The Baby's Bodyguard

“No, I can do it. It’s just—”

“I get it. You don’t have to explain.” She laid the baby on the berth and pushed a pillow under the mattress so Janie couldn’t roll off.

He pulled the box closer and lifted the lid. Without allowing himself to think about it, he pulled out a silver baby rattle and the tiny T-shirt that Charlie wore on his first day of life. A pressed flower that his wife had kept from their first date. Other precious bits and pieces of a life gone by. And the fingerprint card and picture he’d made on the last outing he’d had with Charlie.

Laying the handprint beside the fingerprint card, he compared the two. Neither was very precise, considering they’d been done on a six-month-old. But he could see the swirls and arches. His heart began to pound.

They looked like a match, the newer one only slightly larger.

Kelsey pushed him out of the way and pulled the cards where she could see them. “Oh my—Ethan. They match.”

He pushed away from the table and paced the dozen steps to the door of the cabin before turning back. “We need to get it verified.”

“SBPD can do that. But I think the place for us to start is with her.” She gestured to the little angel sleeping on Ethan’s bunk. Janie’s diaper-clad booty was hitched up in the air, and her chest rose and fell in even breaths. “If we find out who she is and who led her to you, just maybe that information leads to more information about your son.”

Hope and desperation mixed inside him—the need to believe that it could be true, the desperate wish for something so improbable. He turned to pace the length of the boat again, but in the small space he quickly ran into Kelsey as she paced the other way.

He leaned against the wall, his stomach in knots. “I don’t know what to think. We can try to trace her using the missing persons database, but something tells me she’s not going to be there.”

“I’ve got to get back to the office.” Kelsey slung the diaper bag over one shoulder and picked the baby up, easily settling her on her shoulder without waking her. With one hand, she dug her cell phone out of the back pocket of her capris. “Put your information in my phone. If I find something I’ll call you. With both of us working on this, something is bound to turn up.”

After finishing out his workday—which was thankfully spent doing mundane work like stopping boats to check for onboard safety equipment—Ethan spent the entire night searching the internet for information. He’d turned the problem around in his head every way he could possibly think of, and still he came up with nothing. From grief to hope to frustration, he’d pretty much run the gamut.

And now, running on little sleep, he wanted to take someone down.

Someone like the criminals who had set this whole thing in motion in the first place. Who stole someone’s child? Someone with no conscience. Someone who bought and sold people as commodities.

He slammed the brush on the surface of his boat and scrubbed. One thing about living on a boat—something always needed to be cleaned. Maybe it would help him work through some of his anger issues.

“Permission to come aboard, sir?” Kelsey’s voice drifted out from the pier.

“Permission granted, but be prepared to swab the deck.” Ethan reached for the T-shirt behind him on the rail and pulled it over his head.

“Nuh-uh. I’ve lived in Sea Breeze long enough to know better than to get between a man and his boat.”

Despite himself, he laughed, turning to greet her. She was dressed in a simple khaki skirt and a T-shirt, but she had on several long necklaces of brightly colored beads, and Janie had her hands twisted up in them. “I thought she would be in foster care by now.”

“It’s always the goal to get kids placed as quickly as possible.” Kelsey passed Ethan the baby and lightly stepped on board. “Unfortunately, all of our emergency foster care placements were full. We’re on our way to the pediatrician for a checkup.”

Janie grabbed his face and grinned, a half-dozen teeth on the top and bottom shining in her mouth. “She looks pretty happy.”

“I think she’s doing fine. I came by because, as I was looking through her diaper bag this morning, I found this.” She handed him an SD card, the kind that would go in a digital camera. “I don’t know what’s on it, but I thought it might be more evidence. It was sewn into the lining of her bag.”

Ethan stuffed the card into one of the pockets of his cargo shorts, one of the pockets that wasn’t wet from scrubbing the deck. Janie bounced on his free arm, but as she bounced, her foot got caught in his pocket.

She bounced again, but her foot didn’t come loose. Her face mashed up into a red-faced scowl. A wail came out of her mouth that rivaled the air horn he carried on his boat for emergencies. He hadn’t known she could do that. He looked at Kelsey. “A little help here?”

