Since having the car easily accessible seemed to mean so much to the woman and obviously represented independence to her, he hadn’t tried to talk her into leaving it in his driveway. After the incident in her room last night, he knew that despite her bravado, a fragile woman lived beneath the tightly wrapped layers.
He also suspected that she would continue to keep that fragile side buried rather than try to find a way to heal.
It was early, earlier than he was accustomed to coming in. But Kait was chomping at the bit to begin viewing the tapes and capture a better close-up of the man who had rented the van used in the abduction. Since the chief of Ds had unofficially made the visiting detective his responsibility, Tom knew that he couldn’t just let her come back to the precinct without him. No matter how much he wanted to get some extra shut-eye to make up for what he’d lost playing her human nightlight last night.
Beauty sleep would just have to wait.
About to walk up the back steps into the building, Kait abruptly stopped dead and looked at him quizzically. Her guard was up as she asked, “What?”
“When you were having that nightmare last night, you were begging someone to let you go,” he said. “Who was it that you thought was holding on to you?”
He watched her stiffen, as if she was bracing for a physical blow.
“The devil.”
The answer was flippant, but in this case, it actually fit the situation, she thought. Because the foster parent so vividly conjured in her nightmare had been more devil than human when she’d had to live with the man and his wife. The moment she became a policewoman, she’d gone back to the house where she had spent a hellish five months. She’d been prepared to do whatever it took to arrest the man as well as his wife and bring them up on charges of child endangerment and molestation.
At the time, it was too late to bring her own case to light. The statute of limitations had run out on that. But she was positive that hers hadn’t been an isolated incident. There had to have been more little girls who had suffered at Elliot Caulfield’s hands.
But life had cheated her again. Her former foster parents were both dead thanks to a murder/suicide that had taken place in their house less than a year earlier.
Coming away from the neighborhood, she’d felt both vindicated and disappointed at the same time. She’d been struggling to put the memory behind her and had thought she’d succeeded.
But this case had brought it all back to her. Just her luck, the Aurora detective had been a witness to her unintentional meltdown.
“I already told you, I don’t remember,” she insisted, then went on the offensive. “Didn’t you ever have dreams that faded the second you were awake?”
“Yeah.” His tone of voice told her that whether or not he’d had those kind of dreams was beside the point. In this case, he didn’t believe her. She knew that what he believed or didn’t believe shouldn’t bother her. But it did.
You’ve got something more important to focus on, remember?
Kait upbraided herself.
Megan needs you.
“Let’s go watch those surveillance tapes and see if we can get a better shot of the man who rented that van,” she urged.
Turning her back on Tom, she raced up the stairs.
Finding their quarry on the rental-agency tapes turned out to be a great deal more difficult than they’d originally thought. Whether due to a power failure or plain neglect and incompetence, the clock on the recording camera hadn’t been set correctly so the time stamp on the tapes was off, not by hours but by days.
Consequently, finding the man they searched for wasn’t just a matter of queueing up the tape to the approximate time he had rented the vehicle. They were left to painstakingly go through all the tapes they’d collected to identify the man who had driven off with the white van. At the very least, with both of them diligently working, it would take at least hours if not the whole day.
“Damn it!”
Sequestered in an almost claustrophobically small, darkened video room where they had been sitting side by side, Tom’s head shot up when he heard Kait bite off the curse. He realized belatedly that he’d almost nodded off from boredom.
Looking at her monitor now, he searched the screen, trying to see what had prompted that reaction from her. “You find him?”
The triumph she’d anticipated when she finally located the son of a bitch who had taken Megan was pointedly missing.
“Yeah, I found him,” she grumbled.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Look at him!” she cried, waving her hand angrily at the screen. “He’s wearing a ski jacket with the collar turned up and a hat. All he’s missing is a ski mask.” She suppressed the second curse that rose to her lips. “He could be anybody,” she said in disgust. “For all we know, that could be a woman or even a dog trained to walk on its hind legs.”
