The camera is downstairs in the kitchen, shoved into the back of the junk drawer. She smiles apologetically as she moves screwdrivers and masking tape out of the way. The drawer is incongruous with the rest of the house, and it makes Parks happy to see Andrea Austin Gorman isn’t utterly perfect.
The camera’s battery is dead, but she has the right cord, and within minutes, it is charged enough to start looking through the photos. Outside of paling, and a few excessively loud swallows, Andrea holds it together long enough to find the shots of Gorman and his skiing celebrity crush.
She holds out the camera, and Parks looks closely.
Gorman, grinning ear-to-ear, one hand with fingers up and spread in a rock and roll sign, the other around a teenage girl with long, dark hair and dark eyes.
Parks feels his jaw drop.
“What is it?”
“Can I take this?”
“Um... I...”
“Oh hell, Andi, these are your last pictures of him. Never mind. Tell you what, can I load the pictures onto my computer?”
“That would be fine. Actually, I can dump them onto a thumb drive. Hang tight.” There is a laptop on the counter, and she expertly offloads the photos and hands over the drive.
“Thank you.”
“Can I ask?”
Ever the cop’s wife, discretion is always paramount.
Parks gives her a long look, then gestures to the computer. “May I?”
“Sure.”
He opens Google and types for a moment. A few seconds later, he turns the laptop around.
“Does she look familiar?”
“That’s Mindy Wright.”
He clicks again, and a photo of a young couple loads onto the screen. Side by side, the photos take his breath away.
Andi looks at the screen for a good three seconds before saying, “My God. Do you think—”
“That Gorman may have found Vivian and Zack Armstrong’s kidnapped daughter? Yes. I do.”
And left unsaid are the words they both think.
And it was the last thing he ever did.
*
Parks keeps his cool on the drive back to the office. He doesn’t make any calls or set off any alarms. He has a long way to go to figure out what is going on, but his instincts have paid off.
Mindy Wright isn’t a dead ringer for Vivian Armstrong. She is taller, her face leaner. But she has her father’s eyes and her mother’s chin. So much similarity that Parks is sure if he shows a photo of the girl to Zack Armstrong, he’ll be on the first plane out of Nashville to find her.
They have to step carefully. If Gorman suspected the same and went out to Colorado to casually check things out, and something happened to him that wasn’t an accident...
Parks is grasping at straws, he knows, but it all feels so strange and wrong, and he’s been a cop long enough to know there is no sense ignoring a hunch.
And he has a hunch Gorman found a trail.
38
DENVER, COLORADO
Fueled by beer and pretzels, and around 2:00 a.m., delivery Chinese, Juliet and Cameron work all night, running and re-running DNA tables while researching the Armstrong murder/kidnapping. She loves Mindy heart and soul and will do anything to keep her from getting hurt. But she is becoming more and more convinced Mindy is the lost child from Nashville. The photographs of Vivian and Zack Armstrong are telling—Mindy resembles them both, especially Armstrong himself.
As horrible as the case and the situation, there is, of course, a significant upside to this discovery. Zack Armstrong, or his immediate family, might be a match for Mindy’s stem cell needs.
Juliet longs for a pipette of his blood. Blood she understands. It is simple, straightforward. Hemoglobin, plasma, water. Potassium, chloride, phosphorus, sodium. Oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen. It is beautiful—balanced, the perfect nutrient to keep the body moving. Until it decides to betray its host in some way, as it has Mindy.
The more she learns about the case, the stranger this all feels. She is trying to stay rational and focused but is having a hard time. She is family; these are her people. She is involved. It gives her a new appreciation for the crime victims she works with, albeit anonymously, behind the scenes.
Around four in the morning, they have the DNA profiles lined up, and Juliet goes to work. She runs the sequence one more time, bottom lip between her teeth, a pencil stuck in her hair pulling it back from her face, Cameron looking over her shoulder.
“It’s a match,” he says, but she shushes him and runs it again, just to be sure. Her blood is whirring in her veins, the adrenaline rush coming as the sequence lines up perfectly, again.
“Come on, Juliet. It’s right. You know it’s right. You’ve known it all night.”
It is. The mitochondrial DNA doesn’t lie. Mindy is Vivian Armstrong’s biological daughter.
“Just...give me a second, okay?”
He rubs her shoulders, and she closes her eyes, lets him soothe her. She is having a hard time grasping what this means, and at the same time, her coolly logical side is running a situational awareness report.
Vivian Armstrong, stabbed to death. An infant daughter, stolen from the home. A doctor in Colorado, running an illegal adoption scheme.
Her sister, taking receipt of a stolen child. No teen mother named Graciela, wanting her child to have a better life. But a child ripped from her mother, who is very, very dead.
Lauren is going to freak out entirely when she finds out the whole truth behind Mindy’s birth.
More importantly, how is this going to affect Mindy?
Juliet can already see the headlines. World-Class Skier Stolen Child of Murder Victim.
The notoriety alone will be difficult for Mindy, who only wants accolades for her hard work. She will be devastated to have her skills supplanted by what will amount to tabloid news after the initial flush.
“Okay,” Juliet says, finally. “What are our next steps?”
“You have to report this to Woody, obviously. And tell your sister. As for the rest?”
She spins her chair around. “I need to get Zack Armstrong here, immediately, is what I need to do. We need to get a blood sample. He could be a match for the transplant.”
“He could. Two-pronged approach then? Find Armstrong, bring him to Colorado, and let your people start an investigation at the same time.”
She leans the chair back so she can see his face. “I’m worried the investigation will take precedence. That Armstrong will say no. That the whole world is going to collapse in around us.”
Cameron toys with the edge of an empty noodle container then shrugs. “Well, it might. But it all might work out for the best. It’s not an optimal situation, no matter how you look at it. But you have to tell. You can’t keep this a secret.”
“I’m not my sister,” she snaps.
“I know you’re not, J. But we’ve made a discovery that’s going to have long-term ramifications. Why don’t you fill in Woody, and Lauren, then fly to Nashville and haul Armstrong’s ass back here.”
“I think that’s my only course of action, don’t you? And let the investigative chips fall where they may. I’m just... This is going to kill Lauren. She’s so private, so determined to let Mindy shine. Having a spotlight on her and Jasper, her actions, it’s not going to be easy on her.”
“It’s never easy on any victim.”
“I know. At least we’ve helped solve part of the case.”
Juliet lines up all her ducks, and Cameron helps, and when he leaves for work, bleary-eyed and rumpled, she goes through it all again.
She looks at the DNA profile as if the answers will rise from the page and give her the truth she needs. Everything she is seeing tells her the same story.
Vivian and Zack Armstrong’s long-lost daughter has been found.
But the questions this raises are daunting, and as she arranges her day, she can’t help letting them run through her mind.
Who killed Vivian Armstrong? And how was Mindy chosen to sell to Lauren? Was Castillo involved in more than simply helping place her indigent and illegal patients’ children? Why, and how, was she trafficking in stolen babies?
These are questions for her CBI agent compatriots to answer. Juliet has to handle her family.
Juliet showers and cleans up the apartment. Despite what she told Cameron, she still doesn’t know what step she wants to take first. Talk to Lauren? Talk to her boss? Get on a plane to Nashville and see if Zack Armstrong will come to Denver, no questions asked?