Blood Bound (38 page)

We all leaned forward to read.

As Anne had said, the letter was short and to the point. Just a paragraph long, with no obvious code or pattern in the letters, and no single words which could easily be identified as names.

Below the official request was the list of vital statistics Anne had mentioned, and below that, Hadley’s potential allergies. And at the very bottom of the page, there was a small ink sketch of a teddy bear with button eyes and a stitched X for a nose.

“Did Elle draw that?” I asked, and Anne shrugged.

“I guess so. That’s the bear that came in the diaper bag—the only toy Elle sent with Hadley. It was her favorite until she started school, and some little prick kindergartner told her only babies carried stuffed animals. After that, she put Harrison up on her shelf and she hasn’t taken him down since.”

A chill crawled up my spine. “The bear’s name was Harrison?”

“Yeah. Harrison Lee.”

That first chill spawned an army of baby chills that raised goose bumps as they raced across my skin. “Did you name the bear?”

“No, she named it herself.” Anne blinked as the facts clicked into place with the memory. “That was one of only two or three things she could say when I got her. ‘More,’ ‘Pwease’ and ‘Hawison Wee.’”

I glanced at Cam. “Do babies name their own stuffed animals?”

He could not have looked more surprised by my question. “I know as little about babies as you do. Maybe less.”

So I turned to Anne, but she was already frowning. “I don’t know. Hadley’s the only toddler I’ve ever spent any time with, and I didn’t question it. However he got it, the bear’s name was Harrison Lee.”

“So, are we all thinking what I’m thinking? That Elle gave the bear Hadley’s middle and last names so that—at least subconsciously—she’d always know them? Then she drew the bear at the bottom of the basics-of-parenting cheat sheet as a hint for Annika, complete with an actual X to mark the spot?” The bear’s nose, of course.

Anne shrugged. “Nothing has made any more sense than that, so far.”

I glanced at Cam and he nodded solemnly. “It’s worth a shot.” He closed his eyes, and as we watched, he muttered, “Hadley Harrison Lee.” His eyes rolled beneath his eyelids, as if he was actually scanning his own private darkness for light on the horizon. I held my breath, my mental fingers crossed, and if wishing for success could have made it happen, we would have found Hadley in that very moment.

But instead, several seconds later, Cam opened his eyes and shook his head. “That’s not it.”

“Reverse them,” Anne said, unwilling to give up. “Try it one more time, in a different order.”

While Cam tried again, I flipped open Hadleys memory box and took out the thin, four-by-six-inch photo album, staring at the baby whose picture peeked through the oval frame cut into the cover.

I saw no resemblance to Elle. But then again, I saw no resemblance to the older Hadley, either, except for her green eyes. Everything else had changed, and her hair had lightened several shades, as if she spent most of her time in the sun. Seven-year-old Hadley’s hair was much closer in color to Elle’s as I remembered it.

Cam mumbled the name again, this time using Hadley as the last name and Harrison as the middle name, and I flipped through the album while Anne watched him intently. Just past the halfway point in the thin album, I found an empty photo sleeve on the left side of the page, opposite a shot of—

I froze with the next page between my fingers, ready to flip before I’d realized what I was looking at.

What the
hell?

“Anne…?”

“What?” She turned to see what I was staring at, and Cam whispered again, trying another name combination.

“Is this Hadley?”
It can’t be. No wa
y.

“Yeah, that’s one of my favorites. According to the date on the back she was about six months old, and I think she’d just learned to sit up on her own. See?” She flipped the blank page to reveal the picture behind it, then turned back to the one that had sent adrenaline shooting through my heart, strong and fast enough to make it literally skip a beat. “This is the first one where there’s no pillow propping her up from behind.”

I stared at the picture of baby Hadley in a tiny, solid blue baseball cap, chubby little fingers clutching the corner of the green checkered blanket she sat on, and I had to will my pulse to slow before my vision went black.

“Where’s this one?” I whispered with as much volume as I could manage, tapping the blank page.

“Don’t know. That one was empty when I got it. I guess she just skipped a page. I thought about shifting them all down one so I could add a new one at the end, but it just seemed wrong to rearrange something Elle made for her.”

