by Julie Miller
No. There was no might about it. “He needs us, Emma,” she whispered out loud. “And we need him.”
Emma squealed her agreement.
But what kind of woman put her faith in a man who was so—?
“What the...?” She saw the young woman coming up behind the SUV in the side-view mirror and the internal debate stopped. Strange. Despite all the cars parked around them, there wasn’t another soul around. And suddenly this woman was here, standing in the rain when everyone else had dashed inside. Where had she come from? What did she want?
Robin’s pulse kicked up a notch as the woman’s sunken blue eyes locked on to hers in the mirror. There was something familiar about the dripping swing coat and straight dark hair. But she couldn’t place her as one of the Vanderhams’ guests. The woman touched her fingers to the rear fender of the SUV and trailed them along the wet black metal as she walked along its side.
Was she homeless? Had she been in accident?
“How do I know you?” Robin breathed. Even the rain falling around her seemed familiar. Outside the shop. The night of the assault. “That’s it.”
Recognition dawned, but brought little comfort. This was the same woman she’d seen watching the shop from across the street that night. Watching her. No. “Oh, God.”
Watching Emma.
Robin scrambled to turn around in her seat. “Get away from my baby.”
The woman stopped beside Emma’s window. She smiled as she braced both hands against the glass and looked inside the vehicle. “Do you like your new toy? Mama made it just for you.” Her eyes widened like saucers in her gaunt face. “Where is it? Where’s your dolly?” Robin was on her knees, facing the woman when she smacked her palm against the glass. “What did you do with it?”
The sharp sound startled Emma, and after a beat of silence, she burst into tears.
With Robin temporarily forgotten, the woman tapped on the window, trying to get Emma’s attention. “No, baby. Stop crying.” She felt all around the window, looking for a way to get in. “Baby? Don’t cry.”
“It’s okay, sweetie.” Robin reached over the back of the seat to take Emma’s hand. But she only got louder and redder and more upset. “Back away from the car, please. You’re frightening my daughter.”
“That’s my baby! You don’t deserve her.” Giving up on the window, the woman grabbed the door handle and rattled it. Thank God it was locked up tight. “I want my baby!”
When she reached for the front door handle, Robin leaned back and hit the horn. “Jake!” Please come back. She honked three more times and Emma’s unhappiness grew louder. “It’s okay, sweetie. We’ll be okay.”
“Hailey!” Emma’s birth mother? The strange woman was a stranger no more. “Stop crying, baby.”
Tania Houseman tried all the doors, rocking the SUV as she fought to get inside. Five minutes had passed. With the celebration in full swing inside, and the rain falling steadily outside, it seemed no one could hear Robin’s pleas for help. “Leave us alone. You’re not supposed to be here.”
She pushed up higher in the seat to follow Tania’s uneven walk as she staggered away from the car. Was she leaving? Was this freak encounter over? Robin lost sight of Tania for several precious seconds as she stooped down.
When she finally stood back up and turned toward the car, she held a fist-sized rock in her hand from the alley. “Hailey!”
Robin didn’t think. She simply acted. She dove over the back of the seat and threw her body over Emma as Tania hurled the rock at the window.
The blow chipped the glass and Tania disappeared from sight again. While the disturbed young woman reloaded, Robin unbuckled Emma from the car seat and pulled her into her arms. She hunkered down as close to the floorboards as she could get, in case the window shattered. “Shh, sweetie.”
Emma’s cries filled the car as Robin flipped open phone and pressed 9.
“You should have died in that alley,” Tania yelled. She pounded at the glass with another rock. “You don’t deserve her.”
The glass splintered into a web of cracks and Robin pressed 1.
“I’m taking my baby.” Tania raised the rock again.
A big black figure swooped up behind her, grabbed her arm and shook the rock loose. Robin whispered a grateful prayer as Jake twisted Tania’s arm behind her back and pushed the woman’s face up against the window of the SUV.
“Is the kid okay?” Jake shouted through the glass.
Robin could only nod.
