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She came up beside him with her own mug nestled in her hands, relishing the heat that warmed her cold body. She faced the darkness and saw their reflections. He was only a few inches taller than her five feet eleven inches, but where she was slender, almost reed thin, he was broad shouldered and muscular.
Madison remembered J.T.’s two older children reluctantly agreeing to go home with Reverend Colin Fitzpatrick and his wife, Emma, to get some rest. She’d also seen the silent struggle waging within J.T. Did he allow his children to go or stay with him where he could keep an eye on them, possibly protect them from whomever had taken Ashley? J.T. was sure his youngest daughter had been kidnapped, and after going over what evidence they had, she agreed. Deep down it felt like an abduction.
She turned toward him, her arm brushing against his. The brief contact riveted her attention on him, causing a catch in her throat. “I’m glad the rain finally stopped a while ago.”
“Yeah.” J.T. sipped his coffee.
“Did you have a chance to talk with Colin when he picked up Kim and Neil?”
“Just a few minutes. He’s bringing my son back at dawn, so Neil can help with the search.”
“How about Kim? I want to talk to her again.”
“Emma will stay with her at Grace’s house. Between those two they should be able to—” he cleared his throat “—take care of her, keep her safe.”
“If I recall correctly, Grace was a drill sergeant in the army before she retired.”
“Yes. I have to know Kim’s in good hands or—” He worked his mouth but no other words would come out.
A tightness clogged her own throat. She put her mug on the windowsill and faced him. “Let us take care of everything. I don’t know how you’re keeping yourself together.” She reached out and touched his arm, wishing she could take his pain away, wishing she could do so much more.
His muscles tightened beneath her fingertips. His gaze bore into her. “No! My daughter is missing. I will bring her home.” His mouth firmed into a fierce expression. “You don’t need to worry about me falling apart. I won’t allow it. I have the most important job of my life to do and nothing will stand in my way.” His savage tone, directed more at the situation than at her, never rose above a loud whisper.
When he brought his mug to his lips, her fingers slipped from his arm, but not before she noticed the hand holding his coffee quivered slightly. “We all have a breaking point.”
Over the rim of his cup, he glared at her but didn’t say a word.
Determined to make him see he had his limits, she didn’t back down from him. “I’m available if you need someone to talk to. And I’m sure Colin is, too.”
“I know.” The hardness in his features melted some. “I know you’re worried, but don’t be. I haven’t been a sheriff of a small town all my career. I’ve seen bad situations before.”
“But none that involved your own family.”
A distant look flared in his eyes as though a memory surfaced, best left in the past. “I know what I have to do, Madison. I won’t fail Ashley.”
His professional facade, locked in place, shut down any further discussion about how this was affecting him. Madison drew in a calming breath. “Okay. Then let’s talk business for a moment. I see Eric Carlton on the list of people you interviewed, but nothing was written down under his name. Why?”
“Because we couldn’t find him. I have two deputies out looking for him right now. He’s the only person in Crystal Springs that has been convicted of a sex crime. He lives outside of town near the lake. One of the teams with a dog from the K-9 unit will be concentrating around his cabin.”
“Then he’s your prime suspect at the moment?” Although she felt out of the loop, she had to remember she was just one agent and could do only so much. For the past hours she had concentrated on going over what physical evidence they had, then looking at all the logs of the interviews so she could talk with each person and possibly discover something that could help the investigation.
“The only suspect at the moment unless you count all the people I’ve put away who are now out of prison. Your boss has one of your agents over at Carlton’s cabin waiting for him in case he decides to return home.”
“Do you think he will? Or will he flee?”
“I think he’s long gone. I put an APB out on him and his black Ford truck. Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will pick him up.”
“How about any other sex offenders from the surrounding towns or Central City?” He flinched as she asked the question which had to be asked. The thought of a sex offender having Ashley terrified her, so she could imagine how J.T. felt.
“I have Rachel working on that.”
She studied his thoughtful expression, his creased forehead. “But you don’t think that’s it?”
He looked long and hard at her. “No. Someone came into my yard and took Ashley, probably through my back gate that leads to the woods and lake. It feels calculated to me.”
