Chương 5
“What happened?”
“Mommy was sewing too fast.”
The newly stitched seam.
Richard felt the story rearrange itself.
“Lucy,” he said, “did she put something inside before she sewed it?”
The girl stared at him.
Ruiz said gently, “You don’t have to answer him.”
Lucy ignored her.
“She told me never to open it unless I found you.”
Richard swallowed.
“Why me?”
“I asked her that.”
“What did she say?”
“She said because you’d know what proof is.”
For the second time that afternoon, Richard had no reply.
Ruiz stood.
“We need the doll.”
Lucy’s arms tightened.
“No.”
“It may contain evidence.”
“No.”
“Lucy, if your mother put something important in there—”
“She said him.”
She pointed at Richard.
Ruiz looked at him.
Richard said, “She trusts an instruction from her mother more than she trusts you.”
“I understand that.”
“Then don’t make her wrong.”
Ruiz’s jaw flexed.
“You’re asking me not to secure possible evidence in an abduction.”
“I’m asking you to establish a chain of custody that doesn’t begin with taking it from a terrified seven-year-old against her dead-or-missing mother’s explicit instruction.”
“That’s a very prosecutor way to phrase obstruction.”
Bennett muttered, “Here we go.”
Richard looked at him.
Bennett raised both hands.
Ruiz said, “We can open it here. With her watching. You watching. Body cameras running.”
Richard considered it.
Lucy did not.
“No.”
He looked at her.
She shook her head harder.
“No. Mommy said you. Not police. You.”
Richard crouched.
His knees objected immediately.
“Lucy, I need to ask you something difficult.”
She watched him.
“If I open it, I may have to give what’s inside to Officer Ruiz.”
“No.”
“If it can help find your mother—”
“No.”
“Then we may lose time.”
Her eyes filled, but she did not cry.
“She said if I gave it to the wrong person, they’d find me too.”
Richard looked up at Ruiz.
She had heard.
He said, “There may be a compromised officer.”
Ruiz’s expression had become hard.
“Yes.”
“Then your body camera may protect all of us.”
Bennett shifted.
Richard noticed.
Ruiz noticed Richard noticing.
“What?” she asked.
Bennett said, “Nothing.”
Richard said, “He reacted.”
“I heard the child say a cop might be involved.”
“No. You reacted to body camera.”
Bennett flushed. “I adjusted my vest.”
“Did you?”
“Richard,” Ruiz said.
He hated the use of his first name from strangers.
“I’m not accusing him. I’m observing.”
Bennett said, “You’re making a terrified kid think everyone’s out to get her.”
Lucy spoke from behind them.
“Someone is.”
No one answered.
A patrol supervisor arrived. Then a child-services representative. Then questions multiplied.
Richard watched Lucy shrink beneath the attention.
People spoke about procedure. Temporary placement. Emergency guardianship. Medical evaluation. Trauma assessment.
All reasonable.
All unbearable.
When the child-services worker, a patient woman named Helen Park, asked whether there were any known relatives, Lucy pointed at Richard.
He nearly turned around to see whom she meant.
Helen looked at him.
“Would you be willing to undergo emergency kinship screening?”
Richard said nothing.
Lucy stared at the floor.
The question was not whether he wanted a granddaughter.
The question was whether he could safely become anything to a child whose mother he had failed.
He had spent twenty-one years privately rewriting Anna’s disappearance into a tragedy with no preventable cause because the alternative required admitting his last words to her had mattered.
If you walk out with him, don’t expect this house to remain yours.
She had walked out.
Her boyfriend at the time had been a musician named Evan Mercer. Petty arrests, marijuana possession, one assault charge dismissed after the complainant recanted. Richard had seen danger. Anna had seen a father treating her choices like evidence in a prosecution.
Six months later, she vanished.
Evan disappeared too.
Richard had assumed they fled together until Evan’s body was found in a lake two states away, identified from dental records after nearly a year. The official finding was accidental drowning.
Anna remained missing.
Eventually, legally, dead.
Richard had put a stone beside Margaret’s grave even though there was nothing beneath it.
Now a seven-year-old with Anna’s eyes waited for him to answer.
“Yes,” he said.
Lucy looked up.
Helen asked, “You understand this may involve a home inspection, background check, temporary supervision requirements, and court review?”
“Yes.”
“You live alone?”
“Yes.”
“Any firearms in the residence?”
“One.”
Lucy’s gaze flicked to him.
“In a biometric safe,” Richard added. “Unloaded. Ammunition stored separately.”
Helen wrote something.
“Any health conditions affecting your ability to provide care?”
“I’m seventy.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
Richard almost liked her.
“Controlled hypertension. Mild arthritis. No cognitive impairment. I drive. I cook badly but safely.”
Helen looked at Lucy.
“Do you know him?”
“No.”
“Do you want to stay with him tonight if we determine it’s safe?”
Lucy’s answer took several seconds.
“I don’t want to stay anywhere.”
Helen nodded.
“That makes sense.”
Richard would remember that.
Not It’ll be okay.
Not You’re safe now.
It makes sense.
Lucy looked at Richard.
“But if I have to, him.”
Richard looked away first.
They opened the doll in the café office after Ruiz arranged for a detective from the department’s major crimes unit to attend. Detective Simone Brooks arrived wearing plain clothes and a wool cap wet with rain. She introduced herself, showed identification without being asked, and turned on an audio recorder in addition to the body camera Ruiz still wore.
Lucy sat on Mara’s office chair with the doll in her lap.
Richard used a small seam ripper from the café’s emergency sewing kit.
His hands were steady at first.
They stopped being steady after the third stitch.
Lucy noticed.
“You can cut it.”
“I’m trying not to damage anything.”
“Mommy said the doll was ugly anyway.”
Richard looked at the cloth face.
One blue-thread eye was slightly higher than the other. The yarn hair had once been yellow and was now the color of dust.
“Who made it?”
“Mommy.”
May you like
“Then it’s not ugly.”
“Yes, it is.”
