The Truth About Comfort Cove

“And that could explain why he was so calm and prepared when you interviewed him last weekend. My money is on the professor,” she said. “That Beck woman.”

“I was thinking Chester Brown.”

“Then we go back to both of them.”

He agreed. “Unfortunately, we’re in Comfort Cove. With a wedding to attend tomorrow.” Maybe she’d suggest that they miss the wedding. Emma

would rather they find Claire than watch her get married. And Ramsey would rather be working than anything else.

Especially now. He was teetering on the brink of something disastrous, now that he knew Lucy in a personal sense, and the only way to circumvent the inevitable, to protect himself and everyone else, was to bury himself in work.

“You could try calling the number,” Lucy said, Amelia’s book open in front of her. But her attention was on Ramsey. “See if someone answers.”

“We risk tipping them off to the fact that we’re on to them if we do that.”

Colton didn’t yet know that Ramsey had warrants for his personal belongings. He only knew about the financials.

“So we phone Professor Beck and Chester Brown and tell them we’re doing a follow-up call.”

She wasn’t letting him off the wedding hook.

“Wait a minute, Ramsey, look at this.” Lucy slid Amelia’s book over beside his laptop, which he moved to make room so he could see where her finger was pointing.

“Amelia says she got an extra preemie blanket made for the church’s blanket drive for the neonatal intensive-care unit at Boston General because she’d been woken by Jack’s raised voice,” she said. “She thought she’d heard him say something about a baby. Later she’d asked him about it and he’d said that he’d said maybe. He apologized for waking her up. He’d been talking to someone he worked with who’d been out drinking and wanted to know if Jack would come pick him up and give him a ride home. She made the note because when she heard the word baby and couldn’t sleep for loneliness creeping in, she calmed her heart by making the blanket. She finishes the entry by saying that God always takes care of those who take care of others.”

He was reading as she was speaking.

“I’ll bet Jack did say baby, Ramsey.”

Ramsey was sure of it. Calling the station, he put out an APB on the man. And when he hung up, Lucy was just ending a call, as well.

“That was Lori Givens,” she said slowly, frowning.

“From the DNA lab in Cincinnati?”

“Yeah. She says she found something. It sounds really important.”

“She didn’t tell you what it was?”

“No.” Lucy shook her head, her blond hair more tousled than usual. “She said that it’s going to be pertinent to your case, and since you’re the lead, she feels that you would want to make sure that all protocols are properly followed. She’s sending the results to your work fax number. It must have to do with Frank Whittier, Ramsey. And that sample you sent her.”

He picked up his keys. “Then let’s go.”

Waiting impatiently while Bill greeted Lucy effusively, Ramsey tried not to notice the other man’s admiring glances toward his pseudo partner, or to care. Bill was crazy in love with Mary, and Lucy was not Ramsey’s to claim.

He’d slept with her. Past tense. And they’d agreed, going in, that it wouldn’t mean anything more than it had in the moment.

But instead of having her wait at his desk while he grabbed the fax off the machine on the other side of the room, he sat her with a cup of coffee she didn’t ask for in the break room that doubled as an interrogation room, closing the door behind her.

No telling who might walk into the squad room. Kim. One of the other, younger detectives on the squad. He didn’t need Lucy distracted right now. They were getting ready to close a twenty-five-year-old cold case.

Or at least close in on it.

Finding the perp didn’t automatically mean that they’d find out what happened to little Claire Sanderson.

After shutting the door behind Lucy, he went straight for the fax. With proof that Frank Whittier was Claire Sanderson’s biological father, he could prove motive for him taking her. With the new, previously undisclosed evidence, he could arrest the man on grounds of impeding a criminal investigation. And it just so happened that Frank was going to be in town later that day. Which meant that he wouldn’t have to extradite him.

Timing was everything.