He could understand her frustration, but something could be gleaned from the segment. “Hold on, now. Rewind that. We might not have a clear shot of his face, but maybe we can pick up something else from the clip.”
Her eyes narrowed as she dared him to find something positive from this. “Like what?”
“Rewind the tape to just before he opens the back door to the lot,” Tom instructed.
Frowning, she did what he asked even though she thought it was a huge waste of time. When she’d rewound it to just before the man emerged from the rear of the building to claim the van he’d requested, she hit Play.
“Slower,” he told her. “Play that in slow motion,” he added, watching her screen intently.
“What are you looking for?” Kait asked.
“Something. Anything.” His eyes remained trained on the monitor, straining to catch the one telltale detail that might put their search into the proper perspective. “I’ll know it when I see it.”
“Terrific,” she muttered under her breath. In other words, he hadn’t a clue.
Trying to work her way past the encroaching hopeless feeling, Kait rewound the tape a third time. When she played it this time, it advanced a frame at a time. Kait stared at the screen, hating that she didn’t see what the other detective apparently was looking for.
“You getting anything out of this?” Kait finally asked.
There were tiny bits and pieces of information. If put together, would they be larger than the sum of their parts? He had no answer, but he knew he had to play every angle. They were all that missing little girl had.
“Well, he’s a short man,” Tom told her.
He looked to be of average height to her. “How can you tell?”
Tom hit the pause button and the video froze the man on the screen in an awkward position. “Look where his shoulder comes up to against that poster on the back wall,” he pointed out, tapping the screen. “When we were out in the lot, I looked down at the poster. The kidnapper had to look up to see it.” She’d begun advancing the film again. “There!” he cried. “Freeze it.” When Kait did, he ran his finger along the man’s basic outline. “He also either has a limp or one leg is just a little shorter than the other, because his gait is uneven,” he told her with finality.
She’d been so intent on getting a clearer picture, she hadn’t even paid attention to the way the man moved. From side to side like some roly-poly clown doll.
“Wow, Ronald would have been impressed with you.” To her, that was the highest compliment she could bestow on anyone.
“Ronald?” Was that the name of a boyfriend? Tom couldn’t help wondering. Someone she’d left back home she needed to get back to? And why did the identity of this “Ronald” person pique his curiosity so much?
She nodded. “My father.”
Rather than answer questions, the revelation only raised more. “You call your father by his first name?” He found that a little odd.
A bittersweet mood moved over her, taking her emotions prisoner. “Right now, I’d call him anything he wanted if he was just around to answer.” She saw the question rise to the other detective’s eyes. “He died four years ago.” He’d lived just long enough to see her made the youngest detective in the precinct. He’d been so proud of her. “Best man to ever walk the earth,” she said with no little feeling.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
It never ceased to strike him how very hollow those words sounded even when he meant them in all sincerity. The words, the sentiment behind them, didn’t begin to embrace the immense sorrow he knew that the loss of a parent or someone close had to generate. When his mother had succumbed to an insidious disease, the hole left in his family’s hearts had been insurmountable.
“Really,” he added with quiet fierceness.
Her eyes met his for a moment. The flip comment that automatically came to her lips faded before she could give voice to it.
Instead, she told him, “I believe you. And I called him by his first name because I first knew him as ‘Uncle Ronald.’” She could see more questions forming in his mind. Maybe it did deserve an explanation. She wasn’t ashamed of her connection to Ronald. “I was about three or four at the time. He and his partner posed as a couple desperate to adopt a baby. I remember just before they came, my grandmother warned me that if I wasn’t nice to these people and they left without me, she’d stick a hot poker into my mouth to show me what happened to ‘bad little girls who didn’t listen to their grandmother.’ I remember being so scared,” she admitted. “Then there was a lot of commotion and there were all these policemen, handcuffing my grandmother and her boyfriend and taking them away. I started to cry. What I remember most of all were these big, strong arms lifting me up.”
