At her apartment, he parked in her parking space and looked over at her. She was already getting out of the truck and headed for the door. He jumped out and followed her.
At the front door, she jammed her keys into the lock and pushed it open. Kopriva caught the door in his hands as she swung it closed behind her.
“Katie!” he said.
“Leave me alone, Stef,” she said, her voice thick with tears.
Kopriva hesitated in the doorway. He wondered briefly if she needed to be alone. Then he heard an abbreviated moan erupt and he pushed the thought away. Right now, she needed someone.
He found her in the living room, curled into a ball in the center of the room. Her body hitched and jerked with soundless sobs. Slowly, her legs writhed on the carpet. Her mouth opened into a silent scream. She shook her head from side to side.
Kopriva knelt down and then lay beside her. Reaching out, he touched her lightly on the head. At his touch, she rolled over and buried her face into his chest. Her body pressed tightly against him, her elbows tucked into her sides. Kopriva wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close
Finally, her sobs found sound and she wept loudly into his chest. He held her tighter and tighter with one arm, stroking her hair with the other. He tried to whisper comforting things to her and when no words would work, he kissed her lightly on the top of her head.
They lay together on the living room floor for what seemed like hours. Slowly, her sobs came further and further apart, until she was reduced to the occasional start in her chest. She turned her head to the side and looked up at Kopriva.
“I couldn’t save him, Stef,” she whispered, her voice raw.
Kopriva nodded and kissed her forehead.
“I…just…couldn’t,” she whispered.
A lump rose in Kopriva’s throat and he struggled to swallow over it. Katie closed her eyes and he tried to think of something profound to say to her. Something that would ease her pain and make her realize that she wasn’t responsible for what happened, no matter how terrible the result had been.
The clock on her wall seemed to tick and tick and he couldn’t think of anything to say. Finally, he opened his mouth to say something, anything, unsure of the words until they tumbled from his lips.
“I love you, Katie,” he said.
But his only answer was the even pattern of her breath as she lay against his chest.
1422 hours
Tower smiled at Kendra Ferguson, trying to mask his urgency. The little girl had set up a tea service for both of them and she gave his cup a long pour.
“Why, thank you,” Tower said, picking up the tiny pink cup and pretending to sip.
“You’re supposed to wait,” Kendra told him. “At least until Mr. Puddles has his, too.”
“Sorry,” Tower said, putting his cup down until the shaggy stuffed poodle had a full cup. “It’s just too delicious.”
Kendra flashed him a grin and picked up her own cup. “I know.”
Tower picked up his cup and made another sipping sound. “Ah, good stuff.”
Kendra sipped, too, obviously delighted that he was playing along. She seemed to give no thought to why he was there.
Tower fake-sipped once more, looking at the little girl over the top of his miniature cup. When he put it down on the saucer, he asked her, “Kendra, I need to talk to you about Amy again.”
A hurt look came across Kendra’s face. She put her cup down and picked up Mr. Puddles. “Okay.”
Tower smiled at her. “You’re very brave to talk about this, you know?”
Kendra nodded and picked at the stuffed dog’s fur.
“What I want to talk about is when the van pulled up next to both of you. Do you remember what color it was?”
“Uh-huh.” She paused and thought. “Brown.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. It was a brown van.”
“Not blue?”
“No,” she said with a shake of her head. “It was definitely brown.”
“Okay,” Tower said. “Do you remember the man who was driving?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t see him.”
“No?”
“Uh-uh. I only saw the man with scary eyes.”
“The one who took Amy?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was tall.”
“How tall?”
“Taller than you.”
Tower made a quick note on his pad. He stood an even six feet tall. Then he asked, “Do you remember what color his skin was?”
“Yeah. It was black.”
“Black skin?”
“Yeah. I could see his arms.”
“Did he say anything?”
Kendra squinted her eyes, thinking. Then she said, “Yeah, he talked like that mouse, remember? The fast one with the hat?”
“Speedy Gonzalez?”
“Yeah! Speedy!”
Tower uncrossed and re-crossed his legs. “But his skin was black?”
Kendra nodded.
“Do you know what a tattoo is, Kendra?” he asked.
“Sure. It’s like a picture on someone’s skin.”
“That’s right. Now, did this man have any tattoos?”
Kendra squinted in thought again, then nodded happily at him. “He did. He had them.”
“What kind of tattoos did he have?”
“It was red spiders,” she said, pointing to her bicep. “Right here.”
Tower sighed. Either she was unreliable or she was lying, he realized. And what he had to do next was not going to be pleasant. He was momentarily grateful that Kendra felt comfortable enough to sit alone with him while the grandmother waited downstairs.
Then he took a deep breath and confronted the six-year-old girl.
1436 hours
“It’s a white male about six feet tall that grabbed her up,” Tower told him.
Browning nodded and wrote, cupping the phone receiver between his chin and shoulder.
“Clothing?”
“All black, including a ski mask. No look at the driver. And the van was definitely blue. All the rest was bullshit.”
Browning swore quietly as he wrote. “Why’d she lie?”
“There’s a nearby vacant lot where they found some little cave in the side of a dirt mound. They called the place Fairy Castle. Both mothers knew about it and the girls weren’t allowed to be there.”
“So she lied…”
“She lied because she was afraid that she and Amy would get in trouble. Then she lied some more because she’d already lied. Only she forgot the first lie.”
“Jesus,” Browning muttered.
“Are you going to tell Patrol?”
“Yeah,” Browning said. “Blue vans, white males.”
“And we’re back to square one with the sicko squad,” Tower said, meaning that they would have to go back through all the registered sex offenders in River City for white males this time. “And we’ve got our work cut out for us. There’s about five times as many white RSOs in the city than black.”
“Why don’t you head home from there?” Browning said. “I’ll pull the files and we’ll get to work on them in the morning.”
“I’ll come and help you pull the files at least,” Tower said, and both men knew it wouldn’t stop there. Browning could almost smell the bleached odor of the pillowcases in the down room.
“All right. See you.”
“Be about forty minutes.”
Browning hung up the phone, leaned back in his chair and let out a long sigh, punctuated with the foulest curse he could come up with on short notice. Almost all of their work was gone. They’d have to start nearly from scratch.
He started to get up to head over to Tower’s office where the RSO files were stored, but stopped. Instead, he reached for the case file and flipped it open. He’d made the mistake of not reading it completely and carefully once before and it took Renee to point out something that he missed. There was no way that was going to happen again. If they were going to start over in this case, then he was going to do it right.
He started with the computer printout of the Computer Aided Dispatch report. He noted the time the call came in to dispatch, when Giovanni arrived and when further officers were dispatched. He followed the entire course of the first two days of the investigation in the short radio codes and time stamps. Nothing jumped out at him.