a sheen of tears. The tiny, blue knit cap and appled cheeks were too similar, too much of a reminder of his own son’s sweet, angelic face. A face that had been bruised and pale and still the last time he’d seen it.
“Stop that.” Dwight turned away, not sure if he was talking to the infant or the nightmare. He smashed the knob on the music box with his fist, silencing the repetitive tune. Then he picked up the folded note, scrawled on a sheet of his office stationery.
Depositing a baby in his office was too cruel to consider any type of joke. And if this was some kind of sick message to remind him about his own son… If this was the manifestation of that unspoken threat from Sanchez…
Dwight opened the note and read the short message scribbled inside. “Son of a bitch.”
He turned his back on the baby, embarrassed to have cursed in front of the kid. “This can’t happen.” He almost crushed the paper in his fist but, at the last moment, remembered the whole concept of untainted evidence. He tossed the paper back on top of the desk. “I won’t let it happen.”
More at home taking action than dealing with emotions, Dwight pulled the cellphone from his belt and strode out of the office, leaving the smells and softness and memories behind him. He was out in the hallway, pacing the length of the cool, dark corridor before the number he’d punched in answered.
“Rodriguez.”
“A.J.” Dwight hadn’t even considered the time, but the sleepy sound of a woman’s voice in the background reminded him. “Damn.” Dwight planted his feet and filled his deep barrel chest with a cleansing breath as he gathered his wits about him. “Sorry to call so late. I didn’t mean to wake you or your wife, but I need a detective’s expertise.”
A subtle rustle of movement told Dwight that A.J. was moving out of bed.
“The ADA doesn’t call at twelve-thirty in the morning unless there’s a problem. What’s up?”
“I’m at the office.”
“You work too much, amigo.”
“I wish this was about work. It might be. I came in to check messages and… Hell, I don’t know. I’ve probably already compromised the crime scene.”
“Crime scene?” The sudden gravity of A.J.’s voice was drowned out by the renewed fussing of the infant two rooms away. “Is that a baby? Madre dios. What’s going on?”
Dwight turned and walked away again. “You once said that you owed me one after helping you and Claire take care of that incident at Winthrop Enterprises last year.”
“I meant that. Most of KCPD owes you a favor, counselor.” A.J.’s hushed voice was insistent now. “Tell me what you need.”
“I need to call in that favor.”
“YOU WENT DOWN to No-Man’s-Land on your own?”
Maddie glared across the desk at the bald man who sounded more like one of her high-school students than a badge-wearing, gun-toting detective. How many times was he going to ask that same question? “Yes.”
“At night?”
“Yes. I was there last night.”
“Are you crazy?”
The detective, who looked almost ten years younger than her thirty-six, wasn’t bald so much as he’d shaved his head. And he wasn’t impressed by the temerity of her forays in the night so much as he seemed to think she was totally bonkers for taking it upon herself to help the only family she had left.
“I’m desperate, Detective Bellamy. Katie’s only seventeen. I’m supposed to be raising her and protecting her.”
“From what?”
From monsters like the man who killed Katie’s mother. From users like Zero. From a world that overlooked a woman who was shy and sensible and took advantage of a girl who was vulnerable and afraid.
“I need to protect her from whatever made her run away in the first place.”
Cooper Bellamy nodded and thumbed through the papers in his file. It was pitifully thin, considering she’d first reported Katie’s disappearance a month ago. “Let’s see. You said there was no inciting incident that prompted her to run away—no breakup, no family squabble, no change in location?”
“No. None of that.” For four years now, Maddie had done everything she could think of to provide Katie with a stable, secure home life. “She’s a normal, healthy teenager.”
“Except for the pregnancy?”
Maddie kneaded her purse in her lap, feeling the stirrings of the temper she worked so hard to keep in check. “Katie was fine with the baby. I was fine. She and the father amicably parted—he didn’t want any responsibilities to ruin his opportunity to attend Stanford, and she didn’t want a father who wasn’t interested in the baby.”
He flipped another page in the file. “Do you think she could be trying to reach her own father?”
Joe Rinaldi. The sickness that infected Maddie’s and Katie’s lives—shadowing every memory, coloring every decision.
Trust me, sweetheart. The only time I’ll send you flowers is for your funeral. He’d sent a dozen roses to the house just after Maddie’s sister, Karen, and Katie had moved in. The roses had arrived the day before Karen had disappeared from work. Two days before Maddie had been called to the morgue to claim her sister’s mutilated body.
But that was four years ago. Karen had been his obsession, his daughter little more than an afterthought. Katie had been an innocent bystander trapped in the nightmare.
But that nightmare had nothing to do with this one, right?
Maddie steeled her voice against the inevitable guilt, fear and loathing she associated with mention of her ex-brother-in-law’s name. “Joe’s in prison, serving a life sentence. He’s not a part of Katie’s life anymore. He’s not a part of our life,” she enunciated, as if saying it could make her believe it. “Joe Rinaldi couldn’t have had anything to do with Katie’s disappearance.”
“You’d be surprised what a man can accomplish from inside a prison cell if he’s determined enough.”
Hadn’t Joe made a similar promise to her on that last day of sentencing in the courtroom? A private little aside for her ears alone before the bailiff led him away?
I’ll find a way to get to you, bitch. Tellin’ those lies about me. You’re just jealous I married Karen instead of you. You turned her against me. Don’t think no jail cell is gonna keep me from giving you what you deserve.
But someone else had heard the threat that day. The prosecuting attorney, Dwight Powers. A cold, unflappable man who’d done the one thing no other man had ever done before or since in Maddie’s life—he’d saved the day. Defended her honor. Got in Joe’s face and told him, in no uncertain terms, that he would be watching every move Joe made. And if he did one little thing to challenge the verdict or violate the sentencing he’d worked so hard to obtain…
“Ms. McCallister?”
There were no heroes in Maddie’s life to save the day now. She pressed her back into the vinyl chair, sitting up as straight and tall as five feet five inches would allow. She had to fight her own battles. She had to be the hero Katie could count on.
Weary from a night without sleep, Maddie wished she’d taken the time to do more than shower and throw on some lipstick and jeans. Maybe a power suit. She should have at least put her hair up in one of those sensible buns that made grown men and the high-school students in her English class take her more seriously.
She tucked one brash-colored strand of hair behind her ear and put on her best schoolteacher voice. “I don’t think Joe has anything to do with Katie’s disappearance. I’m more interested in what that man named Zero told me last night.”