Stand Alone (39 page)

“Satisfied?” she questioned.

“Empty your pockets and let me have a look at your backpack.”

Justine shook her head, grinning.

“I don’t think so, Shelly,” she said. “My personal property. You don’t have my permission to search it.”

“You want to force my hand? Fine. You’re under arrest for trespassing,” he told her.

Justine rolled her eyes.

“Seriously? For trespassing?”

“What did I tell you about ‘no skating’ here?”

“And you want to go to all that trouble to arrest me?”

“You’re obviously not going to leave when you are asked. So I have to do what I can. Now, empty your pockets, please.”

Justine looked at him, but he wasn’t giving in. Justine dug into the pockets of her baggy jeans, and pulled out the contents.

“Put them on the sidewalk, right there,” he pointed.

Justine did so.

“Now turn out your pockets so I know they’re empty.”

Justine pulled them partially inside out. Officer Sheldon pulled the pockets the rest of the way out, releasing a couple of cigarettes in the process. Sheldon picked up the hand-rolled cigarettes and smelled them.

“Possession of marijuana,” he observed. “Now let’s see your backpack.”

“You’ve already got me on trespassing and possession,” Justine said. “You really gotta find anything else?”

He considered this.

“I guess that depends what else I’m going to find,” he said. “You got any weapons?”

“A blade, that’s it. It’s legal.”

“Switchblade? Butterfly?”

Justine shook her head.

“Just a Swiss army knife,” she said. “It’s legit.”

“No firearms?”

“No.”

“Other drugs?”

Justine hesitated.

“Might be another roach or two,” she admitted.

“Still going to be simple possession. Well, give it to me, and I’ll think about it. Show me your hands.”

Justine cooperated as he pressed her hands together behind her back and handcuffed them. She could hear the hooting and lowered voices of the skaters who hadn’t left yet. Sheldon frisked Justine quickly, and escorted her to the police car, where Sheldon’s partner joined him.

“What’s all this?” the partner questioned.

“Little miss decided she wanted to go to jail today,” Sheldon said, his tone clipped. “Trespass and possession so far. She’s decided to stop there.”

The other cop sighed and shook his head, obviously not excited about taking Justine back to the police station and processing her for something so minor. Justine got into the back of the squad car and they took her into the police station.

“What’s your name?” Sheldon questioned, as he started the paperwork at the station.

“Katie. Umm
  
…
 
Smith.”

“Nice try. How about your real name, now?”

Justine shrugged.

“I don’t know my real name,” she said. “It’s Katie, but I don’t know my last name.”

“Sounds like there’s a story here,” Sheldon observed. “But I need to get you processed. So tell me. What is your real name?”

“I was kidnapped when I was little,” Justine said. “I don’t know what my name was before I was kidnapped. Just Katie.”

“What was your name after you were kidnapped?” he questioned with a tolerant smile. “You must have been going by something all these years.”

“Yeah, but that’s not my name. And I don’t want Em to track me down again.”

“Katie. Do you have a record?”

“No.”

“You’ve never been arrested before?”

Justine shook her head.

“Nope.”

“So your fingerprints won’t be in the system.”

Justine hadn’t thought about that. She hoped that the interstate records were not connected. She knew there had been cases reported on the news in the past where criminals had fallen through the cracks because they used different aliases in different jurisdictions, and the state fingerprint records weren’t shared.

“No,” she said, feigning a confidence that she didn’t feel.

“Let’s run them, then,” he said. He took her to a fingerprint scanner and ran her prints through the system. Nothing was found in the database. Justine breathed a sigh of relief. Sheldon looked at her face, and shook his head.

“What state do you have a record in?” he questioned shrewdly.

Justine shrugged.

“Nothing here,” she said with a smile.

“No. And you’re not going to tell me your real name?”

“Katie is my real name,” Justine insisted. “And Smith
  
…
 
is the best I can do. I don’t know what my last name was, before I was kidnapped.”

He shook his head, obviously not believing her story.

“There are lots of reasons for keeping your name to yourself,” he said. “But this is the first time that I’ve heard that one.”

