, you know?” Daryl spoke fast, flustered. “The only thing I can think of is that she kept talking about this ranch. Dunrovin. You know it?”
His stomach sank. “What did she say about it?”
“Only that she was going to take the place down. One person at a time.”
“And you thought this woman was innocent?” Christina asked as she walked down the hallway toward them. The glass of water in her hand was shaking. “Where is she, Daryl? Where can we find her? Where can we find my niece?”
“I don’t know anything. I swear, I don’t know nothing. All I know is she had some kind of vendetta. I don’t know why.” Daryl stared at Christina, an apologetic look on his face. “If this were my deal, I would start looking there. At that ranch. Flies are always drawn to things they think are rotten.”
Chapter Sixteen
“It has to be Alli. If the woman wasn’t Alli, who could it possibly be? Who would want to hurt Winnie? Us?” Christina asked as she tried to keep her rage in check.
None of this made any sense. Winnie was innocent in all this. Alli was the only person who could have wanted her—she was the only one with any motivation to do it. That was, unless Daryl had been right and the person behind Winnie’s disappearance had been carrying a vendetta toward the ranch and everyone who lived there.
It felt like they were chasing a ghost—a ghost who knew their weakest points.
Everyone loved Winnie. If a person wanted to hurt everyone at the ranch, the girl was the best place to start. She was the heart of the place and everyone in it.
Waylon reached over and took Christina’s hand, gripping it hard as he pressed down on the gas. Her body flew back in the seat as he raced the truck back toward the ranch. “I don’t have a frigging clue why this person did what she did. But whoever this woman is, she’s not going to get away with anything else. And if she touches a single hair on Winnie’s head, I will make it my mission in life to make sure she never draws another breath.”
His words carried the weight of truth to them.
“You don’t really think this mystery woman would hurt a child, do you?”
“Don’t underestimate people. Evil is evil. And truly evil people, they don’t have a sense of right or wrong. They believe whatever they do is right. For all we know, this woman is psychotic, or a socio
path. She’s capable of anything.”
She leaned over to read the speedometer on the truck—the needle pointed at seventy. “Can’t you drive any faster?”
He slammed his foot down on the gas pedal, and the truck bellowed. They squealed down the road, and the ranch quickly came into view. The parking lot was full of flashing red and blue lights, and people were milling around the barn. Even the horses were alarmed, and as they drove past the pasture, a mare raced down the fence line next to them—almost as if the horse knew who was missing and feared what could have happened to Winnie just as much as they did.
It was amazing how quickly the love for a child could bring even the most unlikely people together.
Christina squeezed Waylon’s fingers. She needed him, and she had a feeling he needed her just as badly. It was inconvenient and unwieldy, but she loved him. Looking at him, the intensity in his gaze, the strength in his body and soul, she loved everything about him. No matter where in the world he went, or what the future would bring, she would love him. She hated it, but there was no fighting the truth deep in her heart.
Mrs. Fitzgerald ran up to the truck as they struggled to find a parking spot in the melee of emergency vehicles. There was even an ambulance parked toward the edge of the parking lot. The EMTs were standing among the police officers, and everyone had a look of concern on their face.
Waylon let go of her hand and rolled down the window as his mother stopped beside them.
“We’re organizing search parties. We’re going to go over every square inch of this place. Wyatt is setting up a grid in and around Mystery, and the highway patrols are watching all roads. Everyone is helping. Everyone,” Eloise said, her voice cracking with nerves.
Waylon jumped out of the truck and drew his mother into his embrace. Christina followed him. “Don’t worry, Mom. We’ll find her. They couldn’t have gotten far. How’s Gwen doing?”
Eloise pointed a shaking finger across the yard toward Gwen, who was sitting on the porch steps. She was moving back and forth, hugging herself. Wyatt was with her, rubbing her back, but he was talking to one of the officers.
Mr. Serious Page 15