Racing Against Time (5 page)

He looked at her, wondering if she was patronizing him or giving him her philosophy. “You don’t believe in profiling?”

“I believe in the unpredictable, Your Honor.” Callie took his arm. The look he gave her was one of authority, meant to freeze her in her tracks. There was never any confusion who was in charge in his courtroom. But they weren’t in his courtroom. They were on her turf and she got to make the calls. “Now, if you don’t mind, Judge, I really have to get back to work.”

With one precise gesture, Brent moved his elbow out of her range. He wasn’t about to be ushered out the door like some guest who had overstayed his welcome.

“I have my sister and brother-in-law staying at the house just in case something falls through the cracks.” He held up his cell phone for her benefit. “All my calls are being rerouted to my cell.”

They’d bugged the telephones in his house, but not this one. If the call was rerouted, they’d miss their opportunity to hopefully trace it back to its source. She reached for the cell.

“We’ll have to put a device in your cell—”

Her fingers brushed against his before he pulled the cell phone back and deposited it into his pocket. He had an ancestor who came from the old country, Brianne MacKenzie. Her village had thought of her as a witch. Legend had it they’d almost burned her at the stake before her future husband had whisked her away. She had what they called “The gift.” She was a seer. Touching someone at times allowed her to make a connection, to see into that person’s future or see something about them in a hazy flash.

Something seemed to crackle between them as Callie’s fingers brushed against his, and he thought of his great-great-great-grandmother, wishing he had her abilities, just for a moment. So he could unlock doors closed to him.

He was looking at her oddly, Callie thought, as if he was trying to discern something about her. Or maybe he was just lost in thought. She couldn’t blame him for being preoccupied.

“Brent?”

He shook himself free of the haze. “Already taken care of.” His hand curled around the outline of the cell phone in his pocket. “I asked the technician who bugged the phones at the house to do it before he left.”

Well, one problem down, a million to go. “Thinking ahead.” She nodded her approval. A lot of people in this situation couldn’t think at all.

His frown went down to the bone. “Not nearly fast enough.”

Callie could read his mind. “It’s not your fault she was taken.”

She was trying her best to be kind, he thought. But this wasn’t a time for kindness, it was a time for brutal honesty. If he were a bricklayer, his daughter would be home right now, trying to finish the simple homework the teacher had given the class so that she could sit and watch her favorite cartoons.

“It is if it’s someone who’s trying to get back at me,” he replied grimly.

He was right, and there wasn’t anything she could say to the contrary. Frustrated for him, Callie dragged her hand through the top of her hair.

“All right, since you’re here, why don’t we get the rest of the questions out of the way?” She gestured toward the chair on the other side of her desk and sat down in her own.

“Questions?” They weren’t going anywhere. After a beat, Brent sat down.

Callie pulled out a pristine white legal pad and placed it in the center of her desk. She tried to make this sound as innocuous as possible. Was there such a thing as an innocuous interrogation? She didn’t think so. “About you, your relationship with your daughter, your ex-wife—”

His dark eyebrows drew together over his almost-perfect nose. He’d already tried to call his ex to tell her, but in typical Jennifer fashion, she was unreachable. “Jennifer? What does Jennifer have to do with it?”

“Maybe nothing, maybe everything.”

A couple of people came into the squad room. This was all wrong, she decided. She couldn’t expect the judge to talk to her where almost anyone could overhear them. She looked around. Her captain’s office was free. As far as she knew, the man was going to be out for the rest of the day. Something about a photo opportunity. The captain was always at his best when there was a supply of videotape around.

She rose again, taking her legal pad with her. She pointed out the glass-enclosed room. “Why don’t we go into that office and talk?”

Did she think he needed privacy? That there was some kind of confession forthcoming? She was going to be sorely disappointed if she was leaning toward that. Brent held his ground. “We can talk out here, I have nothing to hide.”

Maybe yes, maybe no. Privacy encouraged talking. “Good. But I like tight, secure places. Humor me,” she requested. With that, she led the way to the captain’s office.

With a pastel blue back wall, the office had three sides of glass. Or three walls buffered with blinds, depending on how you viewed it. Callie lowered all three blinds and closed them before she turned to talk to Brent. She made herself as comfortable as possible in the captain’s chair. It was one of those ergonomic ones designed to relax your back. It always had the opposite effect on her, making her feel as if she was on a rack.

