The Truth About Comfort Cove (21 page)

And didn’t like the fact that he couldn’t. Colton wasn’t answering his cell. Ramsey didn’t believe for one second that that was a coincidence.

Bill didn’t know him. Because Cal was one of the cold cases Ramsey was pursuing on his own time. He kept up his share of the team work. And his team left him alone to do the rest without complaint.

Ramsey had thought, a time or two, that Bill might have been willing to help him a bit with the cold cases, on his own time, too. He might have asked, if he hadn’t met Lucy.

“I know him,” Ramsey said, putting the pages in front of him back in their folder, and locking the information in the top drawer of his desk. He grabbed his navy suit coat—the only suit he hadn’t dropped at the cleaners that morning—off the back of his chair, tightened the tie he’d loosened, tapped on Bill’s desk as he passed by and went out to greet the son of one of his prime suspects.

Amber stood beside Lucy’s desk, her eyes filled with more compassion than Lucy had ever seen.
“I’m fine.” She was writing up a report on the dig from the other night. The discovery of the bone.
She’d tried to call Ramsey, but he hadn’t picked up. And that was just as well.
Todd had gone home and Lionel was in his office with the door closed, which left the two women alone.
Pulling her chair over, Amber sat down at the side of Lucy’s desk.
“Listen, there’s a fine line between having what it takes to do the job, and going nuts to do the job.”
Lucy didn’t want to hear it. She was not going nuts. And if Amber thought she was going to convince her she had a screw loose, then she could save her breath.
“You’re a woman, Luce. You deal with things differently than a man would. That’s okay. It doesn’t make you any less capable as a cop.”
Where, a second ago, Lucy had been ready and able to speak her mind loud and clear, she suddenly couldn’t speak. She looked at Amber and prayed that she wasn’t going to cry.
Amber’s hand covered hers. “We’ve got a tough gig here, holding our own with the men whose ability to do the job isn’t questioned beyond physicals and test scores. If we show emotion, we’re weak.”
If Lucy showed emotion it scared Sandy to death. Unless it was hurt feelings from liking a guy who didn’t like her back. Or fear of the first day of school.
“But the truth is, Lucy, what makes us a valuable asset to the team is the differences we bring to the investigations. You, in particular, your ability to understand people, to get inside and know what makes them tick, that’s a real talent, Lucy. Most of us just guess based on personality profiles and experience, which is all good, but you…you’ve got an edge on us that makes any team you’re on lucky to have you.”
She listened. And she believed. She just wasn’t sure how much she cared at the moment.
“But if you lose your ability to feel, your femininity, the nurturing that comes so naturally to you, you’re going to lose that edge.”
Maybe. And maybe that was as it should be. Maybe she wouldn’t always be a cop. Maybe she just didn’t know who she was at the moment.
She’d let her mother down. And she’d let herself down. She wasn’t going to bring Allie back. She wasn’t going to be able to save Sandy, as she’d always told herself she would do. She couldn’t give her mother a happy ending. She wasn’t ever going to know who Sandy had been before the rape. Before she’d lost Allie.
“You’re at a crossroads, Lucy. One that most female cops come to at some point or other. You either shut down and eventually lose what made you a good cop to begin with, or you learn how to be a cop and a woman at the same time.”
It wasn’t Amber’s words so much as the honest and warm look in the woman’s eyes that reached Lucy.
“What was your crossroads?” she asked.
“I answered a call for a baby who wasn’t breathing. The mom called it in. I listened to the 9-1-1 recording—she was frantic. I got there. The baby was blue, but worse, she had these marks around her neck. I was sick to my stomach and needed to console the mother, and then I realized she didn’t even see that her baby had been hurt. It didn’t take an hour to build the case. The mother, probably in a postpartum depression, tried to quiet her own newborn daughter by grabbing her around the throat. She held the baby, rocking her, crying, begging her to be okay, and I had to collar her.”
“Did the baby live?”
“Yeah. And miraculously without brain damage. She’s in second grade now and excelling in every way.”
Another happy ending. “That’s great!” Lucy said, truly happy for the little girl, and for the mother, who’d acted out of illness but whose daughter meant everything to her in the world.
“Yeah. She’s living with her aunt and uncle. They’re her legal guardians since her mother’s in prison for assault and battery on a minor.”
“But you said she was suffering from postpartum depression… .”
“The jury returned a guilty verdict and the judge gave her fifteen to life. And the night after sentencing, when I left the courtroom, was my crossroads. I am a woman. I don’t have children of my own, but I hope to someday. As that poor mother was taken from the courtroom, sobbing for her baby, I wanted to die knowing that it was partially because of my testimony that she was going away. I’d done my job well enough to get a conviction.”
“What did you do then?” Lucy asked.
“I went to a bar, got drunk, met a man who was more than willing to hold me, went to a hotel with him intending to have mind-numbing sex and ended up spending the night sobbing in his arms. I’m a good cop. I’m capable of getting the job done. And when the case is heartbreaking, I cry.”
She would never have guessed it.
Amber Locken cried.
C
al
W
hittier
,
dressed in jeans
and a button-down shirt under a long-sleeved blue sweater, hardly resembled the man who’d been with Emma Sanderson that day she’d brought in hair ribbons containing her sister’s DNA providing the means to prove, one way or the other, if Claire Sanderson had been one of Peter Walters’s victims.
The man who stood before him, holding a brown paper sack rolled down from the top, was relaxed. At ease. His eyes met Ramsey’s with a peace that was noticeable. His hair was longer, too.
