Not Without Her Child, page 20
Couldn’t have been easy, growing up that way. Her heart cried for the child he’d been. And opened up wide to the man he’d become.
“What happened?” She had to know. It was a part of him. And the minutes in life they were sharing together...called for everything.
“When arrests failed to bring any kind of peace or satisfaction, he started drinking. Coupled with taking most of his meals in his car on his way to some watch or another, he had a fatal heart attack the year I graduated from college.”
She hugged him. She couldn’t help it. And didn’t get to her tears in time to stop them from dripping to his chest.
“Just like my mom, he wouldn’t listen to anyone else,” he said. “Not from me, naturally, I was a kid for much of the time, but not from his chief or from mandatory counseling either. He didn’t seem to care if his behavior was reckless...”
Her breathing slowed. Her heart rate slowed.
“Like me,” she said.
“Maybe.”
She wanted to reassure him. Her first instinct was to tell him she understood. To promise to try to change her behavior for him. Because that was what working relationships required.
But more, she didn’t want to. And knew she couldn’t.
They weren’t building a lasting relationship.
She already had one of those to which she was fully committed and there would be nothing of her left to give to him if she didn’t do everything she could to rescue Brooke.
Her flesh and blood. The child she’d grown inside her and brought into the world.
“I’m like them,” he said then.
And maybe it wasn’t about her at all.
“How so?”
“My ability to figure out how the pieces fit together, the way I can stick with something, ferreting out even the most minute detail until it all makes sense. My passion for doing so.”
“That’s all good stuff, Brian. Great stuff.”
He knew that.
“It’s why I do what I do. But with a difference. I don’t get emotional about it all. And my goals are realistic. I’m not out to save the world. I’m just out to give as many people as I can the peace that my father couldn’t find. And hopefully save some innocent lives, as my mother was trying to do.”
When tears sprang to her eyes again, she blinked them away. Didn’t want him to know they’d appeared.
They weren’t for him to know.
The feelings behind them weren’t anything he could ever find out.
For both their sakes.
Because she was falling in love with the man and didn’t have a free heart, or a free life, to give to him.
And he wouldn’t want it even if she did.
Loving her, staying in one place to be part of a family, having a real home, would require giving up his life’s purpose, and she’d never ask him to do that.
* * *
Brian felt her tears fall to his chest. They’d started slowly, but came with full honesty after a time. He got the sadness behind them. Related to it. She didn’t speak. He had nothing more to say.
He’d figured out the answer to his problem. Still had no place to file it, but he knew. Brooke’s case was different, the job was unlike any other, and his senses on the job were different because of it.
From the minute he’d seen her in the airport, Jessica had been different.
He’d done kidnappings. A few of them.
Involving young children, too.
He just hadn’t gotten emotional about it all. He’d cared. He always did. On all of his cases, he cared deeply.
But not personally.
And with Jess, from those very first minutes, long before the sex, it had been personal.
He lay awake long after her even breathing told him she’d fallen asleep. He thought about her, about her little girl.
He thought about the case.
He made his plans.
Now that he knew what was going on with him, he could deal with it, handle it. File it away. And when the job was done, maybe he’d take a vacation before jumping right into the next one.
He’d been getting more and more like his father without realizing it. Failing to take time to rejuvenate. To rest.
He’d go away someplace. Lie on a beach or veg out in a suite in a five-star hotel, maybe sip mojitos at a rooftop pool bar.
Plan in place, he slept.
And the next day, he hit the ground running with renewed energy and enough determination to satisfy even him. He had a long interview with the preacher from the church in Lincoln. Left feeling satisfied that if there was any illegal activity going on around him, the man honestly didn’t know any details.
Wayne Bennet certainly had seen no evidence of any human traffickers, nor was he aware of any little children in the area who hadn’t been born to their parents, though he wasn’t nearly as hopeful when it came to drug trafficking.
Brian wasn’t much concerned about a drug connection. As deeply as he was looking into the kidnapping and Clint Johnson’s life, there’d been no evidence, other than a phone out of a batch of five hundred, that told him he should be.
No longer having to worry about Jess’s immediate safety with a possible lurker on the loose ready to hurt her, he found it immensely easier to keep his emotions in check where she was concerned. Until bed Wednesday night.
But there they just had incredible sex, and those emotions he’d already approved.
Thursday wasn’t quite as free from distraction for him. All day long, as he worked, he was aware that if he didn’t find the missing pieces within the next twenty-four hours, Jess would be meeting virtually with Clint again.
And have some whatever clue to go running after.
A hint that could likely lead to more danger for her.
He couldn’t prove that Clint had deliberately sent Jess to a place he knew to be housing illegal arms, one that was owned by a suspected madman.
But based on her ex’s behavior, over their entire marriage, he just didn’t see Clint giving Jess up. The man knew she’d hired someone to help her, which, he saw clearly now, would only escalate Clint’s narcissistic need to be the one who controlled her.
