Bone Cold (7 page)

She could sell it now. Downsize and stash a nice chunk in savings. Homes in this area went for top dollar. The townhouse would easily go for a million and a half. She wouldn’t have to walk past Sophie’s bedroom anymore. She wouldn’t have to block the memories of making love with Tom in her own bedroom.

There were advantages to starting fresh with a clean slate.

Except this was Sophie’s home. If she was still alive, she might come back here one day. It happened. Abducted children, if they escaped or survived to adulthood, sometimes sought out their real parents once more—unless they’d been totally brainwashed into believing they were someone else.

Sophie
could
come back.

That was the sole reason Sarah endured the haunting memories. She had learned to walk through the house without seeing or hearing or feeling anything.

Spending the better part of the day with Tom had disabled her ability to block the images and sounds, like the way the front door squeaked when she closed it. Sophie used to laugh every time that sound echoed down the hall. The whisper of their bare feet on the wood floor. Leaving their shoes next to the table where mail and cell phones landed each evening had been habit.

Sarah closed her eyes. If she tried she could smell the scent of rain on her child’s hair and skin. She and Sophie were the world’s worst about forgetting their umbrellas. Street parking ensured they made many dashes through the rain and snow.

Even now, Tom’s scent lingered inside Sarah, around her. He still used the same soap. It reminded her of all those times they had showered together, making love and wondering if they’d ever get pregnant again.

Sophie had been easy. They’d made the decision the time was right and suddenly Sarah was pregnant. Number two hadn’t happened.

Then Sophie vanished.

Sarah shrugged out of her coat and let it fall to the floor with her purse. She toed off her shoes and started forward. She should eat. Shower. Take a pill and go to bed. No more thinking. No more seeing.

Slowly, she went through the steps. A can of chicken soup with crackers. A beer for washing down the pill she hated and loved at the same time. Then bed.

She climbed between the sheets and told her brain to shut down. No matter that Tom had not slept in this bed in more than fourteen months and twenty-nine days, she could smell him all around her. He had invaded her senses and would not be evicted.

The sound of Sophie giggling followed Sarah to sleep.

Sunday, October 22, 4:00 a.m.

Her cell woke her. Sarah sat up, scrubbed a hand over her mouth before shoving the hair from her face.
Tom calling
flashed on her screen.

“What?” She reached for the bottle of water on her nightstand. Her mouth was dry as hell.

“We have an employee from Avalon who’s come forward. He’s agreed to a meeting. I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll drive my—” The call dropped and Sarah glared at her phone. Had he just hung up on her? Maybe he’d gotten another call.

“Dammit.”

She did not want to ride with him, but if he’d landed a lead she wanted to be a part of it. She desperately needed a break in this case.

Ten minutes later, as promised, Tom’s SUV eased to the curb behind her car. Sarah stepped outside, set the alarm and locked the door, then hustled down to the sidewalk. Tom reached across the console and passenger seat to open the door for her. She climbed in and fastened her seatbelt.

“Where’re we going?” She reminded herself to relax. Maybe she should have taken the time to finish her coffee.

“He wants to keep his cooperation under the radar so we’re meeting at an IHOP.”

“How did he know to contact you?”

“I’ve been putting out feelers for a while now,” he explained without explaining anything at all. “Patrick Schneider was a maintenance engineer at Avalon. Two weeks ago he was fired. I guess he has an ax to grind now that he’s been let go.”

“A grudge makes him an unreliable source,” she reminded the man who’d been doing this longer than her. She’d turned thirty-seven last month, which made Tom forty. She couldn’t deny that he’d always been good at his job. No matter, this whole situation just didn’t feel right.

“We have nothing to lose by hearing what he has to say.”

Now there was something they could agree on. They had nothing to lose.

IHOP, Baltimore Avenue

College Park, Maryland, 5:09 a.m.

“People pay big money for the doctors at Avalon,” Schneider said. He glanced around the nearly deserted restaurant before hunching his shoulders around his head as he leaned forward. “They do things no one else does.”

Tom sensed the tension in Sarah. She wasn’t buying his story any more than she had the one Tom had given her less than twenty-four hours ago. He didn’t blame her. If he hadn’t seen the undeniable evidence in that small, quiet Tennessee town last year, he wouldn’t have believed it himself. But it was real. At least one cloned human had survived to adulthood. Unimaginable genetic experiments had been conducted on so many others.

Paul Phillips and his family had barely escaped with their lives. Their secret was one the world could never know. Tom had ensured any files on Paul’s wife and sister-in-law vanished. As deep as his loyalty to the Bureau went, his loyalty to the people he cared about went much deeper. He just hoped Sarah would forgive him one day for what he’d done in his efforts to help her.