Justine cocked her head at him.

“How long have you lived in Burbank?” she questioned.

“All my life.”

“How long have you been in the police force?”

“About six years.”

“Hmm.” Justine frowned and shook her head. “Not long enough. You don’t remember any news story from before that about a little girl being kidnapped? A baby or toddler? Years ago?”

“No,” Sheldon shook his head. “What makes you think that this is where you were kidnapped from? You could have been kidnapped from another city. Your abductors wouldn’t have stuck around, would they?”

“No, I didn’t grow up around here. But the birth certificate that she used, it was from here. So maybe this is where I came from.” Justine shrugged. “No way to know, I guess.”

“There are lots of missing kids out there,” Sheldon said. “If you’re serious, your best bet is to look on the missing children websites, see if you can find something that matches.”

“I have,” Justine sighed. “I use the computers at the library. There’s just too many to narrow it down. I thought maybe the police would have better search facilities.”

“When you were a toddler?” he looked her up and down and shook his head. “Those cold cases won’t be on the computer. They haven’t been entered. They’d have to do a manual search of the archives, and they’d have to know some specifics about what they were looking for. Best bet is to find an officer who was on the case.”

Justine sighed.

“Yeah. Like that’s gonna happen.”

He nodded.

“Maybe I’ll hear something. I can mention it to some of the senior officers.”

Justine shrugged, not optimistic about it.

“Yeah, maybe.”

* * *

C
HAPTER
17

I
T
WAS
HER
BRILLIANT
blue eyes that Frank saw first. Just as he’d looked into them all those years before. They held him frozen in their gaze. Frank reached out, but couldn’t reach her. The face morphed from infant to toddler to an older girl, only the eyes remaining the same. Blue, intelligent, demanding.

“Help me,” she begged him. “Please help me.”

“I can’t,” he protested, reaching for her but unable to get to her. “Wait, I’ll get you
  
…
”

But she was fading from his view, fading into darkness, and he had only the memory of her clear blue eyes.

Frank gasped and jumped awake, his whole body tense with the sensation that he was falling.

“No—no!” he protested, still reaching for her, knowing it was too late, that she was gone again. Marilyn rolled over and rubbed his back and arm.

“It’s okay, honey,” she soothed. “You were just dreaming.”

“She was here,” Frank choked out. “I almost had her.”

“The baby?” Marilyn questioned. “Was it the same one?”

Frank nodded, nestling into her arms for comfort.

“Yes, the baby,” he agreed.

“It’s okay,” Marilyn soothed. “She’s fine. Wherever she is, she’s okay.”

“She needs help,” Frank argued. “She needs help, and I don’t know where she is.”

“It was just a dream.”

He closed his eyes, half wanting to dream about her again, and half afraid that he would.

“Are you reviewing cold cases again?” Marilyn questioned drowsily.

“Yeah.”

“You always dream about her when you’re looking at her file. Can’t you just skip over that one? Give it to someone else to review?”

“I’m the only one who really cares about her. Everyone else will just browse through it, say that there’s no new leads, nothing else to follow up on, and put it back away.”

“But there aren’t any new leads.”

“I have to be sure. I have to make sure that there’s nothing else that I can do. Nothing that I have missed.”

“Maybe you need a new set of eyes,” Marilyn suggested.

“Yeah, I probably do,” he agreed. “If I can get anyone else to look at it.”

“Think about it tomorrow. Maybe someone else can see something new.”

Frank nodded and drifted back off to sleep.

In the morning, Frank was reading the paper over breakfast, something that he wasn’t actually supposed to do. He wasn’t supposed to be ignoring his family. But his mind wasn’t even on the paper. He became aware that they were trying to talk to him, and lowered the paper to look at his wife and children.

“What?”

“Simon asked if you had a good sleep,” Marilyn repeated.

Frank folded up the paper and put it to the side, determined to give his family the attention they deserved.

“Well
  
…
 
I didn’t sleep really well,” he admitted.

“Did you have a dream, Daddy?” Jocelyn asked sweetly.

Frank smiled at her.

