her finances were not in the best of shape. Maybe he’d think that she decided to supplement it by ransoming Annie.
The very thought moved a cold shiver up and down her spine. The nausea that she had been struggling to keep at bay threatened to overpower her.
She blew out an annoyed breath as she slammed the drawer shut harder than she’d intended. “Look, I can take a lie-detector test.”
Guilty people didn’t usually volunteer to do that—unless they were very, very good, Dax thought. Lie detectors were not infallible and had been known to be fooled. Still, he decided to pass—for now. “That won’t be necessary.”
She surprised him by not grasping at the truce he offered her. “I think it is just to get that look out of your eyes. I want you to understand that I love Annie Tyler, maybe because no one else seems to, but I think that she is a wonderful little girl who has been given a raw deal from the day she was born.”
He decided to play devil’s advocate just to see her reaction. “Having parents who can buy you anything you want doesn’t seem like such a raw deal to me.”
“Anything but their time,” she pointed out evenly.
He looked at her with renewed interest. Not all kidnappings were about ransoms. Sometimes children were taken because the kidnapper thought they were rescuing the child from an unhappy life. “Maybe you could give her a better life.”
“I know I could—” Brenda stopped abruptly. “I didn’t take Annie. I wouldn’t traumatize her like that. Besides, I was right out there in plain sight all the time,” she pointed out.
That didn’t constitute an ironclad alibi. “Accomplices aren’t unheard of.”
She’d had just about enough of this. “Detective Cavanaugh, I want a lie-detector test,” she repeated. “I insist.”
“We’ll see what we can do to accommodate you later,” Dax told her before turning toward Harwood. “Right now, I’d like to talk to some of the other teachers, see if they saw anything. And while you’re at it, I’d like the address and phone number of those prospective parents Mrs. York was showing around.”
“Of course,” Harwood agreed quickly. “It’s in my office. I’ll go back and get it. Mrs. York can help you with the other teachers.”
Right now, Dax thought, Mrs. York looked as if she’d rather hand his head to him on a platter.
Chapter 3
“You really suspect her?”
Nathan was leaning back against the desk at the front of the room, his attention diverted toward Brenda York. He glanced at his partner. To his left a stocky, pleasant-faced teacher was leading a gaggle of second-graders out of the art room, which had been set aside to conduct questioning.
Dax was looking at Annie Tyler’s teacher from across the room. She was saying something to one of the kids who looked concerned. The boy smiled at her and nodded. She had a way about her, he thought. Made people trust her. Put them at their ease.
And at her mercy?
He glanced at his partner. “We’re supposed to suspect everyone, Nathan, you know that.”
Nathan gave a little shrug. His small pad inside his jacket pocket rustled against his shirt. The pages, thick with notes, were no longer smooth. “Yeah, but she seems so upset about it.”
Dax smiled. “You always did have a weakness for blondes.” He turned toward his partner. “The woman had access. By her own admission, she knows the little girl inside and out, that means she’d know exactly how to handle her.”
Shaking his head, Nathan frowned. “What’s her motive?”
She moved like poetry, Dax thought. Flowing into every step. Confident, yet incredibly feminine.
Abruptly, he wiped the thought from his mind, telling himself he had to get out more. Dax shoved his hands into his pockets. “Money’s always a good motive. Most people can’t have enough of it.”
“So you do suspect her.”
Dax shrugged. He was thinking out loud, but he and Nathan had that kind of relationship. Half-formed thoughts could be voiced in safety.
“My gut tells me no, my training tells me to hold off any final judgments.”
As he watched the woman stop to comfort one of the last children in the line, Nathan sighed. “If I were single, my gut would be telling me a whole lot of other things besides hold off.”
Dax laughed but made no comment. Precisely because his gut, or whatever part of him that was instrumental in allowing attraction to set in, was telling him a great deal, none of which included the phrase “hold off.” If being a cop, a good cop, wasn’t so ingrained in him, he might have followed through on one of any number of instincts.
As it was, he felt something stirring within him, something beyond the enormous sexual pull that kept harassing him. Harassing him because it couldn’t go anywhere. She was part of a case. And she was married.
She was also human. He saw the strain on her face before she locked it away.
Leaving Nathan behind him, he crossed to her. “You looked tired. Why don’t you take a break?”
The sound of the detective’s voice coming from behind her startled Brenda. She’d been allowing her mind to wander for a second. And grasp onto some awful scenarios. Regaining control over her emotions, she turned around to face him.
“That won’t help Annie.”
The sincerity he heard in her voice crept through the layers of steeliness he’d imposed around himself whenever he was working. He had to admit she impressed him. Someone else in her position would have been looking to distance themselves from the police as they covered their own tail. But she didn’t. Her concern was completely centered on the missing child.
“You know, about that lie detector test—”
Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly and she raised her chin again, as if bracing herself for a further confrontation. “Anytime, Detective.”
Anytime.
If he’d had the luxury right now, he would have allowed his thoughts free rein in a fantasy. But he didn’t have that luxury. What he had was a missing child.
Dax looked into her eyes. Nothing there made him doubt his decision. “I think we can skip it. The department doesn’t like having its time wasted.”
Was she finally allowed to get off the hook—or was he just toying with her? The thought that he suspected her of being involved in the kidnapping made her furious, never mind that logically, she knew it was his job to suspect everyone.
Brenda measured her words out slowly. “Then you finally believe that I didn’t have anything to do with this?”
He knew he was stepping outside the lines, but they paid him for going with instincts, and his professional one told him exactly what Nathan’s told him. That Brenda York wasn’t
