Unspoken (37 page)

Bryce sat down on a bleacher and changed into his running shoes.

Paul jogged over from the track, finishing his warm-up. “You look like you had a bad night.”

Bryce glanced up, but he wasn’t going to touch that comment. “Just things on my mind.” He stretched in preparation for their run, jogged part of the track and back.

“Ann and I,” Paul said as he capped his water bottle, “and a couple of people I trust have been looking over the Bazoni case file on the off chance Charlotte might like to have a conversation one day.”

Bryce nodded. It seemed years since he had hinted to Paul there was a third person still out there.

“Bryce, can you give me something to work with?”

“I can’t. Let’s do six miles today.” Bryce took to the track and set the pace. He appreciated the feel of the track under his feet. And as he ran, he felt his mind begin to clear. For the first time in days he pushed away the problems he was wrestling with, the pain his wife was in, and simply ran. He didn’t want the six miles to end, even though they were both pulling in air and fighting quivering muscles as they passed the last lap.

They cooled down with a half-mile jog, then walked.

Bryce offered a water bottle to Paul, drank down much of a second one himself. “How’s it going with that cold case you and Ann were working on?”

“Baby Connor?”

“Yes.”

“It’s coming along.”

“Good. You should solve that case.” Bryce pushed his water bottle into his gym bag. “I appreciate the run. Give me a call when you want to meet again.”

Ann paused from icing a cookie. Her husband had retrieved a soda from the refrigerator but was simply standing, holding it, the refrigerator door still open, his attention obviously far away. “What is it, Paul?”

“I can’t be one hundred percent sure,” he said thoughtfully as he closed the refrigerator, “but I think Bryce implied this morning that the Bazoni case and baby Connor case are linked. It was deliberate, the way he said it. A six-mile run between my question and his comment, but he was responding to me. I heard him make the connection.”

She put down the knife.

Paul opened the soda. “I mentioned the Bazoni case and asked if Bryce could give me something to work with. He said he couldn’t. A six-mile run later, he told me I should solve the baby Connor case. It’s just hit me—it was deliberate, the way he said it. The way he paused, looked over. It wasn’t a casual comment.”

Ann trusted Paul’s instincts. “Then we pursue it as if they are connected and see where it leads us.” Ann put down the cookie and reached for paper, quickly graphed out the details she remembered on each case. “They were in the same general area, and the time frames overlap.”

Paul leaned against the counter to watch the outline develop. “The baby Connor case gives us a possibility of two men. The Bazoni case gives us two men shot dead. If they
are
connected, it’s the same two men.”

Ann connected them on the sketch.

“Bryce told her not to talk to us about what happened, which suggests there is someone out there Charlotte is still worried about today. We’ve got a caller never identified in the baby Connor case. Same person?”

“The simplest answer is typically the right one. The same person. Someone Charlotte is worried about, and we have his voice on tape.”

“If the cases are linked, we know more about him now. We know he was friends with the cousins who were killed. If Charlotte is afraid of him, he was in the area during those four years.
He had information about where baby Connor was buried. He likely had, and eventually spent, some of the Bazoni ransom money. He received ten thousand from Henry Hewitt.”

“Someone the original cops had on their list and passed over. Or more likely someone the original cops did not have on their list,” Ann guessed. “It’s now a process of finding names and eliminating names.”

Paul drank his soda and looked at the diagram. “Two cases. One group of guys behind both.”

“At least three guys, two of them now dead,” Ann agreed. “We are looking for a man in his forties or fifties now, who knew the two men who held Ruth Bazoni well enough to be involved in that crime, who was considered a local resident to the customers at the Dublin Pub, and who may or may not be a cop. We have his voice on tape, know he probably left the area about the time the Bazoni case ended.”

“A good, workable summary,” Paul said. He tapped the page. “We passed over an obvious point. Charlotte can identify the voice on the Dublin Pub tape. Maybe not his name, maybe not his face, but she can say ‘I know that voice.’ It’s interesting that she hasn’t said that in nineteen years.”

“She needs cops to be looking for that man, can’t risk saying ‘I think he’s a cop,’ so she doesn’t say anything. That leaves the baby Connor case open. Nice tactics when you think about it. She has the cops looking for the man without saying she needs us to find him.”

Paul thought about it. “I’ll buy that.”

Ann studied the picture and sighed. “Paul, it’s Charlotte’s butterfly pin on the blanket. She was the woman involved. It has to be. Her medical records—she broke her wrist about a year before she was rescued. It healed wrong. She tried to protect the baby from being shaken to death. The timeline on the injury fits too.” She bit her lip. “This is more than you catching a hint
of something from Bryce. I think Bryce knows they are linked. I think she told him what happened. We need to talk with her.”

“We ask, she’ll give us a variation of no comment,” Paul replied. “Better to have the conversation when we have something to offer that’s more than speculation. First we identify the voice on that tape.
Then
we talk to Charlotte about baby Connor.”

