He Was Not There

by P. D. Workman

  “And she’s not quite the same as she was back then? She’s matured, married, had kids of her own?”

  “Yeah. But she’s not… she is so introverted and shy now. Doesn’t want to rock the boat… afraid to speak up for herself.”

  Their show had returned from a commercial break on the TV, and Kenzie eyed it, but didn’t unmute it.

  “Is that because she was abused by her foster family?”

  “I don’t know. Not that she’s said. She was the victim of an aggravated sexual assault when she was fourteen, and maybe that’s what changed her.”

  “Something like that could have a profound effect on a person,” Kenzie agreed. She picked up her glass of water and watched Zachary over the rim as she sipped it. She didn’t bring up Archuro, but she didn’t have to. Zachary already knew she was thinking it. Of course he was affected by the attack, but it hadn’t changed his personality. He was still the same person as he had been before. The change in Heather was jarring to him.

  “I’d really like to meet them,” Kenzie said after putting her glass back down on the coffee table by her knee. She cuddled up against Zachary.

  He forced his muscles to relax and put his arm around her, focusing on the warmth of her body and how good it felt to have her close.

  “Maybe we could get together sometime.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know about doing it right away. Heather might need some time to get used to the idea… we just barely met.”

  “Why? If she’s interested in reuniting with her family, why wouldn’t she want to go out to dinner with you and meet your girlfriend? And I’d like to see Tyrrell again too. He’s a nice guy.”

  Tyrrell was like a less-damaged version of Zachary. He hadn’t had to live with the same abuse as Zachary had and he hadn’t had to deal with the guilt that Zachary did, knowing that he was the one who had set the fire that night that resulted in the breakdown of his family.

  Kenzie’s eyes narrowed and the corner or her mouth lifted. “Is that jealousy I see? I’m not interested in him romantically, Zach. I’d like to get to know your family better. That’s all.”

  It occurred to Zachary that he hadn’t met any of Kenzie’s family. He knew about them; she had two parents, both living, divorced, and she was an only child. But it had never occurred to him to ask if he could meet her parents. But maybe now that they were so close to each other, he should be considering it. Sooner or later, her family was going to want to meet him and find out what kind of a guy she was with.

  “I’ll ask them,” Zachary said finally. “But like I said… Heather is pretty shy. I don’t know whether she’ll want to do it.”

  But Heather had agreed. Fairly quickly, and without any apparent reservations. Maybe she was only careful of men. So they arranged a place, a Chinese restaurant that each of them could get to in under an hour’s drive. It was quiet, but not too quiet. A good place to talk without feeling awkward or having people eavesdrop on the conversation.

  Kenzie and Heather seemed to click pretty well from the start, talking to each other comfortably and able to maintain small-talk seemingly without effort, in a way that Zachary had never been able to. Both women ordered wine, and there was a noticeable relaxation of the lines around Heather’s eyes.

  Zachary hadn’t told Kenzie that the cold case he was investigating was Heather’s, but it hadn’t taken Kenzie any time to figure it out, and Heather seemed willing to talk about it with her. Zachary expected Heather probably didn’t have a lot of chances to talk about it with sympathetic female friends. It didn’t seem like she had much of a support network.

  “What was probably hardest was raising my daughter,” Heather was confiding in Kenzie. “It’s so hard to raise a daughter to be cautious and to make her understand how dangerous it can be out there without sounding like a hysterical nut job or else making her too scared to do anything.”

  “Teaching her to take precautions,” Kenzie contributed, nodding.

  “Men don’t understand,” Heather’s glance flicked to each of her brothers before going back to Kenzie. “They don’t know the lengths that women have to go to to try to avoid being victimized. Grant was totally clueless about the dangers; he always thought I was being too strict with Nicole when I would get after her for thinking she could dress provocatively without any consequences or for being late and not keeping me informed about where she was.”

  “I would expect him to be more understanding, knowing what you had been through,” Kenzie commented.

  Heather splashed more wine into her glass from the bottle on the table. “I never told him about it.”

  Zachary paused with his fork held right in front of his mouth, remembering she had mentioned that before. “You didn’t tell your husband anything about the assault?”

  “I didn’t talk about it with anyone. After the trauma of having to tell my mom and what happened at the police station and the hospital… I completely shut down. I can barely even remember the next ten months.”

  Zachary put his fork down. He looked at Kenzie for her reaction. He could see that, like he, she was struck by this comment. She looked back at him with wide eyes. Neither said anything. Tyrrell was murmuring something to Heather about being sorry for what she had gone through. Heather looked back at Kenzie and caught her expression.

  “What?”

  “Did you get pregnant?”

  Heather looked unsure of how to answer. She looked at the three of them and fiddled anxiously with her wine glass. Finally, she gave a little nod and answered quietly. “Yes.”

  At first, Zachary just saw red. He was furious with the rapist and in spite of Zachary’s normally nonviolent demeanor, had the man been in front of him at that moment, Zachary didn’t know what he would have done. Not only had the scumbag raped Heather, but he’d gotten her pregnant, so she had to go through that physical ordeal for months, and then all of the feelings of guilt and heartbreak that she must have suffered through in giving the baby up.

