Delores Fossen - The Cradle Files

He remembered the picture. In fact, he’d stared at it for hours after Lexie had left. “From that, you decided I’d fathered your baby?”

“There was something about the way you were holding me.” She shrugged. “It was…intimate.”

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

And it was still intimate.

Even now.

Hell. He could feel the attraction. Evidently that was something even gaps in memory couldn’t cool down. Well, he sure as heck would put an end to it. He was not going to lose his badge by giving in to emotions that he should have never felt in the first place.

“Yeah. Intimate,” he repeated. His boss had thought the same thing—so much so that the single photo had spurred some hard questions from Internal Affairs. Questions about Garrett’s professionalism. About his dedication to the badge and his assignment.

Questions that had cut to the core simply because they’d been asked.

No.

He wasn’t going back there.

“After you testified that day, you were upset. Rightfully so,” Garrett explained, trying to make it sound clinical. “Billy Avery’s lawyers had asked some tough questions and tried to rattle you while you were on the stand. They also tried to discredit you and your testimony about the illegal activity that you’d witnessed. But you held your ground. You were able to give details that the defense couldn’t refute.”

“And it was after I left the courthouse that we went to the hotel and…had sex?”

Garrett waited a moment. “You remember anything about that?”

“No.”

That didn’t matter. Because he had enough memories for both of them.

“And I don’t remember leaving,” she continued. “Though there was an article that mentioned I’d disappeared.”

There was no way he could keep this clinical, so he settled for keeping it short. “You did.”

She stared at him. “I don’t know where I went. Where I stayed. What I did. All of that is a blank, and I don’t remember anything until I went into labor.”

Well, at least they had that. “You have no idea who took the child?”

“None. But I remember where it happened. It was at the Brighton Birthing Center.”

The facility instantly rang a bell. There’d been some kind of altercation there recently, but he couldn’t remember the details. “That’s one of those back to nature places just outside the city limits?”

She nodded. “This isn’t a real memory, but more like a vague recollection coupled with a theory. I went there when the labor started. Why, I don’t know. Maybe because I was staying close by, or maybe because I knew someone who worked there. I delivered the baby. And then the doctor gave me that syringe filled with drugs. I think he did that so the other man could take the baby from me.”

Despite her sketchy details, Garrett could almost see it. A sterile, milk-white delivery room. Lexie, weak from giving birth. At that moment, she was about as vulnerable as she could get.

“What happened next?” he asked.

“The doctor left me there in the birthing room. I managed to get off the bed, somehow. I went to look for the baby. But I was dizzy, and I couldn’t see where the man had taken her. Then I heard the doctor telling the security guard to find me and make sure I didn’t get out of there.”

Garrett forced the emotion aside and dealt with the facts. “But you obviously escaped.”

“Through the fire exit. I was still wearing a hospital gown, and I was barefoot. Not to mention I was drugged. I saw the man who took the baby. He put her in a dark blue van and sped away. I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay conscious for long so I, uh, borrowed a car from the parking lot and tried to go after him.”

Garrett ignored the borrowed part. He would deal with the stolen car issue if and when it came up again. “You weren’t successful.”

She shook her head. “No. I only made it a few miles, and I barely managed to get off the road and onto a path deep in the woods before I blacked out. When I came to, it was nearly two days later, and the man, the dark blue van and the baby were nowhere around.”

He could almost see that, too. As a cop. And as a prospective parent. Neither viewpoint pleased him.

Mercy, did he really have a child out there somewhere?

A child who’d been born, and stolen, under the circumstances Lexie had just described? He certainly couldn’t dismiss it, but he couldn’t dismiss the problems in her account, either.

“When you regained consciousness, you didn’t go to the police?” he asked.

“I tried.” She made a soft, throaty sound of disapproval. Probably because it was obvious he was now interrogating her. “I was on my way there when someone ran me off the road. It was a cop.”

Garrett felt his stomach tighten. “A cop?”

“Well, he was wearing a cop’s uniform, anyway. I managed to get away. I drove the car back into the woods so the cop or anyone else on the road wouldn’t be able to see me, but I was so weak that I passed out at the wheel again. Someone found me. A rancher. And he took me to a small county hospital and that’s where I’ve been—in and out of consciousness, for nearly three weeks.”

And with her having no wallet, ID or memory, the medical staff wouldn’t have known whom to contact. Not that she had a next of kin—her parents were dead.

“Why didn’t the doctors at the county hospital call the police?” Garrett asked.

“Because I begged them not to. I told them I was on the run from an abusive ex, that he’d beaten and drugged me. And I told them that my ex was a cop.”

“And they bought all of that?”

She nodded. “They wanted to give me a gynecological exam. They thought maybe I’d been raped, but I assured them that a rape hadn’t occurred, that I was simply having a heavier than usual menstrual cycle. I didn’t want them discovering that I’d recently given birth, because it would have spurred too many questions, and it might have caused them to call the cops, after all. I couldn’t risk that. I couldn’t even stand on my own two feet, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to fight off another attack.”

Garrett considered everything she’d said. “Yet you weren’t so weak that you couldn’t come up with a whole list of apparently believable lies.”

Oh, that earned him a glare. “Be thankful that the lies came easily. If they hadn’t, I probably would be dead by now. And where would that have left the baby, huh?”

He wasn’t ready to think about that just yet. But soon. Very soon. “After you were discharged from the hospital—”

“I wasn’t discharged,” she interrupted. “Once I regained consciousness and some strength, I sneaked out. Because I was afraid someone would try to kill me again.”

Her fear certainly seemed genuine, but like her memory, there were some huge gaps in her story. “And you still didn’t go to the police?” he pressed.

“I didn’t think I could trust the cops. Especially since it may have been a cop who ran me off the road.” She turned away from him, in the direction of his dresser. She didn’t exactly glance at his Glock, but Garrett figured she was well aware that it was there.

“Remember that part about not doing anything to rile me?” he warned.

“Well, you’re riling me,” she retorted. But she wasn’t just kidding around. Anger chilled her voice, and she got right in his face. “Don’t you get it? We have a baby out there, and someone has her. Do you think it’s a good idea to stand around here wasting time with all these questions? We could be using this time to find her.”

“Information and facts will help find her, and you seem to be seriously short on both.”

“Because I can’t remember!” she shouted. The burst of emotion left as quickly as it came. Her shoulders slumped. “Please, just believe me.”