“Oh, that’s too bad. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Fortunately the California Missing Persons Unit kept her up to speed with their investigation. What’s also fortunate is that this case had bothered Todd enough that she kept very detailed notes. Officer Ortiz is emailing them to me. It should be in my inbox within the hour.” He flipped through the notepad. “I think we should contact the California Missing Persons Unit in the morning and talk with them, as well.”
She plucked off the hairband circling her wrist and pulled her hair back in a ponytail. “Yeah, about that…you could contact them, but they can’t know I’m working with you.”
He raised his dark brows. “Piss someone off, did you?”
She held the tip of her thumb and index finger about an inch apart. “Little bit. Maybe the FBI, too.”
“The FBI? And I’m just now hearing about this?”
“In my defense, how was I supposed to know they had an operation in place and the missing child I was interested in finding under surveillance?”
His lips tilted in a half grin. “You messed up their investigation.”
“Again, just a little bit.” When she’d first begun searching for her daughter, she’d thought she had a solid lead in the San Diego area. She’d even skipped town for four days and flown to California, hoping she was right. While there, instead of finding her baby girl, she’d stumbled on a child pornography ring. Thank God the local authorities and the FBI had intercepted her before she’d done serious damage to their case. She would have hated it if she’d been the reason the bastards abusing those kids had walked away on lesser charges. “They still ended up with more than enough evidence to convict and the missing girls were still returned home.”
“I thought you said you were looking for one missing child.”
She drew in a deep breath and met his eyes. “Yes, ours.”
He looked away and down at his notes. “Let’s see what Ortiz emails me and decide from there if I need to contact the California Missing Persons Unit. Moving on, the New Brunswick detective, Dean Stagliano, who ran the investigation on the third boy—”
“Max Weast,” she reminded him.
“Right. Anyway, the number you had in the file was Stagliano’s cell and I caught him at home. He’ll also email what he has from his investigation, but we probably won’t get it until tomorrow.”
“That’s a bummer,” she said, glancing at the map on the wall.
“Not really. Stagliano, like the others, was really bothered by this case. He had plenty of info to share.”
She straightened. “Do tell,” she said, her mood lightening.
“He also used the serial number to track the stroller—get this, to a Walmart in Worcester, Massachusetts.”
She quickly went online and looked up the driving distance. “That’s a three and a half hour drive.” Pushing away from the card table, she stood and retrieved the junk box. She found three green pushpins and placed one in Little Rock, the next in Phoenix and the last in Worcester. “What time is it?”
“Eight forty-five. Why?”
“Walters gave me the serial number from their stroller. I’m wondering if it’s too late to call Rachel and ask her if she could help us.”
“It’s worth a try. Before I do that, let me finish telling you what Stagliano had to say. They also had Max checked by a pediatrician and child psychologist. Again, there was no sign of abuse. Like with the Lamoni boy, they found a hair.”
Hugging herself, she turned and faced him. “They have DNA evidence. That’s fantastic. I can’t wait to compare the results against the hair sample Walters found.”
“I mentioned this to Stagliano. He said to let him know when we have them and he’ll make sure his forensics people get theirs to us.” He set the notepad on the table and picked up his cell phone. “I’ll give Rachel a call and see if she can help us.”
“Before you do, do you have any plans for tomorrow?”
“Not really. I was just going to do a few things around the house. Why?”
“I might have told Walters that we’d be in Lamoni around noon.”
“You might have,” he echoed.
“If that’s a problem, I can go by myself. But I think Walters is hoping for a CORE agent, not a detective from Chicago. Just as I thought, he looked up CORE and he’s really anxious to work with the agency.”
“How far of a drive is it?”
“Six hours.”
He shoved a hand in his front pocket. “We should be on the road by five-thirty in the morning. If we plan on staying overnight, we—”
“No need for that.” As it stood, they’d have to spend twelve hours round trip together in a car. They hadn’t been in that close of a proximity to each other, for that length of time, in nearly five years. The thought of having to drag out their time together by staying overnight didn’t appeal to her. Especially because it brought back heated memories she’d been trying to keep buried.
“Why not? If I recall, you enjoyed spending the night at a hotel,” he said, and she swore his tone had become huskier, sexier.
“No. I enjoyed hotel sex,” she reminded him. “Which we won’t be having.”
“Interesting. All those times you dragged me to a hotel, I thought you were just looking to unplug. I guess the sex was just a bonus.”
A big bonus and the main reason she had dragged him to the different hotels. There was something about having sex away from home that had always turned her on. For whatever reason, she felt free to turn up her kink and take a walk on the wild side. Which was exactly why they wouldn’t be staying the night in Lamoni. If temptation was only a room away, after going without Dante’s touch for nearly a year, she could easily see herself caving and inviting him to her room. She could easily picture them naked, skin-to-skin, his skillful mouth on hers or—oh, yeah, between her legs.
She cleared her throat. “Are you going to call Rachel? The serial number she needs is next to my laptop.”
He stared at her for a moment, the heat in his eyes clear. “Yeah, I’ll get right on it.”
