The Truth About Comfort Cove

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  But maybe, in the interim, they would share a bed. At least once.

  Somewhere over the past days, he’d begun to count on it.

  So he thought about her as he reached Comfort Cove, drove straight home, grabbed a juice bottle out of the refrigerator, stripped down and climbed into bed, taking his laptop and cell with him.

  Only when he was settled back against the mound of pillows, with his laptop booted up, did he pick up his cell and push the speed-dial button he’d assigned to her. Just for now. While they were working together.

  Less than a week and they’d be together. The wedding was only a week away. Could be, this time the following week, she’d be right there in his house. Assuming she stayed with him.

  He’d stayed with her… .

  He wasn’t offering her his spare bedroom.

  She wasn’t answering her phone.

  At midnight?

  Or at 12:15 a.m. or 12:30 a.m.

  She could be on a date. The thought wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t horrible, either. This “thing” between them would be less complicated if she was dating someone.

  He called again at one.

  So maybe he’d scared her off with his fine-wine comment. For all of her strength and energy and determination, Lucy Hayes was fragile.

  Which was why he was getting worried.

  He’d give it fifteen more minutes and if she still wasn’t answering, he was going to call Lionel Smith, Lucy’s captain. If he woke the man up in the middle of the night, it wouldn’t be the first time someone had done so.

  Thirteen minutes later, his phone rang.

  “Hello?” He put a rein on his fear. If she was fine, then everything was good.

  “I saw you called. Sorry I missed you.”

  She wasn’t fine. At all. She was talking like she had marbles in her mouth. Or had just been to the dentist. Or something… Sitting up, his entire being on alert, Ramsey said, “What’s wrong?”

  Had she been crying?

  Her mother again?

  “I…”

  “Lucy?” She was scaring him. “Where are you? Are you okay?”

  “I’m home.” He started to breathe a little easier.

  “And?”

  “I took a drive tonight, Ramsey.” Her voice wasn’t just tired. It was weak. He waited.

  “I mapped those numbers from Wakerby as coordinates on an Aurora area map.”

  With several uncharacteristic pauses and starts and stops, she told him about starting at the grocery store where her mother had been attacked. About coming to a dirt track and trees and looking around.

  “I fell, hit my chin. I’ve just come from the emergency room. I’m not concussed, but I punctured the side of my tongue and have four stitches in my chin.”

  Her tongue injury explained some of the difference in her speech.

  “You fell?”

  “Tripped over a root.”

  Lucy hadn’t been watching where she was going? Didn’t sound right.

  “I…just…went a little crazy, Ramsey. Thing is, I knew it. I just didn’t stop myself. I was so determined to find something.”

  Another pause. Frustrated that he was so far away, that he couldn’t do more, Ramsey waited.

  “What if we don’t break Wakerby? He meets with his lawyer on Monday, and then who knows? We still only have him for Mama’s rape. The DNA evidence could be thrown out. Which only leaves Mama’s testimony and she’s a wreck. Any half-decent defense attorney could cast doubts on her ability to get things straight. He might walk.”

  “If he does, you’ll get him again.”

  “I can’t just sit back and let that happen. I have to look at everything.”

  “You weren’t wrong to look, Lucy. It’s what any good cop would have done.”

  “That’s not what Lionel said.”

  “You’ve seen your captain?”

  “I called him.”

  “From the emergency room?” He wished she’d have called him. But maybe she’d needed a ride home.

  “No. From the woods. I saw this mound. I dug a hole. And…I found a bone.”

  Fully focused, alert, he stood up, pulled his slacks off the top of the dry-cleaning bag and, one-handedly, put them on. “A bone.”

  “It’s a fragment from a human bone, Ramsey.” Her words were starting to slur and he wondered what drugs they might have given her at the hospital. “Lionel’s got a uniform team going in at first light with shovels. We don’t know yet if this one fragment is all there is.”

  Pacing his bedroom, Ramsey asked, “What did you use to dig the hole to begin with?”

  A bone. She’d found a bone. At the site of the coordinates she gleaned from numbers she’d found in Wakerby’s belongings. The woman was good. And far too bold and gutsy for her own good.

  “My hands.”

  “And you dug deep enough to find a bone?”

  “I told you, I kind of lost it.”

  He understood what drove her. He lived with the same forces pushing him from the inside out.

  But he didn’t worry about himself.

  “Could you tell anything else about the fragment? Is it an arm or leg bone? What about the age of the victim?”

  “We don’t know anything yet and I’m not jumping to any conclusions. Lionel showed up with an ambulance and I had to leave the scene. He met me later, at the hospital, to tell me that he’d cordoned off the area and that the team would be there at first light.”

  “Did he have anything else to say?”

  “Yeah. He’s going to take my badge if I ever do anything so harebrained again. And he told me I’d done good work.” She still sounded like she was talking around something, but her voice was gaining momentum. And just a bit of humor.

  He sat down on the side of the bed. “How do you feel?”

