by M. S. Parker
That sucked the air out of me, and I all but sagged, barely able to support my own weight. Ryan continued to hold my wrists, but now he was holding me up too.
His gaze was level. “Her own mother raised her – if you could even call it that – and her life sucked. She had to know the girl was with people who loved her.”
My mind spun back.
“Do you think about her?”
“Don’t you want more, though? I mean, you’re out now. You can take care of her.”
“You’re good people.”
“Sometimes the people who raise you aren’t the good people they should be, though.”
Swallowing, I let go of his shirt and he released me as I turned away. “You did this right after Carly and I got together, didn’t you?”
“No. I started looking right after we hired you full-time.”
I turned to stare at him but he just shrugged.
“It took me about six weeks to get the information. Carly hinted that you might want to know, so I started the search. But she didn’t ask again until you got together. I showed it to her then, letting her decide, and she let it go. She said you only wanted to know she was happy.”
“She is...” Fuck, I shoved the heels of my hands against my eyes. “She was, wasn’t she?”
“Yeah. Her mother – her adopted mother, I mean...”
“That was her real mom. He’s her real dad. I’m just a...sperm donor,” I said, feeling more bitter than I could remember feeling in a long time. Bitter for the life I’d lost. The child I’d never known. “But they love – loved her.”
“We’ll find her, Bobby,” he assured me. “This bastard, he’s just fucking with you. He’s doing this to get you here.”
I lowered my hands and stared at Ryan, anger burning away the bitterness. “Yeah? Well, he got his wish.”
And if I had anything to say about it, it might just be his last one.
* * *
It was the same guy. Had to be. The type of paper was generic as hell. Even the font was nothing special, the default for pretty much every PC word-processing program.
But the message...yeah. That was sort of unique.
Tell Bobby a child’s life for a child’s life.
The words echoed in my head.
“Mitchell.”
At the sound of Ryan’s voice, I looked up.
Two cops were sitting across from us. It was a familiar set up, almost as familiar to me as my own name at this point. Ryan sat next to me, so that was something new. Lawyer he might be, but he wasn’t here because he was being paid. He was here because he had my back. That was also a new thing for me. Unsettling, in a way. I wasn’t sure if I deserved that unwavering support. Not from him, not from Carly. Not from any of them.
But I had it nonetheless.
And with my daughter’s life on the line, I wasn’t about to turn it away.
As Ryan’s resolved gaze connected with mine, I pushed everything out of my head and tried to focus. He’d help. He was a smart bastard and a resourceful one. Everything he could do, every string he could pull, he’d do it. I’d need that. My daughter...my throat tried to lock up on me.
Clearing the blockage away, I asked, “What about him?”
“I’ve done some digging. It looks like his parents split up a few years after he died.”
I frowned. “After I killed him.”
Ryan’s shoulders tensed slightly under the polo he wore. “Yes. They split up. His mother, Lois, she still lives in Louisville near her surviving son, Dale. The father, though, he sort of fell off the grid.”
“The grid?” I shook my head.
“It means nobody can find a lot of information about him.” The words were low and raspy and it was the first thing I’d heard from Detective Tuite. He was a broad, solid-looking bastard, his thick brush of reddish hair a scrub across his stumpy head. His watchful eyes didn’t reveal much of anything going on inside his head. He’d make one mean-ass bad cop.
As that thought rolled through my head, he braced his elbows on the table. I wasn’t what anybody could call scrawny, but his arms looked like they might be the size of my thighs. I vaguely wondered if he had a lot of guys resisting arrest. I didn’t think it would’ve been on the top of my list.
“Did you ever have much contact with Derrell Mitchell, Sr., Mr. Cantrell?”
Him? Not Dale? Dale and Darrell’s father? My head spun and I struggled to find the answer to the question.
I shook my head. “That I’m aware of, no. He barely looked at me during the sentencing. Barely looked at anybody. He came in late, left early.”
