This would take a giant leap on her part.
Kait took a deep breath—and leaped.
“Ronald Two Feathers had initially been part of a sting operation. My grandmother was given custody of me right after my mother gave birth. Seems someone, much to my mother’s relief, thought prison wasn’t the best place to raise a baby. That same line of thinking seemed to dictate that a grandmother would be the right person to raise a baby.”
She stared at the ceiling. Truth be told, she had very faint memories of a tall, skinny, sharp-tongued woman who smelled of stale cigarette smoke and sweat.
“Except that the powers that be who decided my fate didn’t know my grandmother.” Kait laughed shortly. “She was a resourceful woman and found uses for me from the very start.”
Tom wasn’t sure he understood what she meant. “Uses?”
Kait nodded. This, too, she vaguely remembered, mainly in bits and pieces. “If you’re shoplifting food to feed your baby granddaughter, most store owners won’t press charges and they’re most likely to take pity on you and let you walk away with even more than you initially shoplifted.
“But after a while, my grandmother and her boyfriend found they needed drugs more than they needed food, so she tried to sell me.”
“Sell you?” Tom echoed, horrified and incensed at the same time. She hadn’t mentioned this part when she’d told him how she’d gotten her last name. Granted, he knew things like selling children went on, but he’d never had any personal contact with that sort of a case.
He was beginning to see why she had taken Megan’s abduction so personally. Because she put herself in the little girl’s place.
“My grandmother never had much luck. The first guy she tried to sell me to not only turned her down but he called the police. Ronald and his partner posed as a couple who desperately wanted a baby girl.”
She vividly remembered the first time she saw Ronald Two Feathers. He looked impossibly tall, impossibly strong. He’d had shining blue-black hair and she thought he was a guardian angel, sent down to rescue her. Her four-year-old heart had fallen in love with him that very moment.
“My grandmother was more than happy to offer me to them—for fifty thousand dollars. The second the exchange was made, my grandmother and her boyfriend were taken into custody. They turned on each other in record time and were both sent to prison. I never saw my grandmother again.
“I was a scared, dirty, hungry little girl. Ronald bought me clothes, took me home.” The corners of her mouth curved as she remembered. “Had his partner clean me up. And then he cooked me the first decent meal I’d had since I couldn’t remember when—my grandmother thought my looking like a thin waif was more marketable,” she explained.
“When social services came to take me away the next day, I cried and screamed and hung on to his leg. I didn’t want to leave him. He promised he’d come visit me every chance he could—and, amazingly, he kept his word. He was always there, looking out for me, taking me to amusement parks, promising me that someday, he would give me a real home. Then one day he brought around this woman, told me he was getting married. I was twelve at the time and thought that would be the end of it. That he’d forget about me and I’d be on my own again.” She closed her eyes and struggled to keep the hurtful memories at arm’s length. “Some of the foster homes were pretty terrible.
“But Ronald Two Feathers was a man of his word. The first thing he and his new wife, Winona, did when they got back from their honeymoon was sign up to be foster parents and request that I be put in their care. I couldn’t believe it.” She closed her eyes again, willing herself not to cry. “I felt safe for the first time in years. Ronald and Winona adopted me before the year was out.”
And that qualified as the happiest day of her life. But it took her a long time to get over the fear that her new life was just temporary. That her grandmother would come back and take her away. Or that one of the foster parents she’d had over the years would materialize to steal her back and put her through hell again.
When she finally allowed herself to feel secure, fate came and stole it all away from her.
Tom heard the tears in her voice even though she maintained a stoic expression as she related her story for him. “And so you became Kaitlyn Two Feathers,” he said, silently urging her to continue.
She smiled at that. “And so I became Kaitlyn Two Feathers.”
“What was your last name before then?” he asked, curious.
She turned her head toward him. “I really can’t remember.” It was true, she really couldn’t. She had absolutely no sense of curiosity when it came to that. She didn’t want to know. “And as far as I’m concerned, I didn’t exist before I was twelve and Ronald gave me a life.”
