The 6th Target (Women's Murder Club 6)

en we flashed our badges. “The mother’s home,” a uniform told us.

Eileen Ray came to the door. She was white, early thirties, five nine, looked to be about eight months pregnant and terribly, terribly vulnerable. Her dark hair was banded up in a ponytail, and her face was raw and red from crying.

I introduced Conklin and myself, and Mrs. Ray invited us inside, where an FBI tech was wiring up the phone. “The police have been . . . wonderful, and we’re so grateful,” Mrs. Ray said, indicating a sofa and chair for us to sit on.

The living room was crammed with stenciled cabinets, baskets, birdhouses, and dried flowers, and folded-down cardboard boxes were stacked on the floor near the kitchen table. The pervasive fragrance of lavender added to the gift-shop effect of the Ray abode.

“We work at home,” Mrs. Ray said, answering my unasked question. “EBay.”

“Where is your husband now?” Conklin asked.

“Scotty and an FBI agent are driving around with Briana,” she told us. “My husband is hoping to God that he might see Charlie wandering out there, lost.

“Charlie must be terrified!” Eileen Ray cried out. “Oh, my God, what he must be going through! Who would take him?” she asked, her voice breaking. “And why?”

Conklin and I had no answers, but we lobbed questions at Mrs. Ray — about her movements, her relationship with her husband, and why the gate to the yard was open.

And we asked if anyone — family, friend, or stranger — had shown excessive or inappropriate attention to Charlie.

Nothing she told us lit up the board.

Eileen Ray was twisting a handkerchief in her hands when Scott Ray came home with the FBI agent and the nanny, a baby-faced young woman who was still in her teens.

Conklin and I split up, Conklin interviewing Scott in the child’s bedroom while I talked to Briana in the kitchen. Unlike the Westwood Registry’s European imports, Briana Kearny was a second-generation American, a local girl who lived three blocks away and looked after Charlie on a per-hour basis.

In other words, Briana was a babysitter.

Briana cried deep, heart-wrenching sobs as I pressed her, asking about her friendships, about her boyfriend, and if anyone had questioned her about the Rays and their habits.

Conklin and I finally closed our notebooks and said our good-byes, leaving the homey little cottage right as the electric candles in the windows came on.

“That girl had nothing to do with the child being snatched,” I said.

“I didn’t get anything bad off the husband, either,” my partner told me. “This feels like a ‘pedophile lures the kid into a van’ thing.”

“Yeah. It’s just too fricking easy to steal a child. Perv says, ‘Want to see my puppy?’ Kid toddles over. Perv drags the kid inside and takes off. No witness. No evidence. And now,” I said, “the long wait for a phone call . . . that never comes.”

Chapter 82

SIX-YEAR-OLD CHARLIE RAY had been abducted more than seven hours before, and the kidnappers had not called his parents. The Rays, unlike the Tylers, were in a socio-economic bracket that wouldn’t normally indicate a kidnapping for ransom.

And that was a bad thing.

We sat in Captain Jimenez’s office while FBI agent David Stanford briefed us. Stanford was a blue-eyed man with a graying ponytail who’d been working undercover on another case before being pulled into this one.

I took a flyer from the stack on the captain’s desk, studied Charlie Ray’s perfectly round eyes, baby teeth, and short-cropped dark curls.

Would his body be found weeks or months from now in a dump, or in a shallow grave, or washed up on the beach after a storm?

When the meeting broke up, I called Macklin and filled him in. And then Agent Stanford gave me and Conklin a lift to the airport. As we took the freeway exit, Stanford suggested we stop for a drink at the Marriott LAX before our flight. He wanted to hear everything we knew about Madison Tyler and her abduction.

Speaking for myself, I was ready for a drink. Possibly two.

The Latitude 33 lounge had a full bar and restaurant. Over beer and peanuts, we discussed Madison, then Stanford told us about a hideous child-abduction case he’d worked months before.

A ten-year-old girl had been snatched off the street as she walked home from school. She’d been found twenty-four hours later, raped and strangled, left on the altar of a church, her hands folded as if in prayer. The killer still hadn’t been found.

“How often do these kidnappings end in a rescue?” I asked.