A Son's Tale

“Is she drinking?”

“No. I asked.”

He was glad to hear it, not that it was any of his business. He’d never even met the woman. He’d only met Lucy once.

“I got a lead.”

“What?” He heard the covers rustle and figured Lucy had just sat up in bed. “Where?” And then, more quietly, “Oh, Ramsey, did you find another one? Was it Claire Sanderson?”

She was referring to Ramsey’s obsession with the Peter Walters case. He’d busted the fifty-five-year-old bastard on a child abduction case a year back. He’d been in time to save the kid, a three-year-old girl, from more than just a scare, but Walters had a big mouth and an even bigger need to brag, letting Ramsey know that he hadn’t been able to save them all. Not one to have patience with cold cases, Ramsey had nonetheless found himself immersed in boxes of evidence that night—all local missing-children cases. His search had continued for most of that next week and he’d ended up finding information that tied Walters to another case from the Comfort Cove area. It didn’t take him ten minutes of convincing to get Walters to tell him what he’d done with the body.

What he’d found made him puke. And Walters had a last laugh as he told Ramsey that, hypothetically, there could be more victims.

Ramsey had been a madman ever since, using every spare moment to try to prove that there had been no other victims. He’d searched the bachelor’s house himself, enraged enough, when he found nothing, to tear up floorboards with his bare hands. Underneath them he’d found miscellaneous objects— children’s clothing, a stuffed animal, a pink hairbrush. All in all, he’d come out with a box full of items that had potentially belonged to victims.

Going through old cases in a six-hundred-mile radius, he’d already matched four cases to Walters. In Massachusetts and out of state, too.

Walters was in prison awaiting trial on the most recent kidnapping, but since his victim was returned safely, he wasn’t looking at the life sentence without parole that he deserved. And then he’d face trial on the kidnapping and murder of Kylie Jacobs. And on the kidnapping and murder of the other four victims Ramsey had tied him to. One of which had taken place in Massachusetts and would carry the death penalty. Ramsey wasn’t going to rest until the man was dead.

It was during his investigations into cold abduction cases that he’d met Detective Lucy Hayes from Aurora, Indiana. He’d submitted a request for a box of evidence on an Aurora, Michigan, abduction that wasn’t where it belonged; Lucy had checked out the box for a cold case she was following.

He’d called her. They’d exchanged case information and had been working together ever since.

“No,” he said now. “I didn’t find Claire. And I’m no closer to finding out what happened to her box of evidence. How does a box get up and walk out of a vault in the basement of a police facility? How did someone get in the door without a badge, get past security, carry out a box and not get picked up by cameras?”

Lucy didn’t say anything. Probably knew he was venting. They’d been over it all before.

“But I did stumble on to something,” he continued. Over the past months he’d grown accustomed to running things by her. He filled her in on the delivery truck.

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” he continued, speaking in low tones due to the bustle of police business going on around him. “This Frank Whittier had the girl in his car. Probably to keep her out of sight for the few minutes he waited on the truck. Then he hands her over and takes the payoff when the guy sells the baby. Either that, or the two of them are as sick as Walters and then I don’t want to think about what they did with her.” He told her about the two other abductions on meat delivery routes. “I’m checking now to see if there’s any connection to Whittier and the other two kids. We figured Frank didn’t do this alone. So maybe we’ve found his partner.”

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“Do you have the driver’s name?”

“Yeah, but I haven’t found the guy yet. I’m still tracking him down.”

“This would mean that Claire wasn’t one of Walters’s victims.”

“That’s right.” Which had become his goal in life—to rule out which children had been Walters’s victims. Each time a case didn’t match up, he was relieved. At the same time, he was driven to find every one of his victims and hang Walters for each and every one of them. He wanted closure for the families. He wanted Walters to pay. And he grieved every single time he hit pay dirt.

“But whoever took Claire and these other children did something with them,” Lucy said, her voice echoing the sadness that haunted him.

“Yeah.”

“Life sucks, doesn’t it?”

“Seems to.”

“Keep me posted.”

“Yeah.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

MORGAN WAS WAITING for Cal’s call at ten o’clock Wednesday night. He hadn’t said he’d call. They weren’t in a relationship—yet—and didn’t talk on the phone as if they were. But in the past, whenever he’d had reason to call, he’d done so at ten. The time seemed to work for both of them.

And today, he had reason to call.