She stood and took my hand. “Dr. Bowers, pleased to meet you.”
“Call me Pat.”
“Missy.”
Before asking me about my situation with Lansing, she dove into an explanation of her own story: she was a mother of three who’d recently gone back to work after her husband left her last summer, he was a good man, she said, and it hadn’t been for another woman and she didn’t hold it against him.
Once again, strangely forthcoming.
And although I found it hard to believe, she really didn’t seem bitter toward her ex-husband, just wounded by him. I got the feeling that she’d been shattered by the fact that the man she’d given her life to had decided he would rather be alone than with her-a blow that I could only imagine might take a person a lifetime to recover from.
Still, as sympathetic as I felt toward her situation, I just wanted to get started and I think she could tell. “I only share this with you,” she explained, “so that you know I’m a single parent myself and that I can understand the types of struggles and issues you deal with. Every case is personal to me.”
“I’m glad to hear that.”
We promptly discussed her fees, and in contrast to her office surroundings, she wasn’t cheap, but I accepted her terms. Then she told me she would only be able to meet until 1:20, twenty minutes less than I had thought, and we both took a seat. She positioned a legal pad in front of her. “I won’t lie to you, Agent Bowers. These things, these custody cases-they can be…” She seemed to be searching for the right word.
“Tricky,” I said.
A nod. “Yes. And painful. And confusing. Especially for the children.”
I felt a twist of anxiety, maybe even guilt, although I couldn’t think of anything I’d done that I should feel guilty about. “I’m aware of that.”
She lifted an impossibly sharp pencil, held it in her hand just so, the tip against the top line of the legal pad. “All right. From the voicemail you left me this morning, I understand that your stepdaughter’s biological father is trying to get custody of her.”
“Yes.”
I handed her the letter from Paul Lansing’s lawyers.
She studied it. Set it aside.
“Talk me through this. You first met Tessa when?”
My cell phone vibrated in my pocket, and I ignored it.
“About three months before her mother and I got married.”
“Three months.”
“Yes. Christie and I were engaged for only a short time.” I gave her the dates.
She wrote.
The phone continued to vibrate and I continued to ignore it.
A new habit of mine.
I kind of liked it.
She glanced toward my pocket. She must have noticed the muted sound of my phone. “And your marriage lasted?”
“Christie died four months after we married.”
Missy paused. “I’m very sorry.” The sympathy in her voice seemed honest and heartfelt, and I began to trust Missy Schuel with my case.
“Thank you.”
My phone stopped.
“Go on,” I said.
“May I ask-if you only knew Tessa for such a short time when her mother passed away, why didn’t you contact another relative to have him or her raise Tessa after Christie’s death?”
“Both of Christie’s parents died when Tessa was young. Christie didn’t have any siblings. And I had no way of knowing who, or where, her biological father was.”
“So there were no close relatives.”
“Not that I was aware of, no. Before she died, Christie asked me to take care of Tessa.” Another call was coming in, but I didn’t want any distractions, so I took a moment to still the vibrate function on my phone.
“Then you do have custody? Legal custody?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
A ray of optimism. Things were going to be okay after all.
But that’s not what Missy’s face told me as she asked me for more background. I took her through the story of how, after Christie’s death, I’d moved with Tessa from New York City to Denver in the hopes of putting some distance between us and our grief. At first we’d struggled to get along, but since my work schedule required seven or eight days of travel each month, mostly weekends, we were both able to get enough space to stay sane.
“And where did she stay during those times? When you were gone?”
“With my parents.”
I mentioned Tessa’s difficult times with self-inflicting-or cutting, as kids today call it-and then concluded by telling Missy about the weekend last October when our relationship began to improve. Pain had brought us together.
“She was abducted by a serial killer. He cut her and left her to die.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Yes, but I got to her in time. After that, I don’t know… maybe we both realized how much we’d always loved each other, needed each other, but had never really understood how to show it.”
“Does she have scars?”
“Pardon me?”
“You said he cut her. Does she have scars?”
The question seemed a bit intrusive. “Yes. She has a scar on her left arm. There’s a tattoo covering it, but it’s still visible.”
Missy wrote a few notes on her pad. I didn’t like that she scribbled in a style of shorthand that was impossible for me to read upside down. “And Paul Lansing,” she said, “what do we know about his relationship with Christie?”
“The few times I asked her about who Tessa’s father was, she only told me that he was no longer a part of their lives.”
Missy had her head down, staring at the paper, but now raised her eyes, gave me a slow, measured look. I sensed that she did not believe me.
“I didn’t press the issue with her. We all have some things that are too painful or awkward to share. Things we need to put behind us.”
“All right.”
“Tessa only found the diary with Paul’s name in it recently, a few weeks ago.”
A head tilt. “Diary?”
“Yes, Christie’s. From when she was in college. According to what she wrote, she had a short-lived relationship with Paul and that was all.”
“And did he choose to assert his rights as Tessa’s father at that time?”
I hesitated.
Missy watched me. Reading my face, my silence.
“Tell me.”
“When Christie found out she was pregnant she decided to have an abortion. He wrote to her, Paul did, begging her not to. She kept his letter in her diary. After she chose to have Tessa, there’s no mention of him again in the diary entries. But it wasn’t the letter that persuaded her. It was-”
Missy set down her pencil.
“I’ll need to see that letter. The diary too.”
Even though I knew it was wishful thinking, I’d hoped to keep those two items out of this. There was no way either Paul’s letter or the diary was going to help our case. “All right.”
“And after Christie passed away, you didn’t put any paperwork through to legally adopt Tessa?”
“I had custody. It never occurred to me to adopt her.” The more we spoke, the more off balance I felt, as if everything I’d thought was solid in my life was sinking, shifting.
A slim breath. “Tell me a little more about your stepdaughter.”
Brad was parked in the handicapped parking spot beside the Lincoln Towers Hotel.
He crawled into the back of the van, held the woman’s arm still, and slid the needle into her vein. Depressed the plunger.
The drug he was using would work quickly. It wouldn’t take long until she would be unconscious.
He removed the needle, sat back, and watched as her breathing slowed.
As her eyelids drooped.
As her body went limp.
She lay helpless beside him.
He unpocketed his phone and took some video. It wasn’t officially part of the plan. This video was just for fun. For his own personal use.
Then he pulled out the woman’s computer to hack into the hotel’s security system and loop the video footage on the back alley’s surveillance camera.
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