Stolen(22)

“Don’t threaten me.”

Despite his protest, Grady looked relieved. And Caitlin thought she knew why. He could now claim they had dragged whatever it was out of him under duress. If this was something he was supposed to keep quiet about, his friend, Whit, would know the police had given him no choice.

Grady waited another beat before spitting it out. “There’s another reason Laura thought she might have killed Angelina. The day after Laura was rescued she found a lock of dark brown hair, tied with a pink ribbon. It was hidden inside a sock in her top drawer. Laura believed the hair was Angelina’s.”

Hatcher slammed his fist on the table. A few drops of Grady’s coffee, which hadn’t been touched, sloshed over the top of the cup and beaded onto the cellophane wrapped sandwich. “You’ve known this for thirteen years. You withheld physical evidence in a criminal investigation. I should slap the cuffs on you right this minute.”

“Doctor-patient confidentiality—”

“Doesn’t extend to withholding physical evidence in a criminal investigation.”

“I don’t have any physical evidence in my possession. I never did. So your point doesn’t apply.”

“What happened to the lock of hair?” Spense asked, for once the coolest head in the room.

Caitlin considered marking down the date.

“I have no idea.” Grady’s voice contained a slight tremor. The threat of arrest had shaken his usual implacability. “For all I know, there might not have been any lock of hair. For all I know, Laura dreamt it up. Maybe it was a false memory, created by that magical thinking we discussed earlier. Laura claimed it was in a sock that later disappeared.” He offered a halfhearted smile. “Maybe it went where all missing socks go. Maybe it wasn’t Angelina’s hair at all. Or maybe Angelina gave it to Laura as a memento and Laura forgot.”

There seemed to be no shortage of for all I knows and maybes.

“He’s right.” Hatcher’s hunched shoulders lowered. “That lock of hair might not mean a damn thing.”

Spense leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “Or it might be the key that unlocks this entire case.”





Chapter 10





Afternoon

Frank’s Cabin

Eagles Nest Wilderness

Colorado



The note slipped from Laura’s hand, drifting slowly to the floor on a breeze from the cracked window. Her other hand clasped open and shut around the ribboned bundles of hair. Each time she looked down, she held her breath, waiting for them to disappear, willing them to be a dream, a hallucination, a wisp of her fevered imagination.

But each time, they remained, the soft strands of hair brushing innocently against her hand, like lovingly clipped souvenirs for a baby’s memory book.

You can’t feel imagination.

She brought the locks of hair close to her nose.

You can’t smell a person’s lingering scent in your dreams.

No. Just like every other thing about her current situation, these locks of hair were real.

Real hair that had once belonged to real human beings.

Angelina appeared before her in her mind’s eye. All true memories of her nanny’s face had faded away long ago. Now, when Laura pictured her, it was always the image from a photograph she kept secreted away in a shoe box: Angelina smiling down at her, pushing her on a swing in a green park on a sunny day. Angelina’s long dark hair lifting in the wind.

Laura’s eyes stung as though she might cry, but no tears fell.

She was too empty inside.

Her tears had been stolen from her along with her childhood, her innocence, herself.

Sometimes it seemed the woman who stared back at her in the mirror was more like a ghost than a flesh and bone human being. That she was nothing more than haze—night mist that drew life from the lake and rose predestined to die with the morning sun.

She gouged one of the wounds on her neck, hungry for the pain, because pain meant life, substance. That she hadn’t vanished yet.

Laura, you’re losing what’s left of your mind.

Losing it, or being driven out of it?

For a long time, she studied the objects in her hand.

This could be doll’s hair couldn’t it? Sure it could. There was no proof it was Angelina’s or anyone else’s. For that matter, it could be her own hair.

He must have put it here along with the note.

Written in your own hand?

Either she’d done something terrible . . . she slapped herself again and her cheek answered with a satisfying ache . . . or someone was setting her up to make it look like she had.

If she was the evil one, she didn’t deserve mercy.

But she remembered nothing about this note, these locks of hair.