He leaned back, thinking about her and the sentimental notecard, as well as the somewhat bizarre letter to the Montgomerys, apparently one of several. Well-established criminal profiles fit these two. Forced to hide from the world, they found peculiar ways to connect with it.
The only physical link he had between little Ann and grown-up Erin was the bear, if it was the same one. Hers was handmade. When he got the visuals back from Doris, he was going to compare old Pinky to the bear in the photo, examining the stitching on both under the digital microscope. Old photos printed from high-quality studio negatives often provided more detail than pixels.
That could be interesting.
But the case couldn't be resolved once and for all without DNA testing. That would have to be up to her andâHugh Montgomery. Bannon stopped writing and looked up at the painting of horses on the wall, letting his gaze move to the sketchbook she was currently filling up. Erin and Montgomery were getting to know each other, but that didn't mean Montgomery was going to hand over a sample of his oh-so-blue blood just to satisfy Bannon's curiosity.
He allowed himself a minute or so of idle speculation. Had Montgomery commissioned the portrait of his best stallion because he liked Erin's work, or because parental instinct was kicking in? Impossible to verify. He would do better to stick to the facts.
He wrote down the rest of the evidence, what there was of it, and pondered every item one by one, looking for connections, covering the paper with arrows pointing to this or that detail, circles around the important stuff, underlining and crossing out. What a mess. But then he'd never worked a case where the clues were nice and neat and everything seemed to make perfect sense. Life was sloppy. Evidence was worse. In a case this old, it was apt to be skimpy, contaminated, or simply nonexistent.
There was one very big question remaining, and he had no information whatsoever to help him answer it. The more he thought about it, the more curious he became. Where was Luanne Montgomery?
Doris hadn't said. Maybe she didn't know. But just about anyone could be found these days. Even when they didn't want to be.
He sat back, legal pad in his lap, thinking about the identity of the young woman now sleeping in his bed. What he knew and what he could prove were two different things, but they were drawing closer.
Bannon flipped the scribbled-up sheet over to the other side of the pad and jotted one more question on the fresh sheet of paper.
Is Erin Randall really Ann Montgomery?
The final proof would have to be ironclad. He couldn't jerk Erin around with a lot of theories and conjecture. What to say to her on the subjectâhe honestly didn't know.
In abduction cases, psychologists and social workers usually dealt with the families, taking over from the cops and detectives. The longer the separation of the victim and relatives, the longer the resolution took. Bannon knew that the reactions varied. Shock. Guilt. Anger. A flood tide of other emotions and a river of tears.
Some got through it and came out okay, when everything had been pieced together and the dust settled. People coped somehow, went on with their lives, got through the days.
What would happen to Erin when she found out where she really came from? He flipped back to the sheet of paper covered with complicated scribbles, reading it over. Lies inside of lies. Betrayals and selfishness. She had been an innocent child then and she still knew nothing of the deception that had changed her life forever.
Lucky you
, he said to himself.
You get to tell her. You owe her that.
The past couldn't be fixed, no matter what. The future was what counted. He wanted to share that with her. But this wasn't the right time to ask for a lot of things she wasn't going to be able to give.
He heard the bedroom doorknob turn very quietly and looked up to see her come into the room. Casually, he put the legal pad aside. No time to slide it under a cushion or crumple up the paper.
Bannon drank in the sight of her.
Sleepy. Hair messed up. Wearing an oversize T-shirt and leggings. A faint sheen of something that smelled great from where he was made her rosy skin gleam. His breath caught and his pulse quickened.
He couldn't bring himself to tell her what he had been working on, swearing mentally that he would do it in the morning.
“How come you're still awake?” she asked.
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“The light under the door woke me up.”
“Sorry about that.”
She frowned at him and walked over to the sofa, sitting a cushion away from him. She leaned back and yawned, then rubbed her eyes.
“Anything on TV?”
Bannon reached for the remote and handed it to her. “No idea. Check the cable menu.”
She leaned over to take itâand startled him with a bold reach over his thigh to get the legal pad. For more than one reason, Bannon tensed.
“Writing poetry?” she teased.
“Ah, no.” He was doomed.
“What is all this? Mind if I look at it?”
“No. It's time you knew,” he said resignedly.
“What?”
He got up and went into the kitchen. “Just go ahead and read. Then I'll explain. I should have told you everything as soon as I knew.”
Bannon poured himself a shot and tossed it down. This wasn't going to be easy.
CHAPTER 18
E
rin was too stunned to speak when he stopped his explanation halfway through. He began to apologize instead and realized she wasn't listening.
She stared straight ahead, her hands in her lap. She'd torn off the sheets of paper and held on to them. Now she let go. They drifted to the floor in front of her.
“Why didn't you tell me sooner?”
That simple question hit him like a steel dart, center circle. “I didn't know enough. Maybe I should have.”
She didn't say anything more for a little while. “So. What now?”