While he called Rachel, she looked back to the map. Instead of thinking about hotel sex, she looked for patterns. Cody Graham was taken from Atlanta, likely lived with the kidnappers in Little Rock and was dropped in Shreveport… She grabbed a pen and a fresh piece of paper and created a timeline, starting with Cody’s abduction.
Dante ended his call with Rachel and came over to where she stood, hunched over the card table. “Rachel’s going to see what she can come up with and call us back,” he said, pointing at her timeline. “Smart. What are you finding?”
“Another pattern. If you look at the date each child was taken, to the date they were dumped, except for Patrick Cleary, the boy found in Blythe, the kidnappers kept the kids for two years and two months. They kept Patrick an extra month. If you look at the date they dumped each boy, then the date the next one was taken, there’s an eight-month gap.”
He ran his finger along the timeline. “And all of the boys were approximately two and a half when they were found.”
“Plus, they all, for the most part, look the same, they’ve been given the same name and each had been found in a Roll-Baby stroller—exclusively sold at a Walmart. The kidnappers just got rid of their fourth victim. I’m guessing they’re already making plans to take the next one.”
“If the kids are five to six months old when they’re taken, it’s kind of hard for them to plan on stealing a six-month-old baby, eight months ahead of time.”
“But they could be establishing themselves in a new city, taking care of housing, jobs, whatever they need to be comfortable for a couple of years.”
“Yeah, except if a new neighbor moved next door to me—without a child, then months later starts pushing a six-month-old around in a stroller, I’d find that strange. I’m sure other people would, too.”
“They could claim they were foster parents or had adopted the child, or maybe they’d taken custody of a fam
ily member’s baby. I think they could explain the baby away. What they couldn’t necessarily explain is why the child—two years and two months later—no longer lived with them.”
He nodded. “They’d have no choice but to move.”
“I wish we had a pattern for the cities they’re choosing. Eight months from now, another baby boy could go missing.” Unease lodged in her chest and she met his gaze. “We can’t let that happen.”
His jaw hardened. “No parent deserves that,” he said, a hard, angry edge to his tone.
“No they don’t,” she responded just as Dante’s cell phone rang.
He looked at the screen. “It’s Rachel,” he said, then answered. Moments later, he thanked her and ended the call. “The stroller was purchased from a Walmart in St. Joseph, Missouri.”
Eagerness rushed through her as she scooted around the table and sat in front of the laptop. She quickly typed, then sat back in the chair and stared at the screen. “The driving distance from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Lamoni, Iowa is a little over an hour and a half.” She rubbed her temple. “Do you think there’s any chance Rachel could find out the date the stroller was purchased? If we had that, we could work with the St. Joseph PD and see if we can get a warrant to view the Walmart security cameras.”
“I asked her, and she said we’d have to contact Walmart for that information.”
“I bet they’d cooperate for an investigation like this.”
“One would think,” he said, then smothered a yawn with his hand. “I think we should wrap it up for tonight. Five-thirty is going to come at us quick.”
Dante’s yawn was contagious, and she covered her mouth to stifle her own, then rubbed her itchy, tired eyes. Physically she might be ready for bed, but her mind continued to race in a million different directions. Plus, now that she’d spent the evening with Dante, she wasn’t ready for him to leave. She liked having a warm body in the room for company, rather than a wall plastered with missing kids. Damn it, she liked having Dante for company. Which could be a problem if she didn’t keep herself in check. They were going to spend a lot of time together tomorrow and, if this case didn’t go well, possibly see each other regularly during their investigation. Falling into old, familiar patterns would be easy to do. After all, he was her husband and it was difficult to forget about the years they’d spent together.
She’d do well to keep reminding herself that they couldn’t go back to the way their relationship had been before their lives had been ripped apart. Too much time had passed, too many hurtful words had been said. Besides, Dante was, and always would be, a painful reminder of her loss. And she had no idea how to let that go.
Moving toward the door, she said, “We both better get some sleep. Do you mind driving? I haven’t had my oil changed in a while.” Dante had always taken care of their cars. Now that she thought about it, the oil light on her dash had been on for probably about seven or eight months.
“I’ll take your car in for a tune up next week,” he said, but made no move for the door. “I was thinking, since it’s getting late and we have to leave early, maybe I should just stay here for the night.”
No way. Too tempting.
“I don’t have an extra toothbrush and that couch is hell to sleep on,” she said jerking her head toward the living room. “I’m also sure you’ll want to wear clean clothes.”
“We can stop at our house on the way out of Chicago,” he said, taking several steps forward.
“Then we’re backtracking from the freeway, which means we’d have to leave earlier.”
He met her at the door and instantly crowded her space. She caught the faint scent of his cologne, the warmth radiating from his body and the heat and longing in his eyes, and pressed her back against the wall. He leaned in and ate up the distance. “It’s just as well that I leave,” he said, his voice rough, sexy…confident. “If I did stay the night, it wouldn’t be on the couch and we wouldn’t get any sleep.” He pressed his palm along the wall and brought his mouth close to hers. “The last time we had sex was too quick for my liking and too long ago.” He caged her. “What’s it been, about a year or so?”
Ten months, two weeks—give or take a few days.