“Yes, I had a dream,” he admitted.

“’Bout the baby?” Simon asked, making a rocking motion.

Frank looked at Marilyn.

“Am I that predictable?” he questioned.

She nodded frankly.

“You might have other dreams,” she said, “but you never remember or talk about them. That’s the only one that you ever talk about.”

“Yes,” Frank told Simon, giving him a tickle. “It was about the baby.”

“The baby is okay,” Jocelyn said, smiling happily at her daddy. Obviously, she’d heard this conversation many times before too.

“Yes,” Marilyn agreed. “She went to a family who really really wanted a baby. They wanted her so much that they couldn’t wait to adopt a baby the right way. So they took her. But they loved her very, very much, and they took good care of her, and showed her lots of love.”

Frank nodded, but he knew it wasn’t true. He saw her all too often in his dreams. She needed his help, but he couldn’t find her. He couldn’t find who had taken her. Marilyn saw the bitter twist to his mouth and looked away, knowing that he wasn’t reassured. He’d seen too many kids abused and abandoned. He couldn’t believe that someone who would break the law to steal a child would treat her well.

Sheldon greeted some of the other officers at the bar, and looked around to see who else was there. Frank Sylvan sat with a department folder on the bar, pinned under his arm. Sheldon looked at Marcus, and motioned to the folder.

“Is Sylvan bringing his work to the bar now?” he questioned with a laugh.

“Take my advice and don’t ask him about it,” Marcus said with a wry grin.

“Why not?”

“Old cold case. He’s bent on solving it someday. It’s that one that got under his skin. Even when he retires, he’s still going to be chasing that one down.”

Sheldon was interested.

“What kind of case? Homicide?”

“Kidnapping. I’m telling you, he’ll talk your ear off about it if you let him. Don’t ask him unless you’ve got a couple of hours to spare.”

Curiosity killed the cat. And Sheldon couldn’t resist a challenge. He went over and sat on the empty stool on one side of Sylvan and ordered a beer. Frank looked over at him, his mouth quirking up.

“Didn’t anyone tell you that seat is cursed?” he questioned.

Sheldon chuckled.

“Let’s say I was warned,” he agreed.

“That’s an inclination that’s going to get you in some trouble,” Frank said. “You’ll find yourself volunteering for graveyard shifts or going undercover in the hood.”

Sheldon shrugged.

“I suppose so,” he agreed.

He took his beer from the bartender and sipped it.

“So tell me about your case,” he invited.

Frank looked at him for a moment, not quite believing that he really wanted to know. When Sheldon just raised his eyebrow questioningly, Frank decided to take a run at it before Sheldon could change his mind.

“It’s a kidnapping,” he said quickly. “A toddler kidnapped from the hospital, never seen again.”

“Okay. So what’s so special about it? Some nurse decided that she wanted a baby
  
…
 
it’s been known to happen.”

“The baby had previously been abandoned. Almost died. I was part of that rescue.”

“Wow. Do you think it was the mother that initially abandoned her? She changed her mind and came back for the baby?”

Frank shook his head.

“We eventually managed to track down her mother as part of the kidnapping case. Junkie, all strung out. No intention of going back for her. No idea that it had even been in the news. She just left, never intended to go back for her.”

“Brutal. So how did the investigation go? Witnesses? Forensics?”

“Nothing. The abductee had wandered away from her bed several times already. So at first, they had no idea that anyone had taken her. They were just looking for a wandering child. The police weren’t called for hours. There was no bulletin to the public. There were hours of surveillance tapes to review. We found an extra nurse on the security camera. Gloves, so she left no fingerprints. Big smock uniform, so you really couldn’t see her body shape or anything. Didn’t get her face on any of the cameras, but she seemed to know her way around pretty well.”

“It wasn’t one of the hospital nurses though?”

“Nope. They were all accounted for.”

“An off-duty nurse?”

“No one recognized the pictures we showed around.”

“So someone just walks in, takes her, and walks back out? But since she’s in a nurse’s uniform, no one notices anything out of the ordinary,” Sheldon summarized.