Vital Signs. Bobby Hutchinson
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were the ones Hailey spoiled a little with balloons and stories and, if their diets permitted, special snacks and little treats from the kitchen.
She picked up David and took him with her to the playroom, where she sat in a rocking chair and read the kids a couple of chapters from a Harry Potter book. Of course the story was way beyond David’s level, and he kept looking up at her, a puzzled expression on his face. Once, he reached up and took hold of a fistful of hair.
She smiled at him, and there was the tiniest movement of his mouth, not quite a smile, but close. The other kids demanded equal time on her lap, so she strapped David in a wheelchair. He didn’t object. He watched the others, but most of all, he watched Hailey.
A full hour after her shift had ended, she carried him back to his crib and settled him for the night. She bent and kissed his cheek, and a dangerous thought flickered through her mind.
It was probably impossible, but if Roy couldn’t find any relatives who wanted him, was there any chance that she could take this little boy home with her?
ROY WAS FRUSTRATED. Four days had passed since he’d first visited David in St. Joe’s, and so far, all his attempts to find Shannon Riggs or anyone who could tell him where she was had come to nothing. First he’d checked her personnel file on the computer, getting whatever details were available about previous investigations. Then he’d located Tonya Cabral, the volunteer street worker who’d taken Shannon under her wing and helped her get off drugs. Tonya was somewhere in her sixties, a tiny, birdlike woman with deep lines in her face and dark, sad eyes. She’d put a wrinkled hand over her mouth and started to cry when he told her that Shannon had disappeared, leaving David alone.
“I feel so responsible,” she sobbed. “I usually go over and visit her Tuesdays and Thursdays, but I came down with a bad migraine and was knocked out for a few days.”
Shannon had gone through a drug-rehab program prior to David’s birth, and she seemed to have stayed clean, because there was no record of a complaint regarding her care of David. He’d called the social worker who’d been involved at that time, and she confirmed that Shannon took good care of her baby. She was attending parenting classes and working at getting her high-school diploma.
The troubling thing was that Shannon had never revealed who the baby’s father was or given any information about her own background, other than saying she’d grown up in Port Hardy, a coastal village on Vancouver Island. Her file listed her mother and father as deceased, with no other close relatives and no siblings, but from experience, Roy knew that teenagers often did that on their forms. If they were from troubled homes, they didn’t want their parents involved in their lives. The social worker had talked to street kids who knew Shannon, and they’d said she was often seen with a man named Murphy. None of them knew much about him or where he lived. The file wasn’t much help to Roy in finding Shannon. Tracing relatives would be difficult, if not impossible. He called the RCMP in Port Hardy and asked them to locate any families by the name of Riggs, but he strongly suspected that Shannon wasn’t using her real name.
He was also doing his best to locate her. He’d given her description to the people he knew who drove around downtown Vancouver in vans, distributing clean needles and condoms. He knew several of the firefighters who worked the downtown east side, and he’d asked them to be on the lookout for her. He’d checked emergency departments at all the Lower Mainland hospitals besides St. Joe’s, and of course the Vancouver police had Shannon’s description.
He’d interviewed the firemen who’d been first on the scene in the apartment, he’d talked to the paramedics and the staff in the ER, and of course he was keeping close contact with David’s doctor, Harry Larue.
Roy had other cases, far too many of them to be able to devote a full working day to David’s situation. As always, he was forced to do a great deal of work on his own time. And he was starting to really begrudge the fact that his private life and his profession were one and the same.
CHAPTER FIVE
SHANNON RIGGS came out of drugged oblivion and her first thoughts were of Davie, but the thought of him made the pain in her chest too sharp. She shoved the images of her son down into a dark box in her mind and tried to slam the lid.
Shaking and sweating, she struggled to figure out where she was. It was stifling hot. Sunlight penetrated through a rip in the dark-green curtains, and she could hear the sound of traffic outside. A picture of sunflowers was screwed to the wall, and a closed door must lead to a bathroom. A motel room, she decided.
She propped herself up on one elbow and studied the face of the husky man sleeping beside her. He wasn’t Murphy, and to the best of her knowledge she’d never seen him before. Her stomach lurched. She felt nauseated.
She slid out of bed. Her legs were rubbery, and she had trouble making it to the bathroom without falling. Her head felt as if it was about to explode, and the drug need went crawling through her veins like a hungry snake, making her itchy and edgy and frantic and sick.
For an instant memories surfaced, police cars, an ambulance in front of her apartment, urgent voices floating to her in the hot afternoon. A stretcher with a small figure on it—they were taking Davie away, and she had to stop them.
She’d tried to get out of Rudy’s car, but he’d grabbed her, pulled her back inside, then driven off as Murphy held her. She’d writhed and screamed and fought to get loose, but Murphy was strong.
“You’re high, baby, they’ll toss you in the slammer. The kid’s okay. They’re takin’ care of him. Here, have some of this—it’ll make you feel better.”
And from then until now, she couldn’t remember anything.
She retched into the toilet, gasping for breath, disgust and fear and shame gnawing at her soul. Where was her son? Terror and emptiness made it hard to breathe.
The door opened, and the man stood there, squinting down at her.
“You okay, doll? That was some party, huh? I got some stuff left—you want some?”
She shook her head. She managed to get to her feet, turn on the hot water in the shower and step inside. She pulled the curtain and turned the tap until the spray was as hot as it would get. It beat down on her face, and gradually the pain in her chest became unbearable. She opened her mouth and tried to howl, but no sound came out.
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