He made a natural assumption. “Is he the reason you became a cop?” She nodded in response. “He must have been very proud of you.”
He knew how his father had felt about his being part of the force. How he felt about all of them joining up. While Sean had had a father’s natural fears, he was exceedingly proud of all of them.
“He was.” Kait paused for a moment. It was always hard for her to say this. Still hard for her to come to terms with what her reality was. “Like I told you the other day, my father died four years ago. Cancer.”
“And Winona?”
“She was in a terrible car accident less than a year after that. A sports car jumped the divider, plowed right into her.” She pressed her lips together and stared at the ceiling again without seeing it at all. She blew out a shaky breath, trying to steady herself enough to continue. “She never woke up from that. Doctors told me she was brain-dead. I was the only next of kin she had, which meant that I had to be the one who told the doctors to pull the plug and terminate her life support. I struggled with that for a whole week, then realized I was just being selfish, trying to keep her alive for me, not because I honestly thought she could recover.
“I knew in my heart that she wouldn’t have wanted to continue like that, a shell of the woman she’d been. So I said goodbye and told the doctor to turn off the machine.” The sigh that escaped her lips was ragged. “She lived a whole twenty-three minutes after the machines stopped. And then she died.”
Tom thought he’d never heard a voice as sad as Kait’s as she said that.
And then she tried to brighten a little, pushing all the emotions away into a small, invisible container where she kept them locked up. “I’m sure Ronald was waiting for her on the other side. She’d really been only half alive after he died.”
Tom leaned over her and brushed away the tears that zigzagged down the side of her face, staining her cheek and the pillow beneath her. “I am very, very sorry you had to go through that, Kait.”
She took another deep breath. It really didn’t help all that much.
“Yeah, so am I.” She found she had to take a second breath before she could continue speaking. Her throat felt tight and she had to push the words out. She looked at him, trying desperately to regain her equilibrium. “Are you satisfied now?” she added. “Is that a good enough explanation for you about my last name?”
She was in pain, Tom thought, and more than anything, he wanted to absorb that pain, take it away from her. But all he could do was slip his arm around her and draw her closer to him.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated quietly. “I didn’t mean for you to bring up all this pain,” he confessed, then whispered, “Thank you for letting me in,” and he pressed a kiss to her temple.
She curled into him even as she balked at his undoing her. “Don’t be nice to me, Tom. When you’re nice to me, you make me want to cry. And I hate to cry.”
He knew even that admission had been extremely personal for her. “I could kick you if that made you feel better,” he offered.
“Well, what I’d really rather—”
The phone on his nightstand rang, cutting into her thoughts. She turned her head toward it as he reached to answer it.
“What I’d really like,” she concluded, switching directions, “is to pull that damn thing right out of the wall.”
Tom held his hand up, the gesture asking for her silence, as he tried to make out the voice on the other end of the line.
Halfway into the first shaky sentence, he recognized it. It was the clerk from the car-rental agency. Every nerve ending Tom had went on the alert.
“I called like you told me to, Detective. That white van you were asking about? Well, I just saw it. It’s back on the lot.”
Chapter 13
T
he expression on Tom’s face told Kait something was definitely up. If the call had been inconsequential, he would have hung up by now.
Was that Andrew requesting a return audience tomorrow or in the near future? When they’d been there, she’d heard the man talking about throwing another party for Christmas Eve, which was only a few days away.
Kait could hear the clock in her head ticking away the minutes. She’d promised Amanda that she’d have Megan back to her by then.
Or maybe the caller was his Uncle Brian. Maybe the chief of detectives had found out that she was operating on her own out here, without the blessings of Lt. Blackwell. In order for him to have found that out, he had either decided to call her lieutenant to check her out or—
“We’ll be right there. Don’t go anywhere,” Tom ordered sharply.
Kait braced herself, just in case. “We’ll be right where?” she asked, watching his face carefully.
Tom dropped the receiver into the cradle and got to his feet. It was obvious that he’d meant what he said about getting to the unknown destination as quickly as possible.
