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Was Ashley sexually assaulted?
The young man held up a smaller plastic container. “It looks like he used a tranquilizer dart to neutralize her.”
J.T. clenched his jaw to keep the words, “That’s my daughter you’re talking about,” from spilling out. He steadied himself and took the bag with the dart and examined it.
Is this why Kim didn’t hear anything? Why Ashley didn’t scream?
Day one, 7:00 a.m.: Ashley missing twelve and a half hours
“Colin told me you were working on the case.” Emma Fitzpatrick let Madison into her house.
“I wouldn’t have had it any other way when I heard about Ashley missing.” Madison scanned the familiar foyer, remembering back to the time she had worked with J.T. on Emma’s brother’s murder case.
“You’re here to see Kim?”
“Yes. I want to talk to her. Is she up?”
“Actually, I doubt she slept any last night even though she went to bed. She’s in the kitchen with Grace. We were fixing breakfast. We’re trying to get her to eat something.” Emma started for the back of the house. “Have you eaten yet?”
“No, but—”
“If I discovered anything from my trauma last year, it was that a person has to take care of herself if she’s going to do her best job.”
“You’re beginning to sound like Grace.”
Emma slanted a glance over her shoulder. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You should.” When Madison entered the kitchen, Grace greeted her with a smile and a mug of coffee. “I heard you coming and remembered you like your cup of joe black.”
A night of no sleep was beginning to catch up with her. Madison drank some of the brew, wondering when she would turn into a huge cup of coffee. “Thanks. This tastes wonderful, Grace.” Then turning to the teenager at the table, her gaze riveted to the window overlooking the backyard, Madison added, “I came to see you, Kim. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“I told Dad and Rachel what happened.”
The waver in the girl’s voice italicized the fragile control she had over her emotions. Madison noted that as she sat across from her and placed her mug on the table. “I know. But sometimes when you retell an event, it triggers a memory you forgot.”
“Nope. I told them everything.” Kim shifted her attention to Madison, a dullness in her gaze. “I told Ashley to go outside and play while I talked with Lexie. It had stopped raining and the sun had even peeked out of the clouds. I checked on her as she went to the swing and sat down, then I took a seat on the couch again and talked until I heard Dad come home.” Hopelessness rang in the rote recitation of the facts.
“You didn’t see anything out of place in the backyard?” Madison asked, concerned by both Kim’s apathetic tone and her appearance, as though she had wakened from a nap and hadn’t bothered to comb her hair.
The teenager shook her head. Suddenly her lower lip quivered while tears flooded her eyes and a look of devastation took hold of Kim.
“It isn’t your fault,” Madison said, knowing from J.T. that Kim blamed herself for Ashley’s disappearance. Blame was such a wasted emotion, but she almost always saw it in this type of situation. The “if onlys” could eat at a person until there was nothing left.
Kim blinked, loosening a tear to slide down her cheek. “You don’t understand. I screamed at Ashley to leave me alone. Daddy doesn’t think so, but I think she ran away because of me. What if she fell and hurt herself so that’s why she hasn’t come home?”
Madison wished that was the case, but more and more she felt J.T. was right. Ashley had been abducted. “As we speak there are search dogs and teams of people out looking for Ashley. If that happened, they’ll find her.”
Suddenly Kim reached across the table and clutched Madison’s hand. “I need to help in the search. Make Daddy see that. Please.”
The desperation in the girl’s voice tore at Madison’s composure. Knowing the people involved in this tragedy made her job doubly hard but doubly important, too. “Kim, I want you to think back to yesterday. Close your eyes if it will help you visualize the scene with Ashley in the backyard.” After the teenager did as she was instructed, Madison continued, “Now, do you see anything unusual, anything out of place?”
A long minute passed with a heavy silence filling the air, spiced with the aromas of bacon and biscuits.
When Kim opened her eyes, her forehead wrinkled and she tilted her head to the side, as J.T. did when he was thinking. “There was something shiny by the bushes along the back of the fence where Ashley’s fort is.”
“Could you tell what it is?”
“No,” the girl answered slowly, then more definitely, “No.”
The ringing of Madison’s cell phone pierced the quiet. She quickly answered it.
“It’s J.T. I told you I would call if we found anything. We discovered Ashley’s clothing in a pile behind a set of bushes forty feet from the back gate. There was a dart from a tranquilizer gun at the bottom of the pile. That’s why Kim didn’t hear a scream from Ashley. We’re bringing in a cadaver search dog.”
The implication of bringing in a dog that specialized in finding dead bodies, even ones buried in the ground, caused her to draw in a sharp breath. “I’ll be right there.”
Day one, 7:30 a.m.: Ashley missing thirteen hours
Madison hurried to the area where some of Ashley’s clothing had been found. She stopped at the perimeter of the taped-off section, spying J.T. directly across from her about fifteen yards away. The grim look on his face as he watched the crime scene techs process the evidence and comb the ground for any more clues highlighted the anguish he had to be feeling, standing to the side, unable to do anything but watch.