Kelsey loosened Janie’s foot, but stepped away, leaving him to deal. She dug in the diaper bag. He patted the baby on the back and shushed and—what was that other thing he’d read in the baby book you were supposed to do with crying kids?

His natural calm disappeared as she wailed. It was forever ago that he’d done baby stuff. Think, Clark. You’ve got this.

He started rocking back and forth. Yeah, that was it, motion.

It didn’t work, not even for a second.

Janie didn’t stop crying, but she did hiccup and gasp as she cried. Screaming kids made all kinds of crazy noises, but she didn’t sound right. He laid her back on his arm to look at her. Her lips were blue. “Kels—”

Kelsey came up with a sippy cup and a scrap of a blanket from the diaper bag.

“I don’t think that’s it. There’s something wrong with her. She’s blue—look at her hands.” His voice had risen, and he felt something close to panic.

“What?” Kelsey dropped the bag onto the deck. “Let me see.”

Janie hadn’t stopped crying, and her breathing was fast and shallow—not wheezing, like asthma, but as if she was trying to get more oxygen.

“Call 911.” Ethan might be calm on the outside, but inside he was freaking out. Oh, Jesus, please protect this little baby.

“Wait just a minute.” Kelsey took Janie from Ethan and held her close, letting her have the blanket, which didn’t really work. She didn’t even notice it. But then she tucked Janie’s legs up, almost against her own little armpits and held her close against her chest, rocking and singing to her—in Russian, he guessed.

Slowly, the baby calmed and began to suck her thumb. Her color returned, not quite pink, but not grayish-blue either. He picked up her little hand. The nails still had a bluish tinge, but the hands weren’t blue. His own heart rate started to return to something resembling normal.

“Russian?”

Kelsey nodded. “I don’t think it’s her language because she doesn’t really respond, but it probably sounds a lot more familiar to her than English.”

He dropped onto a bench seat. “I was afraid she was going to die. How did you know to do that?”

“I didn’t know, not for sure.” She eased to the seat beside him. Janie’s eyes were drifting shut, but her color was good. Crisis averted, for now. “But kids in underdeveloped countries don’t have the kind of medical care we have here, so I’ve seen this before. I think it’s a heart defect.”

“Oh, right—missionary kid. Where was this?” He watched Janie’s chest rise and fall, not quite ready to assume she was going to be okay.

“Rwanda. There was a little kid there who would be running and playing and then all of a sudden his lips and hands would turn blue and he would gasp for air, just like this. His fix was to stop and squat down and lean forward. It’s a crude treatment, but it works—for a while.” She stood with the baby in her arms. “I think instead of going straight to the pediatrician, I’ll have the pediatrician call Children’s Hospital. She needs to be seen by a specialist.”

He grabbed the diaper bag and sippy cup from the deck and followed her toward her car. “Do you want me to go?”

“We’ll be fine. I’ll keep you posted when I can.”

Seven hours later, Kelsey pulled up at the drive through at Chick-fil-A. She briefly felt guilty about her choice, but just as quickly discarded the thought. She was starving. And she was traumatized.

Janie had been poked, prodded, stuck, ultrasounded, echoed and basically put through every test any of the pediatric cardiologists could think of at the children’s clinic. And every test came back with the same result. She was one sick little baby. The miracle, they said, was that she had lived—and basically thrived—this long. She was small for her age because of the lack of oxygen and nutrients getting to her cells.

And she would have to have surgery as soon as the doctors could arrange it. Normally kids with her condition would’ve had surgery before they were a year old.

The thought that this little baby might’ve died because no one had gotten her the medical treatment she needed … Kelsey took a deep, cleansing breath and tried not to focus on how angry it made her.

The perky teenager handed Kelsey a bag of yummy chicken and fries and not one but two milk shakes. She figured if she was going to go bug Ethan, she should at least take a food offering.

She hadn’t really stopped to think why she was going to him. Maybe it was because he had found Janie, and she thought maybe he would have an emotional connection. Maybe it was because she saw how tender he was with the baby. Or how worried he’d been when she had had the episode earlier this morning.

