by Julie Miller
She’d asked about Alicia and he’d been stunned to hear himself answer without thinking—without filtering his words and memories through a sharp grip of pain. His therapist would have called it a breakthrough moment, but he’d just felt lighter—as if a bit of the weight that burdened his heart had been lifted.
For the first time, he’d been able to think about their marriage in the past tense. Without missing her. He treasured what they’d had, remembered how he’d loved her, still knew he was responsible for her death.
But he’d been able to set the memories aside and keep himself in the moment. He’d imagined Maddie’s lush body, hidden beneath the folds of his robe, and felt something stirring in his blood. He’d savored her spicy orange scent that clung to the soft terry cloth. He’d listened to her husky voice and knew he wasn’t cooling down the way he should after a workout.
He’d tested his theory about moving on by kissing her. He hadn’t batted one eye at how she’d opened for him, clutched at him, responded to him. He hadn’t felt such a rush—in his veins, in his head, in his groin—for ages. God, he was out of practice. He’d cornered a woman on the stairs in his basement and told her to shut up. Even with Alicia, he hadn’t been much of a romantic, but that had seriously lacked in style.
But it hadn’t lacked in passion. Kissing Maddie had been the truest connection he’d had with a woman since Alicia.
If the phone hadn’t interrupted them, he might have picked her up, carried her to the sofa or his bed and tested his theory in a way that would probably shock the good Ms. McCallister.
But the phone had rung. And despite the frissons of lust still thrumming through his body, this morning, she was a different person. As he drove, he glanced across the seat at Maddie. She’d pulled that glorious hair back into a tight no-nonsense bun. And the soft skin that had fired beneath his touch last night looked chilled and pale, except for the light dusting of makeup she wore.
This morning, Maddie McCallister was back to stoic and subdued, the way she’d been four years ago at the trial—as if keeping her fears and doubts and questions locked inside was the only way to prevent her strength and perseverance from rushing out along with them. Though he’d complained about her incessant need to argue a point, he liked the chattier version of her better than this. Even when she was rambling on, jumping from one topic to the next, at least he knew what she was thinking. At least—like she’d said last night—he couldn’t get lost in the silence, worrying about her.
As he pulled into the parking lot outside the lab, he tried to prep her for what to expect. “A couple of homicide detectives are going to meet us first. A. J. Rodriguez—you met him at the precinct—and his partner, Josh Taylor.”
“Can’t I just see if it’s her and go?”
“You’ll have to check in, get a visitor’s pass. The ME will meet you and give you a little speech.”
Maddie angled her gaze toward him. “You’ve done this before?”
Oh, damn, this was tricky. Dwight managed to park the car and kill the engine before the haunting images overwhelmed him. The long metal tables, shiny with their sterile cleanliness, cold to the touch. The crisp, white sheets. The tags on the bodies to match the label on the doors and the paperwork.
The neat bullet hole in Alicia’s temple.
The gray bruises on Braden’s round, sleeping face.
Dwight’s breath caught in his chest. He ached as if he’d taken a blow straight to the sternum.
He hadn’t forgotten one harsh detail.
“Dwight.” A cool, gentle hand curled around his fist on the seat beside him. “Your wife and son?”
He nodded.
“You don’t have to go in with me. The memories must be horrible for you.”
He reversed the grip of their hands and clutched hers tightly within his. He selfishly absorbed the comfort she gave him but wanted her to know everything he hadn’t been prepared for. “It’ll be a shock. Make sure you know where the bathroom is before you talk to Holly. There’ll be some paperwork—I’ll help you with that—and probably some more questions afterward.”
“Maybe it will give me a sense of closure to finally see Katie again. To know.”
Dwight shook his head and climbed out of the car, denying himself the contact with her, putting space between them before he roared something terrifying. Like there was no closure when a loved one was murdered. Like seeing her dead body was only the beginning of the nightmare. Like putting away the bastard responsible for the murder appeased only your sense of justice. It didn’t assuage the guilt that you might be partly responsible. It didn’t mend the hole in your heart or piece together the shreds of your soul.
