Settling Scores (Piper Anderson Series)

by Danielle Stewart

  “You’re sorry I think you’re being an ass or you’re sorry you are being an ass? I’ve got a different response depending on which one of those you meant.”

  “You always have a smart ass remark, don’t you? You remind me a lot of Jedda when he first moved in with us. I was so excited to have a brother, but he was always shooting his mouth off. Eventually he warmed up to us though,” Bobby remembered as they headed toward the deserted playground.

  “It has nothing to do with me warming up to you. I don’t want anyone around me right now who thinks what I’m doing is stupid or impossible. It’s not impossible.”

  “It’s improbable,” Bobby started and then bit at his lip, trying to shut himself up. “What Jedda did, it changed all our lives. I’m sorry if I’m being hard on you. It’s just that the people around me, they are finally hitting their stride. Jedda’s doing well. Jules has her life together. Piper is in a great place. Even I’m over my own crazy ideas of what I thought I could have done to stop Jedda. We’re all getting past it and I just wish that you,” Bobby stopped short as Willow cut into his words.

  “That I’d pretend I was over it too? That I’d just act happy? I’ve already tried that. It’s not working. This isn’t about Jedda killing our parents. It’s about the people they hurt before he killed them. It’s about being silent and staying silent for too long. I’d think as a cop you of all people would want to piece this together.”

  “That’s just it, Willow, I do. I want to take whatever it is you know and hand it over to the cops up here and let them do their jobs. I’m not saying you should bury this and just move on. But there is a difference between sharing what you remember with the authorities and completely immersing yourself back into the darkest time in your life.”

  “You tell me right now that those cold cases get the attention they deserve. Look me in the eye and tell me that some flashes of memories I have will be taken seriously. Or, like I’m trying to do, I can walk in there with something complete, something they can’t ignore. I owe it to these girls, these faces I can’t unsee. I want to help them.”

  “The odds aren’t good Willow. Happy endings are not real life. You didn’t go in that building today. It was too much for you. So what makes tomorrow any different? I just don’t want to see you lose yourself in this. You could stop now, I could help you find the right detective, and you could go back to your life.”

  “What life? Move back to Block Island so everyone can treat me like a leper? I’m sure my parents have been crucified over this and I’m the last person they want to see.”

  “They call me every Sunday,” Bobby said as he walked over to the creaking swing set and sat on the blue rubber swing. Willow took the swing next to him and leaned her head against the chain as she closed her eyes.

  “They do?”

  “Yes, they want you home. They don’t care about the money or anything else. They love you.”

  “They’re just saying that now. The reality of me actually being there would be different. I’m never going to unsee this stuff Bobby. I pretended it wasn’t there for so long but it came back and now it’s just burned into my brain. I can’t quiet it. But maybe if I do this, I’ll at least have some closure. Making this right, it feels like what I have to do.”

  “You’re the face that’s etched into my brain,” Bobby whispered, kicking some mulch mindlessly with his foot as he rocked a little in the swing. “The day I followed Jedda and walked into that apartment it changed me. I’ve never been the same. You were there all cut up and starved half to death. Chained to a wall like an animal. It’s what I see on my darkest days.”

  “I’m sorry my imprisonment popped the perfect bubble you were living in,” Willow snapped feeling defensive. Why that was always her knee jerk reaction, she wasn’t sure. But talking about this made her angry, and the closest people to her would have to suffer the backlash.

  “That’s not what I mean,” Bobby corrected. “I guess when I’m here giving you a hard time about diving back into all this, it’s because I remember what it felt like that day to see you hurting. I remember how broken you were. I never want to see you like that again. I didn’t know you, but I knew Jedda. He was my brother too and I loved him. His heart exploded at the sight of you like that. It wrecked me. I don’t want to see him go through that again either.”

  “Bobby,” Willow huffed as she slowly parted her eyes, letting the light back in, “if I don’t do this I will be lost. If there is any hope for me at all it’s going to be because I make one small piece of this right.” It went against every ounce of her nature but she tried to muster the right words that would let him know she could hear what he was saying without acquiescing to what he was asking. “I need to do this, but I’d like your help.” And with that, the hunch in his back and the tilt of his exhausted head disappeared. Straightening like an arrow his words came quickly. That was Bobby’s Achilles heel, a friend in need.

  “I’ll help you. Piper and I will both help you. If you really feel like this is your only way to get through this then we’ll do it together. Just promise me something.”

  “I don’t think I can make any promises right now.”

  Bobby ignored that excuse as he spoke. “No matter what happens, however this turns out, you’ll come to our wedding in two weeks. Jedda needs you there.”

  “I promise to try,” Willow conceded, as she pushed off and began to swing with impressive speed.

  “I haven’t done this in years.” Bobby chuckled as he got his bearings on the squeaking swing. “Well if you don’t count the porch swing.”

  “It’s weird how different it is. Don’t you think?” Willow asked pushing off forcefully with her feet.

  “How so?”

  “When I was a kid, I’d swing until my legs ached. All I wanted to do was go so high my feet hit a cloud. Now my stomach sinks the second my feet leave the ground.”