But this wasn’t about her.

“Since you brought up your ex-wife,” she began mildly, as if they were having a conversation over afternoon coffee, “let’s talk about her.”

He didn’t need to be a seer like his ancestor to know where she was going with this. “You couldn’t be more wrong.”

Maybe he was a little too quick to judge, she mused. You never wanted to think the worst of someone you loved. Or loved once.

Callie phrased her words tactfully, not wanting to add unnecessarily to his pain. “Sometimes we don’t know people as well as we think we do.”

Brent held his position. He would have bet his life on this, and he wasn’t the type to bet on anything except a sure thing. “Jennifer never wanted to be a mother. Rachel was an accident. One of those tiny percentages that manage to screw up the birth control industry’s batting average. When Jennifer got pregnant, I had to talk her into keeping the baby. Having Rachel cost me the price of a full-length mink coat. Best return on an investment I ever had.”

So the woman also believed in murdering animals for their pelts. She knew she wasn’t supposed to have an opinion of the judge’s ex, but Callie was getting to like her less and less by the moment. Especially since Jennifer Montgomery apparently had no mothering instincts. Families were such a way of life in her world, she couldn’t fathom someone not wanting a child.

She looked down at her pad. It was still snow-white, but she couldn’t very well write “Ex-wife is a bitch.” At least, not while the judge could read the words upside down. She folded her hands over the pad and looked at the man. “So she wouldn’t suddenly try to have your daughter kidnapped?”

His laugh was short and without mirth. “It’s all I can do to get Jennifer to visit Rachel a few times a year.” Brent hated the way Rachel looked whenever Jennifer canceled a visit. He knew his daughter was trying to keep up a brave front for him, but he also knew that her feelings were deeply hurt. For that alone, he damned Jennifer. “Believe me, she has no interest in taking Rachel.”

Love wasn’t always a motive. But oftentimes hate was. “Even to get back at you for something?”

Jennifer would have been more inclined to feel that way if he hadn’t allowed her out of their marriage. “The only thing my ex-wife wanted from me was my last name and my money. She got a share of both in the divorce. She also wanted to be free. She couldn’t wait to be rid of both of us. There is no way that she would do anything like this.”

This time she did write. “Ex-wife wants no part of child.” She looked up at Brent. “All right, if it’s not about your housekeeper and it’s not about your ex-wife, there are still two ways to go here. Someone is trying to get revenge against you, or—” and this was a very big or “—someone wanted to kidnap your daughter.” She had a feeling Brent already knew this, but she made it a point to lay out the foundations for every parent whose child had been kidnapped. “Other than parental snatchings, kidnappings occur for four reasons. To get a ransom, to replace a lost child, real or imaginary,” she tacked on, knowing that one was just as strong a reason as the other, “to sell the child, although those are usually younger than your daughter.”

“That’s three.”

Was he asking her about the fourth? Or did he just want it out of the way? “The fourth is for reasons of pedophilia.” But even as she stated it, she ruled it out. At least, for now. “This was too awkward, too difficult to be a random snatching by a pervert who just happened to see your daughter and had something triggered inside of him. That would have been more likely had he been driving by your house or walking by the schoolyard and seen her playing outside.”

He wanted to believe that, to believe that his child wasn’t in any more danger than her kidnapping already placed her in. “What do your instincts tell you?”

“Since there haven’t been any ransom phone calls, I’m inclined to agree that this isn’t about money. I’m more inclined than ever to think that this might be about revenge. Which brings us back to you.” She looked at him pointedly. “Has anyone threatened you in the past year or so, Brent?”

Threats were part of the territory. He could still remember how unsettled the first one had made him. It was only after three that he began to shrug them off. Until now.

“I’ve been a criminal court judge for five years, Callie. It would be unusual for me not to have been threatened.”

“All right, anyone in particular stand out in your mind?” Before he could answer, she quickly added, “This isn’t to say that it might not be someone who has just quietly plotted revenge, but odds are, the vocal ones are more likely to carry out a threat.”

