Racing Against Time (8 page)

She had several police officers positioned at various sections of the cemetery. So far there was nothing out of the ordinary to report.

Brent was surprised at how comforting her appearance here was to him. “Thanks.”

Making the sign of the cross, the priest ended the service. A kindly smile of condolence on his thin lips, he looked from Callie to Brent. “Anything you would like to say or add?”

Brent wasn’t good at personal moments like this. Had trouble speaking what was in his heart. But there was no one to speak for Delia and she had died in his employ, no doubt trying to save his child. He owed her more than he could ever repay.

Brent stepped forward, placing a single white rose on the coffin’s lid. “I’m sorry this happened, Delia. Rachel is going to miss you a great deal. You were very good to her, and neither one of us is ever going to forget you.”

Callie saw the tears in his eyes then, just a glimmer before he forced them back.

Moved, she slipped her hand into his without thinking, and squeezed. “We’re going to find her.”

“How?” he demanded once they turned away from the grave and were walking toward his car. The ceremony had gotten to him and for a moment, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of futility. “How are we going to find her? It’s been two days, and all we know is that the kidnapper may or may not have been driving a Mercedes.”

“He was,” she told him quietly, undercutting his tone. “Specifically, because of the impression and a partial tire skid, we know it was a Mercedes 500 SL.”

He supposed that was something, although he still felt the information was a long way off from helping them find the kidnapper. “Has anyone reported having their Mercedes stolen?”

“Five people. We’re checking their stories out right now. Meanwhile, I have someone getting in contact with the DMV for the names of all Mercedes 500 SL owners in Aurora and the surrounding vicinity. In addition, calls have been pouring in from all over ever since your press conference yesterday, people claiming to have seen Rachel after the kidnapping.” The sightings had been from as close as a mile from the site of the abduction to as far away as Santa Fe, New Mexico. Each call was logged and a flag was inserted in a map to mark each site. “We’re checking out as many as we can as quickly as we can.”

He thought of yesterday morning and the files Callie had taken home with her. “What about the people I put away?”

“We’re working on that, too.” Her cell phone rang, instantly silencing them both as the sound sliced through the late-morning air. “Cavanaugh.” She listened a second, then nodded as she muttered, “Thanks.” Shutting the phone, she pushed it back into her jacket pocket. “That was just the police officer I left in charge on the grounds here. No one out of the ordinary has been seen anywhere in the area.”

“You thought the kidnapper would come to the funeral?”

“I think the kidnapper wants to see you squirm, wants to see you vulnerable. Funerals have a way of dragging out emotions from the people involved.” She’d certainly seen emotion in his eyes as he’d said his final words over the Culhane woman’s coffin. Looking at him, Callie debated for a moment, then asked, “Do you want to go somewhere for a cup of coffee?”

The personal invitation was unexpected and caught him off guard. “Don’t you have clues to run down?”

She wondered if he thought she was shirking her responsibility. Nothing could be further from the truth. She considered his well-being a part of her job.

“I have a great team for that. I thought maybe you needed someone to talk to for a few minutes. Someone who qualifies as a sympathetic stranger.” She knew how hard it was at times to talk to someone close to you, no matter how well meaning they were. She thought that was why people struck up conversations with total strangers, the need to unburden themselves anonymously.

For a moment that night at the fund-raiser flashed through his mind. “You’re not a stranger, Callie.”

“Almost,” she pointed out. “You don’t know anything about me.” She noticed that he was looking at her waist. Glancing down, she realized that the hilt of her service revolver was peeking out from beneath her jacket. “Other than the obvious, of course.”

He was about to refuse her offer when he thought of returning home. His sister and brother-in-law were still there, waiting to offer comfort at every turn. Fairly or not, he still wasn’t in the mood to deal with his sister hovering over him, trying to cheer him up.

And if he was with Callie, he’d be on the front lines if anything broke. It was what he’d wanted all along. “Coffee sounds good.”

“Okay, I know a good place. Why don’t we take my car?” she suggested.

He was about to get in on the passenger side when his cell phone rang. It was probably his sister, checking on him, he thought. Childless, she thought of Rachel as her own. The kidnapping had hit her pretty hard, he thought, a flash of guilt traveling through him.

