When Shadows Fall (17 page)

Chapter
35

Bethesda, Maryland

CLIVE AND MAUREEN
Rousch’s house was tired and worn, a one-story redbrick rambler with overgrown shrubs blocking the windows. The sun was gone, but there was still enough light to see the home’s disrepair. The driveway was concrete, weeds forcing their way up through multiple cracks, and the lawn was yellow and burnt after a long summer without water. It was a thoroughly depressing scene.

Sam and Xander got out of the car, Baldwin pulled up behind them a second later. Xander took one look at the house and said, “I’ll be around. Call if you need me.”

Sam and Baldwin made their way to the front door. The porch lights didn’t work. There was shattered glass beneath them and no lightbulbs in the sockets. The doorbell was broken, too, the button missing and wires sticking out, so Sam knocked hard, three times, with the side of her fist.

After a moment, the door opened slowly. A bloodshot eye appeared, then two, then a downturned mouth and wispy gray hair tucked under a faded red bandanna.

“What?”

Baldwin flashed his creds. “Mrs. Rousch? I’m Dr. John Baldwin, FBI. This is Dr. Samantha Owens. We are involved in your daughter’s case. There’s a new development, and we were hoping we could speak to you.”

The face twisted. “New development? Our girl’s been dead for a long time. You find who did it?”

“No, ma’am. Can we please come in?”

“No. I don’t want you here. You don’t got any justice to talk about, go away.”

She tried to slam the door, but Baldwin put his foot in the gap. “Mrs. Rousch, we have reason to believe we made a mistake sixteen years ago. We think Kaylie is still alive.”

The woman’s eyes widened at that bit of news, and the door swung wide open. Sam caught a gust of sandalwood and vodka, smells she immediately associated with the old, unwashed and drunk. Great. Granted, it was late in the evening, but Sam had the distinct impression Mrs. Rousch had been tippling since well before dinner.

“If she’s alive, where is she? Why hasn’t she come home?”

“We don’t know for sure, ma’am. Perhaps we could come in and talk?”

She stepped away from the door and gestured toward the living room. “Want something to drink?”

They both shook their heads. “No, ma’am,” Baldwin said.

“I do. You sit. I’ll be right back.”

The floor was carpeted with white shag so old and dirty it had turned gray, and there was a thick layer of choking dust on all visible surfaces. Newspapers littered the corners, and a bowl partially full of old, dried-out dog food sat forlornly in a corner.

Sam made a mental note to make sure someone came in and tidied up the house before the reporters started banging on the doors and windows. If they found Kaylie, this shouldn’t be the homecoming she got after seventeen years away: a drunk mother, a fetid house.

Maureen Rousch came into the living room carrying a tall, clear plastic cup with green bamboo leaves on it. It was filled almost to the brim with clear liquid. With anyone else Sam would assume it was water. From the fumes that drifted out, this clearly was not.

Once the woman was settled on the couch, Baldwin asked, “Is Mr. Rousch home?”

“Yeah. In the bedroom. He had a stroke last year, doesn’t get around much anymore.”

“Should we go in there to discuss things, then? I’m sure he’ll want to hear what’s happening.”

“He’s asleep. He sleeps most of the time. Don’t want to disturb him. He doesn’t like it.”

“All right,” he said. “Have you had any contact from your daughter since she disappeared?”

“What, like was I visited from the great beyond? The girl’s dead. We buried her. And I don’t believe in ghosts. So no, Detective, she hasn’t been hanging around.”

He ignored the mistake. He knew that to a woman like Mrs. Rousch, who had probably dealt with hundreds of law enforcement types over the years, details like rank and even what agency someone was from were meaningless.

“Nothing unusual happened in the past couple of weeks? Letters, calls?”

“No.” She took a slurpy sip of the drink. “She’s not my daughter, just so you know. My stepdaughter. I married her daddy when she was just a baby, thought it was going to be nice, like having a family of my own until I had my own babies. I never got pregnant, so things didn’t turn out the way I wanted. I wouldn’t raise a girl to be such a brat. That child was a nuisance from the first day.”

Sam drew back at the woman’s tone. “I take it you didn’t get along with your stepdaughter?”

“She was a liar. Lied about everything and anything without any sort of remorse. Nothing I did could stop it, neither. Even when she was punished, it didn’t seem to make a lick of difference. Always figured she ran off with someone she met online.”

Sam was about to explode. This woman’s child, whether biological or not, had only been six years old when she went missing. Six. Baldwin put a hand on her knee and she bit her tongue.

“Ma’am, when you say she lied, can you be more specific?”