“Excuse me?”
Looking at Tuite’s partner, the long, lean Detective John Witter, I said, “I’m sorry?”
John was a tall, skinny black guy. He was as skinny as his partner was broad and he had an affable face, the kind of face you expected to always see smiling.
Except he wasn’t smiling now.
Echoing Tuite’s posture, he leaned closer to me and shook his head. “I’m just not following. You killed his son, but he was late for the trial...?”
I ran my tongue across my teeth as I shot Ryan a glance. I guessed they hadn’t had much time to read up on things. Ryan shrugged and I looked back at the two cops. Of course, they’d been busy trying to find a missing kid...my kid.
“There wasn’t a trial,” I said, locking everything I felt behind a steel door. I’d think about her later. Haley. Her name was Haley.
Suddenly, I had their entire attention.
“You made a deal,” Tuite said.
I heard the disgust in his voice and forced myself not to react. “Yeah.”
“What kind of deal?”
“Do we really have time for this?” I demanded. “My daughter–”
“She’s not your daughter,” Witter said, cutting me off. He curled his lip. How I’d thought that face could be a friendly one, I didn’t know. He’d probably make one hell of a bad cop himself. “She’s the daughter of a preacher. A good guy. He volunteers at a homeless shelter two days a week. Put himself and his wife through college working the night shift at a shitty plastics plant. Lost his wife and has been raising that little girl on his own.” He stood up as he spoke, glaring at me. “I’ll be damned if I let him lose his daughter because somebody has a vendetta against a punk-ass boy who knocked up some two-bit–”
Ryan caught me before I could hit him. I might not have loved Leah, but no one talked about a woman like that.
“Easy,” Ryan said, his arms wrapped around me.
Tuite stepped between Witter and me, trusting Ryan enough to turn his back on us.
“That’s enough, John,” he said, his voice low.
I barely heard it over the roaring of blood in my ears.
The door opened, cutting off Witter’s response. A tall, slim woman stood there.
Ryan’s arms fell away but not before he bit off, “Behave.”
I always behaved. I just didn’t always behave well. But I gave him a terse nod and sat down, deliberately turning my chair so I was angled toward Tuite. If I looked at Witter any time in the next few seconds, I’d hurt him. And I wouldn’t be sorry.
Maybe I’d be sorry for the consequences, but not for my actions.
“Well, it looks like I showed up just in time,” the woman said, her mouth smiling, but the amusement didn’t reach her eyes. She shut the door behind her and moved deeper into the room.
My phone vibrated as the blonde walked further into the room, and I glanced at it. Carly’s image flashed across the screen. I turned it upside down. Too tempting.
“Are we interrupting your busy day, Cantrell?” Witter asked, his voice silky.
Without looking at him, I flipped him off.
The woman chuckled. “I don’t think he likes you, John.”
“Captain, that hurts me so much,” he said.
She didn’t respond. She stood at the table, and although Tuite offered her a seat, she refused, opting to stand.
I had to fight the urge to squirm as she studied me. Her eyes felt like they were cutting through me.
“I’ve been hearing a lot about you, Mr. Cantrell.”
“Don’t believe half of it,” I said without thinking.
“So I’m okay to believe the other half?” She smiled, and this time, it showed in her eyes.
I wisely kept silent.
She looked over at Tuite. “You know how my daughter is with the celeb gossip, right?”
Oh shit.
I glanced at Ryan, but he wasn’t even looking at me.
Tuite angled his head to the side. “Yeah. I keep thinking Adele will grow out of it. She’s a smart cookie, that girl of yours, captain.”
“Well, we’ve all got our weaknesses.” She blew out a breath and then caught the chair Tuite had previously offered. “You and me? We’re hooked at the inane Bachelor and Bachelorette, even though we know it’s bullshit.”
“It’s entertaining bullshit.”
This back and forth shit was starting to get on my nerves. My hands curled into fists.