“Call Montgomery.” Jake pulled Tania Houseman’s coat down her arms, and twisted the sleeves to anchor her arms behind her. “I think we found your stalker.”
Chapter Eleven
“You think her story’s legit?” Detective Fensom asked.
“It’ll be the biggest break we’ve had on our investigation yet if we can prove it’s true.” Spencer Montgomery never took his eyes off the glass. “Even if she IDs him, her testimony will never stand up in court.”
“But we’d have DNA. With DNA and a reliable witness who can describe the attacks, we could put that bastard away.”
Jake scrubbed his hand over his face and jaw and paced a circle around KCPD’s Fourth Precinct observation room. The sun was setting outside. The rain still drummed on the rooftop. There were at least a dozen detectives and uniformed officers on the other side of that door in the building’s third-floor bullpen.
And there was a man somewhere out there in the city who’d managed to track him to that church this afternoon.
No one had been able to track him for two years.
He’d spotted that retro-cool trilby hat, like that morning at the newsstand. Sitting in a car on the street in front of the church. With all the fancy trappings of that overblown soiree, he could bet that the driver with the black hat masking his face wasn’t a guest. He could bet he wasn’t on Jake’s trail because he wanted a friendly family reunion, either. Who was that guy? DEA agent? Gun for hire? Someone with a personal grudge he couldn’t remember?
After securing Robin and Emma in the car, he’d gone back to see what the guy’s interest was in Jake’s business. But the car was gone. Trilby guy was nowhere to be seen. And Robin had needed him.
Saving that woman was getting to be a regular habit.
But it was a job he needed to hand off to someone else.
His location in Kansas City had been compromised. If he wanted to stay alive, he needed to get out of this police station and get as far away from the responsibilities and unexpected notoriety of protecting a stubborn woman and her innocent child as he could get.
But he couldn’t leave. Especially after hearing Tania Houseman’s tragic story. His conscience wouldn’t let him.
His heart wouldn’t, either.
Jake felt trapped, caged like some sort of wild animal. He stood behind the mirrored window with Detectives Montgomery and Fensom and watched as Robin sat at the interview table in the adjoining room, trying to coax anything that made sense out of Tania Houseman.
Judgment day could come, and Jake knew he wouldn’t leave Robin alone with the crazy woman who’d been identified as Emma’s birth mother. If that whacko had gotten through the SUV’s windows to Robin and Emma, Jake might be pacing a hospital corridor or even the morgue right now.
Whacko. Like he had room to talk. He took a deep breath and stopped at the window to watch Robin work some of that patient, stubborn magic that was changing him on the disturbed young woman who’d been calling, mailing and following Robin for weeks now, apparently. It was all part of Tania Houseman’s obsession with the baby she’d given up for adoption.
A doctor from the Oak View Sanitarium sat in the room with her patient, after giving her whatever meds were necessary to calm her down. But it was Robin who’d finally gotten the woman talking after she’d either freaked out or shut down when the task force detectives had tried to interview her.
“When you’re a mother, even when it’s hard...you still have to be a mother.” Robin had left
Emma with Officer Wheeler in one of the nearby conference rooms. But she hadn’t shied away from sitting down with the woman who’d butchered Emma’s clothes and threatened to kidnap her. She sat at the table opposite the dazed young woman who scratched at the scars on her wrists. “I think you did a very brave thing by going through with the pregnancy after you’d been raped. You gave your daughter life, and I, for one, will always be grateful to you for that.”
“I thought I could love her. I do love her.” Tania lowered her gaze to the table. “I miss her.”
“I know. I miss her terribly when I’m separated from her, too.” Robin rubbed her hands up and down her arms, as if the temperature in the next room was dropping. She glanced back at the mirrored window and Jake moved toward her. Maybe she didn’t need him right now. Maybe she was looking to the detectives for a bit of guidance on how to elicit the information they were hoping Tania could give. She turned back to the young woman across the table. “Tania, do you know who Emma’s, I mean Hailey’s, father is? Do you know who raped you?”
