The Perfect Child
Page 1
PRAISE FOR THE PERFECT CHILD
“A mesmerizing, unbearably tense thriller that will have you looking over your shoulder and sleeping with one eye open. This creepy, serpentine tale explores the darkest corners of parenthood and the profoundly unsettling lengths one will go to to keep a family together—no matter the consequences. Electrifying and atmospheric, this dark gem of a novel is one I couldn’t put down.”
—Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author
“A deep, dark, and dangerously addictive read. All-absorbing to the very end!”
—Minka Kent, Washington Post bestselling author
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Heather Berry
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542040549 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 154204054X (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781503905122 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1503905128 (paperback)
Cover design by Rex Bonomelli
First edition
To my readers, who have been with me since the beginning
CONTENTS
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
ONE HANNAH BAUER
TWO CHRISTOPHER BAUER
THREE HANNAH BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
FOUR CHRISTOPHER BAUER
FIVE HANNAH BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
SIX CHRISTOPHER BAUER
SEVEN HANNAH BAUER
EIGHT CHRISTOPHER BAUER
NINE HANNAH BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
TEN HANNAH BAUER
ELEVEN CHRISTOPHER BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
TWELVE HANNAH BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
THIRTEEN CHRISTOPHER BAUER
FOURTEEN HANNAH BAUER
FIFTEEN CHRISTOPHER BAUER
SIXTEEN HANNAH BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
SEVENTEEN HANNAH BAUER
EIGHTEEN CHRISTOPHER BAUER
NINETEEN HANNAH BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
TWENTY CHRISTOPHER BAUER
TWENTY-ONE HANNAH BAUER
TWENTY-TWO CHRISTOPHER BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
TWENTY-THREE HANNAH BAUER
TWENTY-FOUR CHRISTOPHER BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
TWENTY-FIVE CHRISTOPHER BAUER
TWENTY-SIX HANNAH BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
TWENTY-SEVEN HANNAH BAUER
TWENTY-EIGHT CHRISTOPHER BAUER
TWENTY-NINE HANNAH BAUER
THIRTY CHRISTOPHER BAUER
THIRTY-ONE HANNAH BAUER
THIRTY-TWO CHRISTOPHER BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
THIRTY-THREE CHRISTOPHER BAUER
THIRTY-FOUR HANNAH BAUER
THIRTY-FIVE CHRISTOPHER BAUER
THIRTY-SIX HANNAH BAUER
THIRTY-SEVEN CHRISTOPHER BAUER
THIRTY-EIGHT HANNAH BAUER
THIRTY-NINE CHRISTOPHER BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
FORTY HANNAH BAUER
FORTY-ONE CHRISTOPHER BAUER
FORTY-TWO HANNAH BAUER
FORTY-THREE CHRISTOPHER BAUER
FORTY-FOUR HANNAH BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
FORTY-FIVE CHRISTOPHER BAUER
FORTY-SIX HANNAH BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
FORTY-SEVEN CHRISTOPHER BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
FORTY-EIGHT CHRISTOPHER BAUER
FORTY-NINE HANNAH BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
FIFTY CHRISTOPHER BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
FIFTY-ONE CHRISTOPHER BAUER
FIFTY-TWO HANNAH BAUER
FIFTY-THREE CHRISTOPHER BAUER
FIFTY-FOUR HANNAH BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
FIFTY-FIVE CHRISTOPHER BAUER
FIFTY-SIX HANNAH BAUER
FIFTY-SEVEN CHRISTOPHER BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
FIFTY-EIGHT CHRISTOPHER BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
FIFTY-NINE CHRISTOPHER BAUER
SIXTY HANNAH BAUER
CASE #5243 INTERVIEW: PIPER GOLDSTEIN
SIXTY-ONE HANNAH BAUER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CASE #5243
INTERVIEW:
PIPER GOLDSTEIN
“Is this your first homicide case?” he asked in a clipped voice, all business. His chest bulged with muscles underneath his blue collared shirt.
No matter how many times I was questioned by the police, it never got easier. My nerves jumped into high gear automatically. They always made me feel like I was lying, even when I was telling the truth.
I cleared my throat. “I’ve been on other cases.”
I wished I lived in a world where I didn’t know violence intimately, but I’d seen more than my fair share, given the work I did. I’d just never expected the Bauers to be involved in anything so awful.
“How did you find out there’d been a break in the case?”
I glanced at the two-way mirror behind us. Even though we were the only two in the room, I knew we weren’t alone.
“Claire told me.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Claire?”
“My coworker,” I responded quickly.
It was hard to believe it’d been less than an hour since Claire had walked into my office. We were always the first ones in in the morning, and I’d assumed she was stopping by to ask how my date had gone the night before, since she got more excited about them than I did. She had been married for twenty years and liked to live vicariously through me, but her married life must have been pretty boring for her to get so excited about mine. My dating life was nothing to get worked up about.
