Authors: Debra Dixon
“The only gift you have, Goldilocks,” Sully told her as he got up, “is curiosity, which leads to poking around in other people’s business and reading refrigerator magnets.”
The tricky part for Sully hadn’t been handling the chief or getting the time off. Munro carried a big stick in Jericho. His money had paid for any number of improvement projects. So sticking close to Iris was easy to sell from a public relations standpoint. If and when Munro was found, the chief was certain he’d be grateful for all the courtesies extended his only daughter.
Calling Utopia and convincing their police chief that probable cause existed to search Jessica Daniels’s residence was the tricky part. Sully mentioned Munro’s disappearance, implying that Jessie was one of a number of potential suspects they were attempting to weed through. Of course he could get a warrant, Sully offered, but they weren’t looking for specific physical evidence, just background information—a place to start their investigations. The lady wasn’t talking. She was hiding something, and it made her look mighty guilty.
Since yesterday John Fields, the Utopia chief, had already managed to find out she’d paid cash for the land and had no visible source of income. He’d met Jessie once or twice and liked her. She was quiet. Her local bank account showed a sizable direct deposit each month from some New York bank account. He couldn’t imagine her being involved in anything like
this. Sure, John agreed, he’d check the residence and phone back.
So, now Sully waited. His “couple of hours” stretched to three before the call came.
“What’d you find, John?” Sully asked as he closed the door of the small office he shared with the other Jericho detective.
“Well, you were right. Ms. Daniels is hiding something all right, but I don’t think it’s got anything to do with the mess you got over there in Jericho. Her last name’s not Daniels.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“This will. We found some old high school yearbooks, and a family scrapbook. She’s Jessica Dannemora. Guess she couldn’t bear to part with everything. Couldn’t bear to be who she was either, so she changed her name.”
Jessica Dannemora
. Sully tried to make some kind of connection to the name and couldn’t. “That’s all? She’s living under an assumed name?”
“Hell, you’re probably not old enough!” John exclaimed. “Lord, I guess it’s been fifteen years ago, maybe more. It was one of the biggest manhunts we ever had in Texas. Every county was beating the bushes when those little girls were kidnapped.”
Sully closed his eyes as dread rumbled through his gut. He could feel the rage already coiling within him. He didn’t want to hear this. But he didn’t have a choice. He had opened Pandora’s box.
Jessie, girl, this is what you don’t want anyone to know, isn’t it?
Her comment about it being sixteen years too late for a guardian angel came back to him.
What happened sixteen years ago?
Puberty
.
Such a snappy answer. Such a horrible reality.
“How old was she?” Sully asked.
“Just short of their thirteenth birthday if I recall.”
Iris’s age. No wonder Jessie came out of retirement
.
“You said, ‘girls.’ Sisters? Friends?” Sully wondered, eyes still shut as he leaned his forehead into the palm of his hand.
“Twins. Identical twins. Jessie and Jenny. From up around Dallas-Fort Worth. Their bastard of a father wouldn’t agree to negotiate the ransom. He had more money than Midas, and he wouldn’t even pretend to pay so the FBI could set up a sting. Made us all sick. He insisted the bureau and local police do their jobs and find those girls. Like we weren’t trying. Can you imagine?”
“No.” Sully thought he might be ill.
“The kidnappers got a little pissed off.” John intentionally understated the situation. “According to Jessie, there were two of them. They killed Jenny, thought it might soften Dannemora up some. Of course, Jessie didn’t wait on her daddy to save her.”
Go to bell, Sully. I don’t need knights or anyone else to rescue me. I take care of myself. I always have
.
“What happened?” Sully opened his eyes and braced himself.
“She killed one of them. Stabbed him and got away. That kid had to have some kind of courage.” John exhaled a breath of admiration. “They kept the girls together for almost two weeks in a dark basement. Windows were bricked in. The place was isolated. Jessie was in there another couple of weeks after they killed her twin.”
I’m not very fond of the dark
.
The image of Jessie, alone and terrified, haunted him. He remembered leaving her in the driveway that night he’d wanted to turn around. Remembered leaving
her after they made love. Never once did she ask him to stay. Jessie wouldn’t. Jessie didn’t expect anyone to come for her or to stay with her. She expected to be alone in the dark.