She skirted the edge of the taped area and came to his side. “Have they found anything else?”
“No,” he said in such a tight voice she was afraid he would shatter any second. “Finding her clothes, folded in a neat pile, like that—” His voice came to an abrupt halt, his jaw clenched so tight a nerve twitched on his face.
Why would the kidnapper remove Ashley’s clothes, leave them here for them to find? Was it some kind of ritual he needed to perform? Was he toying with J.T., trying to break him? Was the little girl molested? Question after question bombarded Madison, with no real answers. The only thing she knew was the effect it was having on J.T. Color leached from his normally tanned features and the despair in his expression as he watched one of the crime scene techs remove the evidence bags to their van illuminated how effective the kidnapper’s technique was if he was after revenge.
She didn’t care that they were standing among a swarm of people. She took hold of his hand, hoping to impart some support. He needed to know he wasn’t alone through this. “We may be able to find some clues on the clothes that will help us.”
He closed his eyes for a long moment as though he had to shut out the scene around him in order to keep going. “The kidnapper came prepared. He brought a tranquilizer dart to silence Ashley. As I suspected, this wasn’t spur-of-the-moment. He planned it, possibly for years while he was in jail.”
J.T. was so positive it was a criminal he had put in jail, and frankly she was beginning to think that was the most likely prospect. This case was becoming more personal as the hours passed.
He turned toward her, breaking their linked hands apart. “Another search team found a trail off to the left that ended at the road. But I don’t know if that means Ashley was taken in a car somewhere or if she went that way to play sometime recently.” Frustration marked his face. “The trouble is her scent is all over the place. She loved to play here which isn’t making it easy for the dogs.”
“When will the cadaver search dog be here?”
He checked his watch. “A half hour. I should have had it here from the beginning. It’s just…” Not finishing his statement, he snapped his jaw closed, every line of his body conveying the anxiety that gripped him.
Madison lay her hand on his arm, hoping to draw his attention to her and away from the techs still working the crime scene. Again she wished she could take some of his pain away and felt helpless because she couldn’t. No one could but God. J.T. faced the bushes where Ashley’s clothes were found, his mouth set in a frown.
“It’s rough having to admit the possibility there could be a body. You weren’t thinking along those lines.” She gently squeezed his arm, imparting her support the best way she could.
“I need to think more and feel less.”
She moved in front of him and blocked his view, forcing him to look at her. The brief anger that flashed into his eyes dissolved into a solemn expression. “No matter how much you want to be totally the sheriff right now you won’t be able to do that. It’s not possible to forget you’re the parent as much as you would like to. We all understand.”
The tic in his jawline increased its twitching. “How do you know what I’m going through?” He swept his arm wide to indicate the people around them. “How do any of them know?”
“This isn’t my first missing child case, J.T. Matthew Hendricks has dealt with quite a few abductions in his career. We’re here to help, and as much as we can, we do understand what you’re going through.”
“Then understand this. It’s the sheriff in me that will bring my daughter home safely.” He pointed toward where the clothes had been found. “All I want to do right now is begin digging with my bare hands everywhere nearby until I find her—” he swallowed hard “—or there’s no place left to dig.”
As a career law enforcement officer he knew the importance of processing the scene first, but whether he wanted to admit it or not, his emotions were involved in this case and if he wasn’t careful that could become a big problem. “They might discover something to help us. When we find this guy we want the evidence to be sound, not tainted,” she said as a gentle reminder of what the crime scene techs were doing at that very moment, even though it took precious minutes away from searching the area.
He sent her a look that iced her blood as though he were saying the man responsible would never be taken alive. Again the urge to help in more ways than she was already flooded Madison. Was Colin right? She was beginning to wonder if the Lord had led her to this case because J.T. needed someone to be there for him through the ordeal—someone who could understand the pull he was experiencing. He was a sheriff, and from all she knew a good one, but he was also a parent who desperately wanted to protect his family even to the point of taking the law into his own hands. She couldn’t allow him to do that. He would pay for that the rest of his life.
She smiled, pointing toward the direction she had come in. “C’mon. I noticed Susan at the staging area. She’s got some doughnuts and coffee. You need to eat something.”
J.T. sidestepped so she didn’t block his view. “I need to stay here.”
She got in front of him again and thrust her face close to his. “You need to take care of yourself or what good will you be to Ashley?”
His glare snagged hers. “I can’t eat at a time like this!”
She didn’t back down. She toughened her expression and voice. “You know how important it is for the family, especially the parents, to take care of themselves through an ordeal like this. That goes for you, too. Just because you’re the sheriff doesn’t make it any less important. What good can you do if you collapse from exhaustion and lack of food?”
His mouth slashed down in a frown. “I’ll go, but as soon as the dog arrives, I’m returning.”
“And I’ll come with you.”
He started walking toward the staging area where Susan manned the table, signing in the search volunteers. “I thought Matthew assigned you to interview everyone again.”
