by Dinah McCall
There was a long moment of unbroken silence, then Marcus spoke. The tremor in his voice gave away the emotions with which he was struggling.
“I owe you more than you will ever know,” he said.
“You don’t owe me anything,” Trey said. “I was doing my job.” Then he added, “But just so you know, if I’d let anything happen to Livvie, I couldn’t have lived with myself.”
“I see,” Marcus said.
“Sir, I sincerely hope you do see,” Trey said. “Because a while ago I sort of gave my word to Livvie that we’d give our relationship another try, and I’m not the kind to break a promise.”
“She regrets the lost years, doesn’t she?” Marcus asked.
Trey sighed. “No more than I do, sir.”
“It’s all my fault,” Marcus muttered. “I didn’t know…I didn’t realize that—”
“Look…we were kids,” Trey said, then added, “But we’re not anymore. I don’t want to cause trouble between you and Livvie, but I won’t walk away again.”
“Olivia is a grown woman, fully capable of making up her own mind,” Marcus said. “And trust me, the last thing I would ever do is knowingly cause her pain. You’re obviously an upstanding man, and I owe Olivia’s life to your diligence.”
“As I said before, you don’t owe me anything. I’ll see you shortly, then,” Trey said, and hung up.
As he was dropping the cell phone into his pocket, he heard someone calling his name. He turned around just as Chia was getting off the elevator.
“Hey, cowboy,” Chia said. “Caught any more bad guys?”
He grinned but ignored her sarcasm as he began grilling her about Rawlins.
“Did he say why he’d targeted Olivia?”
Chia rolled her eyes.
“He’s loony, but that’s another story. Guess what we found when we ran him through NCIC?”
“What?”
“He’s wanted for questioning in the bombing of an abortion clinic up in Boston about nine years ago.”
“No kidding?”
“No kidding,” Chia echoed. “Not only that, but seven kids and their teacher died in the blast.”
“How did that all come about?”
“Seems the church bus they were on had engine trouble and caught fire. It was snowing, so when the teacher got the kids off the bus, she hurried them up the sidewalk to the big overhang at the entrance to the clinic, thinking she would be sheltering them until another bus was sent. Instead, they died in the blast.”
“And they think Rawlins is responsible for that?”
“He was one of the main suspects,” Chia said. “Then he disappeared. Why he targeted Olivia Sealy is a mystery, but mine is not to reason why, and yours is to solve the Baby Jane Doe case. If they link up in any way, we haven’t found it yet.”
“Thanks anyway,” Trey said.
Chia shrugged. “Lieutenant Warren wants to see you.”
“I’ll call him. I’m not leaving here until Olivia’s grandfather arrives.”
“Hey, we caught the bad guy, or you caught the bad guy. So what’s the fuss? She should be fine now.”
“Yeah, but I’m not,” Trey muttered. “And I won’t be, not until I know she’s all right.”
Chia’s eyebrows arched as she pursed her mouth and let out a soft ooohh.
“What’s the deal here, cowboy? Don’t tell me the mighty Bonney has fallen for the poor little rich girl? If you ask me, that was pretty fast work, even for you.”
“There is no deal here, and nobody needs to tell you a damn thing,” Trey snapped.
Chia held up her hands. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to step on any toes.”
“No, I’m the one who’s sorry,” Trey said. “I shouldn’t have snapped. And just for the record, there’s nothing fast about what I feel for Livvie. I’ve known her since high school.”
The smart-ass answer Chia had been about to utter died on her lips. Her eyes widened, and her lips went slack.
“No shit?”
Trey shoved his hands through his hair.
“No shit.”
“So…I’ll talk to you later?” Chia said.
“Yeah…later,” Trey said, and headed back to Olivia’s room.
Someone was in the room with her. Anna knew it, even before she opened her eyes. Panic hit her like a fist to the belly. She sat up with a jerk.
“Who are you?” she cried.
