“Good to see you,” I said, not feeling too badly about not remembering his name.
We stepped into the elevator and traveled down to the basement. “From what I remember, the parents split up after a few years.” Another round of tongue clicking followed. “That happens a lot after a big tragedy. It’s almost as if the spouse is too big a reminder of the pain.”
“That makes sense.” The elevator chimed and the doors opened.
“They were both doctors.”
My stride faltered as I stepped out of the elevator.
“Watch yourself there,” Randall said.
“Did you say doctors?”
“Well, at the time they were Residents over at County. She was going to be a surgeon, I think. They had everything going for them and then their world just opened up and spit out the worst life had to offer.”
The notes in my dad’s office had been scattered, and some had been hard to interpret, but nowhere had I read that the parents were doctors. “Do you think they still practice medicine in Nevada, or did they move on?”
Randall opened the door to the archives. A young woman was sitting at a desk typing away on a computer. “Luke, this is Rachel. She’s updating our filing system down here from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first.” Rachel laughed at his comment.
“We’re just here to look at a cold case file.”
I followed him along a row of bookshelves that were set up like a library system. Someone had handwritten the years in black pen on index cards. The cards were stuck on the ends of the shelves with masking tape. He tapped a shelf. “Here we are. Oh, and about your question. Last I heard, the wife took a position in Texas, but the husband stayed in Nevada.” Randall looked back at me. “Might be he decided to stay close to the scene of the crime in case the girl was found. I don’t think you ever stop looking, you know? It’s like leaving a candle in the window for a missing soldier hoping that someday the lost person will find their way home.”
He stared straight up. “Always on the top shelf, why are they always on the top shelf? You’d think there was nothing but empty boxes on all these lower ones.” He sized me up. “I’ll bet you can reach it if you step on that bottom shelf. It’s the light pink box. You’re dad did that. Pink went along with his filing system at home.”
I placed the toe of my shoe on the bottom shelf and stretched my good arm up until it made contact with the corner of the box. I got hold of it and slid it off the shelf. My dad’s handwriting was scrawled across the white label, which had turned pale yellow with age. I ran my fingers over the letters. Randall seemed to sense what I was thinking.
“Your father was the last person to touch that box.”
Everything about the penmanship on top was so familiar. It was almost like hearing his voice. He would always leave notes for Seth and me on the refrigerator in the same sprawling, nearly illegible print.
“There’s a table and chair over by the wall if you want to sit and look through it.” Randall’s voice popped me out of my thoughts. “I can’t let you take it out of here.”
“Right, I understand.” I lifted the box up. “It feels pretty heavy considering there wasn’t much evidence.”
“Those are just pages and pages of reports we had to write about the case. Sometimes it seemed we were just going in circles and chasing our own tails. Of course, when the story broke, it was all over the papers, and every Good Samaritan in Nevada came forward to say that they were sure they’d seen the baby, whether it was in a cart at the grocery store, or at an airport, or at the post office. One lady even accused her neighbor of pretending to be pregnant and then stealing the girl. Everyone was looking for the little Starlight Baby. She was a striking little thing too, according to her picture. And she had a tiny brown birthmark on her shoulder that looked a little like a star. Although from what I saw in pictures, it looked more like a smashed flower. But the press managed to work that birthmark into the story.” He shook his head. “‘Kissed by a Star’ that was the headline. For us, it was the perfect distinguishing mark for locating the missing infant.” He hitched up his pants and sighed. “But we never found her. Like she vanished into thin air.”
“Maybe the kidnappers hid the birthmark,” I said, and his eyes widened at my notion. I hadn’t meant to voice it aloud, but the more he spoke, the tighter my gut knotted with the inconceivable and mind-blowing idea that I’d found the baby. Only now, she was a young woman and the love of my life.
The lines around Randall’s eyes creased as he seemed suddenly curious about what I wanted with the box. Before he could ask the obvious question, I answered.
“It’s just a hunch, and it’s really farfetched, but you’ll be the first to know if anything comes of this,” I said.
He looked slightly stunned by my explanation but didn’t ask anything else. “There’s a pad of paper on the desk if you need it.”
“Thanks.” I carried the box to the table and sat down. My wrist hurt like hell, and I propped it up on the arm of the chair to keep it elevated. I stared at the box for a few seconds before removing the top. It smelled of dust and aging paper and an earthy odor that I was sure was the lingering scent of my dad’s cigarettes. There was hardly a time when he didn’t have one tucked in his mouth or between his fingers. It was the main source of contention between my parents. My mom would beg him to quit before it killed him. Turned out he should have listened.
I peered into the box. Everything was arranged in manila folders, and more of my dad’s writing met me inside. I hadn’t thought about the fact that he would be a big part of this box, and I hadn’t expected my profound reaction either.