The officer’s eyes drilled holes into me. He wanted more from me, but I didn’t want to say too much. He rested his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “What did she say when she told you?”
He had to be new, because I’d never seen him before. In a town as small as Clarksville, even the police had familiar faces. He’d told me his name when he’d come into the waiting room, but my head had been swimming with shock, and it had never registered.
I shrugged, anxiously twisting my hands underneath the table. “She didn’t say much, but I could tell something was wrong as soon as she came into my office.”
I had just logged on to my computer and had been organizing my files for the day when Claire had stuck her head through my door before I’d even finished my first cup of coffee. “Jeez, girl, why don’t you just go on my dates for me?” I had joked, but my joke had fallen flat when I’d seen the look on her face.
All semblance of playfulness had been gone, replaced with her m
ost serious expression. All of us had it. The face we wore when the case was so horrible we knew it would keep us up at night and infiltrate our dreams after we finally found a way to fall asleep—the cases that made the social workers with kids hold them tighter.
“So you just knew?” His tone suggested he wasn’t sure if he believed me.
I hated when we weren’t on the same team. You couldn’t be on the other side of the law and not feel like a criminal. It was impossible.
“I knew something serious had happened, but I didn’t have any idea what it was or who was involved.” I glanced down at my phone for the third time, willing it to vibrate. It wasn’t like I was under arrest. I could leave anytime I wanted, but there was no way to leave without looking like I was hiding something.
“What did you think when you found out it was the Bauer family?”
I swallowed past the emotions pushing their way up my throat. “I hoped that it would finally provide them with some answers. They’re like family to me.”
He glanced down at the open file spread out before him. “It says here that you were the original social worker assigned to the case?”
I nodded, then quickly remembered I was being recorded. “Yes.”
“What was that like?”
How could I describe what the last two years had been like? It was the most complicated case of my career and had ended with the worst possible outcome. I’d doubted myself at so many different points, wondering if I’d made the right decisions for everyone involved—what if I’d been wrong? What if I was partially responsible for all this? I took a deep breath, trying to clear my thoughts.
“You couldn’t have asked for a better home for Janie. I’ve been in children’s services for over twenty years, and there are plenty of bad foster homes. A lot of foster parents just do it for the money, so they run their families like businesses, but the Bauers were one of the good ones. All they wanted to do was help.” My eyes welled with tears, and I couldn’t hold them back, even though I tried. I wiped them away quickly, embarrassed to look so soft in front of him. “I’m sorry. This is all just happening so fast.”
“I understand,” he said, but I knew he didn’t. In all my years, I’d never seen a cop cry. He waited a few beats before continuing. “Would it be easier for you if we started at the beginning?”
It didn’t matter where we started. Nothing about this was going to be easy.
ONE
HANNAH BAUER
“I wouldn’t let that fly. I’d ignore him until he apologized,” Aubrey said in the righteous, uncompromising way all unmarried people do, without even looking up from her phone. I forgot she was there half the time because her eyes were glued to her phone from the moment we all walked into the hospital break room, her fingers gliding across the screen with manic speed.
Stephanie and I rolled our eyes at the same time. Stephanie had just spent the last ten minutes unloading her pent-up frustrations with her husband—things ranging from leaving his dirty socks all over the house and forgetting to take out the trash to not cleaning up his wiry black hairs in the sink after he shaved. She’d called him out on it, which had led to the age-old argument of her being a nag and him not carrying his weight in household responsibilities that anyone who’d been married for over a decade knew well. Their argument had ended in a major blowout.
“He’s so manipulative when he’s angry. He leads me on these wild trails, trying to put all this stuff back on me, and before you know it, I’m the one apologizing. I fall for it every time. It drives me crazy,” Stephanie continued, shoveling bites of reheated pasta in her mouth while she talked.
“See, that’s what I was saying last night—we need a girls’ weekend. It’s been way too long,” I said. Last time we’d checked ourselves into the Four Seasons for the weekend and done nothing but drink wine next to the pool and bliss out in the spa. I loved their papaya facial peels and was long overdue for one.
“Totally. Just say when,” Stephanie said.
One of our other coworkers, Carl, stuck his head in the door. “We need you guys.”
We jumped into action, and within seconds, we’d picked up our mess and were squirting antibacterial foam on our hands as we walked out the door. The nurses’ station buzzed with activity and anticipation, everyone on heightened alert. Stephanie shifted into nurse-manager mode and made a beeline for Dr. Hall. The two of them ran the emergency department like a well-oiled machine.
I leaned into Carl. “What happened?”
He shrugged. “Not sure. Only know that it’s a lost kid or something, and she’s in really bad shape. Ambulance is bringing her in with a police escort.”
My stomach churned. Treating sick kids was one thing. Treating hurt ones was another, and police presence always signaled serious injury. It was the part of my job that had never gotten easier. I glanced at the board, seeing how many of my assigned rooms were open, and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that all my beds were full. The call button on bed 8 blinked, and I headed in to see what Eloise wanted.
