The Truth About Comfort Cove

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Had Ramsey received an invitation to the wedding? She couldn’t imagine that Emma and Chris would ask Lucy and not Ramsey, the lead detective on the case.

  Would Ramsey accept the invitation?

  Picturing the cute black dress she’d purchased on a whim a couple of years before to wear to the chief of police’s annual Christmas party, Lucy put her car in Drive, skidded too quickly down her driveway and sped away. The reception was on a boat. She wouldn’t be wearing high heels.

  And what Ramsey Miller thought of anything she might have on her body was not food for thought.

  Another trip to the penitentiary was.

  Mrs. Gladys Buckley didn’t resemble any convict Lucy had ever seen. Even after six years of incarceration—and two years on house arrest before that while she awaited trial— Gladys had the bearing of a rich and privileged woman.

  “New hair color,” Lucy said as she sat down across the standard oblong table in the small, caged interview room at the minimum-security state penitentiary where Gladys would be living out the rest of her days with no chance for parole, thanks, in part, to Lucy.

  Lucy had found out about Gladys through Sandy and called the police—not that Gladys knew this.

  “There’s a girl on my street, licensed from one of the expensive salons with superior training,” the older woman replied. “She does it for me.”

  Gladys spoke like she still lived in her mansion on the hill, when her street, these days, was a cell block on the second floor of the prison.

  “I’ll bet you pay her well.” Gladys could use commissary funds, monies given to prisoners for services rendered incarcerated, which went a long way when you were “decorating” a six-by-twelve foot abode.

  Dressed in expensive-looking brown slacks, a white blouse and an orange-and-brown flowered jacket, she looked more like a model from the pages of a fashion magazine for older women than a prison inmate as she nodded. “Of course. Good work deserves ample reward.”

  And money bought loyalty. A moral code from Gladys’s world that had served her well for more than two decades. Until Lucy, wearing a wire with a direct link to the Aurora Police Department, had posed as an unwed mother and blown Gladys’s black-market baby business, and her world, to hell.

  “I have some questions for you,” Lucy said now, looking the older woman straight in the eye. When she’d first met Gladys, when she’d first spent time in Gladys’s home, she’d liked the woman. A lot.

  “I’ll answer what I can,” the sixty-three-year-old said as gracious as always, her manicured hands calmly folded on top of the table. She’d been offered a plea deal, minimum-security housing with every freedom she could be allotted while still being a guest of the state, in exchange for full cooperation.

  “How did you meet Claire Sanderson?” Lucy spoke slowly, choosing her words carefully as she slid the photo across the table. She wasn’t there under any official capacity. Gladys’s case was closed. Unless Lucy turned up any unaccounted-for children who Gladys had sold.

  Gladys looked at the photo and slid it back with one finger.

  “I don’t know her.”

  They’d been through this before. The month before. With Ramsey Miller, who was officially working the Sanderson cold case.

  Lucy and Ramsey were long-distance friends. With no lives outside work. He sat in with her on the Wakerby case. She sat in with him on the Sanderson case. And the Walters case. All cold-case child abductions. They’d proven that Lucy’s sister, Allie, was not one of Walters’s victims. And the previous month, they’d celebrated with Emma Sanderson when DNA from her missing little sister, Claire, had turned up negative for a Walters match.

  “Look again, Gladys. Please.” Lucy met the woman’s gaze, taking imaginary deep breaths while she reined in her frustration. “She’s two years old in that picture.” Taking another photo from the folder she’d brought in with her, Lucy put it in front of the woman. “This is an age-progressed photo. Possibly what Claire looked like at four.”

  Emma and her mother, Rose Sanderson, had paid for a private age progression to adulthood a few years before. They’d posted it on the internet and taken it with them to speaking engagements. And received nothing but false leads.

  The more time that had elapsed between one’s disappearance and an age progression, the more chance there was for no likeness at all. Age progression was a science based on average calculations and no one was completely average.

  Still, at two, or four, those changes would have been fewer, the progressed photo more accurate.

  “I don’t know her.”

  “Evidence says you do.”

  “It’s wrong.”

  Detective 101. Evidence didn’t lie.

  “Her DNA was on a hair ribbon found in your home.”

  “I had a drawer full of ribbons. Most of them from my nieces when they were younger.”

  “Did you have a niece that looked like Claire?”

  “No. They were dark haired. They grew up in Florida and still live there. Kasey and Kylie. They’re my younger brother’s girls. You can verify the truth. Ask the girls to give you DNA samples and check them against the ribbons you found and I’m sure you’ll find that they match. And before you ask, the girls are in their late thirties—thirty-seven and thirtynine—so they don’t fit your girl here.”

  Gladys shook her head softly, her lips pursed in confusion. “I turned over all of my records,” she said. “I handled hundreds of babies. Not a single toddler. I’d remember a two-yearold. You can come visit me once a month for the next twenty years if you’d like, hon. I don’t mind the socializing. But I don’t know this child you keep insisting I know.”

  Lucy didn’t trust the woman. But Ramsey’s words from two nights before held the truth that drove Lucy back to see her again and again. One piece of information inevitably leads to another. Emma Sanderson’s invitation had spurred on this visit.

