Tyler nodded, his face still stoic.
Dee took a deep breath. “I want to talk to her about Carly dancing in their den, about how her breath smelled as a baby.” She paused. “About how the emptiness of losing your only child is like a sinkhole in your heart that can’t be filled by any other thing, any other person.” She stepped back and looked at both of them. She had to convince them. “Have either of you talked about Carly as a little girl, not just another missing kid case?”
Tyler grabbed her arms in an explosive move that startled both her and Fletcher. His low, almost breathless words, froze Dee in place. “Don’t ever…ever doubt how hard we’ve tried to find Carly. Ever.” Releasing her, Tyler turned and left the room.
Stunned, Dee looked at Fletcher. “What did I do?”
Fletcher’s enigmatic gaze betrayed nothing about how he felt. He simply took a deep breath and said, “Too many people mistake calmness for a lack of passion. You questioned who he is as a man as well as a cop. He doesn’t need that right now.” With that, he left her alone in the room.
Tears fuzzed Dee’s vision, and she crossed her arms tightly. Tyler was the last person she’d want to hurt, and she’d blundered horribly by not seeing how much he had invested in the attempt to find Carly. She just wanted to help!
Dee slowly walked from the interrogation room to the door of Tyler’s office. His back was toward her, but she could tell he stared at something in his hand. A photo. He gently replaced it on his phone, and Dee thought her heart would burst. A photo of Carly.
She inhaled deeply, shuddering. “Tyler…I’m sorry.”
He stood quietly a moment, then turned. “No.” His soft words focused on her. “No. I’m the one who should be sorry. I should not lose control. It’s just that—” He broke off, glancing at the photo again.
“It’s Carly.”
He nodded.
Dee stepped into his office and shut the door. The click of the latch made him turn to face her, his blue eyes dark with concern.
“It’s a passion we both share.” She crossed to stand beside him, not entirely sure of what she meant to say, but the words seemed to tumble out on their own. “I don’t know what this has done to me, Tyler, this finding of Carly’s shoes. Seeing Nancy and Jack like that. It’s like something has been set afire here.” She clasped her hands just above her stomach and pressed in on her diaphragm. “I ache. It’s like a craving to help them.”
“Maybe it’s God.”
His low words stunned her, and she stepped back. He couldn’t mean…“What?”
He glanced down at his desk for a moment, as if he would find the right words written on its top, then back at her. “God guides us in all sorts of ways, Dee.”
A darkness clouded the back of her mind. “God left me three years ago. This has nothing to do with Him.”
Tyler looked her over carefully, as if trying to search her soul, then lifted one shoulder in resignation. “Be careful with Nancy.”
Dee nodded and squared her shoulders, determined to return to the reason she came to his office, more than to apologize. “Have you talked to Jack alone at all?”
He shook his head. “They never let go of each other. Haven’t since the day Carly disappeared. We should have interviewed them apart, but a neighbor saw Carly going into the woods with the dog so they were never really suspects. I didn’t push it. Nancy sort of collapses when Jack steps away, as if she’s terrified he’ll leave, too.”
“I doubt it.”
Tyler’s expression snapped back into cop mode, stoic but questioning. “I beg your pardon.”
Dee stepped closer. “It’s not about abandonment. It’s about support.” As his look grew more questioning, she continued, reaching to take his hands in hers. As her fingers closed over his, she realized that she wanted to comfort more than the Bradfords.
She wanted Tyler to feel as safe with her as she did with him. She squeezed his fingers. “It’s not about losing Jack. It’s about being alone. Alone with your thoughts. That’s when your imagination runs wild. And that’s going to happen now. Anyone who reads a paper knows that when a child is taken and not killed right away, then the motive may be something even…worse. If Nancy doesn’t think it, Jack will, and it’ll make both of them crazy.”
He tensed but didn’t pull away. She stepped closer, turning her face up to his. “When something like this happens, the last thing you want is to be alone, even for a minute. Your mind goes insane with thoughts about the ones missing.” She blinked hard as sudden memories of Joshua and Mickey splashed in her mind, then took a deep breath. “You have flashbacks, and your arms ache to hold them. You have to hold something or you’ll go truly nuts. That’s why she clings to him. Her arms want her daughter, but Carly is just not there.”
