Snake Skin (5 page)

"Just a blood count and a mono test. If the
strep test is negative."

"That's all? Mono, that's not too bad." The
tension that had locked her jaws eased. Mono she could handle. Her
phone began to vibrate and her pager went off as well. Damn. "I'm
sorry." She yanked the pager from her belt and glanced at the
message. 911. "I really need to get this. I apologize."

"No problem. I'm just glad it wasn't mine.
Why don't you go ahead and make your call while I start the strep
test?"

"You okay with that?" she asked Megan, her
cell phone already in her hand.

The new Megan, the stranger who gleefully
channeled Bette Davis at will, resurfaced. "Mom. I'm not a baby.
Go."

Summarily dismissed as superfluous, Lucy
stepped out into the hall and punched the speed dial for her office
at the Federal Building. "Guardino here."

"I like that doctor," Megan said as Lucy
drove them home through the twists and curves of Pittsburgh's South
Side. "He was kind of cute."

Lucy resisted the urge to steer the car to
the nearest cloistered convent. Over the past year her daughter had
gone from thinking that boys had cooties to comparing their "pecs"
and "six packs". And now Megan was noticing
men
.

She was
so
not ready for this.

She'd always told Nick that she'd be the
go-to person for anything from dirty diapers to broken arms—right
up to puberty. Then it was time for him to take over.

After all, he was the psychologist, able to
unravel the mysteries of the adolescent mind far better than she
could. He'd agreed, saying it wasn't politically correct to deal
with horny teenaged boys by threatening them with a loaded forty
caliber Glock.

"At least I don't have to get the blood
work," Megan continued, legs crossed on the front seat as she swung
her foot in time with Led Zeppelin's Black Dog.

"He said you didn't have to get the blood
work
today
."

Good thing because Lucy was already losing
precious time taking Megan home. Plus she needed to change
clothes—couldn't go out on a high-risk missing child case looking
like, as Megan so bluntly put it, a slut. She wished she'd have
time for a shower, she stank of sweat and algae and adrenalin. And
snakes.

"If your throat culture is negative Monday,
then we'll take you in for the tests."

"But Mom—"

"No buts."

Megan's lips blanched, pressed together in a
thin line. Lucy pressed her hand on Megan's shoulder, stroked her
upper arm. "It's okay. Either Dad or I will be there with you."

Megan shrugged her hand away. Lucy swallowed
her sigh. She couldn't remember the last time Megan had welcomed
her touch. Since before they left Virginia.

"If I feel better on Monday, can I at least
play soccer?"

"We'll see, no promises."

Megan blew her breath out in a sigh more
sorrowful than a funeral dirge. As if Lucy had just condemned her
to a fate worse than death. Lucy was glad Megan had no idea how
lucky she was that skipping a soccer game was the worst catastrophe
life could offer.

After she dropped Megan off, she had to face
a parent's greatest nightmare. A fourteen-year-old missing since
sometime yesterday afternoon—at least eighteen hours gone already.
Multi-jurisdiction nightmare, divorced parents, evidence the kid
may have covered her tracks, no witnesses, delay in reporting—all
conspiring against their chances of finding the girl alive.

Apparently the parents wielded some
political clout and were waving it like a club, unhappy with the
local response. So it had been dropped into Lucy's lap. Probably
with some relief.

Exactly the kind of case the SAFE squad and
Crimes Against Children initiative were designed to handle. The
kind of case that rarely had a happily-ever-after ending.

Statistically, if Ashley Yeager had been
taken against her will, then she was already dead. If she'd been
coerced away from home, then there was a good chance she was either
dead or being prepared to enter the trade as a sex worker.

Best case scenario, she ran away and right
this moment was hiding out at a friend's house, laughing at all the
commotion she'd caused….Unfortunately, by the time local law
enforcement called in Lucy and her people, things were usually way
beyond best case scenario.

When Lucy and her team were called in, it
usually meant worst case nightmares.

She pulled the Subaru into the driveway of
their new home—a remodeled Victorian in a gentrified area of West
Homestead. Pittsburgh's entire South Side was undergoing a
renaissance, its flats and slopes bristling with new construction
and renovations. They had been lucky to find this house so close to
her work and Nick's office and in their price range.

