Twenty-Four
“Okay, so Elle’s been planning ahead.” Anne leaned back on the couch, one arm over her closed eyes, and I wondered if she was trying to keep the light out or the hope in. “But if she could see so far in advance, wouldn’t she know we’d eventually need Hadley’s real, full name? Even if she never saw this particular problem coming? Why on earth would she trust me with her child, but not with that child’s name?”
“Maybe she did,” Cam said, and Anne sat up to frown at him. “But she couldn’t just write Hadley’s middle and last names down somewhere where anyone might find them.”
“An understandable paranoia,” I said, waving one hand for him to continue.
“So maybe she hid them.”
“Hid them where?” Anne demanded, her voice brittle with frustration. Or maybe that was pain. She was probably miserable by now, considering how long her accidental breach of contract with Noelle had been in effect.
“It would have to be somewhere you’d be sure to see them, but no one else would notice them.” I rubbed my forehead, my brain racing. “They’d have to be in something she gave you. Something she sent with Hadley. Or maybe something she left in her apartment.”
Anne shook her head. “I’ve been through all that!” She ran one hand through her hair in exasperation. “I’ve been through everything. Over and over. She didn’t have an address book—not hard copy, and not digital. There are no names on the backs of her photos except for Hadley, and that’s all she ever called her in writing. Just that one name. There was nothing embroidered or written on her clothes, no name tag on her diaper bag or suitcase. It’s like Noelle was hiding her before she ever even sent her to me.” Another sigh, then Anne met my gaze with an exhausted one of her own. “Besides, she was too careful to leave anything telling in her apartment. What if I hadn’t come to clean it out before she was officially evicted? What if someone else came looking for her before her neighbor called me? She couldn’t have seen everything, Liv. Some things had to be in the shadows, and she wouldn’t have taken a risk like that.”
“She’s right,” Cam said, before I could reply. “Elle wouldn’t have left sensitive information in the apartment. So it had to have come with the baby. It had to be in or on something she sent with Hadley.”
“There wasn’t anything!” Anne’s eyes watered, and she swiped away the tears angrily. “There was just the baby in her carrier, a diaper bag full of supplies, a stuffed bear, over-the-counter medication and a small suitcase full of clothes. And I went through all of it over and over. I ripped the lining out of the carrier, the diaper bag and the suitcase when I was looking for Hadley’s birth certificate. Hell, I even cut the bear up his rear seam and ripped out the stuffing, then had to sew the damn thing up again by hand. There was nothing. No note. No mysterious P.O. box key. And certainly no X to mark the spot. There was just Hadley and the letter from Elle, asking me to take her.”
“The letter…” I glanced at Cam and was both relieved and thrilled to see the same spark of possibility glowing in his eyes. “It had to be somewhere in that letter. In code or something.”
“Yeah. Or maybe written in invisible ink.” Anne sighed. “Wouldn’t that be a bitch. All these years I’ve been searching for information, and it could’ve been right there the whole time, written in lemon juice, just waiting to be exposed by a warm lightbulb.”
“Anne…” Cam reached for her hand, and with it, he also got teary eye contact. “Do you happen to remember what that letter said? Exactly? I’m assuming you read it several times over the years…?”
“Yeah. You want to see it?”
I blinked, sure I’d heard her wrong. “You have it with you?”
Anne shrugged. “It’s in Hadley’s memory box, with a few of the baby pictures Noelle wrote notes on the back of—the date and the occasion. Her first steps, stuff like that.” She leaned forward and grabbed the backpack she’d brought with her, digging through the contents as she spoke. “They’re the only things she has from Elle, and I wasn’t going to go on the run without them. Of course, she hasn’t seen them yet…”
Because Hadley didn’t know anything about her real mother.
Anne pulled an old-fashioned cardboard pencil box out of the bag. It was pink, hand-decorated with Hadley’s name in purple glitter paint and accented with white daisy stickers—clearly Anne’s handiwork. She flipped open the lid and pulled out a folded sheet of blue-lined white notebook paper, then set the box on the coffee table and unfolded the letter beside it.