But why drag his daughter into this? “Wouldn’t a threat mean they’d tried to kill me?”

She could see he was struggling to suppress rage. “You kill someone, it’s over. Taking your daughter promises the kidnapper that you will be suffering for a very long, long time.”

He hated admitting it, but she was right. Brent shook his head, hoping he would be able to get five minutes alone with the kidnapper. Even just three. “You have a very logical mind, Callie.”

She blew out a breath. At times she was too logical. If she hadn’t been so, she and Kyle would have been married; then they couldn’t have been on the same squad and he wouldn’t have taken that bullet meant for her.

“Yeah,” she agreed quietly, “it’s a curse.”

Chapter 5

B
rent’s chambers at the courthouse seemed somehow more somber than they had before, as if the weight of what he was enduring had permeated his surroundings. Working with the vibrations coming off the man, Callie felt as if the very walls of the room had darkened and were closing in.

Without waiting to ask, Callie walked over to the curtained bay window behind Brent’s desk and drew back the drapes. The late-afternoon sun immediately brightened the room tenfold.

Brent held his hand up before his eyes. In his present frame of mind, he felt the room had far too much light in it. “What are you doing?”

She moved away from the window. There were filing cabinets all along the adjacent wall. Oak, to match his desk. No one had to tell her that he had brought in his own cabinets. Standard issue was gunmetal gray, emphasis on the metal.

She wondered if they were for show, or if they were filled. “You need light.”

He had thrown the light switch on when they’d walked in. “That’s why they invented electricity.”

Callie deliberately stood in front of the drawstrings on the drapes, blocking his access. “We’ll use that, too, but nothing beats sunlight when it comes to illuminating and to buoying up.”

He frowned at her. The last thing he wanted was a cheerleader. He wouldn’t have said she was the type. But his judgment wasn’t exactly on target right now. “Do I look as if I want to be buoyed up?”

“No, but you need it.” Her voice was nonconfrontational, but firm just the same. He had the feeling that she was accustomed to taking charge. “You can’t give up hope. All we have is our faith and our hope to see us through.”

There was that word again,
hope,
both his enemy and his friend. “I’m not giving up hope, I just don’t believe in using crutches.”

Her eyes held his for a long moment. It was a visual tug-of-war and for the moment, it was a draw, but one grounded in respect. “Sometimes crutches are all we have until we can stand up on our own again.”

Impatience clawed at him. Brent blew out a breath, trying to maintain control over his emotions, which threatened to burst out and go all over the board. “I know you mean well—”

She placed a gentling hand on his arm. He looked down at it, then at her. Callie kept it where it was. “I mean more than that, Brent. I mean to find her.” Withdrawing her hand, she let it drop to her side. “Now, shall we get started?”

Brent squared his shoulders, telling himself to focus on the task ahead and not what it might ultimately mean. That one of the people within the case files had his precious girl. “Right.”

They’d been at it for hours, sorting through files, with Brent first making a judgment call and then Callie considering it. The list of people to investigate began to form.

The filing cabinet drawers had turned out to be crammed full of cases. She’d discovered to her amusement that Brent preferred to deal with paper rather than computers, opting to make his notes in pen rather than type them on a keyboard, to be printed out. In a high-tech world, he was still, at bottom, an old-fashioned guy.

The stack of viable contenders who might want to exact revenge on him had grown steadily over the past four hours.

Leaning back in her chair and rubbing the bridge of her nose, Callie willed away the headache that threatened to overtake her. For the moment it appeared to listen. Or maybe it was just lying in wait for an opportune moment to strike, announcing its presence with a chorus of drums throbbing at her temples. She’d take what respite she could get.

She glanced at the file opened on her lap. Brent’s handwriting was a challenge at times. “You know, this might have been a lot easier if all this was on your hard drive.” She indicated the dormant computer on his desk, which she was beginning to suspect was nothing more than a glorified, overly large paperweight on steroids.

He looked in the direction of the machine with something less than respectful regard. Carmella had spent hours trying to get him to at least learn the basics. It wasn’t that he couldn’t; he wouldn’t. There had to be a place for the human touch in this high-tech world of theirs. In his opinion, people relied too much on computers. If there was ever a power shortage, the entire world outside the Australian outback would grind to a sudden, jarring halt.

