by Beverly Bird
But he felt him. He felt Sam. He felt him as soon as he stepped in the front door.
“Where?” he asked the woman hoarsely. “Where is he?”
“The first bedroom on your right,” she said quietly. “That way.” She didn’t seem surprised by the arrival of so many lawmen. Nor did she seem to doubt what they had come for. Jake thought she was on the verge of crying.
One of the Fibbies began to read her her rights.
Under any other circumstances, Jake might have felt sorry for the woman. But he could think of nothing other than finding Sam. He jogged down the hallway and into the first room he came to. Sam was standing up in a crib. As soon as he saw him, the boy’s eyes widened in recognition.
How does he recognize me so quickly, so easily? Sure, he’d given him a piggyback ride one night after dinner, but other than that, Jake had spent much more time with Sam’s big brother, and that had been none too comfortable, either. He’d thought he’d kept himself removed, apart from Katya’s kids.
Obviously, he hadn’t. He felt a sinking sensation in his gut. Then he felt a glow.
“Wawa,” Sam said.
Wawa? Water? Wallace.
The baby began jumping up and down in the crib. Jake crossed the room to get him out of the thing.
“I found you.” I made it all right this time. I did something. He held the kid as tightly as he dared and he wasn’t the least bit sure which of them was crying.
Two hours later, Jake prowled the FBI field office in Dover like a large cat confined to a cage. “Know anything yet?” he demanded.
The man at the desk looked up at him with impatience. His nameplate said Dave Winslow. “Detective Wallace,” Winslow said with exaggerated care, “you’ve been pacing this office for the past thirty minutes. Have you noticed me pick up the telephone and speak into it? How is it that you expect me to know anything more than you do?”
Jake had had enough. He stopped moving to plant his palms on the man’s desk. Winslow jumped. “You guys bungled this whole thing from start to finish,” he snapped. “If it weren’t for me, Mills would be home in Toms River, New Jersey, right now, counting out his money. You weren’t even near to closing in on him. So let’s be polite, okay? Do me a favor. Pick up the phone and call somebody in New Jersey. Find out if they’ve gotten it out of him yet where the other four kids are. Then find someone to inform me of the status of this situation so I don’t have to pace.”
It didn’t turn out to be necessary. As Winslow glared at him, a door opened at the back of the office. Another man strode in.
Relief hit Jake squarely in the chest, driving out his breath. It was Lawrence Spina from D.C., a face he finally recognized.
Spina shook his hand. “Good work, Detective. Actually, it was excellent work. Sure you’re not interested in a job with us?”
“No way,” Jake said automatically. And his brother’s voice came back to him. You wouldn’t be horsing around in a low-paying job...turning down the FBI... He managed a quick, tense grin. “I don’t do suits,” he explained. “What are you doing here? What have you guys done with Sam?” They’d taken the baby from him outside the Chavers house. Jake was uncomfortably aware that they hadn’t done so easily.
“I’m here because you’re here,” Spina said, “and you’re not with the Bureau. I was called in to smooth the waters, so to speak. As for Sam, he’s still with our doctor. Mills never mistreated him, for what it’s worth.”
Jake acknowledged that with a guttural sound.
“Of course, his mother will probably pitch a fit to know what he’s been eating lately,” Spina went on. Mills poured orange soda in his bottle in lieu of milk. “Sam has a bellyache and he wants his mama.”
Jake winced. He wanted the boy’s mama, too.
He couldn’t think of her now. Not yet. Not now.
“Are you going to take him to her?” he asked carefully.
“Sure. There’s a chopper waiting out in the parking lot—the same one that brought me in from D.C.”
“Good.” Jake cleared his throat, to no avail. “I need to say goodbye to him,” he said hoarsely.
“Sure. They’ll bring him out in a few minutes. Like I said, they’re almost finished debriefing him.”
“You can’t debrief a kid who’s not even two, for God’s sake!”
