The Only Witness (3 page)

The smokers joined her. She stabbed a finger toward the passenger seat. "I left her right here. She was sleeping in her car seat. Did you see anyone around here?"

They all shook their heads. "I saw you walk into the store," Jed said, "but I didn't see a baby. I didn't even see your car."

"That's because I parked on the other side of the—" She spun on her heel. The van was gone. Had it been there when she came out of the store? She couldn't remember. Choking down the nasty ooze that rose in her throat, she turned back. "Ivy was right
here
. See, I rolled down the windows a crack, and I locked the doors. All the doors. I know I did."

"Omigod. You
left
your baby in the car
all alone
?" Madison's mouth stayed open after she said it.

A brown-skinned woman in an orange sundress heard Madison and brought her shopping cart to a halt. "You left a baby in the car alone?" She stared straight at Brittany.

How could she pretend she hadn't now? Brittany nodded miserably. "And now she's gone." Her heart was pounding in her ears. Oh god, it was true. Ivy was gone. "Someone took my baby!"

The woman pulled a cell phone out of her purse and dialed nine-one-one. Then she made Brittany and the others go back into the store with her, and they talked to the manager and asked everyone in the store if any of them had seen a stranger with Ivy. Several people remembered seeing Brittany—"the girl with the strawberry-blonde ponytail"—but nobody had seen an infant at all. Nope, no baby.

"You left your baby in the car?" everyone kept saying, over and over. "You left a baby all alone in the car?"

Like that was somehow more awful than somebody stealing her daughter.

Chapter
4

One hour after Ivy disappears

Finn's cell phone chimed from the table beside his easy chair. There was a cat in his lap. Crap, he'd fallen asleep again watching the news. The TV, still on mute, displayed a game show. Yawning, Finn flicked the cell phone open. EPD—that would likely be Sergeant Carlisle on the desk this time of evening. He checked his watch. Damn. Officially, he still had ten minutes to go on his shift.

"Detective Finn," he growled.

The cat on his stomach slitted its yellow-green eyes. It looked like it was smiling.

"Get out of those slippers and into your wingtips," Carlisle said. "We need you down at the Food Mart."

"I wouldn't be caught dead in slippers
or
wingtips." Finn groaned. "The Food Mart? You kidding me?"

The small police department had four detectives: two men, two women. Each twenty-four hours was split into four shifts between them, which meant they didn't really work as partners. The shifts overlapped by two hours, which theoretically allowed the detective going off shift to pass information and update the detective coming on about the open cases. Practically speaking, the system meant that most of the time each detective worked solo on his or her own case for however long it took.

The uniforms had a tendency to call the detectives in for every crime in which the perpetrator had not yet confessed. In this economy, there was no overtime pay, just a vague promise of 'comp time' that would probably never happen.

"Some vegan unplug the meat freezer again?" Finn asked. "Can't it wait until morning?"

"This'll wake you up."

Forty minutes after he received the phone call, Finn was in the Food Mart parking lot. The uniforms had taped off the parking spot and kept everyone out of the blue Civic. He walked around the little car now, stopped for a moment to ponder the sticker on the back bumper—
The Dinosaurs Died for Our Sins
. Probably something to do with the school board. There was some silly argument about a resolution to teach all sides of the global warming and evolution debates. Whatever the hell
that
meant.

He studied the scene. A typical grocery store, cars coming and going, shoppers rolling carts up the curbs and through the lot, even now, at eight-thirty in the evening. The breeze was picking up, gusting candy wrappers and plastic bags across the pavement.

An empty soft-drink cup rolled into the taped-off area where Finn had assigned a rookie to collect debris. Scoletti wasn't happy about the job, especially now, when Finn had just told him to scrape up and bag all the chewing gum in the zone. Each wad in a separate bag, he had to remind the kid. Man, he missed having a Crime Scene team on his speed dial.

"Hey, Detective, you want me to get that cup, too?" The rookie's tone was smart-aleck.

"Yep. Bag it. But mark it as from across the lot." Finn ignored Scoletti's scowl and turned back to the youngster in front of him.

The girl, a strawberry blonde with hair falling into her eyes, appeared far too young to be a mother. Brittany Morgan had just turned seventeen, according to her driver's license. "So, Miss Morgan," he said for the second time, "Tell me again why you left your baby?"

"She was asleep. I didn't want to wake her up."

"And where was she when you left her?"

"I already told you, Ivy was in the front seat, the passenger seat," she sobbed. "Why aren't you out
searching
for her?"

"I need a little more information," Finn said mildly. "The baby was lying in the passenger seat in front?"

Brittany shot him a dirty look. "Ivy was in her car seat. What sort of a mother do you think I am?" She waved a hand in the air. "I know she's supposed to be in the back, but have you ever tried to put a baby carrier in the back of a two-door?"

Finn had already examined the interior of the Civic. Crumpled potato-chip bag, two hairclips in the back seat. An empty soda can on the floor behind the passenger seat and a bag of groceries in the driver's seat. There were faint marks on the front passenger seat that might or might not delineate the bottom edges of a baby carrier, and some crusty stripes on the floor mat that might or might not be dried drool or baby barf. No definitive sign that this girl even had an infant.

"Car seat?" he asked now. He turned and stared pointedly at the Civic again. No sign of a car seat.

"They took it! They took it when they took Ivy!"

"They?" Interesting that she used the plural. Just an offhand comment, or did she know more than one person was involved?

"Whoever!" she gestured wildly. "Whoever took Ivy!" She glanced into the car again. "Shit! They took my diaper bag, too!"

"Can you describe the car seat and the diaper bag?" He held his pen poised over the notepad.

Her gaze jerked to his. She pushed her fingers through her bangs, which immediately fell back into her eyes. He couldn't tell what she was thinking. She looked bewildered. A confused child.

