“You hungry?”
“Not too bad.” Her flight had been too early to think about breakfast. But she’d eaten a ton the day before.
“Have you had breakfast?”
“No.”
“I took a chance that you wouldn’t and waited. We can stop anyplace you’d like. Or we can go back to my house. I fry a mean egg. And I brought home the lab report on Claire Sanderson’s teddy bear.”
“You don’t have to be at the office?”
“I flew solo yesterday so I’m off today.”
“And tomorrow?” They had the wedding.
“Yeah. I’m off until Monday.”
So was she. She also wanted to see the Sanderson file. Even if all they had was theory, she wanted to be able to give Emma at least a slim line of hope on her wedding day. Hope was everything.
As she’d learned when she’d temporarily lost hers.
“Breakfast at your place sounds great,” she said. “I brought some things to show you, too.” The Wakerby file, which now included all of Todd’s information regarding Allie. They had to find a way to tie her sister’s death to the bastard who’d killed her.
R amsey had never before had a hard-on while frying eggs. Thankfully the suit he was wearing hid the evidence, and experience told him that as soon as he focused his thoughts, the embarrassing reaction to Lucy Hayes in his home, sitting at his dining-room table going over his files, would dissipate.
“Here, take a look at this,” he said, pulling a binder from the far corner of the table and putting it on top of the report she was currently looking at. A copy of what he’d written late the night before regarding his ninety-year-old dead body. They were going to go over the Sanderson file together while they ate. “I asked Amelia Hardy if I could take a look at her activity journal and she insisted that I bring it home with me.”
Opening the pages, Lucy was soon engrossed enough that he was able to get eggs and toast onto plates and in front of them at the table. He managed napkins and forks and glasses of juice, too.
He didn’t manage to rid himself of a great desire to take the woman at his table into the bedroom, hold her in his arms and block out the world for a while.
“It says here that immediately prior to Claire’s disappearance, Amelia was living in Boston.”
“That’s right.”
“So she doesn’t know if he had someone at his place then or not.”
“Correct.”
“He and Frank could have met there and we’d have no way of knowing that.”
“Yep.”
She waited for him to sit and then started right in on the eggs and toast. “Before we look at what we have, I think we should pretend that Frank and Jack are out and see if there are any angles we’re missing. Let’s make certain that we aren’t just on this path because we need answers and can make cases that sound strong.”
So they spent breakfast coming up with other theories, using the tunnel, and not. And reached dead ends for every single one of them. If the perp had been completely unknown, wouldn’t Jack have noticed? Wouldn’t Frank? Wouldn’t Claire have cried out? And the police had combed the area at the time of the disappearance. There was no sign of anyone who didn’t belong in the area, not a stray footprint. Not a car or a bike or anything.
Which was why Frank Whittier had been the only suspect all these years.
“But Jack had been there and the police hadn’t known that,” Lucy pointed out.
“Because his presence wasn’t anything unusual in the neighbo
rhood.”
“So let’s look at everyone else that ‘belonged’ in the area. Could any of them be our perp?”
By rote, he went over every resident on the block, naming names, alibis, job descriptions and family situations.