The 2nd Cycle of the Darc Murders Omnibus (the acclaimed series from #1 Police Procedural and Hard Boiled authors Carolyn McCray and Ben Hopkin)

by Carolyn McCray

  “Is this Cameron Holdon? From the Empty Crib Organization?”

  And there it was. The only good excuse for an early morning call.

  “Yes,” she answered. “Yes, I’m Cam.”

  The voice on the other end of the line broke down and began sobbing.

  * * *

  Harper Pembroke sat in her car by the side of the road, waiting for Cam to get there. The house of the woman who had called her partner at the crack of dawn was up in Mira Mesa, about 20 minutes north of San Diego. What was her name? Elizabeth? No, that wasn’t it. Emma. Like that novel Harper was supposed to have read her senior year of high school. Stupid Jane Austen.

  Emma Young. And her husband. Some weird name that started with a J. Like Jerome, but not. She shook her head. Names had always been a bit of a problem for her.

  Kicking at a soda bottle that had slipped over into her car well, Harper had the thought, as she did almost every day of her life, that she should really get more organized. You know, go through her glove compartment, sift through the papers in the passenger side seat, clean out the fast food bags and wrappers that acted as her car floor mats. Maybe she was just repurposing. That was it. Using the paper bags as a shield for the carpeting in her car.

  Yeah, right.

  The last time she had seen the bottom of her car was probably back in 2008. Man, that had been a rough year. Sometimes Harper was convinced she could track the good times by the amount of trash in her car. The more trash there was, the happier the times.

  There was a honk, and Harper looked out of her window across the street. There was Cam’s beat up Chevy Venture. That thing had to be over ten years old, and it looked twice that. Not that Harper could talk all that much. Her POS Honda wasn’t much younger, and she’d run into the odd pole here and there. Gave her vehicle character, right?

  Cam stepped out of the minivan, a Baby Alive doll falling out and nearly tripping her. Harper held in a snort out of solidarity. Cam might not realize it right at the moment, but Harper had her back. She wasn’t about to laugh at her best friend’s misfortunes. Oh, who was she kidding? Cam was pretty much her only friend.

  Besides, Harper could stand to have a doll or two to trip over. She and her ex-monster-of-a-husband had only had the one child, so when Billy had gone missing and eventually turned up dead, that had been the end of the child-related paraphernalia around the house.

  And when the killer had turned out to be her spouse, well, that had necessitated a whole ‘nother mess of changes. Hellfire and damnation if that wasn’t the understatement of the century.

  There had been a time, back when she was desperately searching for her boy, that she’d thought to herself that she just wanted to know, one way or the other. Turned out, getting closure was a mixed bag. Whether that closure had done anything other than turn her into a cynical bitch was up for debate.

  Harper’s eyes blurred a bit as she watched her friend throw the doll back in the car, lock up and cross the street. It was a good question, honestly, and one that Harper couldn’t answer. How would an outsider assess the differences between Cam and her?

  Both had been through hell. Both had ended up losing their spouses, Cam’s to the bottle and Harper’s to the big house. But where Harper knew what had happened to her boy, Cam still had no idea.

  They didn’t discuss it too much, but Harper knew that Cam was still searching for her lost boy. How could she not? If there were even a squirrel’s fart in a windstorm’s chance that she could see her Billy again, Harper would be all over that like caramel on an apple.

  She grinned at her own colorful imagery. Sometimes she thought she should’ve grown up out in the sticks. In the Appalachians somewhere, maybe.

  There was a rapping on her window. Cam had made it across the street and was giving her a puzzled look through the glass.

  “You fall asleep in there?”

  “Hey, you know me,” Harper quipped. “Always up for a little shut-eye.”

  Cam smiled, and her entire face lit up. Man, was she pretty. Like, near model kind of pretty. The only thing that would keep her off the runway was that look in her eye. The look that said that Cam saw more than she said. It was the knowledge that there were bad things out there in the world that did more than go bump in the night.

