“The police are waiting, too, and they’re pushing, Carrie,” the nurse replied.
“Tell the officers they’re going to have to wait just a few more minutes.”
Carrie released the button and turned to pour Sadie some water from the pitcher on the nightstand. She hadn’t even finished filling the glass when Sam burst through the door, pausing only briefly just inside to stare at Sadie. His entire face was taut with fear as he entered, but then it relaxed in the most immense look of relief Carrie thought she had ever seen on a human being.
Sam moved to the bed, sliding his arms around Sadie and pulling her upright, holding her gently, rocking her, burying his face in her hair. Carrie backed away, intending to step into the hall and give them some privacy, but Bryan Kendall, in his uniform, and a bird-faced man in a dark blue suit, stood in the open doorway, blocking her path.
“Excuse me,” she said. “We can talk out here.”
“If she’s awake, then it’s not you we want to talk to, Doctor,” said the suit.
Carrie blinked at him. He was a small man, with a wiry build, close-set, perfectly round eyes that shifted constantly and a beaky nose. Yup, he looked like a bird, all right. “You can talk to her in a couple of minutes,” she said, holding his eyes and blocking his path into the room.
“Unless there’s a medical reason, ma’am, we’ll talk to her right now.”
“Then there’s a medical reason.” She lowered her head and walked the rest of the way through the doorway, leaving the two cops no choice but to step aside or let her bump right into them. She held the doorknob in one hand, so she could pull it closed behind her.
“Do I need to speak to your superior?” the birdlike little man said.
Carrie frowned at him. “I’ve been working here for sixteen years. Good luck finding anyone to boss me around.” Then she looked at Bryan. “Who is this pushy jerk, anyway?”
“He’s FBI, Carrie.”
She did a slow blink, then looked at the guy again. “Dr. Carrie Overton,” she said, extending a hand.
“Special Agent Wesley Cooper.” He shook her hand, his grip clammy and weak. Made her think he needed a good physical exam. But he was chirping again, so she listened up. “If the girl is well enough for one visitor, she’s well enough for us,” he said.
“That visitor is part of her therapy. A vital part. Give them ten minutes. Then you’ll get your turn.” She looked at Bryan. “Where’s Pattie?”
“Who’s Pattie?” Agent Cooper asked.
“Detox,” Bryan said, ignoring Cooper’s question to answer Carrie’s instead. “It’ll be a while.”
“Then I’d like to stand in on any questioning, in lieu of a parent,” Carrie said.
“I think that’s a reasonable request,” Bryan said, but he glanced at Agent Cooper, as if awaiting his consent.
Cooper looked at her with new interest. “You know the kid, huh?”
“Almost as well as I know my own.”
“You need to understand that anything said in our conversation with her is not to be repeated.”
“I’m a doctor. I know about confidentiality.”
“Fine.” Cooper put his hands into the pockets of his blue trousers and jingled the change in one of them. “I’m going to get a cup of coffee down the hall. We’ll talk to the girl as soon as I get back.”
He didn’t ask if that was all right, just walked away with his polished black shoes tapping the hospital’s tiled floor.
Carrie lifted her brows. “Used to getting his way, isn’t he?”
“Probably because he usually does.”
“So, what’s going on?”
“We’ve pulled all the volunteers out of the woods and put officers in, instead, checking the vicinity of that cliff she fell from.”
Bryan met her eyes, his serious. “Don’t push Agent Cooper too hard, Carrie. He’s a dick.”
“Aren’t they all?”
“You know better than that,” he said. Then, more softly, “You look tired.”
“I am. But I’ve got help.” She nodded toward Gabe, who was in the waiting area, sitting patiently until she had time to fill him in. He’d been chatting up Ambrose the last time she’d seen him, but he was alone now.
“Go on, see him for a minute. It’s fine.” Then Bryan paused and tilted his head. “He’s not…I mean, is he someone from your past, Carrie?”
She lifted her brows. “No, I only met him recently. Why?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, I just thought—he looks enough like Sammy to be— Well, I guess he’s not.”