“You need to be more specific, Mr. Schneider,” Sarah pressed. “What you’ve said so far is public knowledge. Avalon is one of the most renowned private hospitals in the country. The facility didn’t reach that status without world-class physicians. No law against being the best.”

Schneider glanced around again. He was nervous. No doubt about it. He’d been waiting at the booth in the very back corner of the dining room when they arrived. His head hadn’t stopped oscillating since.

“If they find out I looked at the charts…” His eyes went wide with fear. “They’ll kill me.”

“What charts?” Tom asked, careful to keep his voice down. Though there was only one other couple in the restaurant, there were plenty of waitresses preparing for the morning rush.

“The charts of certain patients.” Schneider cleared his throat. “Rich kids. The parents brought them there when nothing else worked.”

“Were these children ill?” Sarah asked. There was a fine tremor in her hand as she reached for her coffee.

She wasn’t as strong as she wanted Tom to believe. God almighty, he was worried about her. This case had consumed his existence for more than a year. Still, he should have made time to check on her. No wonder she was determined to go through with this divorce.

Schneider nodded. “Most of them died.”

“Doesn’t sound as if those award winning physicians did anything special if the children died anyway,” Sarah suggested.

“I don’t know about that, but I know what I saw in those charts.”

“What was that, Mr. Schneider?” Tom was ready to hear more than speculation. If the man had something concrete he needed to spit it out.

“The kids weren’t listed as patients. They were listed by number as
test specimens
.”

Tom looked toward the waitress. It was time to make this guy put up or shut up. “I don’t appreciate my time being wasted, Mr. Schneider.”

Schneider surveyed the restaurant again to make sure the waitress wasn’t coming. “If I tell you more, I don’t want my name in it. I don’t trust these guys.”

“Why?” Sarah asked. “Why would you be afraid of anyone at the hospital?”

“Those kids were in a special unit at the hospital.” Schneider leaned across the table again, his voice getting lower with each word spoken. “None of the regular staff goes in there. The patients don’t go in the usual way. They don’t go out the usual way either. If someone dies in that unit an unmarked van takes the body away. And I don’t mean someone from one of the funeral homes. I know all those guys.” He looked from Sarah to Tom and back. “This is different.”

“Why come forward with this information now?” Sarah asked. “You’ve worked there for a decade. What happened to prompt you to speak up now?”

That would have been Tom’s next question. This guy wasn’t telling them everything he knew. He was holding back some relevant piece of information.

“That missing kid, Myers, he was…” He moistened his lips. Cleared his throat again. “He was in the unit and his parents took him out. There was a big hubbub about it. The next thing I knew he was on the news.”

Sarah glanced at Tom, and then asked, “You’re certain? Sean Myers?”

Schneider nodded. “I swear to God. I don’t know about the other kids, but I believe with all my heart Avalon had something to do with that boy going missing.”

“In ten years, you never noticed activities out of the ordinary until now?” The revelation was stunning, no question. It was the man’s motive for coming forward that worried Tom.

“I’m human.” Schneider shrugged. “Avalon paid the bills. I looked the other way when I saw anything a little off. I don’t have any reason to look the other way now.”

“Give us one good reason,” Sarah proposed, “we should take the word of a disgruntled former employee?”

Another shrug. “It’s the truth. I don’t need a reason to tell the truth.”

“Maybe we’d be a little more convinced if you shared a few more examples of situations where you looked the other way.” Tom needed more than supposition. The story had him chomping at the bit to look more deeply into Avalon. Moving forward with caution was essential considering all they had was the word of a man who’d recently been fired and the fact that Tom wasn’t exactly in a good place with his superiors right now.

“That’s all I got. Lots of situations I encountered felt wrong, but this is the only time I can point to a specific wrongdoing. That kid was a patient in Avalon one day and suddenly he was on the news the next. That has to mean something. If it does, maybe I’ll win one of those rewards.”

Each of the families was offering a reward for information leading to the discovery of their child. According to Sarah, the rewards had brought out the desperate, the greedy, and at least a few nut cases. No true leads.

Whatever this guy’s story, his sudden compulsion likely had more to do with the rewards and wanting to get back at his ex-employer than a sense of doing the right thing.

Tom passed Schneider his card. “Call me if you think of anything else.”

“Whatever else you do,” Schneider said, “you should check out that hospital. They’re doing bad things to kids. Believe that if you believe nothing else.”

