Stand Alone

by P. D. Workman

  “No firearms?”

  “No.”

  “Other drugs?”

  Justine hesitated.

  “Might be another roach or two,” she admitted.

  “Still going to be simple possession. Well, give it to me, and I’ll think about it. Show me your hands.”

  Justine cooperated as he pressed her hands together behind her back and handcuffed them. She could hear the hooting and lowered voices of the skaters who hadn’t left yet. Sheldon frisked Justine quickly, and escorted her to the police car, where Sheldon’s partner joined him.

  “What’s all this?” the partner questioned.

  “Little miss decided she wanted to go to jail today,” Sheldon said, his tone clipped. “Trespass and possession so far. She’s decided to stop there.”

  The other cop sighed and shook his head, obviously not excited about taking Justine back to the police station and processing her for something so minor. Justine got into the back of the squad car and they took her into the police station.

  “What’s your name?” Sheldon questioned, as he started the paperwork at the station.

  “Katie. Umm  … Smith.”

  “Nice try. How about your real name, now?”

  Justine shrugged.

  “I don’t know my real name,” she said. “It’s Katie, but I don’t know my last name.”

  “Sounds like there’s a story here,” Sheldon observed. “But I need to get you processed. So tell me. What is your real name?”

  “I was kidnapped when I was little,” Justine said. “I don’t know what my name was before I was kidnapped. Just Katie.”

  “What was your name after you were kidnapped?” he questioned with a tolerant smile. “You must have been going by something all these years.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not my name. And I don’t want Em to track me down again.”

  “Katie. Do you have a record?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve never been arrested before?”

  Justine shook her head.

  “Nope.”

  “So your fingerprints won’t be in the system.”

  Justine hadn’t thought about that. She hoped that the interstate records were not connected. She knew there had been cases reported on the news in the past where criminals had fallen through the cracks because they used different aliases in different jurisdictions, and the state fingerprint records weren’t shared.

  “No,” she said, feigning a confidence that she didn’t feel.

  “Let’s run them, then,” he said. He took her to a fingerprint scanner and ran her prints through the system. Nothing was found in the database. Justine breathed a sigh of relief. Sheldon looked at her face, and shook his head.

  “What state do you have a record in?” he questioned shrewdly.

  Justine shrugged.

  “Nothing here,” she said with a smile.

  “No. And you’re not going to tell me your real name?”

  “Katie is my real name,” Justine insisted. “And Smith  … is the best I can do. I don’t know what my last name was, before I was kidnapped.”

  He shook his head, obviously not believing her story.

  “There are lots of reasons for keeping your name to yourself,” he said. “But this is the first time that I’ve heard that one.”

  Justine cocked her head at him.

  “How long have you lived in Burbank?” she questioned.

  “All my life.”

  “How long have you been in the police force?”

  “About six years.”

  “Hmm.” Justine frowned and shook her head. “Not long enough. You don’t remember any news story from before that about a little girl being kidnapped? A baby or toddler? Years ago?”

  “No,” Sheldon shook his head. “What makes you think that this is where you were kidnapped from? You could have been kidnapped from another city. Your abductors wouldn’t have stuck around, would they?”

  “No, I didn’t grow up around here. But the birth certificate that she used, it was from here. So maybe this is where I came from.” Justine shrugged. “No way to know, I guess.”

  “There are lots of missing kids out there,” Sheldon said. “If you’re serious, your best bet is to look on the missing children websites, see if you can find something that matches.”

  “I have,” Justine sighed. “I use the computers at the library. There’s just too many to narrow it down. I thought maybe the police would have better search facilities.”

  “When you were a toddler?” he looked her up and down and shook his head. “Those cold cases won’t be on the computer. They haven’t been entered. They’d have to do a manual search of the archives, and they’d have to know some specifics about what they were looking for. Best bet is to find an officer who was on the case.”

  Justine sighed.

  “Yeah. Like that’s gonna happen.”

  He nodded.

  “Maybe I’ll hear something. I can mention it to some of the senior officers.”

  Justine shrugged, not optimistic about it.

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER 17

  IT WAS HER BRILLIANT blue eyes that Frank saw first. Just as he’d looked into them all those years before. They held him frozen in their gaze. Frank reached out, but couldn’t reach her. The face morphed from infant to toddler to an older girl, only the eyes remaining the same. Blue, intelligent, demanding.

  “Help me,” she begged him. “Please help me.”

  “I can’t,” he protested, reaching for her but unable to get to her. “Wait, I’ll get you  …”

  But she was fading from his view, fading into darkness, and he had only the memory of her clear blue eyes.

  Frank gasped and jumped awake, his whole body tense with the sensation that he was falling.

  “No—no!” he protested, still reaching for her, knowing it was too late, that she was gone again. Marilyn rolled over and rubbed his back and arm.

  “It’s okay, honey,” she soothed. “You were just dreaming.”

  “She was here,” Frank choked out. “I almost had her.”

  “The baby?” Marilyn questioned. “Was it the same one?”

  Frank nodded, nestling into her arms for comfort.

  “Yes, the baby,” he agreed.

