style="font-size:15px;"> “I’ll do my best,” Alissa answered, though they both knew it wasn’t really an answer at all.
Maya, being Maya, smiled and touched her arm in passing. “I know you will, ’Lissa.” She turned back with her hand on the door. “You want me to send one of the boys to sit outside the door and make sure you have your privacy?”
“Already taken care of,” Alissa said. “McDermott’s outside.” Then she held a finger to her lips and mouthed, and he’s probably listening.
Lord knows she would be, under the same circumstances.
Maya raised her eyebrows but didn’t comment beyond a cautious, “Okay. I’ll be back to check on you in twenty.”
“Good enough.” Alissa watched as Maya pushed through the door. Sure enough, McDermott was right outside, not even bothering to pretend he wasn’t eavesdropping.
She glared and he flicked an unrepentant half-smile. Then the door swung shut between them, separating them some, but not enough. Irritated and faintly anxious, she forced her mind back on to the job. On to the girl, the victim who had seen the face of her kidnapper.
Or so Alissa hoped.
She pulled out her pad and turned back to the bed, intending to sit with Lizzie until she woke up. But the girl’s eyes were open and wary. “I already told them I don’t remember anything,” Lizzie said, voice faintly petulant, as though Alissa was interrupting her.
“Okay.” Alissa sat and settled her sketch pad in her lap. When she lifted the hard charcoal pencil she used for initial blocking work, she saw the girl’s eyes follow. “We’ll just chat a little until your parents come back. No pressure.”
Instead of tarting off or repeating her denial, Lizzie surprised Alissa.
The girl began to cry.
Huge tears welled up in her eyes and spilled over, and she rolled to her side and hugged her knees to her chest beneath the thin hospital blanket. “I th-thought he was going to kill me. He said he was going to, that I wouldn’t have any warning. That one night he’d just do it, maybe while I was sleeping.” She swallowed a racking sob. “I t-tried not to sleep much after that, but it was so cold. So dark. Once, I woke up and he was standing over me. He had a knife.” She burrowed her face into the pillow and howled, straining her body into the mattress as though she wished it would swallow her up. “Then he put me in that cave. He drugged me. I was out of it, but I knew what he’d done. I knew there was a bomb. I thought I was going to die when you came. I thought we were both dead.”
Her thin frame shuddered with the force of her tears.
Alissa’s throat closed, and she reached out to touch the girl’s scraped-raw ankle, the only part of Lizzie she could reach from her seat.
God, she hated this. She wanted to gather the young woman in her arms and tell her not to think about it. Instead she forced her voice calm and asked about the place where Lizzie had been held. About the man, who’d always stayed in the shadows. About what he’d said, what he’d done. What he’d looked like.
Lizzie cried as she talked. The words came pouring out of her as though she’d wanted to talk about it, needed to talk about it, even though she’d said she remembered nothing.
But she remembered, all right. She remembered plenty, though maybe not enough. As she talked, Alissa sketched furiously, trusting her microcorder to catch all of the girl’s descriptions for later analysis. The images engraved themselves on her heart, wounding her with fear for the others, for herself.
After ten minutes Lizzie’s words slowed. After fifteen, they stopped altogether and the girl slipped back to sleep, her body shutting down when her soul couldn’t handle any more.
Instead of being frustrated, Alissa was grateful. She wasn’t sure she could have handled more, herself. So she sighed, swiped her sleeve across both cheeks where sympathetic tears had dried and pushed to her feet. The outer door moved slightly as she crossed the room, but by the time she opened it, McDermott was leaning against the far wall, looking like he’d been there all along.
She jerked her head towards the exit. “Come on. Let’s talk to the task force.”
Instead of moving right away, he stared at her, dark eyes intense, until she raised a hand to her cheek, expecting to find that she’d missed a tear. Then he uncoiled and crossed to her. He stopped a breath away, and the warmth of his body eased the tension inside her chest even as it tightened another, lower down.
He started to say something and stopped. Started again and stopped. Then he blew out a breath and said simply, “If we’re going to be working together, I suppose you should call me Tucker.”
Surprise rattled through the numbness left by her painful sketch session, and she nodded. “Thanks. I’m Alissa.”
Sneaky pleasure warmed her. It wasn’t quite acceptance, wasn’t quite a pat on the back for how she’d handled Lizzie.
But it was a start.
STILL FEELING GUT PUNCHED by what he’d overheard of Alissa’s interview with the rescued girl, Tucker ushered her down the hall toward the exit. He was careful not to touch her, because if he did, he might pull her into his arms and tell her that it was okay, that she’d done the right thing by questioning the witness, by keeping her talking.
He’d seen the self-doubt in her eyes, seen what the interview had taken out of her.
They passed a small, intimate waiting area that was painted in soothing blues and golds. The psych specialist, Maya, sat there with Lizzie’s mother, father and brother, all of whom looked exhausted and haggard but happier than he’d seen them in the weeks since the kidnapping.
Tucker nodded as the family stood and filtered back toward the hospital room on Maya’s heels, all save for Lizzie’s father, a shaved-bald patriarch who stank of the cigarettes he’d chain-smoked while they waited for news.
Reginald Walsh stopped near Alissa and said in a low voice, “I don’t care what it takes. I want you to get the bastard. Find him.”
A few of the officers had reported having problems with Walsh, who operated used-car lots around the city and seemed to think money should be enough to buy his daughter home. The morning after her kidnapping, he’d thrown a chair through the front window of his house when one of the officers had suggested Lizzie might have run away.
Knowing this, Tucker stepped between Walsh and Alissa. “We’re working on it. You take care of your daughter and your family. We’ll take care of finding and punishing her kidnapper.”
He kept his voice low but stared the guy in his bloodshot eyes. The last thing they needed right now was a vigilante out for justice.
Walsh glared. “I don’t give a damn about punishing the bastard right now. Not yet. That’ll come later. Right now, I just care about finding those girls for their families.” His voice went strangled. “For God’s sake, they’re just kids.”
He pushed past Tucker, who felt a punch of shame at having misjudged the man. On the heels of shame came fatigue. He’d been up nearly thirty hours without a break, and the last few had been a hell of a ride.
“Hey,