“Doesn’t matter. If I’m only allowed to make love to my wife once a year, next time won’t be quick.” He slid his hand down the wall, then tilted her chin. “I’ll damn well take my time.”
She drifted her gaze to his mouth, then quickly turned her head. “It’s going to be hard to make love to your wife if you’re divorced.”
His warm breath brushed against her cheek when he released a soft chuckle. Pushing away from the wall, he opened the door. “Then I guess I’ll have to make sure I seduce her before that happens,” he said, his eyes drifting to her breasts before he turned and shut the door behind him.
Yeah, she’d definitely have to keep herself in check where Dante was concerned. The man was too sexy and had a way of making her easy, needy and oh so greedy. If she caved and let him seduce her, where would that leave her?
Sexually satisfied and longing for the husband she could no longer have.
Chapter 6
“THIS IS THE place.” She touched Wayne’s arm and motioned toward the long, winding dirt driveway. “The house is set way in the back.”
“Are you sure about this, hon?” Wayne asked, and pulled the F-150 to a stop.
“Of course I’m sure,” she said, taking in the lay of the land with excitement. Missy Schneider’s home and dog breeding business sat on nearly thirteen acres of land. Since she couldn’t see the house from the road, she assumed it was nestled in the back, where the tops of tall oak trees reached for the bright blue sky. A massive alfalfa field separated Missy from her nearest neighbor’s house, which she and Wayne drove by about a half a mile ago. “This baby is going to change our lives.”
“You said that before.” He shifted the truck into PARK. “Nothin’s changed. Anymore, I feel like we’re living like fugitives, running from one town to the next. Aren’t you tired of living that way?”
She looked past him, out his open window to another alfalfa field on the other side of the road. A slight, hot breeze drifted through the truck and brought with it the alfalfa’s slightly tangy, earthy scent. “I am,” she answered honestly. She’d love to own a home, build roots, maybe even make friends and become involved in their community and church. For the past thirteen years, it had only been her and Wayne—the boys, too. But they didn’t really count considering they only lasted a couple of years.
Since leaving St. Joseph yesterday evening, Wayne had been…off. For whatever reason, laying their last Elton to rest had bothered him. Losing his job had, too. Which was plain dumb since he had been ready to quit anyway. “And I’m doing this for you,” she added, reaching across the cab and taking his hand in hers. “I promise, this is the last one. From here on out, we’ll be a family. And nothing and nobody is going to take that away from us.”
“Until we get caught.”
She tore her hand away. “Goodness, Wayne. What’s gotten into you? I told you last night I don’t want to hear anymore of that kind of foolish talk.” After they’d made the three-and-a-half hour drive to Marshalltown, Iowa—in near silence, and checked into the Best Western, Wayne had started worrying about the police. He’d started second-guessing himself. Had they covered their tracks, had they left behind any evidence? Then he’d gone on and on about what would happen to them if they were caught. Life in prison without the possibility of parole. “You need to stop worrying and stop watching those CSI shows we love.” She’d made sure their tracks had been covered and had also made sure they moved across the country in an untraceable pattern. She might’ve not graduated from high school and only had a GED, but, thanks to God, she had common sense. Wayne usually did, too. Right now though, his guilt was overriding it.
“Look,” she continued, “do you want a baby or not?”
“I told you I was happy with the last one and where we were livi
ng.”
Repeatedly. She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “What’s done is done and we can’t take it back. We can only move forward. Now answer me. Do you want another baby?”
He tugged on the bill of his ball cap and hung his head. “I want you to be happy.”
“I want you happy, too. If not having a baby in our lives is what—”
“I didn’t say that,” he said, and stared at her with a combination of concern and impatience. “If you’re happy, I’m happy. If having a baby is what’s going to get us there, then we’ll get us another baby. But I’m worried we’re moving too fast too soon.”
In a way, he was right. Normally they’d find a new city and place to live between babies. She’d take a job for a few months to stash away extra money and, in the meantime, search for their next baby boy. By the time they brought the baby home, they were established and ready to give that baby everything he would need. But she couldn’t pass up this baby boy. Too soon or not, she didn’t know when she’d have a chance like this one again.
No one, not even Wayne, was going to take the opportunity away from her.
To be able to bring a life in this world and be the very first person to hold and kiss the precious angel was something she’d dreamed of for more years than she could remember. God had given her the gift of being a born nurturer. Now He was giving her Missy Schneider’s baby boy.
“I promised you this would be the last one,” she said. “When have I ever gone back on my promises?”
He pressed his head against the headrest. “Never. But how can you make a promise like that? When the boy starts walkin’, talkin’ and he’s ready for potty training, what makes you think you’re not going to have the itch to get rid of him and find a new one?”
“We’re both thirty-six. How many years can we keep doing this?” She remembered what she’d thought about that yesterday. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure I want to deal with sleepless nights and dirty diapers in my forties. I’m telling you the truth, Wayne. I’m ready to settle down, too. Just think, after living in Chicago for a few years and saving up more money, we could buy a house.”
Ultimate Fear (Book 2 Ultimate CORE) (CORE Series) Page 12