He held up his hand. “Just a second,” he said to Callie. Drawing the phone out, he placed it against his ear. “Hello?”

“How does it feel, Judge? How does it feel to lose your daughter?”

Every nerve ending stood at attention. There was no point in trying to recognize the voice on the other end. The caller used one of those synthesizers that distorted voices. Brent could have been talking to a man or a woman for all he knew.

“Where is she, you scum?”

Callie had rounded the hood and was at his side immediately.

“Where is she?” Brent demanded again. “Tell me what you’ve done with my daughter.” The silence mocked him. “If you hurt her, if you so much as harm one of the hairs on Rachel’s head, there’s no place on earth that you’ll be safe. I’ll find you and kill you. I swear I will kill you.”

“She’s mine now.”

The scratchy sound of laughter echoed against his ear. And then the line went dead.

Chapter 8

C
allie saw anger take hold of every fiber of Brent’s body, and she pitied anyone who ever attempted to face down the judge.

“Was that the kidnapper?”

Hardly hearing her, Brent searched his memory, trying to think who could hate him enough to steal his daughter. Somewhere, in the back of his brain, a chord was struck, but he couldn’t make it clear, couldn’t bring it into the foreground.

He was vaguely aware of nodding his head in response to her question. And then he felt Callie’s hand on his shoulder. He looked at her.

Her eyes seemed to scan his face. “Could you recognize his voice?”

“No.” He tried not to allow defeat to seize him as he made the admission and shook his head. “Whoever it was used one of those electronic distorters. It sounded like a robot.”

Frustrated, Callie began with the basics. “What did the voice say?” she wanted to know, then cautioned, “Exactly.”

The words were still burning in his brain. “He said, ‘How does it feel, Judge? How does it feel to lose your daughter?’ And then he said, ‘She’s mine now.’”

It wasn’t much. But maybe it was something. There were so many wrong directions to go off in, she thought. But she couldn’t allow that to paralyze her. One of these directions had to be the right one, and there was no way to discover that without pushing forward.

“That almost makes it sound as if there was a tug-of-war over your daughter.” She raised her eyes to his face, returning to a familiar path. Most missing children were taken by estranged spouses. “Like a custody battle.”

“I already told you, there was no custody battle.” Bitterness leaked into his voice. “Unless there’s a photo op involved, Jennifer wants no part of being a mother if it entails playing the role for more than an hour.”

She still wasn’t a hundred percent convinced. “What did your ex-wife have to say when you told her that Rachel was missing?”

He frowned as frustration built on frustration. “I haven’t been able to reach her. Jennifer’s on vacation somewhere in Nevada. Reno, I think, although I’m really not sure.”

On vacation. Convenient. Callie made a mental note to get in touch with the Reno police and have the woman tracked down. From everything Brent had told her, it sounded as if Jennifer Montgomery had willingly washed her hands of all parental privileges, but you never knew what went on in a person’s head. At the very least, the woman might want the child as leverage for reasons of her own.

But for now Callie decided to turn her attention in a different direction. Maybe she’d missed something in reviewing the judge’s cases. If there wasn’t a tug-of-war over this particular child, maybe the kidnapping signified a tit-for-tat frame of mind. Someone had had their daughter taken away by the judge, so now he was taking away the judge’s daughter.

“Was there anyone you convicted of incest, Brent? A father separated from the daughter he was abusing?”

The question seemed to come out of nowhere. He shook his head. “No, I haven’t had any cases like that.” Damn it, why weren’t they making any progress? “You know that,” he heard himself snapping. “You’ve been through the cases with me.”

Callie sighed. “Right.” But there was something nagging at her, something they’d overlooked or skimmed over. Something that had registered on the perimeter of her mind, maybe late that night as she’d been reviewing the cases. Something that she couldn’t readily summon now. “At least now we know that it was a kidnapping with a definite motive.”

“Then why kill Delia?”

That was simple. “Because she got in the way. Because she could identify the kidnapper.” Callie stopped as another thought struck her. She saw Brent looking at her expectantly. Hopefully. The slowness of the process was as frustrating to her as it was to him. “In calling you, it seems as if revenge isn’t enough. He wants you to know that this wasn’t a random act, that Rachel was not just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but that he specifically chose her. I’m hoping now that his ego will make him want you to know that it’s him. That he’s the one who caused you all this grief.”