Sure, you could function in the world, you could do your job, you could learn to lust after someone new. But you couldn’t… He couldn’t…
“Dwight?” He started when he felt her hands on him again. Twin medallions of soft heat at the middle of his chest. He blinked his eyes open and looked down into a sea of deep, shadowy blue. “You wait out here. Or with your detective friends inside. I can do this on my own. I’m the one who has to make the ID, anyway. I won’t let Katie down.”
If she hadn’t tried to smile, he might have been low enough to let her go into the morgue without him. But her soft lips curled, trembled, failed. He touched his fingers to the tremulous pout of bravely checked emotions, silently called himself every name in the book for not having the guts this woman had, then grabbed her hand and led her inside.
A. J. RODRIGUEZ had taken Dwight aside while Maddie signed the registry and got her visitor’s pass. “Hoped I’d never have to see you in this place again, amigo.”
A.J.’s partner, even bigger and taller than Dwight, had introduced himself as Josh Taylor. He’d expressed his condolences about her missing niece, then joined the conversation with Dwight and A.J. while the ME, Dr. Holly Masterson, came out of her office to explain the procedure to Maddie.
Though shaded by his personal grief, Dwight had already given her a pretty good idea of the identification process. So while she appreciated Holly’s business-like demeanor and the kindness in her hazel eyes, Maddie turned her ear to pick up snippets of the conversation between Dwight and the detectives.
“Found her in an alley in No-Man’s-Land, though Holly says the body had been moved from the original crime scene.”
“Probably a drug overdose. Though whether accidental or intentional, self-inflicted or…”
Maddie could answer that one. Katie didn’t do drugs. And she wouldn’t take her own life. That left intentional. That left murder.
“Ready?” Holly asked.
Maddie nodded. Her knees quavered like gelatin and her stomach sat like a rock inside her. But she could do this. She had to do this. For Katie.
Holly looked over her shoulder to Dwight. “You coming?”
Seeing the stark, unblinking pain in those gray-green eyes, Maddie knew she couldn’t force him to relive a nightmare.
“It’s okay,” she assured him, then turned to follow Holly’s white lab coat down the hallway through a set of swinging and glass-and-stainless-steel doors.
When they reached the proper square of stainless steel that looked like a refrigerator door, Holly hesitated. She rested one surgically gloved hand on Maddie’s arm. “Remember. All you have to do is look at the face and tell me if you recognize her or not. It won’t take long.”
Maddie nodded. “I’m ready. Wait.” She wasn’t. “There will be a face, right?” Panic welled in her throat. Tears burned in her eyes. “When I found my sister,” Maddie said, splaying her fingers and touching her cheeks where some of Karen’s wounds had been, “part of her face was…” She couldn’t say it.
Could she survive looking at Joe Rinaldi’s handiwork again?
“Ms. McCallister.” Dr. Holly Masterson’s voice remained very calm, but Maddie could hardly hear her from the panic roaring in her ears. “This girl wasn’t stabbed.”
“But he sent the roses.”
“What roses?”
A warm suit coat draped over Maddie’s shoulders. A sturdy arm curled around her. Long, blunt-tipped fingers laced with her own. And a familiar, growly voice gave the command. “It’s a complicated story, Doc. Let’s do this.”
Having Dwight beside her to lean on short-circuited her panic. His warmth surrounded her and gave her strength. Feeling the tight clutch of his hand reminded her of what supporting her must be costing him.
She tilted her face to his. “You don’t have to be here.”
“Yeah, I do.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead, then nodded to Holly. “Do it.”
Maddie nodded her consent, then stepped back as Holly opened the door and slid out a long, narrow gurney. Squeezing Dwight’s hand between both of her own, Maddie held her breath and prayed.
With care and respect, Holly folded back the sheet, exposing the teenage girl’s body down to her shoulders. “Is this your niece?”
