Buch lesen: «Hide The Child»

Chapter One

“Shall we leave the frosting white?” Trina Marr had already mixed up a cream cheese icing to go on the cupcakes cooling on a rack. “I might have some sprinkles. Or let’s see.” Being obsessive-compulsive neat, she knew right where she kept the small bottles of food coloring. “Green? Red? Or if we use just a tiny bit, pink?”

The little girl looking up at her nodded vigorously. The pigtails she’d started the day with sagged crookedly.

“Pink?”

Another nod.

Trina had become accustomed to the lack of verbal response. As Dr. Katrina Marr, she specialized in working with traumatized children. Three-year-old Chloe Keif had started as a patient but was now her foster daughter. Chloe still wouldn’t talk, but she relaxed with Trina as she didn’t with anyone else. She’d remained stiff and unresponsive in the receiving home where she was first placed. An aunt and grandparents both were hesitant to take Chloe when she had such problems. Offering to foster had seemed a natural step for Trina, if a first for her.

“Ooh,” she said now. “You know what we could put on top?”

Chloe waited, bright-eyed and expectant.

Trina rose onto tiptoes to reach a jar in a high cupboard. “Maraschino cherries. Have you ever had one?”

A suspicious shake of the head.

“They’re super sweet, like candy. The flavor just bursts in your mouth when you bite into one.” Trina wrinkled her nose. “Don’t tell anybody, but every once in a while when I’m feeling mad or sad, I open a jar and eat every single cherry.” She winked. “Which makes me sick to my stomach, but I don’t care.”

Chloe laughed, then clapped her hand over her mouth, eyes wide with astonishment and...fear? Yes.

It was the first sound to come out of her mouth in the two weeks Trina had known her. She crouched and tickled Chloe’s tummy. “It’s okay, cupcake.”

That almost earned her another smile.

“It was really smart of you to stay quiet when the bad men were in your house, but you’re safe now. Anytime you’re ready, you can start talking. You can make all kinds of noises.” She blew a noisy raspberry. Neighed, like a horse. Revved, like a motorcycle engine.

And Chloe giggled again.

Heart feeling as light as a helium balloon, Trina swung Chloe up to sit on the kitchen counter. “Here, try your first maraschino cherry.” She opened the jar, stuck a fork in and popped one into her own mouth. “Yum.” She offered the next one to the little girl, who sniffed it cautiously, then touched the tip of her tongue to the cherry.

Chloe’s face worked as she savored the taste before she opened her mouth and snatched the cherry off the fork.

Trina waited for the verdict.

“Yum!”

Trina grinned and said, “Then let’s make our frosting pink.” Her mouth fell open. “Wait. You talked.”

Chloe’s freckled nose crinkled mischievously.

Laughing exultantly, Trina swung her to the stool she’d pulled up to the counter. “Now you’re just teasing me.”

The little girl nodded. It was all Trina could do to concentrate on how many drops of red food coloring she ought to add to the bowl of icing to turn it a pretty pink.

Her delight was quickly dampened by the sobering knowledge that once Chloe really began to talk the police would be ready to pounce.

If investigators had a clue who’d murdered her mother, father and older brother in their home, they hadn’t confided as much in Trina or even hinted when pressed by reporters. Admittedly, the crime was not only horrific, it was puzzling. Chloe’s mother hadn’t been raped. Expensive electronics weren’t stolen. Neither was the nearly thousand dollars in Michael Keif’s wallet that had been left on the counter of the island in the kitchen. His Piaget watch, which according to the detective sold for over ten thousand dollars, remained on his wrist. If Michael, a wealthy businessman, had been the target, why had the rest of his family been killed, too?

Chloe wouldn’t have been mute and terrified when she was found if she hadn’t seen her father murdered within feet of her hiding place. With the investigation seemingly going cold, the detectives had latched on to the hope that this preschool girl could crack the case. It was making them nuts that so far, Chloe hadn’t been able to answer a single question.

