But might as well be thorough. Foley would check with Jefferson County Courthouse security and be back with the answer. Meanwhile, she could toy with Morris a little more, see if she could coax a confession out of him.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” Morris broke the silence after a couple of minutes.
“Don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence that a guy who has it in for Sam Cooper managed to find the only other guy in town who feels the same way?”
“Maybe he heard about my son’s case.”
“And just knew you’d go along with his plan to terrorize Cooper?”
“I didn’t know what he was going to do with the photos.”
“Then why did you take them?”
“He said he was working for Cooper’s old lady.”
“His old lady?”
“Yeah, the kid’s mother. Said she was looking to take the kid away from Cooper, and if I’d take pictures of her at the day care it would prove he just pawned her off every day to other people to take care of.”
Kristen frowned. “Maddy Cooper’s mother is not seeking custody of Maddy.”
Morris looked confused. “She’s not?”
“No, she’s not.”
He pressed his lips into a tight, thin line. “Then he lied to me about what he was up to.”
“Isn’t it more likely that you decided to pick this excuse for your own behavior without knowing the real situation between Sam Cooper and his ex-wife?” Kristen asked gently. “It’s understandable, to assume Maddy’s mother wanted custody. Most mothers do.”
“You’re trying to twist me up and make me cop to something I didn’t do,” Morris protested. “I didn’t touch that kid. Or that girl, either.” He pushed away the photo of Cissy. “I wouldn’t do that.”
Foley came back into the room. She looked up. He gave a small shake of his head.
“The camera outside the courthouse didn’t pick up anyone else with you, Mr. Morris,” she said aloud.
Morris looked up at her, alarmed. “He was there!”
“The camera didn’t see him.”
“I’m telling you-”
Foley pulled up a chair next to Darryl Morris, crowding close. “Mr. Morris, what say we start over from the beginning?”
“IS MOMMY REALLY GONE?” Maddy asked Sam that afternoon as he fed her a snack of peanut butter, banana and crackers.
He paused, his heart breaking a little for his daughter, who seemed more confused than saddened by the question. “She went back to Washington. That’s where she lives, just like we did for a while, remember?”
Maddy licked a stray dollop of peanut butter from her fingers, blinking at him. “And she’s not coming back?”
“Maybe now and then to visit. I don’t know.” He handed her a slice of banana. “Does that make you sad, baby?”
Maddy shook her head. “Now Miss Kristen can be my mommy, can’t she, Daddy?”
He stared at her, nonplussed. “Miss Kristen isn’t your mommy, Maddy Jane. You know that.”
“But she can be, right? If I want her to?”
“I don’t think it’s that easy. Miss Kristen may not want to be your mommy.”
The look of puzzlement on Maddy’s face would have been comical under other circumstances. “Why not?”
“She may want to wait and have a little girl of her own.”
“She don’t have to wait.”
“But maybe she wants to.”
The light of determination in Maddy’s green eyes reminded him of his younger sister, Hannah, who’d never taken no for an answer without a fight. “You do it, Daddy. You tell her to be my mommy.”
He couldn’t help but laugh at the thought. “I
She reached out and cradled his face between her sticky hands, her expression serious. “Try, Daddy.”
He swept her up into his arms, cracker crumbs and all. “Tell you what. Why don’t you take a nap and we’ll talk about this when you wake up?” He tickled her gently to distract her.
She squealed in his ear, half deafening him, but at least she dropped the subject of Kristen after that. The last couple of days with Norah had apparently taken some energy out of her, for she settled down to her nap without protest, drifting off before he’d finished half of
He tucked her in, his mind still worrying with her question about Kristen. Of all the women in the world, why had Maddy decided a kidphobic cop with a bleak and tragic past was the best candidate for motherhood? Hell, why was he himself thinking about taking their already-complicated relationship into dangerous new territory?
Anytime now, Kristen could call with the news that Darryl Morris was the guy behind the attack on Cissy. Then it would all be over.
Maybe instead of thinking so much about how to make their relationship with Kristen last beyond the end of the case, he should be thinking about how to close the book on the Kristen Tandy chapter of his life for good.
“JEFFERSON COUNTY’S BOOKING him,” Carl Madison told Kristen after another fruitless hour of interviewing Darryl Morris. “We only have the threatening message to hold him on, and that happened in their jurisdiction.”
Kristen didn’t answer, frustration bubbling deep in her gut. He’d admitted to almost everything except the attack on Cissy and the threat, and he hadn’t wavered a bit from his story about a mystery man pulling the strings. The story seemed crazy, but if Morris was lying, he was lying consistently.
“We’ll tie him to the attack,” Foley added when she remained silent. “He’s got to be the one.”
She wanted to believe it. Then Maddy Cooper would be out of danger and safe to return to a normal, happy life with Sam and the rest of his family.
And she could get out of their lives before anyone got hurt.
Carl pulled her aside as they walked down the hall toward the detective’s office. “Dr. Sowell from Darden left a message for you. He asked if you were still planning to visit the facility this afternoon.”
Damn. She’d forgotten about her planned drive to Tuscaloosa. She glanced at her watch. Almost three o’clock. If she left now, she could be there by five-thirty.
On her way down to the parking lot, she called Dr. Sowell to make sure someone would be there to talk to her about the mysterious “Bryant Thompson.” He promised to stick around until she arrived, so he was waiting for her when she got to Tuscaloosa. He guided her through the security checkpoint, where she had to relinquish her Ruger P95 pistol to the guard before following the doctor to his office.
Sowell pulled a grainy black-and-white photo from the top drawer of his desk and handed it to her. “This is the man who introduced himself as Bryant Thompson. Do you recognize him?”
She looked at the image. The surveillance camera apparently covered the small visitors’ area from a position high on the wall, giving her a bird’s-eye view of the entire room but not much in the way of details about anyone in the frame.
There were only three people in the photo-the mysterious Bryant Thompson, a uniformed guard standing nearby and a thin, frail woman dressed in a white gown and a darker robe, her hands folded in her lap.
Kristen’s stomach gave a sickening lurch as she realized the woman in the photo must be her mother.
She was almost entirely unrecognizable, no longer the woman Kristen remembered. Though hospitalized for only fifteen years, she looked decades older, her formerly dark red hair now a dull gray bird’s nest twisted up in a messy knot atop her head. Her cheeks were thin and sunken, her body stooped and frail.
Tears burned Kristen’s eyes, catching her unprepared. She blinked them away, steeling herself against a flood of devastating memories.
She forced her attention to the man sitting across from her mother. He had light-colored hair-blond? Gray? Hard to say, given the photo was in black and white. He seemed to be sitting very still, his hands on his knees. He wasn’t leaning forward into her mother’s space, as she might have expected from someone claiming to be there to help her. If anything, he seemed to be keeping a careful distance.
Beyond that, she could see only small, unimportant details about the mystery man. He wore light-colored slacks, not jeans, and a jacket that might be corduroy.