“I caught her once, taking a cookie from the pack. She wasn’t allowed but she did it, anyway, brazen as a hussy. And when I told her I saw her doing it, she looked me straight in the eye and said, no, she didn’t. She was always losing her homework, not turning it in, and the teachers would call and complain and I’d ask her why she didn’t turn it in and she’d say they didn’t give her any homework. But I’d seen her sitting at the dining room table working on it. She was too smart for her own good, skipped a grade and was in a gifted program to boot. She thought she was mighty special.”

“But compulsive lying was a regular behavioral problem?” Baldwin asked.

“Girl lied for the sake of lying. I never could understand why. Drove a wedge between me and her daddy, too. He bought every word out of her mouth like it was honey, didn’t seem to care she was lying to him, too, stealing money from his wallet, which he blamed on me.” She took another drink. “She was a bad girl. I was sorry when she died, but I wasn’t surprised. Girls like that, they can’t be trusted.”

Baldwin nodded, humoring, digging deeper. “I understand completely. Tell me more about her lying. Why did you think she might have met someone on the internet?”

“I see it on the TV all the time, these girls who sign up for dating websites and chat rooms and the men on there pretend to be teenagers to strike up friendships.”

“In 1998, did your family own a personal computer?”

“How’m I supposed to remember back to then? That’s years ago.”

“Personal computers weren’t nearly as common then as they are today. And Kaylie was only six, despite being advanced for her age. We don’t think she ran away of her own accord, ma’am. We still believe she was taken against her will. Despite the fact that we may have made a mistake about her death, I’m hard-pressed to imagine she arranged this,” Baldwin said.

“I don’t know about that.” She nipped, swallowed, nipped again. “If it wasn’t the internet, she probably ran off with some boy she met at school. I never was sure she’d been kidnapped. She never wanted to be here. She probably saw it as an easy way out, and she got famous to boot. If she ain’t dead, then I was right. She did arrange for it all.”

That was it. Sam couldn’t help herself. “She was only six years old. A child. How can you possibly think she orchestrated being kidnapped?”

“Well, she ain’t dead, is she? And I told you she was a liar. Those shows always say the kid is usually dead within twenty-four hours. We assumed it was too late from the get-go, even though her daddy insisted on mortgaging us to the hilt to put up a reward, and begged and pleaded for her safe return. None of it worked, so we figured she was dead, just like everyone else did. Then they found the body, and we buried her and grieved and moved on.”

She took another, deeper drink of the vodka. She was listing from side to side in her seat. “What are you gonna do with the kid we buried? Do we get our money back? Times are hard since Clive’s stroke.”

Sam nearly bit through her lip.

Baldwin adopted his most eminently reasonable tone. “Mrs. Rousch, we will need your consent to exhume the body.”

“How much is that going to cost?”

“We’ll cover it.”

“Then it’s okay, I guess. You just talk to that funeral home, tell them we want our money back if the kid we buried wasn’t ours.” She stared off into the gloom of the living room, and her tone softened. “I know it ain’t Christian of me to say I didn’t like the child. God help me, but there it is. She was wrong in the head, and a liar, and I’m surprised she didn’t burn down the house around our ears one night just to pay us back for disciplining her.”

Her eyes cleared for a moment and she stopped weaving on the couch. “I know you think I’m just an old drunk, and maybe I am. Maybe I just don’t care anymore what people think about me. But I’m telling you the God-to-honest truth. That girl was crooked as a snake, warped inside, even as a youngster. Despite that, her daddy loved her to pieces, and I mourned her loss once. I don’t care to repeat the process. I think you should go.”

Baldwin stood, and Sam followed. “We’ll leave in a moment, ma’am. I’m afraid I will need to speak with Mr. Rousch first.”

“Told you, he’s asleep. He’ll kill me if I let you wake him up.”

“Since you say he loved his daughter, I think he’ll want to hear about this,” Sam said.

Mrs. Rousch stumbled to her feet, swaying alarmingly. “You can’t go back there, I said. Now leave!”

Baldwin ignored her and strode down the hall to the bedroom. Sam blocked Mrs. Rousch from following. The woman was drunk but stronger than she looked, and Sam had to force her back onto the couch.

Baldwin returned a moment later, his face pinched. He gestured for Sam to follow him, went out onto the front steps and pulled out his cell phone.

“Where are you going?” Mrs. Rousch yelled. They ignored her.

“What is it?” Sam asked.

“Mr. Rousch is dead. Has been for a while. I don’t know if she’s just addled in the brain from all the alcohol and actually believes he’s sleeping, or if she’s been covering it up.”

“How long has he been dead?”

“A year, maybe more. He’s pretty well mummified. You want to take a look?”