Lucy herded Megan into the foyer and reset
the alarm. "Your dad has clients until one. Will you be all right
until then?"

"Mom, I'm not a baby." She gave an irritated
shake of her head and started to flounce away, implying Lucy had
gone senile.

Lucy was running late, a kid's life ticking
away with the seconds, but she couldn't restrain her need. She
caught Megan from behind, giving her a bear hug and a noisy smooch
on the top of the head, inhaling the almond-vanilla scent of
Megan's shampoo. She'd liked the No More Tears scent better—it felt
safer with its memories of Megan splashing in her baby tub, Lucy's
hands supporting her; nights spent with her and Nick bleary eyed
with exhaustion, rocking Megan, watching over her...

"Mom!" Megan protested, breaking free. "You
smell awful. Gross." She stomped into the living room where she
threw herself onto the sofa and reached for the TV remote.

Lucy reluctantly started up the steps. Ten
minutes later, face scrubbed, hair combed, a fresh swipe of
deodorant, and a change of clothes, she was racing back down them
again. "Remember, drink lots of fluid and tell your dad you had
ibuprofen at eight, so you're not due again—"

"Mom, would you just go already? I can
handle it. Go on, they're waiting."

"Okay, okay. I'm out of here. Love ya!"

Apparently the last was too soporific for
the Queen of Apathy, who gave Lucy a shrug and a wave, muttering,
"Yeah, right."

"I can't stay long, Mom." Jimmy gently combed
no-rinse shampoo through his mother's silver-white locks. Her hair
was heavy, thick. Once upon a time it had been dark as ebony, her
crowning glory. The nurses here at Golden Years did a good enough
job, but Alicia always insisted that Jimmy was the only one who
could take care of her hair.

Alicia patted her hand against his thigh and
shifted in her chair so that he could reach better. "Tell me all
about your new girl, Jimmy. I want to hear everything."

He grasped her hair above the comb so that
when he tugged against snarls it wouldn't hurt. Just the way she
had taught him. "I think she might be the one. She's smart, really
brave, and so beautiful."

"How old is she? Not too old, I hope. I keep
telling you, Jimmy, a man like you, he needs a young woman to keep
up with him. Just like your father had me."

He closed his eyes, swaying in time with her
words. Her voice was whisper soft, his one constant companion until
her health had forced her to leave his side three years ago. Even
so, he visited every day.

"Your father was only a few years younger
than you are now when he came and stole me away. Climbed up on the
porch roof, slipped into my window like Errol Flynn, so handsome he
was. Rescued me, carried me away before my father even knew it.
Good thing too. He would have shot us both." She shuddered. "Or
worse."

Jimmy wrapped his arms around her from
behind. She was so petite that it was no effort at all to reach
around her wasted body. Years of unchecked diabetes had stolen her
vision, aged her beyond her seventy-eight years and now threatened
to finish her off if the doctors couldn't fix her kidneys. Her hand
fluttered up, landing on his arm.

"How old were you?" he asked, following
their familiar litany.

"I was fourteen. But I knew enough of the
world, that's for sure. Enough to know that anything was better
than staying in my father's house. If not for your father, big,
brave, bold, beautiful man that he was, I would have died. He saved
me."

Jimmy set the comb aside, rested his head
against hers, inhaling the lemony scent of the shampoo. So much
better than the sickly-sweet-dead-flesh smell that shimmered from
the other denizens of the Golden Years Home. "Tell me about my
father."

"Ah, how I wish you knew him. Even for one
day. Being near him was like being near the sun. He was so
brilliant you had to sometimes shut your eyes or be blinded by the
beauty of him." Her hand tightened on his arm. "I would have done
anything for the man."

"Why didn't he stay after I was born?"

She straightened, dropping his arm and
pulling away, leaving him cold and alone. That question was
not
part of the ritual. He'd never dared to ask it before,
but he needed to know.