He tried for a more gentle tone. "There are a lot of babies in the area. The car seat and diaper bag could help to identify…" He scanned his notes for the baby's name.

"Ivy!" she yelped. "Ivy Rose Morgan!"

"Ivy," he repeated softly. "What was the brand of the car seat?"

"I can't remember. It was used when I got it." Brittany scrubbed her hands against her cheeks for a minute, her eyes on the concrete sidewalk. "It was this icky color, kind of gray beige."

He wrote down
taupe
. "And the diaper bag?"

"The diaper bag was—well, it wasn't a real diaper bag, it was my old blue backpack, but it had two diapers and a little yellow dress in it, with a duck on the front. And some extra socks, because Ivy's always losing—" At that point her eyes flooded with tears and she made a strangling sound as she clapped a hand over her mouth.

He stared at the lines on his pad for a few seconds, giving her time to pull herself together. "Any other distinguishing marks on the bag—backpack? Any other items of yours inside?" he prompted in a low voice.

She turned back toward him. "I can't remember. I can't think about anything but Ivy. Why are we just
standing
here?" She stared at him, blue eyes pleading. After a second, she dashed over to Scoletti, who was on his hands and knees scraping gum from the pavement with a screwdriver. Grabbing a handful of the rookie's shirt sleeve, she sobbed, "Please, go look for my baby!"

In spite of his determination to stay dispassionate, Finn's heart lurched. When older kids went missing it was bad enough, but infants and toddlers—they were portable and easily disposed of, and they never asked strangers for help. He couldn't get the tiny corpse he'd seen this morning out of his head.

And then there were his missing cases in Chicago—a whole parade of them. Most were resolved as accidental deaths or negligent homicides, which often amounted to the same thing with careless parents. The only cases that ended more or less happily were the ones in which one divorced parent stole the kid from the other; at least those parents had hopes of their kid coming home, even if it was after a court battle. The worst case
he'd worked on was the hunt for four-year-old Ashley Kowalski. After a twenty-two-hour search, they'd found her in an old refrigerator in the junk heap her grandparents called a backyard. He'd never forget catching her body as it tumbled out. He still had a scar from where he'd cut the back of his hand on the broken latch. He rubbed it now.

The discovery of Ashley's body had been bad, but it was the autopsy report that had done him in. The girl died an hour before they'd opened the refrigerator door.

He'd lasted two years in Missing Persons before asking for a transfer to Homicide. At least the victims there were already beyond help.

There were no detective divisions here in small-town America. In eighteen months, he'd worked everything from vandalism to hog rustling to armed robbery. Whether this was a homicide or a kidnapping or something else entirely, it was his case.

He walked over to Brittany and pulled the girl gently away from Scoletti. He led her to a bench at the side of the store. "We will look for Ivy, Miss Morgan, but first we need to know a little more. Now, when we arrived, the driver's door was unlocked…"

"Because I was putting the groceries in!"

"And what did you buy?" Sometimes a peripheral question resulted in important details.

"Diet Dr. Pepper, apples, bean dip, Fritos, oh no—" Her hands flew to her mouth again. "I forgot the Huggies! I need Huggies!"

A dust-streaked tow truck pulled into the parking lot. The driver's window slid down, letting a blast of country rock escape, and the guy's gaze flicked from each uniform to the next. When the driver finally glanced at him, Finn tilted his head toward the Civic, and the driver started maneuvering into place.

"I can't believe I forgot the Huggies," Brittany moaned. A mascara-laden tear rolled down her cheek, leaving a dark trail over freckles on its way to her chin. "That's the whole reason I came." Then she noticed the tow truck driver attaching the hook. Her expression changed to outrage. She jumped up from the bench. "Don't let him take my car!"

One of the other unmarked cars rolled in, and Perry Dawes, the detective Finn most often worked with, got out, accompanied by a middle-aged man who wore blue jeans and a worried expression.

"Daddy!" Brittany threw herself into the man's arms.

Finn listened to the girl's sobs and her father's questions for a few seconds. Satisfied that he'd glean no more clues there, he pulled the sack of groceries from the Civic and placed it on the sidewalk for the girl. Then he pulled Dawes aside. "Did you find the father of the baby?"

Dawes shook his head. "Not yet. Mr. Morgan told me that the baby's father is Charlie Wakefield, age nineteen. Who is in Cheney at Eastern Washington University right now, according to his parents, sharing a dorm suite with three other students. I've got the local PD checking on that. And by the way, the elder Wakefields—I had eyes on both of them—told me there's no proof Charlie is the baby's father."

"Really?" Finn raised an eyebrow. "Wakefield…" The name seemed familiar.

"Yep," Dawes said. "Travis Wakefield—our County Exec. Charlie's his son."

Finn rubbed a hand across his brow. The County Executive wielded a lot of influence, especially in a rural area like this. He and Dawes watched Brittany weep in her father's arms. Her tears were real and plentiful, but Finn had learned long ago that teenagers could be consummate actors. Brittany's father—Noah Morgan—seemed completely lost. His eyes scanned the parking lot as if he could spot the infant out there. Finn made a mental note to get the man alone as soon as possible to quiz him about his daughter and granddaughter.

"Where's Brittany's mother?" he asked Dawes.

"Closing up at Washington Federal Bank. She's assistant manager there. She'll be here any minute now. Dad runs the county recycling center outside of town."

"So all grandparents are accounted for?"

"Looks that way." Dawes raised a hand to cover a yawn, then continued, "I've never had a missing baby. Had kids that wandered off before, had two snatched by the non-custodial parents, but they could all walk and talk. Kids and babies," he grumbled. "They should've assigned Larson and Melendez to this."