Rose set a cup of coffee down on the table in front of the sofa where Anna had been sleeping.
“You know who I am,” Rose said firmly. “It’s me. Rose. I’m the housekeeper for Olivia and Mr. Marcus, and you’re Anna. You took care of Olivia when she was a baby.”
Everything the woman was saying seemed familiar. Anna leaned forward, took the cup of coffee and then sniffed it, as if testing it for something vile that didn’t belong.
It seemed fine.
She took a sip.
It tasted wonderful.
She took another, then looked at Rose anew. Suddenly she smiled.
“You make good meat loaf,” Anna said.
Rose grinned.
“Why, thank you, Anna. Now come with me. I’m going to make you some breakfast. Then you can get dressed and help me in the kitchen.”
Anna stood. A plan. She had a plan. Plans were good. They made her feel steady, as if she’d suddenly been balanced.
“I will have two eggs over easy,” Anna said. “And bacon? Will there be bacon?”
Rose laughed. “In this house, there’s always bacon.”
Anna smiled. The laughter felt good against her ears. She liked being here. It wasn’t nearly as lonesome as it was being at home.
She followed Rose into the kitchen, and with each step moved further and further away from the life she’d been living in Arlington and closer and closer to the world of her past.
10
It had been three days since Olivia had come out of surgery and turned Trey’s world upside down. He’d been so worried—so sick at heart for what had happened to her—that he’d been blindsided when she’d asked him for a second chance. Now he went through his hours at work just waiting for the moment when he could get back to the hospital. Even if she slept through most of his visit, it was enough to just watch her breathe.
Although Dennis Rawlins had finally confessed to his crimes, his mental state had been compromised enough that a judge had ordered a complete psych evaluation. He’d been temporarily committed to a facility for the criminally insane, which, to Trey, meant he was going to get away with murder.
But one thing had come out of the Rawlins investigation that related to Trey’s case. Dennis Rawlins had been fourteen years old and in a military academy when the Sealy kidnapping and murders occurred, which meant there was no way this attack was connected to the first crime.
While this was a process of elimination that had to be done, it also put Trey back at square one regarding suspects. They still had a BOLO out for Foster Lawrence, though it was only for questioning. But the “Be on the Lookout” was old, and Trey figured if Lawrence had been anywhere in the area when it went out, he was long gone now. Trey was down to waiting for the DNA results from the lab, and for Terrence and Carolyn Sealy to arrive from Milan. Unless something broke from one of those areas, they were at a dead end.
With all the leads coming up blank, he wanted a second look at the things that had been in the suitcase with the baby’s remains. Maybe there was something there they’d missed—something that would give them a new direction—and that meant a trip to the lockup where evidence was logged and stored.
Trey’s mind was on the task at hand as he approached the evidence desk. The skinny sergeant in charge eyed him curiously as he grabbed the sign-in sheet.
“Hey, Bonney, rescued any more damsels in distress?” the sergeant asked.
“What’s the matter, Bodine? You jealous?” Trey countered.
“No, I ain’t jealous,” Bodine muttered. “I was just asking.”
Trey grinned. He knew all about Russell’s aversion to flirting with other women. Everyone on the force knew his wife, Peggy. They also knew about the knife.
Russell Bodine was six months from retirement and almost forty years married, and the only time he’d stepped out on his wife, he’d been found out before he ever made it home. He’d fallen into bed and woken up with the sharp edge of a butcher knife against his groin.
Without a word, Peggy had taken the knife and proceeded to shave every hair from around his penis while he pleaded and begged for her not to hurt him. He’d made promises to her, and God, and everyone he knew, that he would never stray again if she would just leave him with his manhood intact.
She had, but with a nightly reminder that never failed to work. The last thing he saw at night before he closed his eyes was the butcher knife that she’d had mounted and hung on the wall opposite their bed.
“What you needin’ to see?” Russell asked as he opened the door and let Trey in.
