He was on the road out of town, driving along the coast, before he made a conscious choice of where he was headed.
Not that he was kidding himself. He’d been making the trek at least once a week since the previous spring. He’d taken a call on a one-year-old girl, missing from her own backyard. As it did every time he made this drive, the nine-month-old case played itself out in Ramsey’s mind as the ocean beckoned off to his right and trees stood proud, and now bare, on his left.
Ramsey had worked around the clock to find the little girl. It had taken three days, and Peter Walters had not stepped a foot outside of custody since Ramsey had personally put the bracelets on him.
Ramsey drove. And turned. And turned again. Walters’s place was not easy to find.
Pulling up the long, unpaved drive, he stopped his sedan in the side yard, the building looking nothing like the freshly painted white home he’d first descended upon. Walters’s version had had blue curtains in the windows—room-darkening curtains it had turned out—not boards.
A month later Ramsey had returned with a forensic unit from Boston, there specifically to pillage the basement.
Staring at the house, Ramsey could still hear the old man’s taunting jeers to Ramsey the day he’d been convicted of kidnapping and battery in the Kelsey Green case. Ramsey had been sitting in court with the prosecuting attorney, and as he’d passed by the defense table on his way out of the courtroom, the defendant had whispered that Ramsey hadn’t been able to save the others.
Why?
Why had Walters’s moment of truth resulted in a taunt?
Ramsey asked the question again. Did Walters feel even a minute fraction of the conscience Ramsey needed him to have regarding the children he’d hurt? And killed?
Kelsey was the lucky one. Her doctors and family had expected a full recovery, at least physically. And she was young enough, loved enough, to have no subconscious emotional baggage from the agonizing three days she’d spent with the devil.
Days that might have been prevented if Ramsey had been able to get to Walters sooner. If he’d put the clues together more quickly. He’d taken the missing-person call when it had come in, and it had taken him three days…?.
When he’d put the facts together, he’d gone after Walters, sending Bill after the little girl, whom Walters had left alone in a locked storage shed.
Ramsey had been sitting by himself in a deserted waiting area the night that the doctor had finally finished with Kelsey. Her parents were with her. The rest of the world had been in bed asleep. And there sat Ramsey.
“You still here?” The white coated, middle-aged female doctor had asked him when she’d seen him sitting there on her way past.
“Yes.”
“Is there something I can do for you? Do you need to see the family? You have more questions?”
“No.”
He just hadn’t left.
“She’s going to be fine, Detective. And she has you to thank for that.”
He’d been working a case, just like any other. No more, no less.
“If you hadn’t acted so swiftly…”
It hadn’t been quickly enough. No sleep and it still hadn’t been enough. There hadn’t been an inch of that baby’s body that wasn’t bruised.
“How many bones were broken?” The question wasn’t necessary. The D.A. would have access to all of Kelsey’s medical records. But he’d put the answer in his report.
“Fourteen, counting the little bones in her left hand. And three ribs.”
He swallowed bile. He’d puked up the food he’d had in his stomach right after turning Walters over to the guys at the jail.
Steeling himself, he stared at the wall across the room from him. “What else?”
“Some internal bleeding, but we’ve got that under control. Nothing that won’t heal. No lasting damage to any of her organs.”
“And?”
“That’s it. A couple of days in here and she’ll be home in her own crib.”