The younger woman, dressed in orange jail scrubs, nodded. “I never saw his face that night. But he gave me a red rose.”
* * *
ROBIN PAUSED IN the doorway of the interview room as Dr. Freitag and a female police officer escorted Tania down the hallway to the restroom. She rubbed the weary tension in her neck and wondered if Emma was still asleep. She wished she was sleeping, too. Preferably with Jake’s arms around her like they’d been last night so she could feel that sense of security his strength and warmth gave her. How did detectives like Spencer Montgomery and Nick Fensom do this kind of grueling, heart-wrenching work?
“Where’s my sister?” Like everyone else on the floor, Robin turned at the man charging across the room from the sergeant’s check-in desk. “Tania? Where are they taking her?”
Robin stepped forward to stop him and urge him to lower his voice. “To the restroom, Mr. Houseman. She’ll be back.”
The banking executive wore a suit and tie similar to the outfit he’d worn that day outside the Shamrock Bar when he’d warned her about a “life-or-death” problem. He was still preaching the same doom and gloom when he turned on Robin. “My sister is a sick woman. Whatever she’s done, she isn’t responsible.”
Robin braced her hands at her hips. “Are you the responsible one in the family, then?”
“I tried to warn you. My sister is unstable. Who knows what she’ll say or do?”
“She says she was assaulted by the Rose Red Rapist—that my daughter is the child of that rape.”
That bold statement seemed to take him aback as much as seeing Spencer Montgomery, Nick Fensom and Jake step out of the adjoining room to form a semicircle around him. “This isn’t about her vandalizing your car? Or sending those messages?”
“Or locking me in the refrigerator at my shop.” Tania Houseman’s misguided transgressions seemed minor, in retrospect, compared to what big brother had done. “She said you advised her not to report that she’d been raped.”
Bill Houseman’s hands went to the knot of his tie, needlessly straightening it. “I didn’t find out about it until after the child was born.”
“She’s tried to kill herself at least once, judging by the scars on her wrists. She needs to talk to someone about it.”
As the circle of armed men closed in around him, Bill Houseman grew more agitated. “I did what I thought was right. At first I thought she was less than thrilled about having a baby because she had just launched her art career with her first big show.” He raked his fingers through his perfectly styled hair and left a rumpled mess in their wake. “About halfway through the pregnancy, she changed. She became sullen, depressed. She stopped painting. That’s when I sent her to the Oak View Sanitarium. She had the baby and came home and was happy for a month or so. Then she woke up one morning and slit her wrists.” He turned to share his explanation with Jake and the detectives. But he wasn’t finding much sympathy there, either. “That’s when she told me about the rape. I had her sign away her rights and put Hailey up for adoption. I wanted to get any symbol of that monster out of Tania’s life.”
Jake stepped forward to defend Emma before Robin could. “There’s no monster in that little girl. She’s a beautiful, perfect baby.”
“I thought maybe getting that baby back would bring Tania back to me. It’s not easy to watch the talented little sister you grew up with waste away into an empty-eyed shell of herself.”
“That’s why you attacked me?” Robin asked. “Was Tania trying to kidnap my daughter while you dragged me into that alley?”
“No. That was all on me. I thought I’d knocked you out, and I was going to take the baby then. But you wouldn’t stay down.”
Spencer Montgomery had an idea on that. “So you tried to make it look like a rape so that we’d look for a different type of suspect. Not someone trying to kidnap a child.”
“I just wanted my sister to be happy again.”
“Billy?” Tania, barely vocal, shuffled a little faster down the hall as she went to greet her brother.
Bill Houseman wound his arms around her slender shoulders and pressed a kiss to the crown of her hair. “Hey, kiddo. How are you holding up?”
“Better. The police department has a victim specialist I can talk to.” She glanced back at the woman behind her. “And Dr. Freitag says the hospital has a trauma-recovery program I can go to. Is that all right?”