The captain nodded and looked back at me. “So my daughter follows celeb gossip. I don’t like it, and when she starts spouting stuff as fact, I make her start actually looking up the facts. That was the case when she got hooked on that pop singer...you know, that Canadian kid? Anyway, she used to be one of his believers or whatever they called themselves a few years ago. She was whining about how unfair it was that he got in trouble for one of his DUIs? So I made her write a report about drunk driving.” She gave me a slightly smug look. “It had to include images. She was fifteen, a cop’s daughter, so it’s not like she wasn’t aware of certain things.”
I really hoped she was going somewhere with this. My patience was about gone.
Her expression sobered and she looked out the window. “A week later, a friend of hers was killed by a drunk driver. She got rid of all of his music, tore up his posters, trashed it all. To this day, she gets hot if his name is even mentioned. We still have these discussions, though. If she goes on and on about how much she likes somebody, I ask her why.”
She looked back at me and my skin felt about two sizes to small now. Maybe I was slow, but I’d just figured where she was going with this.
“Which is why I was kind of surprised when she told me she was kind of rooting for this Cabby thing.”
Confused, I looked over at Ryan. He coughed. It didn’t do much to cover his laugh, though.
Getting irritated, I looked back at the captain. “I don’t know what in the hell this Cabby thing is and I don’t care. I want to know what we need to do to find my–” I stopped and blew out a breath. “How do we find Haley?”
“We’re working on it. This is just part of the team. We have a meeting in thirty minutes with the rest. Work with me, okay?” She glanced at Ryan. “Are you going to explain so I can finish?”
Ryan shrugged as he glanced at me. “Cabby is a mash-up of you and Carly. Bobby and Carly. It’s a…” He grimaced and smacked his hands together. “When people like a couple together, they say things like ‘we ship Cabby’… that means they like you and Carly together.”
“Fu–” I snapped my jaws together and looked at the captain. “Excuse me, ma’am.” Tuite made an odd strangled sound, but I ignored him. “Okay, I get that. Now, Haley?”
“In a few minutes.” She’d come in with a folder, and now she laid it down, flipping it open.
“You impressed a Lieutenant Todd Hollister quite a bit, I must say, Bobby...may I call you Bobby?”
I jerked a shoulder. She’d done her homework.
“As I was saying, Bobby. Hollister had some interesting things to say about you. Granted, he solved a number of cases with the evidence you gave over the months following your arrest, so perhaps he had reason to be partial, but he said if any of the kids he brought in had a chance at turning it around, he’d bet on you.”
She was watching me now. I could feel it, but I stared at the table top. It was some cheap kind of fake wood, typical cop shop décor. Maybe I’d start comparing all the cop shops I ended up in. I had Indiana under my belt – long story – Kentucky, and now California. Three out of fifty states.
“Why didn’t you just grab the kid?” she asked softly.
“What kid?” Witter asked.
Paper rustled. I stared harder at the table.
As the tension in the air grew thick and heavy, I scraped my nail over a minuscule indentation in the fake wood. Some sort of chip.
A few minutes passed and then I heard Tuite’s voice. “I’m already familiar with the basics too, John. My, um, well, my wife’s sort of into the whole Carly and Bobby thing too.” He cleared his throat.
I glanced up as the heat spread up my face and he was staring pointedly at the ceiling. Now John was eying me with narrowed eyes. Because he was there and I still didn’t like him, I shot him the bird. Again.
Ryan blew out an exasperated breath. “Bobby.”
I spun my chair to face the captain. “I want to know what we have to do to find Haley.”
She simply drew another piece of paper from the file she’d brought in. “Is he familiar at all?”
All the oxygen rushed from my lungs and my heart sank as I found myself staring at a skinnier, older, harder version of the man I killed.
“That’s...” I had to clear my throat twice to finish. “That’s Derrell’s father. Derrell Mitchell, Sr.”