  To Harper’s eye, it only made Cam more beautiful, but it wasn’t an easy kind of attractiveness. Nothing vapid about her. It was all about getting down to brass tacks and getting the job done. Not an easy thing to be around that kind of determined competence.

  Not even for Harper sometimes.

  Grunting as she pushed her car door open and stepped out into the bright California sun, Harper turned her attention to the house that was their destination. A modest home, a bungalow-style that would have been popular back in the 1920s, it had been kept up well enough, Harper supposed, but it looked like it could use an update-and-a-half.

  Cam stepped forward and pushed the cracked doorbell with no response. A sigh escaped Harper’s partner as she leaned in to rap her knuckles on the door. Right above where she had knocked, a sign read No solicitors. Nothing like a back-the-hell-off sign to make your visitors feel all nice and welcome.

  A woman appeared at the door. She was a young brunette, fairly put-together, but with the feel of someone that was dressing to deemphasize her body. Her very fit, quite attractive body. That was interesting.

  It happened every time they met a new client. Harper began looking past the surface appearance, searching for the hidden secrets that every family had. What would make an attractive, fit woman want to play down her sexiness? Insecurity? Sexual abuse from the past? Jealous husband?

  As the woman looked at Cam and Harper, sizing them up, she stepped more fully into the light. There were dark circles under her eyes, as well as a look of quiet caution that made Harper sure they had found the right person.

  “Mrs. Young?” she asked.

  There was a pause. “Oh, no,” the woman responded after a moment. “I’m Rachel. Just a friend of the family.”

  Odd. What was she doing answering the door?

  There was an awkward stretch, during which Rachel just stared at the two on the doorstep, frowning. The time seemed to stretch out into eternity, and Harper was milliseconds from just turning around and leaving, when a voice called out from inside the house.

  “Is that the women from Empty Crib?”

  “That’s us,” Harper said, moving to push past this odd gatekeeper of a woman. Her abrupt move seemed to unnerve Rachel, who stepped back with what seemed to Harper to be a touch of reluctance.

  They moved into the living room, a cozy affair with hardwood floors and worn but sturdy furniture. There, seated on the couch, were too more women, both dressed in a similar fashion to Rachel. One of them, a dishwater blonde, had red eyes and was holding a tissue.

  That had to be Emma.

  Just beyond the couch was a fireplace with an old, darkly polished wooden beam for a mantel. Above the beam was a framed picture of Jesus in a white shirt and a red overcoat. And just like that, the fact fell into place. They were religious. Probably evangelicals, if Harper didn’t miss her guess. Conservative, one way or another.

  The picture above the fireplace was a much more masculine painting of Christ than Harper had ever seen. Usually he was depicted as kind of scrawny, but not here. This was a guy that you could believe was once a carpenter. That’s what he was supposed to have been, right? Or was that Buddha? Harper always got the big religious figures mixed up.

  The woman with the Kleenex looked up, her face brightening ever so slightly. “Ms. Holdon?”

  Harper backed up and pointed to her partner. It was the way it always went. Everyone always wanted to talk to Cam. It came from them using her phone number for their organization, but every once in a while it gave Harper a little twinge. Jealousy? Surely not, but it was unpleasant, whatever it was.

  There were family photos up on the wall. Emma with four kids, the smallest looking like he was ju
st new born. That must be Joshua, the one who had been taken. And there at Emma’s side, a good-looking man with a neatly trimmed goatee.

  “This your husband?” Harper asked.

  Emma nodded. “Please, sit down,” she said, indicating the chairs across from the couch. “I don’t have long to talk.”

  Harper and Cam exchanged a look. Usually when there was an abduction, there wasn’t really a time limit set on their first meeting.

  Emma must have seen the confusion on their faces, as she blushed and looked down at her hands that were resting in her lap. She cleared her throat.

  “Jarom… my husband… He doesn’t know that you’re here.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Well, this was a first.

  After her oldest son had been taken and her marriage had gone from bad to worse, Cam had founded the Empty Crib Organization with Harper. A group to help support those who had been through the same experiences that they had.

