Where is the Baby? (27 page)

His blond hair had turned completely white, his blue eyes were still clear, still direct; his symmetrical features had softened with time but he remained a singularly beautiful man.

‘What will I do without you? Who will I call when something like this arises?' Faith asked him that evening.

‘Don't you worry about it,' he said. ‘I've started grooming a smart young detective to be your go-to guy. He's better than smart: he's intuitive and great with kids. You perform an important service, Faith. I'm not about to let that just slip away.'

Reassured, she gave him a rundown on the Browns.

After describing the office visit and the condition of the baby, she said, ‘There's no woman in evidence, and I don't think this child is related to him, which is why I asked you to have your lab do fingerprints, DNA and blood-typing from the samples. I'm positive the baby's oral swab results will have nothing in common with his. I'm just praying that the genital swab won't indicate any serious STD but I don't think that's going to be the case.'

She went silent, looking down at her hands, trying – again, again, always – to comprehend the sick need grown men had to force themselves on helpless babies, little toddlers. What sort of need for power could be satisfied by dominating someone so small, so utterly defenseless? When she considered what the evidence indicated had been done to this baby rage all but overwhelmed her. It was only with concerted effort that she could battle down her anger and retain control. She needed to keep her wits about her.

She wanted baby Jill to go forward into the future with no permanent damage from what had been done to her, and no memory of the experience – unlike the little girl who'd been called Humaby, whose nights were occasionally galleries of horrors that forced her into trembling wakefulness. Unlike the woman who'd been called Faith, whose body had been emptied of its diseased reproductive organs, Jill might grow into womanhood able to give herself freely to someone she found attractive. She wouldn't wake up the next morning, sick with self-loathing. She wouldn't waste several years talking to therapists who couldn't comprehend the experiences that had shaped her, primarily at the hands of a family of psychiatrists who'd infected her with a viral case of shame. Ultimately, she'd abandoned therapy in favor of meditation, and the shame was now at a distance. She had, at last, accepted the reality of her innocence. None of it had been her fault.

‘Did you read that piece in the
Times
a couple of months ago?' she asked him. ‘It was about the New Jersey state Division of Youth and Family Services searching for eighty children missing from care. The governor has ordered them to search for almost three hundred kids, Brian.
Three hundred!
I just read an article about more kids missing in Florida. We trust the system to look after children taken into care and they
lose
them! All over the country, state agencies have no idea of the whereabouts of kids they've taken into the system. It's scary, but it could work for us.'

'It's bad, and yes it could,' he agreed.

‘I have to do what's right for baby Jill. I'm going to rescue her if it's the last thing I do,' she vowed, her eyes on Brian's. ‘But putting her into the hands of DCF . . .' She shivered and closed her eyes for a moment.

‘I will help you,' Brian promised. ‘And we'll make damned good and sure that all the i's are dotted and the t's get crossed. If it's the last thing I do, I will make sure nothing goes wrong. This baby will not wind up in the system.'

‘Thank you,' she said softly.

Tally sat on her heels and surveyed the garden, deeply satisfied by its perfection. The weeds vanquished for the moment, the soil dark, rich, and moist around the flowers in the large, irregularly shaped bed that curved from the front porch around to the rear of the house. Her first summer in residence, she'd planted bushes alongside the driveway, with lilies of the valley hiding among the hostas on the near side of the property that came right up to the boxwoods rimming the porch.

Having spent her early years in San Francisco where expansive gardens were all but non-existent, broken by long stretches of time spent with her grandmother in Nevada where plantings consisted primarily of succulents, she loved the wild-seeming arrangement of flowers in the big bed. The outrageous shapes and colors – the bluebells and wild anemones, hollyhocks and trilliums, bleeding heart and jacob's ladder – constituted a glorious riot that cheered her even in dreary wet weather. Keeping her garden weeded, watered and nourished gave her a pleasure so intense it felt slightly illicit.

