“Will you carry her to the car, please?” Joe asked.
Louis walked to Amy and knelt to pick her up. It was an awkward lift, but Amy seemed to be in a comalike sleep, and she didn’t wake up.
“The front door’s padlocked,” Louis said. “We’ll have to go back out through the kitchen.”
Joe followed him to the kitchen, holding open the door as Louis angled Amy through the frame. Joe tried to work the door closed, but it was caught on the buckled linoleum, and she finally just left it.
As she rounded the corner of the house, she saw Louis had stopped. He was staring at a car parked in the road behind her Bronco. A rusty green Gremlin. Two people inside. Ohio license plates.
The passenger door opened, and a man stepped out, looking at them over the roof of the car.
It was Owen Brandt.
Chapter Thirteen
Louis stayed where he was, on the grass, cradling Amy in his arms.
Owen Brandt walked toward the gate, keys in hand. He was a stocky man, buffed by six years of lifting weights in the prison gym. His face was the color of a raw steak, the cheeks scored by deep lines down the sides of his mouth. Small spikes of black hair stood on end around his head.
He unlocked the gate and pushed it open, his dark eyes never leaving Louis and Joe. Stepping inside the gate, he faced them, jingling the keys like a pissed-off jail guard.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked.
Louis and Joe came forward together. Brandt assumed a blockade position between the gate and the road behind him. He wore a dirty denim jacket and baggy jeans, and Louis could not tell if he had a weapon on his belt.
“I asked who the hell you people are,” Brandt said again.
Joe held up her badge, only long enough to let Brandt see that it was gold but not long enough for him to read the county name. But Brandt had seen too many cops and had been in prison too long not to notice the sleight of hand.
“Let me see that again,” Brandt said. His lips curled when Joe held it up. “Where the fuck is Leelanau County? That even a real badge?”
“It’s real,” Joe said. “And it’s good throughout the state. Now step aside and let us by.”
Brandt didn’t move, his gaze narrowing in on Amy, first with curiosity, then with shock as recognition set in.
“That my girl you got there?” he demanded.
“Step aside,” Joe said.
“Now wait a minute,” Brandt said. “That’s my girl, and you don’t have no right to take her anywhere.”
“She’s a runaway in need of care,” Joe said.
“She ain’t no runaway if she’s home, and that’s her home,” Brandt said, gesturing to the house. “Now put her down.”
The thud of a door closing drew Louis’s attention behind Brandt. A woman had climbed from the Gremlin. She was short, her bleached blond hair a pile of frizz atop her thin face. She wore an oversized black leather jacket over licorice-stick leggings. As she wobbled across the road on spiked black heels, Louis could hear the clatter of her plastic bracelets.
Joe’s gun suddenly came level, held out in front of her in one hand. With her other hand, she motioned for the woman to halt.
“Stay where you are,” she called. And to Brandt, “Now, you, put your hands on the gate and spread your feet.”
Brandt stared at her with hatred.
“Now!”
Brandt stepped reluctantly to the gate and assumed the position of a man who had been frisked a hundred times. Louis shifted the sleeping Amy to get a better hold and continued toward Joe’s Bronco, praying the girl would not wake up now and see her father.
When he got to the truck, Amy started to slip, and he adjusted her again, trying to balance her while he opened the door. The blond woman was suddenly next to him, the air thick with a sweet perfume.
“I’ll get that for you,” she said, opening the door.
Brandt’s voice shredded the air. “You stupid bitch!” he shouted. “Don’t you help them do nothing. Get your ass back to the car!”
The woman’s face shot up, and she stared at Brandt for a moment, then turned away, head down.
Louis set Amy in the backseat of the Bronco and buckled her in, then reached to the console for his Glock. When he got back to Joe, she had finished her pat-down of Brandt. She had holstered her gun and had nothing else in her hands, which meant she had found no weapons on Brandt. Too bad. It would have been a parole violation, and they could have locked him up.
Joe walked away to talk to the blond woman. Louis stayed with Brandt, his Glock at his side. But Brandt didn’t seem interested in him. He was watching Joe.
“This ain’t right, what you’re doing here,” Brandt said. “You can’t be inside my house without a warrant. That’s the law.”
“Shut up,” Louis said.
Brandt ignored him. “And it don’t matter where you take her, because I’ll just go and get her back,” he said. “And they’ll give her to me, too, because I’m her father, and people out this way understand that. Fathers have rights. That’s the law, too.”
Joe finished talking to the woman and motioned for Louis to join her in the Bronco. She took the driver’s seat and had the engine running by the time he climbed in. He waited until they were a mile down the road, making sure the Gremlin had not followed them, before he put his gun back into the console.
Amy was still sound asleep.
He looked to Joe. Her profile was sharply defined by the harsh sun. Eyes unblinking, lips drawn, jaw tight. Adrenaline from a potentially dangerous confrontation or something else?
“You okay, Joe?” he asked.
“I can’t stomach the thought of that man having Amy in that house and being alone with her.”
Louis was quiet. He knew she was thinking the same thing he was — that if they took her to Livingston County authorities now, Brandt would have her within hours.
“But damn it, Louis, what you want me to do could cost me my reputation — and the election next fall,” Joe said. “And it’s not only disrespectful to Livingston County, it’s against every procedure I’ve ever been taught. I just can’t take people wherever I want to.”
“Joe, I don’t want you to do anything but help her,” Louis said. “How you choose to do that is totally up to you.”
Joe slowed for a stop sign at a T intersection. There were no signs, but he knew that north led them to the city of Howell, the county seat for Livingston. South would take them to I-94, the freeway that went to Ann Arbor.
“Help me out here, Louis,” she said. “How can we explain to this local sheriff why we took Amy to Ann Arbor?”
“We could tell them she’s a key witness in a homicide,” he offered. “And that we’re taking her into protective custody. With Brandt back in town, they’ll believe that.”
“Amy was only four when Jean disappeared,” Joe said. “We have no reason to think she witnessed anything.”
“We can hope.”
“Hope…” Joe whispered.
She sat for a moment longer, then hit her right blinker and turned south.