“The stuff that came in with Baby Jane Doe from up at Lake Texoma.”
Russell frowned as he led the way back through a maze of shelving and boxes.
“Someone was a real bastard, doin’ that to that poor little baby,” Russell said as he pulled a box from the shelves and carried it over to a table. “You gonna need this long?”
Trey shrugged. “I don’t know if I’m going to need it at all. Unless we get a hit on the DNA from the crime lab, we’ve run out of leads. I thought this might turn up something we haven’t considered.”
“Good luck,” Russell said, and then added, “I didn’t mean nothin’ by that remark ’bout bein’ a hero and all.”
“No offense taken,” Trey said.
Confident that he’d done the right thing, Russell ambled off, leaving Trey with the contents of the box.
He grabbed the lid, then braced himself as he took it off. Besides the suitcase itself, there were only four small plastic bags inside, each one labeled and dated. Four remnants of a brief young life that had been snuffed out all too soon.
He gave the suitcase the once-over but came to the same conclusion Jenner had come up with. It was like thousands of others that had been made in the seventies. It was old and peeling, with not one remarkable thing about it that would help him in finding the owner. He moved on to the bags.
He took out the first bag and opened the Ziplock top. Inside was a single sock about the length of his index finger—originally white, now a dirty color, as if it had been dipped in tea and left out to dry. There was a small dot of yellow near the edge of the cuff, and on closer examination, he decided it was what was left of a yellow embroidered duck. It told him nothing.
The second bag yielded a small pink nightgown. There were a series of dark stains near the shoulder, then down the back. Bloodstains, he guessed, and fingered the spot where the lab had taken a snippet of the same for testing. The label that would have been at the neck had been cut out, but he knew from experience that people often did that to prevent chafing, rather than from a need to conceal. He always cut off the tags on his new T-shirts as soon as he got them home. It was simply a matter of preference, and he decided the missing tag didn’t mean anything.
Laying that garment and bag aside, he pulled out the third. It was the largest, yielding most of a baby’s blanket. The fabric was a dirty, faded pink, with frayed remnants of a pale satin binding. There was no manufacturer’s tag, no identifying marks whatsoever that would aid him in giving Baby Jane Doe a name.
He laid that aside, too, and picked up the last bag. The wooden cross inside was approximately twelve inches high and obviously handmade. He took it out of the bag and turned it around, hoping to find the name of an artist, but found nothing.
He turned it over, eyeing the three words that had been etched into the cross with a wood-burning tool.
Sleeping with angels
What the hell did that mean? Had someone actually made this after murdering a child, or had it been tossed in as an afterthought? It gave him the creeps to think that someone had been callous enough to stuff that baby’s body into a suitcase and plaster it up inside a wall, yet had still included what amounted to an epitaph—and a religious one, at that.
Frustrated that the items hadn’t given him anything new to go on, he bagged them back up, put the lid on the box and left it on the table for Russell to deal with.
Russell looked up as Trey came around the aisle empty-handed.
“Didn’t do you no good?” he asked.
Trey shook his head.
“It’s a shame,” Russell said. “Hope you catch who ever did that.”
“Yeah, I do, too,” Trey said. “Thanks for your help. Tell Peggy I said hello.”
Russell made a face. “Peggy’s sort of pissed at me right now.”
“Mad enough to take down that knife?” Trey asked.
Russell saw the gleam in Trey’s eyes and frowned. He wished to hell and back that everyone on the force didn’t know the story about the knife, but he couldn’t complain. It was his own fault for getting drunk one night and telling it on himself. Now everyone knew, and no one seemed to want to let the story die.
“No, not that pissed, but enough that I reckon I’ll be coughin’ up some jewelry. Peggy’s real fond of jewelry, you know.”
“What did you do?” Trey asked.
“Well, hell, I accidentally mowed some flower she’d been babyin’ along. Looked like a dang weed to me, so I mowed it. Any other time she would’a fussed at me for leaving the weeds.”