Trina worried about what the weight of their expectations might do to Chloe. What if she was never able to tell them anything, and had to live with that failure for the rest of her life?

But there was another really scary possibility. Somehow reporters had learned that the three-year-old survivor of the massacre couldn’t say a word. On the local TV news, they’d even flashed a photo of Chloe as the anchor talked solemnly about the mystery and the devastating impact witnessing the horror had had on a little girl. Chloe had said her first word today, and Trina didn’t want anyone else to know. Because...what if this incredibly vulnerable child became a threat a killer couldn’t ignore?

Trina shivered. Pay attention, she told herself. She had to be careful not to turn this frosting bloodred.

* * *

GABRIEL DECKER SWUNG his rope with practiced ease. The loop settled on the ground just in front of a calf’s hind legs, tricky to do in such tight quarters in the temporary corral. The second the calf stepped into the loop, Gabe pulled in the slack, wrapped the rope around the saddle horn and drew the calf toward the fire. Once a pair of wrestlers tossed the struggling calf to his side and pulled off the rope, Gabe would coil it up and go back for another one. Today, four ropers and four teams on the ground were moving things along well. They aimed by the end of the week to have every spring calf branded, dehorned, castrated and vaccinated.

His eyes stung from the dust cloud raised by bawling calves penned in the corral and their mothers milling outside it. Unpleasantly reminded of a dust storm in Afghanistan, Gabe had to keep pushing the memory back. The work demanded focus. At least he felt useful, which he hadn’t much lately. He was irked that he couldn’t be one of the men tossing the calf and holding it down, a task he’d performed by the time he went to live on a Texas ranch when he was fourteen. Size and muscle were appreciated for that job, since even two-to-three-month-old calves could weigh up to two hundred pounds.

Now he was lucky to be able to sit astride for hours at a time, although he’d suffer for it later. Actually, he was already suffering but refused to let anyone else suspect. He’d been wounded before but never taken so long to heal.

This had been a bad one, though. An IED had thrown him into the air and he’d landed poorly, breaking his femur on top of the damage done to his pelvis by the explosion. The doctor had suggested age might be an issue. A twenty-two-year old healed faster than a man closing in on forty, he’d said with a shrug. Gabe knew that, at thirty-six, he was close to aging out of active duty with his Army Ranger unit. But damn it, he wasn’t ready to hang it up yet!

He’d tightened his legs in a signal to his gelding and gripped the rope in a gloved hand to start swinging it, when his partner waved him over to the side of the temporary corral.

Boyd Chaney rested one booted foot on a lower bar and his forearms on the top one. “If you’re hurting, take a break.”

Gabe stared expressionlessly at his friend. “What makes you think I hurt?”

“I know you,” Boyd said with a shrug.

He did. They’d served together for a decade and become best friends. On recent deployments, Gabe had missed Boyd, who had been shot and crushed beneath his jeep when it rolled two years ago. He’d spent the next year in rehab and conditioning, trying to achieve the state of fitness required for their elite ranger unit, but had finally accepted that he’d never pass the physical. Unwilling to accept a desk or teaching job, he’d retired to the Oregon cattle and cutting horse ranch the two men had bought together with an eye to the future.

“I can manage,” Gabe said now, tersely, and reined his horse back into the melee. Even over the bellowing cattle, he heard Chaney call after him.

“Stubborn bastard.”

Yeah, so? Since that was the working definition of a man tough enough to make it as a spec-ops soldier, Gabe didn’t bother responding. He’d make it back. He told himself that every day. Two, three more months, tops. But right now he could contribute here on the ranch. A little pain had never stopped him before, and it wouldn’t now.

* * *

“I’LL BE THERE in ten minutes,” Detective Risvold said.

“No!” Trina was in her office, seizing the chance to make the call between patients. In the past week, Chloe had made enough progress that Trina felt obligated to report that there was hope she’d soon be able to talk about what she’d seen.

