His Case, Her Baby Read online

  Chapter 4

  The thrum of excitement that filled Peyton was almost as sickening as the helpless, hopeless feeling that had been with her all day long.

  “Four years ago, Jack Warner and his wife renovated their detached garage and made it into a small studio apartment,” Tom said. “Their son rented it from them until he got married and moved into his own house, and since then they’ve rented it out to whoever needed it. Jack told me a woman by the name of Sarah Johnson rented it and has been living there for the past two months. He said Sarah Johnson looks exactly like the woman on our flyers.”

  “So, she used a fake name to rent the place. Surely we’ll find something there that will give us a clue to her real identity,” Peyton said. “A fingerprint or maybe something she left behind.” Excitement roared through her. “We’re a step closer, Tom. We’re a step closer to having Lilly back where she belongs.”

  He frowned, and with that gesture some of Peyton’s excitement waned. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What is it you aren’t telling me?”

  “Jack said her car is parked out front. I’m trying to figure out why a woman who snatched a baby didn’t take her car when she left town.”

  A faint disquiet swept through Peyton. “Maybe she was afraid we’d find out about the car and could broadcast the license plate information with the AMBER Alert?”

  “Maybe, but then the question becomes how did she leave town? There’s no bus service in Black Rock, no airport or train station.”

  “Maybe she didn’t leave town. Maybe she’s crazy enough to think that she could steal my baby and stay in that garage apartment and nobody would know.” Even as Peyton said the words, she didn’t believe them.

  It didn’t make sense. But then nothing had made sense since the moment Kathy had attacked her in the bathroom.

  “She’d be stupid to hang around here,” Tom replied. “And a woman who was able to so thoroughly manipulate you and plan Lilly’s kidnapping wouldn’t be stupid enough to hang around town.”

  “So, she’d have to have an accomplice, somebody working with her.” The idea that there might be two people who had wanted her baby was almost as frightening as anything else that had happened so far.

  “Maybe a husband or a boyfriend,” Tom said.

  “How could a man allow himself to be a party to such a crime?” she asked.

  Tom shot her a quick glance as he turned off Main Street and onto a tree-studded residential road. “My brothers and I call that crazy love.”

  “Crazy love?”

  He nodded. “You see it in the headlines all the time. A woman who helps her husband kidnap women for his sexual pleasure. She does it because she loves him. Or a man who might help his wife run a credit card scam because he loves her too much to tell her no.”

  “That’s not crazy love. That’s two crazy people thinking what they feel is love,” she replied.

  “You wouldn’t break the law for a man you loved?” he asked.

  A nervous laugh escaped her. “I’d never be with a man who would ask me to break the law,” she replied.

  “That’s good to know,” he replied.

  Every muscle in her body tensed as Tom pulled the car to the curb in front of a neat ranch house. An older man sat on a wicker chair on the front porch and rose to his feet at the sight of them.

  Tom unfastened his seat belt and then turned and looked at her. “Peyton, I need you to stay in the car until I assess the scene. I don’t want to put you in danger, and I certainly don’t want to put your baby in danger if she’s somewhere on the property.”

  Although she desperately wanted to be beside him when he went into the apartment, she reluctantly nodded her head. The last thing she would want to do was put Lilly at any greater risk.

  “I don’t want to make things more difficult for you.” She placed a hand on his forearm. “But, if Lilly’s in there and you get to her, you’ll bring her right to me, yes?” Her heart beat loudly in her ears and she felt half-breathless with anxiety.

  “Of course, but you know, Peyton, the likelihood of them being here is pretty low.”

  She squeezed his arm. “Just go find something, Tom. Find something that will get my baby back in my arms.” She released her hold on him and watched as he got out of the car and met the man she assumed was Jack Warner in the middle of the front yard. She quickly rolled down her window so she could hear the conversation taking place between the two.

  “She was no trouble at all,” Jack said to Tom. “Paid the rent in cash on time and kept to herself. I never saw anyone here visiting her.”

  “Did you have her fill out a background form before renting to her?”

  Jack laughed and shook his head. “Now, Tom, you know that’s not how we do things here in Black Rock. She seemed like a nice young woman and she had the cash in hand. She told us she wanted a fresh start and had fallen in love with Black Rock. That was good enough for me and Martha.”

  “Did she mention where she was from?”

  Jack frowned. “I don’t believe it came up.” As the two men began to walk around the side of the house, their voices were lost to Peyton.

  She unfastened her seat belt and tried to still the frantic pounding of her heart. Even though she knew it was completely irrational, she hoped and prayed that Tom would open up that apartment door and Kathy would be sitting on her sofa with Lilly on her lap.

  Closing her eyes, she imagined Lilly in her mind. Her head filled with the sweet baby scent of her daughter, and a vision of Lilly’s toothless smile nearly made her cry out loud.

  She felt as if she’d been so strong, had tried so hard to keep it all together, but at the moment she felt as if the smallest thing could shatter her completely apart.

  All she could do was pray that wherever Lilly was, she was safe and with somebody who was loving her and taking care of her until the time she was back in Peyton’s arms.