“So you’ll start the search at your back gate?”
“No, the swing set, although I think the trail will lead to the back gate. Our goal will be twofold. We’ll look for any evidence left behind and for a trail that leads to Ashley’s whereabouts.” His gaze shifted to the window. “Last night before it become totally dark, I checked out the immediate area by my gate. I didn’t see anything, but the shadows could have hidden something.”
Madison twisted around and saw the shift in the degree of darkness. “While you’re searching, I’m going to canvass your neighbors again, especially Mrs. Goldsmith. Maybe she’ll remember something about that car she saw pull out of the side street near your house. After that I want to talk with Kim.”
He squeezed his eyes closed for a few seconds. “She’s not taking this well. She blames herself. I’m hoping Colin can help her. He’s especially good with teens.”
“Are you blaming yourself?”
He stiffened. “Kinda hard not to. I think someone from my past has decided to make me pay for putting him behind bars. While working in Chicago, I received some threats, usually when the criminals had been convicted and were going to prison. They like to blame the cop who caught them rather than themselves.”
Her heart broke at the desolate expression on his face. “Is anyone making a list of people you caught who are now out of prison?” In Chicago when she’d jumped at the chance to return to Crystal Springs to help find J.T.’s daughter, she hadn’t realized how hard it was going to be to keep herself from becoming emotionally involved. Nearly impossible.
“Rachel. She’s good with the computer.”
“I want both her lists when they are compiled.”
After he put his mug next to hers on the sill, he rolled his shoulders then worked the kinks out of his neck. “Let her know. If the search doesn’t produce anything, that’s where I’ll be concentrating next.”
“You know, something is bothering me about this whole situation.”
He slid his gaze to her, his head tilted. “What?”
“From the gate at the back of your yard to the swing set is a good twenty feet. If a stranger had come into the yard, wouldn’t Ashley have reacted? Screamed or something? Which means Kim or a neighbor would have heard her.”
His eyes widened. “You’ve got a point.” He glanced behind him at the throng of people in the large room, all waiting for the first rays of light. “That would mean the person who took her was someone she knew and possibly trusted.” The hand he pushed through his hair trembled.
“It’s something we need to consider.”
“Which would blow my theory out of the water. Because I know no one in this town has been in prison because of me. I grew up in Crystal Springs. I came back here five years ago and I know everyone. I have a hard time believing it could be someone I know. It’s more likely an ex-con.”
“The evidence says otherwise. Prove me wrong.”
He straightened. “I will.”
The door to the sheriff’s office opened and Colin, followed by Neil, came into the station. J.T.’s eighteen-year-old son looked almost as bad as his father. Dark circles under his eyes gave him a haunted look. And from Colin’s appearance, Madison surmised no one got any rest at the Fitzpatrick household.
J.T. strode toward the pair and enveloped his son in a bear hug, patting him on the back. Madison stayed off to the side for a few seconds while father and son exchanged some words. When she finally approached the threesome, both J.T. and Neil had their emotions under control.
“Dad, any news?”
J.T. shook his head.
“No ransom demand?”
“No, son.”
Neil perked up. “Then Ashley might just be missing.”
“That’s a possibility.”
The way J.T. had said the sentence left no doubt in Madison’s mind that it was a distant possibility, and his son picked up on that fact. Last year during the murder investigation J.T. would never have allowed his tone of voice to give any hint of what he was thinking unless he had wanted it that way. Now however, exhaustion and a father’s love had stripped him of his usual defenses.
“You don’t think it is, do you, Dad?”
“I’m not gonna lie to you. No, I don’t.”
“But if the person doesn’t want money, what…” All the color drained from Neil’s face. He collapsed back against the desk behind him and clutched its edge to keep himself upright. Tears sprang to his eyes.
J.T. grasped his son’s shoulders and forced Neil to look him in the eye. “Nothing is going to happen to Ashley. I will bring her home alive and safe. I won’t lie to you and I won’t mince words with you. I think some felon from my past has taken Ashley to get back at me.”
“Then she could be dead,” Neil said in a raw whisper.
“No!” J.T. pulled away and placed his fist over his heart. “I would know in here. She’s alive.”