He was someone she admired, someone she was working with. That was all. Maybe it was the fact that, like her, he’d endured more than anyone should have to. The fact that his beautiful blue eyes connected with hers in a way that she’d rarely felt before … well, that was just something she would have to deal with.

He needed to find his son. She needed to find out the identity of the baby currently sleeping in the backseat of her car.

They could help each other.

She passed the turn to her house and kept going to the marina. When she pulled into a parking place, she called his phone. When he answered, his deep voice, raspy from lack of use, rumbled in her ear.

“Hi, I’m in the parking lot. I have news.”

“Be right there.”

In two minutes, he came walking down the pier, a computer under his arm, his long, jean-clad legs eating up the distance. He slid into the passenger seat, glanced in the backseat at the sleeping baby and then back at her, those blue eyes full of concern. “Is she okay?”

“She will be.” Kelsey handed him a milk shake. He looked at it like it was a bomb. “It’s chocolate. Drink it.”

He took a sip. “What did the doctor say?”

“Doctors, plural. We just got done. She has to have surgery. Maybe more than one. Tetralogy of Fallot is the genetic defect that causes her to turn blue, but she also has another defect that has to be repaired. It turns out it’s pretty rare.”

“Wherever you have to go, we can take her.”

Here he was, his son missing after two years of being presumed dead, and he was offering to take her wherever she needed to go, whatever she needed to do to take care of Janie.

It was enough to melt the strongest woman’s defenses, and she was a sucker for a soft-hearted man.

Kelsey took a long sip of her milk shake and cleared her throat. “There is some good news, though. The pediatric cardiologist at Children’s emailed the records for Janie to the specialist in Boston and got him on the phone. It seems that this doctor has been emailed her records before.”

Ethan jolted. “So we can identify her?”

“Maybe.” This was the frustrating part, the part that had her banging her head on a wall for most of the afternoon. Well, more than the constant waiting with a fussy baby. “The doctor wouldn’t release the records he had. In fact, he wouldn’t reveal any information about her at all, not even the doctor who originally emailed the records.”

“We need to get a court order. That’s the closest thing to a lead I’ve seen. I have someone I can call—”

She shook her head, smiled. “I’m already on it. There’s a federal judge here who knows a judge in the Boston area he can tap for a warrant. I called him this afternoon when it became clear that Boston was going to be difficult.”

Ethan turned to her, and there was the smile, just that little tug, at the corner of his mouth. “Oh, you are good.”

“It isn’t my first time around this particular block with doctors and records on foster children. I go straight for the big guns. So what did you find out?”

In answer, he opened his computer and clicked through to the photo gallery. At least a hundred, maybe two hundred photos of infant faces popped up.

She sucked in a breath. “All those are …?”

Ethan shrugged. “Without any more information, I can only assume that they are babies who were trafficked here for profit. Adoption scam is what I’d guess. There’s a lot of money to be made if the person is ruthless enough.” He clicked on one about halfway down. “Here’s Janie.”

“She would’ve been an adoption risk because of her birth defect. If anyone made a stink, they would put the whole operation in jeopardy.”

“Exactly. This one—” he scrolled up a little bit and his cursor hovered over another picture “—is my son. It looks like it was taken about two weeks to a month after he supposedly died. I think this is proof that he was abducted.”

“That’s absolutely incredible.”

He nodded. “I don’t know what Amy was doing at the restaurant that night, but at least now I can figure that it had something to do with these babies being trafficked and Charlie being kidnapped.”

Kelsey reached for his hand. “I’m so sorry, Ethan.”

His gaze tracked to meet hers. And held.

“I know.” He took a long, slow breath and opened the door. “Do you want me to follow you home?”

How could he be worried about them when he was the one who’d just heard life-altering news? News that turned the belief he’d had for the last two years on its head. It had to be killing him that his son could be alive, yet he didn’t know where he was.

She shook her head. “We’ll be all right. I just live a few blocks away. We’re almost neighbors.”