  One thing was certain. She was grateful for Tom. His calm, steady presence through all of this was part of what had kept her sane. All she had to do was look in his dark brown eyes and she felt the calm soothing her rising hysteria.

  The hours spent with Rick had only reconfirmed the fact that they hadn’t been right for each other. Although he’d tried to be supportive in his own way and she knew he was hurting, too, she’d almost been grateful when he’d gone back to Wichita.

  It wasn’t lost on Peyton that she’d found comfort in Tom’s arms and not in Lilly’s father’s arms. On some level it surprised her to realize that she felt more comfortable with the handsome sheriff than she had in all the months of her relationship with Rick.

  Rick was self-contained, rarely showing any deep emotion. He was a bundle of suppressed energy. All qualities that she knew made him a wonderful assistant district attorney but didn’t bode well for personal relationships.

  Tom was different. She sensed a tremendous capacity for love in him. It shone from his eyes when he spoke of his family, and it had radiated from his very being when he’d held her in his arms.

  She sighed with impatience. She knew what she was doing—thinking of anything and everything except what might be taking place in the apartment where Kathy Simon had lived.

  What was taking so long? Why hadn’t Tom come out to tell her what he’d found? With each agonizing minute that ticked by, it became more apparent to her that Lilly wasn’t inside the apartment.

  Something was wrong. She felt it in the sudden weight of her heart in her chest. Something was wrong and she needed to know what it was, what was happening. She needed to know right now.

  Even though she’d told Tom she’d remain in the car and stay out of his way, the need to get out of the car and go to the garage apartment was stronger than her half-hearted commitment to Tom to stay in the car.

  She opened the car door and got out, a terrible foreboding washing over her. It was taking too long. Something just wasn’t right.

  As she began to walk toward the side of the house where Tom an
d Jack had disappeared, she felt as if her feet were weighed down by the inexplicable dread that coursed through her.

  When she reached the side of the house, the detached garage came into view. Two things caused a screaming alarm to go off in her head. The first was Jack Warner seated on the grass next to the building with his hands over his face. The second was Tom standing off to one side talking frantically into his cell phone.

  Tom’s features were taut with tension, and that tension electrified Peyton. A screaming protest came from her. Then she whispered, “No.” Suddenly she was running, deep sobs welling up inside her as she raced for the open front door.

  “Peyton, wait! Don’t go in there,” Tom exclaimed.

  She ignored him. She ran into the front door and stopped short as a deep moan escaped her. On the floor just inside the door was Kathy Simon. Dead.

  The young woman was sprawled on her back like a broken doll. Her blue eyes were wide open and staring up as if in surprise. Her hair was no longer long and red but instead was cut short and dyed black. Still, there was no question it was Kathy.

  A large knife protruded from her chest.

  “Oh, God. Oh, God,” Peyton gasped. “Lilly!” The name ripped from the depths of her being as she nearly fell to her knees.

  “Peyton.” Tom gripped her firmly by one arm. “She’s not here. Listen to me, Peyton. I promise you Lilly isn’t here. You need to come outside now. This is an active crime scene.”

  She stared up at him with incomprehension but allowed him to lead her back outside, where she drew several deep, steadying breaths. “I don’t understand. Who would do this? What’s going on? And where is my baby, Tom?”

  “I don’t know, Peyton,” he replied.

  For the first time since Lilly had disappeared, Peyton faced the possibility that she might never see her daughter again.

  Tom stepped outside the garage apartment and drew a deep, weary sigh. It was just after midnight and the scene had been processed. Kathy’s body had been taken away to be looked at more thoroughly by the local medical examiner.

  Peyton had left the scene hours earlier. Benjamin had taken her home and was staying with her so Tom could sort things out there.

  The medical examiner had tentatively determined that death had probably occurred sometime the evening before. Cause of death had been the single deep stab wound to the chest.

  Tom now not only had the job of finding Lilly but also of solving a murder. The only sign that Lilly had been in the studio apartment at all was a tiny pink bootie he’d found next to the sofa.

  He drew in a deep breath of the hot night air as his brain worked overtime to try to make sense of everything. Why would somebody murder a kidnapper? And where had Lilly been taken?

  Caleb stepped outside and joined Tom. “We found her purse in the closet. She’s got a driver’s license in the name of Kathy Simon and another in the name of Sarah Johnson. To my eyes they both look like very good fakes.”

  Tom frowned. “We’ll run her fingerprints through the AFIS system and see if anything pops.” He knew it could take anywhere from twenty-four to forty-eight hours for the Automated Fingerprint Identification System to make a match and that was only if she’d been arrested or had her fingerprints taken in the past.

  “Maybe with a real identification it will be easier to make sense of all this,” Caleb said. “I’m glad you didn’t rip up Peyton’s patio looking for a body. Guess I was off base where she’s concerned.”

  Tom clapped a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “You were right to be suspicious of Peyton’s story.” He dropped his arm back to his side. “What a mess.”

  “I hate to add to the mess, but nobody’s heard from Brittany all day,” Caleb said. “I drove by her place on my way here, and her car is gone.”

  “God, I hope she hasn’t gone and done something stupid.” Tom released another deep sigh. “I suppose she’ll eventually call one of us.” He would be more concerned if Brittany hadn’t done this before.