  “The older you get, the more you see in the world, the more fragile everything feels. It’s like you know better than to try to touch the clouds because you might fall. You miss out on soaring through the sky.”

  “That’s depressing,” Willow groaned, as she pumped her legs to gain more speed.

  “That’s adulthood,” Bobby shot back with a shrug of his shoulders as he stepped himself back and then launched his body toward the sky on the swing. “But we can always try to fight it.” He laughed as he pumped his legs and aimed for the clouds.

  Chapter Nine

  “That’s a pretty big pile of notes,” Piper remarked as she took a seat next to Bobby and across from Willow and Josh. The hotel room was too small, a restaurant not private enough, so they’d taken refuge in the empty study room in the back of the city library.

  “Some of it is just gibberish,” Willow shrugged as she spread the haphazard papers out in front of her, proof she wasn’t any sort of private detective. As Bobby reached across the table to take the sketch Willow had assisted in making that morning with the sketch artist, she snatched it away. “I wrote down everything I remembered. Even things that don’t make any sense, just in case they do at some point. Some of these are descriptions of the men I remember coming to the house. They might be involved. I know it looks like a random stack of nonsense, but it’s in an order that makes sense to me, so don’t touch it.”

  “Sorry,” he said raising his hands and eyebrows all at once. “Where do you want to start?”

  “There are three girls total who I remember but I want to start with the one I know most about and hope more comes back to me about the others as we go.” She slid the sketch along the wood table toward Piper and Bobby but never took her fingers off the paper, indicating they could look but not touch. “This girl is Hispanic. I heard her speaking Spanish to herself a lot. Praying I think. She was around ten or twelve years old and showed up in 1998 on Valentine’s Day at my house. She never told me her name but,” Willow paused trying to make this all as clinical as possible, leaving emotion out of it, “she mentioned a b
aby brother. I think she called him Carlitto. I don’t remember how long she was with us. I don’t know where she went, though I do recall multiple men coming in to look at her. But I wasn’t there the day she was taken, or bought or whatever. That’s all I know.”

  “That’s a lot,” Josh reassured her as he looked over to Bobby clearly hoping he’d do the same.

  “It is,” Bobby agreed. “The date, the age, the sketch. All of that will help. We should be able to use missing persons records to get a name. Then we can see the status of the case.”

  “What do you mean the status of it? You think they would have found her? I’m sure whoever took her would have disappeared with her. That’s why I think we need to track whomever the men were who bought her from my parents. We need to know how they contacted them and how their entire operation worked. I want to find the scumbags who paid my parents to steal kids for them.”

  “Isn’t all this about helping the girls?” Piper asked, getting the question out before Bobby could, and giving it a lighter spin than he likely would have.

  “It is. I think that would be the quickest way, don’t you?”

  “No,” Bobby said flatly. “Whatever your parents did, whoever they worked with, too many years have gone by to dissect that. We’re talking about vagrant and transient people who are accustomed to doing business in an underground way. There isn’t going to be a paper trail. The girls--getting their names, understanding when and how they were abducted--that’s the stronger lead. So let’s go with it,” Bobby used a definitive tone as he opened his laptop. “My captain has given me a pretty long leash. He said as long as I don’t piss anyone off I can work with the precinct up here and tell them I’m investigating some cold cases with leads that turned up in our jurisdiction. It’s not entirely true but I’ll tread lightly.”

  “Fine,” Willow grumbled as she slouched back in her chair with a huff. “We’ll start there.”

  “The information you provided will actually do well in the missing persons database. I’ll plug it in and see if anything meets those parameters,” Bobby said as Piper leaned in close to him. “It’s kind of a one man job.” He smiled and playfully shrugged her away.

  “How long does it take?” Josh asked, and Willow could tell her nerves were rubbing off on him.

  “It’s coming up now.” Bobby grabbed a pen and paper to jot down the results. “There are four girls who were reported missing on Valentines Day in 1998.” The pause in his voice brought everyone leaning in a few inches closer with a look of impatience pulling at the corners of their faces. “None of them match the description you provided. A two-year-old, a seventeen-year-old, and two five-year olds are coming up. The cases were all closed within a couple days, which usually means the kids were found quickly. I’m looking at the pictures and none look anything like the sketch.”

  “That can’t be right. I know for sure she came to our house on Valentine’s Day.” Willow’s voice was shaking with disappointment.

  “Could she have been somewhere else for a few days? Maybe you can expand the search?” Josh asked, resting his hand on Willow’s forearm to try to calm her.

  “The wider you cast the net the more fish you have to go through to find the right one. I’ll put the age range and physical description in, too, and see if we can narrow it down.” Bobby tapped harder on his keys as though he was willing it to give him something. “I went back six months. There are nineteen girls matching that description and in that general age range but none look very close to your sketch.” He spun the computer around so Willow could take a look for herself.

  Her eyes scanned the screen, scrutinizing the features of every girl. With a squint of her eye and a slight tilt of her head, she prayed she’d see her. But she wasn’t there. “This doesn’t make sense. Something is wrong with the database. Are you doing it wrong?”

