by Janet Dailey
“On Hoebel’s dime?”
“Yeah. My pal Doris told me Hoebel’s a little too interested in the old case files on Ann Montgomery’s kidnapping. She doesn’t know why and I don’t know why, but he is.”
“So what do we do now?”
Bannon sighed. “Walk around the house. Observe. Did you bring a camera?”
His brother patted the gun in his holster. “I can take pictures with this.”
Bannon looked at him with surprise.
“Lame joke. Sorry,” Linc said. “Okay, lead the way. I never planned to live forever. In case the dude jumps out and kills me, I just want to say that it’s been nice working with you and being your brother and all.”
“Same here.”
They did a standard recon around the perimeter of the house. Bannon noted the same distinctive footprints he’d seen the first time—long and dug in at the toe. The prowler had gone the same way toward the woods of the Blue Ridge.
“He could live up there somewhere,” Bannon said to his brother, nodding toward the brooding mountains.
“No one lives up there. That’s state park land, as far as I know. About a million acres. You can’t see it all from here.”
“He could be a squatter. Tent, shack, something like that—a roof over his head.”
“Maybe. Who knows? Anyway, the two of us can’t search an area that size on our own.” Linc holstered his gun with a decisive shove under his arm.
Bannon followed his brother back inside the house. “I’m wondering if we should bring her computer and things back.”
“I was just thinking that myself. Want to call her?”
“Not yet.” The thought of how Erin would feel when she heard that the stalker had returned made him want to break the bad news nice and slow. “Let’s just do it. Then I’ll tell her.”
“Okay,” Linc said. “I can keep stuff in my garage until she needs it. You know the code if you want to pick it up. Don’t forget to deactivate the alarm,” he added. “The wah-wah-wah is seriously loud and the feds receive the silent one.”
They disconnected everything that boasted a USB port, including the two vidcams, both of which got wrapped in yet another clean rag to preserve any prints, and carried it all out to the government car. Bannon went back in for a last look around. He went for the box of sentimental things first, the one with the scrapbook.
Linc was standing in the doorway. “Anything else?”
“You could grab those portfolios over there.”
“What about her car?”
“Some other time.”
In less than an hour, they had filled the car with everything they thought Erin might want, operating on an unspoken understanding that she was never, ever coming back.
Erin was in the shower when Bannon came in. Charlie rose to greet him and Bannon noticed that the cat had come out of hiding to perch on the upper part of the sofa.
“Hey, you two,” he said. “Getting along better?”
Babaloo responded with a tongue-curling yawn.
“I see. Just bored. That works.”
He slung his jacket over the chair and tried not to think about the creep who’d showed his ugly face.
There was a beautiful alternative to occupy his mind, and she was wet all over. He envied the lucky, lucky water that got to run over Erin’s bare skin. The bar of soap—he was definitely jealous of the soap. He knew it made a generous lather that got everywhere on its own. A whiff of its spicy fragrance tickled his nose, carried there by floating steam.
Bannon tripped over the dog, who gave him a hurt look. “Sorry. Not your fault.”
He went into the kitchen and looked into the fridge to see if he had anything that could be thrown together for dinner. Not really. Takeout, then.
The shower stopped. She must be drying off. Pat pat pat. Fluffy towels and a gorgeous naked woman he couldn’t touch. Pat pat pat.
Shoot him now.
He distracted himself with a careful study of several different takeout menus. “Feel like eating Thai?” he called to her.
“You’re home,” Erin called back. “Sure, that’s fine. I love anything noodly. With lemongrass and chicken.”
“You got it.”
Bannon was on the phone with a nice lady who didn’t speak too much English as Erin came out of the bathroom, not looking at him. Her slender body was wrapped in one big towel, and her hair was wrapped in another twisted into a turban.
Was the towel-turban thing something women were born knowing how to do? He couldn’t manage that to save his life. Face scrubbed absolutely clean, wet hair swept under the turban, Erin was even more beautiful. He stared when her back was to him, loving the way the big towel cuddled her rear. His old, roomy jeans were suddenly uncomfortable.
He figured out the order with the Thai lady and hung up. Bannon took a deep breath. “Dinner’s on the way,” he said to the steam in the air. Erin had made it to his bedroom—he heard the door close with a soft snick.
Bannon stuck a large glass under the fridge’s ice cube dispenser, watched the ice rattle out, and moved the glass to the water side, filling it. He thought about pouring it over his head, but he drank it instead.
Refreshing and effective.
He made himself another glass.
The delivery arrived before she’d finished dressing. Not that she spent a lot of time fussing with her appearance. Maybe she was just lying down, Bannon thought, aching inside. He was glad he had something important to do, like paying the little guy holding up two plastic bags filled with Thai food. He shut the door and carried the order into the kitchen.
“Supper time,” he called. He heard a faint okay.
Plates. Forks, spoons, knives. Napkins. A glass for her. He put the one he’d been drinking from by his plate. Being crazed with lust didn’t mean he’d forgotten how to set a table. His mother would be proud.