He cleared his throat, his eyes bright. “Where are you going with this?”
“Come with me. Let’s do this together. You’re the law, you know the details and can put the pieces together. I’m a mom, I can hear their hearts. I can give you more pieces, more insights for the puzzle. If I can get Nancy to talk to me alone, sit with me, mother-to-mother, Jack might be ready to talk to you, man-to-man. He’s got to be feeling things he hasn’t dared share with his wife.”
“How do you know that?”
Her mouth twisted with a touch of amusement. “Because he’s a man. You guys have this amazing, sometimes maddening instinct to protect those you love, and he probably has had thoughts, maybe even suspicions that he can’t share with her because he knows they’ll frighten her. Likewise, Nancy may have held back things from him she’d share with another woman. Between the two of them, they may know stuff they don’t know they know. Y’know?”
One corner of Tyler’s mouth jerked as if he were fighting a smile. “Which is a key to most investigations.”
She dropped his hands and held her arms wide. “See? Maybe I can help.” She dropped them to her side. “Please?”
Again, he considered her a moment, then reached for his hat. “First, I need to get the dress and sandals out of the room and get Wayne started on the forensics. We’re not going to take any chances with this. We’ll get lunch, then I want to go back to where you were attacked. That will give Nancy and Jack time to pull their thoughts together, to recover from finding out their daughter may still be alive.”
Today was a “nice” day. Her captor was in a good mood and the air had been filled with tuneless whistles and hums all morning.
Carly picked morosely at her breakfast plate as the eggs congealed and the scent of the bacon grew bitter. Last night she’d read in one of her books how the villain had tricked the heroine into taking poison that had been hidden in her food. Her food looked okay, but with villains, you never could tell.
She looked at her captor through lowered eyelashes. Across the room, more toys had appeared, and the villain in Carly’s life was making sure a hand-held DVD player had the right batteries. A stack of new DVDs had joined the books on the shelves, pulled with glee from a large paper sack on the floor.
The whistling paused. “Sweetheart?”
Carly cringed at the word. “What?”
A hand rested on the stack of DVD cases. “Let me know what you think of these. I don’t want you to get bored.”
“Then let me go home.”
Immediately, Carly froze. She hadn’t meant to say it. It was exactly the kind of thing she’d learned not to say in the first few days here, the kind of sentence that caused her captor to flip suddenly from nice to horrible.
The hand on the DVDs trembled slightly, then Carly’s villain rushed at her, eyes wide with anger.
Carly screamed and scrambled backward on the bed, causing the breakfast tray to slip off the bed and scatter eggs, bacon, and fruit all over the floor, where pounding feet crushed it into the rug. Carly pressed herself against the wall, but clawlike fingers curled around her arms, jerking her forward. A sickly sweet scent washed over her as the shouted words hurt her ears.
“
You are home!”
Her captor flung her sideways and Carly hit the headboard, then sank down on the bed, pulling her pillow tightly against her. The room went silent as the door slammed and the lock clicked.
Her arm throbbed from the blow against the padded headboard, and unstoppable tears stung her eyes. Carly hugged her pillow and rolled toward the wall, drawing her knees up to her chest.
“Please, Lord,” she whispered. “Where are You?”
EIGHT
The Federal Café’s daily special—lasagna, garlic bread, drink and a dessert of steaming peach cobbler—sat enticingly in front of both of them. Dee waited as Tyler lowered his head in a silent grace before the meal, ignoring the urge to join him. Then both attacked the food with the relish of two people who had not bothered with breakfast.
He paused to take a sip of water. “Do you like Italian?”
“I make my own spaghetti sauce.” Dee grinned at his look of disbelief. “Seriously. My mother-in-law taught me. She was Italian, and every inch the stereotypical Italian mom. She loved to feed her men, and she guilted me into learning how to make the sauce. We’d make it by the gallons twice a year and freeze it in plastic bags.”