Frowning, Carrie looked at Gabe with fresh eyes as she moved to the waiting room. He glanced up as she came toward him, caught her gaze and smiled slightly. His eyes crinkled a little at the corners, and deep dimples appeared in his cheeks.
Just like Sam.
She was so startled that she almost choked. He saw the way her expression changed, and his smile died. Rising to his feet, he met her halfway. “Carrie? What is it?”
This time she realized that there was something about his eyes. God, no wonder she’d found him so easy to trust right from the start. He looked like her son. He looked like Sam.
She pasted a smile over her sudden turmoil and lowered her eyes. “Nothing. She’s awake and stable. No serious damage. But I’ll still be a little while. The police want to question her, and I’ve convinced them to let me be in the room, since her mother can’t.”
“Oh, yes, her mother can.”
Carrie and Gabe turned around simultaneously at the words. Patricia Gray was standing at the other end of the waiting room, wearing a pair of red polyester stretch pants under a hospital gown.
“She a patient?” Gabe asked.
“Sadie’s mom. When they went to tell her the news, she was too drunk to stand up, so they took her in to the detox unit.”
“Yeah, well, they took her out too soon.”
The woman came closer, her gate uneven in the blue foam hospital-issue slippers, but surprisingly speedy. She looked like hell. Of course, she never looked well, being a chronic alcoholic, but the added strain of a missing daughter had taxed her obviously limited coping skills to their limits. She looked old enough to be Carrie’s mother, though Carrie knew they were close to the same age. She had a puffy, pasty face, except for her cherry-red nose and cheeks, and she was skin and bone, except for the distended beer belly. Her hair looked as if she had cut it herself after finishing off a bottle of vodka, and was rat-gray in color and filthy to boot. She reeked, as alcoholics tended to, of the booze literally seeping out her pores with her perspiration. You would think they would understand how desperately their bodies wanted to get rid of it, Carrie thought vaguely. But they didn’t tend to understand much, beyond their own excuses.
“I’m her mother,” Pattie Gray said. “And I’m damn well gonna be with her for the questioning. Those goddamn cops got no reason to harass my little girl.”
“Mrs. Gray,” Carrie said, moving closer, reaching out to touch the woman’s shoulder. “I know you’ve been through a lot, but you’re in no condition to—”
“Get away from me!” The woman twisted away from Carrie as if her touch were contaminated. “Where’s my daughter? I have the right to see her! Where is she?”
Carrie took two steps back, holding up both hands, and then Bryan stepped in, having heard the commotion from down the hall. Agent Cooper was right on his heels, complete with his cup of coffee.
“Where is she, I said!”
“Easy, ma’am.” Bryan stepped into the woman’s range of vision. “You’re in no condition to see your daughter right now.”
“I have a right—”
“Take her in,” Carrie said softly, turning to Bryan. “Go on. It’s all right. Sadie’s seen her a lot worse than this.”
“An’ what’s that s’posed to mean?” the woman slurred, leaning so close her breath made Carrie’s hair wilt.
“It means—”
“It means,” Gabe inter
rupted, one hand on Carrie’s shoulder, “that after what your daughter’s been through, she probably won’t be shaken up by who’s in the room during her questioning and who isn’t.”
Carrie glanced sideways at him, but she didn’t smile or thank him. She was no longer sure about him or his motives, and she needed time to think her new suspicions through. In the meantime, she felt angry with him—perhaps unreasonably so. But she felt that way all the same.
“This way,” she told the woman and, turning on her heel, left the waiting room. She didn’t look back to see if the useless alcoholic was behind her. She didn’t much care. She was going to be in the room during Sadie’s police interview, and if they didn’t like it, she would…she would…explode.
She stopped walking and lowered her head into her hands, trying to get a handle on the emotions roiling in the pit of her stomach. What was she thinking? That Gabe might be here for entirely different reasons than what he’d told her? That he’d been romancing her just to get closer to her son? That maybe Sam was in fact his son? And she was basing all that on what? A casual resemblance that she hadn’t even noticed until Bryan had pointed it out to her?