Picking up his jeans from the floor, he told her, “That was the clerk from the car-rental agency.”
If he hadn’t had her attention before, he did now. Kait scrambled out of bed, taking her cue from him. Her clothes were lying in the doorway.
“At this hour?” she questioned. “Why would he be opened now?” It didn’t make sense. “Who rents a car at close to midnight?”
Tom looked around for the blue pullover he’d worn earlier, before clothing had no longer been an option. Spotting a blue cuff peeking out from under the bed, he pulled the shirt out.
He shook off the dust, pushed his arms through the sleeves and pulled the shirt on. “According to him, he lives near the place and he was out walking his dog when he decided to look in on the lot to make sure nobody had broken in to steal any of the cars.” Dressed, he began to hunt for his shoes. “Not only had no one stolen any of the vehicles, but according to him, the van was back. My guess is that it must have been returned after he closed down tonight.”
Kait was hurrying into her own clothes as she listened. Questions multiplied in her head. Trust was something she usually held in abeyance. “Doesn’t that strike you as a little odd? Bringing the van back when no one was around?”
He knew what she was thinking. That maybe the rental clerk was in on the abduction after all and had just played dumb. But if that were the case, why the improbable story about the van’s sudden return? Why not just have the van returned on someone else’s watch, when he wasn’t on duty?
After turning the thought over in his head, Tom had another explanation.
“Not if you think about it,” he said. He sat down on the edge of the bed and began to pull on the worn pair of boots he’d tugged off earlier. “The guy who took Megan is probably afraid that it’s only a matter of time before someone sees the van and connects him to the abduction. Afraid he’s going to run out of luck, he brings the vehicle back. One less thing to worry about.”
She supposed that made sense. In a way. “Until we get the fingerprints off the inside of the vehicle.”
“We already got those, remember?” he reminded her, thinking of the application form that had been dusted. “The guy’s squeaky-clean.”
The hell he was. “Yeah, a squeaky-clean predator,” she said bitterly. “I’ve been thinking about the case and it seems to me that this has to be a two-man job. Someone to drive the van and someone to grab the girl.” She saw that he was about to voice his doubts and she talked right over him, convinced that she was right.
“Think about it. If he’s the only one, he has to grab the girl, stick her into the van, then run to the driver’s side and drive away. Too risky that way and too time-consuming. Megan was taken from her front yard in broad daylight. There had to be two people involved. And maybe the second guy got careless, left his prints on the dashboard, or the door panel. All we need is one clear print if the guy has a record somewhere.” She looked at Tom, silently asking him to humor her. “It’s all we’ve got.”
He nodded after a moment. What she’d just said made sense. And who knew? Maybe they would finally get lucky with this case.
“You’re right,” he told her. He grabbed his wallet and car keys off the bureau. “Let’s go.”
They arrived at the car-rental agency in record time. A very nervous-looking Clark was pacing back and forth before the dark office. An equally jumpy-looking Chihuahua tethered to a leash kept pace with him.
The moment Clark saw the white Crown Victoria approaching, he tensed, his drawn face looking even more pasty in the light from the streetlamp. It was apparent that he was eager to go home and put all this behind him as quickly as possible.
“It’s back here, I’ll show you,” he offered eagerly, then hurried away without waiting.
“Was there any footage of the van being brought back?” Kait asked. Maybe this time, the man hadn’t kept his face so hidden. If they had a clearer picture to work with, maybe someone would recognize him.
“No, sorry,” Clark said. “Camera broke down right after you left. The boss is real mad. He just got that one on eBay about three months ago. Said you can’t trust anyone these days,” the clerk complained, shaking his head.
“So, no tape,” Tom repeated. He found that just too much of a fortunate coincidence. Entering the lot, they made their way over to the white van. It was the only one there. “Just the van,” he said as they stood in front of it. The vehicle had recently been washed. There didn’t appear to be a speck of dust on it. He frowned. “Probably no fingerprints, either.”