Chapter 6
“I’m sorry to bring this up, Mrs. Bonneville, but I wonder if I could ask you some questions about your daughter?”
“Is this necessary, Office Quinn? Can’t you just let us get on with our lives without dragging up the heartache all over again unless you have some concrete evidence?” The mother stood holding onto the door handle, her knuckles showing white through the screen door. Ryder understood her anguish and the need to keep the police at bay from the only sanctuary she felt safe. But after days of research and mapping, she’d come to the conclusion as had Jake, that she may be on the right path. They’d made contact with the main operations centre in Sydney and a dialogue had been set up between them.
“Mrs. Bonneville, I wouldn’t be doing this to you if I could help it, ma’am, but I’ve been asked to go over the case again in the hope that I can find something others may have missed.”
“Officer Quinn used to work with the FBI, Mrs. Bonneville. Jake wouldn’t send her here if she wasn’t up to the job. You know he wouldn’t.” Mick fumbled with his keys, clearly uncomfortable confronting the upset mother. “Neither would I.”
Her hand moved slightly and the door swung open. Dark shadows played under the woman’s eyes, and her lips quivered. The sallowness of her skin showed Ryder that she must have holed herself up in the house when her daughter was taken. Who could blame her? The last time she’d let her daughter go outside, she’d been taken.
“Can we sit down and talk?” Ryder took her cap off and held it in her hands trying to look as non threatening as she could.
Mrs. Bonneville turned and walked away, leading them into a lounge. The first thing that struck Ryder was that it was a shrine to the missing toddler. Photos of her lined the walls of the family room. Barely an inch of bare wall showed. The collection ranged from days old pictures of Paris to the cheeky two year old who’d been taken. Her shiny black hair and bright blue eyes reminded Ryder all too easily of her own daughter and her stomach dropped. They were so similar and that alone chilled her to the bone.
“Ma’am, I’m truly sorry to do this to you but I need to hear it all myself. If you could go over the events of the day again, I’d appreciate it.”
“Why is an American cop doing this to me?” Tears swam in the woman’s eyes.
“My name is Ryder Quinn, Mrs. Bonneville. I was born here in town. My family moved to the States when I was around three because my mother is American. I moved back home to rear my daughter in a small country community after my husband died. Believe me, I’m very much Australian even though my accent would tell you otherwise.”
The distraught mother nodded her head, seemingly satisfied and began to talk in a cool, modulated voice. It was like listening to a tape recording, Ryder thought. “She won’t be the same, will she? If you get her back, I mean.”
“I can’t tell you that. I know a lot can happen in nine months, Mrs. Bonneville, but children are resilient, that I know from my own experience as a mother. I can tell you though that I have reason to believe she may not have been taken by paedophiles as first thought.”
“What do you mean? Who has her and why? Tell me that.” The woman stood up, her fingers digging into her arms leaving red welts from her nails.
“I suspect there is an organised gang operating from Sydney that are snatching children to order. I worked a case in the States where families that couldn’t have their own children thought they had no choice but to pay for what they wanted.” She ignored the gasp from the mother. “You see, the criteria for adoptions is getting harder and if you’re desperate for something there will always be somebody ready and willing to take your money to give you what you want.”
“That’s sick.” Lacey Bonneville’s face had paled even further. She looked at Ryder as the cogs slowly turned in her mind. “Did you find any of the children that had been taken?”
“Yes, we did. Not all of them, but we did manage to return a few children to their parents.” She sat up straight. “I won’t beat around the bush and give you false hope though. I cannot promise you this is what happened to Paris, nor can I promise to bring her back. We can only hope and do our job. To do that, I need to get a bit more personal and in depth with you.” Ryder took a calming breath and looked her in the eye. “Can you deal with that?”
A frown played on her forehead before she answered. “Yes.”
“Where is your husband right now, Lacey?”
* * *
Saturday dawned bright and clear. Ryder opened her eyes and looked out the window watching the old net curtains blowing in the breeze. Even the crowing of the old rooster hadn’t dragged her out of bed early this morning. Her day off and she’d been determined to sleep in for once.
She raised her hands over her head and stretched, feeling the muscles in her spine grow taught and tingle before she relaxed and sank back into the soft mattress. Her eyes settled on a photograph of the three of them, Gabe, Ebony, and herself. Her dark head rested on her husband’s shoulder and
