Not Without Her Child, page 6
“‘Butterflies are free.’”
The thirty-sixth clue. He typed. And words burped out of him. “She was six months old when he took her. Maybe he gave her some chocolate. Chocolate milk. Or a tiny piece that would melt in her mouth. A lick of chocolate ice cream.” It hurt, sitting there, with her actually allowing herself to hope that her ex still had some kind of contact with her daughter, after fifteen months in prison.
Clint Johnson was a brutal man.
“Babies don’t get milk until they’re a year old.”
The man had kidnapped a baby. Giving her some milk before she should have it didn’t seem like a stretch. Brian kept that thought to himself.
And burned to find out what disgusting move in Clint’s insidious game he’d just delivered. How chocolate fit in to the big play.
“‘Wrinkles are good.’”
He typed.
“‘It’s better when it’s warm.’”
She hadn’t looked up from her journal. But each time he’d finished typing, she read again.
“‘A good book.’”
He entered in the twelfth of the fifteen clues.
“I believe he knows that Brook likes chocolate.”
Brian’s gaze flew to hers. She held on with her core of steel. Bobbing her head slightly, she said, “He knew he had to give me something more today. I told him I didn’t trust him and if he had any hope of getting me to continue playing his game, he had to give me something.”
He hadn’t heard those words but... “When he talked about you understanding someday, and thanking him...”
Her gaze softened. “Yeah. He knows me well enough to be able to play me, but he knows me well enough to know when I’ve had all I can take, too.”
Brian believed her about that. Believed that there was some real way that chocolate had played a part in Clint’s plan.
And try as he did, sitting there, meeting her look for look, he couldn’t find an ounce of him that believed Clint had any way of knowing what Brooke liked or didn’t like in present day.
He knew, when Jessica looked away, that he’d disappointed her.
“‘The only one.’” She read, as though part of a lecture.
Back at his spreadsheet, Brian entered the next every fourth clue, wondering if he’d ever been on a more difficult job. Didn’t think so.
“‘Singing in the air.’”
The clacking of his typing keys reverberated in that room like firecrackers.
“‘The rising star.’”
Jessica picked up a pen and wrote on the page from which she’d been reading, saying, “And she likes chocolate.”
The sixty-fourth clue, the first time the words had been personal to the baby, falling on the week of Brooke’s birthday.
The man’s attention to detail, his plan, was diabolical.
But he had limitations. And those were Brian’s tools for success. With a couple of clicks, Brian incorporated information, sent it to a new page, and turned his computer toward Jessica.
“Smart, narcissistic people—and Clint, while not clinically diagnosed, exhibits signs of being such—are largely incapable of reflective thinking. That being the case, they sometimes work in patterns. A clear A, B, C, D that makes sense to them. Gives them a sense of control over a situation, as they’re the only one who knows the pattern. The only one with the complete puzzle.”
Mouth open, Jessica looked at his computer screen but then straight back at him. “How do you know this?”
“I’ve spent years studying people, studying their actions. I have to get in their heads in order to figure out their actions,” he told her. Then added, “And I made a call this afternoon to Sierra’s Web’s psychiatric expert, Kelly Chase.”
Her attention turned to the spreadsheet on his screen.
“When I was looking for patterns, I kept coming up with the number four.” Brian leaned in closer, more to get his point across than anything else. He had to prove to her that she could rely on him to get the job done.
Because he had to get the job done. Not because it was his job, but because it was eating at him. Hearing Clint Johnson, seeing the man’s seemingly genuine confidence, his ability to play all the right emotions to get what he wanted... Brian couldn’t walk away from it.
As he opened his mouth to begin his next sentence, a flash hit him, almost literally, like a blinding light behind his eyes. Except that he could still see information on his computer clearly. Was still in the room on the job.
And he was twelve again. What he’s doing to their minds, the way he controls them... I can’t let him get away with it. I can get this guy...
A couple of seconds was all it took. He blinked and it was gone.
But not forgotten.
* * *
Brian’s intensity captivated Jessica, maybe escalated by the warmth of his nearness as he drew closer to her, pointing to the first heading across the top of his chart.
“Look at the timing,” he said, his voice vibrant. “He took her the fourth day of the week. He was missing for four days before he suddenly turned up at home, claiming to have been fishing...”
Claiming he didn’t know anything about Brooke’s disappearance. Crying with her those first couple of days, comforting her as they grieved, worried and waited together.
Until his alibi hadn’t panned out—a fluke that the river he’d claimed to have been camping beside had been dammed up in the area due to a sewage backup five miles away.
“He insists on an in-person visit every fourth week,” Brian noted.
“Why not two? Or three?” she said aloud what she’d wondered many times, nodding. Nerves on full alert, flooding with emotions, she sat forward. Skimmed other facts on the chart.
Their meetings were at four o’clock. Clint had asked four things of her. Weekly visits, one in person visit the fourth week of every month, that they meet alone, and that she share her daily life with him when they met.