Ramsey looked for a wedding ring on the other man’s left hand and noted there was none. Had his fiancée, who was the single mother of a ten-year-old boy, wised up? Did she know that Cal was covering for his criminal father?
“I brought you something, Detective,” Whittier said, holding out the bag. “I was going to give it to Emma, but Morgan insisted that you might be able to use it. And this morning, when I asked Emma, she said the same. I don’t think it’ll help, but if it does, then I am with them one hundred percent in wanting you to have it.”
Leary, Ramsey took the bag.
“You and Morgan set a date yet?” Ramsey asked.
“January 18,” the professor replied with a smile. “Society weddings require a bit of time to plan and prepare for.”
“I wouldn’t have figured you for a society wedding.” Whittier was the most private man Ramsey had ever met.
“I’m not. And neither, incidentally, is Morgan. But if that’s what it takes to keep the family intact, and to get her old man to walk her up the aisle and give her over to me, then I’m game.”
So they were still engaged. And had her family’s blessing.
Would the Lowens still be as willing to put on the big public bash when the fiancé’s father was called out for abducting a little girl?
And why didn’t Ramsey feel any better about knowing that the wedding would soon be off?
“What’s in the bag?” he asked, holding up the brown paper.
“Claire’s teddy bear.”
What? Ramsey peeled open the bag and looked inside. He’d have pulled out the brown bear—something Claire had, reportedly, refused to have out of her sight—if he’d had gloves on.
“How did you get this?”
The bear had been found in Frank Whittier’s car after Claire had gone missing. Everyone in the family had reported that Claire had been trying to feed the bear breakfast the morning of her disappearance. And then the bear had turned up underneath the seat in Frank’s car.
It had been logged in as evidence, but it’d been missing from the box of forensic evidence that was stolen and later recovered from Emma’s ex-fiancé. The evidence that was, at that moment, at the DNA office in Boston waiting for further testing.
“I guess you could say I stole it,” Cal said, his face serious. “When Claire disappeared, they brought us all down here to the police station.”
Cal had been here, in Ramsey’s building, while Ramsey had been a child running around on the farm in Vienna, Kentucky.
“They put me in a room,” Cal said. “They gave me French fries and anything else I wanted to eat. They brought in a counselor. And they asked me questions about Claire and my dad.”
Ramsey had read about the meeting in the writings he’d confiscated from Cal in August. And in police reports.
“The container of evidence they were collecting was on the counter,” he said. “I saw Claire’s bear there. And when I was left alone for a couple of minutes, I took it. I was scared to death, for her and for me and Emma, too. I thought about how Claire wasn’t afraid as long as she had that bear. And I guess I thought that if I kept the bear safe for her, she’d come to get it. And in the meantime, Emma and I would be safe, too.”
The elevator binged and the doors opened. Kim got off. She gave Cal a curious look, smiled at Ramsey and went on into the squad room.
“I hid the bear in my jacket, brought it home with me and have kept it hidden ever since.”
Ramsey frowned. “Your father never knew you had it?”
“Nope. No one did until I showed it to Morgan. And then, this morning, to Emma.”
“Has Frank seen it?”
“No.”
“Is he here with you?”
“No. I came early because Emma and Chris have asked me to officiate their wedding and I had to get a single-use certification to do so. My father and Morgan are due in on Friday.”
“You said you showed the bear to Emma. Have you seen Rose, as well?”
The professor hadn’t visited his one-time almost-stepmother during his last visit to town. From what Emma had told Lucy, Cal hadn’t yet forgiven Rose for turning on his father.
“Not yet. We’re having dinner tonight.” Cal didn’t seem all that eager.
Because Rose had done him a great disservice? Or because, even now, he knew that his father had done the worst disservice to Rose?
“Will Sammie be coming with Frank and Morgan to the wedding?” Morgan’s ten-year-old son reportedly adored both Frank and Cal.
“No. He’s spending the weekend with his grandparents. With Frank and Rose seeing each other for the first time since we…left Comfort Cove…we just figured Frank deserved a bit of time to deal with things without having to keep up appearances for Sammie’s sake.”
Maybe Cal Whittier knew that there was a chance his father would be arrested upon his return to Comfort Cove and he hadn’t wanted Sammie to witness that.
But Ramsey was beginning to believe that Cal really was what he seemed. A good man who only wanted to do what was right.
A man who’d been a seven-year-old child the day Claire Sanderson had been abducted. One who truly did not know if his father had anything to do with the little girl’s disappearance.
Had the older man played his son, just as he was playing the rest of them?
Thanking Cal for the package and telling him he looked forward to seeing him on a much happier occasion that weekend, Ramsey returned to the squad room with one thought in mind.
To get the bear to the lab for testing against the sample of water taken from the storm sewer near Claire Sanderson’s home. And to have it checked for prints, too. By most accounts, the bear had been in Claire’s possession when the kidnapper had grabbed her.
Ramsey could almost promise whose prints they’d find.
Of course, Frank Whittier would claim that his prints were on the bear because he’d lived with the little girl, had picked it up to tuck it into bed with her. Or some similar, logical explanation.
But Frank’s days of skating the law due to too little evidence were almost through.
Cal Whittier had delivered his father to the police twentyfive years before. And he might have just unwittingly done so again.
And this time, the police weren’t stopping short of a conviction.