life. “She’s a normal, healthy teenager.”
“Except for the pregnancy?”
Maddie kneaded her purse in her lap, feeling the stirrings of the temper she worked so hard to keep in check. “Katie was fine with the baby. I was fine. She and the father amicably parted—he didn’t want any responsibilities to ruin his opportunity to attend Stanford, and she didn’t want a father who wasn’t interested in the baby.”
He flipped another page in the file. “Do you think she could be trying to reach her own father?”
Joe Rinaldi. The sickness that infected Maddie’s and Katie’s lives—shadowing every memory, coloring every decision.
Trust me, sweetheart. The only time I’ll send you flowers is for your funeral. He’d sent a dozen roses to the house just after Maddie’s sister, Karen, and Katie had moved in. The roses had arrived the day before Karen had disappeared from work. Two days before Maddie had been called to the morgue to claim her sister’s mutilated body.
But that was four years ago. Karen had been his obsession, his daughter little more than an afterthought. Katie had been an innocent bystander trapped in the nightmare.
But that nightmare had nothing to do with this one, right?
Maddie steeled her voice against the inevitable guilt, fear and loathing she associated with mention of her ex-brother-in-law’s name. “Joe’s in prison, serving a life sentence. He’s not a part of Katie’s life anymore. He’s not a part of our life,” she enunciated, as if saying it could make her believe it. “Joe Rinaldi couldn’t have had anything to do with Katie’s disappearance.”
“You’d be surprised what a man can accomplish from inside a prison cell if he’s determined enough.”
Hadn’t Joe made a similar promise to her on that last day of sentencing in the courtroom? A private little aside for her ears alone before the bailiff led him away?
I’ll find a way to get to you, bitch. Tellin’ those lies about me. You’re just jealous I married Karen instead of you. You turned her against me. Don’t think no jail cell is gonna keep me from giving you what you deserve.
But someone else had heard the threat that day. The prosecuting attorney, Dwight Powers. A cold, unflappable man who’d done the one thing no other man had ever done before or since in Maddie’s life—he’d saved the day. Defended her honor. Got in Joe’s face and told him, in no uncertain terms, that he would be watching every move Joe made. And if he did one little thing to challenge the verdict or violate the sentencing he’d worked so hard to obtain…
“Ms. McCallister?”
There were no heroes in Maddie’s life to save the day now. She pressed her back into the vinyl chair, sitting up as straight and tall as five feet five inches would allow. She had to fight her own battles. She had to be the hero Katie could count on.
Weary from a night without sleep, Maddie wished she’d taken the time to do more than shower and throw on some lipstick and jeans. Maybe a power suit. She should have at least put her hair up in one of those sensible buns that made grown men and the high-school students in her English class take her more seriously.
She tucked one brash-colored strand of hair behind her ear and put on her best schoolteacher voice. “I don’t think Joe has anything to do with Katie’s disappearance. I’m more interested in what that man named Zero told me last night.”
The detective stopped shuffling his papers. “Zero? Hefty black guy? Lots of jewelry?”
Maddie nodded. “I’m sure he’s a pimp. I was talking to one of his girls first, a woman named—”
“KCPD is well aware of who Zero Chambers is. You don’t have any business messing with him.”
“Yes, well—” she breathed deeply to ignore the memory of his hands and body rubbing against hers “—he mentioned something about a clinic. One where pregnant women go to sell their babies. I guess it’s more profitable than giving the child up for adoption.”
“Wait a minute. Go back.” Cooper touched his fingers to the back of Maddie’s hand, where she still clutched her purse in her lap. “Zero knows about a clinic where they’re buying babies?”
Isn’t that what she’d just said? “Is Zero—this Mr. Chambers—reliable? He talked as if it were something he’d considered investing in.” Maddie pulled her hand away, embarrassed that she wasn’t a better judge of men. “Maybe he just made it up. I’m sure he was trying to shock me.”
Instead of another lecture on the foolhardiness of conducting her own private investigation, Cooper Bellamy was suddenly, intensely interested in everything she had to say. “If there’s word on the street, Zero would know about it.” He pulled out his pen and notepad and turned to a fresh page. “Now tell me again exactly what he said about this clinic.”
Hoping that she’d finally provided a lead in the search for Katie while praying that a place that bought and sold babies couldn’t really exist, Maddie carefully related the details of her encounter with Zero—minus the touchy-feely, groping part. “I can’t imagine anyone doing something so awful—taking advantage of the most vulnerable people in our society—and not hearing about it on the news.”
Detective Bellamy raised his dark eyes from his notes and looked at her as if he thought she was simpleminded. “It’s not something they want to advertise, Ms. McCallister. Those babies are for sale. They want to keep their operation way under the radar so that it doesn’t generate any press. They have to be sidestepping a bunch of legalities—medical licenses, government inspections, forged documentation, taxes.”
“Who’d want to buy a baby?”
“Wanna-be parents who can’t or don’t want to conceive themselves. Couples who’ve gotten stuck for years in the legal-adoption process or who don’t qualify for some reason. If they can meet the asking price, Junior can be theirs.” He pulled up something on his computer and scrolled down the screen.
“KCPD suspected something like this was going on.” He spared her a glance from his furtive work. “Six months ago, we had an eighteen-year-old show up in rehab. The girl’s parents claimed she’d been pregnant before disappearing on a meth binge. The girl wasn’t pregnant when she surfaced again, and she had no recollection of the baby’s whereabouts or even having been pregnant.”
“Katie isn’t a drug addict. If that girl you mentioned was a meth user, then her baby might have—” it was tragic to even suggest the possibility “—died. Katie wouldn’t take drugs, drink or smoke anything that could harm a fetus.”
Bellamy nodded, but Maddie had a feeling the detective’s interest in her search had moved way beyond Katie. “We had another vic, unidentified, show up two months back who, according to the medical examiner, had recently gone through a healthy delivery. The mother was dead, but there was no sign of the baby—alive or dead. It matches a case in St. Louis. We haven’t had any leads—”
“Dead? The mother was dead?”
The idea that anyone would treat an innocent baby like a commodity didn’t stun her as much as the expression on the detective’s face that said Zero’s story could be true.
Maddie felt the blood draining to her toes, leaving her light-headed and