When he eventually confessed to the kidnapping, he’d said the same four things over and over. Brooke was in a better place. He didn’t know where she was. He didn’t know who had her. And he didn’t kill her.
That column didn’t feel right to her. Clint had had a lot to say, ardent in his message, eager for her to hear him. And yet, when she thought back, all he’d ever said before and during the trial, to her, to detectives, on the stand, amounted to those same four facts.
“It’s possible that I’m fitting things into a pattern that doesn’t really exist,” Brian said as she continued to silently study the screen. “I have to start somewhere, and this feels like the place,” he continued. “So what I wanted you to do was take a look at every fourth clue, in a list by themselves, and see if, by themselves, they say anything to you.”
Yes, yes! Oh God, let them say something...
Her gaze glued to that last column, she read quickly. Then again, more slowly. A third, fourth and fifth time. Despair showing up again, but not completely taking over.
“Let’s start with ‘a good book,’” Brian read one of the more recent clues. “Did you read to Brooke?”
She nodded. Spoke through a dry throat. “Every night.”
“Did she seem to have a favorite book?”
“Bear Bellies.” She named it immediately. A story about bears with symbols on their bellies. “My stepmother read it to me as a kid,” she said, trembling.
“Did Clint take it? Have you seen it since Brooke’s disappearance?” The intensity in Brian’s tone surged through her. Keeping hope alive.
And then reality sucked everything back out of her. “It’s still here,” she said, not mentioning that she’d spent innumerable nights in her baby girl’s room, in the rocking chair, reading the book aloud to herself before bed in the past fifteen months.
Because it calmed her. Made her feel peaceful enough to go to her bed in the spare room and lie down.
She did what she had to do to keep going.
One of the things no one needed to know.
“I need to see it.” Brian didn’t seem at all deterred. “To study it. If, as I’m theorizing, these fourth clues are the ones with real significance, there could be something in that book...or about that book...”
Heart leaping, she turned to him. “He could have bought it for her after he took her,” she said. “If she was fussy, he knew the book, had read it to her. He’d think it would calm her down.”
She grabbed her phone. Pushed two for Anderson. Told him about the book. Asked if he could check bookstores in the areas they’d been able to trace Clint’s truck through gas receipts and see if he’d purchased the book. And purposely added that Brian Powers had been instrumental in bringing up the question. With a sigh, but good cheer, the man said he would look into it.
Not that the book alone was going to do anything for them all those months later. At best, it helped to show what they already knew—that Clint had had Brooke after her disappearance. Even if only for long enough to hand her off. But if it panned out, if they found a bookstore with the book purchased during the four days after Brooke’s disappearance, there was a possibility of surveillance footage in the store or the area. Maybe even a bookstore clerk they could find and question.
Someone who’d seen Clint with another adult. A woman who was keeping Brooke safe...there could be a picture of her that they could show around, find someone who knew her, who knew where she lived, knew if she had a two-year-old living with her.
Or...even if there was no surveillance, no clerk...
“If they find any evidence that Clint purchased a book during those four days...not that he’d used his credit card, of course, we already know he didn’t since we have all of those records...but searching by the book’s title...if there was a cash transaction for that book, when Clint’s truck was in the area...”
“Then you can reasonably assume that there’s some basis of reality in at least one of the clues Clint has given you,” Brian finished for her, his tone, the seeming satisfaction there, drawing her eyes to him.
He didn’t say anything more. Didn’t move toward her. Wasn’t touching her. But those hazel eyes, they seemed to be doing it all, talking to her, drawing her in, wrapping her in warmth and, for a long moment there, she let them.
Chapter 8
The gun had been fired.
Back at his temporary apartment Friday evening, eating lo mein and honey-walnut shrimp out of cartons, Brian had just settled back into full focus on his computer screen in his makeshift kitchen office when he got the call from Anderson.
“Since the weapon’s been sitting for so long, there’s no way to tell if it was fired before or after Brooke Johnson’s disappearance,” Anderson continued as soon as he’d delivered the news in lieu of hello.
Brian’s expletive didn’t escape his lips. “Was it loaded?”
“Yes.”
“Fully?”
“There were two empty chambers.”
Anyone who could shoot a...
No, he wasn’t going there. He was going to find the truth. “What’s the seller, Blake Redmond, say about it?”
“Can’t find him. Which is why I’m calling you. Does tracking this guy down fit within the scope of your employment?”
That was up to him. He decided what would or would not lead him to Brooke. “Absolutely.” Jessica wouldn’t like it. She’d understand, though. “What’s his last-known whereabouts?”
Anderson rattled off an address for an apartment complex in a small town an hour outside Fayetteville. And an out-of-date website for an online hunting goods store that Redmond had managed before driving a truck. Brian agreed to take it from there.
And called Jessica. He’d left her studying the sixteen clues they’d pulled out of the list Clint had given her. Her stated intention had been to spend the evening brainstorming each one, to see if anything came to mind, as the storybook had. All but the chocolate one she’d already followed up on in various ways, but seeing them separated, and together, could trigger new directions.
