CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Interrogation room B hadn’t changed at all in the almost ten years Veronica had been away. Dark wood wainscoting, dingy yellow paint, a chalkboard scrawled with what at first looked to be clues to some convoluted mystery but that turned out to be fantasy football scores. It was just like stepping into a time warp.
Except instead of a vain, lazy, incompetent Sheriff Lamb, now we’ve got a vain, lazy, corrupt Sheriff Lamb. She looked across the table at Lamb’s glowering face. He’d just been upstaged, and he wasn’t happy.
The room was at capacity. Veronica and Keith sat across from Dan Lamb and Petra Landros. Mike, Margie, and Ella Dewalt sat close together on the side to Veronica’s left, Crane standing behind them. To Keith’s right sat the Scotts. Lianne was inches from Keith, which sent an anxious, electric charge up the back of Veronica’s neck every time she glanced their way.
Keith and Lianne hadn’t seen each other in more than ten years now; their divorce had been quick and uncontested, a signature on a piece of paper. Veronica had worried their presence in the same room would be like matter and antimatter, exploding on contact in a rush of blinding light. But all that had happened had been a smile, a handshake. A civil exchange.
“Hello, Keith.”
“Lianne. It’s good to see you. I’m sorry for the circumstances, though.”
And then they’d sat down. That was all.
Veronica looked around the table at the other faces. Mike Dewalt’s eyes were bright with relief. Margie couldn’t stop crying, her face hidden behind her enormous handkerchief. Ella looked pale, her lips and eyes like dark marks on paper. Behind them, Crane clutched the back of a chair, his fingers white. On the other side of the table, Tanner and Lianne held hands. Hunter sat on her lap, resting his head against her shoulder and looking at no one.
They’d all just heard that their daughters had been murdered, only to get what felt like a reprieve minutes later. A sense of cautious relief hung on the air.
“The e-mail address it came from is just a bunch of scrambled numbers,” Mike said, setting his phone on the table. “But it had a … a sound file in it. What’s it called, sweetie?”
“MP three,” Ella said, in a soft, distant voice.
“MP three,” he repeated. “Here, listen.”
He hit Play. A man’s voice came through the speaker, garbled through some kind of voice modulator so it sounded like a child’s toy robot.
“Dewalts: Your daughter is alive. If you want to see her again, follow our instructions to the letter. We want six hundred thousand dollars in unmarked, nonsequential bills. Pack it in a small suitcase. Do not try to put any trackers or dye into the money; this will result in your daughter’s immediate death. Do not involve the cops; this will result in your daughter’s immediate death. We will be in contact on the evening of the twenty-sixth to instruct you on where to leave the money. Do not try to set up some kind of sting, as we are watching every move you make.
“For the time being she is safe and comfortable, but very scared. To prove she’s alive we asked her to tell us something only she would know. She said you once let slip that she’d been conceived to Meat Loaf’s ‘I’d Do Anything for Love.’ She said only you, Mrs. Dewalt, Mr. Dewalt, and she know that fact.
“Do not try to outsmart us. If you follow the instructions to a T, you will have your daughter back again by the weekend. We do not want to be violent, but if we have to, we will.”
Margie hid her face entirely now, her sobs loud and ringing in the quiet room. Ella wrapped a slender arm around her mother’s neck, her face pinched and scared. For a moment, no one spoke.
“Someone’s been tracking the money on the website,” Veronica said. Her voice felt too loud in the quiet room. “They’re asking for the exact amount of money raised. That’s not an accident.”
“Ours is almost the same,” Tanner finally said. He wore a T-shirt with a picture of his daughter printed across the front. It said find aurora in large dark pink letters across her forehead. The creases in his face seemed deeper, more graven than before. He thumbed a button on his phone to play the message.
He was right; it was the same, word for word, until it got to the paragraph on proof of life.
“Aurora said she and Lianne made gingerbread pancakes together in the middle of the night during Tanner’s last relapse. You were waiting for him to come home, and you made the pancakes to kill time and fed them to the dog.”
“That was years ago,” Lianne whispered. “She was twelve or thirteen. I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it since.” She took a shuddering breath and looked around the room, her eyes round, hopeful. “But this is good news, right? It means the girls are still alive. It means we can get them back.”
Lamb cleared his throat. He seemed to be fighting to keep his face sympathetic, but it wasn’t a natural expression for him—the effect came across almost passive-aggressive, like he actually was going to kill someone with kindness.
“I don’t want to dash your hopes, folks, but there are almost always hoax ransom demands that come in after a disappearance. The Lindbergh baby, JonBenét … it’s possible that this is some kind of prank or con.”
Margie let out a gasping sob. “There’s no way Hayley would have told anyone about that song. She was so embarrassed. It came on the radio one night when we were making dinner, and I … I thought it was funny. I couldn’t help myself. I had to tell her. But she ran to her room and hid for the rest of the night.”
“She might have told a friend, a boyfriend …,” Lamb said.
“No. You don’t know Hayley like I do. She was furious that I told her. I can’t imagine her telling anyone else.”
Lamb sighed. “Look, I just want to caution you all to not get your hopes up. We’ll look into every possible lead here, but the fact is, we have a suspect in custody who we can place at the scene of both crimes. And we have physical evidence tying him to one of the disappearances. The signs are not looking good, and it would be a mistake to comply with these demands.”
That was when Lianne spoke, and Veronica saw it—saw a glimpse of her mother, the woman who’d been married to a cop, who’d been willing to fight for things she loved when the vodka wasn’t pickling her brain.
“A mistake?” Lianne leaned forward. “Listen to me, Sheriff. As long as there’s a chance of finding Aurora alive, we’ll take it. We’ll do anything we have to do to get her back.”
Landros, her face much more convincing than Lamb’s in its mask of sympathy, held up her hands. Her pillowy lips were turned down, her dark eyes gentle. “Please, Mrs. Scott. We’re here to help. Rest assured that we will do everything in our power to bring the girls home, alive and well.”
With startling intensity, Lianne whipped her head around to face Keith and Veronica. “What do you think, Keith?”
Keith shook his head. “I haven’t been working this case. I can’t really speak to the details. It’s Veronica we should be asking.”
All eyes settled on Veronica. Her heart picked up speed, and her hand, almost unconsciously, drifted up to touch the cut at her neck.
“Well,” she said carefully. “I don’t know anything for sure. But I’m not convinced Willie Murphy’s our guy.”
Lamb looked at her incredulously. “You’re the one who brought me the evidence, Mars. Now you’re saying—”
“I’m saying that we don’t know the whole story yet,” she said, speaking over him. “Murphy risked his life to help me back at the Gutiérrez house. I think he knows something about what happened to the girls—but I’m not convinced he’s a kidnapper. Or a murderer. And we’re all ignoring the fact that he was in custody when the ransom notes came in. Either he has an accomplice—or he didn’t do it.”