She sighed. No, she didn’t, but this was her job, her world. This wasn’t her first mummy. It happened more than people thought, a loved one passing away without any fanfare, or even a decent burial, because no one knew exactly what to do. Or they were planning to game the system, collect unemployment benefits or Social Security checks.

She went back inside, ignored a now sobbing, slurring Mrs. Rousch and walked down the hall to the master bedroom.

Clive Rousch was tucked up into the bed, the covers drawn back a bit from where Baldwin had checked on him, the desiccated skin of his face now exposed. His eyes were closed, his mouth open, as if he’d gone to sleep and had never woken up. Not gruesome, not horrible, but sad, so sad.

She snapped on a pair of purple nitrile gloves—old habits die hard; she always had a few pairs tucked into her purse—and did a quick external examination. The skin around his legs and arms flaked onto the sheets as she touched him. His right arm was drawn up, the wrist curled in on itself, an involuntary contracture of the muscles. Left-sided stroke, then. He would have suffered aphasia, language apraxia, paralysis. Baldwin was right. He’d been dead at least a year.

Helpless, paralyzed, unable to communicate, left to die in his bed.

Who was the real liar in this house?

Her heart tripped, and the edges of her vision began to darken.

One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four.

Pulling off the gloves, she stalked out onto the ramshackle porch, desperate for air. The night was warm and damp. She pulled in three breaths quickly, realized the symptoms of panic had passed as quickly as they’d started.

Baldwin spoke quickly into the phone and Sam stared back inside, swore she could hear Mrs. Rousch crying. She was torn between wanting to leave, to clear out immediately, and going back in to soothe the crazy old woman.

Poor Kaylie. Six years old and on the receiving end of so much hate and mistrust. Sam had wondered why, if she were alive, Kaylie wouldn’t have let her parents know. Now she understood, understood completely. She hadn’t been wanted, anyway.

It broke Sam’s heart to think of that lost little girl being taken from one hell and placed in another.

They had to find Kaylie, and find Rachel Stevens, now.

Xander slid out of the darkness behind the house, came to her side.

“There’s something back here you’re going to want to see.”

Chapter
36

THEY HEARD THE
benevolent wail of a siren in the distance, and Sam knew the authorities were on their way to take Mr. Rousch to the morgue, and hopefully, take Mrs. Rousch to the hospital. Get her dried out, see if there was permanent brain damage from the years of alcohol abuse or if the old witch was just twisted naturally.

She was still in shock—how could a mother, even a stepmother, be so hateful toward a little girl?

Hopefully Xander had found some answers.

Baldwin retrieved a flashlight from his trunk and gave it to Xander. “Lead on.”

They set off around the side of the house, through the backyard, into the woods.

“What’s back here?” Sam asked, trampling across what she hoped was just squishy grass and leaves.

“There’s a small campsite not far off the trail. Might just be from some homeless, or kids, but the site itself looks old. There’s a lean-to shelter and an old blanket, but there’s also fresh scuffs in the dirt and a recently dampened fire and the remains of a rabbit. Someone’s spent some time back here, very recently.”

“Kaylie?”

“Maybe.”

The camp was a ten-minute walk. It was as simple as Xander had described. A small stone seat, a worm-eaten lean-to and the remains of a ratty pink blanket. Pink. While the men circled the area, looking for any more signs of life, Sam kicked at the small blanket—it was shredded, had been the home of many mice and insects over the years. Under it, stashed in the corner of the lean-to, was a small, tattered stuffed lion. Sam put on a fresh pair of gloves, picked it up gingerly. It took her a minute, then she realized it was Simba, from the movie
The Lion King.

Her heart broke all over again. This poor little girl, unloved and unwanted by her evil stepmother, had created a small home for herself out in the woods, with a few treasured comforts. She wondered if Kaylie had cried for her lost stuffed lion when she’d been taken.

Sadly, she probably had bigger issues.

Xander came up beside her. “What’s that?”

“Stuffed animal. I think Kaylie must have come out here to get away from that monster of a woman.”

“Makes sense. Someone’s been here recently, but we can’t find anything to indicate where she may have gone. If it’s her, that is.”

“Who else would it be?”

“Good point. Let’s let Baldwin deal with the M.E. and everything. You need rest. You’re swaying, you’re so tired.”

She nodded, stepped closer to him, leaned her head on his shoulder. There was nothing more for her to do here.

* * *

Sam was quiet on the ride to Georgetown. Everything about this day had been over-the-top, from Ellie Scarron to the FBI to Maureen Rousch and the small remembrances of a lonely child. She just wanted to crash and sleep.

But she could tell there simply wasn’t going to be any decent rest in her foreseeable future, not until this case—no, these cases—was resolved.

