Luke Delaney - The Toy Taker

‘We’re capable of more than you think, Sean,’ Anna told him. ‘But I take your point: house-breaking would be a highly unusual crime for a woman.’ They sat in silence for a while. ‘So perhaps there are two people working together — a man and a woman. She selects the children, possibly at random, but more likely because she knows them somehow, and he takes them for her. A childless couple who have no hope of having their own, perhaps?’

‘That’s interesting,’ Sean told her, but his unexcited eyes told her she wasn’t offering him anything new.

‘No, it’s not,’ she replied. ‘You’d already considered it.’

‘Maybe,’ he admitted with a shrug.

‘Then why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?’

Her question was met only with the piercing blue of his eyes.

‘Can I get you a drink? Tea or coffee, perhaps?’ she asked, needing some respite from Sean’s intensity.

‘No thanks,’ he answered, watching her stand and straighten her charcoal grey pencil skirt, her small, heavy breasts moving slightly under her white blouse.

‘I need a drink of water,’ she told him, walking to the small water-cooler in the corner of her office, standing with her back to him as she took her time filling the plastic cup. She heard the creaking of his chair as he rose, felt the distance between them close as he came to her, standing too close behind her, making her tremble. She pushed herself back into him when she felt his arm curl around her waist, unable to control urges she’d long been pretending to herself she didn’t have.

‘Made you feel alive, didn’t it?’ he whispered into her ear. ‘Being around me and the others — a real-life murder investigation — hardly ever sleeping or eating, your only thought to catch the bastard that took those women. Killed those women. Everything else in your life suddenly seemed trivial and futile.’

‘Maybe,’ she whispered back. ‘It was … it was …’

‘Thrilling,’ he answered for her. ‘It thrilled you. But now everything’s back to normal, just like it used to be. Only it never can be, not for you. You need more now. You always will.’

‘You’re right,’ she admitted. ‘You’re right. I need more.’

He pulled her closer so he could feel her chest rising and falling, the curves of her back pressing against his body as her buttocks fitted into his groin making his testicles curl and tense as his penis began to flush with blood — his arm tightening around her waist as the other slipped around her chest and cupped one breast releasing her sweet warm breath as she sighed and turned to face him. She gripped his face in her hands, pulling his mouth on to hers, biting softly on his lower lip while her right leg rose and curled around his thighs, locking them tighter together. His tongue entered her mouth and she imagined it exploring the place between her legs, imagined him inside her as they moved as one on the floor of her office or across her desk. But without warning her conscience betrayed her and defeated her desire. She untwined her leg and pushed against his chest with both hands, pulling her lips, swollen with passion, away from his searching mouth. ‘No,’ she told him. ‘This is wrong. We can’t do this.’

‘Yes we can,’ he argued, still searching for her warm breath.

‘We’re both married, Sean,’ she reminded him. ‘We can’t do this. It’s wrong.’

He detected the change in her voice — in her breathing − and knew the passion had passed. ‘Christ,’ he told her. ‘Can’t we just do something we want, instead of what people expect of us for once? Nobody needs to know.’

‘We’ll know,’ she told him. ‘We’ll know, Sean.’ She pushed him harder, increasing the distance between them until it was obvious their brief affair was already over, although their hands still rested gently on each other. ‘I want to, but I won’t,’ she continued. ‘We could do this and I’d be fine. I could go home tonight and I’d be fine. I’d wake up in the morning and I’d be fine. But you wouldn’t be, Sean — you wouldn’t be fine.’

‘You don’t know me as well as you think you do,’ he argued.

‘I know you well enough.’

‘Is that your professional opinion or your personal one?’

‘Both,’ she told him, any trace of passion gone from her voice. ‘If we were to do this it would destroy you, Sean, and everything you are.’ He looked at her blankly. ‘Don’t you understand? It’s your wife and family that anchor you. Without them you’d be lost, drifting without a purpose or belief. You betray them, you betray yourself and you’d never recover. Don’t cross a line that you can never come back from.’

Finally he untangled himself and stepped away, her words mingling with something he remembered McKenzie saying: Once you’ve crossed that line, there’s no turning back — not for anybody. Don’t cross a line that you can never come back from . Thoughts of Kate and his daughters rushed into his aching mind — the family that was growing up without him, becoming little more than strangers to him. He felt a dizzy and searched for a chair to sit in.

‘Sean?’ Anna asked. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ he managed to lie. ‘I’ll be fine.’

Anna studied him for a moment in silence before speaking. ‘I don’t think you really wanted this to happen, no matter how much I did.’

‘Then you’d be wrong.’

‘Would I? This isn’t about me, Sean. We both know it. It’s as if you’re trying to be something you’re not. Why?’ He said nothing. ‘Is it something to do with the new case? Trying to get the scent back by putting yourself on the edge, by risking everything that’s important to you?’ Still he didn’t answer. ‘It is, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here.’

‘I’m getting nowhere with this investigation,’ he finally admitted. ‘I can’t work out his motivation. Can’t get inside his head.’

‘Sounds as if you already have,’ she contradicted him. ‘You could very well be right: maybe this one isn’t doing it to torture and kill. Something else, perhaps?’

‘Yeah, but what?’

‘As we were discussing before …’ They exchanged an awkward glance. ‘The abductor could be working with someone — a male and female working together to take the children — to take them and keep them as their own. To love them.’

‘I’d considered it,’ Sean told her.

‘But?’

‘But how could they ever hope to get away with it — raising abducted children as their own?’

‘You’re assuming they’re rational.’

‘One delusional person acting alone I can consider, but two fantasists sharing the same obsession — an obsession as unusual as this? I don’t think so.’

Anna considered him for a minute, surprised at how dulled his instincts appeared to be. ‘I agree,’ she told him, making him look her in the eye. ‘But in a case like this I would expect to find one delusional and one rational person. The rational person no doubt knows exactly what they’re doing and that ultimately it’s doomed to failure, but they do it anyway out of a need to please or even appease the delusional one. A husband trying to satisfy a wife; a lover trying to please a more dominant partner … It could even be a dynamic between siblings or some other type of family relationship — a mother and son?’

‘Maybe,’ Sean half agreed, stretching and rubbing the back of his neck. ‘But one thing I’m sure of is that our suspect knew both families. We’ll keep cross-referencing names until we get a hit, and when we do I’ll have my prime suspect. Then they can tell us why themselves.’

‘Good luck,’ Anna told him as he stood to leave.

‘Thanks,’ he answered. ‘I’ve got a feeling I’m going to need it. And I’m sorry if I … if I did anything to make you feel … uncomfortable. I wouldn’t want you to ever feel that way around me.’