The one she felt she needed most.
He’d do whatever he could to remind her that he was the only one who had her answers. And to scare her into staying in line with his wants and needs.
The four hundred dollars she’d been depositing each month in his commissary account was proof enough to him of what the man could make her do.
He wanted to believe that Clint was the only source of his tension. Tried not to think about the tender way he and Jess had come together the night before, as though something about their joining was brand-new. He mostly succeeded.
He ordered in her favorite Chinese chicken salad for lunch, enough for two, and took hers in to her. She’d been on the phone and typing on her computer at the same time.
The look of concentration on her face, the confident, somewhat excited tone of her voice, had him turned on all over again.
He was still in recovery mode half an hour later when his own phone rang.
Hudson Warner.
The IT expert had managed to uncover the IP address where messages sent from the prison through a dark web app had landed—outside the prison. Hudson couldn’t prove, as of yet, who had sent them. Only that they’d come from the IP address of a computer in the prison library that was there for inmate use.
But he knew the IP address where they finally landed—and were opened.
The expert who’d been working the case was using the same technical in to decode messages and would be sending them along as soon as she had anything readable.
Madder than hell, at himself first and foremost, for not seeing it, Brian hung up and dialed Anderson.
Chapter 24
The bell signaling the end of Brooke’s business day had barely rung when Brian appeared at her office door. That fact alone alerted her. Other than bringing her food, and sitting on her floor during her calls with Clint, the man never stepped foot inside her office.
Showing her a respect Clint hadn’t been able to do.
The way Brian’s nose was flaring, in conjunction with the visible tension in his jaw, had her standing slowly. Heart pounding.
“What?”
“We need to get to the police station,” he said, and she grabbed her bag, followed him out the door and down the hall as he continued. “Hudson found where the prison messages were being sent. He uploaded several of the messages to Anderson’s secure server...”
She was dying there, hardly breathing as she hurried after him. Needing to know everything at once, hardly able to take in what he was saying.
“Do we know where Brooke is?” That was all that really mattered.
“No.”
She nodded, still slightly behind him, looking at the side of his face. Keeping her gaze on him as though he could pull her through whatever came next.
“The messages were being sent to Bonnie Lichen.”
One foot followed the other on the floor, but her knee, more jelly than joint, buckled. Brian’s hand under her elbow grabbed her, supported her, all without slowing them down.
“Turns out she was visiting her grandmother in Lincoln today and Anderson has her in custody. He’s going to allow you to watch the interview.”
“He is?” Shocked, she found her own strength to hurry out to her SUV. “I can’t believe he’d do that. I’m grateful but...” She glanced at Brian. “You asked him for the favor, didn’t you?”
He shrugged, pulled the handle on the driver’s door and sank down. “I would have,” he admitted as he pushed the button to open the garage door and started the engine. “But he said he thought you needed to hear what she had to say.”
“What?” New fear filled her. Stabbing at her stomach. Her chest. “What’s she going to say?”
“I honestly don’t know.” Brian kept his gaze on the backup camera, and then the road as they sped away from her house. She couldn’t get him to look at her. “He’s seen the messages. I haven’t yet,” he finished.
He’d talked to Anderson, though, and clearly the news wasn’t joyous. No way Brian wouldn’t have caught on to that just by talking to the detective.
“We know she didn’t have Brooke at her apartment.” He dropped the words softly. Trying to prepare her?
Didn’t he get yet that she wouldn’t let her mind see a picture of her baby girl being anything but loved?
Using every ounce of determination and strength she had, pulling from reserves deep inside herself, she managed to keep hope alive as she went to find the answers she’d been seeking for eighteen agonizing months.
* * *
They had the small viewing room to themselves, door closed to shut out anything going on in the hallway. Standing at the one-way window, waiting for the audio to be turned on so they could hear the interview that was about to start in the room they could see but from which they could not be seen, Brian felt Jessica’s fingers slide into his.
It wasn’t a business thing, standing there with hands interlocked. And it wasn’t a sex thing either. He didn’t pull away from her, though.
The case would end. Maybe even yet that night.
Releasing her from the void that prevented her from living.
And he’d be released, too, from the hold her need had on him. He’d move on to the next case. And pray that he never ran into another Jessica Johnson.
He didn’t ever want to have to say goodbye to someone like her again.
Her body pushed into his, not so much leaning on him as holding them together. He could only imagine how painful the passing seconds were on her.
“He’s reading her her rights,” he said in case knowing what was going on made it any easier.
She nodded. So did Anderson, at the officer standing in the corner of the room.
The woman reached for a switch on the wall and Anderson’s voice filled the room. “You lied to the private investigator who came to see you earlier this week, Bonnie.”
The young woman was in clothes similar to the day they’d seen her. Gym shorts, a short, tight T-shirt and tennis shoes. Her hair, blond and long, like Jessica’s, hung in her eyes.