  Lucy had promised Emma she wouldn’t stop looking for Claire.

  And while Lucy was certain that Gladys Buckley had associated with Sandy Hayes but had never seen Allie Hayes, she was equally certain that Gladys had some connection to Ramsey’s missing Claire Sanderson….

  Claire Sanderson. A two-year-old blonde sprite who’d disappeared from her home twenty-five years before and never been seen or heard from again. Emma Sanderson was four when Claire went missing. And her life had been irrevocably changed. Much like Lucy, Emma had grown up with a mother so stricken with grief that the daughter left behind had never had the chance to be a kid.

  Or to be innocently happy.

  Lucy had recognized a kindred spirit the moment she’d met Emma the previous month.

  Folding her hands on the table, Lucy leaned forward. “I don’t doubt that you have nieces who live in Florida and that their hair ribbons were among those taken from your home. What I need to know is how a hair ribbon worn by Claire Sanderson happened to be among them.”

  “I have no idea,” Gladys said. “And no reason not to tell you if I did know.”

  Unless there was some as-yet undetected crime that Gladys had committed. Her plea agreement stood only for the charges already made.

  And Lucy had done what she could for the moment. At least as far as the Claire Sanderson case was concerned. So she should go. But she had a more personal matter… . One that, ethically, she couldn’t discuss. One she hadn’t discussed with Gladys Buckley in all the years she’d been aware of the woman’s association with her mother.

  “I was going through names and numbers in your business address book yesterday,” she said. “I came across a name with no corresponding records attached. And no notes designating that the contact had failed to produce…anything.”

  There’d been coding for every aspect of the baby business. Including those for referrals or leads that did not result in a baby to sell.

  “There were a lot of names in that book. I can’t possibly remember them all.”

  “The name was Sandy.” No last name. Y
ears before, while examining her mother’s papers, Lucy had found a peculiar scrap of paper with Gladys’s number written on it. That had been the beginning of the end for Gladys’s operation. Later, when Lucy had access to Gladys’s private information, she’d come across a record of her mother having called the older woman.

  Not that Gladys had any idea who Lucy was, apart from being the cop who’d helped bust her.

  Gladys didn’t know how Lucy had stumbled upon her operation in the first place. For her mother’s sake it had to stay that way. But she’d had a hellish weekend with Sandy, who hadn’t been sober since Saturday morning’s ID, and she was sitting right across from a woman who might be able to help her.

  The focused look on Gladys’s face told Lucy she’d hit a mark. “That was a sad one,” Gladys said.

  One piece of information was all they needed. Ramsey said so. And it didn’t look like they were going to get the information from Sandy—or Sloan Wakerby—anytime soon.

  Last month, Lucy had scored the DNA match of a lifetime and found the guy who’d ruined her mother’s life. She’d always assumed that would be the hardest part. Finding the guy. After that all the pieces would fall into place.

  Her mother’s memory would be jogged.

  The guy would talk in a bid for leniency.

  Neither one of those things had happened. And here she was, a month later, and no closer to finding her sister than she’d ever been. She was getting desperate.

  She’d exhausted every lead she had from her mother’s life in Aurora—which were precious few.

  Based on key evidence, the police had determined all those years ago that the abduction/rape had been a random stranger attack. There’d been no sign of anyone following her mother. Or of the attack having been planned. Quite the opposite. The busy parking lot, the open door, the body dumped by the river, were all signs of a spur-of-the-moment act.

  A classic fit for one of the FBI’s most dangerous classifications of rapist profiles.

  And a dead end when tracking reasons and motivations.

  Amber Locken was doing the follow-up on Sloan Wakerby’s past. His associations. Any sightings of him with a baby almost thirty years before. So far, she’d turned up a big fat nothing.

  Lucy didn’t know where else to turn, but Gladys. And she was here, anyway—here because she’d promised Emma Sanderson she wouldn’t quit looking for her sister until Claire was found. Or evidence of her death was found.

  Her mother hadn’t been in contact with Gladys until after the rape. After Allie’s disappearance. There was no way Gladys could lead her to the man who’d raped her mother and taken her baby sister.

  “Tell me about Sandy,” she said, after taking a moment to second-guess herself. This line of questioning wasn’t within protocol. It probably wasn’t smart.

  But then it wasn’t the first stupid thing she’d done in her mother’s case. On her own time, her own dime, she’d identified Sloan Wakerby as a person of interest, but until she had his DNA she couldn’t arrest him. And without arresting him she couldn’t get his DNA. She’d tampered with his car— breaking both taillights—and given the police a reason to arrest him. Then she’d called and reported him. Sometimes, when there was no other way, you did what was necessary.

  Gladys’s watery gray eyes were shadowed as she looked at Lucy. “Did something happen to the poor girl?”

  “Tell me about Sandy,” Lucy repeated.

  “I don’t know a lot. She was raped. Her baby was taken at the time of the attack. It was in all the papers, names withheld, of course. But I watched for the baby to come through. I only dealt with newborns, but that wouldn’t prevent someone from contacting me if they had a baby to dispose of quickly.”

  Lucy’s palms started to sweat. “Did someone contact you?”

