Secure Location - By Beverly Long Page 0,70
sorry for him.
No. She felt sorry for his parents. At what point did they know that they had raised a monster? At what point did they stop thinking about their little girl? They never got to see her first day of kindergarten, her first high school dance, her college graduation. They never again got to feel her chubby arms wrap around their necks. They never got to kiss her good-night and stroke her soft hair.
Her own parents had suffered, too. She could still remember sitting on the top step in the dark, weeks after Missy’s death, listening to her parents talk in the downstairs living room. Her father had been loudest. How could she have been so careless? Her mother’s voice softer but no less filled with despair. I don’t know.
A month later, after her father had lost his job, she’d tried to tell them how sorry she was. She’d cried and they’d told her that they still loved her. Her mother had patted her hand. We will never talk about this again.
And she hadn’t.
But she had thought about it every day for the past twenty years. And she had grieved.
* * *
MYERS’S TEAM IDENTIFIED twenty-nine buildings that had four or more stories in the eight-block area known as Valdez. It was called that because it surrounded Valdez Park, where a small statue marked the contributions of some hero from the Spanish-American war. The park might have been nice at one time but now it was run-down, matching the apartment buildings that lined the streets. At least half of them had more than ten floors and six had more than twenty floors. It was a hell of a lot of space to cover.
Myers started by calling in the canine unit. Four dogs and their handlers arrived within the half hour. They got a shirt out of Meg’s dirty laundry pile and the dogs picked up her scent. The officers, twelve in total, split into four teams of three. Each team took a dog and they started working the list. Cruz was grateful for the manpower. He realized it was probably every available cop that they could spare. He and Myers paired up, making a fifth team. They didn’t have a dog but Cruz didn’t intend to let that stop him.
The plan was fairly simple. Knock on doors, ask a few questions, show both Blakely’s and Meg’s pictures, and let the dog do his thing. If the animal showed any interest, investigate further. If not, move on. Any leads or new information would immediately get triaged back to the temporary command center that had been set up unobtrusively in a trailer in an empty parking lot.
Fortunately, the neighborhood was one that the police knew well in that there was frequent violence requiring a police response. They were on a first-name basis with lots of people in the community. Even so, some doors went unanswered. A few of the inhabitants might have been working but many more were likely inside but just not keen on interacting with the police.
They didn’t break down any doors. If they couldn’t get inside to do a visual, they relayed that information back to one additional officer who was charged with tracking down landlords, to get access through them.
Nobody recognized Blakely or Meg.
As report after report funneled into Myers, Cruz got more worried. Meg. Sweet Meg. Who could only see the good in people. How would she handle a crazy man?
Stay alive, Meg. Just stay alive until I can find you. Keep our baby safe.
Their baby. It was staggering news. Wonderful news. Terrifying news in these circumstances.
Meg had tried to tell him. Why the hell hadn’t he returned her call? Why the hell had he let his pride get in the way?
Eight hours later, it was just past midnight and the streetlights in the area that hadn’t been broken out had been burning for over four hours.
Cruz and Myers had been moving at a relentless pace. Ten minutes ago, Myers had insisted they return to the command center and he’d pushed a turkey sandwich and a cup of coffee into Cruz’s hands. “Eat,” he said. “Before you fall down.”
Cruz gulped down the food. He was wadding up his sandwich wrapper when he glanced down the street. Two blocks away, he saw a man and a woman emerge from a building. They were moving fast, the man had his arm around the woman. The angle of the streetlight was just right and holy hell, he couldn’t be sure