I fumbled for my satchel, and Anne caught the album when it slid from my lap. But before she could snap at me to be more careful, Cam exhaled, long and low.

“I got it.”

My fingers fell away from my bag and I looked up at him in surprise. “You got it?”

“Yeah. I had to try several variations, accounting for the possible speech difficulties of an eleven-month-old child, but I got it. She’s Leah Harrison Hadley.” His grin nearly split his face in two. “I’m assuming Harrison is a family name—maybe Elle’s dad’s?—and Hadley’s her
last
name, not her first.”

“Harrison is her brother’s name,” I said.

Cam frowned. “Harrison Maddox?”

I nodded absently, still focused on that missing photo.

“Clever Noelle…!” Anne mumbled,lready reaching for the pen and paper to write her daughter’s name down. Then she evidently thought better of that and dropped the pen on the end table. “Is the energy signature strong?”

“Strong enough. I think she’s still in the city. And she’s definitely still alive.”

“Great. Let’s go.” She was halfway to the door before we could stop her.

“Anne,
wait.
” Cam lunged forward and grabbed her arm before she could throw open the front door and expose herself to whoever Ruben had watching the apartment. “We need a plan. We need backup. We need…a plan.”

She tugged her arm free and frowned at him. “You already said that.”

“It’s worth repeating.” He gestured toward the couch and she sat again, reluctantly. “I know you’re eager to get her back, but if we just bust in…” Cam rubbed his forehead, and I wondered if he was getting repercussion pain from working with us, in conflict with his oath to Jake Tower. Or maybe he hadn’t actually crossed that line yet and was just anticipating the pain—I could certainly sympathize.

“Actually,” he continued, “that’s not even possible. I
can’t
bust in on Tower’s pet project, so it would just be the two of you, and that’d be
beyond
stupid.”

“So…what are we going to do?” Hope drained from Anne’s face, revealing the fear and worry it had briefly hidden.

“Uh…guys? I hate to complicate things, but…” I set Hadley’s photo album open on the coffee table in front of them and tapped the empty page. “We need to talk about this missing picture.”

Anne glanced impatiently at the album. “What about it?”

“It’s not missing anymore.”

“What are you talking about?” she demanded, as I pulled a green plastic binder from my satchel, but Cam only watched in silence as I opened it on my lap. I flipped to the back of the binder and popped open the three one-inch rings, then removed a clear plastic page protector and handed it to Anne.

She glanced at the photo it held, then blinked and looked again. For a long time. When she finally met my gaze again, her eyes were wide and tear-filled. “Where did you get this?”

I sighed. “I can’t tell you that.” Then I rushed on before she could argue. “Am I right? Is that Hadley in the photo?”

She pinched the top of the page protector and held her hand over the opening. “May I…?”

“Yeah. That’s a copy anyway.”

She pulled out the photo and held it inches from her face, as the first tears fell. “Where’s the original?”

I thought about that for a second, then decided that answering wouldn’t actually breach my contract, though I probably couldn’t answer anything
else
she was certain to ask. “The original is in the top drawer of the desk in Ruben Cavazos’s home office.”

“What…?”
Anne glanced from me to Cam, and I looked up to see him leaning with both elbows on his knees, shaking his head slowly. He’d already deduced what I couldn’t say. “What the hell is going on here, Olivia?” Anne demanded.

I couldn’t answer her, but before that became an issue, Cam spoke up with another question I couldn’t answer.

“You’re serious?
Hadley
is Cavazos’s illegitimate son?” Another painful pause. “That means that Noelle…?”

I shrugged. “Well, obviously Hadley isn’t a boy, but beyond that, I can’t…” Another shrug, and I had to let them draw their own conclusions. “I’m sorry, Anne. I’m contractually prohibited from discussing most of this.”

“Fortunately, I’m not.” Cam sighed and twisted on the couch to fully face her. “Liv’s spent the last year and a half trying to track Ruben Cavazos’s illegitimate son, born by a mistress he had…” Cam’s eyes closed as another piece of the puzzle fell into place. “Damn. Eight years ago, or so. That makes sense now.”

Scary, beyond-coincidental sense. How much of this had Elle known?