As J.T. talked with Neil in a low voice, their heads bowed in prayer, Madison moved to Colin’s side. The emotional impact from the brief encounter between father and son left her reeling.
“Okay?”
The reverend’s question forced her to acknowledge what this case was doing to her. “No, I’m having a hard time distancing myself from this one. I wanted to come to Crystal Springs to help in the search for Ashley, but maybe I shouldn’t have.” The constriction in her chest rose into her throat. “His pain—it must be unbearable.” She twisted toward Colin. “If I’m having this much trouble keeping my personal feelings under control, how in the world is J.T. going to manage to keep his professional perspective?”
“One moment at a time. That’s all he can do. He knows God is with him and will take the burden from his shoulders. They will face it as one.” Colin took her hands. “The Lord has already eased J.T.’s load. He brought you here to help. You two worked well together last year.”
Madison glanced over at J.T. and saw him put an arm around his son’s shoulder. She prayed the reverend was right. A little girl’s life hung in the balance.
THREE
Day one, 6:00 a.m.: Ashley missing eleven and a half hours
Wisps of fog fingered their way through the trees, reaching toward the lake like claws digging at the earth. J.T. stood at his back gate, his skin clammy from the cool, damp spring air. The searchers had received their instructions and Ashley’s denim jacket for the dogs to get her scent. The teams had begun to move forward from his property line through the woods because the trail from the swing set led to the back gate. That only confirmed in J.T.’s mind he was on the right track.
A handler from Central City, a young police officer J.T. had worked with before, held Ashley’s jacket up to his German shepherd. After a few sniffs, his dog took off to the right into the forest.
J.T. hurried after the dog and his handler. The German shepherd stopped at the base of an elm and smelled its trunk. In the distance J.T. heard another dog bark.
Although he knew this wasn’t a viable lead, J.T. checked the area around the tree just to be sure. “Dead end. Ashley often comes out here and climbs this tree. She’s been wanting me to build her a fort in—” The rest of the words couldn’t get past the knot lodged in J.T.’s throat. He might never get the opportunity to build that fort he’d kept putting off. If only he had another chance…
Day one, 6:30 a.m.: Ashley missing twelve hours
Madison rang the Goldsmiths’ doorbell, scanned J.T.’s neighborhood. A white Escort sat in the neighbors’ driveway. People headed toward the side street where the volunteers were signing in. The barricade in front of J.T.’s house still stood, proclaiming a crime had been committed. Several reporters milled about, looking for people to interview. Thankfully she’d been able to evade them.
Behind her she heard the door open and turned toward an older man. She showed him her FBI badge. “I would like to talk to Mrs. Goldsmith.”
“I was just about to call the sheriff.”
“Why?”
“Ruth remembered some more about that car she saw pulling out of the side street yesterday evening.” He stood to the side to allow her into his house.
A muscular woman, medium height, came into the foyer from what looked like the living room. She stuck out her hand.
Madison shook it, noticing the scent of vanilla permeating the house. “What did you remember about the car?”
“I’ve been baking sugar cookies. I do that when I need to think.” Ruth turned back into the room. “Come in and have some coffee.”
Madison glanced at her watch. Minutes ticked by faster than she wanted. The longer Ashley was missing, the harder it would be to find her—alive. That thought prompted her to say, “I can’t, but thanks for the offer. I have a lot of people to interview this morning.” She took several steps into the room. “What do you remember, Mrs. Goldsmith?”
“Ruth. The color was definitely a metallic blue, not gray as I thought last night.”
Madison nodded, remembering that from the report she’d read. She bit down on the inside of her cheek as Ruth sat again on the couch and brought her mug to her lips.
“The thing is I’m almost positive the first three numbers of the license were five, one, three.”
“How positive?” Madison wrote the numbers down on her pad, trying not to get too excited.
Ruth leaned forward and set her mug on a magazine. Then she sat back straight and looked right at Madison. “Positive. I was thinking those numbers were today’s date. Well, yesterday I was thinking tomorrow’s date.”
“Do you recall the make of the car?”
“Big. I’m not good with the different kinds of cars.”
“Yep, Ruth thinks a car is either big or small.” Mr. Goldsmith took the seat next to her on the couch and patted her knee.