Spina smiled, unperturbed. “We’re Federal, Detective. We can certainly try.”
At least he was honest. Jake gave him that. “Is he scared?”
Spina thought about it. Jake liked him a little better for that, too. “His eyes have pretty consistently remained the size of two moons. Other than that, he seems fine.”
Jake breathed again. “Yeah, well, that’s to be expected. What else? What’s going on in New Jersey?” Ernie had gone back there, and he hadn’t yet heard from him.
Spina looked at his watch. “Mills ought to be arraigned on the federal kidnapping charges any minute now. We’re pushing that through fast so we can get a bond hearing and keep him in custody. As for the murder of that woman you found, we’re going to have to wait for the forensics team to finish with her. We’ve got nothing with which to charge him on that right now. Nothing but conjecture.”
Jake nodded. No surprise there. “What about the other kids?”
“All in the northeast. Mills didn’t have to go far, what with all the childless couples waiting to adopt. Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland and New York.”
Jake’s heart stalled. “Where in New York?”
Spina looked uncomfortable. “City. As in Manhattan.”
Jake closed his eyes. In Manhattan? He thought sickly that there might be some long-term scars there for that baby. Talk about culture shock. Then again, with any luck, the little one might just grow up believing it had all been a very strange nightmare.
“You’re going to go get them?” Jake demanded.
“Yes. Our field officers in all locations have been notified and they’re moving in.”
“What about the people who...well, who bought them?”
Spina shook his head. “There can’t be any across-the-board decisions on that. We’ll have to take it on a case-by-case basis. It will depend on how much they knew of Mills’s operation.”
“They had to know,” Jake snarled. “How the hell else was a healthy baby going to suddenly and easily fall into their laps?”
“Sure they knew, but they looked the other way in their desperation and pretended they didn’t. We’ve been through Mills’s ‘office’—it’s more or less a broom closet on the fifth floor of a high-rise. Fancy address, nothing there. He never let couples come to his place of business. He assured all of them that the mothers were unable to care for their babies, for one reason or another. He’d forged all the usual paperwork—hell, you can get forms in any legal supply store—so it looked as though the women had given up custody. But when something looks too good to be true—like being able to adopt a healthy baby after only a few weeks on a waiting list—it usually is.”
Jake felt a surge of relief. At least they had Mills. He’d gotten Mills, and Sam and the others were going home. That was all that mattered.
The door swung open again. An agent came in carrying Sam. He looked very small.
Jake went to him. “You okay, buddy?” he asked, taking one small hand in his large one. Sam’s other clutched a bottle filled with milk this time.
“Mama,” Sam said.
Jake’s heart stopped, then stuttered back to life. “Yeah. These men are going to take you back to her.”
“Wawa?”
“What?” Jake was having trouble with his heart again.
“Wawa, too?”
“Oh.” He stepped back from the baby fast, his throat tightening unaccountably. “You don’t need me. You’ll be fine.”
Spina, damn him to hell, looked amused. “Got yourself into a bit of a personal mess this time, did you?”
“And now I’m getting out again,” Jake said flatly.
“Whatever you
say. You ready, Sam?”
Jake ruffled the boy’s hair awkwardly. “Bye, kid.”
Jake watched them go until he lost sight of them, until they had ducked under the whirring blades to climb up into the chopper waiting for them in the lot. Sam looked terrified. Jake’s heart hurt. The phone rang briefly behind him. He barely heard it. He was having a ridiculously hard time swallowing.
He pulled the door open and hurried outside even as Dave Winslow shouted after him. He ignored him.
He just needed to get back to Dallas. That was all. Then he’d be fine.
Chapter 18
By the time Jake got to his apartment in southeast Dallas, it was past midnight. Thinking required a conscious effort he could not quite master, so he simply stood inside the front door, looking around.
The plants were dead, he observed. He’d left a towel thrown over the back of the sofa—presumably it was dry by now. He decided he wasn’t hungry enough to see what the state of the refrigerator might be. Then again, he’d seriously like a beer.
