“He’s fine. I know it.” She said it softly as he released her. “What have you found out so far?”
“No sign of forced entry.” He drew her into the big, rambling house she remembered from their youth. It echoed now with brusque conversation between officers through open doors and windows that chilled the rooms. “The front door was probably unlocked since Stallworth was posted out front. He was hit on the temple with a rock—possibly by slingshot through the open car window.”
“Slingshot?” She frowned, surprised a twenty-year-old woman would be carrying around something like that.
“We found one on the ground nearby, probably a kids’ toy, and the attacker put it to good use.” Sam brought her into the kitchen, though his focus was on his phone that was buzzing nonstop with messages and alerts. “Lorelei has her phone off, but we spoke to a neighbor who is watching the younger boys. She said Lorelei had a meeting with the guidance office for Dawson’s school admission.”
Amy took in the scene in the kitchen, where another officer was looking through a leather handbag that, she guessed, must belong to Bailey McCord based on all the purple accessories and the white feather fringe on the bag. The officer used gloves to check the girl’s phone. It was in a purple case that said “I love my Irish setter” and showed a picture of a dog’s profile.
“Bailey didn’t take her purse with her.” Her unease grew seeing the cop handling the girl’s personal belongings with those gloves on.
“We’re still trying to determine if she left with the intruder or not. We haven’t found any signs of a vehicleparked in the driveway, and none of the neighbors saw anything. But then, the closest house is three-tenths of a mile up the road.” Sam’s jaw flexed, his whole body radiating tension and frustration.
“We got a fresh print out here, sir,” a young man wearing jeans and a sweater shouted through a back window.
Sam didn’t invite her to join him, but then again, he didn’t duct-tape her to the kitchen chair, so Amy rushed out into the yard with him.
“Did you call Cynthia?” she asked, her brain firing off a hundred thoughts at once as her sneakers crunched through dead leaves from a nearby tree.
“I’m calling in five minutes.” He picked up his pace toward a young woman bent over something in the grass behind a metal shed. “Maybe we’ll know something by then.”
She prayed so. As worried as Amy was about Aiden, what would the news do to the boy’s mother, who was already suffering from postpartum depression?
“We have a clear Nike imprint,” the blonde crouched on the ground said, waving Sam closer. “It’s size seven, heavy on the toe like she was running.”
“Good. That’s Bailey.” Sam shoved his phone into a leather strap at his waist. “Linda, I need you to organize the search parties. Groups of two, canvass the woods in a mile of each direction from here.”
The younger woman stood. In her uniform and with her hair tightly pulled back, she had that all-business look of someone who could marshal the troops.
“I’ll have them rolling in five. With your permission, I’ll also ask some of the neighbors to take the outer flanks. Everyone wantsto help.”
“However you want to handle it. You’re in charge until I’m back.” Sam took Amy’s hand and pulled her forward with the momentum of his hope.
“How do you know the print is Bailey’s?”
“I’m pretty sure the person after her is Patience Wilkerson. Her sister informed us that she wears a size-nine shoe.”
“Oh no! Poor Faith. Should we call out to Bailey, then? Or do you think Patience is with her?”
“Patience left a boot print outside a front window. We think she exited that way and is heading in a different direction.” Sam jogged deeper into the woods, his phone still buzzing with messages while they searched the area. “So I don’t think they’re together. But the question is—which one of them has Aiden?”
Her stomach churned with the sick feeling of not knowing. This had to be killing Sam.
“After meeting Faith, I find it hard to believe her sister would be such a monster as to...hurt them.” Her eyes roamed the trees and low undergrowth, searching for any sign of someone having been through the area. A dropped baby toy. A piece of torn clothing or a broken branch.
“She could have killed Stallworth with the rock to the head.” The steel in Sam’s voice only chilled Amy more.
In her adrenaline-fueled rush to leave the house, she’d forgotten her jacket, and now with the sun going down and the trees shading her completely, she felt the full impact of the cold.
“If she truly found the slingshot on the lawn, she probably didn’t realize it could be lethal.” Amy, on the other hand, would have known. How often had she studied ways to hurt an attacker in her self-defense classes?
They’d taught her to use any means at her disposal to incapacitate someone. Her pepper spray was in easy reachand so was the baton as they rushed through the dense brush, past rotten logs and a discarded, rusted washing machine someone had been too lazy to haul to the dump.
Her chest ached to the point of pain as Sam stopped to open the washer and look inside it. She thanked God it was empty except for a chipmunk that scurried out.
“Criminal intent or stupidity doesn’t matter to me if she hurts my son.” The words were so evenly spaced, so deliberately articulated, that they revealed a wealth of emotion seething just beneath the surface.
She reached out to run a hand over his tense arm, never taking her eyes off the ground as they searched.