The radio blared another warning, the statewide AMBER Alert for Rachel Stevens. Sam listened to the automated voice giving the description of the girl, and was overwhelmed with worry for her. She’d been fighting the visions of Rachel all night. Lost, alone, perhaps being abused, maybe even dead...and what was she doing? Traipsing around after a ghost.

Stop that, Sam. The FBI and D.C. Metro are doing everything they can to find her. That isn’t your role here.

All the adrenaline left her. She was dragging. They’d been going hard for two days, and her mind was starting to shut down. Baldwin had instructed them to sleep, that everything would be waiting for them in the morning. She didn’t know if she could. She was in that mode of being so tired she was wide awake.

She leaned her head against the window. Thor snuffled his nose into her hair from behind, and she reached up to scratch his muzzle.

Xander was quiet, as well. One of the things she liked most about him was his ability to synthesize a situation. To take in all the variables and make a levelheaded decision about it. He’d make an excellent investigator. She wondered if she should mention that to him, but figured she should stay well away from anything that might be construed as criticism. Their earlier fight was still fresh in her mind, and she didn’t want to lay the
you’d be so good at this
thing on him in case his temper was still flared and he took it as her saying he should get off his ass and get a job.

Xander was a unique being. Tempered in steel from his years in the army, when she’d met him, he’d been nothing more than a hermit, living off the grid on top of a mountain, a runaway from life. He was alone by choice, with only Thor for company, hunting the woods for food, growing what he couldn’t shoot and kill, playing his piano to the squirrels and deer. Money wasn’t important to him. He routed his military pension to his parents in Colorado, only withdrawing cash from the account when it was absolutely necessary.

Meeting Sam had given him purpose again. She knew that, as much as she knew he gave her a reason to get up in the morning, too. It was getting harder for her to imagine a time without him, and she knew that was a good thing. It didn’t matter anymore that they hadn’t known each other very long. The heart wants what it wants, and you can try to deny it, or give in, let go and acknowledge you sometimes don’t have one hundred percent control over your life. Destiny and fate have a say, too.

But today’s argument had been much worse than any little squabble they’d had over the past three months. She chalked it up to the pressure-cooker situation they’d been thrust into, but part of her knew it was more than that. Xander had checked out from the world on purpose. Being with Sam was forcing him back into it. And she wondered if that was a good thing.

Saying he’d be good at something that wasn’t along the lines of the life he’d chosen was tantamount to saying she wanted to change him, and she honestly didn’t. She was perfectly content with his choices. They brought him peace, a peace he’d earned after his service, after what he’d seen.

What she was wondering was how they were going to align his desire to be left alone on top of his mountain with her clear desire to be in the thick of things.

She wasn’t ready to deal with the knowledge that being at FBI headquarters, seeing Baldwin, working with him on this case, was bringing back a long-dormant part of her psyche—the part that made her such a good medical examiner in the first place.

Curiosity.

She had it in spades.

She’d been a reluctant participant in anything more complicated than determining whether a person died from cardiac arrest or cerebral hemorrhage for nearly two years. She could tell that was over. Done. She wanted to be involved in this case. Wanted to help solve it.

And wanted, perhaps, to work on some more.

So what did that mean for her and Xander?

She glanced over at him, driving in the now deep darkness through the dimly lit streets of Georgetown, arm casually resting on the steering wheel, a hand over his shoulder massaging Thor’s ears. It was going to take some doing to get him to fit seamlessly into this new world she was walking into.

But she loved him enough to make it work.

“Hey,” she said softly.

He looked over, face hopeful. He’d caught her tone, heard the unspoken apology.

“I was a bitch this afternoon. I’m so sorry.”

He touched her knee with his right hand. “No, you weren’t. I can see how intriguing this is for you. You’re all lit up inside. Watching you in action today, seeing you save that woman’s life—I was a bit in awe, to tell you the truth. And a little jealous. I can see it might steal your attention.”

“This is what I’m good at.”

“That’s clear as glass, sweetheart. I’m not going to stand in your way anymore. Just promise me something.”

“What’s that?”

“Be careful. I can’t lose you, not to something that would have been easily avoidable if I went all caveman on you and forced you to stay home making me pancakes. All right?”

They hit the red light at M Street and Wisconsin Avenue. She smiled, scooted over in the seat, leaned over the gearshift and kissed him. She wasn’t gentle about it, either, and she felt him respond. Teasing, she pulled away, back to her own space.

“Light’s green,” she said.

“I don’t care. Come back here.”

He kissed her, hard, and she felt it all the way through her body as if she’d been struck by lightning.

The car behind them laid on the horn, three long bursts, and they came up for air, laughing. It felt good. Right. This was how things were supposed to be between them.

She let her hand linger on his thigh. “We’re only a few minutes from home. Hurry.”