  “Yes.”

  Lucy’s mother lied and “forgot” by habit. But she’d believed Sandy when she’d told her this woman hadn’t found Allie.

  “Who? When?” Her interrogation skills were slipping.

  “Sandy did. After the attack. I’d all but forgotten about it, but then I got this phone call. The girl had been asking around downtown Cincinnati, in places a nice young woman shouldn’t have been, for ways to get rid of a baby. Someone sent her to me.”

  “She wanted to hand over a baby?” Lucy asked, because she would’ve asked that if she didn’t already know.

  Gladys shook her head. “She was trying to find out where people took babies they didn’t want. She wondered if whoever had taken her daughter had brought her there.”

  Sitting back, Lucy waited for her stomach to settle.

  Gladys was telling it to her straight. And Sandy had, too. Their stories matched explicitly.

  “I only heard from that young woman once. Never even met her. But I never forgot her, either. I always kept her name and number just in case I ever heard anything. I’d have found a way to get her reunited with that girl. That’s one mama who needed her baby home.”

  Sandy had kept Gladys Buckley’s number, as well. And Lucy found it when she’d been going through her mother’s things, getting rid of stuff, when it looked like they were going to lose their home her junior year of high school.

  Sandy’s social security had come through in the nick of time and they’d stayed put. But Lucy had held on to the phone number.

  And when she finally got her mother to tell her what Gladys Buckley did for a living, shortly after Lucy had graduated from the academy, she went straight to her mentor—Amber Locken—and volunteered to be an unwed mother in their sting.

  She didn’t find Allie. But she got Gladys Buckley put behind bars.

  “Why are you asking questions about Sandy?” Gladys asked softly. “Did they find her little girl?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.” Lucy gave the answer by rote.

  She slid one more photo in front of the woman.

  “Do you recognize this man?” Sloan Wakerby’s picture was current, but Sandy had recognized him.

  Gladys studied the picture. And again she shook her head. “I’ve never seen him before in my life. And that’s not the type of face you’d forget.”

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “Absolutely sure. I know what you all think of me, selling babies for money, but the way I look at it, I was offering a service to people who needed it. The babies who came through my home were mostly drug babies, or the results of teenage pregnancies. They were unwanted. And I put them in the arms of parents who wanted them enough to pay a large sum.”

  “You don’t think you ever sold any babies who’d been kidnapped by scum out to make a buck?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  Lucy had a mouthful to give the older woman—they’d discovered at least a dozen of the children that Gladys had sold had been reported missing—but she saved her breath.

  “You ever hear of a guy named Sloan Wakerby?” she asked instead.

  “Sloan? I’ve never known a Sloan in my life.”

  If Gladys was lying she was damned good at it. But then, the woman had made a career out of lying in a big way.

  But she’d kept records—listings that had allowed them to match more than a dozen missing children to their biological parents. And there’d been no Sloan or Wakerby listed in those records.

  Lucy was done here.

  “Thank you for talking to me.”

  She gathered up her things, shook the woman’s hand and motioned to be let out.

  She’d already had two strikeouts on this visit, and she had an entire evening ahead of her, filled with investigative avenues to pursue.

  But first, she got into her Ford Escape, drove down to the river, headed southwest on the road along the shore and called the only person she wanted to talk to right then.

  The one who’d care about both strikeouts.

  The only one who’d understand.

  She called Ramsey Miller.

  He didn’t pick up.

  CHAPTER FOUR

>   “H ey, Miller, you got a minute?”

  With his arm halfway in the sleeve of his brown suit jacket

  Wednesday evening, Ramsey looked over at Bill Mendholson, a detective five years his senior and Ramsey’s mentor.

  Bill had been out most of the day.

  Ramsey had made a connection between the two Boston

  missing-child cold cases. He’d gone through both evidence

  boxes, including trash found in the area, and read all the reports written by everyone who’d done any work on the cases,

  or who’d been on the scene and made a statement, and the only

  similarity he could find was that chocolate-bar wrappers—not

  the common kind found in drugstores and supermarkets—had

  been found in the vicinity of both disappearances. Might not

  mean anything. Probably didn’t. But as long as those girls’

  disappearances were unsolved, he wasn’t going to stop checking out every single possibility. No matter how remote. He’d been researching chocolate, chocolate manufacturers, the effects of chocolate, perps who offered chocolate, for

  most of the day. He’d been immersed in chocolate. Chocolatiers in Boston. Chocolate distributors in the Boston area in

  August of 2000. Establishments that sold chocolate bars. He’d

  exhausted every possibility he could think of for connections

  between the two abductions that took place in the same city

  in the same time period twelve years before, and he knew he

  had to take a break.

  So he was on his way out to check a name and address that had finally come in on a person of interest in the Claire Sand

  erson case. An address he was off to investigate.

  “Yeah, Bill, what’s up?” Five o’clock was quitting time for

  both of them and only an hour away, but with all of the papers

  spread on Bill’s desk, it didn’t look as if he’d be heading home

  any time soon, either. Mary must be working late. Ramsey would be spending most of the night with the

  Sanderson files. Another cold-case toddler abduction. This