He shrugged. “My eyes get tired, looking at the screen. I’ve never been much of an electronics junkie,” he confessed in a moment of honesty. He knew most men thrived on the things that left him cold. Brent reached for the cup of coffee that had long since passed the point of lukewarm. “An embarrassment to my gender, I suppose. But the sight of a fifty-inch screen never turned me on.”

Her energy level was ebbing away quickly. Since he had opened up this avenue of conversation, she decided to draw him out a little. Remind him that he was not just a judge and a justifiably concerned parent, but a human being with likes and dislikes, as well.

Still leaning back in the chair, she studied him. He had the face of a leader and the soul to match. But even leaders had outside interests. “Just for the record, what does turn you on?”

The answer came as if it were part of a word-association quiz. “Tulips.”

The last thing she expected to do sitting here, looking through five years’ worth of files for a possible kidnapper, was grin. The headache circling her head hovered somewhere between oblivion and attack as she looked at Brent.

“Excuse me? Did you just say ‘tulips’?”

He’d never seen her grin before. It made her seem younger than her years, as if she was just playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes and was really still just a young girl instead of a police detective. Was he placing his faith in the wrong person? God, he hoped not.

“You find that amusing?”

She lifted a shoulder, letting it drop carelessly. “That depends on whether you like growing them or getting them.”

A smattering of a smile, far smaller than anything gracing her lips, emerged on his. He hadn’t thought he was capable of smiling after this morning.

“Growing them. It relaxes me.” Jennifer had thought he was crazy, telling him gardening was a hobby for boring housewives and old men. But Rachel had liked sitting beside him, digging in the earth with the small shovel he’d gotten her. “There’s something very basic about getting back to nature, about getting your hands dirty and nurturing seedlings along until they germinate into something beautiful.” He looked at her, half expecting a sarcastic comment. “Does that surprise you?”

She debated a polite answer, but knew that he would respect honesty more. So she was honest. “Frankly, yes. I wouldn’t have thought of you as the kind of man who liked ‘getting his hands dirty.’ I pictured you with a squadron of gardeners to get dirty for you.”

He didn’t have far to look to know the origin of that image. He was well acquainted with it. Had been schooled in it when he was young.

“Ah, yes, the good old Montgomery legacy.” It was said that none of his recent ancestors actually knew the meaning of an honest day’s toil. They’d all been lawyers to the rich and celebrated. He doubted if any of them even knew the first name of any of the people who worked for them. “We’re not all cookie-cutter identical.”

She could hear the annoyance in his voice. At least she’d momentarily redirected his attention from the kidnapping, although she hadn’t meant to get his annoyance focused on her. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I’m usually better at keeping my temper in check.” Unable to remain seated any longer, he got up, shoving his fisted hands deep into his pockets. Hitting nothing. Wanting to hit something. Wanting more than anything to hit this man who had destroyed his world. “It’s just that I feel so damn helpless, so damn impotent.” He stared out the window. It had long since gotten dark outside. Evening shadows sat where cars had been parked earlier. Brent’s voice was small, tight, as he added, “There’s nothing I can do.”

Rising, she came up behind him. Feeling for him. “You’re doing it,” she contradicted. “You’re going through cases, looking for a possible suspect.”

It was beginning to feel like an exercise in futility. He turned to look at the piles on his desk. “About twenty percent of these cases represent possible suspects.” His words were dressed in frustration. He gestured toward the filing cabinets they had emptied. “I really doubt there are many people in there who wish me well.”

But that was exactly why they were going through the files in the first place. “Wishing and doing are two very different things.”

He turned completely around to face her. Surprised at how near she was. “So, in your opinion, wishing isn’t the very first step toward doing.”

“A lot of times, no.” She laughed softly, a tired, resigned laugh that had somehow not gotten lost amid the exasperation she had faced today. “Otherwise, there’d be a lot more dead people out there for the police to process.” The scent of his cologne seemed to descend on her out of nowhere. Callie remembered the electric charge she’d felt when she’d danced with him that night. It was so vivid, she could swear she felt the remnants now. “There’d also be a great many more infidelities.”