“I'm not sure. Things are happening fast. You start turning over rocks and things crawl out.” He gestured toward the boxes that Kelly had sent from the TV station. “Once the story hit the airâ”
“That was your idea, right?” She pressed her lips together.
“Yeah.”
Now he regretted it. He'd wanted to get the ball rolling, gain momentum before the chief could deep-six the Montgomery files and find a way to fire him at the same time. He'd had no idea that things would turn out the way they had.
“Have you looked at any of that stuff yet?” Erin asked shakily.
“No. It just came. I did review the e-mails Kelly forwarded at first. But the stuff in those boxes came in to the station later.”
“Who else knows what you know?”
He hesitated for a few seconds. “Are you asking if anyone else thinks you're Ann?”
“Yes.” Her reply sounded far away.
He wondered if she meant Hugh Montgomery. It was still hard for him to imagine that the two of them might be so closely related.
But Bannon hadn't been at the stable when she'd met him for the first time. If he ever got a chance to observe how the old man acted around Erin, another piece of the puzzle might fall solidly into place. What father wouldn't recognize his own child? An age-progression image created by a studio technician could be way off the mark, but not a parent's memory.
Which begged a lot of questions.
Uneasily, he reminded himself of the distinct possibility that there was evidence out there he didn't have, evidence that could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Erin was Ann, even without DNA testing. This case had it all. Family secrets. Money. People went to dangerous extremes to keep both.
“Well?”
The single word jolted him out of his thoughts. “It could be that someone else thinks that besides me. Exactly whoâI can't say for sure.”
“I could guess.”
She didn't add anything to that blunt remark and he soldiered on. “The truth is going to come out.” He hesitated. “Look, Erin, I didn't know what I was getting into. It's not like I was assigned to the caseâI just got interested. And one thing led to another.”
“Interested in what? Can you be more specific? This is my life we're talking about.”
He picked up on the edge in her voice.
Tread carefully
, he told himself. He hadn't planned on telling her anything until he was absolutely sure. But when she'd come out of his bedroom and latched onto that legal pad, he hadn't had a choice. If she hadn't, would he have been able to look her in the eye and keep his suspicions to himself much longer? Not if her safety was at stake. He took a deep breath.
“Erin, when we were first getting to know each other, you told me some things about your family that seemed a little strange to me.”
“Like what?”
“The brother who died before you. The baby pictures you didn't have. The way you grew up so isolated. Those things fit a pattern. We're trained to look for them.”
“Right. You're a detective. Why do I want to forget that?”
“Sometimes I wish I could myself.” His voice was level. “I don't want this to come between us.”
“Too late now. Keep going.”
“I minded my own business. More or less,” he amended. “Then something cropped up that didn't fit a pattern at allâthe notecard that said âgirl of gold.'”
“You mean the one in my scrapbook? What about it?”
He nodded. “I didn't think anything of it. Until Doris happened to see the same three words in a letter she found in the Montgomery files.” He paused, gauging the effect of what he was about to say on Erin. “An anonymous letter. From a woman who called herself, quote unquote, Ann's new mother.”
Erin's brow furrowed slightly. “âGirl of gold' is just a phrase. It must be from a poem or a song.”
“I couldn't find it online anywhere. So I took the cardâokay, sorry.” He held up his hands in a placating gesture at her furious look. “You asked me to go over and walk the dog.”
“I didn't ask you to snoop,” she said heatedly.
“Well, after Doris told me about the letterâlook, I knew it was wrong and I take full responsibility. I wanted to examine the card under a digital microscope. It was from a store, you're right about that. But the calligraphy inside was done by hand. I haven't had a chance to compare it to the writing on the letter.”
He gave her a sideways look, about to confess all and dreading it. Erin was staring straight ahead, not at him.
“When I took the card, I photocopied your birth certificate to do a document check, compare dates, that kind of thing. Routine.”
“Is it?” she snapped. “I don't remember you asking my permission. I don't even remember the certificate being in the scrapbook.”
“It slipped out from behind the card. Took some doing to track down what I wanted to know. The hospital where you were born shut down years ago. So I went to the new oneâ”
“And flashed your shiny badge at some dumb clerk.”
Good guess. It didn't seem like the right time to mention the fifty he'd flashed too. “Erin, I knew it was forged the second I saw your brother's birth certificate. And when I found a translation for the Latin words on the fake sealâ”
“Truth is the daughter of time.” She fell silent. “That rings true. My father liked puzzles. The harder the better.”
“How well did he know Latin?”
She gave an infinitesimal shrug. “He could read it. He taught me a little.”
“Were you familiar with that phrase?”
“No. I only learned a few words. Nothing like that.” Her face was beginning to crumple with strain. “So what else did you find out?”
“Not much. I don't have a theory about how you were taken from your house and I couldn't truthfully say who did it. There wasn't a whole hell of a lot of evidenceâpractically none, if you want to knowâand the reports in the files didn't speculate.“
“And you're sure I was taken. That I'm not Erin Randall.”