“Whatever you need.” Billy gave his sister another kiss and then handed her back to the doctor. “Take good care of her.”
Dr. Freitag put a supportive arm around her patient to lead her down the hallway. But the fragile young woman who’d endured far more than she should stopped and turned to her brother. “It’s better for Hailey—” she flashed an apology to Robin “—for Emma, I mean—to be with Ms. Carter. She loves her, too.”
Billy nodded and winked at his sister. Once Tania and the doctor had left the floor, Houseman turned to Detective Montgomery, who must have been exuding enough authority that he assumed, correctly, that Montgomery was the man in charge. “Are you pressing charges against my sister?”
“That’s up to Ms. Carter.”
Robin shook her head. “Your motives might be in the right place, Mr. Houseman. Your methods, however, are unforgivable.”
Bill Houseman nodded. “You can’t prove I’ve done anything. We’re just having a friendly conversation here. You never Mirandized me.”
Jake moved to stand beside Emma and draped an arm around her shoulders. “Ask him if he still has a bruise under his collar from where I put a choke hold on him that night. From what I hear, it leaves a mark.”
Nick Fensom looked like he was ready to rip open Bill’s collar on the spot. “Well, Mr. Houseman?”
Houseman was fiddling with his tie again. “I think I’d like to talk to my attorney now.”
* * *
JAKE WAITED FOR Nick Fensom to escort Bill Houseman to lockup before he went down to the conference room where Robin had given Emma a bottle and was changing her. The hour was late, he was bone tired and he needed a shave. But when he looked into the room and saw how Robin’s face lit up as she played a tickle game with her daughter, and heard how Emma’s laughter filled the room, he smiled.
The moment didn’t last, though. Spencer Montgomery walked up beside him. He pulled back the front of his suit coat and stuck his hands into his pockets. But Jake didn’t believe there was anything casual about the detective’s thoughts and actions.
“We need to verify Ms. Houseman’s statement,” he started, without any preamble, “but the MO she described of her assault matches what other victims have said about the Rose Red Rapist, including some details we’ve never released to the public.” Montgomery watched the mother and daughter show for a few seconds before adding, “If our unsub finds out that baby is his—that we now have his DNA—”
“Then he’ll go after Emma.” Jake glanced over at the detective. “Let’s try to
keep that particular story out of the newspapers, okay?”
“Agreed. Ms. Carter has already agreed to let our lab take blood samples from her daughter. Do you think she’s figured out what kind of danger they’ll be in?”
“The woman is too smart not to.”
Jake had been thinking a lot about Robin and Emma’s chances for a happily ever after if he saved his own hide and left K.C. He’d also been thinking about his own chance at happiness if he left the Carter girls behind and someone even more violent than a disturbed young woman and her misguided brother hurt them.
Talk about a guilty conscience.
“Are you staying on as bodyguard?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Jake vowed.
Montgomery nodded. “Agent Nash stopped by my office this afternoon. I sent him to the Journal to talk to Gabe Knight about those articles he wrote on you. He’s going to call me later tonight. Are you still unavailable?”
Jake was wondering if his instinct to trust Spencer Montgomery was a smart one, or just wishful thinking. “Did this Agent Nash say anything about me?”
“He showed me a picture of you—when you were younger and prettier.” Good one. Jake almost laughed. “He said he’s your handler.”
“Handler?” Jake looked the detective straight in the eye. Nash hadn’t come with a wanted poster?
“He said you were one of the best undercover operatives he’s ever worked with. Apparently, you’ve been listed as MIA for a couple of years now. What happened? Did you go AWOL on a mission?”
He was one of the good guys? That DEA badge in his pocket was his? Then who did he kill? And why was the guy in the trilby hat following him? It was a lot of information to process. And he had no way of knowing how much or little of that information was true until he talked to Nash or the mystery guy in the hat.
“It’s a long story.” Reenergized by the need to verify some answers and possibly get a breakthrough to his missing past, Jake nodded to the detective and headed into the conference room to gather the Carter girls and their things.
