“You have a girlfriend there at Beech Glen?”
“Me?” Damon said, feeling his phone buzz in his pocket again. “Uh, no.”
“But you are so handsome, how is this possible?” she cried softly, while smoothly taking his arm. “Come, you must tell Karla everything.”
Chapter
37
When I found the kitchen, Bree was consoling Dr. Lancaster, who was sobbing from the depths of her soul. Her husband’s expression was one I recognized. I’d seen variations of it on the faces of the survivors fighting the zombies on that show Ali liked so much.
“Mr. Lancaster, I’m Alex Cross,” I said, reaching out to shake his hand.
A lobbyist, Lancaster shook hands for a living, but now he gave my hand the faintest of squeezes, looked at me with yearning, and said, “Can you find her?”
A familiar male voice behind me said, “We can and we will, Bill.”
I looked over my shoulder. Special Agent Ned Mahoney, an old and dear friend and colleague from my days at the FBI, was coming into the kitchen.
“Ned?”
“Bill’s my cousin, Alex,” Mahoney said, patting me on the shoulder and then going around me to hug Lancaster. “I promise you we will do everything possible to get Evan back.”
The missing boy’s father lost that yearning look. His lower lip trembled. “Ned, I’ve been so goddamned busy lately. I hardly know him.”
I glanced at his wife, who looked at the floor as if it held answers.
Gently patting Dr. Lancaster’s back, Bree said, “With the three of us working the case, it’s only a matter of time before we find him.”
“Unless she’s killed him already,” Dr. Lancaster moaned.
“That’s highly unlikely,” I said. “Young women who do this sort of thing are more often than not motivated by their inability to conceive. They are so desperate for a baby, they’ll steal one.”
“He’s right,” Mahoney said.
“Could you look at the drawing again?” Bree asked. “Tell us if that’s Kelli Adams?”
“I barely saw her on my way out to work,” Lancaster said.
But his wife wiped her eyes, picked the sketch off the counter, and studied it carefully before saying in a thick voice, “Could be. She wore a lot of makeup. The eyes are the right shape but the wrong color. The hair’s different, and her cheeks were not so full as this. My God, she had references. I spoke to them myself.”
“We’ll need those names and phone numbers,” Mahoney said.
Dr. Lancaster nodded and reached for her phone.
“Did she touch anything?” I asked.
The missing boy’s mother looked up at me with that dazed expression I’d seen only moments before on her husband’s face.
“She was only here a few minutes and yet she’s touched everything,” Dr. Lancaster replied, beginning to cry again. “That woman’s touched and ruined everything in my entire home!”
Chapter
38
“So, no girls?” Karla Mepps asked, setting a coffee in front of Damon. “I’m sorry, but the former LSU cheerleader in me is saying, ‘How is that possible?’ ”
Damon smiled, glanced over at some other boys from the school who were staring at him dumbly, and squirmed a little. He’d never had a girl, much less a beautiful woman, talk to him like this. “I dunno,” he said. “Just too busy, I guess.”