The vegetable patch at the back of the house provided a different sort of pleasure. It also produced far more food than she could consume. So, from the beginning she'd taken to giving Hay the overages for The Farm. And when he'd become head chef almost twelve years earlier, he began creating dishes that were very well received: lightly steamed, still-crisp green beans mixed with Reggiano parmesan and slivers of red onion in virgin olive oil; sautéed tomatoes, fresh basil leaves and walnuts with a splash of balsamic vinegar; a warm new potato salad with bits of crisp bacon, fresh dill and home-made mayonnaise; grilled coins of zucchini with a hint of garlic, topped with a sprinkling of home-made vinaigrette; leaf salads of different varieties with custom dressings. The food was frequently mentioned as one of the attractions of The Farm, now officially a rehab of renown.

Tally was always the first to taste the recipes he created, and she'd taken to noting the details of their preparation in a notebook she kept solely for that purpose, and taking photographs of the final products. And although Hay couldn't believe it would ever come to fruition, she was more than halfway through the creation of a cookbook that would, when completed, bear his name.

She acquired a digital camera and spent the winter that year he became head chef going to twice-weekly classes on Photoshop and page layout up in Great Barrington. She got into the habit of taking advantage of the long drive to stop on her way home at Guido's for exotic cheeses, out-of-season imported vegetables, and fresh fish or local meat or free-range chicken. A couple of nights a week, Hay would turn The Farm kitchen over to his sous-chefs and head home to Tally's to prepare dinner for the two of them. And on weekends, except for the Saturday night roast-beef commitment, they usually invited Tyler and Mae to join them for a meal and Faith, too, if she was available.

Tyler had been captivated by the elegant redhead on sight, when Tally had taken him to dinner at Chez Mae a few days after they'd flown home together from the west coast. He'd stayed at the bed-and-breakfast for several months while he looked at houses. And with typical wit, Mae had observed over breakfast one morning that winter, ‘It's a good thing there's only you and Tally. This could get to be an expensive tradition, family members staying here for months while they shop around for houses and then get them fixed up. Mind you, I do enjoy the company. There's rarely more than a few nights booked in the winter, except for an occasional couple or two visiting someone at The Farm. The rest of the time, I'm rattling around in here thinking it's about time for me to sell up. I'm getting too old to be up at five thirty in the morning to make breakfast for guests and then somehow manage to hold a conversation while it gets eaten. I'm naturally inclined to be on the surly side first thing in the morning.'

‘I haven't noticed that. But don't say a word if you don't feel like it,' Tyler had said with a smile. ‘I will just enjoy looking at you.'

‘You're awfully good for a gal's ego, I must say.'

She had finally sold the big six-bedroom house a few years earlier to an enthusiastic young couple who didn't have a clue about how much work was involved in running a B and B, and she agreed to move with Tyler into the charming little house he'd bought just beyond Kent Falls. They were a fine match, comfortable, conversational and warm. With goodhearted, expansive Mae at his side, Tyler's long-stunted growth accelerated and he caught up with the man Tally believed he'd always been meant to be. She and her father almost never spoke of his deceased wife, but when he did, Tyler always referred to her as ‘the late, unlamented Ivory.'

On her knees admiring the garden, Tally realized she was happy. She liked her life. Her father and the wonderful Mae were only a few miles away. There were shopkeepers, people in town who knew her by sight and greeted her warmly. Hay and Faith were fixtures in her life. Via computer she kept in touch with former warden Donna Hughes who'd retired to Las Cruces with her sister and bred Basenjis; with Warren and Alexis, now living in a villa in Mexico to which they were always inviting her; and sometimes by email with Faith when her schedule had her on the run and prevented her from visiting for a week or two.

Tally's world was far less fraught than it had been when she was young and her primary source of love and consolation had been with her grandmother at the ranch. Shockingly, she was now four years older than Annalise had been when she'd died. Twenty years before, when Warden Hughes had told her not to look back, Tally would never have believed she'd get to be fifty-seven years old and actually content with her life. When she'd left Warren at the airport and got behind the wheel of that Mercedes, nothing seemed to matter – especially not her life. She'd felt as if she were headed to the end of the universe and would simply drive right off the edge when she got to it. Instead, because of an oddly designed highway and dreadful traffic, she drove into Connecticut. And here she still was, with people she loved, whose entrance into her life and ongoing presence had redeemed her.