“Okay, I’ll check in with you tomorrow.”

She thought he would slam the door because most people wouldn’t consider the sleeping child in the backseat. But not Ethan. He closed the door gently.

She pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward her house. Ethan stood alone in the parking lot, his hand raised in farewell. After all these years in the mission field, saying goodbye was a particular talent of hers.

It seemed that Ethan was pretty good at it, too.

THREE

When they were partners, Ethan wouldn’t have waited to call Bridges. If he hadn’t been able to sleep because of the puzzle of evidence crowding his head, he would’ve called him in the middle of the night, or in the early hours of the morning. New information would’ve meant an instant call, day or night.

But he and Bridges hadn’t been partners in more than two years.

Ethan hadn’t even talked to his former partner in close to nine months. Without the day-to-day working relationship and with the secret nature of the job that Bridges did, there wasn’t as much as Ethan would’ve thought to build a friendship on. And truthfully, at the time, Ethan hadn’t cared.

Now he needed help to put together the random pieces of this case. Because of the trauma surrounding the event, there were things Ethan didn’t remember about the night Amy died. Hopefully Bridges could put those things in place.

The voice was grumpy and sleep-thickened, but sounded the same. “Bridges.”

“Still aren’t checking caller ID, I see.”

“Ethan Clark. You better have a good reason for waking me up at one in the morning, my friend.”

“It can wait until tomorrow.”

“No, I’m awake. What’s going on?” Sleep had disappeared from Bridges’ voice. A field agent got used to being awakened in the middle of the night. Ethan waited for the twinge, the little giveaway that he missed the job he used to do in the FBI when he was partners with Bridges. It wasn’t there.

With concise, short sentences, Ethan filled in his former partner on what had happened in the last two days, only leaving the fact that he believed his son might still be alive. “I just can’t figure out how all this ties in to what we were working back then or why someone would reach out to me now.”

Bridges was silent on the line. Then, “Ethan, you have to know that we searched every piece of ash from that explosion. There was nothing. Cantori was smoke, like he’d never existed.”

“I know.” The knot in his stomach was back. He dug in his pocket to find the roll of Tums he’d bought at the convenience store earlier and thumbed off a couple. “What about the girls?”

“We never found where he was keeping them. The only thing I could ever figure is that the operation is tight, with only a few key players. You know that—you’re the one who was in with them.”

It was true. “What about your confidential informant?”

“You don’t remember?”

The question he’d been dreading. And because Booth Bridges had been his partner, he had to be honest. “Everything is hazy, Booth. I tried to wipe it all out of my memory for two years.”

There was silence on the line. Then his former partner cleared his throat. “The CI was killed in a car accident a few weeks after you went in. The wreck was cleared by local cops as accidental, but neither of us thought it was an accident.”

Ethan had a vague recollection. “He was eliminated.”

“Yes, I think so.” Bridges sighed heavily. “We can’t protect you, Ethan.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that these are very dangerous players. If you open this back up, you’ll need to watch your back. These guys—they play for keeps.”

Anger roared through Ethan. Deftly, with the familiarity of long practice, he pushed it back, though his voice shook with the effort. “I think I’m in a position to be aware of that.”

His partner’s breath came across the line in a rush. “Of course you are. I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry, Ethan.”

“Even if I had nothing personally at stake, I don’t know how I could let this go. If they are selling babies, then there’s a lot more to this than we realized. More than a simple trafficking-for-profit scheme.” As if that wasn’t bad enough. His lip twitched. Frustration. Anger again.

Like an echo of his own feelings, frustration came through the line in his former partner’s voice, as well. “Right now all you have is an unidentified child, and I’m not sure what you want me to do with that.”

“We’re handling it. Local P.D. are on it and the FBI out of Mobile is involved in her case. What I need is information about the case that we worked. If it wasn’t about selling those young girls, what was it about?”

The line went quiet. Ethan could hear the clink of ice falling into a glass and liquid splashing in after it. Then, “For years, we’ve been going at this from the angle of trafficking women and coming up with nothing. Maybe I can run this new information by someone at Crimes Against Children and see if I turn up any complaints. It’s a stretch, but I’ll try.”