Trey grinned.
“Sometimes it’s hard staying on the good side of a woman,” Russell muttered. “You’re a single man. If you’re smart, you’ll stay that way.”
Trey thought of Olivia and then shook his head.
“I’d rather take my chances with the woman and the flowers than live a life without them.”
Russell thought about that a minute and then nodded.
“Yeah, I reckon you’re right. Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with,” he said.
“I’ll do that,” Trey said, then left.
Olivia was sitting on the side of the bed. Her jaw was clenched against the pain of movement, and a cold sweat had broken out on her forehead. Her left shoulder was in bandages from the surgery, and her arm was in a sling. The IV needle was taped to the top of her right hand, which left her with nothing to brace herself with if she stood, although that was highly unlikely. She had a pounding headache, caused by the concussion, and her lower lip was still a little bit swollen. The only thing she could eat without wincing was soft cold stuff, like Jell-O and ice cream, and that diet was getting old fast.
It was only a few feet from her bed to the bathroom, but it might as well have been a mile. Just as she was about to give up and ring for a nurse, the door opened. She looked up, unaware there were tears on her face.
It was Trey.
Within seconds, he was at her side.
“Livvie, sweetheart, what are you doing? Why didn’t you ring for help?”
“I was trying to go to the bathroom,” she mumbled, then started to cry in earnest.
“Oh, honey, don’t cry,” Trey said, and picked her up in his arms. “I’ll help. Can you grab your IV or do you want me to get it?”
“I can do the IV,” she said, and then hiccuped on a sob.
She pulled the pole along as Trey carried her to the bathroom. When he put her down inside, he held on to her shoulders until he was satisfied she wasn’t going to fall.
“Can you manage from here?” he asked.
She wouldn’t look at him, only nodded.
“It’s okay,” he said softly. “It’s part of what comes from being friends.”
She looked up at him then, tears welling in her eyes.
“Are we friends, Trey? Really friends?”
He leaned down and kissed the side of her face, near her lips.
“Yes, baby…real friends. I’m going to be right outside the door. Just
call out when you’re done and I’ll help you back to bed.”
He stepped outside, pulling the door closed as he went.
A couple of minutes later, he heard the toilet flush.
“Livvie?”
The door opened. She was swaying on her feet.
“Come here, darlin’,” he said softly, and picked her up in his arms so gently that she hardly knew when her feet left the floor.
She pulled the IV pole as they went, and moments later he had her back in bed, the IV pole shoved back in place against the wall.
“Feel better?” he asked.
She nodded and closed her eyes.
He picked up a washcloth from her bedside table and washed her face, then her hands, careful not to jar the sling or the IV needle.
Olivia was still crying, but without making a sound. The sight of the tears seeping out from under her eyelids undid him.
He dabbed at her eyes with a handful of tissues, then, on impulse, leaned over and kissed her square on the lips.
The contact was gentle—the tremble of Livvie’s lips matching the tremor of his own. It was the first time in eleven years that he’d had the pleasure, but it was as if the break in time had never been. His ache for her was as familiar as the sound of his name on her lips. When he pulled back, Olivia opened her eyes.
“Oh, Trey,” she whispered, and reached for him.
He took her hand, tenderly kissing her palm as he gazed down at her.
“What’s happening?” Livvie asked.
“You mean here and now, or with the world in general?”
“Both,” she said.
“With regards to the here and now, I’m falling in love all over again. As for the world in general, well…I guess you might say there have been better days.”
“Are you really?” Olivia asked. “Falling in love with me again?”
His eyes darkened, but he couldn’t lie.
“Yes.”
She tried to smile, but the tears only came faster.
“That wasn’t supposed to make you sad,” Trey muttered as he grabbed a second handful of tissues and swiped them across her cheeks.
“I’m not sad, just humbled by your ability to forgive.”
