Search and Seizure

Love ya,

Katie

What did she mean? What sort of debt did a seventeen-year-old have to pay that would be shrouded in such secrecy?

Tyler cooed in his sleep and Maddie smiled for his benefit. “Where’s your mommy, sweetie? What’s so important that she can’t be with you right now?”

Even if the baby couldn’t understand, Maddie refused to mention the possibility that someone else might be keeping mother and son apart.

Not for the first time, Maddie considered the neatly cut stump of Tyler’s umbilical cord and the tiny little ring ready to fall off his circumcision. Wherever Katie had been, whatever she had done, Tyler had received medical care.

Had Katie? Maddie still hadn’t shaken the memory of the blood on Tyler’s blanket or Dwight Powers’s blunt words about the blood in his office. “Please don’t let it be your mama’s,” she whispered into the darkness.

Was Katie in good hands, recovering from the delivery? Was she in a hospital far away or close by? Had she been in an accident and lost her memory and forgotten her way home? Was she, God forbid, in that secretive baby clinic that Cooper Bellamy and the KCPD were so anxious to investigate?

One phone call. That’s all Maddie needed. One call from Katie to tell her where she was and Maddie would move heaven and earth to bring her home.

“She’ll be here soon.” Maddie made the foolish promise to herself and the boy. “And then your mommy can rock you to sleep. That’s how it should be. That’s how it will be.”

Tyler dozed as Maddie rocked in the old walnut chair handed down from her grandmother. It was one of the few surviving family treasures. If it had gone to her sister, Karen, it would have been destroyed. Busted up with an ax and burned in the fireplace. Thrown across a room. Backed over with Joe Rinaldi’s pickup truck in one of his sick, controlling rages.

A silent tear ran down Maddie’s cheek and soaked into the bodice of her white cotton nightgown.

Karen had once confided that it was the not knowing that scared her most during her marriage to Joe. Would Joe be in a good mood when he came home from work? What would set him off this time? Was he asking a question to make conversation? Or putting her through a test she was bound to fail?

Karen had described a scary place inside her head where she’d lived 24/7.

And while Maddie had witnessed the external effects of Joe Rinaldi’s abuse, she hadn’t truly understood the internal fears her sister had lived with until now. Not knowing Katie’s fate—imagining the worst, trying to plan a way to make things right, praying it wasn’t foolish to hope—had to be the truest hell Maddie had ever gone through.

Sometime later, after the twilight shadows had muted the primary colors of Tyler’s nursery to shades of gray that matched Maddie’s mood, she got up from the rocking chair and put Tyler in his bassinet. She bent down and kissed his cheek. “Good night, sweetie. See you in another four or five hours.”

She would have stayed there even longer, just standing in the shadows and watching him sleep, if the flash of headlights hadn’t streamed through the window and swept across the room. It was enough of a visual alarm to wake her from her wistful yearnings and remind her that she needed to get some sleep, too, if she was going to do Tyler any good tomorrow morning.

Maddie padded on bare feet to the window and adjusted the curtain. She paused a moment to rest her head against the bright yellow frame and look out across the familiar northern Kansas City neighborhood that had been her home all her life.

She saw the familiar one-and two-story houses set close together with deep, narrow yards. She saw the familiar cars and trucks parked in the driveways, lining the street. She saw the familiar trees and gardens, the street lamp at the corner.

But tonight, the homes felt less friendly, less familiar. The shadows seemed darker, the sleeping windows like spiteful, spying eyes. It had to be her imagination, fueled by fear and fatigue. “Where are you, Katie?”

As if to answer, a sixth sense led her gaze to an unfamiliar car—gray or dirty black—parked across the street, just beyond the fringe of light cast by the street lamp. There was nothing extraordinary about the car, nothing alarming or sinister about the metal or rubber or glass. It just felt…wrong. It didn’t belong in her familiar world.

Maddie sighed, shook her head and let the curtain close. She had enough to worry about. She didn’t need to imagine enemies or curious eyes where none existed. The Dixons, who lived catty-corner across the street, had two teenage boys. One of them had probably bought a new car or had a friend over for the night. Or maybe Cooper Bellamy had made good on his promise to step up the KCPD’s efforts to find Katie. Chances were that was just an unmarked police car with an unseen protector inside.

But before Maddie climbed into bed, she checked the window from her room. The car was still there. Dark. Out of place.

And she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone in the darkness was watching.

Chapter Four

Dwight went after the heavy bag as if finally landing a good punch could blank his mind of all the unnecessary details from the past weekend it kept trying to process.

Work hadn’t helped.

Sleep hadn’t helped.

A cold shower hadn’t done a damn thing.

That left going a couple of rounds with his guilt at midnight down in his basement gym.

“You did—” he hit the bag with a left-right-left combination, then danced back on the balls of his feet “—what you had—” he leaned in for a right-left “—to do.”

A final cut left the body-sized bag shaking on its suspension mounts. Dwight tipped his head back and closed his eyes, relishing the blood pounding in his veins and the stretch of muscle through his chest and shoulders as he breathed in deeply.

But as he inhaled the smells of vinyl mats and exercise, a softer scent crept into his thoughts. Baby powder. He squinted his eyes open and stared at the ceiling’s steel beams, cursing as familiar ghosts refused to die.

He’d been right to walk away from the Tyler Rinaldi case. A. J. Rodriguez had briefed him on the latest developments. The special-victims unit had launched an investigation, looking for some sort of illegal-adoption ring. The police department had set up regular patrols around Maddie McCallister’s house and tapped her phones. The KCPD was on top of things. They’d protect Tyler. They’d locate his mother.