The poor little tyke was so overtired she barely had the energy to cry. But cry she did—as if her heart were breaking.
Carley pulled open the diaper bag and hauled out a change of clothes, diapers and a half-size baby bottle. She changed Cami and went into the bathroom to fill the bottle with water. When she returned, Carley nearly stumbled over the open bag. She heard a clink and remembered that she’d crammed her framed photograph of Witt into the side pocket.
Of course! No wonder Cami seemed to recognize the man. Carley had kept his picture on her dresser for all these months. Smart kid. Houston Smith was no stranger to her. In fact, Carley had told her over and over that he was her daddy. No doubt Cami was brokenhearted because the man she thought of as “daddy” had not recognized her.
Carley gave Cami the bottle of water and her favorite stuffed toy, a pink crayfish that Carley’s mother had given her. Before long, sleep closed the baby’s eyes and quieted her sobs.
Carley knew she’d better not keep Witt’s picture in plain sight here at the ranch, so she buried it inside one of her suitcases for storage. Then she reached for the mobile phone she’d also stuffed in the pocket of the diaper bag.
Slightly warm in the closed room, Carley pulled open the window, then punched in the many numbers necessary to reach Reid Sorrels. A hot, stiff breeze blasted her as it came from off the range, and she took a deep breath as Reid answered her call.
Before saying hello, he spat the question at her. “Is it Davidson?”
“You knew all the time it was. But, yes, I can confirm he’s Witt.” She gave her boss a pithy statement of what she’d found, then cut to what she needed from him.
“Run complete backgrounds on a local pediatrician, Dr. Luisa Monsebais, and on the home’s administrator, Gabriel Diaz. See if you can get hard copies to me without anyone knowing.”
“They’ll arrive in the local field office no later than tomorrow. Someone will get them to you on the ranch.” Reid fell silent for a minute. “He didn’t recognize you at all?”
“Not that I could tell. It’s so strange here, Reid. Otherworldly. And what with Witt being this Houston Smith person, I feel cut off and alone.”
“Try plugging your laptop into the Bureau’s satellite link. Maybe you’ll be in range there. And check in with me twice a day by phone.”
Carley smiled grimly at Reid’s no-nonsense reply, but she wasn’t through with her requests. “Contact a Dr. William Fields at the Cannon Neurological Institute in Chicago and arrange for a conference call today. Both of us need to pick his brain on this one.” She stared absently out the open window at the scruffy live oaks and prickly ebony trees. “Call me back when you’ve reached him. I’ll wait here.”
Carley cut the connection and cradled the instrument against her breast. Reid had bent the rules for Witt. By all rights, he should have picked Witt up and carted him off in custody to interrogation the first moment Manny had ID’d him. But Reid waited for her report—and now he’d wait a little longer.
Witt had been one of the best agents on the task force. His loss set the operation back years, and his unexplained disappearance caused a black mark against Reid. Not to mention the fact that Reid had unfortunately lost her, in a way, to the same calamity: Carley had spent months searching fruitlessly for word of Witt among the lowlife gathering spots and bars near Houston where they’d been investigating the kidnapping ring. She’d researched Witt’s background, even visiting the little town in West Texas where he’d grown up.
Digging further, she’d located his former teachers, the grave sites of his family and talked to some old neighbors and friends. All the checking gave her a better picture of the man who’d disappeared—but didn’t give her the man.
Carley found that he’d been scarred in many ways because of his childhood. She’d worked with children from similar backgrounds, children who’d shut off their emotions rather than take a chance on being hurt again. Many turned into adults afraid to commit, afraid to trust.
Because his mother had died early and his abusive father had been killed in a drunken rage, Witt might never have been able to give her the love she craved. But she’d been sure he was a responsible and honorable man who would never just deliberately disappear. Still, he was gone without a trace.
As the time neared for Cami to be born, the doctors had ordered Carley to bed. She’d collapsed with exhaustion and despair.
Cami’s birth had rallied Carley’s spirit. Her little girl was a constant reminder of the man she loved. Carley knew that as long as she and Cami were together, they’d someday find the answers. She never gave up on finding him. Never.
But now she wanted to know what had happened to keep him from her that night eighteen months ago. How he’d lost his memory, and what had become of him during the unaccounted month when he’d first disappeared.
She figured the man calling himself Houston Smith was the only one who could give her all the answers. But Carley needed to find a way to help him remember—and to bring Witt back to her.
The conference call came through two hours later.
Dr. Fields took the time for explanations. In the end, his descriptions were thorough, if not hopeful.
“Please, Doctor,” she begged. “We can give you a couple of hypothetical causes for the amnesia. Can’t you give us some possibilities?”
After a long-winded, ten-minute lecture on one possible cause, Reid broke into the doctor’s explanation. “Hold it. I need a translator.”
“The doctor’s simply saying that a person can have something so horrible happen to him that his mind refuses to acknowledge it,” Carley explained to her boss. “Sometimes the person might even blank out not only the terrible event but also everything that came before.”
Carley tried to make the doctor spell out that kind of malfunction for Reid’s benefit. “This would be more a psychiatric problem, wouldn’t it Dr. Fields?”
“Indeed, but it would be recognized under the branch of medicine called cognitive neuropsychology. Unfortunately, for the condition to continue for a period of eighteen months would, by definition, mean the person had immersed himself in a drastic, multiple-personality disorder that would take literally years of intense therapy to conquer.”
The idea of Witt having such a dire mental illness made Carley shudder. “Let’s hope that’s not the case here. What if it was not the denial of an event but rather an actual physical trauma that’s caused this amnesia?”
“That’s the other possibility. Any trauma to the head can cause brain damage, bruising the cerebral cortex and causing problems with memory retrieval. I would naturally need to study the brain scans before I could attempt to assess the extent of such damage.”
Carley was getting impatient with the doctor’s hedging. “Yes, but can’t you tell us in general the symptoms and recovery time?”
After a few seconds of indignant silence, the doctor continued. “Brain trauma can cause temporary loss of personal memories…for instance, one’s identity, while other memories like language skills and word recognition that are stored in a different part of the brain are not lost.”
“Right.
