Piece of My Heart (Under Suspicion #7) - Mary Higgins Clark Page 0,72
den.
She heard the sounds of kicked doors and footsteps stomping through the house.
Finally, she reached the far end of what appeared to be the master bedroom on the second floor. A set of mirrored sliding glass doors was cracked open by three inches on one side. She approached the closet slowly, keeping her back against the bedroom wall to limit her exposure to a gunshot.
Chief Dawson appeared at the threshold of the bedroom. Catching his eye, she pointed to the closet doors. He extended his weapon, ready to cover her if she drew fire. When she reached the closet, she used her left foot to roll one door to the side and then quickly shifted her body backward to distance herself from whoever might be hiding inside.
But once the door was open, she saw nothing but hanging clothes and an overflowing laundry basket. She moved to the other side of the closet and pushed open the doors in the opposite direction.
“Clear!” she yelled, hearing the distress in her own voice.
She worked her way back to the front door, registering the deflated expressions on the faces of her fellow law enforcement officers.
To be absolutely certain, she walked the property again, inside and out. She inspected every square foot of the four-acre lot, and then walked through each room of Toby Carver’s bungalow once more, opening each and every drawer for any clue that a child had been in the house.
Chief Dawson was waiting for her on the front porch, hands on his hips as he watched three departing patrol cars leave a trail of dust on the dirt road to the house.
“I sent the rest of my guys home,” he explained. Dawson was probably in his mid-sixties. He had a kind and gentle face.
“Thank you again for everything. I really thought we were going to save Johnny today.”
“I only worked one child abduction case in my career, back when I was still NYPD, but I know what you’re going through. You wanted to make a different kind of phone call right now.”
Once Langland was alone in her car, she fought back tears as she pulled out her cell phone. She pictured Marcy and Andrew Buckley, glued to the phone, waiting for an update. They’d recognize her number on the caller ID. They’d picture their son being rescued, carried to a waiting car where he’d be consoled and comforted.
And then Langland would have to break their hearts all over again: if Johnny Buckley had been in this house in the last week, he wasn’t here now.
Chapter 47
Even before Leo Farley had taken his retirement, he was focused more on running the administrative parts of the NYPD than on individual criminal cases. It had been more than a decade since he had personally cuffed a suspect. His interrogation skills were similarly unused. But once he was “in the box,” as they said, with Summer Carver, he felt those old muscles fall right into place. Maybe police work was like riding a bicycle.
Because Summer was so clearly obsessed with Darren Gunther, it had been decided that Leo would be the one to handle her interrogation, at least initially. She was more likely to make a misstep in the same room with the man she believed had framed her beloved.
To Leo’s surprise, Summer immediately waived her right to a lawyer after receiving Miranda warnings at the coffee shop. Just as quickly, she insisted that she had not kidnapped Johnny. “I only said that to get you to admit what you did to Darren!”
Leo pushed back. “That doesn’t make any sense, Summer. What kind of strategy is it to implicate yourself in a serious felony, just to help your boyfriend?”
“Check my phone. I recorded our entire conversation. So it worked, didn’t it?”
“Of course it didn’t work, Summer. You thought you were tricking me with a cell phone recording? We had a judge monitoring that entire conversation. We were the ones playing you, and we did it for a reason. You’re the one who kept saying that Johnny was missing because of my bad karma. That justice would balance the scales. Why would you suggest such a thing if you don’t actually have possession of this innocent boy?”
“I only pretended to have him. Toby came up with the idea after I talked to Laurie last night. She’s the one who compared Darren being locked up with Johnny being kidnapped. I told Toby what she said, and I guess it planted the seed.”