  Kenzie put her hand over Zachary’s on the table. He struggled to get his rage under control and to mask it, so that Heather wouldn’t have to deal with his anger on top of everything else. He had a sip of his soft drink and looked away for a minute. He looked back at Heather, more calm.

  “You gave the baby up for adoption?” he asked.

  He knew the ages of her children with Grant. She had obviously not made the choice to raise the baby conceived by the assault.

  “Yes. What else was I going to do? I was fourteen. It wasn’t like it is now when they practically pin a medal on a teenager for having a baby. Mom said she’d never give me permissions to have an abortion, and I didn’t know that I could go ahead and have one anyway. So I did what they told me to.”

  Zachary sat back, his dinner forgotten, his head buzzing with the possibilities. The conversation went on around him, but he didn’t hear anything else that was said.

  “Do you know who adopted the baby?”

  Everyone stopped talking and looked at him. Zachary realized that he had spoken out of turn and interrupted the conversation which had continued to go on without him, his question no longer seeming relevant. His face heated a little in his embarrassment, but he looked at Heather, waiting for an answer.

  “No. How would I? They just took it away. Took him away. The birth-mother didn’t get any input back then. I could tell them I wanted a Christian home or something like that, and they would consider it, but it didn’t really matter what I said. They would just go ahead and do what they wanted. I didn’t have any rights.”

  “You did, but they wouldn’t tell you that.”

  “No. They didn’t. They just overrode everything I said, decided what they wanted done with me. I didn’t have anyone on my side telling me I could have made a different choice. I don’t know that I could have, but it would have been nice to know I had other options.”

  “You didn’t get put in a home?”

  “No. The Astors ‘let’ me stay with t
hem. Told the school I had mono. They acted like it was my fault I got pregnant. Like they didn’t know that I’d been assaulted.” Her voice shook with outrage. “It wasn’t my fault.”

  “No, of course it wasn’t,” Kenzie agreed, rubbing Heather’s shoulder soothingly. “It’s horrible that you had to go through that. I hope the world has improved since then. That they aren’t so ignorant and narrow-minded.”

  “There are still plenty of ignorant people around,” Tyrrell contributed.

  “Who would know what family the baby went to?” Zachary persisted, not to be distracted from the track he was on. “Did your foster parents? Your social worker?”

  “I don’t know.” Heather shook her head. “Why does it matter? It was supposed to be a secret, no one was supposed to know. That’s how it worked back then. They didn’t have open adoptions.”

  “It matters because the baby carries his DNA.”

  14

  There was silence around the table. Everyone stared at Zachary. He shifted uncomfortably and leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table.

  “Half of that baby’s DNA is Heather’s, and half is his. If we can get the baby’s DNA, we might be able to get a match on the system.”

  “I don’t know if the technology is that far advanced,” Kenzie disagreed. “I see where you’re going with this, but I don’t think they’d be able to do anything like that. The database isn’t set up that way. You need the perpetrator’s DNA, not his child’s”

  “Why not? If they can test a child and test a man and prove whether he is the father, why can’t they do that in this case? Why can’t they prove who the rapist is by proving who the father is?”

  “I don’t know. You have to have a sample to test against. You can’t just run the baby’s DNA against everyone in CODIS to find a paternity match.”

  “Why not?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not set up to do that!”

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” Heather said. “Because there’s no way to figure out who adopted that baby.”

  “They do it all the time. They have TV shows where they reunite biological families. People put posts up on Facebook with their birth information on it. There are times you can get the records unsealed. There are databases to register in if you want to be connected with a child or parent.”

  “Or you could hire a private investigator,” Tyrrell said wryly.

  Zachary had never been asked to trace an adopted child, but he knew a lot of ways to track down people who changed their names and didn’t want to be found. He’d done all kinds of tracing in his career. He was sure he could track Heather’s baby down, given enough time.

  Heather’s eyes were wide. She shook her head. “I don’t want you doing that, Zachary. Don’t look for him.”

  “But this could work. It could find the slimeball who hurt you.”

  “Kenzie’s right, they aren’t going to search CODIS to look for the father. Even if they did, they’d only get a hit if he was in the system. He probably isn’t. You said it was a long shot and not to get my hopes up.”

  He stared at her, not understanding her sudden reluctance. Just when he hit on something that might help them to track her attacker down, she backed out of it? If she wanted to find him, then she needed to be open to all channels. Unless she had entered into the prospect knowing it was a wild goose chase and hoping to get some closure by running into a nice solid dead end. Maybe she didn’t really want to find the guy; she was just hoping for some kind of confirmation that there was nothing more they could do.

  Heather looked away, her eyes brimming with tears. Zachary forced himself to look down at his plate and take another bite of the Chinese food. It was good food, but he just didn’t have the appetite, and had no interest in it with his brain zooming off down the paths that he could take to find his quarry. He took a deep breath, and managed to force down a few more bites while letting Heather relax and hoping Kenzie would start the conversation up again. He glanced over at Tyrrell to see what he thought. Tyrrell gave him a tiny shake of the head, which Zachary interpreted as ‘just let it be for now.’

