“Oh, yeah. Pulled that outta her briefcase like it was a rabbit and she was a magician. And Erasmus got a mighty strange look on his face when she did. I thought he was gonna hit her. He said it held all his research. Did you know he was researching a book on the history of the Chadwicks?”

  “No, Nana,” I said, pressing a hand to my stomach. Research on the family history would include where the burial plots were, wouldn’t it? Like the rest of us, he would have the genealogy chart with all the missing family members and access to the family Web site.

  Farley stuck his head in the door and said, “Two codes on the way in.”

  I gave the okay sign with finger and thumb, and he closed the door. “I have to go, Nana. Will you call me when Erasmus shows up?”

  “So you can say I told you so?”

  I chuckled, hearing the false note in my fake laugh.

  “Fine. I’ll call. Crazy old man. Cause me to have a heart attack. Bye, Ash.”

  “Bye, Nana. Love you.”

  We hung up and I stood. I looked at the phone. Should I call Jim and tell him Erasmus was missing? If I did, all the law-enforcement attention would focus on one old man, a man I trusted totally. Didn’t I?

  Through the door, I heard a commotion. The first code had arrived. Slowly, my thumb lowered, to hover over the cell’s off button. Deliberately, I depressed it. And went out to deal with my patient.

  21

  “Y our mother is not someone you can trust. You must not expect her to help you. She’s an evil woman who wanted to take you away from me. She tried. She tried.” He nodded slowly.

  The girl in the corner stared at him with huge eyes. Her tae kwon do uniform was wrinkled and dirty. Her hair hung in straggles, and he wanted to brush it back and up, securing it with combs, but it was too soon. He had to win her over first.

  She had put up a fight, but he had been prepared this time, and the duct tape had been perfect for holding her still. No wonder maintenance and construction types praised it so highly. But he would have a hard time getting it off her favorite blanket. The velour held tightly to the sticky tape.

  “You’re that crazy man the TV has been talking about,” she said.

  He smiled gently. They were always this way, but it would be harder now, he knew, with all the media attention. He had expected that. “I’m your father. The courts and your mother have been trying to keep us apart. But I fixed it and we can be together now.”

  “You’re not my father,” she said, standing taller. “My father was killed in Iraq. He was a marine. And he’d have kicked your ass, you pervert.”

  He ignored that. “Would you like to see your mother? She’s right next door.”

  Her face went through a series of changes. Shock, disbelief, pain, hope. Her little body quivered with need. “You have my mama?”

  “Right next door. Do you want to see her? I’ll take you to her, if you promise to eat your supper, take a shower, put on your nightgown and go to sleep.”

  She quivered harder but she nodded, acquiescing as always. He stood and opened the door. The dark hallway beckoned. He waited as she measured the dark beyond, the open door and the man who stood between. Hope and fear warred within her, his little warrior. She took a deep breath and let it out.

  Moving with the jerking, measured steps allowed by her shackles, she left her corner and came toward him. Toward the dark. He stepped back, allowing her to walk past him, sorry that events and the media had forced him to apply the restraints. It had been so much easier to win their trust when he could befriend them slowly and safely. The press had also forced him to move up his ultimate timetable. He didn’t have a choice now.

  She moved into the hallway and he rewarded her by turning on the light. She blinked, the tension in her shoulders easing at the sight of the ordinary white-painted walls, the three doors, the carpeted floor, the stairs up to the next floor. Shelves lined the hallway, each containing a memento or an artifact from his travels. Urns, statues, one broken horse he had not been able to repair when the severed hoof went missing. Many statues of the Muses, reproductions mostly, though not all. Ordinary things. There was no devil with a pitchfork or wild man with an ax. The door from the basement was locked, so that if she tried to get away, she wouldn’t get far. She stopped and looked up at him, questioning with her eyes. Beautiful eyes.

  He walked to the other door and turned the knob, pushing the door wide. She stepped forward, hesitant. When she was framed in the doorway, he flipped on the light. The room within lit up instantly.

  The girl screamed.

  And screamed.