She was one of our frequent flyers. She was a widow and often came into the emergency room because she was lonely. There was never anything seriously wrong with her. She was one of the healthiest eighty-one-year-olds that I worked with, but she came in every few weeks convinced that she was dying. This time, she complained of throbbing leg pain and was terrified she had a blood clot.
She smiled up at me from bed, wrinkles moving underneath her eyes. She motioned for me to come closer. I leaned in to give her the customary hug she’d grown to expect from me. The familiar scent of vanilla musk and baby powder filled my nose. She squeezed me tightly before pulling away to arm’s length while still holding on to my forearm. “Hi, dear. I don’t mean to keep bothering you, but do we have any of my results back?”
I shook my head and moved above her bed to adjust the drip on her IV. “We’re still waiting to get them sent down from the ultrasound tech. Sorry. It’s probably going to be a few more minutes because we’re pretty slammed tonight.”
As if on cue, the sound of police scanners interrupted our conversation. Eloise peeked around her curtain, trying to catch a glimpse of the police. “What’s going on out there?”
I smiled. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
She leaned forward, trying to get a better view. “There are just so many officers. Why are there so many? Am I in danger?”
“You’re fine. I’d never let anything bad happen to you.” I patted the top of her hand. I could tell by the doughy feel of her skin that she was dehydrated again. “And you, Miss Thing”—I shook my finger at her playfully—“need to drink more during the day. How many times have I told you that?”
She hung her head but couldn’t hide the smile tugging at the corners of her lips. I checked her vitals, noting them in her chart. “I’ll keep my eye on your reports and let you know as soon as I know anything. Deal?”
“Deal.” She crossed her arms on her chest, settling in comfortably. She closed her eyes, and some of the lines in her face relaxed. She had told me once that she didn’t sleep well by herself and spent hours each night terrified of someone breaking in to her house while she slept. It was no surprise that her hospital visits were only at night. She didn’t even open her eyes as she spoke. “And see if you can find out anything about what’s going on with all the police officers.”
“I will,” I promised as I headed out to check on my other patients, knowing I wouldn’t be able to tell her even if I did.
The night grew busy as it wore on, and I didn’t get a chance to sit down until after four o’clock. I poured myself a cup of coffee and logged on to the computer, eager to get started on my notes while I had a brief reprieve. Stephanie grabbed a chair and slid down next to me. “Did you hear anything about what happened?” she asked.
I’d forgotten all about the officers earlier. I shook my head. “I haven’t had time to even breathe. We ended up doing a lumbar puncture on bed 6.” I pulled up my first
patient and scrolled through their blood type results, searching for the one I needed in my report. “What’d I miss?”
“The police brought in an abandoned toddler. She’s pretty beat up. They found her wandering around a parking lot. She was only wearing a diaper and some kind of weird collar thing around her neck. How sad is that?” She talked fast, eager to get out the story before she got called to the next crisis. “She wouldn’t let the police anywhere near her. It took three officers to coax her into the car. She’s filthy, has blood all over her hands and arms, but we can’t clean her until they’ve gathered all the evidence that might be on her. They have no idea who she is or where she’s from.”
The angry knot of unfairness lodged in my stomach. Why did the universe allow people who hurt kids to have them? Why couldn’t it give them to people like me, who wanted them?
My husband, Christopher, and I had tried to get pregnant for years, but it was one disappointment followed by another. We got a second opinion after our doctor diagnosed me with an inhospitable uterus, but he agreed with the first doctor—birthing a child of my own was impossible. I swallowed down the bitterness. Some days it was better than others. Today wasn’t one of those days.
“Do they have any leads on her parents?” I asked.
“Nope. Not a thing. They think either she walked over there from the trailer park across the street or she was dropped there by someone.” She wrinkled her face in disgust. “She’s so skinny, looks like she hasn’t eaten in days.”
“Poor thing. Hopefully, they’ll find her parents, and it’ll turn out to be some weird accident or misunderstanding.”
Stephanie raised her eyebrows. “Misunderstanding? What kind of misunderstanding leads to your toddler being lost in a parking lot wearing only a diaper? And blood. Did you forget that part?”
“Someone’s got to be an optimist.”
I wished I were as optimistic as I pretended. I used to be. Not anymore.
Stephanie burst out laughing and squeezed my arm. “That’s what I love about you,” she said before hurrying off.
Christopher was waiting for me with a cup of chamomile tea when I got home. He held his cup of morning coffee in one hand and my favorite mug in the other—the one that said PUG LIFE on the front even though I’d never owned a dog. I’d been working swing-shift overnights for the last two years, and he worked days unless there was an emergency, so we were on opposite schedules, but it worked for us. It gave us an opportunity to miss each other, and sometimes you needed that in a relationship even when you loved each other as much as we did.