to toughen her up.
Jeremy started kicking the bench. Brittany pulled on her sundress. He couldn’t think about what he was doing to either of them right now. “Go look for Steffie, will you? I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
He gave them a reassuring smile and set off for the farmhouse and Tracy’s ex-husband. He should have done this two days ago, but the son of a bitch had been elusive.
Ren stood by the farmhouse door and watched Harry Briggs coming toward him. The rain had cooled the air, and Ren had been about to go for a run, but it seemed that would have to wait.
He’d always had a secret admiration for guys like Briggs, mathematical whizzes with high-powered brains and low-key emotions. Men who didn’t have to spend their workday digging into their internal cesspools looking for memories and emotions they could draw on to help them convince an audience they were capable of murder. Or of molesting a child.
Ren pushed the thought aside. He’d simply have to find another way to look at it. This evening he’d sit down with his notebook and get to work.
He met Harry next to Isabel’s Panda. Harry wore a pin-striped shirt, slacks with a knife-edge pleat, and polished loafers, but there was a smudge on his glasses that looked like a tiny thumbprint. Ren slouched like a badass against the side of the Panda just to irritate him. Since Briggs had made Tracy miserable, he didn’t deserve anything better, the cheating bastard.
“I’m going back to Zurich,” Briggs said stonily. “But before I leave, I’m warning you to watch yourself. Tracy’s vulnerable right now, and I don’t want you doing anything to upset her.”
“Why don’t I just leave that up to you?”
The cords in Briggs’s neck tightened. “I mean it, Gage. If you try to manipulate her in any way, you’ll regret it.”
“You’re boring me, Briggs. If you cared so much, you wouldn’t have screwed around on her, now, would you?”
Not even a flicker of guilt crossed his face, which seemed odd for an uptight guy like Briggs. Ren remembered that Isabel had reservations about Tracy’s story, and decided to poke around a little. “Funny, isn’t it, that she came running to me when she started to hurt? And you know what else is funny? I might have been a shitty husband, but I stayed away from other women when we were married.” Pretty much anyway.
Harry began to respond, but whatever he’d been about to say got lost as Jeremy shouted from the top of the hill. “Dad, we’ve looked everywhere, and nobody can find Steffie.”
Harry’s head shot up. “Did anybody check the pool?”
“Mom’s there now. She said to come right away!”
Briggs started to run.
Ren took off after him.
16
Steffie wasn’t in the pool or hiding in the gardens. They fanned out to search every room of the house, including the attic and the wine cellar, but she wasn’t anywhere. Harry’s complexion took on an ashen hue as Ren made the call to the local police.
“I’ll take the car and look along the road,” Harry said after Ren had hung up. “Jeremy, I need another set of eyes. You come with me.”
“I’ll search the grove and the vineyard,” Ren said. “Isabel, maybe Steffie’s hiding in the farmhouse. Why don’t you check that out? Tracy, you have to stay here in case she comes back.”
Tracy reached for Harry’s hand. “Find her. Please.”
For a moment they simply gazed at each other. “We’ll find her,” he said.
Isabel had her eyes closed, so Ren knew she was praying, and for once he was glad. Steffie seemed too timid to wander off. But if she hadn’t wandered off, and there hadn’t been some kind of accident, that left only one alternative. He pushed away the ugly thoughts that had started working overtime in his brain. The
“She’ll be fine,” Isabel whispered to Tracy. “I know it.” With a reassuring smile, she set off for the farmhouse.
Ren headed through the wet garden toward the vineyard, the muscles in his neck growing more tense with every step. That damned script… He reminded himself that this wasn’t the city, where predators skulked in alleyways and hung out in abandoned buildings. They were in the country.
But Kaspar Street had found one of his victims in the country, a seven-year-old girl, riding her bicycle down a dirt road.
He forced himself to concentrate on the real instead of the imaginary and mentally divided the vineyard into sections. It was barely three o’clock, but so cloudy it was hard to see. The mud from the earlier rainstorm tugged at his running shoes as he began making his way along the rows. Tracy said Steffie had been wearing red shorts. He kept his eyes peeled for a flash of color. Wherever she was, he hoped there weren’t any spiders.
Street would have used spiders.
The back of his neck tightened. He absolutely could not think about Street now.
Tracy gave Bernardo a photo of Steffie she kept in her wallet when he showed up in response to Ren’s call. She asked Anna to stay by her side as an interpreter so there wouldn’t be any miscommunication. Occasionally she stopped to reassure Brittany and cuddle Connor, but nothing could keep her terror at bay. Her precious little girl…
Isabel searched the farmhouse, but no child had hidden herself away there. She checked the garden, peered beneath the wisteria that grew over the pergola. Finally she grabbed a flashlight and headed for the pie-shaped section of woods that ran close to the road, between the villa and the farmhouse. As she walked, every step she took was a prayer.
Harry inched along the road, with Jeremy keeping watch on the right while he watched the left. The clouds had begun to boil in the sky, and visibility was growing more limited by the minute.
“Do you think she’s dead, Dad?”
“No!” He swallowed the lump of fear in his throat. “No, Jeremy. She just went for a walk and got lost.”
“Steffie doesn’t like walks. She’s too afraid of spiders.”
Something Harry had been trying to forget.
A splatter of raindrops hit the windshield. “She’s fine,” Harry said. “She’s just lost, that’s all.”
The rain was coming down so hard that Ren wouldn’t have noticed the storehouse door if a bolt of lightning hadn’t flashed just as he slogged past it. Two days ago it had been locked. Now it wasn’t shut all the way.
He swiped the rain from his eyes. It was unlikely that a child with a fear of spiders would go inside, at least not voluntarily. He remembered how the door had dragged in the dirt. She wouldn’t have been strong enough to open it herself. But someone else could have opened it and carried her inside…
Kaspar Street had him spooked. He headed for the door. As he pulled on it, he noticed it didn’t drag nearly as much as it had. The rain must have washed away some of the dirt. He pushed it back on its hinges.
Inside, it was dry and dark as hell, even with the door open. As he skirted a pile of boxes, he wished he had a flashlight.
“Steffie?”
There was no sound except the thud of rain. He banged his shin against one of the wooden crates. It shifted on the dirt floor, making just enough noise that he nearly missed it.
The sound of a sniffle.
Or maybe he’d imagined it. “Steffie?”
There was no response.
Resisting the urge to push through the clutter, he stayed where he was and let several seconds tick by, until he finally heard it again, a muffled sob coming from the back, just off to his left.
