in the undecided column. I don’t know.”
“You were a good cop, Hunter.”
“Yeah, I was.” He didn’t say it out of ego. “I loved it. But I have to admit I don’t have much faith left in the system.”
How could he, when that system he’d worked so hard to uphold had failed him so miserably? Despite an unblemished—even stellar—career with the Salt Lake City Police Department, he had first been arrested and then convicted of taking three lives, one of them an unborn child, one a dying cancer patient and one the woman he thought he loved.
He would still be in that cell on death row if not for his sister’s unwavering faith in him. God knows, his former buddies on the force had all turned on him. The system of justice he had built his life around had failed him with disastrous consequences, and he didn’t know if he could ever believe in it again.
And if he didn’t believe in it, he sure as hell couldn’t pick up his detective shield again and take up where he had left off before his arrest nearly three years earlier.
“So what will you do?” Kate asked.
He shrugged. “For now, I guess I’ll just stay out here and watch the mountains.”
She laughed a little, then shivered as a cold gust of wind blew across the porch. “We’re both going to turn into blocks of ice if we stay out here much longer.”
“I suppose we’d better go inside.”
He was surprised to see her expression become guarded, reluctant.
“Why the hesitation? That’s your family in there.”
“I don’t know. I must be crazy, right?”
He gave a harsh laugh. “Believe me, I know crazy. You can’t spend thirty-one months behind bars and not get real good at telling the nuts from the wackos. You’re neither—in fact, you’re one of the most sane women I know.”
“Not the last six weeks. I’m a mess, Hunter.”
She faced him then and he was stunned to see tears gathering in her vivid blue eyes. He didn’t know what to do for a wild moment, then he placed a hand over hers, struck by her icy fingers.
He squeezed her hand and she gave him a tremulous smile. They stood there for a moment, then she slipped her hand away and returned to the deck railing.
“I should be happy. I know I should. I’m suddenly surrounded by this wonderful family, people who love me and want me to be part of their lives. I want that too but I’m just so damn angry.”
“At what?”
“Whoever did this to us! I’m filled with rage toward the person who kidnapped me, who took me away from a sane, normal, happy family and dragged me into…”
Her expression closed up and he wondered about her childhood after she was taken from her family, about what she might have been through to put that bleak look in her eyes. “Into a world far removed from the safe, happy life I likely would have known as Charlotte McKinnon.”
Someone had kidnapped her more than two decades before. He hadn’t been so self-absorbed that he didn’t know all about that. Who was it? he suddenly wondered. And had they paid for the crime that had devastated the lives of so many people?
For the first time since his release—hell, since the shock of his arrest three years ago—he found himself concerned about someone else’s problems, found himself actually interested enough to want to solve the mystery.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to care, but he had been a cop too long to turn it off completely.
“Any idea who kidnapped you?”
“Until six weeks ago I thought my mother was a woman named Brenda Golightly. She’s all I can remember until I was taken away from her and put into foster care when I was seven.”
“And you think she was the one?”
“She must have been. My earliest memories are of her—driving beside her along a lonely stretch of highway. Sleeping in some dingy motel somewhere. Eating peanut-butter sandwiches and washing them down with warm soda. She’s the one listed on all my records as my mother. I have a birth certificate and everything. I don’t know how she did it but my name was Katie Golightly until I changed it at eighteen to Kate Spencer.”
At least she had a name. He could work with a name. “Any idea where she is?”
“We don’t exactly exchange Christmas cards. Brenda was a prostitute and a junkie, stoned more often than she was sober. After I was taken from her, she used to write or phone me once in a while but by the time I was in high school, she seemed to have lost interest—the letters and calls had trickled down to maybe once every couple of years. I was glad she didn’t seem to want much to do with me. It was easier that way.”
She paused, and again he wondered what dark images she was seeing in her memory.
“Anyway,” Kate went on, “I haven’t heard from her in nine years, since I left for college, but last I knew she was living in Miami somewhere.”
He could drive to Florida in two days if he pushed it. The thought sneaked into his mind and Hunter drew in a sharp breath. Now who was the crazy one, contemplating a drive across the country on what was probably a fool’s errand?
On the other hand, he didn’t have anything else to do right now. He was restless and edgy and a road trip might be just the thing to help him figure out what to do with himself.
“Either she kidnapped me herself,” Kate went on, “or she had to know who did it. I only want to know why. Why me?”
He studied her there in the moonlight, this small, beautiful woman with shadows in her eyes. He could help her. Like she said, he’d been a damn good detective once. Maybe he could be again. He had considered going into private-investigator work, the logical second career for a burned-out cop. This could be a way to test if he had the temperament for it.
One of them at least ought to be able to put some ghosts aside and move on. With a sneaking suspicion that he was going to have some serious regrets later about ever opening his mouth, he took the plunge.
“You want to know why you were taken,” he finally said. “Why don’t I find this Brenda Golightly and ask her?”
Chapter 2
Kate stared at him. He looked perfectly rational, his eyes dark and intense as he stood there in the cold night air with the soft snow sifting down around him like powdered sugar. But looks could be deceiving, she thought.
“Didn’t you hear what I said? She’s probably in Florida! The last address I had was Dade County.”
“Sunshine sounds nice right about now.”
No wonder, she thought. Since his release, sunny days had been few and far between in Utah. The state had seen a wet, cold fall—a boon for the ski resorts but probably not so enjoyable for someone who had been incarcerated for more than two years.
She