  “Kind of numb. Like I’m outside myself looking in.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “Stiff, but no. They got some kind of painkiller into my IV before I could tell them I didn’t want any.”

  “Do you have more with you?”

  “Yes, but I’m not taking it. I’d rather hurt than have my head feel like fog. Pain, I can deal with.”

  The fog took away a measure of her control. Her power. He understood that, too.

  “Are you there alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Has anyone called your mother?”

  “No. And I’m not going to tell her what happened, either.”

  “You’ve got stitches in your chin,” he reminded her. He’d like to see her for himself. To be there just for the rest of the night.

  “They’re underneath my chin. I’d have to lift my head for her to see them. Besides, they’re coming out in four days, she doesn’t expect to see me until Thanksgiving day. She knows I’m on shift all week so that I can spend Thursday with her. If the bruising isn’t better, I’ll wear lots of makeup.”

  “You’ve got that well thought-out.”

  “It’s second nature,” she said, and took a deep breath.

  “What?” he asked, telling himself that he was noticing every nuance about her because he noticed everything about everyone, because he was a good detective.

  “I just bit my tongue,” she said. “It’s swollen and getting in my way.”

  “You want to hang up? We can talk tomorrow.”

  “No. Unless you want to. I know it’s late.”

  He should let her rest. He didn’t want to let her go. She was hurt. And alone.

  “Are you in bed?”

  “Lying on the couch. I don’t have a television in my room and I plan on taking it easy in the morning. Lionel says he’ll fire me if I show up at the station before Monday.”

  “Okay, you lie there, I’ll talk.”

  “Good, I’ve been waiting to hear how things went with Jack Colton.” Ramsey half smiled and half frowned at the way she sounded with her usual bravado returning, but a thick tongue and painkillers still in her system.


  The woman was an enigma. A female version of himself— the parts he liked.

  Still, he didn’t like her being hurt. And alone. Didn’t like the idea that she lived every day with the same dangers he took on.

  And he knew there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about any of it.

  So he focused on work. Just as he’d always done.

  He told her about his interview with Colton.

  “So what’s your take on him? You still like him for doing it?”

  “Let’s just say I’m not convinced he didn’t do it,” he told her. He’d been thinking about Colton on and off all day. “He could be telling the truth. All of the signs are there. His handshake was firm and confident. He looked me straight in the eye. He only blinked out of sequence once during the entire interview.”

  “When?”

  He remembered exactly. “When I asked him about stopping for gas when he came upon the accident.”

  “What was his answer?”

  He told her about Colton using the gas stop to legally cut through the station to avoid traffic and the red light.

  “Sounds valid.”

  “Yeah. He’s got an answer for everything.”

  “Because he’s telling the truth?”

  “Or because he’s smart and he’s one step ahead of us. He knows what we’re going to ask before we ask and he has his answers all prepared. He’s had twenty-five years to work on his stories.”

  “What does your gut tell you?”

  He wanted to know what hers said. “That he might be telling the truth, but your scarcity-mentality theory keeps coming back to me, too. If he’s being driven by a base need for safety and security and being chased by the belief that he’ll never have enough, he could be capable of saying anything, in good conscience, because he feels justified in doing so since he’s never had enough of anything.”

  “And yet, he has a conscience. Which would explain why he feels guilty about Frank Whittier. His actions created a scarcity for Frank.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And his lack of fear of being found out? How do you explain that?”

  “He’s confident that whatever he’s hidden, and where he’s hidden it, is undiscoverable.”

  “I agree. And that means you’re going to have to look in the most obvious and least obvious places.”

  That was when Ramsey told her about the sewage ditch.

  “Did you go there?”

  “No, I’m doing that first thing in the morning. I intended to go this afternoon, but I got a hit on the Boston case and ended up going into the city instead.”

  “Did it pan out?” She was sounding tired again, her voice fading.

  Ramsey told her about having gone through prison commissary records, focusing on the spending habits of perps who’d been arrested since 2000, looking, specifically, for chocolate-bar purchases. He hadn’t found anything significant. Then he’d looked prior to that, honing in on those prisoners who’d been released before August of 2000. And he’d made a hit. A big one.

  “I paid a visit to a Boston detective I know, showed him what I had, and they brought the guy in this afternoon—he’s been working as a cook in a greasy spoon downtown for the past thirteen years. They tell the guy that they’ve got a DNA match on him for the August 2000 disappearances, which, by the way, took place shortly after his release from prison.”

  “They couldn’t have a DNA match yet since you just fingered him. The match takes time.”

  “Right, but they will have it in time for trial. The guy broke. They got a full confession.”

  “And the girls?”

  “He took them to an adoption agency half a block from where he works. They take children, no questions asked. Or they did. They’re out of business as of this afternoon. Permanently, if Boston P.D. has any say in it. They claim they were doing a good service. They had statistics that showed how many children who are victims of abuse could be saved if it were easier for parents to drop their kids off, no questions asked, and know that they’d get to a good home.”