Callie raised her eyes to his as she said the latter, not completely sure of just what she was doing. Or why.

Maybe it was the hour and the fact that when she was tired, her defenses, always so rigidly in place, tended to slip just a little. Enough to make her think of herself as vulnerable.

It was the last thing in the world she wanted to be. And he was the last man on earth she had a right to be feeling this way with. The man was fighting desperation, trying to find his daughter before it was too late. He needed a crack detective at the top of her game helping him, not a woman who was feeling odd stirrings in his company.

Yet there it was. She was feeling something.

She was feeling.

The realization slammed itself against her like a loose newspaper page suddenly being blown against a windshield.

It took her breath away.

She hadn’t felt anything for a very, very long time.

He laughed shortly. “Not everyone subscribes to your theory.”

Very few times did she speak before her brain was engaged, but this was one of those times. “You mean your ex-wife?”

When Brent looked at her, his eyes somber, she realized that she’d crossed some line she shouldn’t have, but there was no way to retreat gracefully to the other side.

She shrugged in what she hoped was a casual manner. “There were rumors.”

Yes, he damn well figured there would have been. Not because he was a judge, but because he was a Montgomery. “What kind of rumors?”

She blunted the edge. And gave it her own spin. Not just to be kind, but because it was what she believed. It was one of those nonsecret secrets that Brent Montgomery’s wife had been unfaithful to him. “That your ex-wife didn’t know what she had. That she didn’t belong in your circle.”

One minute the woman before him was coming across tough as nails, the next minute she was soft. Brent couldn’t exactly read her. But he knew what she was doing now.

“You’re making that up to spare my feelings. I know what they said. That I couldn’t keep Jennifer satisfied. That she found me boring.” The latter had been an accusation she’d hurled at him when he’d confronted her with the name of her lover.

Jennifer Montgomery needed her head examined and her eyes checked. And an MRI to find her missing heart wouldn’t have been out of the question, either, Callie thought.

Knowing that this had to make him feel uncomfortable, she took it out of the realm of personal. “I read somewhere that Taylor Madison’s first wife said the same thing about him.” She shrugged, mentioning the latest Hollywood heartthrob to grace the fantasies of women everywhere. “Go figure. Me, I think that he’s one of the nicest men in the world.”

Brent raised an eyebrow, mildly surprised. “You know him?”

Callie shook her head “Just what I read.” She didn’t want to sound like some mindless fan. It was her instincts that came into play here, just as they did with him. “Sometimes you don’t have to know a person inside and out to have an educated opinion.”

Suddenly she realized they were standing so close there wasn’t enough room for a whisper between them now. Another moment, and—

What the hell was she doing, her brain thundered, finally ushering in the hovering headache full force. This was the parent of a kidnapping victim, not her latest date she was talking to.

Maybe that was the problem. She didn’t have a latest date. Hadn’t had any date at all, not since Kyle was killed. Her family had been urging her for the past six months to set her grief aside and begin going out again, but she just couldn’t get herself to do it. Couldn’t gather up the will, the courage, to get back on a horse that could possibly throw her again. Or maybe even get stuck at the starting gate.

And yet…

And yet she was a normal woman with hormones that reacted to a good-looking man. Like the man standing right before her. But one didn’t live by hormones alone, she argued fiercely.

Her temples throbbing, her pulse inexplicably scrambling, Callie pulled back, stumbling inwardly as she retreated. Her eyes never left his face even though she wanted to look away. “It’s getting late. Neither one of us is thinking clearly.”

Was she talking about his daughter’s case, or what had almost happened here? Because if she hadn’t had the sense to pull back, Brent knew he would have kissed her. Kissed her because he needed the comfort of a human touch, of compassion turned his way.

Of he didn’t know what.

He’d always been the strong one, no matter the situation. The one who, though not overtly an optimist, had always held things together by sheer grit. Because he had to. It was a matter of honor. He hadn’t allowed himself to get swept away by his family’s name or his family’s wealth, the way his cousin Hamilton had. At thirty-eight, Hamilton had yet to grow up, yet to become a responsible adult. Brent had always been determined to make something of himself even if he didn’t have to. Not for the family name, certainly not for his distant parents, who only required from him a lack of scandal, but for himself.