“All right,” he said. “Have you had any contact from your daughter since she disappeared?”
“What, like was I visited from the great beyond? The girl’s dead. We buried her. And I don’t believe in ghosts. So no, Detective, she hasn’t been hanging around.”
He ignored the mistake. He knew that to a woman like Mrs. Rousch, who had probably dealt with hundreds of law enforcement types over the years, details like rank and even what agency someone was from were meaningless.
“Nothing unusual happened in the past couple of weeks? Letters, calls?”
“No.” She took a slurpy sip of the drink. “She’s not my daughter, just so you know. My stepdaughter. I married her daddy when she was just a baby, thought it was going to be nice, like having a family of my own until I had my own babies. I never got pregnant, so things didn’t turn out the way I wanted. I wouldn’t raise a girl to be such a brat. That child was a nuisance from the first day.”
Sam drew back at the woman’s tone. “I take it you didn’t get along with your stepdaughter?”
“She was a liar. Lied about everything and anything without any sort of remorse. Nothing I did could stop it, neither. Even when she was punished, it didn’t seem to make a lick of difference. Always figured she ran off with someone she met online.”
Sam was about to explode. This woman’s child, whether biological or not, had only been six years old when she went missing. Six. Baldwin put a hand on her knee and she bit her tongue.
“Ma’am, when you say she lied, can you be more specific?”
“I caught her once, taking a cookie from the pack. She wasn’t allowed but she did it, anyway, brazen as a hussy. And when I told her I saw her doing it, she looked me straight in the eye and said, no, she didn’t. She was always losing her homework, not turning it in, and the teachers would call and complain and I’d ask her why she didn’t turn it in and she’d say they didn’t give her any homework. But I’d seen her sitting at the dining room table working on it. She was too smart for her own good, skipped a grade and was in a gifted program to boot. She thought she was mighty special.”
“But compulsive lying was a regular behavioral problem?” Baldwin asked.
“Girl lied for the sake of lying. I never could understand why. Drove a wedge between me and her daddy, too. He bought every word out of her mouth like it was honey, didn’t seem to care she was lying to him, too, stealing money from his wallet, which he blamed on me.” She took another drink. “She was a bad girl. I was sorry when she died, but I wasn’t surprised. Girls like that, they can’t be trusted.”
Baldwin nodded, humoring, digging deeper. “I understand completely. Tell me more about her lying. Why did you think she might have met someone on the internet?”
“I see it on the TV all the time, these girls who sign up for dating websites and chat rooms and the men on there pretend to be teenagers to strike up friendships.”
“In 1998, did your family own a personal computer?”
“How’m I supposed to remember back to then? That’s years ago.”
“Personal computers weren’t nearly as common then as they are today. And Kaylie was only six, despite being advanced for her age. We don’t think she ran away of her own accord, ma’am. We still believe she was taken against her will. Despite the fact that we may have made a mistake about her death, I’m hard-pressed to imagine she arranged this,” Baldwin said.
“I don’t know about that.” She nipped, swallowed, nipped again. “If it wasn’t the internet, she probably ran off with some boy she met at school. I never was sure she’d been kidnapped. She never wanted to be here. She probably saw it as an easy way out, and she got famous to boot. If she ain’t dead, then I was right. She did arrange for it all.”
That was it. Sam couldn’t help herself. “She was only six years old. A child. How can you possibly think she orchestrated being kidnapped?”
“Well, she ain’t dead, is she? And I told you she was a liar. Those shows always say the kid is usually dead within twenty-four hours. We assumed it was too late from the get-go, even though her daddy insisted on mortgaging us to the hilt to put up a reward, and begged and pleaded for her safe return. None of it worked, so we figured she was dead, just like everyone else did. Then they found the body, and we buried her and grieved and moved on.”
She took another, deeper drink of the vodka. She was listing from side to side in her seat. “What are you gonna do with the kid we buried? Do we get our money back? Times are hard since Clive’s stroke.”
Sam nearly bit through her lip.
Baldwin adopted his most eminently reasonable tone. “Mrs. Rousch, we will need your consent to exhume the body.”
“How much is that going to cost?”