  “I’m not doing it wrong,” Bobby snapped back momentarily losing his composure. “Maybe she was taken much earlier and held somewhere else. Let me see if I can change the parameter.”

  “She wasn’t,” Willow said forcefully spinning the laptop around. “She was crying for her parents like she’d just been taken from them. She cried for her mom every day. She still had the terrified look in her eye, not the hardened dead look that comes later. She was taken on Valentine’s Day or shortly before.” The bite in Willow’s words mixed with the painful sharp edges of her memories was enough to quiet the room.

  They all looked back and forth between each other as they tried to figure out how the girl might not have ended up in the missing persons database at the time Willow knew her to be missing.

  “Wait,” Bobby said as his fingers moved fiercely across the keyboard. “Here she is.” He spun the computer around again and pulled the sketch from under Willow’s hand, holding it up next to the screen.

  “Yes,” Willow shouted and then quickly covered her mouth with her hand partially because her voice had been too loud for a library and partially because she knew she was about to cry. Her chin quivered as she leaned in and stared at the photograph of the girl she had failed. The girl she knew was in trouble but did nothing to help.

  “Do you need a break?” Josh asked his hand sliding up to her shoulder and squeezing it tightly.

  “No,” she said, shaking him off. “What does it say? How did you find her? When was she taken?”

  “This doesn’t tell me when she was taken, it tells me when she was reported missing. It dawned on me that sometimes parents wait to report their kids missing if they aren’t expecting them home for some reason. So I expanded the search to the end of February.”

  “Smart.” Piper smiled rubbing Bobby’s arm, a proud look on her face.

  “There’s a problem though. She wasn’t reported until two weeks after Valentine’s Day. Her mother filed the report.”

  “Why would a parent wait that long?” Josh asked, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  When Bobby didn’t answer, Piper’s face fell with a sad realization. “She wasn’t abducted, she was acquired. The parents were in on it?”

  “They both have a history of drug arrests. They were addicted to meth.” Bobby scrolled further down the report. “It’s possible that for a price they turned their daughter over to your parents and delayed filing the report as a means to make sure the trail was harder to follow.”

  “What?” Willow asked breathlessly. “They gave her up, like a used car they just traded her for money so they could score drugs?” She pounded her fist down on the table. “Then we find them too. We track them down.” Somewhere in her mind, Willow had built a fantasy that involved finding this girl and reuniting her with the family she’d been ripped away from. The slicing open and gutting of that possibility was painful.

  “They’re dead,” Bobby said pointblank. “The mother overdosed, the father was killed in a prison fight. We can’t know for sure if they sold her or if she was abducted but it would explain the timeline issue.”

  This wasn’t at all what Willow was constructing in her mind. She’d imagined these girls riding down the street on their pink bikes with white streamers flowing from the handlebars and her horrible parents pulling them away to a terrifying new reality. She hadn’t prepared herself for so many others to be culpable. There were too many bad guys in this scenario for her to wrap her mind around.

  “What’s her name?” Josh asked in a calm voice, pulling Willow back into a hopeful place. He didn’t say, what was her name. He didn’t make her existence past tense.

  “Josephine Vasquez. She was eleven years old when reported missing. The actual case file, not the missing persons report, has been marked as closed. I don’t have access to it, but if I go down to the precinct and they are open to the idea I should be able to see where it stands.”

  “Why would they close it, because they found her?” Willow asked, a dim flash of hope jolting through her.

  “Yes, if they hadn’t found her the case would be marked cold or o
pen. So if it’s closed it means they’ve located her or her body.” Bobby’s voice trailed off and though it was clear, he wasn’t trying to, his words shot through Willow like an arrow.

  “So being closed means she might be dead?” Willow asked a vulnerable tremble in her voice.

  “Or that she was found safe,” Josh added, though it was apparent he was treading lightly. And for good reason. Bubbly optimism was just the kind of thing that would send Willow running for the hills at this point.

  “It could be either,” Bobby admitted as he scratched down more notes in his book. “Do you want to go over what you remember about the other girls now or do you want me to go chase this?”

  “She,” Willow hesitated, “Josephine is the one I remember most clearly. I think we should get this answer first. I’m going to go back to the apartment today. I know going in there will help me remember the others.”

  “You sure you’re up for that?” Piper asked and Willow ignored the pins and needles all over her body as she nodded her head “yes.”

  “What about tracking down your parents things?” Bobby asked as he closed the computer. “Some stuff would have been entered into evidence by the crime investigator who processed their murder. But mostly everything else would have been deemed nonessential and was likely left behind. Maybe if you don’t get into the apartment today for whatever reason, you can start looking for their belongings.”

  “We can call Tony back. He’s the super of the building and has been for a couple decades. If anyone knows what happened to their things it would be him,” Josh said with a hopefulness in his voice.

  “You guys call us if you find anything out, and we’ll do the same,” Piper said as she and Bobby headed out of the room.

  “How are you feeling?” Josh asked in a hushed voice. “You did so great. I mean she has a name now. That’s incredible.”

  “I feel like shit,” Willow snapped standing and slinging her bag over her shoulder. “I didn’t want to find other deadbeat parents. I didn’t want to think that no one even wanted her.”