“Anything else? Did you recognize who was driving?”
“Nope. The windows were tinted dark. Couldn’t see too well inside and besides, whoever was driving sped away.”
“Speeding? You didn’t say anything about that last night.”
“All I could think about last night was that Ashley was missing. That poor child. I’ve got to fix something for J.T.’s family to eat. They will need to eat during this ordeal.”
“Yes, ma’am. They will.” Madison finished putting the information down on her pad. “Is that all? You might close your eyes…” When the woman did, Madison continued, “…and try to picture the car driving away.”
Ruth popped one eye open. “You mean speeding away.”
“Yes.”
The fiftysomething woman closed both eyes again. An almost tranquil expression descended on her lined face. Suddenly she looked right at Madison. “Nope. Nothing, but if I remember anything else, I’ll give you a call.”
Madison removed one of her cards and jotted down her cell number. “You can reach me here day or night.”
The second Madison stepped out onto the Goldsmiths’ front porch and the door closed behind her, she punched in the sheriff’s number. When the deputy on duty at the office answered, she gave him the description of the car with the partial Illinois license plate number. “It’s important we find the driver. The car was seen speeding away from the area about the time of the abduction.”
Day one, 6:30 a.m.: Ashley missing twelve hours
As J.T. made his way through the woods toward the back gate with the K-9 police officer and his German shepherd, a dog’s bark echoed through the trees repeatedly.
“We found something,” a searcher shouted.
J.T. glanced in the direction and hurried his steps as a crime scene tech reached the dog who sat next to his handler. After the tech took a photograph, J.T. saw him pick up Ashley’s pink socks with butterflies and put them into a plastic bag. His heart slowed to a painful throb. Then the young man removed a wet, pale pink T-shirt from the ground behind a bush.
For a few seconds everything came to a standstill for J.T. The woods swam before his eyes and he staggered a couple of steps.
Focus!
He drew in a breath that didn’t fill his lungs. Again he inhaled the moisture-rich air until finally he didn’t feel so light-headed. Careful where he walked, J.T. made his way toward the crime-scene tech who now was bagging his daughter’s blue jeans with butterflies around the hem. Sweat popped out on J.T.’s forehead and seemed instantly to drench him as he spied Ashley’s outer clothing in separate evidence bags lined up on the ground. That sight nearly brought him to his knees.
Was Ashley sexually assaulted?
The young man held up a smaller plastic container. “It looks like he used a tranquilizer dart to neutralize her.”
J.T. clenched his jaw to keep the words, “That’s my daughter you’re talking about,” from spilling out. He steadied himself and took the bag with the dart and examined it.
Is this why Kim didn’t hear anything? Why Ashley didn’t scream?
Day one, 7:00 a.m.: Ashley missing twelve and a half hours
“Colin told me you were working on the case.” Emma Fitzpatrick let Madison into her house.
“I wouldn’t have had it any other way when I heard about Ashley missing.” Madison scanned the familiar foyer, remembering back to the time she had worked with J.T. on Emma’s brother’s murder case.
“You’re here to see Kim?”
“Yes. I want to talk to her. Is she up?”
“Actually, I doubt she slept any last night even though she went to bed. She’s in the kitchen with Grace. We were fixing breakfast. We’re trying to get her to eat something.” Emma started for the back of the house. “Have you eaten yet?”
“No, but—”
“If I discovered anything from my trauma last year, it was that a person has to take care of herself if she’s going to do her best job.”
“You’re beginning to sound like Grace.”
Emma slanted a glance over her shoulder. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You should.” When Madison entered the kitchen, Grace greeted her with a smile and a mug of coffee. “I heard you coming and remembered you like your cup of joe black.”
A night of no sleep was beginning to catch up with her. Madison drank some of the brew, wondering when she would turn into a huge cup of coffee. “Thanks. This tastes wonderful, Grace.” Then turning to the teenager at the table, her gaze riveted to the window overlooking the backyard, Madison added, “I came to see you, Kim. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“I told Dad and Rachel what happened.”
