He and Adam were scanning a list of vehicle registrations. There’d been so many they’d split the list in half.
“Trying to see how many cream and rust-colored ten-year-old Ford Crown Vics there are in this part of the state is proving to be a pain in the ass,” Adam said. He sat back, rubbed his eyes. “I was thinking of sending a BOLO to the Highway Patrol, anyway.”
“It can’t hurt. What about the hospitals?” Matthew asked. He waited and knew when Adam understood.
“Now there’s a thought. Woman’s scared enough of her boyfriend to leave her child behind, you have to figure the prick’s put her in the hospital at least once already.”
“I know that article on the restaurant in the Waco Tribune-Herald was picked up by papers in Austin and Dallas, but I’m going to focus on the hospitals in Waco. I don’t think the woman came from that far away.”
“Good thinking,” Adam said.
Matthew shrugged. “Hell, I have to do something. I promised Benny I’d try and find his mom today.”
“You know,” Adam said, “he doesn’t seem as upset as I would expect a child to be who’d been dumped with strangers.”
“He said something last night about his mother telling him that Kelsey would babysit him. Which means she prepared him for this. Even so, you’d think he’d be hysterical. He is only four. At that age, usually, a kid can’t reason well.”
“Unless he’s had to grow up pretty fast,” Adam said.
Matthew nodded. Adam’s tone of resignation matched his own feelings. Then he remembered what Kelsey had said in the aftermath of her nightmare last night. “A mother’s first sacred duty is to protect her child no matter what,” he said now.
“Pardon?”
“After Kelsey’s nightmare last night, Steven and I were trying to reassure her that her son’s death wasn’t her fault.”
“Of course it wasn’t,” Adam said.
“Well, Kelsey said she knew that, but that it had been her duty as his mother to protect her son. Yesterday, I was pretty pissed at the woman who’d desert a little boy, leaving him with strangers. Now I think I’m feeling a little more compassionate. Maybe the woman believed this was her only option to keep Benny safe, to protect her child.”
Matthew saw Adam’s jaw tighten. His cousin, for all that he was a man of the twenty-first century, had a lot of old-fashioned notions and could be pretty rigid in his beliefs sometimes. In some areas, there was only black and white for Adam Kendall, no shades of grey.
Finally, Adam said, “It’s not my place to judge the woman. Let’s find her first. You could be right in your assessment, but I’ll tell you what I know. Hell, what we both know, really. If she did leave the boy here to keep him safe or to please that bastard she’s with—well, that doesn’t bode well for her to my way of thinking. She’s still likely to get beat on.”
“We’re certainly on the same page there,” Matthew said.
* * * *
“Fucking kid.” Connors had been stewing since the evening before, when he’d watched his well thought-out plan disintegrate before his very eyes. Now, twelve hours later, he paced his motel room on the outskirts of Waco and tried to come up with a new plan.
He had to act soon because he was running out of time. He’d had everything planned last night, knew exactly what he was going to do. After making eye contact with that bitch in her restaurant, he was going to “accidentally” run into her as she locked up the place that night. That was one of the few times she was alone, without either one of those muscle-boys hanging around her. He’d watched her lock up several times now, and he knew her routine and the routine of the community. That hick town all but rolled up the sidewalks at night. There would have been no one around to even see him.
Thank God Cora Lynn’s mother had fallen and broken her hip. He couldn’t believe his luck and had insisted his wife go and stay with her mother in Houston for however long it took for her to be better.
Win-win for him because his wife thought him a hero and he had time to deal with the Madison woman.
He figured he’d been home, and home free, by now.
Desperate times called for desperate measures.
Drawing back the curtain, he peered out at the early morning activity. Folks were traveling, some on vacations, some off to work. Offices and coffee shops and malls would be collecting their employees, getting ready for the retail crowd.
Bleary-eyed, most folks just went about their business, their Monday morning routine so ingrained they never thought twice, never looked twice.