  It had grown from there into something much more… involved. They had become the go-to women to help out with kidnapping investigations. So this wasn’t Cam’s first time dealing with a grieving family, not by any stretch of the imagination.

  But she had no idea what to make of this. From the time she and Harper walked into the house, everything about this scenario seemed… off.

  The husband didn’t even know that they’d been called? And that was just the beginnings of what was strange.

  It wasn’t uncommon for friends to have gathered to comfort the grieving family. Cam saw that all the time. But these two friends of Emma looked like they had set up camp. They almost seemed more at home here than Emma did.

  Rachel had gone into the kitchen to start fixing an early lunch, and the other, older woman, had gone into one of the bedrooms to calm down a crying toddler. She’d introduced herself as Bethany before making her exit.

  Another small child streaked past screaming bloody murder, sans pants or underwear. A boy, clearly. Rachel popped out of the kitchen and called out after him.

  “Hyrum! Put your clothes on!” She turned to face Cam and Harper. “I’m so sorry. Bethany and I had to bring over our own children to help, but I’m afraid they’re running a bit wild.”

  “That’s more than fine,” Cam answered, hoping to set her at ease. “I have triplet girls, so I know how much of a handful they can be when they’re small.”

  Rachel flashed her a grateful look. She seemed to be warming up to the two women a bit from that first encounter at the door. Then Rachel turned a much different expression on Harper. Okay. Maybe it was just Cam that she was warming up to.

  Cam turned back to face Emma, catching sight of the Jesus up above the fireplace. It was one she had seen before, but she couldn’t place exactly where. A surge of complicated emotions surfaced, but she pushed them down. Not the time or place.

  There was a child missing, and the clock was ticking. Most abductions, if they didn’t get solved in the first two days, went south fast. This was the time to find Emma’s baby, not resolve Cam’s issues with her broken faith. Besides, the next topic was going to be tricky enough without adding in distractions.

  “I don’t want to be indelicate, but time is an important factor in abductions. The first 48 hours are crucial. So, your husband didn’t want us to come?” Cam asked, her tone gentle.

  “Do you think he might have had something to do with it?” chimed in Harper.

  Damn her. No matter how many times they talked about it, Cam’s partner just couldn’t seem to grasp the idea of tact when it came to husbands. Not that Cam could really blame her.

  Emma’s face was just as horrified as Cam would have expected.

  “No, of course not,” she gasped. “Why would you even say such a thing?”

  “Statistically speaking, the vast majority of abductions are committed by a family member,” Harper said, before Cam could step in.

  “But wouldn’t those be in cases where there was a custody issue? Like separation or divorce?” Emma asked. Cam couldn’t help but be impressed by the knowledge that went along with the query. This woman was sharp, regardless of her meek demeanor.

  “You’d be surprised,” Harper muttered. Cam managed to catch her eye, hushing her at least for the moment.

  “We just need to assess every angle here,” Cam said, doing what she could to soothe things over. “The most important thing is to get your baby back, and sometimes that means asking questions that aren’t very polite.” She said the last while staring hard at her partner. Harper at least had the decency to look embarrassed. A bit.

  “I guess I can understand that,” Emma said. She glanced at her fingers again. “My husband… He doesn’t want to get the police involved.”

  Once more, Cam was floored. “You mean you haven’t called the police?” she asked after a stunned silence.

  Emma shook her head, and tears began to flow anew. “He… My husband’s a good… I just couldn’t sit by and…” She sat upright, piercing Cam with her sudden gaze. “Please. Find my baby. Do whatever you have to do.”

  * * *

  “Totally the husband,” Harper said as they exited the house. That place had given her the creeps. Way too goody-goody for her taste. As far as she was concerned, when people went to the lengths that family did to show how good they were, they were hiding something in there.

  Cam sighed. “You don’t know it was the husband.”

  It was an ages-old argument between them. Harper always looked at the husband first. She couldn’t help it. She knew it. Cam knew it.

