“Emily’s tongue was bluer than mine,” Kelly Roberts blurted in the back seat of the police car, the stinky blanket scratching her bare shoulders.
Why she’d thought of the raspberry slushes they’d been slurping just before it happened, she wasn’t sure, just as she couldn’t figure out why the lady cop sitting next to her kept patting her arm like she was her mom or something. That itched, too. And made her want to jump out of the car and run.
“You sure you’re warm enough?”
“I’m fine.” But she couldn’t stop shaking, even if it was the hottest day in June so far. She would never be warm again.
She let the officer pull the awful blanket high enough on her shoulders to cover most of her freckles and pressed her cheek against the window to get a better look outside.
Past the yellow tape that had been strung between two trees, Emily’s new lime-green mountain bike lay abandoned across the sidewalk. It had crashed there when the scary man leaped from behind the bushes and yanked her off the seat. Her cup was on its side, the melted drink a blue puddle on the concrete.
Something was clogging Kelly’s throat, and her eyes burned, so she shifted her head. If only her own purple, hand-me-down bike didn’t have to be in the next spot she looked. On the grass farther down the sidewalk. The exact same place where she’d dropped it when she’d unfrozen enough to scream. Once she’d started, she couldn’t stop.
“Your parents will be here in a couple of minutes. Do you think you can give a description… I mean tell us what the man who took your friend looked like?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
As if she could ever forget anything about him. The closed-lipped smile. That raspy voice and his tight jaw while Emily had kicked and scratched to escape, her black ponytail whipping from side to side. A movie villain come to life, with wild eyes and hairy arms. And the only person who could have helped her friend had been too scared to do anything but watch.
That strange lightness she’d had inside her belly a few times in the past half hour floated up again. Was that relief? What kind of friend was she to take comfort in the fact that the bad man had grabbed Emily instead of her? Was that why her eyes were dry when she should have been sobbing by now? Why the officer kept patting her arm and sneaking peeks at her face? No one could ever know the truth. That she was a bad person. That she cared only about herself.
“Don’t worry, sweetie. We’re going to find her.”
Kelly jerked her head to look back at her. She was nine. They couldn’t fool her. Police officers were supposed to tell the truth, and the lady was lying. How did she know, anyway? She hadn’t seen the meanness on the guy’s face. Or the fear in Emily’s enormous chocolate-colored eyes.
Stay quiet, or I’ll be back for you.
Kelly had skipped telling the police that part. If she had, it would have made what the man said real. She’d already disobeyed his instructions by calling for help. Telling the police about it, too, might make him keep his promise.
She turned to the window again, just as another police car, an ambulance and a truck that looked like her mom’s pulled up along the curb. They could ask all the questions they wanted to. They could search for clues and turn on their sirens and pretend that they could make everything better. But Kelly already knew the truth.
Emily was gone forever.
Special Agent Anthony Lazzaro shoved open the door to the plain brick building and tromped to an office with the vague name, Arch Computer Consultants, Inc. He stabbed in the four numbers of the lock code that changed so frequently he sometimes forgot it and had to call one of the other team members to get inside.
Soon he wouldn’t have to remember it at all. The thought should have brightened the drab office walls, just as his formal request should have dulled the stark realities that the two rows of cubicles and the boards of photographs represented. He was finished with agonizing over his decision to transfer from the Innocent Images Task Force of the FBI Cyber Division. No more staring every day at this slimy underbelly of society. No more pretending it hadn’t changed him over the past six years and made him feel older than thirty-eight. No more lying.
Too bad he was stuck in purgatory a little longer.
“Hey, Tony. Ready for another day in the salt mine?”
Tony snarled at Eric Westerfield, but the younger man only grinned as he hurried toward him. The local deputy, who’d joined the task force a year earlier, had so much spring in his step that his coffee swilled over the brim of his paper cup. Wasn’t the guy ever in a bad mood? But the rush of cool air hitting Tony’s face told him Eric had already cranked the air-conditioning, which, by afternoon, would barely challenge the mid-July heat. At least he was good for something.
“Got my pickax and headlamp ready, so sure.” He patted his briefcase, where he’d concealed his .40 caliber Glock 22 in its padded holster with a thumb break for the trip from his rental car to the office. Out of habit, he immediately withdrew the weapon from the bag and locked it and the separate hip holster in his bottom desk drawer.
“Special Agent Dawson told me we’re getting a new task force member today.”
“I heard.”
He’d been livid, too. It was bad enough that Will Dawson, the administrative special agent on the task force, had refused to sign off on his transfer until they’d closed the current case. It centered on the murder of two eighteen-year-old girls and possibly involved cybercrimes. Now the team would be saddled with breaking in a new member during the most high-profile investigation they’d conducted in three years. And his last case on the task force.
“It’s a trooper from the Michigan State Police Brighton Post, since both victims were from Brighton. They referred the case to us in the first place.”
“Heard that, too.”
Tony strode toward the galley kitchen, where the office coffeepot served up hot sludge in daily doses. Though he hoped Eric wouldn’t follow, he did.
“I won’t be low man on the totem pole anymore.”
“Don’t worry.” He didn’t bother looking back as he poured. “You’ll still have your spot near the bottom.”
He didn’t miss the deputy’s emphasis on the word “man,” since they both