“That’s all I can ask.” Ethan stared into the darkness at the lights on the opposite shore. “Thanks, Booth. I owe you one.”

“No. I don’t think you do. I think we all owe you, Ethan.”

Stuffing the sigh down, Ethan said, “Keep in touch,” and as Bridges hung up on his end of the conversation, he resisted the urge to throw the phone. He hated feeling like he’d just been dealt the pity card, but if Bridges wanted to follow this through out of some misguided sense of a debt owed, so be it.

At least he would see where it led.

A few blocks away, Kelsey laid a very sleepy baby into the porta-crib. Janie’s golden curls were still damp from the bath, and she sighed in her sleep, her mouth moving just a touch, like she missed her thumb. Too cute.

The doctor had said that she needed surgery as soon as possible, maybe as soon as next week, to put a shunt in her heart, giving her time to grow until they could do the full reconstructive surgery. She was trying to find the right doctor to follow Janie’s care here in Florida. The red tape to get an unidentified child transferred from one state to another for state-funded medical care was going to be difficult—actually, she wasn’t sure it had ever been done. But Janie deserved a bright future. In the meantime, Kelsey would be vigilant and try to keep her as calm as possible.

She gave the baby’s back one last pat and turned toward the bathroom. Seeing and interacting with multiple children on a daily basis was one thing, but caring for a toddler minute by minute was exhausting—especially after the day they’d had at Children’s Hospital.

They were close to finding out who Janie really was, though. Closer than Kelsey had imagined they would be at this point, thanks to the medical records. She squeezed toothpaste on her toothbrush and reached for the water, turning it on and quickly off again as she thought she heard the sound of something outside.

Her heartbeat picked up speed. She didn’t hear it again. Maybe it was just her imagination. Or an animal in the trash cans. Maybe he hadn’t found anything to his tastes, so he’d ambled on to check someone else’s garbage. She resisted the urge to check under her bed for the baseball bat she kept. She didn’t have to—she knew it was there.

She turned the water on again, straining her ears to listen as she brushed her teeth. Glass broke and she swallowed a mouthful of toothpaste.

That hadn’t been her imagination.

That sound had been in her kitchen. Her legs were quaking, blood rushing in her ears. She ran for the bedroom door and closed and locked it silently, flipping off the lights at the same time.

Now what? Did she stay and take her chances on the police getting there in time? She felt her way across the room to her bedside table, finding her cell phone and stuffing it in the pocket of her sweatpants.

She grabbed the bat from under the bed. Hovering over the baby’s crib, she considered her options.

Stay and hide. Pray the baby doesn’t cry.

Make a run for it out the patio door.

The safety of the baby was her first priority. And if she stayed in the house with an intruder, the baby would be at risk. But what if someone had waited outside?

She breathed a prayer, one she’d said since childhood. Please God, go before us and behind us. Guard us and protect us.

Kelsey heard a door open down the hall. There really was someone in her house. Nausea burned in her stomach. She had to make a decision.

Coming closer. Oh, dear God, help.

Janie’s new medicine was in the diaper bag. She grabbed it off the floor and threw it over her shoulder. She had to leave now, if she was going to. Making the decision, she put the bat down and lifted Janie from the crib. Don’t wake up, don’t wake up.

She crept to the glass doors, her legs weak, the baby’s weight heavy in her shaking arms. Her breath was coming in quick gasps. She had to calm down and think.

From the vantage point in here, the patio looked clear. If she went straight out the back without being seen, she could cut through the neighbor’s yard and be at Ethan’s boat in less than five minutes. She had to get out without being noticed. The night was dark, no moon to speak of. If she didn’t make noise, if the baby was quiet. If the intruders were busy in the house.

So many ifs. She had to take the chance, though. Janie’s safety, her safety, depended on it.

Now or never. Her heart pounding loud enough to wake the baby on its own, she flipped the lock, slid the glass doors open and stepped out, silent in her bare feet.

Don’t wake up, don’t wake up.

She ran.