Trina was thankful she’d been careful not to tell either of the investigators who called her on a regular basis where she “stashed” Chloe during working hours. That had been Detective Deperro’s word. When he used it, Trina had almost said, Oh, when I’m not home, I keep her in the third drawer to the right of the sink but had managed to refrain. If either of the men possessed a sense of humor, she had yet to see it.

“What do you mean, no?” Risvold snapped. “She’s talking, and you know how much is riding on what she can tell us.”

“I wanted you to know she’s begun speaking.” Already regretting she’d made this call, Trina leaned on the word begun. “She’s not back to natural chattering, and if I even tiptoe toward asking about that morning, she goes silent again for hours. Anyway, how is a three-year-old’s description going to clinch anything for you? If I asked her to draw her father, it would be a stick figure. You do know that, don’t you? What little she can tell you would be useless.” She paused. “Unless you have a suspect?”

The answer was slow coming. “We’re looking at a possibility,” he said grudgingly. “Several 911 calls had come in from that neighborhood in the week before the attack on the Keifs. Someone may have been casing houses.”

“But you told me nothing was taken.”

“The guy may not have had robbery on his mind. He might have been a nutcase looking for the right opportunity.”

Making it a random crime. It happened, of course, but rarely. So rarely she had trouble buying it now. “Do you even have a good description of him?”

“One of the homes he wandered around had security cameras. We have footage. If we have confirmation from the girl about what he looks like...”

Her eyes narrowed. The girl? What was with these guys? Were they deliberately trying not to see Chloe as a real person? Maybe cops had to do that, because keeping an emotional distance was healthy for them, but she didn’t like it. “So you’d arrest him if she says the man had brown hair and brown eyes, and that matches the camera footage. Even though half the men in Sadler meet that description.”

More silence. There were undoubtedly things he wasn’t telling her, but...

“From what I understand, you didn’t recover any weapons or meaningful trace evidence.”

“No weapons, but we have a wealth of fingerprints and hairs we can match to the killer once we have him.”

Usually he said “or killers.” Had he become enamored of the idea of the wandering nutjob? And unless, say, they’d found a hair in the blood, she wasn’t convinced. The Keifs probably entertained. Chloe’s six-year-old brother had undoubtedly had friends in and out, the friends’ parents there to pick them up and drop them off. Maybe in the kitchen to have a cup of coffee. However tidy the house, there were bound to be hairs or fingerprints or whatever that didn’t belong to family members.

But investigating was up to the two detectives. Her obligation was to protect Chloe.

“I’m sorry,” she said firmly. “She’s not ready. I wanted you aware that she has begun to speak, that’s all. When I’m sure she can handle it, I’ll let you know.”

They sparred some more, with her the winner—although she wasn’t so sure she would have been if either investigator knew how to lay his hands on Chloe while Trina was tied up with her patients.

* * *

TRINA AWAKENED WITH a start. Her phone must be ringing, she thought blearily as she reached out to grope for it on the bedside table. If that annoying Detective Risvold was calling again—

Except...did she smell smoke? With returning consciousness, she realized the shrill scream wasn’t the phone. A fire alarm downstairs had been set off, and suddenly the one in the hall up here began to squeal, too.

Trina shot up to a sitting position, fear punching her in the belly. Her eyes watered, and when she inhaled again, she bent forward coughing. There was a sharp undertone to the smell that she knew she ought to recognize.

Chloe!

Trina grabbed her phone and dropped to the floor. She crawled faster than she’d known she could to the door and into the hall. Even in the dark, she could tell the smoke was thicker here, and she heard the roar of fire. Heat radiated from the staircase, and when she turned her head, she saw flame burning up the wall.

No escape that way.

She crawled into Chloe’s room and kicked the door shut behind her. Block the crack at the bottom. She’d read that advice before. A door could slow the flames.