The objective had been to meet up again in the morning and spend the weekend ferreting out whatever they could based on what she came up with. Or he did.
“Change of plans,” he told her as soon as she answered the phone, giving her the news from Anderson exactly as it had been given to him. With a clear thought in mind.
He did not want her with him when he chased down and confronted a seller of guns who appeared to be on the lam.
“What did ballistics show, other than that the gun had been fired?” she asked before he could get the part out about him going into that area of the investigation on his own. “Did it show up as involved in any other crimes?”
“No.”
“So, this finding Redmond, it’s to verify Clint’s alibi,” she said then. “To give credibility to what he’s saying, to show that he does tell the truth...”
Most successful liars told the truth some of the time.
“Possibly,” he told her. He didn’t doubt that a Blake Redmond sold Clint Johnson the gun. The slimy man was too smart to lie about something that easy to confirm. Higher on Brian’s list was finding out if the gun had been new when it had been sold to Clint Johnson. To ascertain whether or not Redmond knew if the pistol had been previously fired.
“While you do that, I’m going to work on our list of clues,” she told him.
And as relieved as he was that his new employer wasn’t going to try to insist on accompanying him on what could be a dangerous mission, he didn’t feel great about leaving her to investigate alone.
Shrugging off the still lingering sense of unease, he hit the road for Redmond’s last-known address at sunup on Saturday morning. Brian eased his gut with the knowledge that Blake Redmond—the seller of the hidden and now-found gun—was the surest lead anyone had had since the reemergence of Clint Johnson without his daughter eighteen months before.
Believing that the gun could be key in getting Clint to break—if nothing else, in getting the man to give up his cruel manipulation of his ex-wife and to confess to what he’d done with his daughter—Brian sped out of town. He hoped to soon have answers that would set Jessica free to get on with the rest of her life before Clint returned.
What it meant if Brian was successful—that the baby hadn’t survived her father’s punishment of her mother—he refused to dwell on. He’d taken the job. His goal was to give Jessica the answers she needed to be free.
By evening, his gut was telling him “I told you so.” He still hadn’t found Redmond, though his investigation had led him to three other places within a fifty-mile radius where the young man had lived during the past couple of years. When he’d called his employer to report in, he’d heard that Jessica had spent the day on the road as well. Visiting a series of towns with rivers running through or along them that also had establishments that sold chocolate near green grass.
The type of thing she’d done every single other weekend since her daughter had been kidnapped. Activities that shouldn’t be happening now that she’d hired him to do the searching for her.
His second full day on the job had wasted her money on all accounts.
* * *
Looking for chocolate was worse than searching for a needle in a haystack, since there was no one place to go find it. Not even one place in one town.
It came in so many forms. Was she looking for ice cream? Milk? Candy? Chocolate frosting on a donut? Cookies?
Much of which could be found in every grocery and convenience store, every gas station, in every burb in every state in the union.
Rivers and green grass narrowed things a little bit. As did her inability to travel far in the time allotted to her.
But at least, if she was out, there was a slim chance she’d hit a jackpot. If she didn’t try, she was guaranteed not to succeed.
If she didn’t stay busy, keep herself “doing,” she’d lose her mind sitting at home worrying about guns and bullets and the guy that had sold both to her ex-husband.
While she drove, her mind worked the sixteen clues she’d memorized, searching for any familiar landing place. And kept coming back to the conclusions she’d drawn when she’d first heard each clue and had spent an entire weekend only on it.
A good book. Though, when she’d been sitting there with Brian Powers, the clue had appeared differently to her.
She’d had a potential breakthrough. Not that she’d heard back from Anderson yet on that score.
Picking up the phone, she dialed the man. If he was with his family and she didn’t text a 9-1-1 to him, he’d let the call go to voice mail as per their agreement when he’d insisted that she call him anytime she was out searching, if she thought she had something.
He didn’t pick up. She left a quick message, giving him authority to release access to all of Clint’s financial information, including credit card databases, to her newly hired expert so he could cross-check on the spot. Not positive she had the power to issue such a mandate, she still felt better as she ended the call.
Almost as good as she’d felt when she’d had the call from Brian an hour before, telling her he hadn’t found Blake Redmond. Probably not smart, being glad about that, as it meant her private detective would be wrapped up with gun investigation yet another day. Still, she couldn’t help the instant relief that had poured through her as she’d heard that there was no new evidence on Clint’s gun. Nothing to put the newly found gun to bed and move on, yet, sure, but also no proof that Clint had ever used the gun, let alone shot another individual with it.
At home that night, in her office, busy plotting out the next day’s road trip, Jessica jumped when her phone rang. But seeing Brian’s name pop up, she answered immediately.
The slight rise in her heart rate, the tiny burst of good feeling flowing through her, was to be expected. She was still getting used to having someone on Brooke’s case, exclusively, 24/7. Too bad she hadn’t known about the expert firm months before...
