LITMIR.BIZ

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She probably ran off to school. It’s Delia who you should be concerned about.

      Brent thought of the bright young woman who’d formed such a bond with his daughter. Delia had come to him with excellent references and a real hunger to make a difference in someone’s life. Rachel had been that someone.

      Still, denial was part of survival and it was strong. He looked at Callie, a kernel of hope popping up. Maybe there was some mistake. “Are you sure it was my housekeeper?”

      She knew what he was asking, what he was hoping. Her heart went out to him. He hadn’t had an easy time of it, and she admired the fact that he was a single father. Like her father had been for the past fifteen years.

      Grimly, Callie took out the plastic-encased wallet that the CSI agent had inserted into a bag at her request and given to her. Delia Culhane’s wallet had been placed inside, opened to the woman’s driver’s license. Callie held it up for the judge’s benefit.

      “Oh, God.” He took it into his hands, staring at the woman’s face through the plastic. The license hardly did her justice. It didn’t capture the sparkling eyes, the laughter that his daughter was so quick to respond to. “Did she suffer?”

      Callie continued to watch every nuance that passed over the judge’s face. She felt like a voyeur and hated it, but this was her job. To read people and look for telltale signs that gave them away. She didn’t have to like it.

      “Coroner said she died instantly.”

      At least that was something. Brent nodded, handing the bagged wallet back to her, his eyes on the telephone on his desk. He was dialing again the moment Callie took the wallet from him.

      Callie tucked the wallet back into the wide pockets of her jacket. She indicated the telephone. “Are you calling your daughter’s school?”

      He nodded, then raised his eyes to hers. Maybe she was right. Maybe Rachel had run off, hurrying to the school to notify someone about what had happened. She was a bright little girl, a feisty girl, far older than her young years. Rachel would know that Delia would need help. He pressed the last button on the keypad.

      “It’s all I can think of.”

      It was a logical next move. “Where does she—”

      He heard the question begin, but his attention suddenly shifted to the voice that was coming from the other end of the receiver. A high, sweet voice that was asking him how she might direct his call.

      “Principal Walsh, please.” He struggled to sound calm. “Yes, this is an emergency.”

      Brent shut his eyes as a click and then silence greeted him. The operator had placed him on hold. Placed his very life on hold.

      He felt a hand touch his black-draped arm.

      He was still wearing his judge’s robe, he realized. Somehow that struck him as ironic, given the fact that at this moment he felt as if there was no justice in the world. Not if hardworking women could be struck down and left like so much litter on the road. Not when young children, babies really, could vanish on their way to school in a city where they were supposed to be safe.

      The detective was looking at him, compassion in her blue-gray eyes.

      “If you give me the name of the school, I can have someone there probably before you get taken off hold,” Callie told him helpfully.

      He was about to tell her the school’s name when he heard a click and then a woman’s deep voice echoing in his ear. It was the school’s principal. The one time he’d met her, he remembered thinking she looked like a feminine version of a U.S. Marines drill sergeant. He also remembered thinking that Rachel would be safe in a place run by a woman like that.

      “Yes, this is Judge Brenton Montgomery. My daughter attends the morning kindergarten sessions at your school. Could you have someone check to see if she arrived this morning? Rachel Montgomery,” he said in reply to the question. “No, I don’t remember her teacher’s name.” He almost lost his patience, then fought to regain it. “No, wait, it’s Preston, Presley, something like that. Yes, Peterson, that’s right. Mrs. Peterson. Could you please check if Rachel arrived? Because there’s been an accident, that’s why.”

      What a hollow phrase that was, he thought in disgust. There’s been an accident. Delia Culhane’s life was cut short and it could be explained away by a single sentence that consisted of four words. It just didn’t seem right or fair.

      He blew out a breath, the last of his patience tethered by a thin thread. “Yes, I’ll hold.”

      Brent turned from the wall and looked at Callie. He felt as if he was tottering on the very brink of hell, waiting to plunge down into the fires below as he stood there listening to the sound of silence pulsing against his ear. Waiting until the principal’s messenger returned and she in turn told him what he wanted to hear. That Rachel was miraculously there.

      Or was that pulsing sound his own heart, marking time, waiting, hoping?

      Praying.

      But Bristol and Oak was such a huge intersection and Rachel was such a little girl. Would she have run across it, terrorized by the sight of her beloved nanny being hit by a car?

      Or was she still somewhere in the area, hiding? Crying. Waiting for him to come and rescue her. He wanted to be down there, looking for her. His inertia was strangling him.

      Placing a hand over the receiver’s mouthpiece, he turned toward Callie.

      “Was it a drunk driver?” What other explanation could there be for hitting someone? No matter that it was early, maybe someone was still celebrating something from the night before. And death had stolen in at the end of the celebration.

      Her own negative answers wearied her. “We don’t know. We don’t have any real details yet.”

      “What did the witnesses say?”

      “We haven’t found any witnesses. Yet,” she emphasized.

      Of course they hadn’t, he realized. If there were witnesses, someone would have been able to tell them where his daughter was. Which direction she’d gone in. He wasn’t thinking straight.

      Callie saw Brent suddenly stiffen, his eyes intent as a voice came on the line. She didn’t hear the words, only the muffled sound of someone talking.

      She didn’t need to hear the words. She read his expression.

      The receiver slipped from Brent’s fingers to the cradle beneath. Dread washed over him as he looked at Callie.

      “Rachel didn’t come to class today.”

      Chapter 3

      Callie’s heart immediately went out to him.

      It wasn’t the first time she’d seen that look of complete devastation; the look that said the person’s insides had just been seized and twisted into a knot. Fifteen years ago she’d seen it on her own father’s face.

      For the sake of his children, Andrew Cavanaugh had kept up a good front the night his wife’s car had been found nearly submerged in the river. So good a front that Callie had thought perhaps her parents’ arguments had taken their toll and he’d ceased to care for her mother.

      But then Callie had come up behind him late that second night, when the hopelessness of the situation had hit him and he’d thought he was alone. And heard him quietly crying.

      It was a sound she would never forget. It marked the first time that her very secure world had been breached. The first time the door to that world had been thrown open, leaving them all vulnerable, and she realized that no one was ever completely safe.

      Nothing had brought it home to her more acutely than when Kyle had been killed right in front of her eyes. Her fiancé hadn’t even known that she had reached him a heartbeat later, that she’d held him to her on the sidewalk in front of the bank and sobbed his name over and over again.

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