Her hair was dark, her face pale and unblemished. “Oh, my God.”
“Is this Katie Rinaldi?” Holly clarified.
“No.” The stiff anticipation in Dwight’s body eased on a deep breath. But Maddie wasn’t so quick to relax. She raised her gaze to Holly’s hazel eyes. “It’s Katie’s friend, Whitney Chiles.”
AT FIFTY, SHAUNA CARTWRIGHT was not only one of the youngest acting commissioners in the KCPD’s history; she also had to be the prettiest.
Not that Dwight was paying that kind of attention to the authoritative blonde in the navy-blue suit. His focus was on the curvy redhead in blue jeans, pacing at the back of the Fourth Precinct’s conference room, stopping with each pass to check the sleeping baby in the carrier on the counter.
A paranoid sense of responsibility, of doom lurking just around the corner, made him reluctant to let Maddie out of his sight. He’d buried one woman already, had seen another life snuffed out far too soon today. He wasn’t sure he had it in him to bury anybody else.
At Commissioner Cartwright’s request, a veritable brain trust of sorts had gathered to discuss what now seemed to be several converging cases. She wanted to compare notes and plan a strategy for moving forward in a direct, organized assault to uncover and close down what she’d dubbed the “Baby Factory.”
Detectives from homicide and the SVU, as well as Dr. Holly Masterson and Mac Taylor from the Crime Lab, were there. Plus one surly assistant district attorney and a frantic aunt who was ready to tear Kansas City apart, building by building. All in order to find the niece Maddie loved like a daughter before she wound up on a slab in the morgue like her unfortunate friend.
The precinct had brought in sandwiches and coffee to keep them going through dinner, but Maddie hadn’t eaten a thing. She’d answered official questions at the morgue, dug a card out of her purse with the number for Whitney’s parents so they could be notified. She verified that she’d never known Whitney to take any of the lethal combination of drugs that had been found in her system—and that fists and knives were Joe Rinaldi’s stock in trade, so he was an unlikely suspect in the girl’s murder.
They’d climbed into the front seat of his car before she said anything about what she was feeling. “Thank God it wasn’t Katie.” She’d pressed her fingers to her lips to hold back the tears he heard in her voice. “I feel like a horrible person for saying that. Someone else has lost a child they love. But I’m so glad it wasn’t me.” Her eyes glittered like sapphires as moisture gathered there. “That means there’s a chance Katie is still alive.”
“You’re not a horrible person,” Dwight whispered. “We’ll find her.” He was beginning to think that hope was a real thing and that more than fools believed in it. In the presence of Maddie’s determined faith, he might even consider believing in hope himself one day.
“Thank you for being there with me. I know it wasn’t easy.” When she made a hesitant move toward him, Dwight reached across the seat and pulled her into his arms. He freed her hair from its spinsterish bun and buried his nose and fingers in the free-falling waves. He held her tight, finding more healing comfort for his own wounds than he was sure he had to offer her.
“So we’re ruling this a homicide?” Commissioner Cartwright plucked her reading glasses off the bridge of her nose and directed the question to Mac and Holly.
Dwight brushed at the lapels of his jacket. Even now, the tan cotton carried Maddie’s spicy citrus scent. That constant hint of her stirred his blood, made him edgy to do something, solve something, make something right for her.
The best place to start would be to pay attention to the details of the conversation.
Mac opened his copy of the report the commissioner had been reading. “The blood we found in Dwight’s office belongs to Whitney Chiles. We found trace levels of a sedative in those samples but nothing matching the toxic amount or combination that caused her death. There’s no evidence to suggest she was a user, and the drugs that were in her system were hospital meds—they’re hard to find on the streets.”
Shauna Cartwright jotted a note. “That fits the clinic theory. We need to track down whether any hospitals or doctors’ offices are missing supplies.”
“Already on it,” Mac assured her.
Maddie stopped her pacing. “That wasn’t Katie’s blood on Tyler’s things?”