Tyler reached for another slice of bread. “I bet it’s delicious.”
“Much better than anything you can buy, I can promise you.” Dee paused, her thoughts drifting back more than a decade. “I resented it at first, this idea that she was making me learn to cook something you could buy so easily. The sauce in the jars is not all that bad. Then I started to enjoy it. Not just the cooking for Mickey and Joshua but the act of cooking itself. I realized that cooking and chemistry have a lot in common, and I always loved chemistry in high school. What about you? Do you cook much?”
“I’m more into sandwiches and instant oatmeal. You’d get lost in my kitchen. It’s big and there’s almost nothing in it.” He shifted a bit in his chair, then took another bite of the pasta. “Of course, if you truly tried to cook in there, you’d scare Patty half to death.”
An odd twinge of jealousy tickled the back of Dee’s mind. “Patty?”
He looked up at her. “All these lunches, and I haven’t mentioned Patty?”
A girlfriend? Tyler never struck her as the type who would live with…. “Nope, you’ve never mentioned Patty before.” She swallowed hard and tried to make her voice sound casual. “Is she your girlfriend?”
Tyler froze, then his eyes glittered with a teasing expression. “You aren’t jealous of Patty, are you?”
She shrugged and pressed the tines of her fork deep into the lasagna, trying to look nonchalant, but the heat in her cheeks told her she wasn’t succeeding. “No. Of course not. I just wondered.”
“Patty is my dog.” His grin broadened. “Although I’m flattered you thought otherwise.”
“I didn’t think—” Her gaze met his, and she blushed even harder when she saw the gleam in his eyes. “Stop that. You, sir, are running the risk of getting pasta dumped on your head.”
He laughed. A good sound, she thought, one she hadn’t quite heard enough of lately. “What kind of dog?”
“A peekapoo. Half poodle, half Pekinese. Although I think the ‘poo’ part was a toy poodle, maybe even a standard, not the typical miniature. Patty’s more than twenty pounds of energy. Definitely not a lap dog.”
“Why Patty?”
“For the New England Patriots mascot.”
“You like football?”
It was his turn to shrug. “I enjoy the game, but I didn’t name her. She came with the house I bought because the owner couldn’t keep her at his new residence. He, on the other hand, was a major fan. He also had a tomcat named Brady, but he gave that to his daughter.”
“I’ll have to meet her. I could break in the kitchen with some homemade dog treats. That might win her over.”
He motioned to Laurie to bring the check. “I don’t know. I’d definitely have to introduce you to her slowly. She’s always been jealous of other women in the house.”
“I don’t blame her.”
Tyler’s eyes widened, and Dee wondered if he’d notice if she slid under the table. The words were just out before she could stop them. Now her face felt as if it were on fire. Why did I say that!
Out of the corner of her eye, Dee saw Laurie approaching and almost leaped from her chair. “Look! Here’s the check!” She dug into her jeans pocket for her cash.
Tyler chewed his lower lip, his eyes glinting with ill-disguised humor. He held out his hand. “I’ll get it.”
“That’s not nec—”
“It’ll be a business lunch. We are working on a case.”
She withdrew her hand from her pocket. “Oh. Okay, then.”
He took the check from a grinning Laurie, who wished them a good afternoon, then they headed for the register near the door. After Tyler paid, he escorted her to his cruiser and held the door for her.
Dee settled into the front seat, her eyes taking in each piece of equipment. As he got in, she gingerly touched the radio. “This is the first time I’ve ever been in a police car. At least in the front.”
His hand paused on the way to the ignition, and he looked at her askance. “You’ve spent a lot of the time in the backseat of police cars, have you?”
Dee’s eyes widened, and a sound that was half choke, half nervous laughter burst from her throat. “No! I mean, not like that—” Frustrated, she forced herself to stop, recoup, and face him. “How do you do that to me?”
Tyler started the car. “Do what?”
“Find holes in my sentences big enough to drive humor through.”
