High-Risk Affair. RaeAnne Thayne
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to the challenge of facing the media.”
She seized on the idea. “I’ll talk to Molly when she returns from checking on Hailey.”
“I believe I saw her Expedition pull up a few minutes ago.” Daniel gestured to the row of vehicles in the driveway.
She followed his gaze and saw with mixed emotions that her sister had indeed returned. She must be inside the house.
As much as she needed Molly right now, she dreaded seeing her own fear reflected in her sister’s eyes.
“Thank you. I’ll go talk to her now,” she said.
She walked away from the two men, painfully aware of them watching her every step of the way.
Did the sheriff suspect her of harming her son, as well? She had met him a few times in town, and he had always been friendly and approachable. She hated that he might suspect her of something terrible.
Oh, she couldn’t bear this. She just wanted Cameron in her arms again and for all these people to be gone so she and her family could get back to the business of life.
Cale watched Megan Vance climb the redwood steps of the back deck leading to her house. She paused for a moment on the steps, her head angled toward a lone soccer ball rolled into a corner of the deck. Even from here he could see her shoulders slump, fear and tension in every line of her slender form.
She looked more breakable with each passing moment. He could only hope she had a good support system, that her sister could help pull her through.
She was going to need all the help she could get.
He hated this part of his job, dealing with the tumult of emotions in those left behind.
An image of Amanda Decker’s wild rage two weeks earlier lashed him. Why couldn’t you save them? she had half sobbed, half screamed. You were right there! Why couldn’t you help them?
He knew she had only been speaking out of grief and shock, but her words had been like hydrochloric acid on his already raw emotions. Later she had visited him in the hospital to apologize for her outburst and to thank him for his efforts, but it didn’t take away the searing guilt.
Cale mentally kicked himself. He couldn’t afford to think about Mirabel and Soshi Decker right now. He hadn’t been able to help them, but his complete and abject failure in that case didn’t mean he couldn’t help Cameron Vance and his pale, fragile mother.
“What’s your gut telling you on this one?” Daniel Galvez asked him. “In my book, Megan Vance is either one hell of an actress or she had nothing whatsoever to do with her son’s disappearance. You think we’re looking at some kind of stranger abduction?”
He jerked his mind away from the image of two little coffins being lowered into the ground and made himself focus on this case. “We’ve got to consider every option here. The window was open. Even though it’s a second story, someone determined enough could find a way to get in and take the boy.”
“But why bother to stage things with the old pillow-under-the-blankets gag to fake out the mother?” Galvez asked. “That’s the kind of thing a kid would do on his own, don’t you think?”
He pondered the details he had learned from his interview with Megan Vance. “If someone knew the mother was a light sleeper and that she made it a habit to check on the children in the night—especially the boy with his medical condition—they might have been trying to buy a little more time.”
“How would a stranger know that?”
“Damn good question.” One he unfortunately couldn’t answer at this point in the investigation. “Where do things stand with the state crime scene unit?”
“They’re still working the boy’s room. Mrs. Vance just cleaned the room two days ago. Because the kid has allergies, too, she’s a pretty thorough housekeeper in there. Preliminary reports showed no sign of forced entry and no fingerprints but family members’. Megan’s and Cameron’s are the only ones we can find on the window or the windowsill. I think CSU is still working the scene if you want to hear the details from them.”
“I’ll do that. Thanks.”
At that moment, someone came out of the command center and called for the sheriff’s attention. Galvez sighed and turned away. “Let me know if you need any other information,” he said to Cale before he headed back the way he had come.
Cale paused for a moment, looking at the bustle of activity. Then on impulse, he walked around the house to check the perimeter of the building for more clues. He was pleased to find a state crime scene detective he had worked with before, Wilhelmina Carson, taking pictures of the outside of the two-story log home.
“Hey, Willy. What have you got out here?”
“Hang on,” she ordered in a distracted voice, still clicking away. After a few more shots, she dropped the camera and he saw surprise register in her eyes when she recognized him.
“Davis! I hadn’t heard you were back on the job.”
How long would it take before people stopped looking at him as if he were going to go freaking mental at any minute?
“You know me. I can’t stay away.”
She cleared her throat and he braced himself for what he knew was coming. “I’m really sorry about what happened to you, Cale,” she said quietly. “I worked the Decker scene. I know you did everything you could.”
He wasn’t sure he would ever be as convinced about that as everyone else seemed to be, but this wasn’t the place to argue the point. Instead, he gestured to the home’s exterior. “Have you seen any sign at all of forced entry?”
After a moment, she turned back to the case, though he could still see concern in her eyes. “Not much. The screen was in backward, with the tabs on the outside, indicating whoever put it back did it from out here. I don’t know if that’s significant at all.”
“No ladder impressions or anything like that?”
“Nothing. But keep in mind we had a solid rain for two hours between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m. That’s a sure way to screw up a crime scene.”
Which meant someone could have used a ladder or driven up to the house with a damn cherry picker, for all the evidence they could find.
He studied the exterior of the building. It was a straight shot from the boy’s second story window to the ground. He supposed it was possible Cameron could have jumped, but that was a mighty long way down for a nine-year-old kid.
When he was nine, he used to escape the hell of home by climbing out a conveniently situated tree out his bedroom window whenever he could. The only tree near Cameron Vance’s bedroom was a sycamore a dozen feet from the house. Though the trunk was thick and sturdy, no branches extended anywhere near the kid’s room.
He studied the distance. No way. The tree was too far from the house to provide any kind of useful escape route.
So how would he climb out the window to the ground if he were trying to sneak out in the night? If his shoulder didn’t have a bullet hole in it, he probably would extend out the window, grab hold of the roof line and move hand over hand to the corner of the house, where he could use the gutter spout to climb down, praying the whole way down it would hold his weight.
But he had two feet in height over the kid and years of climbing experience.
He looked at the log exterior of the house again and this time caught sight of something he’d missed before.
“Son of a bitch,” he exclaimed, moving closer for a better look.
Chapter 3
“What have you got?” Willy hurried toward him, her gaze sharp and intent.
He was always glad to work a case with the detective. She had a quick, analytical mind and always took a second or