Brent wasn’t into subtlety. Black-and-white suited him far better. “If that’s the case, then why didn’t he tell me who he was?”

“Because this is a game to him, most likely a game he’s waited a long time to play. He wants to draw it out, to enjoy making you suffer.”

Brent gave voice to the one thing that terrified him the most. “Do you think he’s harmed her?”

The look in his eyes begged her for the truth, but also entreated her to make it the right truth. The truth he wanted to hear. That his little girl was all right. To her surprise, Callie realized that she would have lied to him to erase the pain she saw there.

But fortunately she felt she didn’t have to. She believed in her theory.

“Other than scared her, no, I don’t think he’s harmed her. It’s in his best interest to keep your daughter alive so he can taunt you with her.” She was about to say more when her cell phone rang. Smothering impatience, she flashed an apologetic smile at him. “I don’t think we’re ever getting out of this parking lot for that cup of coffee,” she commented, taking out her phone. “Cavanaugh.”

She heard Adams on the other end of the line. “One of the suspects you wanted me to run down is AWOL. John Walker hasn’t checked in with his parole officer in a couple of weeks.”

Maybe this was finally it. Adrenaline began to pump through her veins. “We have an address for this shy parolee?”

“Last known residence was a motel in one of the city’s less-than-stellar areas. Skylight Inn.”

A motel. That meant that Walker had at least gotten past a halfway house. But predators had patience, she thought.

“We’re not here to judge, Adams, we’re here just to track them down.” Juggling the cell against her ear and shoulder, she pulled out her pad. “Want to give me the address?” As Adams recited it, she quickly scribbled it down in what her father had once said looked like hieroglyphics. “Got it.” She flipped the pad closed. “Good work. I’ll take it from here. Keep going down the list.”

Adams said something unintelligible as he hung up. Callie figured she was better off not knowing what he’d said. The man was a good detective, just a lousy human being.

Brent was on her the second she closed the cell phone. “What do you have?”

“A possible lead.” She tried to recall what she’d gleaned from Walker’s file the other day. She couldn’t remember if the man had a daughter or not. “John Walker was paroled six months ago. He was a no-show at his last meeting with his parole officer.” While wanting to keep his spirits from flagging, she didn’t want to raise his hopes up too high, either. “Could be nothing,” she warned, telling him what she figured he already knew. “A lot of ex-cons pull disappearing acts.” There was a more important question to ask. “Do you remember him displaying any particular sense of hostility toward you when they took him away?”

Brent was quiet for a moment, trying to recall the case, the mood that had surrounded the trial. Only vague facts returned to him. He doubted even those would have returned if he and Callie hadn’t spent so much time going over his cases.

Walker was a two-bit junkie who had robbed a liquor store owner of the princely sum of sixty-three dollars while waving a realistic looking toy gun. It had been his second offense. Brent could remember no remorse being displayed. “No more than usual. He was angrier at his lawyer for not getting him off because he’d used a toy gun instead of the real thing than he was at me. I don’t think I really entered into the picture for him.”

Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe Rachel represented freedom rather than a child to the man. Brent took away his freedom, he was going to take away something precious from the judge.

“Still, I have to check it out.”

Brent nodded, eager to stop talking and start doing. “I want to come with you.”

“And I want you to come with me.” Too late, she realized how that must sound to him. Why had she worded it that way? she berated herself silently. “The kidnapper might call you back. I want to know the second he does. Best way I know to do that is to keep you around as much as possible.” She led the way to her car. It went without saying that they would use hers and return later for his. “Just as long as you remember to stay out of the way if anything goes down,” she warned. “The last thing either one of us needs is for you to get shot.”

He stopped at her vehicle. “But you getting shot is okay?”

The corner of her mouth curved upward. “Never okay. I’ve just had more training at covering my tail than you have.”

“No,” he agreed wryly, his eyes traveling to that portion of her anatomy almost against his will, “they never went over tail covering in judge school.”

She heard the note of cynicism in his voice. “I meant no disrespect.”

Brent sighed. He supposed no one ever knew how they would react under dire circumstances until they occurred. He really was going to have to get better control over himself than this. “Neither did I. It’s just that my nerves are stretched further than I ever thought was possible.”