He went to the kitchen. He’d been right about the refrigerator. An appte on the top shelf had gone soft. There was green stuff on the cheese. He took both and dropped them into the garbage disposal. The beer was good and cold. He returned to the living room with the bottle to open windows and let in some fresh air.
Dallas was damp and chilly on a February night, he thought, but at least it wasn’t as frigid as Lancaster County.
Don’t think about it.
Old routines, he decided. That was what he needed. Everything would be fine if he could fall into his old routines. Eventually, he would forget everything that had had him tangled up for weeks now. He would put it all behind him. He would stop feeling as though he had left some very pertinent piece of himself behind.
He swigged from the bottle and went to the answering machine. Twelve messages. Someone had missed him. He tried to grin and couldn’t quite pull it off. He hit Play and listened.
“Jake. I thought you said you’d be back by now. It’s Molly. Call me when you get in.”
Molly, he thought, frowning. Ah, the blond in the spandex who had thrown a bon voyage party for him the night before he’d gone to Washington. He fast forwarded to the next message.
“Hey, Jake, this is Tina. I haven’t heard from you in so long. Call, why don’t you? We miss you.”
Tina? We? He couldn’t place her.
He scarcely heard the rest of the messages: He fixated on that second call, on the voice of a woman he didn’t recognize, wondering desperately if she had mattered once and how long ago that might have been. Suddenly, he realized that the beer wasn’t sitting well in his stomach at all. It was just that he hadn’t eaten. He was tired.
He went back to the kitchen. He threw the beer bottle in the trash. He decided to take a shower. He stood in the steaming water longer than he had to, the hot water beating down on his skin. Then it began going cold. Call it a day, he told himself. He’d never looked back before. He wouldn’t do it now.
She’d have Sam back by now. She’d be holding him, loving him—hell, she probably wouldn’t take her hands off him. And she’d know he’d kept his promise.
So it was over. It was better this way, for both of them. They were really too different after all. Except...
He wondered if she’d think of him often and if she would smile when she did. He wondered if he had left her enough happiness in the end. Would she stay there? Would she remain forever trapped in the limbo of her marriage to that bastard who had hit her? Or would she finally get out?
He left the shower, toweled off and went into the bedroom. He dropped onto the bed, exhausted. And remembered the time she had crept in on him while he was sleeping. His body remembered and stirred even as he thought how hard it had been then to believe that she was really so sweet, so innocent, that she could think he was dying.
What the hell was wrong with him? Stop thinking about her. Stop it now. But even the scent of her seemed to linger in his head long after he should have left it behind.
That was when it hit him, what had happened, what he had done.
Suddenly, he couldn’t seem to breathe for the warmth that enveloped him. His heart thundered. Was he in love with her? Every instinct he possessed leaped to deny it. No, he thought, no. He’d gone into the danger zone, certainly. Maybe he had begun to fall in love with her. But he hadn’t fallen in all the way, had been able to stop himself, had walked away. Katya Essler would not leave a gaping hole in his life now that he had left her. He had never allowed that to happen. He would not start now.
Like hell.
From the first moment he had roused from unconsciousness to see her face above him, he had instinctively known that she would somehow undo everything he had come to accept about himself. That she was going to have a very big impact upon his life. From the first, something about her had scared him.
But...love her? He just needed to sleep, he decided. Given twenty-four hours, he would remember who Tina was. Maybe Molly would give him a welcome-home party. He’d go back to work. He’d be fine. No looking back. He never looked back.
With that decision, he fell hard and heavy into an exhausted sleep.
The ringing telephone jarred him awake almost immediately. At least, it felt like almost immediately. He blinked groggily in the direction of the window and realized it was morning.
He sat up and threw his legs over the side of the bed. He was careful to avoid bumping the coffee table in front of Adam and Mariah’s sofa. When it wasn’t there, his head began to clear. His heart jumped, sank, rioted, then something heavy and sad settled in.
