What worried him was that there would be no answers until she did remember. And in the meantime she’d be in danger.
Jane also reported having sent her trainee out to Arrow Lake to show the photo of mother and son around. He’d gotten only head shakes. The dentist in Eugene, though, remembered the family. Beck and his mother both looked Eastern European, pale, with dark hair and eyes.
“It has to be them.”
“There’s some connection to Arrow Lake, damn it. But what?” Colin growled.
“Maddie,” she said tentatively.
He only shook his head. In November, Maddie was in school full-time and unlikely to be going to work with her father much or at all. The weather would have been too cold for her to enjoy wandering at will the way she did in the summer.
Except, it occurred to him with a jolt, the proximity of the resort to the Hales’ place was suggestive. If her father didn’t pay any attention to where she was or what she did all day, she could have gone with him on Saturdays or Sundays, then walked as far as the Hales’. Or Beck biked to meet her. She probably knew how to program key cards for a particular room. She could have chosen a vacant one and let herself and Beck in. Of course, she’d be risking an uproar if a maid walked in on them. Daddy Dubeau wouldn’t like his little girl being found in a lodge room or cabin with a seventeen-year-old boy.
Where else could they have hung out for the day? he wondered. Did it matter? Even if they found out, would that tell them anything?
Probably not, he thought, scowling, but he didn’t like loose ends.
Right now, something else was on his mind. “Jane, you were on the Drug Enforcement Team.”
There was a moment of silence. “Yes?” It sounded wary.
“I want you to crop out Chief Bystrom from that picture and show it around. You don’t have to tell anyone the context. I don’t want to be thinking this, but I am. The combination of a private airfield, substantial, unaccounted-for payments and the photo of Bystrom talking to a man he doesn’t want to admit he knows...”
She mumbled something he suspected was profane.
“Go for people who were working drug enforcement then. They might remember the face.”
“Do I tell the lieutenant?”
Colin hesitated, feeling reluctant. “No reason not to,” he said at last. He trusted Duane, of all people. Duane wasn’t a gossip. “We don’t want word to spread, that’s all. You know how touchy this is,” he ventured. “If you’d rather, I’ll do it. You know there’s a risk here.”
“Of finding myself unemployed?” Her brashness was part of what made her good at her job. “I console myself with knowing that if I am, you will be, too.”
He laughed. “Misery loves company.”
They ended the call with him thinking, If Bystrom fires my ass, there won’t be any reason not to move to Seattle.
And he’d be close to Cait, too.
He was making a big assumption. What if Nell wasn’t thinking beyond tomorrow, or next week?
Trying to settle himself down, he checked email, responding to several messages that had nothing to do with the investigations that had him on edge.
His thoughts spun in circles. The glory of making love to Maddie. Nell. His confusion. The gray cast to Gary Bystrom’s tanned face as he stared at his downfall, neatly highlighted in yellow. The picture of the dark-eyed boy with his mother. Maddie again—the knowledge of what she’d gone through, and the terror that had driven her to do anything at all to avoid authority in any form, because she would be sent back where she came from. The headaches, so far triggered by thoughts of Beck, and of the possibility she had been sexually molested. But not her parents, however unsatisfactory the relationship with them had been. Not her brother.
He had a hell of a headache by the time he heard the soft sound of a door closing and then the toilet flushing. A minute later, Nell appeared, looking shy. Knowing he couldn’t let her see his doubts, he smiled and rose. “Hey.”
“Hey,” she responded.
She came to him and he kissed her, sinking into the rightness of her in his arms. He had to figure out what held him back. He didn’t think he could bear to lose her. He hadn’t known how lonely he was until he saw Maddie in that television clip. From that moment on, he’d been waiting, hungry for those phone calls.
And that took him back to Maddie. Because he couldn’t deny she had been Maddie to him, until she arrived in person and he got to know her better.
Finally he held her away from him and studied her face. Despite the nap, purple shadows underlaid her brown eyes. Several tiny clots of dried blood decorated her cheek where she’d been struck by flying bits of glass. He could still see the healing trace of the scrape from the icy street on the same cheek.