Then she went into the bedroom where her own baby lay sleeping. Even though Billy was months away from rolling over, she had stuffed a rolled-up blanket between the mattress and the wall and another one between the mattress and the headboard.
She sat on the side of the bed for a time just watching Billy sleep. The feeling that swelled in her breast went beyond love, beyond adoration. It encompassed something quite elemental and even ferocious. No one was ever going to take her baby away from her. Ever.
She reached down to pat Ralph’s head and tell him good night. He didn’t open his eyes, but his tail swished a bit. “You’re all worn out, aren’t you, boy? Me, too. It’s been a busy day.”
Then she stretched out beside her baby and stared out at the sky for a time. She couldn’t see the moon from this window, but the stars were bright and mysterious. She wondered where Joe was at this moment and what he was thinking.
Just before she closed her eyes, she glanced through the open doorway of the bedroom and could just make out the form of Lynette’s sleeping baby.
Chapter Thirty
IT WAS A FEW minutes after one when Jamie discovered that Lynette’s baby was missing. Billy had been trying to wake up. Sometimes he would go back to sleep if she walked around the apartment jiggling him in her arms. That’s what she had been doing when she realized Sally Ann was no longer in the baby bed.
Panic filled Jamie’s chest and clouded her mind. They knew where she was. They thought they had taken her baby.
Even as she tried to deal with the horror of the missing baby, her mind was trying to push ahead.
How long would it take before they realized the baby they had was a girl?
And why hadn’t the person who took Sally Ann killed Jamie first?
Jamie imagined a shadowy figure putting a gun with a silencer to her temple while she slept and pulling the trigger. Or putting a pillow over her face and suffocating her.
But there was something wrong with both scenarios. And with Jamie sleeping through Sally Ann’s kidnapping. Ralph would have alerted her the instant an intruder set foot in the apartment.
Ralph would have barked.
Ralph!
She raced to the bedroom. Her scruffy little dog was still curled up on the foot of the bed. Jamie knew before she touched him that he was dead. But still her mind cried out in protest. Not her Ralph. Not her sweet little dog who had been at her side for all these many months. Who had saved her sanity and been her devoted little buddy. Who had loved her unconditionally and trusted her completely.
She wanted to scream. To cry out in her grief. And rage. But she didn’t have time to rage or grieve. Not even for Ralph.
She had to get out of here.
She put Billy on the bed, grabbed her backpack, and raced around frantically stuffing things inside. Some clothes for Billy. A couple of baby blankets. Diapers. The baby sling. The Oklahoma map. Then she realized she still had on her nightshirt. She threw on some clothes and stuffed an extra shirt and underwear in the backpack.
She reached under the mattress and pulled out the manila envelope and slid it under the pad in the infant carrier. Then she put her baby in the carrier and bent to kiss her little dead dog good-bye, her chest heaving with the pain of her loss. “I am so sorry,” she whispered. “Good-bye, my darling Ralph. I’ll never forget you.”
Blind with tears, she slung the backpack over her shoulder and picked up the infant carrier. And glanced at the clock on the bureau. Less than ten minutes had passed since she realized Sally Ann was gone.
Billy was chewing on his fists and only seconds away from crying. On the way to the door she picked up Sally Ann’s pacifier from the baby bed. She didn’t take the time to wash it or even wipe it on her sleeve. Billy had never used a pacifier, but he latched on instantly.
Ever so carefully, Jamie unlocked the door and, leaving the chain lock engaged, peeked out into the hall. Then she closed the door, disengaged the chain lock, and opened it again. She took one last look over her shoulder and saw a pair of feet appear in the open window.
The kidnapper was coming back to kill her.
She slipped into the hall and gently closed the door behind her. Then raced down the hall. Down three flights of stairs.
Once she had reached the first floor, she unlocked the front door and opened it a few inches, then turned around and tiptoed toward the back of the house to the basement door. In the inky darkness she crept down the basement stairs. The laundry room with two high cellar windows was less dark. She paused to let her eyes adjust. Pushing the wooden table would make too much noise. It took all her strength to lift it and place it under one of the windows. She put the infant carrier and backpack on the table, climbed on top of it, unlatched the window, and carefully lowered it. It was a tight squeeze to get her long body through the opening. Once through she reached back inside for the infant carrier and the backpack. Then she reached down and pulled the window closed.
She was hidden by the bushes and crouched there unmoving for a time. She heard the front door being pushed open. Footsteps on the porch. Billy was trying to push the pacifier from his mouth, but she held it there with one hand and frantically unbuttoned her shirt with the other and scooped her baby from the carrier.
She was sure the kidnapper was not alone. He had already given Sally Ann to an accomplice and returned to kill Jamie. Probably there were others besides those two. They would fan out to look for her.
She nursed Billy until she was sure that he wouldn’t cry then put him back in the carrier and crept across the deep shadows between Ruby’s apartment house and the one next door, quickly taking cover behind its overgrown shrubs. Pressed against the wall, she made her way toward the front of the building and climbed over the railing onto the covered porch. Keeping to the shadows, she tiptoed across the porch and climbed down into the shrubbery on the other side of the building, which was on a corner. The bus-stop corner. She waited for a few minutes, watching for any sort of movement. Then she sat in the moist dirt behind a huge, overgrown lilac bush to wait for morning and to cry for her little dead dog. She knew what had happened. Someone had been watching her and knew that she took Ralph out front last thing every night and had left a piece of poisoned meat by the front steps.
After they had killed her, they would have disposed of her and Ralph’s bodies and made it look as though she had fled in the night with her baby and dog. Ruby would have remembered her bruised forehead and concluded that Jamie was once again running away from an abusive boyfriend.
Except the kidnapper had taken the wrong baby. Soon someone was going to realize that. Jamie closed her eyes and prayed. Please don’t let them kill Lynette’s baby. Please.
She imagined Lynette coming in the morning and getting Ruby to open the door when Jamie did not respond to her knock. The police would be called. Would the police think that the woman who called herself Janet Wisdom had fled with both babies?
By now the kidnapper and his accomplices would be driving up and down the streets looking for her. Maybe they had called in others to help with the search.
She tried to make herself as comfortable as possible, leaning against the side of the house. She could feel the moisture from the damp earth penetrating the seat of her jeans and scooped a layer of dead leaves between herself and the ground.
And so she stayed. For hours. Grieving for her dog. Holding her baby. Wondering what was going to happen to them.
“We have the baby,” Felipe said when he had Hartmann on the line. He was in the back of a panel truck parked inside a garage at the end of the alley. “Carl and Luis have gone back to deal with the girl.”