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“Maybe.” Emma adored Frank’s son Cal, the boy she’d loved as her big brother—and the man he’d become, too. But Emma hadn’t said a lot about Frank. “Who’d have figured that no one would mention the delivery truck having been on the street that day?”
“Or the fact that young Cal had cut school. If the boy had been where he was supposed to have been he’d never have seen that little girl in his father’s car that morning,” Ramsey added, his voice gaining momentum.
“If Cal hadn’t seen Claire in Frank’s car, Frank would never have been a suspect and Jack, as the only other occupant of the street at the time, would have been the prime suspect. You think Whittier chose that particular day and time to do something with Claire because he knew the delivery truck would be there and could be a diversion?”
“It happens.”
“But no one reported seeing the delivery truck that day,” Lucy repeated, frowning in the darkness, needing answers while not yet sure they had all the right questions.
“Young Cal and the neighbors were asked if they saw or did anything unusual that day, anything outside of their normal routines. That truck was routine. No one reported the cars that were usually parked on the street, either. Or seeing their neighbors going to work. They only said they didn’t see anything different or unusual.”
People noticed what they expected to notice. “And unless we’re going to believe that the neighbors also had something to do with Claire’s disappearance, then we have to believe that they were all engaged in their own lives, their own mornings, and didn’t notice anything unusual or someone would have seen that little girl snatched away from her home in broad daylight.”
“Exactly. How did that happen?” Ramsey asked what she knew was a rhetorical question. And it wasn’t.
“Unless someone who was supposed to be on that block, someone who knew her, took her. What I remember from the police reports is that Claire didn’t cry out. Or scream. Her mother would surely have heard that.”
“Right. No one heard anything.”
“She wouldn’t have gone willingly with Jack Colton. She didn’t know him. Which is why we’re right back to Frank Whittier.”
Ramsey’s angle was a good one. The most likely one. Probably the right one.
If Frank wanted the delivery guy, Jack Colton, to be a suspect, he’d have mentioned the guy when he’d first been questioned twenty-five years before. To divert attention from himself, if nothing else.
“Maybe there’s someone else,” she said, anyway, to keep them both sharp enough not to overlook anything. Not to miss what might be right in front of them. The evidence told the truth and they just didn’t have enough of that yet. “Someone who also knew Jack’s schedule. Someone unrelated to either him or Frank. Because if Frank timed his move in line with Jack’s truck on the street, wouldn’t he have led the police in that direction by mentioning that he saw the truck there?”
Theories were an important part of police work, she reminded herself. Theories led to questions, to quests for information, that often led to evidence. To the truth. They just didn’t want to get so lost in one theory that they missed another. Or lost sight of facts.
“Someone could have silenced the child before she had a chance to scream for her mother,” Ramsey said. “Jack could have been working on his own. Other than the fact that he’s a great guy who cares about old ladies and saving money and is faithful to his girlfriends, who pays his taxes on time, has no police record and not even points on his driver’s license, he could have done this.”
She empathized with his frustration. Felt it along with her own mass of tumbling emotions that night.
“You know something?” she said as she sank a little deeper into her pillows.
“What?”
“I’m glad that I had Allie’s missing-person’s file checked out when you went looking for it to find out if she was one of Walters’s victims.”
“Why?”
Just like a guy was her first thought. He couldn’t intuitively understand an emotional outpouring and return it in kind? “Because you called me to ask about it and I found out that I’m not the only person whose every waking moment is centered on searching for missing children.” Because he’d called her and become her best friend in the world. “This quest just never lets me go. Ever. And it’s the same with you, isn’t it? You’ve got Claire Sanderson and I’ve got my sister.”
“I saw the evidence in Walters’s basement.”
He cared so deeply.
And she wanted to feel that intensity in a physical sense.
She rubbed the back of her neck. “I’m glad that we found each other,” she admitted, the darkness, her meeting with Wakerby, messing with her.
It wasn’t that she needed Ramsey. She was just feeling… glad that he was on the other end of her line.
“There’s no off time for us,” she rambled on. “Any time of the day or night, we’re ready and willing to talk about a case. Before you, I had to wait for a decent hour to run things by a colleague.”
In other words, they were both fully engrossed in work to the exclusion of any other aspect of life. They were twodimensional human beings living in a three-dimensional world.
Could sex be two-dimensional, too?
