But in a way it didn’t matter, because it was too late to change that part of the equation. I just wanted her back. I would have to deal with the ugly specifics of the trauma after that.
Grace Beatty’s cell phone rang, and it startled me. I had been reaching for my coffee mug, and I nearly upended it. My heart leapt up into my throat the way it had done on the last phone call. It pounded dangerously as she pressed the screen to answer.
“Yes,” she said.
A pause. One that nearly killed me.
“Yes, she’s still here.”
Pause.
“What do they have so far?”
Long pause.
I asked her with my eyes if my daughter had been found. She shook her head just the tiniest bit.
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll be right back there.”
She clicked off the call.
“There’s been a break in your case. We still don’t know where Etta is. But they arrested your carjacker on a tip from the guys at the chop shop. They’re questioning him right now.”
She threw a twenty down on the table and grabbed me by the elbow.
“Come on. We have to get back. We’ll stay on the phone with San Diego until we hear what he has to say.”
We sprinted all the way back to the station. Ran as though our lives depended on it. I could feel my lack of sleep, but it didn’t matter. I had sheer adrenaline on my team and nothing was going to hold me back.
I sat in a hard wooden chair beside her desk, leaning forward onto my knees. Waiting. Trembling and waiting.
She was on the phone with the police in San Diego.
The suspect, I had been told, was in an interrogation room, being questioned by two detectives. The room had one-way glass, or a one-way mirror. I hadn’t quite gotten which. But an officer was outside the room, watching and listening, just like in the cop shows on TV. And that officer was on the other end of the phone with Grace Beatty. So we could hear a secondhand account of what the suspect said the moment he said it.
“He says he put her out of the car,” Grace said, covering the mouthpiece of the phone with one palm.
“Where?”
“That’s what they’re still trying to find out.”
“But in West LA, right? I mean, right after he drove away, right?”
I wanted to believe she was in a fairly safe neighborhood. And maybe even a familiar one.
Then I heard my mother in my head. Actually heard these words repeated in her voice.
All of LA is a bad neighborhood. The whole world is dangerous. Not like when I was a girl.
That was the problem with my mother. I could never fully get her voice out of my head.
Meanwhile Grace wasn’t answering me. Just listening with her brow furrowed.
I couldn’t take the waiting. The words just burst out of me.
“Tell me what he’s saying! Please! Tell me something! I’m dying here.”
She covered the mouthpiece of the phone again.
“He’s not being very specific about where he left her. He doesn’t remember exactly where he got off the freeway. But he’d been driving south for a good twenty minutes at least before he knew the baby was even there. Apparently she slept through the jacking. Either that or she was too scared to cry.”
“So it could be anywhere?”
I was talking around the image of my baby too frozen with fear to cry. Or I was attempting to talk around it, anyway.
“They’re working to narrow it down with him right now.”
My mind filled with geography. At least twenty minutes south of the spot where he took the car and my daughter from me.
Had he taken the 405 Freeway toward San Diego? I had no idea.
But I did know one thing. The neighborhoods got a good bit scarier as he headed south. It was not West LA all the way through.
Chapter Six
Molly: Stress
I slept like a rock after those boys went away, and who would’ve guessed it, right? I mean, I was so scared about the whole thing, and the weight of being responsible for this baby was sitting on me like an elephant having lunch on my chest, but also I was tired. I mean, really, really tired.
Tired isn’t always about how much you moved your body, although that too, because I had been all over that neighborhood all day. But the baby slept like a rock, just like me, and all she’d done was sit strapped into her car seat and then get carried around by yours truly.
I really think it’s the stress that takes it out of you.
Anyway, I was sure I’d never even close my eyes for a split second and then the next thing I knew I was having this dream, and a thing that happened in the dream shocked me awake. I was dreaming I was in this dark hole, just like I really was, sleeping hugged tight with this little girl, like I really was, and then all of a sudden somebody picked up the cardboard and found us. In the dream I had this big shot of fear, this jolt, because I figured it was one of those boys. That’s what jogged me awake, that jolt of fear. But then I looked up and it was my mother looking down on me, shaking her head. And, now, that part was weird, because I was already sort of awake. But you know how sometimes you’re so deep asleep that if something jolts you out of it the dream takes a second or two to fade away?
It was like that.
Then I was more awake and my mother was gone and the cardboard was still over us, and the baby girl was still fast asleep. But it was morning, I could tell, because a little thin line of light was coming in under the edge
