Lisa Gardner - Love You More

I whistled low. “See, this is what happens. You hit your first woman, and it gets easier after that.”

“Were you and Brian arguing?” Bobby spoke up now. “Maybe the fight turned physical. Sophie got in the way.”

“I reported for duty Friday night,” I said, looking out the window. Fewer houses, more woods. We were getting close. “I haven’t seen my daughter alive since.”

“So Brian did it? Why not just blame him? Why cover it up, concoct such an elaborate story?”

“Shane didn’t believe me. If he couldn’t, then who would?”

Red-painted apple stand, off to the left. Empty now, but sold the best glasses of cider in the fall. We had come here just seven months ago, drinking apple cider, going on a hay ride, then visiting the pumpkin patch. Is that what had brought me back, Saturday afternoon when my heart had been pounding and the daylight fading and I had felt like a Looney Tune, crazed by grief and panic and sheer desperation? I’d had to move, fast, fast, fast. Less thinking. More doing.

Which had brought me here, to the place of our last family outing before Brian shipped out for the fall. One of my last happy memories.

Sophie had loved this apple stand. She’d consumed three cups of cider and then, hopped up on fermented sugar, had run laps in the pumpkin patch before picking out not one pumpkin, but three. A daddy pumpkin, a mommy pumpkin, and a girl pumpkin, she’d declared. A whole entire pumpkin family .

“Can we, Mommy? Can we can we can we? Please, please, please.”

“Sure, sweetheart, you’re absolutely right. It would be a shame to separate them. Let’s save the whole family.”

“Yippee! Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, we’re gonna buy a pumpkin family! Yippee!”

“Turn right up ahead,” I murmured.

“Right?” D.D. braked hard, made the turn.

“Quarter mile up, next left, onto a rural road…”

“Three pumpkins?” Brian shaking his head at me. “Softy.”

“You bought her the donuts to go with the cider.”

“So three donuts equals three pumpkins?”

“Apparently.”

“Okay, but dibs on carving the daddy pumpkin…”

“The tree! Turn here. Left, left. Now, thirty yards, road on the right.”

“Sure you couldn’t have drawn a map?” D.D. scowled at me.

“I’m sure.”

D.D. turned right onto the smaller, rural road, tires spinning on the hardpacked snow. Behind us, one, two, three, four cars labored to follow suit, then a couple of white SUVs, then the line of police cruisers.

Definitely going to snow , I decided.

But I didn’t mind anymore. Civilization was long gone. This was the land of skeletal trees, frozen ponds, and white barren fields. The kind of place lots of things could happen before the general population noticed. The kind of place a desperate woman might use for her last stand.

Bad Tessa, rising.

“We’re here,” I said.

And Detective D. D. Warren, heaven help her, pulled over.

“Get out,” she said crossly.

I smiled. I couldn’t help myself. I looked the fine detective in the eye and I said, “Words I’ve been waiting to hear all day.”

I don’t want her walking the woods!” D.D. was arguing with Bobby ten minutes later, off to one side of the stacked-up vehicles. “Her job was to get us here. Now her job is done, and our job is beginning.”

“The canine team wants her help,” Bobby countered. “There’s no wind, meaning it’ll be hard for the dogs to catch the open cone of the scent.”

D.D. stared at him blankly.

“Scent,” he tried again, forming a triangular shape with his hands, “radiates from the target in the shape of an expanding cone. For the dog to catch the scent, it has to be downwind, in the opening of the cone, or the dog can be two feet from the target and still miss it.”

“When did you learn about dogs?” D.D. demanded.

“Thirty seconds ago, when I asked Nelson and Cassondra what they needed us to do. They’re concerned about the conditions. Terrain’s flat, which I guess is good, but it’s open, which is more complicated-”

“Why?”

“Scent pools when it hits a barrier. So if this were a fenced-in field or brush-lined canyon, they’d start at the edges. But no fence or brush. Just big open… this…”

Bobby waved his hand around them. D.D. sighed heavily.

Tessa Leoni had brought them to one of the few half-forested, half-fielded, all-in-the-middle-of-nowhere places left in Massachusetts. Given Sunday night’s fresh snowfall, the fields were a flat white expanse of sheer nothingness-no footprints, no tire tracks, no drag marks, interspersed with dark patches of skeletal trees and shaggy bushes.

They were lucky they’d been able to drive in, and D.D. still wasn’t sure they’d be able to get back out. Snowshoes would be a good idea. A vacation even better.

“Dogs are gonna tire faster,” Bobby was saying, “trudging through fresh snowfall. So the team wants to start with the smallest search area possible. Which means having Tessa get us as close to the target as possible.”

“Maybe she can point us in the right direction,” D.D. muttered.

Bobby rolled his eyes. “Tessa’s shackled and trying to walk through four inches of powder. Woman’s not running away any time soon.”

“She doesn’t have a jacket.”

“I’m sure someone has a spare.”

“She’s playing us,” D.D. said abruptly.

“I know.”

“Notice how she answered none of our questions.”

“I noticed.”

“While doing her best to milk us for information.”

“Yep.”

“Did you hear what she did to the male inmate who attacked the CO? She didn’t just take him out. She drove a shank into his thigh and twisted it. Twice. That’s a little beyond professional training. That’s personal satisfaction.”

“She seems… edgy,” Bobby agreed. “I’m thinking life hasn’t gone too well for her the past few days.”

“And yet here we are,” D.D. said, “dancing to the beat of her different drummer. I don’t like it.”

Bobby thought about it. “Maybe you should stay in the car,” he said at last. “Just to be safe…”

D.D. fisted her hands to keep from hitting him. Then she sighed and rubbed her forehead. She hadn’t slept last night, hadn’t eaten this morning. Meaning she’d been tired and cranky even before receiving the news that Tessa Leoni was willing to take them to her daughter’s body.

D.D. didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want to be trudging through snow. She didn’t want to come to a faint mound and brush it back to find the frozen features of a six-year-old girl. Would it look like Sophie was sleeping? Wrapped up in her pink winter coat, clutching her favorite doll?

Or would there be bullet holes, red droplets giving testimony to a last moment filled with violence?

D.D. was a professional who didn’t feel professional anymore. She wanted to crawl into the backseat and wrap her hands around Tessa Leoni’s throat. She wanted to squeeze and shake and scream, How could you do such a thing! To the little girl who loved you!

D.D. probably should stay behind. Which meant, of course, that she wouldn’t.

“The SAR team is requesting further assistance,” Bobby was stating quietly. “We have four hours of daylight left, in less than ideal conditions. Dogs can only walk so fast. Same with the handlers. What do you suggest?”

“Shit,” D.D. murmured.

“My thoughts exactly.”

“Any funny business, I’m going to have to kill her,” D.D. said after another moment.

Bobby shrugged. “Don’t think too many people out here will argue with that.”