  Brittany was only eighteen when their parents had died, and despite the support of her brothers, she’d taken the deaths hard.

  Tom had been thrilled when she’d decided to follow her brothers’ footsteps and make her career law enforcement. She was not only beautiful, but she was also exceptionally bright and had become a valuable team player in the Black Rock Sheriff’s Department. Unfortunately, far too often her personal life interfered with her professional one.

  “I’m going to have to talk to her. I can’t let her just disappear every time she gets a new boyfriend or feels like she needs some time alone. If she’s going to work for me, then I have to know I can depend on her,” Tom said.

  “Don’t be too hard on her. She’s just having trouble growing up,” Caleb replied.

  “In the meantime, I’ve got a murder to solve and a baby to find,” Tom replied. His thoughts turned to Peyton. She had to be hysterical over this latest turn of events.

  He wished he had the time to go over to her house, to somehow find the right words to assuage her fears, but he didn’t. He didn’t have the right words and he didn’t have the time.

  He and his deputies needed to go over the crime scene again and canvass the neighborhood to see if anyone had seen anything related to the murder.

  Besides, it bothered him that he wanted to be there for her, that all he could think about was how badly she needed to be held right now.

  It had been a very long time since he’d had any interest in a woman. Five years earlier, his heart had been ripped out of his chest and he’d thought the wound was fatal, that he’d never feel anything for another woman again.

  Peyton was the first woman since the tragedy to make him feel again, and he didn’t like it. The last thing he wanted was to get close to a woman, to fall in love again.

  He raked a hand down his face, inwardly cursing his own foolishness. The only interest Peyton had in him was as a lawman who could bring her baby home. But he couldn’t do that until they got an ID on the dead woman in Jack Warner’s apartment.

  They worked through the night. The fingerprints lifted were sent to a lab in Topeka, along with any other forensic evidence they’d collected. Black Rock was far too small to have anything resembling a crime lab, so they used the lab in Topeka.

  Sam was dispatched to physically drive the evidence to Topeka, although the fingerprints were already being run through the AFIS. Neighbors were contacted and statements were taken, but nobody had seen anything that might give a clue to the killer.

  The evidence pointed to Kathy Simon opening her door to her killer. There was no sign of forced entry at any of the doors or windows.

  Tom could only speculate on why Kathy had stayed in town, and his theory was that somebody—a partner—had met her there and she had planned to leave with that person. Not only had her hair been cut and dyed, but a suitcase containing all of her clothes had been packed and was waiting in the closet.

  She’d been ready to run, but why had she waited so long? Waiting for her accomplice to show up? There was no way to know if that accomplice was male or female. Was it somebody from Kathy’s life before she moved here or somebody here in town?

  He hated to think that it was somebody in his town, a friend or neighbor who smiled at him or raised a hand in greeting but secretly had the capacity for kidnapping and murder.

  It was after six in the morning when Tom finally headed to Peyton’s place. He wished he had something to give her, but he had nothing. His men were out canvassing the streets, the evidence was on its way to the lab and so far there had been nothing from the AFIS.

  He’d sent photos of the victim to all the news sources hoping that somebody would see the photo on the news and be able to make an official identification.

  It was a waiting game…waiting for the physical evidence to turn up something, waiting to see if her fingerprints would identify her. Until they knew her real name, he had no idea in what direction to take the investigation.

  As he p
arked in Peyton’s driveway, the sun appeared in the eastern sky, promising another hot, clear day. He was exhausted but felt he owed it to Peyton to stop by and check in with her.

  Wearily he pulled himself out of his car, wishing he had something to tell Peyton that would bring a smile to her face, irritated with himself by how badly he wanted to see a smile from her.

  When he reached the front door he knocked softly and Benjamin answered. “How’s she doing?” Tom asked as he stepped into the small foyer.

  “She napped on and off during the night. She’s been real quiet, very self-contained.” Benjamin frowned. “And I’m assuming there’s nothing new.”

  “Nothing,” Tom replied. “Hopefully by the end of the day we’ll have a good identification and can go from there. Where is Peyton now?”

  “She’s in the nursery.”

  “Go home, get some sleep, I might need you later today,” Tom said.

  Benjamin nodded and Tom clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll talk to you later,” Tom said.

  He stood at the door and watched as Benjamin got into his car and drove off, wishing he could go in and tell Peyton something positive, but he had nothing to offer her. As he went down the hallway toward the nursery, the silence of the house pressed in around him. He summoned what strength he had left to face Peyton.

  He stepped into the doorway of the nursery and found her sitting in a rocking chair facing the window. She wasn’t aware of his presence, and for a moment he merely stood, his breath stuck in his chest as he looked at her.

  The morning sun caught in her hair and sparkled with a thousand pinpoints of light. There was no question that something about this woman resonated deep inside him. It wasn’t just her physical beauty that fired through him, that was a given.

  It was more than that. It was a need to right her world, a desire to be a hero for her. It was like nothing he’d felt before, and it scared him more than just a little bit.

  “Peyton.” He spoke her name softly, not wanting to startle her.