Paint It Black (29 page)

“Yeah, I think so.” He fumbled for his wallet.

From my pocket came the muffled ring of my cell phone. My heart raced, and I said, “Grady, could you take the photo up to Bill?”

“Yeah,” he said, and moved past me.

I didn’t recognize the number on the caller ID. “Hello?”

“Denise,” Barnes said. “What’s wrong?”

Quickly, I filled him in on Abby’s kidnapping. For a long moment, he said nothing.

“Hello? Are you still there?”

“I’m here,” he said. “But, Denise … I don’t think Maria would do this. The thing with your husband, the threats—”

“She drugged me and nearly killed me. She burned down my house. Don’t tell me she’s not capable of it.”

I related my last conversation with Maria and was again greeted with heavy silence.

“Will you help me or not?” I demanded.

“All my resources, anything I have is yours.”

“I don’t want your
resources
. I want my daughter.”

“I promise you, Denise … if Maria has done this … if she has harmed that child—I will kill her.”

“If Maria’s hurt Abby, you won’t have to kill her. I’ll do it myself,” I replied, then clicked the phone shut.

While I climbed the stairs, I contemplated what a murderous, cannibalistic little family we were.

Grady sat on the landing, his face in his hands. I didn’t speak as I went by. Reentering the apartment, I
found Bill and Cougar huddled behind one of the cops, who was typing furiously on a laptop.

“Okay, now I’ll take off the threes and fours,” he told them. “They’re spousal rapes, indecent exposure, pornography charges. Not high risk.”

“What are you looking at?” I asked, and Cougar shot me a guilty look.

No one answered, so I turned the screen around.

I didn’t know what I was looking at. Numbers one through four littered the map of the city. I frowned at Cougar, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes.

Bill cleared his throat. “Registered sex offenders. We thought maybe—”

“Okay,” I interrupted, forcing back the bile rising in my throat. “So what do you have?”

I moved beside Cougar, who gave my shoulder a squeeze. He nodded at the cop, who resumed clicking.

Dozens of numbers disappeared from the screen, but still dozens remained.

“Can we weed out the rest by age of victims?” Bill asked.

The officer held down Ctrl + F. A menu popped up, and he quickly typed in the search parameters. When the screen flashed back to the map, a one and a trio of twos remained.

“What do those mean?” I asked, my heart lurching when I saw how close two of those numbers were to my apartment building.

“Ones are high risk, most likely to reoffend,” he replied. “They’ve been convicted of multiple violent offenses, at least one sexual. Twos are sexual felony offense or misdemeanor child molestation.”

Tears burned my eyes. Number one was only a block away. By moving here, had I made Abby a target?

He clicked on the number one, and a mug shot filled the screen.

Barry Green was a tall, skinny blonde with a pockmarked face and hard brown eyes. He smiled for the camera like a tourist at Disneyland. The room spun as I imagined this man with Abby, touching her, hurting her …

Cougar grabbed me when I swayed on my feet. “Hey!” he cried. “Easy.” In one smooth motion, he hooked his arm around my waist and pivoted me around. I let him herd me to the couch.

“Try to be calm, Necie. We don’t know anything yet. We’re looking at everything.”

I nodded, but I was about to hyperventilate. Barry Green or my half sister, Maria … either one would be my fault and either one could be deadly.

“Okay.” Bill wiped a hand down his face and sat on the other side of me. I thought I was going to lose it when he hugged me. “They’re going to question Green, give the other ones a shake, too.”

“I want to do it,” Cougar said, and Bill shook his head.

“You take care of Necie. You know how the state
guys are. If they think we’re trying to butt in, they won’t do a damn thing for us.”

I barely heard them, unable to erase Barry Green’s smiling mug shot from my mind. Even knowing what Maria was capable of, I almost hoped Abby was with her.

I knew the statistics. Of the thousands of children taken and murdered by sexual predators every day, 76 percent were killed within the first three hours.

Nearly two hours had already passed.

Stop it, stop it, stop it!
my mind screamed.

A commotion at the door drew my attention. Everyone stared at the harried-looking woman, who was yelling at someone behind her. I watched an officer drag a teenage boy through the doorway. My heart stalled when I recognized the skateboarder.

“Where is she?” I demanded, jumping off the couch and running toward him. “Did you have something to do with this?”