"I don't know what you're talking about."
She snapped each word between clicks of her dentures. "If you're
going to talk like that about your father, then maybe you should
just go, be with your girl and forget all about me." She rocked the
chair to one side, away from him.

"No, Mom. I'm sorry. Please don't send me
away." He knelt at her side, reaching for her, but she blindly
batted his hands away.

"Why not? When I'm dead, you'll be all
alone."

Ice seared Jimmy's belly. "Don't say that.
You can't leave me."

"A man is nothing without his family. Your
father taught me that."

"Tell me more. Please. About my father, how
he saved you."

"Ahh…your father." A stray shaft of sunlight
spun past her, leaving her face in shadows, giving her the illusion
of youth. "You'll never be half the man he was. Never."

Jimmy had no answer to that other than to
lay his head in her lap as he knelt on the hard, cold floor.
Finally she relented, feathered her fingers through his hair.
"Poor, poor boy. You'll never find a woman as good for you as I am.
Maybe now that I'm dying, you'd be better off dead too."

Chapter 5

Saturday, 10:04 am

Damn, she'd seen riots less chaotic than
this. Lucy hit her horn, attracting the attention of the patrolman
manning the barricades. He held a hand up, ignoring her as he
argued with several civilians. A TV crew set up their equipment not
ten feet away from him. This was what happened when a case was
getting older and colder by the second and an investigation went
from being a case file to a political agenda to a full-blown media
storm.

All with one girl's life hanging in the
balance—and now very much in the spotlight.

The neighborhood was an upper-middle class
development in Plum Borough, a suburb northeast of Pittsburgh.
Large stone and brick homes shoe-horned to fit on small lots lining
streets named Deer Run and Pheasant Way. The development was
surrounded by farmland and forested acres holding their breath,
waiting to be bulldozed in the next round of suburban sprawl.

Lucy counted squad cars from Plum Borough,
the Allegheny County Sheriff, neighboring Monroeville, and the
State Police. Parked haphazardly between the various squad cars
blocking the cul-de-sac were several unmarked cars: brown Fords
courtesy of the Staties, white Impalas from the Pittsburgh Bureau
of Police.

The mother lode was the large black RV,
bright yellow letters, large enough to be read a block away,
proclaiming it the Incident Command Center. It held the spotlight,
straddling the driveway of a beige brick two-story house with no
porch and rigid, unwelcoming landscaping.

Worse were the two news vans at the end of
the street. She wondered who called them, who was thirsting for the
limelight. It wasn't like they could do more than offer a
description of the missing girl—with no vehicle involved they
couldn't even issue an AMBER alert.

Tapping her wedding ring against the
steering wheel, Lucy blew out her breath in a string of expletives,
knowing it would be her last chance to indulge herself. Part of her
job was to play nice with all the other boys in blue.

She exited the car and strode up to the
patrolman. His cheeks were flushed, sweat rolling from below his
hatband as he whirled on her. "Lady, get back in the car!"

Given the noise and crowd and
chaos—including, she now saw, a few enterprising kids who had set
up a lemonade stand on the curb—she might have forgiven him. If not
for the fact that his hand went to rest on the butt of his gun,
levering it a fraction of an inch from his holster.

Bad instinct if you're directing traffic at
a media event crowded with civilians and the press.

The guy was obviously not only out of his
element, he looked exhausted—she'd bet his shift had ended hours
ago but he'd been stuck out here and forgotten.

"Officer Nowicki," she read his name tag,
"I'm Supervisory Special Agent Lucia Theresa Guardino." She smiled
and held her credentials up where he could see them.

He squinted at her, comparing her likeness
to the photo on her credentials. "FBI?"

"Yes sir. I know my vehicle is in the way
here, but I need to get up to the scene as soon as possible. Do you
know who the responding officer is? I'll need to speak with him as
well."

"That would be me, ma'am."

"Wonderful. Tell you what. Why don't you
call your commanding officer and tell him I'm interviewing you and
to send someone to relieve you while you escort me to the scene and
we chat. Oh and, if someone could possibly move my vehicle to a
more convenient location?" She dangled her keys and he took them.
"I don’t want it in your way."