It wasn't a question or a statement. More like an expression of profound pain. Her gaze moved involuntarily to the stacked boxes, as if the answer to all her questions was buried somewhere deep inside.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “As sure as I can be without DNA evidence.”
Erin turned to look at him. The piercing vulnerability in her blue eyes was almost too much for him to bear. “That's going to be tough. My parentsâor the people I thought were my parentsâdied three years ago.”
“I know that.” He wasn't going to go into how DNA could still be obtained. Some other time. Let someone else tell her.
“But someone who knew themâknew meâmight have seen the broadcast.”
“That computer-generated image didn't look like you at all.”
She shook her head. The movement made a couple of tears fall. Erin scrubbed them away viciously. “That doesn't matter. You said the case was all over the news back in the day. Somebody knew my parents from beforeâsomebody might have figured out who I was. My mother had two sisters.”
That fact distracted him for a moment. “Do you remember anything about them?”
“The aunties? Not their names. Just their old photographs. I was so young. I don't remember meeting them, if that's what you mean. I think one died and the other drifted away.”
“Oh.”
Erin's voice dropped to a bitter whisper. “But someone else might have noticed or guessed and didn't say anything.”
“Like who?”
She shrugged, but the gesture was far from nonchalant. “My parents weren't always that isolated,” she added. “So I'm thinking a distant neighbor or former friend. Someone who believed in minding their own business,” she added acidly.
He reached out to reassure her with a touch, but she jumped up and walked away from him. She ran a finger along the packing tape on the top of one of the boxes, making a thin indentation in the plastic without slitting it.
Bannon wished he could make the damned boxes disappear. “Erin, most of those messages aren't going to pan out. People just want to be on TV or they're hoping to get paid for information or something. I'll consider myself lucky if I find one truthful reply in ten thousandâ”
She whirled and pointed an accusing finger at him. “How would you know what's true and what's not? It's me they're talking about. My life. What's left of it.”
“Don't talk like that.”
Erin crossed her arms. He had the feeling she was fighting the urge to attack him physically. “Do you have any idea what it feels like to find out that everything about yourself is a lie?”
“No.”
Â
The silent standoff that ensued lasted for over an hour. She paced. He set his jaw against the pain of a world-class headache, found some paperwork to do, and let her walk it off. Even the dog kept his distance, settling his body against a wall and keeping his head up to watch both of them.
Bannon wished she would go into the kitchen and smash dishes. Or scream it out. She had incredible self-control. Or maybe she had just gone numb.
Finally she sat, glancing once more at the sealed boxes. “Did you tell that reporter aboutâ”
“No,” he interrupted curtly. “And I don't intend to. Ever. You're in charge from here on in when it comes to that. Kelly will probably contact me at some point, but I don't have to say anything.”
“Good. Thanks.”
Bannon looked up at her. He had detected the slightest possible softening in her tone. Not forgiveness. Call it a cessation of outright hostility.
“Right now, none of that is important. I don't have all of the answers, and I don't need them. We have other things to think about. I put you at risk. Now I have to keep you safe.”
“We?” Erin looked down at her hands, which twisted nervously in her lap. “I know you were trying to protect me, Bannon.”
He might have blown that. Big time. He had something to say and he had no idea how she would take it. “First things first. You can't go back to that house, Erin. Ever.”
“I don't want to,” she whispered. “But there's a lot of stuff still there that I needâdid you think about that?”
“Of course we did. Linc and I disconnected the computer and peripherals and took it all with us. Plus a whole lot of other stuff. We stashed a bunch of boxes at his place. You could hide out there if you wantedâI don't think you're safe with me, to be honest.”
She shook her head. “No. I said it once and I'll say it again, I'm not going to keep running.”
Bannon could understand that. And she had a point. Wherever she went, she could be found.
The condo building was no fortress. There were no guards or doormen on the entrances or exits, and the doors were hollow-core junk. One kick and they'd splinter. There were decent locks on his, though, that he'd installed himself.
Charlie was serious protection, but he wasn't enough. Linc could set up new electronic security inside Bannon's placeâoh, hell. He couldn't lock her up night and day.
He looked at her. She was silent.
Shut up and think, Bannon.
He reminded himself that he was up against the chief of police, who seemed to be hooked up with the psycho who'd appeared in Linc's monitor for less than a second before the vidcam had been torn out. Bannon was grateful Erin hadn't seen that face. She'd been terrorized enough for a lifetime.
At least they had that to go on. But Linc would have to pull off a miracle of pixel enhancement on an image from the vidcam feed or they would have no way of identifying him.
“You know what the worst part is?”
He snapped to attention. There was a world of hurt in her voice.
“Even if my parentsâthe Randallsâtook me when I was too young to know better, that still doesn't make me a Montgomery.”