We all leaned forward to read.
As Anne had said, the letter was short and to the point. Just a paragraph long, with no obvious code or pattern in the letters, and no single words which could easily be identified as names.
Below the official request was the list of vital statistics Anne had mentioned, and below that, Hadley’s potential allergies. And at the very bottom of the page, there was a small ink sketch of a teddy bear with button eyes and a stitched X for a nose.
“Did Elle draw that?” I asked, and Anne shrugged.
“I guess so. That’s the bear that came in the diaper bag—the only toy Elle sent with Hadley. It was her favorite until she started school, and some little prick kindergartner told her only babies carried stuffed animals. After that, she put Harrison up on her shelf and she hasn’t taken him down since.”
A chill crawled up my spine. “The bear’s name was Harrison?”
“Yeah. Harrison Lee.”
That first chill spawned an army of baby chills that raised goose bumps as they raced across my skin. “Did you name the bear?”
“No, she named it herself.” Anne blinked as the facts clicked into place with the memory. “That was one of only two or three things she could say when I got her. ‘More,’ ‘Pwease’ and ‘Hawison Wee.’”
I glanced at Cam. “Do babies name their own stuffed animals?”
He could not have looked more surprised by my question. “I know as little about babies as you do. Maybe less.”
So I turned to Anne, but she was already frowning. “I don’t know. Hadley’s the only toddler I’ve ever spent any time with, and I didn’t question it. However he got it, the bear’s name was Harrison Lee.”
“So, are we all thinking what I’m thinking? That Elle gave the bear Hadley’s middle and last names so that—at least subconsciously—she’d always know them? Then she drew the bear at the bottom of the basics-of-parenting cheat sheet as a hint for Annika, complete with an actual X to mark the spot?” The bear’s nose, of course.
Anne shrugged. “Nothing has made any more sense than that, so far.”
I glanced at Cam and he nodded solemnly. “It’s worth a shot.” He closed his eyes, and as we watched, he muttered, “Hadley Harrison Lee.” His eyes rolled beneath his eyelids, as if he was actually scanning his own private darkness for light on the horizon. I held my breath, my mental fingers crossed, and if wishing for success could have made it happen, we would have found Hadley in that very moment.
But instead, several seconds later, Cam opened his eyes and shook his head. “That’s not it.”
“Reverse them,” Anne said, unwilling to give up. “Try it one more time, in a different order.”
While Cam tried again, I flipped open Hadley’s memory box and took out the thin, four-by-six-inch photo album, staring at the baby whose picture peeked through the oval frame cut into the cover.
I saw no resemblance to Elle. But then again, I saw no resemblance to the older Hadley, either, except for her green eyes. Everything else had changed, and her hair had lightened several shades, as if she spent most of her time in the sun. Seven-year-old Hadley’s hair was much closer in color to Elle’s as I remembered it.
Cam mumbled the name again, this time using Hadley as the last name and Harrison as the middle name, and I flipped through the album while Anne watched him intently. Just past the halfway point in the thin album, I found an empty photo sleeve on the left side of the page, opposite a shot of—
I froze with the next page between my fingers, ready to flip before I’d realized what I was looking at.
What the hell?
“Anne…?”
“What?” She turned to see what I was staring at, and Cam whispered again, trying another name combination.
“Is this Hadley?” It can’t be. No way.
“Yeah, that’s one of my favorites. According to the date on the back she was about six months old, and I think she’d just learned to sit up on her own. See?” She flipped the blank page to reveal the picture behind it, then turned back to the one that had sent adrenaline shooting through my heart, strong and fast enough to make it literally skip a beat. “This is the first one where there’s no pillow propping her up from behind.”
I stared at the picture of baby Hadley in a tiny, solid blue baseball cap, chubby little fingers clutching the corner of the green checkered blanket she sat on, and I had to will my pulse to slow before my vision went black.
“Where’s this one?” I whispered with as much volume as I could manage, tapping the blank page.