When Schneider had gone, Sarah moved around to the other side of the booth. “If what he says about Sean Myers is true, considering all eight children were born at that hospital, I say there’s a connection. We should go back to the parents and push for answers.”

Tom reached for one of the menus the waitress had left when she’d taken their coffee order. “We should eat.”

“We should get out there and start pounding on doors,” she argued.

“Too early.” He checked the screen of his cell. “We eat. We give them time to have coffee, and then we go pound on doors.”

“I’m not hungry.”

There was a lot he could say to that, but he knew better. Strong-arm tactics didn’t work with Sarah. He’d learned that the hard way. “I am.”

He placed his order, making sure to go big so he could share in case she changed her mind. To his surprise, she ordered a scrambled egg with a piece of wheat toast.

When the waitress was gone, Tom ventured. “I hear you made lieutenant.”

“I did.” She freshened her coffee, took a sip.

He glanced out at the sky. “Looks like rain.”

“Hmm-Mmm.”

“I like your hair,” he dared to say. She glanced up and he smiled no matter that she didn’t. “It’s longer. I haven’t seen it that long since we first met.”

She tucked a handful behind her ear. “I’ve been too busy to get to the salon. I usually keep it in a ponytail, but I was in a hurry this morning.”

“I like it down.” He’d always loved her hair, even when it was much shorter. The deep, rich brown was a vivid contrast to her smooth pale skin. She reminded him of a porcelain doll, precious and fragile. He had wanted to protect her, but she’d shown him that she was strong and brave and didn’t need protecting. Yet, losing Sophie had stolen some part of her he couldn’t quite name. She still did her job and did it well from all reports. He had to give her credit there, but there was something missing. The fire was gone from her eyes, he decided.

He’d changed, too. His life revolved around work as well. His apartment was nothing more than a hotel room. He couldn’t care less where he laid his head to sleep. Work was his life. The rest of the time he basically existed.

How the hell would they ever get beyond this painful place?

“So Phillips is okay?” she asked tentatively. She met his eyes for a mere second.

“He’s good. He’s married and they have a… child.” She flinched when he said the last. Why hadn’t he left out the part about the kid? Paul Phillips had tried to help when Sophie disappeared, but he’d been too far gone in his own misery to pull himself together. Tom might have hated him for that except he’d understood Paul hadn’t been mentally or physically capable of doing more. Sarah, on the other hand, hadn’t seen it that way.

“That’s nice.” She stared at her coffee some more. “I’m happy things worked out for him.”

“I’m glad you kept the house.”

Another quick glance his way. “Why would I sell? My parents would want me to keep the house.”

He decided not to say anything about the peeling paint or the overgrown landscape. Like him she worked all the time. Home maintenance was likely the last thing on her mind. The realization that those were things he should be taking care of punched him in the gut, but he wasn’t welcome in the home they’d once shared. Not since the day he’d hauled her out of the house and had her committed to a facility where she would get the help she needed.

He doubted she would ever forgive him for taking that step. He couldn’t blame her really. He’d fallen down on the role of good husband in a hundred different ways. He should’ve handled things differently. Too late to repair that bridge now it seemed.

“You’re right.” He reached for his coffee. “It’s a great house.”

Sarah suddenly looked at him as if she’d just remembered some terrible thing she’d forgotten to say. “I don’t even know where you live.”

“I guess that’s why the divorce papers were served at the office.” He forced a smile. “I thought I sent you the address.” He distinctly remembered calling and leaving a message.

“Maybe you did.”

Their order arrived, preventing the need for further small talk. They ate in silence. She muddled through the egg and toast. He goaded her into a bite of pancake. She actually smiled once and he felt fairly certain it was real. He’d glimpsed the tiniest sparkle in those brown eyes of hers he had always loved.

A final cup of coffee and Tom felt almost human. “Do you remember the last time we were at an IHOP?” They’d been on the way to Boston to his cousin’s wedding. Sophie had…

Agony claimed Sarah’s face. “We should go.” She grabbed her jacket and purse and scooted from the booth.

Tom felt like kicking himself. Was there anything they could talk about that their daughter wouldn’t be a part of? Oh yeah, right. Work. The case.

Outside the restaurant, Sarah hesitated to take a call. He hit the remote to start his SUV and get the heat going. It was cold as hell for October. Maybe winter was coming early this year.

Sarah ended the call and gave him an address. “We may have a lead on Cashion’s wife.”

The children were Tom’s top priority, but Mary Cashion deserved justice, too. If her murder helped find her daughter and the rest of the children alive, maybe her death wouldn’t be for naught.