The boy looked at me and began to cry.

“Tell her!” his mother said sharply. “Tell her what you told me.”

“I thought it was a joke! He gave me a twenty to act like I was hurt. I didn’t know—” He gulped. “I didn’t know he was going to take that kid.”

Someone behind me started firing questions.

“What did he look like?”

“He was a white guy. Big. Maybe six foot four, 250
pounds.”

“Hair? Eyes?”

“Red hair. I think his eyes were brown. They were kind of droopy.”

“Any scars, tattoos that you noticed?”

“No, I … I don’t remember.”

“What was he wearing?”

“Dark jeans, a Bears jacket.”

“Somebody call in a sketch artist and add the information to the Amber Alert.”

He repeated his story of how the man had approached him when we’d pulled up.

“He came out of nowhere,” the kid said.

“Did he give you the money?”

The boy nodded and pulled out his wallet. An officer stopped him before he could extract it.

“Maybe we can get a print off it. We’ll need to take yours for comparison.”

The room buzzed with activity, and I felt a burst of hope.

But those hopes dimmed when hours passed with no new leads. Grady and I talked to the reporters, pleading for any information. At some point, he went back to Elizabeth’s.

I watched the sun rise, wondering where Abby was and if she was okay.

I hadn’t heard from Barnes, and I didn’t know if that
was a good or bad sign. In my hands, I held the sketch of Abby’s abductor. I didn’t recognize him, but Barnes might. I’d tried to call him to make sure he’d seen it on the news, but no one answered the phone. Tanya Davis didn’t answer, either.

The only prints on the bill belonged to the kid. A neighbor reported a black Suburban in the area right before the kidnapping. They canvassed the neighborhood, asking questions. Then they asked them again.

Cougar and I sat at the kitchen table for hours, pouring over DMV records in an attempt to find it.

Before I realized it, it was almost sunset.

Cougar noticed it, too. He rubbed his neck and stood. “C’mon. We’re going to get something to eat.”

“Just a few more—”

“We’re going to eat,” he said firmly. “And then you’re going to get some sleep. You can only go on adrenaline so long.”

I knew he was right, but it felt wrong to eat, when I didn’t know if Abby had been fed. It felt wrong to sleep, when I didn’t even know if

Hush! Don’t you say it. Don’t even think it!

Abby was okay.

We were pulling out of the parking lot when I realized I didn’t have my purse. The last time I remembered seeing it was in Grady’s car. Hesitantly, I asked Cougar if he’d mind taking me by Elizabeth’s to retrieve it.

“I’ll buy,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about it.”

“It’s not just my money. My badge … everything’s in there.”

“Okay. We’ll get it after we eat.”

Later, I would remember going into the restaurant, and knowing that I ate, but I couldn’t have said where we’d gone or what I’d ordered. I had to force myself to concentrate enough to tell Cougar how to get to Elizabeth’s house.

Cougar didn’t speak for awhile, then he mused, “So Grady’s living with Mommy, huh? How’s she doing?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

When Cougar pulled up to the curb in front of Elizabeth’s, I said, “Be right back,” and bailed out of the car.

Grady sat on the mansion’s front steps, smoking a cigarette. I had talked him into giving up the habit when I was pregnant with Abby. He knew I hated cigarettes, but apparently, my opinion didn’t mean much anymore.

“Any news?” he asked, punctuating the question with a puff of smoke.

“No. I left my purse in your car.” A drop of rain splattered on my nose when I climbed the steps. His green eyes were bloodshot, and his blond hair was uncombed. His rumpled gray suit looked slept in. For an instant, my heart went out to him. Then I smelled the liquor.

“How could you be drinking at a time like this?”

“What better time is there?” he asked. “My daughter is missing, and I don’t have a clue where she is. The FBI
just left, and they don’t have a clue, either. I’d say it’s a perfect time to drink.” He stared at another drop of rain that splattered across the top of his expensive Italian shoes. “Do you really want to get into this now?”

I took a deep breath. “No. I didn’t come here to fight.”

Grady glanced beyond me, and I could tell by the way his eyes narrowed that Cougar had followed me.

“My purse?” I said, hoping to diffuse the situation before it got out of control. “If you’ll let me into the garage, I’ll be out of your way.”