“He did and I will, but I need to be here in case…” She couldn’t quite say, “In case the dog finds Ashley’s body.” She still had hope that the child was alive and possibly would be found soon.
J.T. cleared his throat. “How are your interviews coming?”
“I’ve talked with Ruth Goldsmith and Kim. I’ll finish the others after we see what happens here.”
“Did either one remember anything else?”
“Mrs. Goldsmith thinks she remembers the first three license plate numbers on the car speeding out of the side street about the time the abduction would have occurred. I’ve got the deputy back at the station working on it.”
J.T. halted and stared at her. Hope blazed for a few seconds. “That might be just what we need to break this case wide-open. If she had only remembered that last night.”
As much as she and J.T. wished differently, witnesses didn’t always recall details right away especially when first confronted with the fact a crime had been committed. “From the report she was pretty upset when she heard about Ashley last night.”
He stared forward again. “I know. She was good to Ashley. My daughter liked to visit her.”
“Kim remembers seeing a shiny flash from the fort area.”
“The sun glinting off something?”
“Maybe.”
When they arrived at the area where the volunteers signed in and got their assigned sector, Madison made her way to the table with the coffee and doughnuts on it. She poured J.T. a cup and gave it to him. His fingers brushed against hers as he took it. The contact jolted her. Stunned at her reaction in the midst of everything going on, she jerked her hand back. While she fixed her cup, J.T. grabbed a doughnut, passed it to her, then retrieved one for himself.
“What a cliché.” He gestured to his doughnut.
“But how would people know we were officers if we didn’t have them?” She lifted the glazed sweet. “Cop. Doughnut. They go hand in hand.”
His chuckle peppered the air for a few seconds before he sobered, his eyes round as though he was shocked that he could find humor when his life was falling apart.
She leaned close. “It’s okay to laugh. It’s good for the soul, especially in times like this.” She quickly pulled back when she smelled his woody scent mingled with the coffee aroma. “Now eat up. We wouldn’t want to disappoint all those people who think all cops eat for breakfast are doughnuts.”
The sweetness of the glazed delight melted in her mouth and she relished it. She needed the energy boost of carbohydrates because she felt the effects of being up for over twenty-four hours. As she ate her doughnut and drank her coffee, she made sure that J.T. did, too. Dutifully, he finished one and grabbed another.
Susan approached the urn and refilled her cup. “I’ve checked in all the volunteers. I even had to turn some away. I told them they could help with making posters and putting them up around town. Boss, why did I have to write down everyone’s name who’s helping and their contact information? I should have been on a team looking for Ashley.”
J.T. peered at the area where they had found his daughter’s clothing. “Like some arsonists, a kidnapper sometimes likes to return and help out with the search. It’s good to have that information in case we need it later.”
With her eyes saucer round, Susan said, “You’re kidding! Then I’m glad I could help. I want to get this monster.”
“We will,” J.T. whispered in a roughened voice.
If it’s the last thing he does, Madison added silently, seeing that look again in his darkened eyes.
Susan took a sip of her brew. “What else can I do now? Join a search team? Make posters?”
“Go back and help at the station. You’re pretty good with the computer. I need the list of criminals I put in jail finished in case nothing pans out here. Rachel has been working on it.”
“I should help here. There’s a lot of ground to cover.”
J.T. plucked the cup out of Susan’s hand. “Go. Sit at a computer and let your fingers do the searching.”
“But—”
“Susan, you look tired. I bet when I sent you home last night you didn’t get any rest. Come back this afternoon. You’ve been great organizing the volunteers. I may need you later.”
She took her cup out of his hand. “Then I could use this if I’m gonna make it to the station.”
Madison watched the older woman walk away, her large, thin frame wilting as though she had held herself together until J.T. had given her permission to admit her exhaustion. “She’s efficient.”
“Since she came to Crystal Springs two years ago, my office actually runs effortlessly. She’s more than efficient. I’m not an organized person. Thankfully, Susan is.”
“And you worry about her?”
“She’s nearly fifty-eight and had some health issues this past year. She even had to take some time off lately. I don’t want her to get sick because she didn’t take care of herself. I don’t need that on my conscience, too.”
No, he didn’t, but Madison wasn’t sure that would stop the guilt from manifesting itself. He was so vulnerable right now. “All your staff is good, J.T. I remember that from last year.” She could have added that the reason he had such a good staff was because of him. But J.T. wouldn’t like her to say that. Last year she’d discovered compliments didn’t sit well with him.
“Well, right now I wish Ted was back from his vacation.”
Madison knew that Ted was J.T.’s right-hand man. They worked well together. “Have you thought of calling him and letting him know what’s going on?”
“Yes, but I won’t. He deserves the time off, and besides, he’s sitting on an island in the Caribbean. He saved for this trip for several years. I won’t cut it short for him.”
“When was the last time you had a vacation?” Madison popped the last bite of her doughnut into her mouth.
“Three years ago. I took the family out to the Badlands. We camped out and saw the sights. Ashley was a little young but…”