  And screamed.

  After a long moment, he knelt and pulled her gently to him. He held her, smothering her hysterical screams against his shoulder. Patting her back soothingly, he muttered gentle nonsense words as the screaming went on and on, finally breaking, to slide down the slope from fear to exhausted tears. It was always like this, and he felt so guilty at crushing them with so much pain, but there was no other way. Slowly the wails subsided until she shook in his arms, silent. He could smell the sweat, the stench of fear caught in her hair and in her gym uniform. Beneath it was an odd sweetish perfume, vaguely familiar.

  He rubbed her shoulder. “As long as you do what I tell you, as long as you are a good girl, I won’t bring your mother here. I won’t be forced to do to her what I had to do to my Mnemosyne. I’ll allow your mother to live. Understand?”

  She nodded, tension once again vibrating through her.

  “But if you act up, if you disobey, I’ll do to your mother just what I did to the lovely Mnemosyne. Now. Go get your shower, and I’ll bring you some soup and a sandwich.” The girl nodded and stepped back. He let her. He was so proud. This one would surely be the one. Surely.

  At 1:00 a.m., Jim walked in the door of the Majors and rested a hip against the desk. Robert was on the phone, chatting to his significant other, and he pointed to me in cubicle seven. Because I had no patient privacy to protect, I continued to change the soiled sheets, gather up the trash and spray the bed with antibacterial cleanser. RNs are usually too valuable in terms of time to clean rooms, but on third shift, we all pitch in and do a bit of everything.

  Jim paused in the door, his face unreadable, the cop mask showing nothing. He was wearing a mixture of fresh and old clothes, his shirt and tie starched and neatly tied, his slacks wrinkled from hours of sitting. When I finished the room, I snapped off the blue non-latex gloves and washed my hands at the sink, using plenty of hot water and soap. My hands were cracked and red as usual, the constant hand washing straining the ability of normal human flesh to keep up. Standing at the sink, watching him, I pulled a tube of hospital-approved moisturizer out of my pocket and squeezed a generous portion out, rubbing it into my skin.

  Finally he sighed and his face softened. “You’re not going to make this easier on me, are you?”

  “Not planning on it.” I tucked the tube away.

  “I’m a cop, Ash.”

  “And I’m a Chadwick. Born and bred. We protect our own.”

  “Even if they’re guilty?”

  “You show me proof that a Chadwick took those girls and I’ll get a gun and shoot him myself. And Nana and I’ll bury him in a cesspit. And the Chadwicks will dance on his grave.”

  A sound that might have been a strangled laugh stuck in his throat. “Are all the Chadwicks so bloodthirsty?”

  I ignored his question as rhetorical. “Do you have proof that one of us did it?”

  He measured my expression, my body language, using skills gained from years as a cop to evaluate me and my reactions. “No,” he said finally. “Not yet. But your cousin Erasmus has accessed several sites on graveyards in research for a book. In light of what we know, that’s suspicious. He’ll be contacted in the morning and asked to come in for questioning. With his lawyer,” he added with a small smile. “Another cousin—you are all cousins, aren’t you?”

  “Second, third, fourth, twice removed. All cousins.” I was pretty sure I kept the belligerent tone out of my voice, the one I carried from school days when some redneck called one of us zebra or Uncle Tom. We stuck together, standing toe to toe, black and white and mixed, Chadwicks against the rest of the world. It hadn’t been easy.

  As if he read my mind, Jim said, “I’ve never heard of a family like yours. Half black, half white, sticking together for generations.”

  When I didn’t reply, he scrubbed his face and seemed to come to a decision. Again. “We’ve made some progress in refining the investigation. Smith, the guy charged with statutory rape of Mari, wouldn’t know a Muse if it bit him. He’s been removed from the list of suspects, and his case has been turned over to local law enforcement.