Without thinking, she laid a hand on his shoulder. “You’re doing fine.”

The soft note in Callie’s voice unlocked something within him. Brent looked at her hand, grateful for the comfort, wary that there was something more happening here than either one of them could allow at the moment. Something that, once this was brought to a successful end, perhaps could be examined more closely. But not here, not now.

Suddenly becoming aware of the contact, Callie dropped her hand. “We’d better go.”

With that, she rounded the hood of her car and got in on the driver’s side. If her heart was beating just a little harder than it should have been, she attributed it to the rush of adrenaline associated with chasing down a possible lead.

John Walker didn’t answer his door when she knocked. Laying her ear against the door, she heard no movement on the other side. There was no reason to believe that the man was there.

But, if he was their man, maybe he’d left behind a clue, something for them to go on.

“You stay here,” she told Brent in case the ex-con actually was inside and playing possum. “I’m going to get the motel manager. If Walker does happen to turn up, I want you to come get me. Nothing else, understand?”

It took no subtle reading of body language to know that the instruction annoyed the hell out of him. “I’m not a child, Callie.”

“You’re not bulletproof, either. I’ll be right back.”

She hurried away, hoping this wouldn’t take too long. The manager was in his small, crammed office. The smell of years of grime mingled with stale body odor the moment she opened the door.

Callie flashed her ID at him. The bald, mousy-looking man squinted at it as if he was trying to make out the letters.

“You have a John Walker staying in room 212. He’s not answering and I have reason to suspect he might be holding a child prisoner inside. I need you to open the door for me.”

With two hands on the counter, the manager seemed to hold the narrow separation as an obstacle between him and her. “I can’t do that. That’s a violation of his civil rights.”

It sounded as if a lawyer had been whispering in the man’s ear. Obviously, the motel had had more than one unsavory character staying here lately. “We’ll discuss civil rights on our way to the room.” Callie left no room for argument in her voice.

The manager complained and whined all the way to the second-floor door, then he stood stubbornly before the door, making no move to open it. Callie glanced at Brent, but the man shook his head. Walker hadn’t made an appearance one way or another.

“When did you last see Walker?” Callie asked the manager.

The man raised what little chin he had defiantly. “Dunno. A week, two. They pay, I don’t bother them.” He peered myopically at Callie. “Look, you sure this is legal? I don’t want to get in no trouble here. Already had lawyers coming at me and I don’t particularly like the experience.”

Brent moved in front of Callie. “I’m Judge Brenton Montgomery.”

The manager’s eyes widened as he looked at Callie. “You brought your judge?”

“I’ve issued a search warrant for the premises,” Brent told him. “This man could be involved in a kidnapping case. If you don’t want to be charged with obstructing justice, I suggest you open the door immediately.”

The manager couldn’t find the proper key quickly enough. Hands trembling, he inserted it into the lock.

“I didn’t know judges were allowed to lie,” Callie whispered to Brent under her breath.

Brent kept his eyes on the door as the manager struggled with the lock.

“I didn’t lie,” he whispered back. “I am a judge, and we already know that Walker could be involved in the case.”

It was nice to know Brent was human like the rest of them, she thought. “I was talking about the warrant.”

He moved the manager out of the way and took hold of the key, turning it. “Just getting a little ahead of myself.”

They both knew he could issue one on the spot if there was reason enough to suspect that Walker was somehow involved in Rachel’s abduction. He put his shoulder to the door and shoved it opened.

The smell that hit Callie the instant the door was opened was sadly familiar. She was grateful that she’d put some time between herself and the breakfast she’d had at her father’s house. Even so, she could feel it threatening to make a reappearance.

John Walker was lying sprawled out on the floor by the window. The right side of his head was bashed opened.

She wasn’t one of those people who could get accustomed or hardened to the sight of a murder victim, even though it was all part of her job. It didn’t matter that the man on the floor had probably been a man no one had ever cared about, much less loved. Who, according to his file, was an incorrigible criminal. No one deserved to die like this. No one deserved to rot in a room for several days, their disappearance from life unnoticed.

“Damn,” she heard Brent say.

“That would be the word for it,” she murmured.

Reaching into her pocket, Callie took out the gloves that were part and parcel of her job and slipped them on before she began examining the body.