No. No, she was basing it on something else entirely. She was basing it on the feeling in her gut when she’d first recognized that resemblance, the feeling of puzzle pieces snapping into place. The feeling of knowing. Just knowing. She had no doubt. She didn’t know how she’d managed not to see it sooner.
“Carrie?”
Gabe stood close behind her.
“I’m fine,” she said, without looking back. “I’m fine.” And she was. Always had been and always would be. Sam loved her. He would still love her, even if he learned the truth about his birth. He wouldn’t turn on her. And that was all that mattered. He was the only person in her life whose opinion mattered to her. Gabe was…Gabe was nothing to her.
She blinked and tried to silence the little voice in her head that whispered, But he is something to Sam. He’s his father. And whether you want to admit it or not, he’s something to you, too.
Lifting her chin, straightening her shoulders, she marched into Sadie’s hospital room, leaving Gabe behind and probably confused. She didn’t care. Let him be confused. He was the one who’d lied to her. Used her, all this time pretending to be feeling…
Oh, hell.
She tried to blink the moisture from her eyes, and the devastation and anger from her expression, as she reentered Sadie’s room. Sam was sitting on the edge of the hospital bed, and the two teens were holding hands and talking softly, their eyes all tangled up in gazing at each other.
Carrie had never had that kind of a connection with anyone—until Gabe.
Stupid thought. She didn’t need that kind of a connection.
“Sam, Sadie, this is Agent Cooper from the FBI,” she said.
The two kids looked impressed and nodded hello.
“He and Bryan need to talk to Sadie now,” Carrie went on, letting her own words distract her mind from the disastrous revelation that was still unfolding inside it. “Sam, I promise you can come back in as soon as they’re done.”
Sam started to get up as Bryan and Special Agent Cooper entered the room. Cooper had a hand on Pattie Gray’s arm. The woman smiled as she saw her daughter and hurried across the room to the opposite side of the bed from Sam. “Baby!” she said.
“Oh, my poor baby, I’m so glad you’re all right. I’m so glad.” She wrapped Sadie in her arms.
From her position, Carrie could see Sadie wrinkle her nose at the booze and cigarette stench that was her mother’s signature scent. But she hugged the woman back all the same. “I’m fine, Mom. Everything’s fine.”
“I’ve been out of my mind with worry!” Pattie cried. “You don’t know what I’ve been through, baby. You just don’t know.”
“I’m sorry,” Sadie said.
Agent Cooper cleared his throat. “Actually, ma’am, it’s what your daughter has been through that ought to be concerning you.”
Pattie straightened and shot the agent a hateful glare. “Obviously you don’t have kids.”
“I do, actually. And when they go through a trauma, I don’t make it all about me. But maybe that’s just me.”
Carrie suddenly regretted being less than pleasant to the man. He was decent—and insightful, to boot.
Agent Cooper shifted his gaze to Sadie. “We need to ask you some questions,” he said, and his voice had altered. Softened. “I promise we’re going to make this as painless as possible, Sadie, but we need your help to solve this thing. All right?”
“I want that animal caught and locked up for what he did to Kyle and what he put me through,” she said. “But I’m not answering one question unless Sam and Doc can stay in the room. And I mean it.”
Carrie nodded a little, impressed again by Sadie’s steel spine. The girl was amazing.
The agent looked at Bryan, and Bryan shrugged. “It’s your call, sir. But from what I know of this one, she means it.”
“All right. Nothing she says leaves this room.” With that, Cooper sent a stern look at Sadie’s mother, who was clearly the agent’s pick for the woman most likely to run her mouth. “Nothing,” he reiterated.
“I’m not deaf.”
He nodded and returned his attention to Sadie. “Now, can you tell me what happened? Start at the beginning and just tell us in your own words. I might prompt you with a few questions here and there, but I’ll try not to interrupt unless it’s really necessary. Okay?”
