In Broad Daylight (4 page)

box where she kept her matches, she stopped.

"They're not here." There wasn't much to move around in the drawer, but she went

through the motions with no success. "I keep them in a metal box, but it's not in here."

The taller of the two detectives said nothing, only nodded, but by now she was convinced

that he thought she was involved in this more than just peripherally. Closer scrutiny into

her life might only convince him of the fact. Recently widowed, her finances were not in

the best of shape. Maybe he'd think that she decided to supplement it by ransoming Annie.

The very thought moved a cold shiver up and down her spine. The nausea that she had

been struggling to keep at bay threatened to overpower her.

She blew out an annoyed breath as she slammed the drawer shut harder than she'd

intended. "Look, I can take a lie-detector test."

Guilty people didn't usually volunteer to do that—unless they were very, very good, Dax

thought. Lie detectors were not infallible and had been known to be fooled. Still, he

decided to pass—for now. "That won't be necessary."

She surprised him by not grasping at the truce he offered her. "I think it is just to get

that look out of your eyes. I want you to understand that I love Annie Tyler, maybe

because no one else seems to, but I think that she is a wonderful little girl who has been

given a raw deal from the day she was born."

He decided to play devil's advocate just to see her reaction. "Having parents who can buy

you anything you want doesn't seem like such a raw deal to me."

"Anything but their time," she pointed out evenly.

He looked at her with renewed interest. Not all kidnappings were about ransoms.

Sometimes children were taken because the kidnapper thought they were rescuing the

child from an unhappy life. "Maybe you could give her a better life."

"I know I could—" Brenda stopped abruptly. "I didn't take Annie. I wouldn't traumatize her like that. Besides, I was right out there in plain sight all the time," she pointed out.

That didn't constitute an ironclad alibi. "Accomplices aren't unheard of."

She'd had just about enough of this. "Detective Cavanaugh, I want a lie-detector test,"

she repeated. "I insist."

"We'll see what we can do to accommodate you later," Dax told her before turning toward Harwood. "Right now, I'd like to talk to some of the other teachers, see if they saw

anything. And while you're at it, I'd like the address and phone number of those

prospective parents Mrs. York was showing around."

"Of course," Harwood agreed quickly. "It's in my office. I'll go back and get it. Mrs. York can help you with the other teachers."

Right now, Dax thought, Mrs. York looked as if she'd rather hand his head to him on a

platter.

«^»

"
Y
ou really suspect her?"

Nathan was leaning back against the desk at the front of the room, his attention diverted

toward Brenda York. He glanced at his partner. To his left a stocky, pleasant-faced

teacher was leading a gaggle of second-graders out of the art room, which had been set

aside to conduct questioning.

Dax was looking at Annie Tyler's teacher from across the room. She was saying something

to one of the kids who looked concerned. The boy smiled at her and nodded. She had a way

about her, he thought. Made people trust her. Put them at their ease.

And at her mercy?

He glanced at his partner. "We're supposed to suspect everyone, Nathan, you know that."

Nathan gave a little shrug. His small pad inside his jacket pocket rustled against his shirt.

The pages, thick with notes, were no longer smooth. "Yeah, but she seems so upset about

it."

Dax smiled. "You always did have a weakness for blondes." He turned toward his partner.

"The woman had access. By her own admission, she knows the little girl inside and out, that

means she'd know exactly how to handle her."

Shaking his head, Nathan frowned. "What's her motive?"

She moved like poetry, Dax thought. Flowing into every step. Confident, yet incredibly

feminine.

Abruptly, he wiped the thought from his mind, telling himself he had to get out more. Dax

shoved his hands into his pockets. "Money's always a good motive. Most people can't have

enough of it."

"So youdosuspect her."

Dax shrugged. He was thinking out loud, but he and Nathan had that kind of relationship.

Half-formed thoughts could be voiced in safety.

"My gut tells me no, my training tells me to hold off any final judgments."

As he watched the woman stop to comfort one of the last children in the line, Nathan

sighed. "If I were single, my gut would be telling me a whole lot of other things besides

hold off."

Dax laughed but made no comment. Precisely because his gut, or whatever part of him

that was instrumental in allowing attraction to set in, was telling him a great deal, none of

which included the phrase "hold off." If being a cop, a good cop, wasn't so ingrained in him, he might have followed through on one of any number of instincts.

As it was, he felt something stirring within him, something beyond the enormous sexual

pull that kept harassing him. Harassing him because it couldn't go anywhere. She was part

of a case. And she was married.

She was also human. He saw the strain on her face before she locked it away.

Leaving Nathan behind him, he crossed to her. "You looked tired. Why don't you take a

break?"

The sound of the detective's voice coming from behind her startled Brenda. She'd been

allowing her mind to wander for a second. And grasp onto some awful scenarios. Regaining

control over her emotions, she turned around to face him.

"That won't help Annie."

The sincerity he heard in her voice crept through the layers of steeliness he'd imposed

around himself whenever he was working. He had to admit she impressed him. Someone

else in her position would have been looking to distance themselves from the police as they

covered their own tail. But she didn't. Her concern was completely centered on the missing

child. "You know, about that lie detector test—"

Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly and she raised her chin again, as if bracing herself for

a further confrontation. "Anytime, Detective."

Anytime.

If he'd had the luxury right now, he would have allowed his thoughts free rein in a

fantasy. But he didn't have that luxury. What he had was a missing child.

Dax looked into her eyes. Nothing there made him doubt his decision. "I think we can skip

it. The department doesn't like having its time wasted."