Dwight could tell by the blush on her skin and her thoughtful pout that she didn’t know whether to be relieved that Katie wasn’t hurt or worried that they no longer had any clear indication of where her niece might have been.
“Are you saying that Whitney left Tyler in Dwight’s office?” Maddie joined the others at the two front tables. “But the note was in Katie’s handwriting.”
Mac offered an explanation that Dwight was curious to hear, as well. “All we know is that Whitney bled in his office. Katie could have been right there beside her.”
“Maybe that’s why Katie didn’t stick around. If her friend was injured, she’d try to help her.” Maddie circled the group, winding up behind Dwight’s chair. “When she ran away, she said she had something she needed to do. That I’d helped her and she wanted to help someone else in return. Like that movie.”
“That motivation fits a teen’s psyche,” Shauna agreed. “So you’re suggesting an escape attempt from this clinic. The girls deposit the baby someplace safe, then try to get help for the one who’s injured.”
“A classmate of Katie’s—a boy who lives across the street from me—said that Whitney had been pregnant, too.”
Holly Masterson chimed in. “Whitney’s body indicates a healthy delivery. But there are no signs that she’d been breast-feeding or even that her milk had come in. It’s not conclusive, but it doesn’t look as if she’d been taking care of her own child.”
“How could she if she was stoned?” Bellamy asked.
“She wasn’t taking those drugs by choice,” Maddie argued. “Whitney wanted to go to New York to pursue a career in music theater. She sang and danced. She took good care of her body.”
Dwight began to see a pattern forming. “It makes sense that she’d want to give the baby up for adoption if she was about to launch a career in a new city.”
“Where were her parents through all this?” Josh Taylor asked.
“Busy hiding news of her pregnancy and creating a cover story from the sound of things,” answered Bellamy. “They didn’t even report her missing for two weeks because they’d bought her a train ticket to Phoenix to attend a special boarding school for unwed mothers. It wasn’t until the school called to find out if they’d gotten the arrival date wrong that they suspected she’d probably never left K.C.”
“How awful.” Maddie hugged her arms around her waist and frowned. “I can’t imagine sending a child away when she needed her parents most.”
A.J. agreed. “That kind of desperation would make her easy pickings for the Baby Factory to approach her. Having a nest egg to live off until she got her big break would make life on the Great White Way a lot easier.”
“Are w
e sure this is an adoption-ring murder?” Though it was in Dwight’s nature to play devil’s advocate, he found himself hoping it wasn’t true. He didn’t want Maddie to have another reason to visit the morgue. “Maybe this is an old-fashioned relationship-gone-bad issue and there’s no bigger conspiracy. Do we know anything about the father of Whitney’s baby?”
Bellamy nodded. “The parents aren’t sure of the father but said Whitney had gotten involved with a theater producer who was conducting a talent search in the Kansas City area. Maybe he got her on the casting couch and got her pregnant.”
Forget the stomach-churning idea of statutory rape; they were looking for a murderer now. “Do we have a name for this guy?” Dwight asked.
“According to her mom and dad, Whitney only referred to him as Roddy. He was with a company out of New York. We don’t even know if he’s still in the area.”
Shauna checked off something in her notes. “Find out. The Chileses sound like stage parents. If they don’t know the name, I’ll bet they know the company and the audition site—things we can track to find Roddy.”
A.J. nodded. “Got it.”
Commissioner Cartwright folded up her glasses and closed her notebook. “I wish I could get somebody on the inside and set up a sting. Catch these bastards in the act of trading lives and selling babies.”
Detective Bellamy laughed. “I don’t think we have anyone on the force who’s pregnant and can pass for a teenager.”
“What about infiltrating the ring from the other direction?” Dwight suggested, pointing out the one facet of the investigation they hadn’t discussed.
Maddie caught on quickly. One hand that had rested on the back of his chair settled on his shoulder. “Get two people to masquerade as a wealthy couple, eager to adopt. Desperate to find a baby.”