  “It’s okay,” Marilyn soothed. “She’s fine. Wherever she is, she’s okay.”

  “She needs help,” Frank argued. “She needs help, and I don’t know where she is.”

  “It was just a dream.”

  He closed his eyes, half wanting to dream about her again, and half afraid that he would.

  “Are you reviewing cold cases again?” Marilyn questioned drowsily.

  “Yeah.”

  “You always dream about her when you’re looking at her file. Can’t you just skip over that one? Give it to someone else to review?”

  “I’m the only one who really cares about her. Everyone else will just browse through it, say that there’s no new leads, nothing else to follow up on, and put it back away.”

  “But there aren’t any new leads.”

  “I have to be sure. I have to make sure that there’s nothing else that I can do. Nothing that I have missed.”

  “Maybe you need a new set of eyes,” Marilyn suggested.

  “Yeah, I probably do,” he agreed. “If I can get anyone else to look at it.”

  “Think about it tomorrow. Maybe someone else can see something new.”

  Frank nodded and drifted back off to sleep.

  In the morning, Frank was reading the paper over breakfast, something that he wasn’t actually supposed to do. He wasn’t supposed to be ignoring his family. But his mind wasn’t even on the paper. He became aware that they were trying to talk to him, and lowered the paper to look at his wife and children.

  “What?”

  “Simon asked if you had a good sleep,” Marilyn repeated.

  Frank folded up the paper and put it to
the side, determined to give his family the attention they deserved.

  “Well  … I didn’t sleep really well,” he admitted.

  “Did you have a dream, Daddy?” Jocelyn asked sweetly.

  Frank smiled at her.

  “Yes, I had a dream,” he admitted.

  “’Bout the baby?” Simon asked, making a rocking motion.

  Frank looked at Marilyn.

  “Am I that predictable?” he questioned.

  She nodded frankly.

  “You might have other dreams,” she said, “but you never remember or talk about them. That’s the only one that you ever talk about.”

  “Yes,” Frank told Simon, giving him a tickle. “It was about the baby.”

  “The baby is okay,” Jocelyn said, smiling happily at her daddy. Obviously, she’d heard this conversation many times before too.

  “Yes,” Marilyn agreed. “She went to a family who really really wanted a baby. They wanted her so much that they couldn’t wait to adopt a baby the right way. So they took her. But they loved her very, very much, and they took good care of her, and showed her lots of love.”

  Frank nodded, but he knew it wasn’t true. He saw her all too often in his dreams. She needed his help, but he couldn’t find her. He couldn’t find who had taken her. Marilyn saw the bitter twist to his mouth and looked away, knowing that he wasn’t reassured. He’d seen too many kids abused and abandoned. He couldn’t believe that someone who would break the law to steal a child would treat her well.

  Sheldon greeted some of the other officers at the bar, and looked around to see who else was there. Frank Sylvan sat with a department folder on the bar, pinned under his arm. Sheldon looked at Marcus, and motioned to the folder.

  “Is Sylvan bringing his work to the bar now?” he questioned with a laugh.

  “Take my advice and don’t ask him about it,” Marcus said with a wry grin.

  “Why not?”

  “Old cold case. He’s bent on solving it someday. It’s that one that got under his skin. Even when he retires, he’s still going to be chasing that one down.”

  Sheldon was interested.

  “What kind of case? Homicide?”

  “Kidnapping. I’m telling you, he’ll talk your ear off about it if you let him. Don’t ask him unless you’ve got a couple of hours to spare.”

  Curiosity killed the cat. And Sheldon couldn’t resist a challenge. He went over and sat on the empty stool on one side of Sylvan and ordered a beer. Frank looked over at him, his mouth quirking up.

  “Didn’t anyone tell you that seat is cursed?” he questioned.

  Sheldon chuckled.

  “Let’s say I was warned,” he agreed.

  “That’s an inclination that’s going to get you in some trouble,” Frank said. “You’ll find yourself volunteering for graveyard shifts or going undercover in the hood.”

  Sheldon shrugged.

  “I suppose so,” he agreed.

  He took his beer from the bartender and sipped it.

  “So tell me about your case,” he invited.

  Frank looked at him for a moment, not quite believing that he really wanted to know. When Sheldon just raised his eyebrow questioningly, Frank decided to take a run at it before Sheldon could change his mind.

  “It’s a kidnapping,” he said quickly. “A toddler kidnapped from the hospital, never seen again.”

  “Okay. So what’s so special about it? Some nurse decided that she wanted a baby  … it’s been known to happen.”

  “The baby had previously been abandoned. Almost died. I was part of that rescue.”

  “Wow. Do you think it was the mother that initially abandoned her? She changed her mind and came back for the baby?”

  Frank shook his head.

  “We eventually managed to track down her mother as part of the kidnapping case. Junkie, all strung out. No intention of going back for her. No idea that it had even been in the news. She just left, never intended to go back for her.”

  “Brutal. So how did the investigation go? Witnesses? Forensics?”

