She shifts her bag to the other shoulder, pulls out her cell phone and notebook. She waves to the driver—one finger up in a hold on gesture—and dials the number she wrote down.
The phone starts to ring, but as it does, she sees a tall, dark-haired man jogging up the street. He has a fawn-colored dog with a black face on a lead by his side. He takes in the car, and the woman in his driveway, and pulls up short. The dog looks interested.
The resemblance in person is much stronger than in the photos. It takes Juliet’s breath away. She clicks off her phone just as Zack Armstrong reaches for the carry bag around his waist.
“Mr. Armstrong?” she calls.
He keeps his hand on his belt and mutters something to the dog, who goes from a happy trot to alert. Slowly, they move to the base of the drive.
“Can I help you?” he asks, planted there, not moving. She doesn’t move, either. She now knows this man’s background. He was a serious operator in his day, though the day is long past.
“Dr. Juliet Ryder. I’m with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.” She flips open her credentials and holds them out so he can see. It feels important to her to be someone for this man, not just the sister of a grief-stricken woman and aunt to a stolen child. She needs him to take her seriously, immediately.
She doesn’t understand the look that passes over his face. But some of the tension goes out of his shoulders, and the dog grins at her, and the two of them come up the drive.
Juliet nods to the driver, who’s been watching, and with a little wave, the girl zooms away to get her next fare, leaving Juliet alone on Zack Armstrong’s doorstep.
40
Zack lets them into the house and gives Kat a fresh bowl of water, which she laps up noisily. They did a full circuit this morning, and he took his time getting them home, stopping for a long lunch break on the way. It is a beautiful late-winter day in Nashville, crisp, cool but not cold, the edges of spring thinking about fighting their way in. Just the kind of day he likes to spend outside, and Kat does, too.
He offers the CBI agent a cold bottle of water, which she accepts. He drinks one down himself, then fills it again from the tap and sits down at the counter.
There is so much tension coming off the woman he doesn’t know if she is going to last another moment without talking. She looks tired, and excited, and scared. Not the usual persona he is used to from law enforcement. And after the visit from Parks and his pet detective yesterday, Zack is paying even more attention.
“Well? What brings the CBI to Nashville?”
She breathes deeply and squares her shoulders. “This is going to come as a bit of a shock. I have a line on your daughter.”
Zack stands so quickly he knocks over the water, and Kat starts to bark, low booms coming from her chest. He is at the woman’s side in a heartbeat, a hand gripped like a vise around her bicep.
“What did you just say?”
“Let go of me, right now.”
He realizes he has a death grip on her, lets loose his hand and steps away. “Shush,” he says to Kat, who whines and sits on her haunches.
“I’m sorry. You caught me by surprise.” Every word is enunciated, carefully, slowly, so there is no misunderstanding. “You think you have a line on my daughter?”
She starts for her pocket, and Zack can’t help himself, he moves into a defensive position.
“Whoa,” she says. “I’m getting out my phone. Calm down.”
“Sorry,” he repeats, simply, but keeps his hand on his waist. He has a Walther PPK in a custom-made holster tucked into his running pants, and he’s kept up with his weapons practice. Old habits die hard.
Zack stands deathly still while she unlocks her phone and pulls up a photograph. When he sees it, Zack thinks his heart might burst.
“My God. She looks like Vivian. My Violet,” he says, the blood rushing to his head. He feels the faint coming as it happens, goes down before a second thought comes.
*
Zack wakes with his head pillowed in Juliet Ryder’s lap, Kat licking his face, whining and pawing at his arm.
“You fall gracefully for such a big guy,” she says, a note of humor in her tone, and he realizes she has very pretty eyes, golden brown, which is hard to miss, considering how close they are to his.
He starts to sit up, and Juliet helps him. Kat is ecstatic at the change in latitudes and gives him smelly bone-breath kisses until he puts an arm around her neck and pulls her close. “Stop, you goose. I’m fine.”
“You good to get up all the way?” Ryder asks.
“Yeah. Let me up.”
She stands and brushes off her jeans, then holds out a hand. Zack takes it and gets up cautiously. He hasn’t fainted since his first summer in the Army, after a ten-mile run through a thick, steamy South Carolina jungle forest in full gear and one-hundred-plus temperatures. He felt foolish then, but not now. Now, fainting dead away seems like the only appropriate thing to do, considering. He steels himself, filled with dread and joy, emotions he hasn’t felt in a very long time. He hasn’t felt anything for so very long.
“Let me see her again.”
Juliet hands over her phone. “You can just swipe around. There’s a bunch of them.”
He sits on the couch, staring, memorizing every image. The photos aren’t in any order. Child Violet, teenage Violet, young child Violet, Violet skiing, messy Violet eating carrots with a spoon, Violet with a book, lifting weights, in a perfect backbend against a mountain sunset, laughing into the camera so hard and happy he can see her perfect molars.
Tears run freely down his cheeks. He looks at all the photos twice in utter silence, then sniffs hard, wipes his face with his sleeve. The idea that this is his daughter, his Violet, is both wrong and somehow exactly right. She doesn’t look how he’s always imagined; now he can’t imagine her any other way. He knows her; his body reaches out to hers. His soul recognizes his baby girl.
The CBI agent is watching him with undisguised interest. It takes a few minutes before he feels able to put words together.
“Talk. Please.”
“She’s my niece.”
“And you work for the CBI?”
“I’m a DNA analyst. I manage the lab.”
“You found a match so soon? My God, they just swabbed me yesterday.”
The pretty brows furrow. “What? Who swabbed you?”
“Nashville Homicide. They came yesterday, said they were considering reopening the case.”
Ryder frowns deeper. He notices she’s contemplatively petting Kat, who is practically floating on air with happiness at the female attention. Kat loves women. He can barely cross campus with her, she’s in every girl’s path, showing off, hoping for some flirting and rubbing from the fairer sex. Watching her with Ryder, he realizes maybe Kat’s been trying to tell him something.
Ryder finally focuses back on him. “What are the odds? No, a colleague and I ran the DNA and found the match to your wife’s case. We just found out about Mindy anyway, and blood doesn’t lie, but when I learned about your case and saw the photographs, saw you...she looks so much like your—”
“Wife. Vivian. Yes.”
“But you, too. She’s a mix of you both, though she has your eyes. And of course, there’s the blood.”
Zack hands the phone back carefully as if it might explode when he releases it. “I think you need to start explaining what’s going on, Agent Ryder.”
“Juliet. Call me Juliet. And I will explain everything. I’m sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. My sister, Lauren, adopted Mindy—your Violet—when she was very young. Days old. A doctor in Colorado put them together. The doctor was doing it all off-book, as we’ve found out, but my sister had no idea anything was wrong. She agreed to a closed adoption, paid a large sum of money to the doctor, and no one, not even me, knew Mindy wasn’t hers. It’s only just come to light for us in the past few days.”
She stops and shakes her head slightly.
“Listen. None of this matters right now. We can figure all of it out later. What we have to talk about is Mindy. She’s sick. Very, very ill. She needs a stem cell transplant, right away, to help her battle an aggressive form of leukemia that she’s been fighting.”