stomach heaved and she tasted bile as a parade of macabre images flashed through her mind, courtesy of every forensics program she’d ever watched on TV. She tried to make her legs carry her outside. Tried to ask the question, but was afraid to because until someone said otherwise, she could believe that Jilly was okay. She had to be okay. Steph didn’t think she could bear it if anything happened to Jilly. The little girl was her lifeline. Her life. A perfect little person who’d been created by an imperfect union.
Steph felt Peters behind her, and drew an ounce of strength from his solid presence, which was more familiar and welcome than it should have been. He asked the question while her stomach tied itself up in knots.
“Is the girl okay?”
Steph might have found it odd that Peters hadn’t said Jilly’s name once since he’d arrived, but that thought disappeared the instant Officer Murphy smiled. “They found her across the street in that little park. She’s okay.”
Thank God! was Steph’s only thought as her feet carried her out the door to her daughter.
A SCANT HOUR later the Patriot cops were ready to pack it up and call it a day, but Reid wasn’t so sure.
“Something about this just doesn’t feel right,” he insisted. “You’re telling me that a three-and-a-half-year-old girl wanders across the street, down a half mile of paths, and nobody sees her? Then two hours later, a jogger tells Officer Dunphy he saw a little girl over by the duck pond, and boom! There she is? Where was she the rest of the time? And where’s the jogger?”
“We have his name and number,” Officer Murphy replied, irritated. “And it’s not unheard of for a young child to follow, say, a puppy and end up lost. Jilly is home, and the paramedics said there’s absolutely no evidence of anything being…done to her. We’re canvassing the neighborhood to see if anyone saw something suspicious, and beyond that it’s a closed case. Why don’t you go…console Miss Alberts rather than trying to make my job harder than it has to be?”
Reid glared, but couldn’t completely fault Murphy. She had a point, there was zero evidence that Stephanie’s daughter had been the victim of anything more than a lapse in babysitting on her great-aunt’s part. And she was also right that he was there strictly as Stephanie’s friend, not as a cop.
Speaking of which…he should probably be going. Crisis over. Time to get on with his day off.
He scratched at the low-grade itch between his shoulder blades and nodded curtly when Murphy excused herself. He glanced into the living room, feeling as though his eyes were being forced there by a magnetic pull. Mother and daughter were wrapped around each other on the couch, and it tugged at his heart to see Steph’s soft red curls clutched in the little girl’s fist. The kid was awake and seemed content to snuggle in her mother’s lap.
Reid couldn’t blame her. And boy, did he need to get out of here.
He didn’t do the kid thing. He did the casual thing.
But the bad feeling he just couldn’t shake compelled him to ask Stephanie, “Are you sure she won’t answer a few simple questions, even if you ask them?” It seemed to him that three and a half was plenty old enough for some gentle interrogation, even if Officer Don’t-Make-My-Day-Longer-You-Schmuck Murphy thought there was no reason for it.
But Stephanie shook her head. “Jilly’s a little shy. She doesn’t talk much. We’re working on it.” She dropped a kiss on her daughter’s dark hair, and Reid found himself wondering about the little girl’s father.
Again, he thought of paintings. He hadn’t been to the MFA in fifteen years and hadn’t painted in longer, but Stephanie Alberts made him think of art. So did her daughter. While Stephanie could have been the model for Botticelli’s misty, ethereal Birth of Venus—before Venus got fat—her daughter had stepped straight out of the Spanish works of the next century. She was a study in sharp angles and warm, dark eyes.
“What about her father?” He hadn’t meant to ask, but once the question was out there, Reid consoled himself with the thought that it was a logical next step. More often than not, kids were snatched by family members.
“Luis? What about him?”
“Would he take her?”
Stephanie clutched her daughter until the child squirmed a protest. “She wasn’t taken. She wasn’t. She just wandered off.” But Reid could see the doubts in her big blue-green eyes. Or were those his doubts? “And besides, Luis is…Luis couldn’t have taken her.”
“Detective? The others are leaving now.” At Maureen’s gesture, Reid joined her at the front door. They bade goodbye to the last of the Patriot District cops.
When he was alone with the older woman, Reid said, “Stephanie’s daughter doesn’t talk at all?”
Though they hadn’t kept in touch, he and Maureen had become friends of a sort while they had both watched over Stephanie’s bed at the hospital. The older woman nodded. “That’s right. We keep hoping she’ll start speaking again, but…” She shrugged. “Not yet.”
Reid glanced back toward the living room. “It would help if she could tell us what happened today.”
Maureen’s gray eyes sharpened. “You don’t think she just wandered?”
He shrugged. “There’s nothing to say any different. I just like to be thorough, that’s all.” Not wanting to dwell on his unfounded suspicions, Reid changed the subject. “Have you taken her to any specialists? Do you know why she’s…quiet?”
He didn’t really want to know about the kid, he assured himself. He didn’t do kids. He was just gathering all the information he could. Then he’d be on his way home.
“Her father left when she was about a year old,” Maureen supplied after a quick glance into the other room. “It was…messy. Jilly had just begun talking, but shut down after that. The doctors said not to worry, she’d sing when she was ready. She’d just started to come out of her shell last fall…”
She trailed off and Reid nodded. “And then Steph was attacked.”
“Yes. We didn’t tell Jilly what had happened, of course, but children know things. She’s been extremely shy ever since. Steph has been talking recently about more therapy, but Jilly hated it so much before that we’re afraid of making things worse.” Maureen shrugged. “And then this…? I don’t know what happens now.”
Reid touched Maureen’s shoulder. “She’s home. That’s what matters, right? Leave the rest of it to the police—it’s our job.”
Like it had been their job to arrest small-time drug dealer Alfonse Martinez six months ago, never dreaming that the ensuing firefight would take the life of a three-year-old girl who wasn’t supposed to be in the house in the first place. A little girl who looked an awful lot like Stephanie’s daughter.
He really needed to get out of here.
Reid touched Maureen’s shoulder again, then took himself back into the living room to say goodbye, standing far away from the pretty, domestic scene on the couch. If his own father hadn’t been enough to convince Reid that cops have no business around small children, the memory of that little girl curled around a blood-soaked rag doll had driven the point home.
There
