and then continued ambling forward on her clumsy little hands and feet.
Kate understood that it might not be the fact that Michelle was crawling that was making her cry. It was the look on the baby’s face, the unadulterated trust and happiness in her little eyes when they found Kate’s face. Michelle looked very much like Melissa had as a baby and the entirety of the situation was just too much.
They were sitting on a blanket on the floor, the blanket doubled over for added thickness in the event Michelle wobbled over. Other than the one time, though, she had not toppled at all. In fact, she was currently slapping at Kate’s legs, as if demanding more attention. Kate picked her up, plopped her between her legs, and let Michelle grip her thumbs.
Kate simply enjoyed the moment. She’d watched her daughter grow up impossibly fast, so she knew how fleeting these moments could be. She did feel a little guilty that Melissa and Terry were missing this milestone, though. She nearly called Melissa to let her know, but she didn’t want to interrupt their date.
As she sat on the blanket playing with Michelle, someone knocked on her door. Kate had been expecting the knock, but Michelle jerked her little head in the direction of the door with an uncertain expression.
Kate wiped the last remnants of tears away from her face before saying, “Come on in.”
The front door opened and Allen entered. He was carrying Chinese carry-out bags and, Kate was delighted to find, his overnight bag.
“How are my two favorite girls?” Allen asked.
“We’re very mobile,” Kate said with a smile. “This little stinker just crawled for the first time.”
“No way!”
“Yes, she did.”
Allen walked to the kitchen and took two plates out of the cupboard. As he divvied out their dinner onto the plates, Kate smiled. He knew his way around her house now. And he knew her well, too; for instance, he knew that she hated eating Chinese food out of those flimsy little containers and much preferred to eat it off of actual plates.
He brought dinner over to the living room, setting it on the coffee table. Michelle showed great interest in it and reached up. When she realized she could not reach it, she turned her attention to her toes.
“I saw you brought your overnight bag,” Kate said.
“I did. Is that okay?”
“That’s wonderful.”
“I figured we could leave early in the morning and make that drive down to the Blue Ridge Mountains we keep talking about. Take in a few wine tours, maybe stay at a quaint little bed and breakfast in the mountains.”
“That sounds nice. And spontaneous, too.”
“Not too spontaneous,” Allen chuckled. “We have been talking about it for about a month now.”
Allen sat down across from her and opened his arms for Michelle to come over to him. She knew his face well enough and assumed the crawling position. She started over toward him, cooing all the way. Kate watched it all unfold, trying to remember a time when her heart had been this full.
She started to eat her dinner, watching Allen play with her granddaughter. Michelle was doing her little rocking-back-and-forth act while Allen cheered her on.
When Kate’s phone rang, all three of them looked toward it. Even Michelle knew the sound of a cell phone ringer, her little hands reaching out for it as she moved into a seated position on the blanket. Kate plucked the phone from the coffee table, assuming it would be Melissa calling to check on Michelle.
But it wasn’t Melissa. The name on the display read: Duran.
She was torn when she saw the name. A large part of her was excited at the prospect of helping out with a case. But the part that was enamored in the current moment didn’t want to answer the phone. While it could be Duran simply calling with a question or research request—something he had been doing more and more these last few months—she also knew that it could be something more pressing and time consuming.
Kate could tell that Allen had already pieced together who was calling. Maybe he figured it out by the indecision on her face.
She answered the call dutifully, still quite proud that she was still actively working with the bureau despite being on the tail end of fifty-six.
“Hello, Director,” she said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Good evening, Wise. Look…we’ve got a situation not too far from your neck of the woods. A double homicide and missing person. All the same case. It’s got a small-town feel to it—so small that the local PD is admitting that they are unprepared for it. Because there’s a missing persons element to it—the missing person being a fifteen-year-old girl—I’d like for you and DeMarco to try to wrap it quietly before the news hears about it and makes it a much harder case than it has to be.”
“Any details yet?” Kate asked.
“Not many. But here’s what I know so far.”
As she listened to Director Duran, letting her know why he was calling and what he’d need her to do over the next twelve hours or so, she looked sadly at Allen and Michelle.
The call ended three minutes later. She set the phone back down and caught Allen looking at her. There was a tired smile of understanding on his face.
“So maybe we can try the winery and bed and breakfast thing some other weekend?” she said.
He smiled back sadly, then turned away.
“Yeah, maybe,” he said.
He stared out the window, as if staring at their future, and Kate could see his uncertainty.
She couldn’t blame him; she herself didn’t know what her own future held.
But she knew one thing: someone was dead out there, and she damn sure was going to find out who did it.
CHAPTER TWO
While Kristen DeMarco was significantly younger than Kate (she had turned twenty-seven just a week ago), Kate had a hard time thinking of her as a young kid. Even when she was excited about starting on a new case, she managed to steep the excitement in the logic and gravity of the facts.
She was doing that now, as she and Kate headed west to the small town of Deton, Virginia. Kate had never been through Deton but had heard of it: a small rural town among a string of similar rural towns that dotted the northwestern edge of Virginia before West Virginia took over.
Apparently, DeMarco knew the town was nothing more than a small speck on the map as well. There was excitement in her voice as she went over the details of the case, but no real sense of urgency or expectation.
“Two nights ago, a Deton pastor visited the Fuller residence. He told police that he was there to collect several old Bibles from Wendy Fuller, the wife. When he arrived there, no one answered the door but he heard the television on inside. He tried the front door, found it unlocked, and shouted into the house to announce that he was there. According to the pastor, he saw blood on the carpet, still wet. He went inside to check things out and found both Wendy and Alvin Fuller dead. Their fifteen-year-old daughter, Mercy, was nowhere to be found.”
DeMarco