“And you’re saying Noelle was this mistress?” Anne said, already shaking her head in denial of what none of us wanted to believe. “But why would he think Hadley’s a boy?”

Since I couldn’t actually answer that, I lifted Anne’s arm by her elbow, placing the photo she still held back at eye level. Cam scooted closer to her so he could see it, and another layer of confusion melted away.

“Because all he had to go on was this picture, and you have to admit, dressed in blue and wearing a baseball cap, she looks like a little boy. And Noelle was obviously in no rush to correct that assumption. If she even brought him the picture in person?” He glanced at me in question, but I couldn’t comment, even though his guess was spot on. She’d sent the picture in an envelope with no return address, accompanied only by a note card with one word handwritten on it.
Yours.

Anne dropped the picture, and it landed facedown in her lap. “You’re telling me that my daughter’s biological father is Ruben
fucking
Cavazos, whose mortal enemy has kidnapped the daughter he doesn’t even know he has?”

“
I’m
not telling you anything. Because I can’t. I can make conjecture about what Elle might have done, but I can’t discuss anything Ruben told me. However, what I
can
say—since it doesn’t fall under the terms of my contract with her husband—is that Michaela Cavazos had her husband’s former mistress killed six years ago and was
not
happy to learn that said mistress might have—” I hesitated, tiptoeing carefully around verbal landmines. “—left a part of herself out there.”

“Shit.” Anne’s breathing quickened, and was starting to sound a little wheezy. “Shit, shit,
shit!
”

“Anne…” Cam said, in a low, soothing voice.

“What am I going to do? What the
hell
am I going to do now?” She turned on me and grabbed my arm before I even saw her hand move. “You can’t tell him. Liv, you
can’t
tell him about Hadley.”

“I
have
to tell him. And I have to tell him very
soon.
” My contract was very specific on that point.

“No!” Anne’s grip on my arm tightened painfully. “Elle hid her for a reason, and it’s obvious now that that reason was Ruben Cavazos! She went to so much trouble to protect her daughter, and you can’t just throw that away. You can’t just hand Hadley over to him!”

“Anne, think about the facts.” I pulled my arm gently from her terrified grip. “If she was afraid of Ruben, she never would have sent that picture. But she knew what I know—he may be a soul-rotting bastard in nearly every other aspect of life, but he would never hurt a kid. Especially his own kid. And she obviously thought he should at least know he was a father. Hadley was his first.” I paused a moment to let that sink in, then continued. “Noelle was probably hiding her daughter from Michaela. Not from Ruben.”

“Michaela Cavazos—the woman who had Noelle
murdered?
If you give Hadley to them, she’ll have her killed, too!”

“No.” I squeezed her hand, trying to pass along some of my own certainty. “He would never let that happen.” Even if he decided not to bring an illegitimate child into his house, he would never let Meika hurt her. “And the truth is that we
need
him to get Hadley back. He has the resources we need to get past Tower’s defenses.”

“That won’t happen without a fight,” Cam mumbled, as if withholding volume would make the words any less true.

“Even if he does fight for her—even if he can get her out of there intact—he won’t give her back to me, Olivia! He’ll take her, and I’ll never see her again, and she won’t be any better off with him than she is with Tower.”

“Okay, you have to calm down.” I held her hand tightly when she tried to pull away. “First of all, that’s not true. Ruben doesn’t want to lock her up and take her blood. Hell, we don’t know that he wants her at all. He’s expecting a son. He already has a legitimate daughter, and I don’t know if he’ll consider another one worth the fight, considering the monumental
bitch-fit
Meika’s going to throw when she finds out. So…there’s a chance he’ll let you keep her.”

Or…he might ship her off to a boarding school, from where he could control her, but never see her….

Anne frowned. “But if he doesn’t want her, why would he help us get her back?”

Cam laughed out loud, a startling sound in the midst of so much tension. But Anne didn’t get the joke. “To save face,” Cam explained. “There’s no way in hell that Cavazos would let Tower get away with kidnapping his kid, even if neither of them knew she was his kid at the time. Cavazos will welcome an excuse to bring the fight to Tower’s front door. The real challenge will be getting Hadley out of there without sustaining any collateral damage.”