Nothing she could use lay in easy reach. Like Trina, Chloe seemed to be obsessively tidy by nature, which meant no dirty clothes strewed the floor. Trina gave it up temporarily and pushed herself up. Heart beating wildly, she hit the light switch, but nothing happened. Then she ran to the bed and shook the small figure that formed a lump beneath the covers.

“Chloe! Wake up!”

A snuffling sound was her only answer—and if anything Chloe drew herself into a tighter ball.

Trina yanked back the bedcovers. “The house is on fire.” Somehow she kept her voice calm. “We have to get out.”

The three-year-old sat up. “I don’t know how to get out,” she whispered, and then jerked. “Look!”

Trina turned to see the orange glow already beneath the door. How could the fire move so fast? She yanked the comforter off Chloe’s bed and hurried to cram it against the base of the door. Then she said, “We have to go out the window.”

Nothing to it, she thought semihysterically. She unlocked and lifted the sash window, peering down at lawn that in early April was still winter brown and probably rock hard. She could scream for help...but what if men who had set the fire came instead of neighbors?

Gasoline, that’s what she smelled. This fire hadn’t started with a spark in the wiring or a frayed electrical cord.

After shoving the window screen until it popped out and fell, she said, “Come here, sweetie.”

Chloe obeyed, thank goodness. Trina rushed to the bed for the two pillows and, leaning out the window, dropped them to the ground. They looked puny below. What were the odds they’d help break a fall? But she couldn’t think what else to do. Remembering her phone, she picked it up and dropped it, too. It bounced off one of the pillows onto the dark ground.

A sheet. She snatched it from the bed, horrified to see that the door glowed fiery orange and was dissolving before her eyes.

Twisting the sheet into an impromptu rope, she tied one end around Chloe’s waist. Then she cupped the child’s face with her hands. “I’m going to dangle you as far as I can with the sheet, but then I’ll have to drop you. Just let yourself roll, okay?”

“No!” Chloe flung her arms around one of Trina’s legs and held on frantically. “I don’t wanna! Please! Don’t make me!”

Throat tight, chest hurting, Trina said, “We don’t have any choice.” She wrenched a squirming, fighting Chloe away. Maneuvering her out the window was a nightmare, with the sobbing child flailing and trying to grab hold of her again. Finally, she was able to start lowering her.

The sheet ran out sooner than she’d hoped. Heat seared her back. She was out of time. I have to drop her.

But somebody ran across her yard and positioned himself below the window. “Let her go. I’ve got her.”

Trina recognized the voice of a brawny young guy who still lived with his parents on the block. With a whimper, she released the sheet and saw him catch Chloe.

The fire behind her had become so intense she didn’t hesitate. She climbed out, turned and grasped the edge of the window frame...and let go.

* * *

ACHING, STILL FILTHY, grateful for the pain meds that kept her from fully feeling the burns and bruises, Trina sat holding an armful of little girl. Her position was awkward, rocked to one side so that most of her weight was almost on her hip. Her back and butt had been slathered with ointment and covered with gauze before nurses helped her put on scrubs to replace her ruined T-shirt and flannel pajama bottoms.

“There’s some blistering,” the doctor had told her. “Minimal, but you had a close call.”

No kidding.

“It’s going to hurt,” he’d continued, “but if you have someone who can reapply the ointment, and if you take the pain medication as prescribed instead of trying to tough it out, I won’t insist you be admitted.”

He hadn’t asked if she had anywhere to go to, given that her house had just burned to the ground, but she’d called one of the two partners in her counseling practice. Josh Doughten and his wife, Vicky, had become good friends. Good enough to be a logical choice for her to call in the middle of the night. Plus, their two daughters were both away at college, so Trina knew they had empty bedrooms. Josh hadn’t even hesitated; he said he would get dressed and come immediately for her and Chloe.

