The Truth About Comfort Cove

But the ID had been made.

Sandy needed Lucy now.

R amsey had last night’s files on the nightstand and his laptop computer open and booted up on his chest when the phone rang Saturday night.

“Lucy?” He pushed the call button the second he saw the

long-distance number. “I expected your call hours ago.” As a favor to Lucy, a fellow missing-child cold-case detective, he’d flown from Massachusetts to Indiana to sit in on the interview when Wakerby had first been apprehended.

“She ID’d him, but collapsed. I had to bring her straight home.”

“That bad, huh?” Where was Lucy now? At home alone? Like he was?

“Worse.”

“Did seeing him spark any new memories?”

“Not that she’s saying.”

He wished he was there. And then wondered what in the hell he was doing. This was about the job. His life was about the job. Period.

“I couldn’t get her to rest. Or to talk,” Lucy said. “She cried most of the afternoon and evening. And clung to me. I finally sedated her, Ramsey. I feel bad for doing it, but she was making herself sick.”

“Her doctor gave you the pills for that reason, Lucy. No need to feel ashamed for using them.”

“Maybe not.”

But it was clear she did. And there wasn’t a damned thing that was going to change that.

Ramsey knew all about the guilt that parents managed to instill in their offspring.

“Give me another rundown of the case again.” He offered the one thing he had to give—the one thing she’d accept— professional expertise. “Start at the beginning.”

They’d been through it all before. Ramsey had read the police report shortly after he’d “met” Lucy by phone when evidence he’d found in Peter Walters’s basement had had a possible link to her sister’s case.

But they were cold-case detectives. They didn’t stop when they reached a dead end. Their job was to keep looking for the missing child. Until they found a link, a clue, an answer.

“My mother was nineteen. A single mom living alone in Aurora with a six-month-old baby girl.”

“Where was the father?”

“Gone. Out of state. She didn’t know where. He’d split right after she had the baby. She got checks in the mail, though, randomly, with no return address. Various postmarks. She can’t remember where from.”

“Seeing Wakerby today didn’t spark any of the memories she’d lost?”

Lucy’s sigh was heavy. And deep. “No. Not consciously, at any rate.”

He could picture her in the precinct room at the station, at her desk along the far wall—he’d only been to Aurora once and had never seen her home—in slacks and a blouse and blazer. As far as Ramsey could tell she wore the same kind of plainclothes “uniform” every day. Just like he did.

“The memory lapse is understandable.” Something in her voice pulled the words out of him. “She suffered a horrendous trauma that night. Her mind is protecting her from what she can’t handle.”

“I know. It’s just…so frustrating. I look at her and I know the answers are in there. And sometimes I think it’s not just the trauma blocking the memories. It’s the alcohol. If I could just keep her sober for enough days in a row to clear her head—”

“She still might not remember.” Cold hard facts. Victims, especially emotionally sensitive ones, couldn’t survive without deleting particularly damaging images from their psyche. “And she’s been sober for a couple of months, at least,” he reminded her.

Lucy had told him that her mother had been in rehab. When, or how many times, he had no idea. But she’d completed the inpatient program at least once fairly recently.

“Okay, so, she leaves her job as a department-store cashier near a mall in Cincinnati on a Saturday afternoon in August, picks up Allie from the mall day care, drives to the bank to deposit her paycheck at the after-hours depository, drives back toward Aurora, stopping at a grocery store in Lawrenceburg.