  “Rather than dropping them at a hospital or police station where they end up in the foster-care system,” Lucy said.

  “Right.”

  “They’re right about that. Just because someone has issues, drug and money problems, youth working against them, doesn’t mean that they don’t love their kids. They want to know they’re in loving homes. Eases their consciences if nothing else. Which is why they keep them when they can’t give them proper care. They know that they’re loved and hope that will be enough.”

  Was she speaking from the experience of having grown up in such a home? Or just because of things she’d seen during her years as a cop?

  “Well, it isn’t right that children can be taken from good homes and dumped without any records being searched,” he said, keeping his focus on the work.

  “I agree. Any chance of finding the girls?”

  “One has already been located. She’ll be returned to her rightful family sometime this next week.”

  “A family she knows nothing about.”

  “Correct. And she’ll be taken from the only family she’s ever known. The parents that she loves.”

  Sometimes there were no good answers.

  “Hopefully her biological parents will allow some kind of visitation.”

  “They might.” He didn’t think so, based on the wealthy couple’s reaction when they’d been contacted late that afternoon. “And maybe it’s in the kid’s best interest to have that part of her life gone so that she can start anew.”

  He left those kinds of problems and answers up to the people who knew better about emotional issues than he did. His job was to serve and protect, not nurture.

  “And the second girl?”

  “They haven’t located her yet. But they feel confident that they will.”

  “Have her parents been notified?”

  “Yeah. I rode along for the notification. They’re simple people—he works in construction and she’s a beautician— but their whole lives revolved around finding their little girl. She’s their only child and they’re so grateful she’s found. So grateful to know that she’s probably safe and well cared for. They can’t wait to see her, of course, but mostly they just want her to be all right.”

  “A good day.”

  Mostly. Until he couldn’t reach her. And then knew that she was hurt and he was too far away to be of any help at all.

  “Two more are found, two more cases closed,” he said.

  “Who would have thought that a penchant for chocolate bars would be a kidnapper’s downfall?”

  “It’s how he lured the girls. He offered them some of the chocolate he always had on him. He kept them happy with it until he turned them over to the agency.”

  “Who paid money for them.”

  “You guessed it. He used the money to get back on his feet after prison. Down payment on a place. A car. Some furniture.”

  “And he’d have gotten away with it, too, if you hadn’t been determined enough to research something as innocuous as chocolate.”

  “Everyone has his weak point.”

  “What’s Jack Colton’s? Other than his scarcity mentality?”

  “If I knew that, the man would be behind bars.”

  “So, other than the sewage ditch, what’s next with Colton?”

  “I’m going to check on that girlfriend he mentioned, Haley Sanders. Depending on what I find, I might need you to follow up.”

  “Of course.”

  “And I’m still watching Frank Whittier, and will go back and take another look at what I have on him. I have to find the connection between the two—the time when they met and planned this thing, or met afterward. I’ve been thinking that maybe Jack saw Frank drive away with that little girl and made a deal with him to keep quiet in exchange for a steady income.”

  “Which could be why Jack is so believable when he says he didn’t take Claire. Maybe the alibi for the time discrepancy is just
the truth.”

  “Frank Whittier hasn’t had a bank account that we can find since he left Comfort Cove. And Jack has been independently employed. Maybe some of his regular income has come from Frank,” he offered.

  “Which leads us back to the question of what happened to Claire. If Frank Whittier took her, what did he do with her?”

  Running his hand through his hair, Ramsey had a brief thought of just staying where he was. In bed. He got so damned tired of answers that only led to more questions. And then he caught a couple of hours’ sleep and had to go search for answers again.

  Before he could come up with an answer he didn’t have, Lucy continued. “And the blackmail angle doesn’t explain Claire’s DNA being in the Buckley home, which, by the way, isn’t as clear-cut as we thought. Turns out that Claire’s DNA wasn’t taken from a hair ribbon, but from a hair found at the scene, probably in the box of ribbons. Anyway, there’s no ribbon to trace.”

  “But the important thing, the connection, the knowledge that Claire was there, is still valid.”

  “Completely.”

  “And Jack’s our connection between Comfort Cove and Aurora.”

  “Gladys Buckley had clients from the East Coast. It might be that Jack’s time in Cincinnati is only a coincidence. As much as we don’t believe in coincidences because they usually mean connections, maybe this time it is just a coincidence.”

  It was possible. “Is that what you think?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t, either.” But he was willing to be wrong. As long as Claire Sanderson was found. “I talked to the DNA lab in Boston and was able to get them to move Jack’s sample up on the list, but unless he touched something the girl left behind, we won’t get a match.” He leaned back against his pillows, still wearing his dress slacks.

  “So you keep looking at what you’ve already seen.”

  Amelia Hardy had invited him over for a turkey dinner when he was off shift on Thursday. Maybe he could take another look at her activity records. Catalog the mentions of Jack Colton. There could be something… .