Was she finally allowed to get off the hook—or was he just toying with her? The thought

that he suspected her of being involved in the kidnapping made her furious, never mind

that logically, she knew it was his job to suspect everyone.

Brenda measured her words out slowly. "Then you finally believe that I didn't have

anything to do with this?"

He knew he was stepping outside the lines, but they paid him for going with instincts, and

his professional one told him exactly what Nathan's told him. That Brenda York wasn't

involved in this.

His eyes held hers and something inside him fidgeted. It gave him pause. But commitment

was a funny thing. Any kind of commitment, even to a state of mind. It meant boxing

himself in and he didn't like to do that either. He liked the freedom that noncommitment

represented.

So, he didn't answer her.

Instead, he said, "You've been a great help with the kids."

She'd had a calming effect, putting questions to them that had needed to be answered.

They'd asked children from all the grades if any of them had seen anything suspicious.

There'd been a few conflicting stories, none of which had amounted to anything. But even

that was headway. It meant the kidnappers were very good at their job and that this had

all been premeditated.

"I'm not too good with them myself," he added since the stillness made him

uncomfortable.

"No children of your own?"

He knew that if his late mother had had her way, he would have been married for years by

now, with half a dozen kids. Truthfully, pleasing his mother had been the only reason he'd

ever considered the state of matrimony—and very nearly made a fatal mistake he would

have regretted, one way or another, for the rest of his life.

Dax shook his head. "No wife of my own."

She gave him an amused look. "That doesn't answer the question."

Dax grinned. Sharp lady. "No, no kids of my own. You?"

She paused for a moment, as if about to say something, then shook her head. "No, I don't

have any children." She nodded toward the last of the children filing out the door. "Those are my kids."

He had the feeling she'd almost said something else, but let it go. He was guilty of

reading too much into everything. "Big family."

She moved her shoulders in a vague shrug. There was the hint of a longing expression on

her face. "I always wanted a big family."

He looked down at her left hand. Again, he wondered why there was no ring there. "How

does your husband feel about that?"

The question stiffened her slightly. Everything was still raw. There hadn't been enough

time for a proper scab to form over things, even though she'd never really loved Wade.

Somehow, that seemed to make it all worse. He had deserved better, he'd deserved

someone who could have loved him to distraction.

She looked toward the doorway, away from the detective who stirred up too many things

inside of her with his questions. "My husband doesn't feel anything at all. He's dead."

Dax felt as if he'd just stomped on a delicate structure, breaking it into a hundred pieces.

"Oh, I'm sorry."

In her mind's eyes, she could still see Wade, see his kind face. God, but she had tried to

love him, really tried.

"Yes, so am I." She knotted her hands together before her. "Wade was a good man. He was killed in a freak accident during maneuvers." She looked at him, gauging her words,

doling them out slowly only after examining them. She wasn't used to being overly cautious.

She liked to be open; it was a freedom she'd embraced wholeheartedly after leaving home.

But this detective put her on her guard. "He was a marine." She shifted her weight,

impatient to leave the subject, impatient to get on with the pressing job of finding Annie.

"That was the last of them. Anyone else you want to question?"

He'd called in backup. Several uniformed patrolmen had searched the building from top to

bottom as well as the surrounding grounds. No sign of the missing girl had turned up. No

handy clues, no lost hair ribbons like in the movies. Annie Tyler didn't wear hair ribbons.

And she seemed to have vanished into thin air.

In addition, the phone number the headmaster had produced as the one given by the

couple Brenda had taken on the tour of the building had turned out to be bogus. No big

surprise there. Dax had expected as much.

There were times he hated being right.

"No, no more questions right now. Except for you." He saw the wariness creep into her

eyes. What was she waiting for him to say? "Can you describe the couple?" He looked from her to Harwood, hoping that one of them had retained enough detail to create a half-decent sketch. Most people, he knew, weren't good with details.

"I can do better than that," Brenda told him. She took a pad from the easel and picked up a newly sharpened pencil from the desk. "I can sketch them for you."

That would have been the next step, putting one or both of them together with a sketch

artist. Exchanging looks with Nathan—Nathan's had unabashed admiration clearly

registering in his—Dax turned back to the woman. "You can do that?"

"Drawing is my hobby," she told him. "It relaxes me." And these days, she thought, she had to work really hard at relaxing. Decisions had to be made, events had to be faced up

to.

Because her time was running out.

"Great, see what you can whip up for us." As Brenda sat down and got busy, Dax looked at Harwood. "We're going to need the little girl's address. Her parents have to be notified."

He'd held off doing that, hoping against hope to find the child without alarming her

parents. He knew what his own parents had gone through the time his brotherTroyhad

been lost in the woods while hiking with his friends. He'd been fifteen at the time and no

one had taken him, but it had been harrowing nonetheless. "Missing" was one of the most pain-evoking words in the English language. It had been the worst twenty-eight hours his

parents had ever gone through.

Obviously anticipating the request, Harwood produced a folded piece of paper from his

pocket and surrendered it to him. On it was theTylers' address and phone number.

"Annie's father is on location inEurope. Her mother's inNew York, I believe, visiting

friends."

Brenda looked up from the image that was forming beneath her pencil on the sketch pad.

"I already put calls through to them," she informed Dax. "Her mother's catching the first flight out of Kennedy. Her father's taking his private jet. But neither of them will be

home for several hours."

She'd jumped ahead of him again. There was no end to the surprises this diminutive

blonde delivered, Dax thought. "So if there's a ransom call—"

She'd thought of that as well. "There's a housekeeper at the house, a Martha Danridge.