“How did you meet Claire Sanderson?” Lucy spoke slowly, choosing her words carefully as she slid the photo across the table. She wasn’t there under any official capacity. Gladys’s case was closed. Unless Lucy turned up any unaccounted-for children who Gladys had sold.
Gladys looked at the photo and slid it back with one finger.
“I don’t know her.”
They’d been through this before. The month before. With Ramsey Miller, who was officially working the Sanderson cold case.
Lucy and Ramsey were long-distance friends. With no lives outside work. He sat in with her on the Wakerby case. She sat in with him on the Sanderson case. And the Walters case. All cold-case child abductions. They’d proven that Lucy’s sister, Allie, was not one of Walters’s victims. And the previous month, they’d celebrated with Emma Sanderson when DNA from her missing little sister, Claire, had turned up negative for a Walters match.
“Look again, Gladys. Please.” Lucy met the woman’s gaze, taking imaginary deep breaths while she reined in her frustration. “She’s two years old in that picture.” Taking another photo from the folder she’d brought in with her, Lucy put it in front of the woman. “This is an age-progressed photo. Possibly what Claire looked like at four.”
Emma and her mother, Rose Sanderson, had paid for a private age progression to adulthood a few years before. They’d posted it on the internet and taken it with them to speaking engagements. And received nothing but false leads.
The more time that had elapsed between one’s disappearance and an age progression, the more chance there was for no likeness at all. Age progression was a science based on average calculations and no one was completely average.
Still, at two, or four, those changes would have been fewer, the progressed photo more accurate.
“I don’t know her.”
“Evidence says you do.”
“It’s wrong.”
Detective 101. Evidence didn’t lie.
“Her DNA was on a hair ribbon found in your home.”
“I had a drawer full of ribbons. Most of them from my nieces when they were younger.”
“Did you have a niece that looked like Claire?”
“No. They were dark haired. They grew up in Florida and still live there. Kasey and Kylie. They’re my younger brother’s girls. You can verify the truth. Ask the girls to give you DNA samples and check them against the ribbons you found and I’m sure you’ll find that they match. And before you ask, the girls are in their late thirties—thirty-seven and thirtynine—so they don’t fit your girl here.”
Gladys shook her head softly, her lips pursed in confusion. “I turned over all of my records,” she said. “I handled hundreds of babies. Not a single toddler. I’d remember a two-yearold. You can come visit me once a month for the next twenty years if you’d like, hon. I don’t mind the socializing. But I don’t know this child you keep insisting I know.”
Lucy didn’t trust the woman. But Ramsey’s words from two nights before held the truth that drove Lucy back to see her again and again. One piece of information inevitably leads to another. Emma Sanderson’s invitation had spurred on this visit.
Lucy had promised Emma she wouldn’t stop looking for Claire.
And while Lucy was certain that Gladys Buckley had associated with Sandy Hayes but had never seen Allie Hayes, she was equally certain that Gladys had some connection to Ramsey’s missing Claire Sanderson….
Claire Sanderson. A two-year-old blonde sprite who’d disappeared from her home twenty-five years before and never been seen or heard from again. Emma Sanderson was four when Claire went missing. And her life had been irrevocably changed. Much like Lucy, Emma had grown up with a mother so stricken with grief that the daughter left behind had never had the chance to be a kid.
Or to be innocently happy.
Lucy had recognized a kindred spirit the moment she’d met Emma the previous month.
Folding her hands on the table, Lucy leaned forward. “I don’t doubt that you have nieces who live in Florida and that their hair ribbons were among those taken from your home. What I need to know is how a hair ribbon worn by Claire Sanderson happened to be among them.”
“I have no idea,” Gladys said. “And no reason not to tell you if I did know.”
Unless there was some as-yet undetected crime that Gladys had committed. Her plea agreement stood only for the charges already made.
And Lucy had done what she could for the moment. At least as far as the Claire Sanderson case was concerned. So she should go. But she had a more personal matter…?. One that, ethically, she couldn’t discuss. One she hadn’t discussed with Gladys Buckley in all the years she’d been aware of the woman’s association with her mother.
“I was going through names and numbers in your business address book yesterday,” she said. “I came across a name with no corresponding records attached. And no notes designating that the contact had failed to produce…anything.”
There’d been coding for every aspect of the baby business. Including those for referrals or leads that did not result in a baby to sell.