“We’re still looking into that.”
Rosa nodded. Her face remained set. Not calm, nor simmering with the barely suppressed rage that animated Colin Summers’s entire body. Instead, she was preternaturally composed. Like a fellow cop, D.D. thought. A woman who’d been there and done that before.
The woman gazed up at Keynes. He gave a faint nod, and she reached down for her oversize cloth shoulder bag, digging around until she produced a manila folder. “Recent photo,” she said, placing it on D.D.’s desk. “Written description. Her fingerprints are already on file.”
D.D. took the file.
“What about Flora’s cell phone password?” D.D. asked. “Because we’re subpoenaing records of her texts and messages now, but that will take a few days, versus if we could access the phone directly.”
Rosa rattled off four digits. D.D. wrote them down, then glanced up. “That’s not a birthdate,” she said.
“No. It’s a random code. More secure. Flora was big on security.” A slight fissure in the woman’s composure. Rosa squared her shoulders, soldiered on. “She shared the code with me, however. More security . . . in case something happened to her.”
“Were you worried about Flora, Mrs. Dane?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. No shirking.
“Do you know what she’d been doing? Even before Devon Goulding?”
“Yes.”
D.D. leaned forward, resting her elbows on her desk. “Mrs. Dane, do you think Flora was truly trying to save the world, or do you think it’s possible that Flora has a death wish? That she wasn’t looking to continue her good work, she was looking to end things?”
Rosa Dane’s facade cracked. A wide, gaping schism that revealed a world of pain and sorrow and resignation. A mother’s aching, powerful, powerless love for her daughter.
Keynes reached out and gently squeezed her shoulder.
“She was my happy child,” the woman whispered. “Darwin . . . he was old enough to feel the loss of his father. To know, at an early age, that a phone can ring and nothing will ever be right again. But Flora was just a baby. She didn’t bear those kinds of scars. She loved the farm. Chasing the hens, planting spring seeds, running through the woods, sneaking food to the foxes. She loved everything, everyone. All I ever had to do was open the front door, and she was happy.
“He put her in a box, you know. He shut her away in a pine coffin, day after day after day. And when he finally let her out, it was under the condition that she call him by her late father’s name.”
D.D. got up. She had a box of tissues on the filing cabinet behind her. Now, she placed it on her desk in front of Rosa Dane. But the woman remained dry-eyed, stoic. The kind of grief too deep for tears. Keynes’s hand was still on her shoulder. He seemed in no rush to pull it away.
“Do you have a child?” Rosa asked.
“A son, Jack. He’s four, currently obsessed with Candy Land.”
“And if something happened to him?”
“I’d do whatever it took to get him back,” D.D. agreed.
“I did. I completed paperwork and designed fliers and personally worked the phones. Then, after that first postcard . . . I wore what the victim advocates told me to wear. I said what the FBI experts told me to say. I went on national television and begged for my daughter’s life.
“Then I waited, and waited, and waited. Morning shows, nightly cable news. Watched my son return from college and lose himself to Facebook drives, Twitter appeals. Neither one of us had any idea. We’d been a family, just a family of farmers from Maine. Except then my daughter disappeared and for four hundred and seventy-two days . . .”
“I’m sure the police appreciated your cooperation.”
“They didn’t.” Her voice was blunt. “The investigators were hopeless. No leads, no clues. First it was all don’t call us, we’ll call you. Then, later, why hadn’t I done this, why didn’t I do that, as if suddenly it was my fault they couldn’t find her. You know who helped us find Flora?”
D.D. shook her head.
“Jacob Ness. Him and his damn messages. At a certain point, postcards weren’t enough. He started sending e-mails, even posting on her Facebook page. Escalation, they called it. But he e-mailed one too many times and an FBI agent in Georgia was able to trace the IP address to some Internet café that was part of a truck stop. But if not for that message, Flora would still be lost. We found her not because the police were that smart but because Jacob was that stupid.”
“Is that what you told Mr. and Mrs. Summers?” D.D. asked.
“Yes.”
“Did you know that Colin met with Flora? Did you know that she had agreed to help find Stacey?”
For the first time, Rosa fell silent. She sat back. Not saying yes, not saying no, but processing.
“Do you think the same person who took Stacey has now kidnapped Flora?” she asked at last.
“We don’t know what to think. But it’s certainly a possibility.”
“I love Flora,” Rosa whispered.
D.D. didn’t say anything.
“I will always love her. That’s what mothers do. But I . . . I miss her.”
D.D. remained silent. Rosa looked up, eyes so much like her daughter’s, searching D.D.’s own.
“My daughter disappeared March eighteenth. My beautiful, happy child. The girl who loved to climb trees and eat blueberries straight from the bush. I can remember how she looked, the full brilliance of her smile. I can remember how she felt, hugging me as if her whole body depended upon it. The lilt of her voice—’bye, Mom—as she was halfway out the door, always cheerful, never worrying because of course we’d see each other again. My daughter disappeared March eighteenth. Seven years ago. Jacob Ness destroyed her, as surely as if he’d fired a bullet into her brain. And now . . . I love her. I will always love her. But this new Flora, she scares me. And she knows it.”
“Did Flora ever talk to you about the Stacey Summers case?”
“Never.”
“But you can believe she’d take an interest, go looking for Stacey herself.”
“I’ve seen her bedroom wall, Detective.”
“Was she getting counseling, therapeutic support?”
Rosa glanced up at Keynes. He’d finally taken his hand off her shoulder. Now, his arm hung by his side. Was it just D.D., or did he seem smaller somehow? Lonelier?
“Samuel designed a plan for her reentry,” Rosa said, gaze on the victim specialist. “In the beginning, it included sessions with an expert in trauma. But Flora didn’t care for those meetings. She claimed they didn’t help. Ironically enough, it was her first self-defense class that made the most difference. After having spent so long feeling powerless, she delighted in discovering her own strength. Samuel approved. The best antidote for anxiety is confidence.”
“But she didn’t stop with a few self-defense classes,” D.D. filled in.
“She became . . . obsessed. With both safety and security and then other missing persons cases. All the other children out there who still haven’t made it home again.”
“Do you think she could find Stacey Summers?” D.D. asked.
“I’m afraid that she could.”
“Afraid . . .” D.D. didn’t have to consider it too long. “You think there’s more to it than saving others. You think it’s also about punishing the perpetrator.”
Rosa didn’t look at Keynes this time when she spoke. She stared straight at D.D.
“After everything Jacob Ness did to her, he died too quick.”
“What happened when they rescued Flora?”
“I don’t know. You’d have to contact FBI agent Kimberly Quincy out of Atlanta. She’s the one who located Jacob and led the raid to rescue my daughter.”
D.D. glanced at Samuel, who nodded.
“Were you there?” she asked him.
“No.”
“But you know what happened.”
“Only from hearsay. And as for anything Flora might have told me . . . We struck a deal that first day. She told me her story once. I repeated it for the official record. And now, we both keep her focused on the future.”
She turned her attention to Rosa. “You’ve mentioned a brother—”
“Darwin.”