The pain in her sun-washed face was hard to look at. But strangely, it was also hard to tear his eyes away. Recognizing that the pull the woman had on him was in danger of becoming a problem, he sucked in a chestful of willpower along with air. “I’m sure she is. Sadly. But maybe just not as far along as she’s letting you think she is.”
Lindsey paused in the process of digging in her purse for a pair of sunglasses to squint at him again. “So, you think there might be something to her story?”
“I think she remembers something terrible that happened to somebody. The question is who? And when? And where?”
She didn’t reply, being preoccupied with rearranging things in the cavernous depths of her purse. She pulled out the photograph of her father and was about to tuck it under her arm to get it out of her way. He held out his hand and said, “Can I see that?”
She glanced at him and handed over the framed photo without comment. He stared at it while she located her sunglasses and put them on, and knew without being able to see them that her eyes had gone wary again and were watching him from behind the dark lenses. There was tension in her body, and she clutched her purse like a shield-or a weapon-the way she had when she’d first come to his office that morning.
Richard Merrill didn’t look like anybody’s idea of a stone-cold killer-but then, in Alan’s experience, the stoniest, coldest killers seldom did. Merrill looked exactly like what he was-a successful banker and family man, now retired to the comforts of suburbia. King of the backyard barbecue. The photo Lindsey had chosen with which to confront her mother was a candid shot rather than a formal portrait, taken at some family outing, probably, a head-and-shoulders shot with blue sky and ocean as a backdrop. Alan’s impression was of a man who had been athletic in his youth and, while not yet running to fat, had thickened in the natural way men do as they get older. In the photo, his face was lifted to the sun and his thinning but still adequate salt-and-pepper hair was disarranged by a breeze from the ocean. He looked, Alan thought, like a happy man. A man completely content with his life. His eyes, smile-creased at the corners-
He looked up at Lindsey and tapped the photograph. “Your father’s eyes are dark.”
“Brown. Yes.”
“Yours are-”
“Blue-I know.” She made an impatient gesture. “It’s possible, you know. For brown-eyed people to have blue-eyed children. If they both carry the recessive gene.”
Alan nodded. “True.” But not likely they’d have a child with eyes as vivid a blue as yours.
“Anyway, what does it matter?” She opened her car door and tossed her purse onto the passenger seat, then turned back to him, her fair skin flushed with anger. “Do you think I care whether or not Richard Merrill is my biological father? Is that what you think this is about? If it was, I could find out easily enough, couldn’t I, through DNA. That man-” she nodded at the photograph in his hands, and her voice quivered “-is my dad in every way that counts. I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for him-because he doesn’t deserve to be shut out of what life my mother has left. And I’m doing it for her, because she doesn’t deserve to spend the time she has left being terrified of the husband who adores her. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I do,” Alan said, and meant it. He understood very well what she wanted; he just wasn’t sure he could give it to her.
“So? Are you going to help me?”
He let out a gusty breath, looked down at the photo in his hands. Lord, help me, he thought. He shook his head, but said, “I’ll see what I can find out. Can I keep this?”
“Oh-of course. Yes. Sure.” She held herself still, but he could almost feel her vibrating with suppressed hope. “Anything I can do to help…”
“We’ve got the approximate when-roughly forty years ago, right? It would help a lot if we could narrow it down as to the where. What we’re doing is looking for a needle in a haystack, in a whole damn field of haystacks. It would be nice if we knew which haystack to start looking in.”
She gave a shrug and a helpless little laugh, and something about the sound of it made him wonder if, behind those sunglasses, she might be crying. “How do I do that?” Her voice was barely a whisper. “You saw her…heard her.”
“Yeah, I did. And just talking to us, she remembered a detail that seemed to be new to her, didn’t she? That thing about floating. You said you visit her just about every day, right? See if you can get her to talk about her life before the trauma. Maybe she’ll remember some little thing that will help us pinpoint where this thing happened. Can you do that?”
She nodded, quick and hard. “Yes-okay.”
“Good. Meanwhile, I’ll start running what we have through our various databases. See if anything pops up. Okay?” He waited-one hand on the top of the car door-while she slid behind the wheel and put the key in the ignition. The engine fired, and she settled back in her seat and looked up at him.
“Thank you,” she said. Just that.
He couldn’t even see her eyes. But something about her mouth…the hint of a flush beneath her skin, a touch of pink on the tip of her nose. He felt a thickening in his throat, a tightening in his chest, and for a long moment couldn’t make himself look away. Couldn’t seem to move. The moment stretched, then snapped with a sizzling he could feel in his scalp, like the warning tingle just before an electric shock, the one that makes you jerk your hand away just in time.
“Okay, then,” he said. “I’ll call if I find anything.” He took a card and a pencil out of his jacket pocket, jotted his cell phone number on the back of the card and handed it to her. “You do the same.”
She nodded. He shut the car door, then stepped back and watched her back out of the parking spot and drive away. He looked down at the photograph of Richard Merrill in his hand, and felt excitement stir and his pulses quicken. And wondered whether it had more to do with the possibility of a very cold case, or a very warm and desirable woman.
Back at his desk, Alan scanned the photo of Richard Merrill and entered it and all the information Lindsey had given him on her parents into the system, started a data search, then turned his attention to writing the reports on the Marchetti case.
His plan was to finish the report and get a head start on the weekend, since it was his weekend to have Chelse. He’d been thinking about maybe taking her to Sea World or the zoo while the weather was holding so fine. Chelse loved the zoo, always had-Sea World, too-but the way she was growing up, Alan figured it was only a matter of time before she started thinking she was too old for that stuff. He hoped it wouldn’t happen, but was realistic enough to know it always did.
Maybe, he thought, he’d get lucky and Chelse would stay her daddy’s little girl forever. Maybe, like Lindsey Merrill, she’d still think he walked on water when she was forty. Although he considered the odds of that weren’t good, being as how he only got to spend every other weekend with her. It was hard to admit, even to himself, how much he looked forward to those weekends. How much he looked forward to not going home to his empty house.