A tingle crawled up Sully’s spine. She wouldn’t want or need his help in finding Phil Munro. She expected to do everything alone. He remembered the odd phone call from Texacon. The wheels were already in motion; he could feel it. And he’d been stupid enough to let her out of his sight this morning.
That wouldn’t happen again.
Sully had one more question. “What happened to the other kidnapper?”
Sully didn’t take another easy breath until he saw the midnight-blue sedan parked in front of his house. The weight on his chest lifted as he realized she’d at least kept her promise. Until he noted that the car was parked on the street. Jessie was either a considerate house guest or she didn’t want her car blocked in. He grimly guessed the latter.
What do you need your wheels for, Jessie?
He had a guess about that too.
The moment Sully got out of the car, an unexpected shriek of laughter caught his attention. Instead of going up the wooden steps in the front of his house, he traced the sound around to the beach. Stunned, he discovered the normally quiet Iris screaming with laughter and tearing back toward the waves, pursued by three kids, who had to be siblings.
“Doesn’t look much like Iris, does it?” Jessie’s soft voice drifted down from the porch above.
Her vigil didn’t surprise him. He assumed she’d be watching the girl like a hawk. In Jessie’s mind twelve-year-old
girls needed protection. They got abducted and abandoned. Who could fault her logic?
Sully loosened his tie and turned around, staggered as always by his physical reaction to her. Jessie was about as far from maternal as a woman could get. She had on a skimpy little sundress that floated around her body, barely covering the essentials. The late-afternoon sun slanted across her, revealing that she had next to nothing on beneath that dress.
Clearing his throat, he jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “That’s not the somber kid I left with you this morning. What happened?”
“Kids on a beach. Doesn’t take long to make friends. Especially when you’re scared to death and desperately need to be normal for a while.”
Yesterday he wouldn’t have noticed the empathy that underlay her casual explanation, or the hint of sadness in her eyes. Yesterday he didn’t know Jessie’s secret. Today it made all the difference in the world. “What did you do?”
“Nothing.” Jessie leaned against the post and carelessly slung her arms around it like it was an old lover. “The other kids saw her on the porch. Their mom came over. I liked her, and we agreed to take turns watching them.”
“I don’t mean that.” Sully climbed the steps, waiting until he got to the top one before tugging the tie all the way off. Waiting until he was eye level with her before he asked, “What did you do when you needed to be normal for a while? How did you forget that you were Jessie Dannemora?”
Jessica recoiled as if he’d slapped her. The sting was hot and sharp and deeply felt. One by one Sully had managed to uncover her secrets, dragging them out like trophies. He’d had to dig deep for this one. She should have realized a thorough cop like him with connections would figure out a way to get impossible information.
Unless—Involuntarily she cut her eyes toward the beach and Iris. Sully spent time alone with her this morning.
“Iris didn’t say anything,” he assured her, anticipating the unspoken question. “But I take it that she knows?”
“The name. That’s all, I think. It was in that damned file.” Slowly recovering her composure, Jessica added, “I didn’t change my name to Daniels until after I started working for Phil. Dannemora was too recognizable.”
“You sure that was the only reason you changed it?” His voice was so soft, so understanding that she wanted to scream.
God, she couldn’t stand the sympathy in Sully’s eyes. She liked the anger better. She didn’t want pity, didn’t deserve pity. She was alive; Jenny was dead.
“Sully, it’s the past. I’m not that little girl anymore. Let it go. It doesn’t concern us.”
“Oh, yeah. It’s the past, all right. That’s why you put your butt on a plane the minute Iris phoned you. It’s so much in the past that you still can’t stand the dark. You could have taken your name back when you retired, Jessie. But you didn’t. What happened to you is
not
safely tucked away in the past. Not by a long shot!”
“What difference does it make? So, you know my real name? What does that change? How does that make things
different
? How?” She flung the questions at him like rapid-fire challenges, without giving him time to answer.
Part of her wanted to believe that she was more than a quarry to him, but the practical part of her believed Iris. Sully was a hunter seeking prey. Pursuing the truth was what he did; he couldn’t help himself. Sully didn’t care. He wouldn’t
let
himself care. God forbid there should be a chink in his armor.