“What would you like to drink?”
“Ginger ale,” she replied. Her voice was louder. She must have opened the bedroom door. He wasn’t going to look.
Bannon found a cold can and set it by her glass. Then he put the takeout containers in the middle of the table between the two plates.
“Ready when you—oh,” he said. “There you are.”
Erin was standing in the open archway of the kitchen, pulling down a light sweater over her hips. She’d combed her hair but it was still wet, dark chestnut strands clinging to her neck.
Bannon knew at that moment he was a goner. He would do anything for her. His heart was hers. A ring. A house. A puppy. Two kids. Whatever she wanted. Right now, he could start with killing the creep who’d tried twice to get to her. No problem.
He would do anything at all to keep her in his life, permanently. How to do it, what to say . . . He looked into the takeout bag.
“Want soy sauce?” he asked.
“No, thanks.” She pulled out a chair and took a seat. They ate. She told him about her good news. He kept a lid on his.
Much later, after Erin had given him a lingering good-night kiss, he forced himself not to think about how good her body felt against his. He’d been the one to break off the kiss, not her, and she’d shot him a disappointed look over her shoulder when she’d gone into the bedroom. For now, that was how it had to be between them.
Protecting her was his first priority. He owed her that. It didn’t matter if he felt guilty about playing detective when she hadn’t asked him to, and worse, snooping in her stuff. Erin was in real danger and she had serious decisions to make.
What he and Linc had seen on the vidcam feed and found at her place told him the heat was on and rising. The new developments had an ugly side, and he knew they had to be connected to a lot of other things that were even uglier.
He wandered through the condo, feeling restless. This wasn’t the safest place for her to be, not after today. She could hide somewhere else, under yet another name—he stopped that train of thought and sat down on the sofa.
No.
/> She’d said she wouldn’t run. He’d been too slammed by all the crazy crap that had just gone down to think about what that meant.
For her sake and his own, he had to start figuring things out, including the right way to tell her exactly what he knew and what he didn’t—and what he had guessed.
Bannon picked up a thin-tipped marker and propped a yellow legal pad on his knee, drawing a line down the middle of it to separate facts from conjecture. Then he started writing.
The man she thought of as her father undoubtedly wasn’t. It was logical to conclude that Ernest Randall—inventor, tinkerer, oddball—had the skills to forge a document and a compelling motive to do so. Everything Bannon had learned about the man fit the bill. Her bogus birth certificate had been created with meticulous skill, right down to the official-looking seal. Getting the fake one filed in the hospital records department had to have been easy by comparison. He thought of the fifty he’d slid to the talkative clerk—worth it, for what he’d obtained.
Bannon frowned, tapping the yellow pad with the end of his pen. The final touch—the tantalizing words in Latin hidden in the state seal—was something that still baffled him. Why leave a clue at all? Guilt? Arrogance?
Her brother’s birth certificate had obviously provided more than one template for Randall. Bannon jotted down a probable step-by-step. A die was made and engraved, then stamped onto a blank gold seal to falsify the first, crucial document of Erin’s new life.
Truth is the daughter of time.
Had Ernest Randall left the motto for Erin to find someday? Or to taunt the Montgomerys? If she had been found and her abductors prosecuted for their crime, it would have been noticed during the forensic investigation. It occurred to Bannon that Randall would have felt a touch of pride to hear it read out in court. But he was dead and gone.
Both copies of the birth certificate in her scrapbook looked like they’d been there a while. Obviously, she’d never really looked at the official seal, but who did?
You, he answered his own question. But only because the identical sets of footprints on the two different certificates at the hospital had forced him to take a close look. He would have missed the changed motto otherwise.
The forger had been methodical to an extreme degree—and more than smart enough to plan an abduction that wouldn’t leave a single clue. But there was little doubt in Bannon’s mind that luck had somehow played a part. It always did. And from what he knew of such crimes, it was a safe bet that two people had taken Ann—and kept the secret between them all the way to their graves.
Ina Randall’s role? All the little details, most likely. The freehand pen and ink on the certificate had probably been filled in by her. She was skilled at calligraphy and artistic. Girl of gold. Her phrase. Ann’s new mother. Why announce it?
She must have been unhinged by the death of her little son. The passing years and the strain of hiding had only made it worse. Erin had made it clear that she wasn’t very close to the woman she called mother.
He leaned back, thinking about her and the sentimental notecard, as well as the somewhat bizarre letter to the Montgomerys, apparently one of several. Well-established criminal profiles fit these two. Forced to hide from the world, they found peculiar ways to connect with it.
The only physical link he had between little Ann and grown-up Erin was the bear, if it was the same one. Hers was handmade. When he got the visuals back from Doris, he was going to compare old Pinky to the bear in the photo, examining the stitching on both under the digital microscope. Old photos printed from high-quality studio negatives often provided more detail than pixels.
That could be interesting.