Grady took another quick puff from his cigarette. “It’s in the house. I saw it, brought it in. I was going to bring it to you, but—” He shrugged and stared at Cougar. “I figured you had company.” Staring up at the darkening sky, he said, “Come on, and we’ll get it. You might as well come, too, Jason.”

He snubbed out his cigarette and tossed it in Elizabeth’s rosebushes. Then he walked into the house.

I glanced back at Cougar. “You don’t have to come,” I said. “I’ll be okay.”

“I’ve seen what he’s done to you when he’s drinking. That shit will never happen again.”

When we walked inside, we found Grady and Elizabeth waiting in the foyer. He leaned to whisper something to her. She shot him a dark look, then came forward to greet me.

“Denise. How are you holding up?”

“Not so good. Grady, could I speak with you?” I glanced at Cougar and Elizabeth. “Alone?”

“In the kitchen,” he said, and resumed walking.

“I’ll only be a second,” I told Cougar.

I could tell he didn’t like it much, but he let me go. I heard Elizabeth offer him a drink as she led him into her sitting room.

There were a few things I needed to talk about with Grady that I didn’t want to mention in front of Cougar. Not yet.

After pulling out a chair at the kitchen table for me, Grady grabbed my purse off the counter, handed it to me, then reversed a chair and straddled it. He shook another cigarette out of the pack, but didn’t light it. “So what’s up?” he asked, rolling it absently between his fingers.

“I’ll get to the point,” I said.

He snorted. “You always do.”

“I might have to tell the police about your affair with Maria.”

“What? Why?”

“You know why. I think she has Abby. I just wanted to give you a heads-up, so you’d know I’m doing this for Abby, not to hurt you.”

He frowned. “Are you going to tell them the rest, about her being your sister?”

“If I have to.”

Grady raked a hand over his mouth and stared at the
wall. “It’s not her, Necie. Why would she want Abby?”

I cleared my throat. “The same reason she wanted you—to hurt me.”

He gave me a long look, then shook his head. “It’s always about you, isn’t it?”

“When it comes to her … yeah, it is. Grady, she burned down our house!”

“So you said.”

“Yeah, so I said. Since when is that not good enough anymore? She told me she’d done it. She
laughed
about it.”

Grady cocked his head and stared at me. The doubt in his eyes infuriated me. What, did he think I was jealous? Making the whole thing up?

“Don’t look at me like that,” he pleaded. “I don’t want to fight. We didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m sorry you found out about us like that.”

Something about his plural pronouns set off warning bells in my head. “You swear you’re not still seeing her?”

Grady cursed. “No. I’ve told you that. I was with her one time. One lousy time. Since when is
my
word not good enough? Do you want me to take a lie-detector test? The police said we’d probably be asked to anyway.” Agitated, Grady stood and paced in front of the table. “I could scratch out an apology in blood and it wouldn’t matter to you. I’m sorry I slept with your sister.”

Anger flashed inside me. “You think it would’ve been easier if it had been a stranger? But yeah, it sucks that
you’d be with her, knowing who she is and everything she’s done … Not that it matters now, but was she even the first?”

He was quiet for a long time. Too long.

“No,” he said.

The word hung between us for a moment. I was too stunned to move. Too hurt to breathe. Even though I’d been angry at Grady, some part of me had shifted most of the blame onto Maria. She was gorgeous, cunning … It was easier to believe she’d led him astray than to believe he would seek to betray me.

“When?” I demanded.

Grady stared at the saltshaker. “That time I went to San Francisco … when Abby was little and we were fighting about you going back to work. There was this girl, Judge Milton’s assistant. We had too much to drink, and …” He lapsed into silence, which was okay, because I could figure out the rest.

Four years ago. I’d never even suspected.

“You bastard.”

“Hey, what did you expect from me?” he asked, as I lurched to my feet and turned to go.

He grabbed my arm and jerked me up close. The stench of Jack Daniels made my eyes water when he said, “I loved you for years, but I never knew you. You never knew yourself. What did you live for? It wasn’t me. It wasn’t Abby. It was revenge, and look what it’s gotten you.”

“Let go of me,” I growled, but Grady wouldn’t be denied this confrontation. Like a genie freed from a whiskey bottle, his anger swirled all around me.