  “Based on the Web site Jas and Paz discovered, we’ve widened the search criteria for the missing girls. We have a total of seven possibles on the map now, five confirmed.” He shifted at the door and slid his hands into his slacks pockets. His exhaustion seemed to intensify, pulling at his face. When he blinked, even his eyelids looked tired. “I want to tell you that we have eliminated your family as suspects, but I can’t. We cemented the common denominator with most of the missing girls. All but one of the seven has a Chadwick ancestor. All but one, Ash. It might be back a generation or two or five, but it’s there, and we’re still looking for the family association with the other girl. There must be a thousand people in the South with a connection to your family. This guy, the unsub, has researched your roots back as far as he can go and turned it sideways and upside down. If he isn’t one of you, then he has some powerful reason to hate all of you. I know I’ve asked before, but can you think of anyone who has a grudge against you? Against your family? Anyone at all?”

  “No.” I closed my eyes and turned to the wall as I worked to bring myself under control. Erasmus… I wrapped my arms around my waist and held myself. This would kill Nana and Aunt Mosetta.

  Jim continued to speak to my back. “The girl he left beneath the Confederate Monument had been dyed blond. Her mother says she thinks that the girl’s paternal great-grandmother was a Chadwick.”

  I shook my head, not in negation, but in horror. The silence stretched between us. In the center of the Majors, two nurses were talking about a man they had both dated and now hated.

  “She hadn’t been sexually assaulted,” Jim said. “So far as we can tell, none of them were.”

  Some of the fear gripping my chest eased, and I was able to take a breath.

  “Her bruises were facial and upper body. Most looked defensive, according to the doctor. No sign of restraints. Mostly blows, not necessarily sexual in nature, but more likely to be signs of a struggle. And a couple on her hands and feet that might have been offensive.”

  There was an admiring smile in his voice, and I knew he was thinking about his own daughter and how she might fight off an attacker. I hadn’t met his daughter yet. Once again, I wondered why.

  “Unfortunately, she still doesn’t remember anything. We’re hoping that changes, but her mother won’t let us near her except for short periods of time. An hour here and there.”

  Good for her, I thought. But I didn’t say it.

  “We’re speculating that both of them, the one we got back and the girl taken last night, from the strip mall dojo, were to be Melpomene, the Muse depicted holding a mask and a knife or a club.”

  Still, I remained with my back turned. I stood and listened without speaking, facing away, and he kept on talking, telling me things he probably shouldn’t.

  My breath sped up. I felt blotches break out on my neck. I kept myself from making fists, but only barely. I felt trapped, Jim Ramsey standing between me and the door.

  “Most of the postmortem results are back on the girls,” he went on, his voice soft, sounding so reasonable. “None had been sexually assaulted. None died violently. They were given something that slowed their metabolism. Slowed their heart rates. They were smothered.”

  I flinched, only slightly, but I knew he had seen it. Cops were trained to notice little things like that. And they were trained to use information to herd their prey where they wanted it to go. That was what I had just understood. I was being herded.

  “Having one alive helped. We’ll be able to discover what he drugged them with.”

  The feebs wanted me for something, so they had sent Jim. And he had come.

  “The docs pulled enough blood and urine for us to test for most anything. They tell us the reference lab will have a definitive answer by morning, and our own lab is doing parallel testing.”

  Emma had sent him, and he had obeyed like a well-trained dog. I knew it. I schooled my face to stony and turned to him. Beyond him, two EMS workers were wheeling in a patient. Her struggle to breathe was apparent even across the room. Other nurses and Farley dove in to help. I had to get back to work. I said, “The Web site with the photos isn’t helping?”

  Jim shook his head. “It originates in Thailand,” he said, offering the information freely and corroborating Topaz’s assessment. “It can be uploaded from anywhere. Identifying the owner is like dancing in quicksand. But we did discover a number of child-pornography sites connected to it, so we’re still running with it.”

  “What did Emma send you here for, Jim?”

  His eyes widened fractionally.

  “You wouldn’t be here if she didn’t send you,” I said, shoving all the anger, all the betrayal, and all the…The word infidelity flashed through my mind, and I knew that the ghost of Jack’s treachery was sparking some of this. That was something to deal with later. Much later. I shoved all the anger down, out of the way, deep inside. When I spoke again, my tone was almost gentle. Almost calm. “You wouldn’t be telling me all this, if you didn’t have her blessing. Some of it, maybe, but not all of it. So you’re here on official business. What is it?”

