The Truth About Comfort Cove

CHAPTER FOUR

> “H ey, Miller, you got a minute?”

With his arm halfway in the sleeve of his brown suit jacket

Wednesday evening, Ramsey looked over at Bill Mendholson, a detective five years his senior and Ramsey’s mentor.

Bill had been out most of the day.

Ramsey had made a connection between the two Boston

missing-child cold cases. He’d gone through both evidence

boxes, including trash found in the area, and read all the reports written by everyone who’d done any work on the cases,

or who’d been on the scene and made a statement, and the only

similarity he could find was that chocolate-bar wrappers—not

the common kind found in drugstores and supermarkets—had

been found in the vicinity of both disappearances. Might not

mean anything. Probably didn’t. But as long as those girls’

disappearances were unsolved, he wasn’t going to stop checking out every single possibility. No matter how remote. He’d been researching chocolate, chocolate manufacturers, the effects of chocolate, perps who offered chocolate, for

most of the day. He’d been immersed in chocolate. Chocolatiers in Boston. Chocolate distributors in the Boston area in

August of 2000. Establishments that sold chocolate bars. He’d

exhausted every possibility he could think of for connections

between the two abductions that took place in the same city

in the same time period twelve years before, and he knew he

had to take a break.

So he was on his way out to check a name and address that had finally come in on a person of interest in the Claire Sand

erson case. An address he was off to investigate.

“Yeah, Bill, what’s up?” Five o’clock was quitting time for

both of them and only an hour away, but with all of the papers

spread on Bill’s desk, it didn’t look as if he’d be heading home

any time soon, either. Mary must be working late. Ramsey would be spending most of the night with the

Sanderson files. Another cold-case toddler abduction. This

one from right here in Comfort Cove, twenty-five years before. And also cleared—thank God—due to recently obtained

DNA evidence, from any connection to imprisoned child molester Peter Walters.

But Claire wouldn’t let him go. He had to find her. Lucy