Sadie nodded and sat up straighter in the bed. “Okay.”
“Okay.” The agent took a digital recorder from his pocket and turned it on. “Begin with when you left Dr. Overton’s house. You were on your way to cheerleading practice, correct?”
Sadie nodded. Then she glanced at the recorder and said, “Yes. That’s right. I was riding my bike. I got about a mile down the hill toward town and then something stung me—or that’s what I thought at first. But it was a dart, and it knocked me out. I passed out. Then—”
“Just a sec now,” the agent said. “We need to take it very slowly. Detail by detail. So this person shot you with a dart, you say?” Sadie nodded, then repeated her assent aloud. “Was there a vehicle nearby? Did you see anyone as you went down the road?”
“No. There was no one there. No vehicle…nothing.”
“So someone was out of sight but managed to dart you. How do you think that could have happened?”
Sadie frowned, clearly searching her memory. “There were trees right up to the edge of the road. It was at that part where the big bend curves around to the right, just before the woods begin to thin out. You know the place I mean?” she asked, shooting a quick look at Sam.
“Yeah. I know,” Sam said and looked at the agent. “It’s the same spot where we found the bike.”
“Good. That’s very good. Did you see this person at all?”
“No.”
“All right. Go on. What happened when you woke up?”
Sadie told her story. She told about being chained by her ankle to a wall in some kind of a basement room with no windows. She told about a person dressed all in black, right up to the ski mask, entering the room, feeding her meals she was convinced were drugged, returning with a hypodermic. She told about how she worked to loosen the chain from the wall, hit the person with it, then ran away. And she talked about escaping through a hatchway and running through the forest, all the while feeling pursued, and then falling a long ways before hitting the ground. She didn’t know if the person chasing her had been male or female, though at one point she’d heard a man’s voice calling out to her to wait. And all the while Bryan and the Fed made notes, asked questions, elicited memories, details. What the room looked like. What the meal consisted of. How tall the abductor had seemed to be. Whether he’d seemed fat or thin. Whether she’d noticed his shoes.
Sadie talked and talked, until she was too tired to talk anymore, and Carrie called the interview to a halt. “She needs to
rest now. She’s all in.”
“I think we have everything we need.” Agent Cooper shut off the recorder. “If you remember anything else, Sadie, you give me a call.” He set a card on her nightstand. “Anything, even the most insignificant detail, could help. We need to get this person bef—”
His cell phone rang just then. He sent an apologetic look to Carrie. “Sorry. I should have turned it off.”
“We dropped that regulation, Agent Cooper. The new phones don’t interfere with pacemakers anymore. Go ahead and—”
And then her pager went off and Bryan’s phone rang.
Before either of them answered, Cooper put a hand over his cell and said, “They found another body near where we found Sadie.”
“God, not another kid,” Carrie said.
“Not this time,” Cooper said. “They think it might be our guy. Can you come with us, Dr. Overton? We might need your expertise out there.”
“Of course,” she told him. Then she looked at Sam. “Stay with her. And be careful, okay? Don’t go anywhere with anyone.”
“I’m sixteen, not six, Mom.”
She smiled softly at him. “I know how old you are. I’m scared, that’s all.”
“I know. Gabe will stay with us, don’t worry. Where is he anyway?”
“Still in the waiting room, I think.” Carrie frowned, not liking Sam’s notion one bit. She didn’t want Gabe alone with her son. Not that she suspected he had anything to do with the abductions. He could be the best liar in the world, but she would have sensed it if he were a threat to her son. She was sure of that. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Not physically, at least.
But he might tell Sam who he was. And she had to be the one to tell him that. Right after she confronted Gabe himself about it.
Until then, she wanted to keep the two of them as far apart as humanly possible. “I’ll need him out there with me. If that’s okay.”
Sam looked at her, and maybe he noticed something off about her tone. He knew her better than anyone, after all. But he let it slide. “Sure, Mom. We’ll be fine.”
Kiss Me, Kill Me Page 20
