-Avery to Derek
Derek
“How’s Avery?” Ford asked as I parked the cruiser.
“Good,” I answered. “She went to school today, and only has to be there for about a half hour. Then she has a college final that she has to drive to the college campus to take. And then we’re meeting for lunch. Do you want to join us?”
Ford sighed. “I can’t. I’m meeting with Ashe to talk about Rachel. She has some thought that she can’t seem to work through. Something that’s there, yet she can’t quite put her finger on it. I told her I’d help her talk through it. See if I could jog the memory.”
I looked over at Ford.
“Tell her to join us for lunch. We can all discuss it,” I suggested.
Ford nodded. “I’ll tell her. She’ll go for it.”
His eyes went to the house where we would find Lindia Bales.
“What are you going to ask?”
I looked over to Ford who’d decided to make the trip over to Lindia Bales’ house with me.
“Honestly?” I said. “I don’t know. I was just going to play it by ear.”
Ford’s mouth quirked up at the corner.
“That sounds helpful,” he muttered.
I grinned and knocked on the door, frowning when I heard the piercing screams of an infant wailing somewhere in the house.
The screaming didn’t stop, and nobody answered the door.
I knocked again, this time much more loudly.
Still no answer. Still wailing infant screams.
I moved until I could see in the side window, frowning when I saw the baby in a swing in the corner of the room, and nobody coming to answer the door or the infant’s cries.
I knocked again, a weird sort of gut feeling overtaking me, urging me to go inside.
“Break it down,” Ford suggested.
“I can’t just break it down,” I said. “There’s…”
Ford broke it down.
“I’m pretty sure that I heard a woman scream for help,” he lied.
The door hit the wall behind it with a loud bang.
I walked immediately into the front room and picked up the screaming baby, feeling like I had practice now with my niece..
Ford walked through the kitchen, his eyes alert, and froze.
“Shit,” he said.
I curled the screaming girl to my chest and followed his path, halting just a few inches behind him.
“Well shit.”
I pulled out my phone and texted Avery that I wasn’t going to make it to lunch. Then I called my mother and asked for her help.
Ford placed his own calls, calling in backup as well as asking for a justice of the peace.
Then he went about clearing the rooms as I took the crying infant outside.
The infant that was still inconsolable in my arms.
Ford made his way outside, and I gestured at him with my chin.
“I think the kid is hungry,” I said. “There any bottles or anything in the kitchen?”
Ford disappeared and reappeared moments later with a bottle and a formula canister.
Between the two of us, we were able to finagle a bottle up, and the poor kid wolfed it down as if she hadn’t eaten in way too long.
I could tell the kid was wet, too, having spent enough time with Katy’s twins to know when it was apparent.
But for now, I wasn’t going back inside that house until it was cleared by the crime scene techs.
Even though I had a good idea who’d done it, this still had to be handled correctly. Because the girl needed every single strike that we could pin against her.
***
“I asked her to help me, and she wouldn’t,” Rachel said, a smile on her face. “The bitch already had all that money. There was no reason that she couldn’t. We both hated Avery. We were bonding over that. But she said she had a baby to think about now, and that she couldn’t do anything now that her husband was in jail. When I told her I would help her with the baby, she laughed… and I just got so… mad.”
I felt nausea churn in my belly at the smile still on Rachel’s face.
“I have these voices.” She grinned. “They tell me to do it.”
They tell me to do it.
Bullshit.
I narrowed my eyes, wondering if this was all an act so she could plead insanity.
I would much rather be in a crazy house than a prison if I were that pretty.
“Okay then,” I said to Rachel, turning to Ashe. “She’s all yours.”
Ashe’s eyes were hard and focused.
“Can I speak to you for a moment?” I asked Ashe just as I was exiting the room.
She nodded once, standing up and walking to the room’s one and only door.
After we both slipped out, I leaned against the wall beside the door that she was leaning on and said, “You don’t believe she’s crazy.”
She shook her head, a sardonic look on her face.
“Hell no,” she answered. “I think that daddy coached her on what to say, and now she’s playing us.”
I looked over at Pierson Howell and narrowed my eyes.
“He knows something,” I found myself saying.
Ford, who was amongst a few of the officers watching the interrogation, came from the room beyond and said, “We can question him.”
“He’s a veteran,” I said. “He’s not going to slip up.”
We looked at each other, then I looked at Howell.
“Rachel loves her dad,” I said. “Maybe if she realizes that he’ll go to jail…”
Ashe grinned. “Let me handle it.”
“The lawyer’s a shark,” I said. “If he thinks you’re going to lead her down the wrong path, he’s going to shut it down. You’re going to have to be quick about it.”
Ashe’s smile was predatory.
“I’ll be quick,” she said, once again going back into the interrogation room.
I walked into the viewing room that overlooked both interrogation rooms and walked up to where Ford was holding the baby.
Social workers had come and gone, and since Avery was officially listed as this baby’s sister, Avery was now the guardian.
Avery, who hadn’t made it back from her exams at the college yet, but should be arriving at any moment, was in for a big surprise.
Just like I’d been.
I wasn’t really sure what I expected when I’d called my mother. But she’d smiled, left to go collect some things she’d been planning to take to Katy’s for the baby and her twins, and had put it all in my cruiser.
She’d then taken out the car seat for the new grandbaby, too. Rigged it up in the back of the cruiser and had told me good luck before disappearing back to work.
Which left me with a kid I had no clue how to handle.
A kid that’d been seen by the social worker, had been given back to me, and that was that.
I didn’t even know the baby’s name.