“Don’t know. That one was empty when I got it. I guess she just skipped a page. I thought about shifting them all down one so I could add a new one at the end, but it just seemed wrong to rearrange something Elle made for her.”
I fumbled for my satchel, and Anne caught the album when it slid from my lap. But before she could snap at me to be more careful, Cam exhaled, long and low.
“I got it.”
My fingers fell away from my bag and I looked up at him in surprise. “You got it?”
“Yeah. I had to try several variations, accounting for the possible speech difficulties of an eleven-month-old child, but I got it. She’s Leah Harrison Hadley.” His grin nearly split his face in two. “I’m assuming Harrison is a family name—maybe Elle’s dad’s?—and Hadley’s her last name, not her first.”
“Harrison is her brother’s name,” I said.
Cam frowned. “Harrison Maddox?”
I nodded absently, still focused on that missing photo.
“Clever Noelle…!” Anne mumbled, already reaching for the pen and paper to write her daughter’s name down. Then she evidently thought better of that and dropped the pen on the end table. “Is the energy signature strong?”
“Strong enough. I think she’s still in the city. And she’s definitely still alive.”
“Great. Let’s go.” She was halfway to the door before we could stop her.
“Anne, wait.” Cam lunged forward and grabbed her arm before she could throw open the front door and expose herself to whoever Ruben had watching the apartment. “We need a plan. We need backup. We need…a plan.”
She tugged her arm free and frowned at him. “You already said that.”
“It’s worth repeating.” He gestured toward the couch and she sat again, reluctantly. “I know you’re eager to get her back, but if we just bust in…” Cam rubbed his forehead, and I wondered if he was getting repercussion pain from working with us, in conflict with his oath to Jake Tower. Or maybe he hadn’t actually crossed that line yet and was just anticipating the pain—I could certainly sympathize.
“Actually,” he continued, “that’s not even possible. I can’t bust in on Tower’s pet project, so it would just be the two of you, and that’d be beyond stupid.”
“So…what are we going to do?” Hope drained from Anne’s face, revealing the fear and worry it had briefly hidden.
“Uh…guys? I hate to complicate things, but…” I set Hadley’s photo album open on the coffee table in front of them and tapped the empty page. “We need to talk about this missing picture.”
Anne glanced impatiently at the album. “What about it?”
“It’s not missing anymore.”
“What are you talking about?” she demanded, as I pulled a green plastic binder from my satchel, but Cam only watched in silence as I opened it on my lap. I flipped to the back of the binder and popped open the three one-inch rings, then removed a clear plastic page protector and handed it to Anne.
She glanced at the photo it held, then blinked and looked again. For a long time. When she finally met my gaze again, her eyes were wide and tear-filled. “Where did you get this?”
I sighed. “I can’t tell you that.” Then I rushed on before she could argue. “Am I right? Is that Hadley in the photo?”
She pinched the top of the page protector and held her hand over the opening. “May I…?”
“Yeah. That’s a copy anyway.”
She pulled out the photo and held it inches from her face, as the first tears fell. “Where’s the original?”
I thought about that for a second, then decided that answering wouldn’t actually breach my contract, though I probably couldn’t answer anything else she was certain to ask. “The original is in the top drawer of the desk in Ruben Cavazos’s home office.”
“What…?” Anne glanced from me to Cam, and I looked up to see him leaning with both elbows on his knees, shaking his head slowly. He’d already deduced what I couldn’t say. “What the hell is going on here, Olivia?” Anne demanded.
I couldn’t answer her, but before that became an issue, Cam spoke up with another question I couldn’t answer.
“You’re serious? Hadley is Cavazos’s illegitimate son?” Another painful pause. “That means that Noelle…?”
I shrugged. “Well, obviously Hadley isn’t a boy, but beyond that, I can’t…” Another shrug, and I had to let them draw their own conclusions. “I’m sorry, Anne. I’m contractually prohibited from discussing most of this.”