  Jim didn’t react. His cop’s face as hard as stone, he said, “We want a complete family tree. There are empty spots on the family Web site and we know some of your cousins are working on adding to it. They may have information that we need. We want a copy. Can you get it?”

  “Yes. What else?”

  “Will you call off your nana? I think we can make some headway if she’ll just bow out. Macon’s not so bad. He knows the score and the law and we can work with him or around him.” Jim rubbed his face again, the gesture of a weary and burned-out man. This case was getting to him. Despite myself, something inside me softened. Emma may have sent him to me, but I knew better than to think she would have approved of him telling me everything about the case. And, if I were being honest, I’d have to admit that it was possible that a Chadwick was the kidnapper and killer of little girls. Drugging them and smothering them.

  Erasmus? God, please, no.

  “Your nana and Aunt Mosetta are causing trouble, Ash,” he went on. “Simmons is going to charge them with obstruction of justice for interfering in an investigation if they don’t back off. And Simmons didn’t send me to say that,” he added quickly. “I’m asking for myself. And for you. And for the little girls. We may step on some toes, but we need to get this guy. Please. The last little girl he took? She’s a diabetic. She can last a couple days before she starts having major problems with her sugar level. We can’t afford to—”

  “I’ll call her.” I watched him as the words stopped whatever he was about to say. “Nana is like a force of nature, so I can’t promise that anything I say will affect her, but I’ll call. Would you be in trouble if Emma knew you were telling me all this about the case?”

  “She’d shoot me herself.”

  I chuckled softly, and the anger and hurt seemed to steam out with the sound, a splutter of foggy pain that dissipated into the air and disappeared. “Since you’ve been so honest with me, I want to tell you two things. One, Jas and Paz found newspaper and online photos of some of the girls who were taken. The guy may be doing research on his victims through the family tree, but he may also be correlating it with news photos.”

  Jim’s gaze narrowed as he processed that information. “This guy’s dedicated to making things complicated. Thanks. Get Jas to send me the dates the girls appeared in the paper. I’ll keep them out of it until this is over. Afterwards, if they want it, I’ll give them credit. What else?”

  I held up an index finger and pulled my cell phone out, activated it and dialed Nana. It was the middle of the night but she would be up. The woman wouldn’t sleep until this threat against her family—or perpetrated by it—was solved. When she answered, I said three words. “Is he back?”

  “No,” she said, her voice tinny in my ear. “He isn’t answering anywhere. No one has seen him.”

  “I’m telling Jim. And I’m asking you to back off. Let him do his job.”

  Jim’s eyes widened and he stood straighter, knowing that I knew something. Maybe something important.

  “Yes,” she whispered, sounding more anguished than I had ever heard her. “I won’t stand in the way of law enforcement doing their jobs. Not against someone who would hurt these children. How can it be one of us, Ash?”

  “We don’t know it’s one of us. But I can trust Jim to find out. To make sure he gets the right man. And Nana, get the keepers of the family genealogy to make copies of all the old records. The FBI needs it. Whether or not this guy is a Chadwick, he’s targeting Chadwicks.” When she agreed, I said, “Thank you. Night, Nana.” I closed the phone when she clicked off.

  “Ash?” he said, a question and a warning in his tone.

  I swallowed and rubbed my chapped hands together. There was no way to put a good spin on this, but I had done the best I could until now. And I wouldn’t do anything to get Nana in trouble. Maybe he’d understand. Maybe not. My palms started sweating but I met his eyes squarely.

  “When the Amber Alert went out, Nana and Aunt Moses started calling all the Chadwick households with grown men in them. Macon had told Erasmus not to leave his house without contacting either him or Nana so one of them could go with him, be witnesses and alibis. He didn’t call them. And when Nana phoned his house, he didn’t answer. So she went out there. He’s gone.”