He reached for the phone. “’Lo,” he rasped, his voice still thick with sleep.
“Jake.” Adam’s voice was worried, maybe even scared.
Jake came instantly, fully awake. Something had gone wrong. “I saw him get on the helicopter, damn it!” he shouted. “I saw the bird take off!”
There was confused silence. “What are you talking about?”
“Sam!”
“You sent him back to the settlement?”
“Didn’t he get home okay?”
“I don’t know. I’m in New Jersey.”
Jake felt his head fill with cobwebs of confusion. “Why?” he asked carefully.
“I’m trying to find Katya. She’s disappeared.”
The room spun. His blood began moving fiercely through his body. Hotly. And coldly, all at once. “Disappeared?” he repeated. He was moderately amazed at how level his voice came out. At how utterly reasonable it was. He sounded like the damned Rock of Gibraltar.
Somehow he knew that when the rock cracked, it was going to be too painful to contemplate. Already ugly words were resonating in his head. Whatever she’s done, wherever she’s gone, somehow it’s because of me... because of me... because of me...
“She heard us fighting yesterday morning,” Adam said.
“So?”
“So apparently she thought that if I didn’t have to support her and her kids, I could continue funding ChildSearch.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Jake snapped. And then a fissure spidered its way through the rock. And it hurt. He had said that. Yeah, it was ridiculous, but...
But she would take what she heard and she would heed it word for word.
“Katya wouldn’t know that,” he added. “She’d believe it.” Just the way she had believed she’d killed him with the rolling pin. She’d done the right thing then, creeping into that room to check on him, no matter how scared she might have been. And she was doing the right thing now—at least as she perceived iL
He should have been used to it by now. But something giddy and terrifying was working its way up his throat.
“She left a note, and as soon as Mariah found it, I started looking for her. I’ve been one step behind her for about twenty-four hours now,” Adam said, his voice a little amazed. “Apparently, she went to Berks County first to get her other kids. They were with her here.”
“In Toms River?” Jake asked harshly. “You’re in Toms River?”
“Yeah. She called ahead to the local police here. They sent word over to the state police barracks. She said to tell you to keep Sam here and she would come pick him up personally. When they got her message, the state guys called for you at the FBI office in Dover. It seems they just missed you.”
Out of the blue, Jake remembered the ringing telephone when he’d escaped the FBI office. He remembered Winslow calling after him. His gut rolled. He’d been too intent on running to respond. What had he done?
“Then, early this morning, she showed up the way she said she would,” Adam went on. “They called the state guys again. They found out Sam had been sent home. She’s going to try to get back to Lancaster, Jake. They weren’t aware of what kind of emergency it was, that she’s not exactly equipped to be traipsing around on her own, or I guess they would have tried to keep her there.”
“Well, good.” Fine, he thought. Okay. It was a temporary snafu, but it would all work out okay. No reason for him to get involved. He was a thousand miles away, for God’s sake.
But he was involved.
“Not good,” Adam was saying. “She only took two hundred dollars and she’s already worked her way clear across two states. She can’t have much left. I was hoping like hell you’d heard from her.”
The rock crumbled.
Laughter surged up from Jake’s chest. It hurt. The reflex was so full, it hurt a lot. It made his eyes tear. “I’ll be damned,” he managed finally.
Adam’s voice went sharp and angry. “I don’t see anything humorous in this.”
“Innocent little Katya. She’s sure given you a run for your money, hasn’t she?”
Adam was quiet a moment as he realized the truth of that. “I’ll be damned,” he agreed.
Jake sobered abruptly. His blood began roaring as the enormity of what she had done hit him at last.
How many times had he told her not to believe in him? She’d believed in him. She’d believed in her heart that he would find her son, that he would protect him and watch over him once he did. She had never doubted it, had believed enough to leave the settlement—the only place in the world she really knew—rather than wait there for Sam to return.