“Fortunately, I’m not.” Cam sighed and twisted on the couch to fully face her. “Liv’s spent the last year and a half trying to track Ruben Cavazos’s illegitimate son, born by a mistress he had…” Cam’s eyes closed as another piece of the puzzle fell into place. “Damn. Eight years ago, or so. That makes sense now.”
Scary, beyond-coincidental sense. How much of this had Elle known?
“And you’re saying Noelle was this mistress?” Anne said, already shaking her head in denial of what none of us wanted to believe. “But why would he think Hadley’s a boy?”
Since I couldn’t actually answer that, I lifted Anne’s arm by her elbow, placing the photo she still held back at eye level. Cam scooted closer to her so he could see it, and another layer of confusion melted away.
“Because all he had to go on was this picture, and you have to admit, dressed in blue and wearing a baseball cap, she looks like a little boy. And Noelle was obviously in no rush to correct that assumption. If she even brought him the picture in person?” He glanced at me in question, but I couldn’t comment, even though his guess was spot on. She’d sent the picture in an envelope with no return address, accompanied only by a note card with one word handwritten on it. Yours.
Anne dropped the picture, and it landed facedown in her lap. “You’re telling me that my daughter’s biological father is Ruben fucking Cavazos, whose mortal enemy has kidnapped the daughter he doesn’t even know he has?”
“I’m not telling you anything. Because I can’t. I can make conjecture about what Elle might have done, but I can’t discuss anything Ruben told me. However, what I can say—since it doesn’t fall under the terms of my contract with her husband—is that Michaela Cavazos had her husband’s former mistress killed six years ago and was not happy to learn that said mistress might have—” I hesitated, tiptoeing carefully around verbal landmines. “—left a part of herself out there.”
“Shit.” Anne’s breathing quickened, and was starting to sound a little wheezy. “Shit, shit, shit!”
“Anne…” Cam said, in a low, soothing voice.
“What am I going to do? What the hell am I going to do now?” She turned on me and grabbed my arm before I even saw her hand move. “You can’t tell him. Liv, you can’t tell him about Hadley.”
“I have to tell him. And I have to tell him very soon.” My contract was very specific on that point.
“No!” Anne’s grip on my arm tightened painfully. “Elle hid her for a reason, and it’s obvious now that that reason was Ruben Cavazos! She went to so much trouble to protect her daughter, and you can’t just throw that away. You can’t just hand Hadley over to him!”
“Anne, think about the facts.” I pulled my arm gently from her terrified grip. “If she was afraid of Ruben, she never would have sent that picture. But she knew what I know—he may be a soul-rotting bastard in nearly every other aspect of life, but he would never hurt a kid. Especially his own kid. And she obviously thought he should at least know he was a father. Hadley was his first.” I paused a moment to let that sink in, then continued. “Noelle was probably hiding her daughter from Michaela. Not from Ruben.”
“Michaela Cavazos—the woman who had Noelle murdered? If you give Hadley to them, she’ll have her killed, too!”
“No.” I squeezed her hand, trying to pass along some of my own certainty. “He would never let that happen.” Even if he decided not to bring an illegitimate child into his house, he would never let Meika hurt her. “And the truth is that we need him to get Hadley back. He has the resources we need to get past Tower’s defenses.”
“That won’t happen without a fight,” Cam mumbled, as if withholding volume would make the words any less true.
“Even if he does fight for her—even if he can get her out of there intact—he won’t give her back to me, Olivia! He’ll take her, and I’ll never see her again, and she won’t be any better off with him than she is with Tower.”
“Okay, you have to calm down.” I held her hand tightly when she tried to pull away. “First of all, that’s not true. Ruben doesn’t want to lock her up and take her blood. Hell, we don’t know that he wants her at all. He’s expecting a son. He already has a legitimate daughter, and I don’t know if he’ll consider another one worth the fight, considering the monumental bitch-fit Meika’s going to throw when she finds out. So…there’s a chance he’ll let you keep her.”
Or…he might ship her off to a boarding school, from where he could control her, but never see her….