“Hey, Sully! Look!” Iris called, snapping the tension in the air. “I’ve got friends! I told them you were a cop. They didn’t know that. They didn’t even know you lived here. Don’t you ever go out on the beach?”
They came pelting up—three redheads and Iris, all wearing the official beach uniform of an oversize T-shirt on top of a bathing suit. The new kids’ eyes widened respectfully at the sight of Sully. They started at the toes of his cowboy boots and worked their way up in awe. The fact that he was standing above them only added to the impression that he was a mountain.
Iris didn’t bother with the inspection. “Jessie,
please can I go next door? They have a Jaguar game system. Please. Just for an hour. I’ll be back for dinner. Please.”
Jessica lifted her eyes to Sully’s. An hour ought to just about do it. “Sure. Have Mrs. Hammond wave at me so I know it’s okay.”
The kids were gone so fast, they could have been Saturday morning cartoon characters zipping off in a cloud of animated dust. Kim Hammond came to the door a second after the horde disappeared inside. She was laughing as she waved. Jessica took that as a good sign and waved back.
“Okay,” she said to him as she checked her watch. “You’re on the clock. What do you want to know, Sully? You want the tabloid version? The police version? My father’s version? If you can tell me why any of this makes a difference, then maybe I’ll know what to tell you. Because right now, I don’t have a clue about why you had to poke around and bring this up.”
“Maybe,” he said, eyes narrowing, “I brought this up because I wanted you to know that you don’t have to do this alone anymore.”
Her stomach plunged as if she’d taken a nasty bounce on the highway. “Do what alone?”
“Whatever it is that you think you have to do.”
Jessica walked away, hardening her heart to the sincerity in his voice. She could feel the tears stinging her eyes. This was a bad conversation going nowhere. The only one she could rely on was herself. She couldn’t forget that. Sully didn’t mean it. He couldn’t. He didn’t know everything.
“I changed my mind,” she said curtly. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Why? Because you’re afraid I’ll figure out why you’re doing all this? Why you’re secretly hatching
some plot to save the day and rescue Phil? Is that what you’re afraid of?” Sully asked as she pulled open the screen door. “Like I don’t already know!”
Jessica stopped, goaded into reply. “You don’t know anything.”
“I know this plan of yours has to be some misguided attempt to make up for surviving your sister. It doesn’t take Freud to figure this one out, Jessie!”
“Freud’s the only thing I haven’t tried. You see, I didn’t just survive my sister, Sully. I killed her.”
Stunned, Sully backed up a step, at a loss for words, just as she intended. Then, Jessie disappeared inside the house—queen of the exit line once again. Sully dragged his hand through his hair, tugging at the back a couple of times before he went after her. He found her in the kitchen, calmly washing her hands, or so he thought. Until he saw how tightly she had them gripped as she worked the lather over and around her fingers.
“You want to try that last bit again?” Sully ordered, hanging on to his temper by the thinnest of threads.
“Get a dictionary. Look up the big words.”
Sully jerked her away from the sink, not caring that her soapy hands dripped water over the counter, on the floor, on him. “Save me the trouble. You explain it.”
“What part didn’t you understand?”
“The part about how you could kill, not just your sister, but your
twin
. You got me for a minute, I’ll admit it, but the fun’s over now. I know you, Jessie; I’ve been inside you. I know what you did to protect Iris. You’d give your life for someone you loved.”
Her odd half smile alarmed him, dredging up an emotion very close to fear. She was going to give him
the explanation he demanded, and he wasn’t going to like it.
“One of the men came down into the basement—” She swallowed and turned back to the sink, obviously gathering herself. After she’d rinsed her hands and dried them, she exhaled audibly and faced him again.
“He … uh, he said that our father wasn’t respecting them. And that they were going to have to convince Daddy.” She stopped for a second, rolling her lips together before beginning again. Her voice was so soft, like it came from another place inside her. “They were real sorry, he said, but our dad just wouldn’t talk about paying the money. The guy apologized a couple more times. Really, really sorry, he said. Then, he called my name.
Jessica, come here
.”