But they wouldn’t be able to stay with the Doughtens long. She couldn’t endanger Josh and Vicky. What Trina wanted to do was jump—okay, climb slowly and carefully—into her car and drive away. Far away.

Two problems with that. Her car had been in the attached garage and was presumably part of the “total loss” the fire captain had described. Problem two? So was everything in the house, from her clothes to her purse, wallet and credit cards. The only thing she’d salvaged was her cell phone. Until she visited the Department of Motor Vehicles and the bank, she couldn’t even pay for a motel. Assuming anyone would rent a room to a crazy-looking woman with bare feet, wearing scrubs and carrying a kid who didn’t look any better than she did.

The police would probably offer her and Chloe protection, but it would come at a price. After all her effort to hold them off, they’d have the access to Chloe they’d been so desperate to get. In phone messages left in the last day and a half, initial begging had progressed to pestering and finally threatening. They didn’t understand the damage they could do to a fragile young child by trying to dig out answers too soon. And yes, Trina sympathized, but the murder victims were dead. Arresting the killers wouldn’t bring Chloe’s family back. But she was alive, and protecting and healing her had become Trina’s mission.

As if she’d conjured them, the two men entered the cubicle where she waited. Risvold was middle-aged and softening around the middle, his blond hair graying. His partner, in contrast, had to be over six feet and was strongly built. His skin was bronzed, whether from sun or genetics, and he had black hair and dark eyes.

His eyes as well as Risvold’s latched on to Chloe with an intensity that made Trina want to shrink back. Her arms tightened protectively.

“I already talked to the arson investigator,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll give you his report.”

Detective Risvold slid one of the plastic chairs to face hers, and sat down with a sigh. Deperro hung back. Good cop, bad cop?

“I’m sure he will, but his job has a different focus than ours,” Risvold said. “So I’d like you to tell us what you saw and heard.”

“Just a minute.” She stood up with Chloe in her arms and left the cubicle. Several people glanced up from where they sat at the nurses’ station. “Excuse me. The police are here to talk to me. Is there any chance someone could hold Chloe for a few minutes so she doesn’t have to be there?”

A motherly looking nurse leaped up and volunteered.

“You won’t take your eyes off her for a second?”

“Promise.”

Fortunately, the little girl was still asleep, a deadweight when Trina transferred her to the other woman’s arms.

Then she returned to the cubicle, where she repeated her story briefly.

“You hadn’t seen anyone hanging around?” Risvold asked. “No car parked on your block that didn’t look familiar? Think hard, Ms. Marr.”

She was really tempted to remind him that she was actually Dr. Marr. Not something she usually insisted on, but this man’s condescension raised her hackles. “The answer is no. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.”

“The faster we’re able to hear what, er, Chloe saw, the sooner you’ll both be safe.”

Hurting, scared and mad, Trina said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t make her your focus right now. For one thing, it’s obvious your wandering crazy is off the table as a suspect.”

“What do you mean?” Gee, Detective Deperro spoke.

“I mean, would he have it together enough to understand that a small child might be able to identify him? And know where she was staying? Oh, and set the fire without a soul seeing him?”

Deperro’s jaw tightened.

She leaned toward them. “Try looking at your own department, why don’t you? It’s been nearly a month since the murders. Chloe and I have been fine. The day before yesterday, I told you she’d begun to speak, that I thought it wouldn’t be long before we could try asking her questions. Then tonight someone set my house on fire when the two of us were asleep inside. How many people knew what I told you? Who did they talk to?”

“Miss Marr... Katrina.” To his credit, Detective Deperro looked worried. “What about her day care? Is there anyone there who would have talked?”

“No,” she said flatly. “And since even you don’t know where she is, how would the killer have known who to cozy up to for news about Chloe?”

“I’m authorized to give you twenty-four-hour protection,” Risvold offered.

Even without a plan, Trina said, “Thank you, but no.”

He frowned. “But where will you go?”

Long-term? The correct answer was I have no idea. But she only shook her head.