Anne frowned. “But if he doesn’t want her, why would he help us get her back?”
Cam laughed out loud, a startling sound in the midst of so much tension. But Anne didn’t get the joke. “To save face,” Cam explained. “There’s no way in hell that Cavazos would let Tower get away with kidnapping his kid, even if neither of them knew she was his kid at the time. Cavazos will welcome an excuse to bring the fight to Tower’s front door. The real challenge will be getting Hadley out of there without sustaining any collateral damage.”
“Maybe Kori…?” Anne suggested.
I shook my head firmly. “She can’t. It’s not her fault.” Not directly, anyway. Though it was her own fault she worked for Tower. “The most she’ll be able to do—if we’re lucky—is remove herself from the fight. If we’re not lucky, she’ll be forced to fight against us.”
“As will I,” Cam said softly, staring at the phone between his feet.
“We’re going to find a way around that,” I said. “Or else…you can’t be there.”
“He’ll call me in.”
“Give me your phone.”
Cam managed a small smile as he dug his cell from his pocket, clearly anticipating my next move. He handed me his phone and I set it on the coffee table, then took my boot off to use the heel as a hammer. Three blows later, his phone was obliterated.
“Can’t answer a call you don’t receive.” I would pick up a prepaid phone for him as soon as I got a chance.
“So, how do you want to play this?” Cam scooped the remains of his phone into one broad hand and crossed the room to drop them into the kitchen trash can.
I shrugged. “I’m going to call Ruben over and fill him in. You guys should probably stay out of sight until I’ve had a chance to…reason with him. If he thinks he’s been set up, he’ll call in the guard dogs and have us all shot before he even knows what’s going on.”
“You’re going to bring him here?” Anne glanced at Cam nervously, then back to me. “You really think that’s a good idea?”
“It’s better than the alternative. I’m not going back to his place while Michaela’s on the warpath. She nearly opened my femoral artery earlier tonight. Besides—” another shrug “—this is his apartment. It’s only a matter of time before he shows up anyway—his spies already know I’m here.”
“This is his apartment?” Anne demanded. “You were going to hide Hadley in her own father’s apartment?”
“Well, obviously I didn’t know about their shared DNA when I came up with that plan. But yeah, Ruben owns the whole building. Why? What did you think this was?” I said, spreading my arms to take in Cavazos’s would-be love shack.
“I don’t know.” Anne hugged herself, and the gesture made her look very fragile and naive. “I thought it was a safe house, or something.”
I stifled a laugh. “Annika, I’m a one-woman operation, not the fucking FBI. I take what I can get, and this was the only place I could think of where Tower’s men couldn’t follow us.” And it would have worked—if Kori weren’t one of Tower’s men.
I gave her a minute to absorb the new-to-her facts, then cleared my throat. “Are you two ready for this?”
“Looking forward to it.” Cam’s firm nod said he was looking for a chance to pick a fight with Cavazos, and the stern look I gave him did nothing to change that.
“As ready as I’m going to be,” Anne said, and I was pleased to find determination strengthening her gaze. She was channeling her inner mama lion, and I was relieved to see it.
“Okay.” I stood and headed for the front door. “I’ll be back in a minute. Stay out of sight and don’t come outside, no matter what. Got it?”
Cam nodded, but Anne’s agreement was a little shakier. But that was as good as it was going to get.
I patted my holstered gun beneath my jacket, then opened the door and stepped onto the second-floor landing. I jogged down the stairs and had only been standing in the parking lot for a few seconds when an unmarked black sedan rolled to a stop in front of me, and the passenger’s side window buzzed as it receded into the door.
“Evenin,’ Liv.” Gene smiled up at me from beneath the brim of his cowboy hat, faux-Southern gentleman, through and through. “What can we do for you?” I didn’t like many of Cavazos’s men, but Gene was at the bottom of my list.
“You can get on your phone, or your radio, or whatever toys Ruben’s passing out these days and tell him I need to see him. Here. Now.”
“Cool your panties.” Gene’s languorous gaze traveled south of my waist. “He’s already on his way.”