  “Nothing. The abductee had wandered away from her bed several times already. So at first, they had no idea that anyone had taken her. They were just looking for a wandering child. The police weren’t called for hours. There was no bulletin to the public. There were hours of surveillance tapes to review. We found an extra nurse on the security camera. Gloves, so she left no fingerprints. Big smock uniform, so you really couldn’t see her body shape or anything. Didn’t get her face on any of the cameras, but she seemed to know her way around pretty well.”

  “It wasn’t one of the hospital nurses though?”

  “Nope. They were all accounted for.”

  “An off-duty nurse?”

  “No one recognized the pictures we showed around.”

  “So someone just walks in, takes her, and walks back out? But since she’s in a nurse’s uniform, no one notices anything out of the ordinary,” Sheldon summarized.

  “It was during a shift change. She put the girl in a wheelchair like she was being taken somewhere for tests or release.”

  “No leads? No one called in with thoughts of who it might have been?”

  Frank shook his head.

  “There were calls, but nothing panned out. We chased everything down, but nothing came of it.”

  Sheldon sat there, pondering.

  “Let me look at the file,” he suggested.

  Frank opened the file and handed it to him. Sheldon looked at the photo of the little girl. Frank had said she was a toddler, but she looked like a baby. Tiny, frail as a bird, her cheeks sunken and her limbs stick-thin. Her eyes were brilliant blue, looking old and out of place on a child.

  “What happened to her? She looks like a holocaust victim!”

  “She was abandoned in a locked apartment. Nearly starved to death before anyone found her.”

  Sheldon shook his head in amazement.

  “When you said abandoned  … I thought, at gramma’s house, or in the ball pit at the mall or something. Not  … that.”

  He flipped through pages of the case summary, looking for anything that Frank might have missed, immersed in the case for so many years. His eyes focused on her name. Katie. He looked at the dates. The abduction was thirteen years ago. He schooled his expression to remain carefully blank and casual and flipped through more pages of the file, though he really didn’t see or take in anything else. A dark-haired, blue-eyed girl named Katie, kidnapped as a toddler thirteen years ago. It was too close to another story that he’d heard recently. But he wasn’t about to get Frank’s hopes up. He closed the file and handed it back to Frank, shaking his head.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said. “But nothing jumps out at me.”

  Frank nodded, looking disappointed. They both attended to their drinks, minds on their own thoughts.

  Time passed without Sheldon seeing the girl again, even though he watched for her at the skater hangouts.

  Sheldon got back into the car as the radio started to squawk. Robertson jotted the details down on the scratch pad.

  “Fifth and twelfth,” he repeated back, “motorist versus skater.”

  Sheldon put the car into gear, grimacing.

  “That’s not going to be pretty,” he predicted.

  “What do you want to bet it’s a DOA?” Robertson challenged.

  “No bets there,” Sheldon shook his head. “Dumb kids. Why do they have to play in traffic?”

  The siren and lights were on, and it didn’t take long to bully their way through traffic, pulling over when they reached the crowd of spectators. As Sheldon got out of the car, he took a pair of gloves from his pocket and pulled them on. They were both surprised to see the skater sitting up and talking, her back to them.

  “What happened?” Robertson questioned.

  The motorist standing beside the car launched into her defense immediately.

  “I looked before I pulled out! There was no one
there. I don’t know where she came from—”

  Robertson and Sheldon both looked at the intersection and where the car had stopped. If the girl was crossing in the crosswalk, she had obviously had the right of way. The car had a stop sign. Robertson closed in on the woman.

  “Why don’t you show me where you stopped, and where you were when you hit her,” he suggested. “Sheldon, see how she is?”

  Sheldon was already on his way over to see if the skater was okay. He moved around her to see her face and what kind of injuries she had, and was surprised to see the girl who called herself Katie.

  “Well, I haven’t seen you for a while, where have you been?” he questioned, crouching beside her and reaching for her carotid pulse. She shied away from him. “It’s okay, just relax. Just need to do an examination and see how you are while we’re waiting for the ambulance.”

  She held still and let him take her pulse. He glanced at his watch and counted it out. Fast, but strong.

  “You hurt your arm?” he questioned.

  The girl nodded, looking down at the arm she was holding against her body with the opposite hand. He could see plenty of road rash up both arms and across her jaw. He glanced down at her legs. The knees of her jeans were ripped, and her knees bloody, but neither was twisted around or obviously broken.

  “How bad is the arm?” Sheldon questioned. “Can I see it?”

  She moved her supporting hand gingerly, letting him see it a little better.

  “It’s busted,” she said tightly. Her face was pale, especially against the backdrop of her long, dark hair. Her blue eyes shone bright and intense.

  “You sure?”

  She nodded.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. How about the rest of you. Legs?”

  “Just burned. And bruised where the car hit me.”

  “No breaks there?”

  “Better not be,” she said with gritted teeth. “I can maybe skate with my arm out of commission, but not with a busted leg!”

  “I don’t think skating is what we need to be worried about right now. Let’s make sure that you are okay. Did you hit your head?”

  She shook her head, jutting her jaw toward him.

  “Landed on my face,” she said, looking downward toward the road rash on her jaw and cheek, “after I caught myself on my hands.”