He put the car in reverse and backed out of his parking space. “I don’t think it’s me. You’re usually pretty precise with what you say. Maybe you’ve just gotten comfortable enough with me to drop your guard.”
She pressed her back against the seat. “Y’know, for a small-town cop, you’re pretty clever.”
“I watch a lot of television.”
Dee laughed.
“Ah, now that’s a sound I like. You don’t do that enough.”
The compliment sent a tinge of shyness through her, especially as she recalled her thoughts about his recent burst of laughter. “Neither do you.”
Now it was his turn to look a little uncomfortable, and after a few moments of silence, Tyler cleared his throat. “You know what we’re about to do won’t be easy, right?”
Tyler glanced at Dee, trying to gauge her thoughts. When he’d suggested going back to the attack site earlier, she’d barely registered his words, and that worried him. Taking a victim back to the scene of a crime could be risky, but he wanted to find out if she could remember anything more about her attacker. His plan—lunch, then the site—had been geared toward putting her at ease. He just hoped it would work.
Dee stared forward, quiet for a moment. She nodded once, then remained silent for the rest of the short ride, the playful mood between them a memory lost in thin air. Tyler hated that, hated to see her go so somber, and he realized how thrilled he’d been at her laughter, her momentary jealousy.
Don’t get distracted, he scolded himself. This is about Carly, not how you feel about Dee. Tyler took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he eased the cruiser to a stop, letting it drift to a halt on the shoulder opposite where he’d almost hit her. He flipped on the flashing lights to warn any approaching cars, then got out.
Dee followed him across the road, pausing to look down the steep embankment she’d clambered up the day before. Her gaze grew distant, and she swayed a bit.
Tyler took her arm, his voice low. “Tell me again. How did it start?”
“I had just realized that the sandals were Carly’s. Then I heard a voice demand I drop the shoes.”
Tyler’s words became a whisper. “Were those the exact words?”
She nodded, closing her eyes. “Drop the shoes.”
“What did the voice sound like?”
Dee hesitated, tilting her head to one side, as if
listening. “Gravelly. Hoarse.”
“Hoarse, like they were sick?”
She shook her head, her eyes still closed. “Like they were trying not to sound normal. Like you’d make the voice of a monster if you were reading to a child.”
Tyler watched her. Interesting comparison. And very apt, if the attacker were trying to disguise his voice. Dee seemed very into the memory now, and she swayed again. Tyler wrapped his arm around her waist to steady her. “You ran.”
Another nod. “I’m not a good runner. I knew I’d have a better chance in the woods than the path. To get here, to this road, to find help.” She opened her eyes and looked up at him. “To find you.” An odd light of recognition came into her eyes. “My first thought was to find you.”
Tyler’s chest tightened around his heart, but his brain came to the rescue. The attacker. Focus on the attacker. “Did he say anything else?”
Dee shook her head, still looking at him, then paused. She looked away into the woods. “He called me stupid. ‘Stupid woman.’” Her gaze grew distant again. “And I think he was right-handed. He kept grabbing for the sandals with his right hand.” She shrugged and looked down at the ground. “Not that that helps you any.”
Tyler wanted to reassure her, to keep her in the memory. “You never know what tidbit will help. Do you remember anything else. A smell? You said the attacker was wearing a sweat suit?”
She nodded. “Really ratty. Like you’d wear to work on your car, not out to jog or see anyone. With a hood pulled down low over his face. I never saw a face.” She frowned. “And I fell into a bed of purple wildflowers. That’s the only scent I can remember.”
“Tall? Short?”
She tilted her head again. “That I can’t say. Taller than me, but most of the adults on the planet are.” She paused again. “But skinny. Really skinny.”
Now for the hard part. “Do you think you can walk back through it?”
She shook her head.
“I know it’ll be hard—”
“No, it’s not that.” She reached a hand out toward the woods. “Tyler, I was running blind. All I could think about was getting around the next tree, getting more distance between us. I might be able to find that patch of flowers, but other than that I couldn’t find that trail with a bloodhound—”
The Taking of Carly Bradford Page 7