She pressed her lips together as she remembered and relived the moments. “He told me everything was going to be okay.”
“And was it?” Tom asked. He studied her as she answered. Maybe this would give him more of a handle on the woman he was being paired with.
“No, but not because Ronald broke his word to me,” she said defensively. “Family court put me into the system and I got passed around to whatever foster family would take me at the time.”
Tom watched the corners of her mouth curve ever so slightly in what had to be one of the saddest smiles he’d ever seen. “Ronald would always find me and come visit. He’d bring me food, or new clothes. Once he brought me a hairbrush because my hair was so knotted.” Fondness slipped into her voice as she recalled the incident. “He spent two hours trying to get the knots out without hurting me. Finally, I had to have my hair cut. I looked like a boy. He promised it would grow out and got me a hat to wear until it did.”
Her words echoed back to her. Startled, she stared at Tom. Her tone changed abruptly. “How did you do that?” she asked.
“Do what?”
It was too late to pull back. The damage had been done. She’d let him see her vulnerable side. “How did you manage to wheedle that out of me?”
“I didn’t wheedle anything,” he told her calmly. “I just listened to you talk.” His eyes were kind as they held hers. “You were the one who volunteered all that information. I didn’t twist your arm.”
Kait pressed her lips together. She wasn’t about to beg, and she knew that a threat was out of place here. Annoyed and flustered with herself, all she could do was appeal to his sense of honor.
“I’d appreciate it if you kept what I just told you to yourself.”
She was lucky that LaGuardia hadn’t been within earshot, Tom thought. The other man had a terrible penchant for not being able to keep secrets.
“Wasn’t planning on having it pop up on my Facebook page.”
Her eyes widened.
“I’m just kidding.” Tom bit his lower lip as he struggled not to laugh at the look on her face. “I was just being flippant.” He looked at her pointedly. “It’s a habit I seemed to have picked up just recently.”
Kait released the breath she’d been holding. “Point taken.” And then she mumbled a near inaudible, “Thanks,” before asking him in a louder voice, “So now what do we do?”
“We go back to the fake driver’s license and take the photo we found there down to the tech lab to see if they can match it up with a face that is actually
on
a real California driver’s license.” Turning his monitor and the ancient VCR off, Tom rose to his feet.
Kait was already moving toward the door.
When she opened it, she was forced to squint at the brightness of the light coming in from the hall. She held her hand up before her eyes to help.
“I had no idea the lights in the hall were so bright.” Very slowly, she raised her eyelids, trying to acclimate herself to the light.
“Now I know how that gopher feels, popping his head out of that hole in February,” Tom commented. He closed the door to the windowless room behind him.
“Groundhog,” she corrected, wishing she’d thought to bring her sunglasses with her.
The word had been half grunted, half mumbled. He wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. “What?”
“It’s a groundhog, not a gopher,” she told him, enunciating more clearly. “That’s why it’s called ‘Groundhog Day,’ not ‘Gopher Day.’”
He inclined his head, accepting her correction. He had a feeling she didn’t tolerate being wrong. The woman was undoubtedly very hard on herself. “I stand corrected.”
She slanted a look at his face, trying to discern if he was having fun at her expense. Apart from Ronald and his wife, forming any sort of a relationship had always been difficult for her.
“You’re humoring me, aren’t you?” she asked suspiciously.
“I doubt if that’s possible.” He had a feeling she handed people their heads for that, because she probably took it as their making jokes at her expense. “What I was just doing was admitting that I was wrong. I do that on occasion,” he told her. “If I’m wrong,” he underscored. Then, changing the subject, he urged, “C’mon, the sooner we get someone started on that facial-recognition program, the sooner we might come up with an actual name for this guy.”
The fact that they hadn’t already taken the fake copy with its fuzzy photograph to the lab was on her, Kait thought, annoyed with herself. She’d held off because she’d hoped they would come up with a clearer, more focused photograph than the overexposed one that the rental agency had copied for their files.