  Thing was, Harper had also been right more often than she’d been wrong.

  “C’mon, Cam. Even you have to admit there was something freaky back there. What husband doesn’t want the cops getting involved when his baby’s been snatched?”

  Cam made a face. “Yeah. That’s weird.”

  “Right?” Harper turned to head for her car. “So, I should go see what I can dig up on the guy, yeah?”

  “Hold on there, Speedy,” her partner grunted. “First we have to contact the police.”

  “You heard her. The husband’ll go ape. Which again…”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Makes him suspicious.” Cam pursed her lips. Her juicy, pouty lips. Sometimes Harper wondered if she hung out with Cam just to make herself feel less attractive. Cam continued, “She told me to do anything we had to do in order to find her baby. And I did warn her that we were going to alert the police. So…”

  “Look, how ‘bout this? I’ll go suss out the dad. Why don’t you go by the police station? They like you better than me, anyway.”

  “That’s not totally…”

  “Oh, come on,” Harper said, rolling her eyes. “Your ex was a cop. They respect you.”

  “They think I pushed him to drink. And then abandoned him.”

  Harper made a raspberry with her lips. “Po-ta-to, po-tah-to. They know you.”

  Cam waved her off. “Fine, fine. Just… be a little more…” She trailed off, waving her hands about in a vague gesture.

  “Pushy?” Harper prompted, eliciting a sharp look from her partner. “Kidding. Kidding. I’ll be good. Promise.”

  Cam shook her head and headed across the street to her minivan. Harper took a minute to make sure the car started before she headed to her Honda. More than once Cam had ended up stranded because her ancient Chevy wouldn’t start.

  Harper felt her pulse accelerate as she turned the key in the ignition. Time to dig into the affairs of Mr. Jarom Young.

  She had a feeling she was going to find a lot more than Jarom wanted her to.

  * * *

  The San Diego Police Department was housed in a modern-looking box with loads of glass that the designer had probably thought appeared sleek. To Cam it just looked like a prison with lots of windows.

  The receptionist recognized her, both from her experience working with the SDPD as well as from before, when she’d just been Officer Holden’s wife. So it wasn’t long before Cam was sitting in
front of a woman with cheekbones that seemed like they could cut through steel and a sharp slash of a mouth.

  Detective Laura Stickler had brown hair that was pulled into a severe bun at the nape of her neck. In another setting, she probably would have been attractive, but with the severe way in which she was dressed and that hairstyle, it was pretty evident that she had no desire to be thought of as the pretty cop.

  “Dolores said you had something to report?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. The effect was one of disdain, and Cam got the feeling that she wasn’t exactly welcome.

  “There’s been a kidnapping. A male infant, four months of age, taken at some point during the night.” Cam sketched in the details of the abduction succinctly including the family’s name and address, doing what she could to be helpful without wasting time.

  After several moments of jotting down information, Stickler paused and put away her notes. She crossed her arms over her breasts and faced off with Cam.

  “So, I’ve got the salient points of the case. Want to tell me why the hell you’re the one giving them to me?”

  “I was contacted by the mother. Her husband doesn’t seem to like the government much.”

  “Great,” the detective muttered. “So now I get to be saddled with an amateur crime-solver.”

  “Excuse me?” Cam said, trying to keep her face from betraying her irritation.

  “I’m fairly certain you heard me. I wasn’t whispering.”

  Cam shifted in her seat. “I’m not an… Look, my husband used to be an officer here.”

  “I know who you are,” Stickler responded, her tone direct. “And I knew your ex-husband. He was a good cop.”

  “Well then, I--”

  “He was a good cop,” she reiterated. “You? You were just his wife. Which still makes you an amateur in my book.”

  Cam felt herself bristle at both the insult and the tone in which it was given. But rather than rise to the bait, she took a deep breath, forcing herself to relax.

  “I can understand your reservations,” she responded, keeping her tone even. “You don’t know me. You have no idea how I operate.”