The telephone rang and with a last admiring look at the garden, she got up to go inside to answer. Mental note: buy a cell phone. She hated the idea of appearing to be one of those people who seemed congenitally unable to be separated from their little phones, but it was absurd to have to drop whatever she was doing and hurry inside to answer every time the telephone rang.

‘T
he house is a furnished rental,' Brian was saying early Monday morning over the remains of breakfast in a restaurant close to Faith's office. ‘According to the landlord, who let us in while Brown was out, the guy's only been there a couple of months. Brown said the mother had died in childbirth. So, naturally, the landlord felt sorry for the guy and he didn't check Brown's references the way he normally would have, especially with somebody calling himself
John Brown
. He figured a widower with a baby, why give him a hard time over what was probably his real name? So Mr Brown moved in with the baby and not a whole lot else.

‘Four of us exercised the search warrant and discovered that Mr Brown has a little soundproofed “studio” in the basement where he can broadcast his activities to order, live online. I'm not going to go into the details of what we found down there. It'd turn your stomach. Once we take this creep tomorrow, everything's going to be confiscated, and the Feds will keep the Internet connection live while they try to track down the subscribers to Mr Brown's pay-to-view site and any other persons of interest.' Brian rolled his eyes and blew out his breath, then took a swallow of his coffee.

‘Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, given all the incriminating stuff we found,' he continued. ‘I'm kind of amazed he's managed to get by for as long as he has, because little Jill is not the first baby he's apparently had in his possession. Based on what we found, she's only the most recent of possibly three infants, maybe more. We didn't have much time to go through the place thoroughly but we did come up with more than enough to send this guy away for a minimum of twenty-five years without parole. With multiple counts of crimes against children, he'll probably get a few hundred years, which means life. We don't want to spook him into going on the run, so a lot of stuff was photographed but nothing was moved and nobody's going near him until he brings the baby back in this morning for her appointment. Everything's set.'

‘I'm so nervous, Brian. What if he doesn't show?'

‘We've got his plate number from the landlord. If Mr Brown doesn't keep his appointment we'll allow him fifteen minutes' leeway before we issue an Amber Alert for the missing baby. If we have to, we've got a judge on standby who'll declare her a ward of the court to legitimize our issuing the alert. Brown won't get far. One way or another, he's going down. Easier and faster if he shows up.'

‘What do you think happened to the other babies?' she asked, jittery and chilled.

‘We'll try to find out but there's almost nothing to go on. Most of what we found was photos and videotapes. There wasn't much of anything on baby Jill; just a couple of circled names in an address book with arrows pointing to the word “baby” in another circle. One's a woman in West Virginia with a long sheet for drug offenses who's definitely of interest and another one, similar profile, in Pennsylvania. At first glance, it looks as if Mr Brown is in the business of buying babies for cash from addicts, which seems to be the case with Jill. No birth certificate, no records except a recent inoculation card but with a different baby's name, from a doctor in Virginia. Indicators pointing all over the map. We'll be talking to that Virginia doctor this morning, to see if he has anything to provide us with DNA.'

Faith listened, wondering how Brown had come to bring the baby to her. She couldn't help thinking it was purely a random choice but, with luck, if their plan worked, one that would be of significant value to Jill in the long term.

‘Every single item of the baby's stuff is pre-used,' Brian was saying. ‘The clothes are a mishmash of shapes and sizes. Everything's old and pretty beat-up, quick grabs from the Goodwill or Sally Ann. No crib. She sleeps in an old Pack 'n Play.' He made a face and took another swallow of his coffee. ‘He's set up to hit the road on very short notice. We got an ID on his prints right away, but it's going to be a while before we get results on his DNA samples. The good part is there are wants out on him, so the arrest is a sure thing. The bad part is they're mostly for out-of-state traffic violations, the most serious being a charge of reckless driving, doing seventy-seven in a thirty-five residential zone. The rest are a boatload of unpaid parking tickets and two lesser speeding citations. Still, combined, it's enough to bring him in and hold him 'til we get all the results back from the lab.'