  Maybe when Heather had had a chance to think about it, she would change her mind. He had sprung it on her too suddenly, and she needed time to catch up and mull over the idea. Once she’d had a few days to consider, she would change her mind.

  He put down his fork, unable to eat anything else. Kenzie looked over at him, but didn’t make any comment. She and Tyrrell both knew that he didn’t have much appetite because of his meds, and could only force himself to eat so much.

  Heather wiped at her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m being such a spoilsport. We got together to visit and have a good time, and I’m crying all over everything.”

  Zachary raised his brows and shook his head. “You’re allowed to have feelings about it. How could you not? It’s unhealthy to just stuff them.”

  He caught Kenzie’s amused glint.

  “Or so I’m told,” he added.

  “I know, but this isn’t the place. I’m out in public. I should be a grown-up and stay in control of myself.”

  “Is that what they told you?”

  She got a faraway look. Zachary poked at his food, pretending he was still eating, and waited for a response. After a minute, Heather nodded. “Yeah… I guess that’s where I got that from. They hated me being emotional. After the attack… I cried about everything. I cried at school, at home over dinner, when I got up in the morning… the least thing would set me off.”

  “You went through a very traumatic experience,” Kenzie said. “And not only that, but you were hormonal as well. It’s much harder to control your emotions when you’re pregnant.”

  It was Zachary who looked at her this time.

  “Or so I’ve heard,” Kenzie said.

  Heather gave a little laugh. “Yeah, I remember with my other kids… I was just a wreck. I would go into the bedroom to set up the nursery for the baby, and just lose it. Blubbering all over everything. Because of something… I don’t know, a teddy bear or a cloud, and I’d just be off to the races. Grant would come home and find me with bloodshot eyes and a red blotchy face and have no idea what to do. He’d think that he’d done something wrong, but of course, he hadn’t. It was just hormones.”

  “And you think your foster parents should have freaked out over them? Told you not to have feelings? To button them up and get them under control?”

  “No.” Heather picked up a napkin and wiped her nose with it. “I never told my daughter that. Not that she was pregnant, but when she was hormonal as a teenager. I never told her that she was wrong to feel something or that she shouldn’t let other people see it.”

  “When she does get pregnant, and calls you for advice and breaks down blubbering over the phone? Or when you take her out to a nice dinner that she doesn’t have to make and she bursts into tears at the restaurant, are you going to tell her it’s time to grow up and not show her emotions in front of other people? Are you going to tell her that she’s embarrassing you with her tears?”

  Heather shook her head again. “No. I would never do that.”

  “You went through a lot more than just being pregnant,” Tyrrell contributed. “You went through a very traumatic experience, and then you were pregnant on top of it. You felt alone and abandoned.”

  Heather gulped. She picked up her glass of wine and drained it. “Yeah. No one had the right to treat me that way.”

  Zachary stared at his plate, lost in thought.

  15

  Zachary started his day with a number of phone calls and web searches as he tried to figure out his next step, which fully depended on Heather and what she decided. If she didn’t want him to search for her baby… well, he still could, he didn’t need her permission—but he didn’t think he would. If she didn’t want him to, if she really wanted him to just drop the case, he’d do what she wanted him to. He didn’t want to wreck his relationship with his sister by not heeding her wishes.

&nbs
p; But he really wanted to find that baby. He was the key to everything. With him, they might have a chance of finding the rapist. Without him, Zachary didn’t see many other options. He could go back to Heather’s old neighborhood and canvass homes, see if he could find anyone who had lived there thirty years before, but even if he found someone who had lived there that long, the chances that they’d have anything that could help him to break the case were doubtful.

  He would search through the file again for any other leads that had been missed, but he wasn’t hopeful that he’d be able to find any other avenues of investigation, other than talking a news magazine show into investigating it and blasting it all over TV. If they got some publicity, maybe they would have a chance of finding a witness that the police hadn’t found. But even that was a long shot.

  Still, he wanted to have all of his ducks in a row for when Heather came back with her answer, if she changed her mind. He would be all ready to put his plan into action.

  He made a call to Mr. Peterson. Not a Skype call, because he didn’t think that Lorne would be at his computer. Zachary also didn’t want Lorne to see his face, when he still wasn’t looking any better and would attract more comments about how he needed to be taking care of himself and eating properly. He would preempt a video call from Mr. Peterson by making it clear he wanted to keep in touch, even if he were having issues.

  “Zachary! Hey, I’m glad you called!”

  “How are you doing?”

  “You know me. Still above ground. We’re as happy as clams.”

  Zachary chuckled. “Just what makes clams happy, anyway?”

  “Warm water, I assume,” Lorne laughed. “So how about you, what makes you happy?”

  “I had dinner with Tyrrell, Heather, and Kenzie last night.”

  “All three of them together. How did that go?”

  “Really well. I wasn’t sure about how Heather would handle it, but she and Kenzie got along.”

  “Your Kenzie is pretty good at putting people at ease. I’m not surprised.”