The waver in the girl’s voice italicized the fragile control she had over her emotions. Madison noted that as she sat across from her and placed her mug on the table. “I know. But sometimes when you retell an event, it triggers a memory you forgot.”
“Nope. I told them everything.” Kim shifted her attention to Madison, a dullness in her gaze. “I told Ashley to go outside and play while I talked with Lexie. It had stopped raining and the sun had even peeked out of the clouds. I checked on her as she went to the swing and sat down, then I took a seat on the couch again and talked until I heard Dad come home.” Hopelessness rang in the rote recitation of the facts.
“You didn’t see anything out of place in the backyard?” Madison asked, concerned by both Kim’s apathetic tone and her appearance, as though she had wakened from a nap and hadn’t bothered to comb her hair.
The teenager shook her head. Suddenly her lower lip quivered while tears flooded her eyes and a look of devastation took hold of Kim.
“It isn’t your fault,” Madison said, knowing from J.T. that Kim blamed herself for Ashley’s disappearance. Blame was such a wasted emotion, but she almost always saw it in this type of situation. The “if onlys” could eat at a person until there was nothing left.
Kim blinked, loosening a tear to slide down her cheek. “You don’t understand. I screamed at Ashley to leave me alone. Daddy doesn’t think so, but I think she ran away because of me. What if she fell and hurt herself so that’s why she hasn’t come home?”
Madison wished that was the case, but more and more she felt J.T. was right. Ashley had been abducted. “As we speak there are search dogs and teams of people out looking for Ashley. If that happened, they’ll find her.”
Suddenly Kim reached across the table and clutched Madison’s hand. “I need to help in the search. Make Daddy see that. Please.”
The desperation in the girl’s voice tore at Madison’s composure. Knowing the people involved in this tragedy made her job doubly hard but doubly important, too. “Kim, I want you to think back to yesterday. Close your eyes if it will help you visualize the scene with Ashley in the backyard.” After the teenager did as she was instructed, Madison continued, “Now, do you see anything unusual, anything out of place?”
A long minute passed with a heavy silence filling the air, spiced with the aromas of bacon and biscuits.
When Kim opened her eyes, her forehead wrinkled and she tilted her head to the side, as J.T. did when he was thinking. “There was something shiny by the bushes along the back of the fence where Ashley’s fort is.”
“Could you tell what it is?”
“No,” the girl answered slowly, then more definitely, “No.”
The ringing of Madison’s cell phone pierced the quiet. She quickly answered it.
“It’s J.T. I told you I would call if we found anything. We discovered Ashley’s clothing in a pile behind a set of bushes forty feet from the back gate. There was a dart from a tranquilizer gun at the bottom of the pile. That’s why Kim didn’t hear a scream from Ashley. We’re bringing in a cadaver search dog.”
The implication of bringing in a dog that specialized in finding dead bodies, even ones buried in the ground, caused her to draw in a sharp breath. “I’ll be right there.”
Day one, 7:30 a.m.: Ashley missing thirteen hours
Madison hurried to the area where some of Ashley’s clothing had been found. She stopped at the perimeter of the taped-off section, spying J.T. directly across from her about fifteen yards away. The grim look on his face as he watched the crime scene techs process the evidence and comb the ground for any more clues highlighted the anguish he had to be feeling, standing to the side, unable to do anything but watch.
She skirted the edge of the taped area and came to his side. “Have they found anything else?”
“No,” he said in such a tight voice she was afraid he would shatter any second. “Finding her clothes, folded in a neat pile, like that—” His voice came to an abrupt halt, his jaw clenched so tight a nerve twitched on his face.
Why would the kidnapper remove Ashley’s clothes, leave them here for them to find? Was it some kind of ritual he needed to perform? Was he toying with J.T., trying to break him? Was the little girl molested? Question after question bombarded Madison, with no real answers. The only thing she knew was the effect it was having on J.T. Color leached from his normally tanned features and the despair in his expression as he watched one of the crime scene techs remove the evidence bags to their van illuminated how effective the kidnapper’s technique was if he was after revenge.
She didn’t care that they were standing among a swarm of people. She took hold of his hand, hoping to impart some support. He needed to know he wasn’t alone through this. “We may be able to find some clues on the clothes that will help us.”