“No, I didn’t.”
“We know that you’ve been messaging with Clint Johnson as recently as last week.”
“So? Clint didn’t know I was sending those text messages to his ex-wife. And he didn’t have nothing to do with me buying the phone either. He didn’t even know I had it.”
Brian’s circulation was nearly cut off as Jessica’s fingers squeezed so tightly he half expected a bone to break.
“This isn’t about the text messages you sent to Jessica Johnson, Bonnie.”
“Then what is it?” she asked. “It’s not illegal for someone to message with a person in prison. Clint told me, and I looked it up, too.”
“It is when the prisoner isn’t following the laws for prisoner communication.”
She looked down. Bit her lip.
“Clint said he was the only one who could get in trouble for that. I wasn’t doing nothing wrong.”
Other than the stinging she was creating in his hand, Jessica hadn’t moved. He wasn’t even sure if she’d blinked.
Listening intently, he wasn’t sure he had. What in the hell had been in those messages? And why wasn’t Anderson grilling her about Brooke?
Where was Jessica’s baby?
Had the detective forgotten they were working a kidnapping case?
Anderson had said he’d thought it best for Jessica to hear firsthand what Bonnie had to say...
He had to remember...yeah, he was Jess’s personally hired detective, but Brooke...and Jessica...had been Anderson’s case for a whole lot longer than Brian had been around. He suspected Jessica had become personal to the city detective, too. He’d bowed to the other man’s wishes.
“Where’s the baby, Bonnie?”
There. Right there. That’s what they needed. Brian stared down the woman in custody as though he was the one interrogating her. Didn’t matter that Bonnie Lichen couldn’t see him through the glass.
“I don’t know anything about a baby!” The young woman’s eyes opened wide. Imploringly. “I told that private detective. Clint never said nothing to me about having a baby.”
Clint. Like she knew him well. Personally.
Not like she was a mere accomplice in a human trafficking or disposal deal.
He should have caught the nuance immediately. Would have if he hadn’t been so busy seeing Clint from his ex-wife’s point of view. From the feelings Jessica portrayed toward Clint.
“The man kidnaps his own child. He comes to you in Lincoln that very first day. Eats in your restaurant. You saw him at least three times after that...”
Three times? He glanced at Jessica. Stone-faced, she stared through the glass. They knew of two other times, three total, in the diner...
“...and yet you know nothing about the baby. Tell me, how does that work?”
Bonnie’s expression broke down. Her lips trembled and she started to cry. To sob.
The truth was coming. Brian wasn’t ready to hear it. He knew Jess wasn’t ready. Just like he knew he couldn’t do a thing to change any of it. Not his mom. His dad. Not Brooke. Or the fact that he and Jess were on different paths in life and soon to say goodbye.
The news was coming and he’d have to leave her to the people in her life to console her shattered heart.
Because to stay would bring her more heartache in the long run. He wasn’t a “have kids” family kind of guy.
But he put his arm around her, pulling her close, half holding her up, as Bonnie gathered herself enough to be able to speak.
“I swear to you.” She looked straight at Anderson, her tone strong in spite of the thickness due to tears. “I had no idea he even had a kid, let alone that he’d kidnapped her. I just found out when that detective and... Clint’s ex...went to my gram’s house. On my grandmother’s life, I did not know. That first day, in the café, he just... I don’t know, something about him got to me. He was so...lost. Kind and polite and...needy. He was so grateful for every little thing I did to tend to him...”
Jessica’s body leaned further into his. A glance at her face told him that if her emotions had been in cold freeze seconds before, they no longer were.
“I don’t know... I just felt for him. So I slipped him my phone number. He called that night and we talked for hours.”
“Where was he?”
“In some motel...in Barneysville. He said he was from Missouri and was in Barneysville on business. Doing a job. He’s an IT guru.”
Jessica started. He glanced over at her. “Charita...one of the women I talked to when I was selling Brain Play Toys...she’s from there...”
“That night when he called, what did you talk about, Bonnie?” Anderson’s next question came sternly.
“His ex-wife. That Jessica woman that the detective brought to my house. Clint gave her everything he had, worked multiple jobs, spent his whole life trying to please her, but she became like this workaholic. She’s a stockbroker or something, and hoarded her money. Clint told me how money meant more to her than anything—even him—and when he lost his job, she divorced him. He was just so...lost...and so I told him to come back to the café the next day, and he did, and he called me again that night, and came the next day, too. I stayed in the back, mostly, when he was at the café, so that Gram didn’t get suspicious. I knew she didn’t like him, because he was kind of off, but I knew why and...”
“The baby, Bonnie. Get to the baby.”
“I...don’t...know...anything...about...no...baby.” The young woman grit her teeth on that one. Then hiccupped and shook her head. “I swear to God. If I’d known he’d kidnapped a kid, no way would I have—”