She simply nodded and then leaned over, tapped the time stamp. “The photo was taken two days ago at a gas station about three hours south of here. A lot closer to your neck of the woods. The make and model of the van fits with what was seen near the missing child’s home.” She gestured to the front end of the van. “It looks like he was working his way north.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Eric Haskell should have been her dad, her birth dad. He was Haley’s real dad and I knew that. In all the ways that counted, he was her real dad.
He’d been there for her first word, her first step, losing her first tooth. He’d put band-aids on her scrapes and wiped away her tears. He would be the one to teach her how to drive, and shoot hoops, and glare at her prom date and all of that.
I wanted to promise him we’d find her so he could do all of those things, things it seemed to me that a good dad would do. But what did I know about good dads?
Even as I tried to find the words to tell him that, the fair-haired man came across the room to me, his hand held out.
“We’re going to find her,” he said softly.
I looked down at his hand, confused by it. He continued to wait. Slowly, I reached out and folded my hand around his. He squeezed lightly and shook. A good grip. He had a good grip, the kind of hand that told me he wasn’t afraid of work, either.
If I could’ve hand-picked a man to be my daughter’s father, I was pretty sure I would’ve picked him.
“We’ll find her,” he said again.
“Shouldn’t I be telling you that?” I said, my voice hoarse.
“We can tell each other.” He smiled then.
His hair was a few shades paler than mine, and instead of green eyes, his were blue. His features were broad and square and his nose looked like it had been broken once. Mine had too, but it had healed fairly straight. Still, we looked enough alike that somebody could mistake us for family. Haley would never have to worry about people commenting that she didn’t look like her parents.
My phone buzzed again and I tugged it out, checking the message from Carly.
I have to talk to you. Urgent.
Glancing behind me, I counted all the cops, eyed Ryan talking with Captain Grace Bauer.
“People!”
Witter and another cop – Lieutenant Rossini – were clearing the way toward the front, two techs behind them. They were adding to the wire taps on the phone and when we left, Witter and Rossini would stay here.
I’d been told Tuite would be coming with me to my hotel.
Fuck that. I wasn�
��t going to a damn hotel.
Hunching my shoulders, I hurriedly tapped in a response.
Don’t have much time. Cops here. Some sort of meeting. I’m supposed to go to a hotel with one of them in case I get contacted. They’re pretty sure they know who it is.
There was only the briefest pause before Carly’s reply came up.
That cache be right. Inn follows.
I scowled at the gibberish, but before I could ask what the hell she was talking about, the next message came up.
FUCKING AUTOCORRECT. That can’t be right. You need to call me. I’m following Ridley. He knows something about this, Bobby!
“WHAT!”
At the sound of my bellow, the entire room went quiet, but they could’ve been invisible for all I cared. I half-knocked one of the techs over in my rush to get to Ryan. One of the cops had a hand on his gun. I did notice that, the same way I saw Tuite stilling him with a hand on his arm. I grabbed Ryan by the lapels of his suit, shaking him.
“Call the house! Carly...” My head was spinning. “Carly...she said...”
What the fuck was I doing, talking to him? I dropped him and called the house.
“You’ve reached–”
I cut Laureen off before she could finish. “Get Carly! I have to talk to her.”
My stomach twisted even as I spoke.
“Bobby?” Laureen’s voice had a bad, quavering vibe. “Is that you?”
“Get her, Laureen.”
Voices were starting to rumble around me.
“She’s not feeling well, sir. She had...she had one of her migraines and I...um, well, I had her lie down. Nobody is to disturb her–”
I lowered the phone, staring at Ryan. “She left the house, Ry.”
* * *
If ever I’d wished to be able to split myself in two, it was now. Part of me needed to be able to focus on what was going on here and now with Haley Haskell, the blonde-haired child who had my mouth and my nose, and apparently hated lima beans with the same passion I did. Her real father was full of stories that made my chest ache.
“Okay, now if anybody calls...”