“I’m not sleeping with him,” I snapped, though I don’t know why I bothered.
“Right.” Gene laughed, and I wished he’d choke on his own disbelief. “You cover the windows and turn on all the lights for privacy so you can get yourself off.”
Bastard. “Just send him up when he gets here.” I jogged back up the stairs and into the apartment without looking back.
My heart thumped painfully when I closed the door and leaned against it. “He’s already on the way.” Which I might have known, if I hadn’t asked Cam to destroy my phone. “It’s only a five-minute drive, so you guys should probably head to the bedroom….”
“Do you know what you’re going to say?” Cam asked, as Anne started gathering her stuff.
I shrugged and slid my arms around him when he stepped closer, pressing me into the door. “I’m going to tell him the truth. Some of it, anyway.” The parts I was obligated to reveal, along with whatever else would help us get Hadley safely out of Tower’s grip. “But I’m going to have to spin it. Let him think he’s making all the calls.”
“What does that mean?” he asked into my hair, while I pressed my face into the side of his neck, breathing him in, dreading the moment when I’d have to trade his presence for Ruben’s. “I’m not going to hide in the other room and let him pound on you!”
“I can hold my own.”
“You don’t have to,” he growled, holding me tighter, and a bolt of dread lanced my heart. “I’m not going to let him touch you.”
“Cam.” I stepped out of his grip and looked up at him, trying to convey the import of what I was about to say. “You have to stay in the bedroom until I call for you. No matter what. Okay?”
“Hell no!”
Outside, a car engine growled to a stop, then died, and my pulse raced. It was Cavazos—it had to be. “Cameron, listen to me.” I held him by both arms, but I was pretty sure that didn’t have the same impact it had when our positions were reversed—my hands only fit halfway around his biceps. “He’s going to be pissed at first, but the important thing here is getting him to help us go after Hadley, and I’m going to do whatever that takes. Anyway, as soon as he hears about his daughter, he’ll forget about everything else.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
Voices spoke outside my window and down one floor, and I recognized Cavazos’s cultured rumble among them.
“He will!” I whispered fiercely, already tugging Cam away from the door. “Promise me you’ll stay in there with Anne.” Who was watching us silently from the bedroom doorway.
“Liv…”
“Swear!” I snapped, whispering because I heard heavy, confident footsteps on the stairs.
Cam scowled. “Fine. I swear.” But we both knew that he’d break his word if Cavazos went too far. If I let him go too far.
“Thank you,” I breathed. Anne stepped back and I used my good arm to push Cam into the room with her. “I’ll call you when I’m ready for you.” I started to close the door, then noticed that Anne clutched Hadley’s photo album to her chest. “Can I take one of those?” I whispered, as the first knock echoed from my front door.
She hesitated, obviously reluctant to alter Elle’s handiwork. But then she nodded, and I flipped through the pages hastily until I found the shot I needed: Hadley, still in her blue cap on her green blanket. But this time, Elle was in the frame with her. I had no idea who’d taken the picture—the neighbor/babysitter?—but it suited my purposes perfectly.
“Thanks. I’ll bring it back.” But at the last minute, I refrained from promising her, because for all I knew, Ruben would insist on keeping the picture, and I couldn’t stop him.
“Olivia!” Cavazos shouted, pounding on the door again. He was pissed, and I wasn’t surprised.
“Shh!” I hissed at Cam and Anne as I closed the bedroom door, then I raced down the short hallway and skidded to a stop a foot from the door. Not yet…
I slid Anne’s photo into an end-table drawer, then jogged into the kitchen and pulled a steak knife from the block on the counter. Just in case. Carefully, I shoved it between the first two couch cushions, then took a moment to catch my breath and slow my pulse.
Then I pulled the front door open to find Ruben Cavazos waiting with his arms crossed over his chest, eyes narrowed in quiet fury—ten times more dangerous than an obvious bluster. “Sorry. I was in the bathroom.”
In response, Ruben backhanded me across the face.