But the case couldn’t be resolved once and for all without DNA testing. That would have to be up to her and—Hugh Montgomery. Bannon stopped writing and looked up at the painting of horses on the wall, letting his gaze move to the sketchbook she was currently filling up. Erin and Montgomery were getting to know each other, but that didn’t mean Montgomery was going to hand over a sample of his oh-so-blue blood just to satisfy Bannon’s curiosity.
He allowed himself a minute or so of idle speculation. Had Montgomery commissioned the portrait of his best stallion because he liked Erin’s work, or because parental instinct was kicking in? Impossible to verify. He would do better to stick to the facts.
He wrote down the rest of the evidence, what there was of it, and pondered every item one by one, looking for connections, covering the paper with arrows pointing to this or that detail, circles around the important stuff, underlining and crossing out. What a mess. But then he’d never worked a case where the clues were nice and neat and everything seemed to make perfect sense. Life was sloppy. Evidence was worse. In a case this old, it was apt to be skimpy, contaminated, or simply nonexistent.
There was one very big question remaining, and he had no information whatsoever to help him answer it. The more he thought about it, the more curious he became. Where was Luanne Montgomery?
Doris hadn’t said. Maybe she didn’t know. But just about anyone could be found these days. Even when they didn’t want to be.
He sat back, legal pad in his lap, thinking about the identity of the young woman now sleeping in his bed. What he knew and what he could prove were two different things, but they were drawing closer.
Bannon flipped the scribbled-up sheet over to the other side of the pad and jotted one more question on the fresh sheet of paper.
Is Erin Randall really Ann Montgomery?
The final proof would have to be ironclad. He couldn’t jerk Erin around with a lot of theories and conjecture. What to say to her on the subject—he honestly didn’t know.
In abduction cases, psychologists and social workers usually dealt with the families, taking over from the cops and detectives. The longer the separation of the victim and relatives, the longer the resolution took. Bannon knew that the reactions varied. Shock. Guilt. Anger. A flood tide of other emotions and a river of tears.
Some got through it and came out okay, when everything had been pieced together and the dust settled. People coped somehow, went on with their lives, got through the days.
What would happen to Erin when she found out where she really came from? He flipped back to the sheet of paper covered with complicated scribbles, reading it over. Lies inside of lies. Betrayals and selfishness. She had been an innocent child then and she still knew nothing of the deception that had changed her life forever.
Lucky you, he said to himself. You get to tell her. You owe her that.
The past couldn’t be fixed, no matter what. The future was what counted. He wanted to share that with her. But this wasn’t the right time to ask for a lot of things she wasn’t going to be able to give.
He heard the bedroom doorknob turn very quietly and looked up to see her come into the room. Casually, he put the legal pad aside. No time to slide it under a cushion or crumple up the paper.
Bannon drank in the sight of her.
Sleepy. Hair messed up. Wearing an oversize T-shirt and leggings. A faint sheen of something that smelled great from where he was made her rosy skin gleam. His breath caught and his pulse quickened.
He couldn’t bring himself to tell her what he had been working on, swearing mentally that he would do it in the morning.
“How come you’re still awake?” she asked.
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“The light under the door woke me up.”
“Sorry about that.”
She frowned at him and walked over to the sofa, sitting a cushion away from him. She leaned back and yawned, then rubbed her eyes.
“Anything on TV?”
Bannon reached for the remote and handed it to her. “No idea. Check the cable menu.”
She leaned over to take it—and startled him with a bold reach over his thigh to get the legal pad. For more than one reason, Bannon tensed.
“Writing poetry?” she teased.
“Ah, no.” He was doomed.
“No. It’s time you knew,” he said resignedly.
“What?”
He got up and went into the kitchen. “Just go ahead and read. Then I’ll explain. I should have told you everything as soon as I knew.”
Bannon poured himself a shot and tossed it down. This wasn’t going to be easy.
CHAPTER 18
Erin was too stunned to speak when he stopped his explanation halfway through. He began to apologize instead and realized she wasn’t listening.
She stared straight ahead, her hands in her lap. She’d torn off the sheets of paper and held on to them. Now she let go. They drifted to the floor in front of her.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
That simple question hit him like a steel dart, center circle. “I didn’t know enough. Maybe I should have.”
She didn’t say anything more for a little while. “So. What now?”
“I’m not sure. Things are happening fast. You start turning over rocks and things crawl out.” He gestured toward the boxes that Kelly had sent from the TV station. “Once the story hit the air—”
“That was your idea, right?” She pressed her lips together.
“Yeah.”
Now he regretted it. He’d wanted to get the ball rolling, gain momentum before the chief could deep-six the Montgomery files and find a way to fire him at the same time. He’d had no idea that things would turn out the way they had.
“Have you looked at any of that stuff yet?” Erin asked shakily.
“No. It just came. I did review the e-mails Kelly forwarded at first. But the stuff in those boxes came in to the station later.”
“Who else knows what you know?”
He hesitated for a few seconds. “Are you asking if anyone else thinks you’re Ann?”
“Yes.” Her reply sounded far away.
He wondered if she meant Hugh Montgomery. It was still hard for him to imagine that the two of them might be so closely related.