“Bishop. Come see the sunset.”

Bryce set aside a letter and went to join Charlotte. She made a point to sit on the front steps and watch the sunset nearly every evening. He took a seat beside her, braced with his hands behind him, and stretched out his legs. Thin lines of clouds cut across a wide swath of the blue sky, and the angle of the setting sun had begun to change them to pink. “It’s pretty tonight.”

She nodded, her chin on her crossed arms as she watched the clouds change colors. She hadn’t brought her sketchbook out this evening, which was a bit unusual.

“God’s an artist,” Charlotte said quietly. “He makes sunsets change every evening, created everything from a walrus to a zebra to a parrot, designed dozens of different breeds of horses and dogs, even the leaves on trees and shrubs are in hundreds of different shapes. God is creative and artistic. That’s the one reason I am still willing to wrestle with figuring Him out. He does beautiful work. He doesn’t have failed designs.”

Bryce realized she was opening a door to a topic she rarely discussed. She was right. God didn’t have failed designs. “You’re seeing glimpses of Him through His work all around you. I think you’re an artist because He wanted to share that joy of creating something with you, and He specifically gave you art as a gift so you could share something with Him that those of us who aren’t artists don’t understand.”

“Probably.” She was silent for a minute. “I can’t believe He
created me and then blew the design by letting evil tear it up. I still hold out hope that He can pick up the pieces of me and make something beautiful one day.”

Bryce sat up and rested his hand on her back, rubbing his thumb lightly along her shoulder blade. “You’re still His masterpiece, Charlotte. God’s been fixing broken people ever since sin came into the world. Give Him time. He’s not done. God promises He will work for the good in all things. What happened to you isn’t beyond His ability to recover.”

“I know you keep praying for me, but I don’t find it easy to reconcile what I see about God all around me with what He let happen.”

Bryce understood her dilemma. “Christianity is hard, Charlotte. Men have free will. Men choose to do evil, from Adam and Eve on through time. I know God loves you. Trust what you see. God’s designs are all around you. This is who God is. The fact evil exists speaks far more about man than about God. The Bible says God hates sin. He did not want you to get hurt.”

She nodded and didn’t say anything more. Bryce didn’t know how to help her. She was asked to accept and reconcile a nearly impossible set of two facts—God was good, and she had been badly hurt.

It seemed like the flaw in life, that God had given men the freedom to do good or evil. And yet that freedom, a true free will, was at the heart of what he believed about life. Driven by love, God had created people with a free will, had given people the freedom to decide what they wanted to do, so God could know who wanted to freely love Him back. Most people rejected God and the world turned evil. But in the midst of that, God was still good, He still acted in love in every situation.

Jesus, is there anything else I can say right now that will help?
The prayer circled through his thoughts, but as hard as he
listened—hoping for a Scripture to come to mind, some words that might comfort—he heard only silence. Old hurts, as deep as this one, were the kind mere words didn’t reach.
Help Charlotte feel the fact you love her. The only way she heals is if she gets held by you until the pain fades.

Bryce slid his arm around her shoulders and sat with her until the sunset faded and the breeze picked up. He reached for her hand. “Let’s get some dinner.”

She let him pull her to her feet. “I was thinking I might like to go to the zoo with you sometime. I always get a kick out of watching the kids when they see a giraffe for the first time or when a goat at the petting zoo bumps them to get fed.”

Bryce smiled. “We’ll plan a day of it. I’d love to see the sketches that come out of that excursion. What sounds good to you for dinner?”

“Italian, I think. Maybe spaghetti and meatballs.”

She set the table while he fixed the meal.

“It smells good.” She paused beside him. “Why do you cook for me like you do?”

He blinked at the unexpected question, hesitated before saying what he had guessed some time ago. “Because they made you cook for them.”

She held his gaze for a long moment, then softly smiled and moved to get out the loaf of French bread. “You’re a very nice man, Bryce Bishop.”

“Bryce.”

“Hmm?” Charlotte was curled up on the couch, her feet pulled up under her, with two pillows and his shoulder for a cushion. He pulled his attention away from his book. The movie she’d turned on after dinner had gone to commercial.

“Do you miss life as it was before?”

He thought about it because she asked it as a serious question. “Not a bit, actually.”

“Not even Bishop Chicago?”

“Devon has it well in hand. I used to have ten people depending on me to make good decisions. Now I’ve got around ten million. Using the money wisely matters. I enjoy the job.” He studied her, curious. “Why the question? Are you missing Graham Enterprises?”

“No. I just realized I’m not. I needed the studio. I didn’t realize how big that hole was until I was at the drawing board again. It feels good to be working on the intricate drawings.”

He waited to see if she’d offer another comment, but she fell silent. She was turning her wedding rings. He was learning to read that small tell. “I don’t regret marrying you,” he said quietly.