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* * *
Pescoli was a wreck and Alvarez didn’t blame her. When the panicked phone call came in, she was at her desk and heard the break in her ex-partner’s voice as she explained about the missing baby.
“. . . we checked the monitor, but it’s been on the fritz and it looks like whoever it was came in through the window.”
“Wasn’t it latched?”
“I think so? God, it’s freezing outside and who would do such a thing?”
Alvarez hadn’t been able to answer it then, nor could she now, in the middle of Pescoli’s family room while a forensics team went over every inch of her house. Regan’s husband was beside her, an arm over her shoulders, but he seemed as shell-shocked as his wife. Pescoli’s kids were gathered in the room, Bianca in a recliner and her brother on the footstool, Ivy Wilde looking small and frightened in an oversized chair and wrapped in a comforter.
“We found marks against the side of the house. It looks like a ladder was used and then whoever it was pried the window open. There’s a partially visible print on the carpet where a wet boot left debris,” Alvarez said.
“I keep all the ladders in the shed. It’s unlocked,” Santana admitted, guilt evident on his face.
“Why would someone take a baby?” Bianca asked, and a dozen answers flitted through Alvarez’s brain. None of them good: Revenge. Envy. The black market. A couple who is barren and desperate. Or much, much worse.
“We don’t know,” she said, but caught the fear in Pescoli’s eyes. She knew. All cops did.
And they all watched the clock.
Though Alvarez had no idea who would be so brazen as to steal a child in the middle of the night with so many people and dogs around, she couldn’t help but wonder if the abduction had something to do with Ivy Wilde. Was her appearance on Pescoli’s doorstep just a coincidence . . . or . . . ?
From the corner of her eye she saw the girl in the big chair, looking shell-shocked. Caused by guilt? Or the tragedy she’d witnessed?
As the crime scene techs pored over the house, she questioned every member of the family, learning nothing more. Santana had been in the house all night, until morning, when he was watering and feeding the stock. Bianca had been asleep in her bed, wearing earphones, but admitting that something, some kind of bump had woken her for a second before she’d fallen back asleep sometime near four in the morning. Ivy, feeling blue, had sneaked over to Jeremy’s r
oom above the garage sometime after midnight, but she hadn’t thought to check on the baby and she swore she knew nothing about his abduction. Just like everyone else.
And yet he was gone.
Snatched out of his bed on the second story.
The baby monitor was working only part of the time. There was an image of someone near the crib on the recorder, but it was pixilated and grainy and was more a shot of darker gray shadows in a dim room.
What the hell had happened?
Who would take Pescoli’s baby?
Someone who had it in for her?
Someone who despised Santana?
Or just someone who had wanted a child for whatever nefarious purpose?
“We have to find him,” Pescoli whispered, her voice raw. “We have to.” She lifted her head and met Alvarez’s eyes. “Whatever we have to do,” she said with dark determination in her eyes, “we have to find my son.”
* * *
The baby was a pain in the ass.
He cried all the time. All the time.
No matter how many bottles of formula she fed him, or how many times she’d changed his diaper or clothes, he wailed.
Nonstop.
How did mothers stand it?