Most of the files were, as Randall had mentioned, reports of people spotting the baby that had not panned out. There was a file marked ‘Baby Lyndsey’. I pulled it out of the stack. I hadn’t even considered the obvious fact that the baby wouldn’t be named Evangeline. I opened the folder. There was a poor quality copy of the birth certificate clipped to several pictures. The baby was born on Valentine’s Day in Reno, Nevada. Her parents were Richard Palmer and Marilyn Haberwood.
I slid the birth certificate off to look at the images. The first photos were the hospital pictures of a tiny, wrinkly faced baby swathed tightly in blankets. The next photo was a young woman sitting in a rocking chair in a nicely decorated nursery. The wall behind her had colorful ponies prancing around on the wallpaper. She was beaming down at the baby in her arms. It wasn’t easy to see the baby’s face, but the woman was exceptionally pretty with dark hair and blue eyes. I had the sensation of someone blowing air on the back of my neck, and I lifted my shoulders in response. While the woman had an entirely different nose, and her face was rounder, something in her expression reminded me of Angel. I ran my finger over the bundle in her arms. It was still too outrageous to believe that the woman in the picture might have been holding Evangeline Sharpe.
The next picture was of the baby lying on her stomach, propped up on chubby arms. The tiny birthmark was visible. The edge of it curled a bit around the baby’s shoulder. Angel’s burn scar ended before the shoulder, but it would make sense that as the baby had grown, the mark would’ve shifted slightly. The exact eye color was hard to see in the twenty-year-old photo, but they were definitely vivid and blue.
I continued through the box. There were numerous pictures and diagrams of the nursery and the window she was purportedly taken through. I lifted one picture and had to bring it closer to recognize what it was. It was an orange peel. It was the one piece of evidence that really stood out to me. It was an odd, unexpected thing to find in a baby’s nursery, and as I’d read, both parents had insisted that they had not eaten an orange in any days prior to the baby’s disappearance. It had to have been the kidnapper’s.
I sat back and stared down at the pile of papers and pictures. Dreygon and his daughters had lived in complete seclusion, off the
grid, as most people called it, for years. They lived in Nevada, but away from everyone else, a world inside a world. And they had very little contact with outsiders. Angel told me that her grandfather had only let her go to a small private school, and even that had made him anxious. He had kept her sheltered with the excuse that she was his granddaughter and that it would be dangerous for her to be out where rival clubs could kidnap her. But the real danger for Angel had been inside the compound walls. And if my hunch proved true, there would been every reason in the world for Dreygon to keep her hidden.
Gunner had long term family connections in the club. If he’d known about the kidnapping, it would have given Dreygon a perfect motive for killing him. The old man had been so slick, he was impossible to catch. Every crime he’d committed up to now would be nothing compared to this. Everything was pointing to my theory as being entirely provable, but how I was going to do that, I wasn’t completely sure. The most daunting thought of all was bringing this whole damn idea up to Angel. The ramifications were enormous, and I couldn’t even imagine how it would affect her if this whole thing turned out to be true.
My phone rang and it jarred me from my state of contemplation. It was Angel. Sometimes it seemed we were so connected, I wondered if she could have sensed that I’d been thinking about her. Of course, I was always thinking about her.
“Hey, Baby.”
“Hi, hope I’m not interrupting your work.”
I picked up the picture of the missing infant and tried to match the voice coming through the phone with the face staring back at me.
“Nope. Everything all right there?”
“Well, actually—”
I sat forward. “Is something wrong?”
“Cash needs our help.” There was a slight waver in her voice.
“What happened?”
I heard her sniffle. “He was ambushed by some club members. He managed to get to a friend’s house, but we need to pick him up. Can you come home soon?”
I started piling the information back into the box. “I’m on my way.”
Chapter 7
Angel
Lauren met us at the door of her small apartment. Her eyes darted in both directions along the moldy smelling corridor before motioning us to hurry inside. I hadn’t seen her for several years, since Cash had stopped dating her. She had lived with him at the compound for six months, but he’d grown tired of her constant state of being completely wasted. It was obvious that the drugs were still a big part of her life, and they had robbed her of some of her beauty. It was sad to see her such a mess.
Lauren stared with a good dose of suspicion at Luke.
“He’s a friend,” Jericho assured her, leaving out the part that would surely send the longtime junkie running from her apartment.
“I’m glad you guys are here. He was on Highway 50 when they attacked him. Can’t believe he managed to make it here without crashing.” Her thin fingers shook as she lit a cigarette. “He said something about being out on bail and not wanting to go to the hospital.”
I gasped. “Is he that bad off? Where is he?”
Jericho didn’t wait for an answer. He walked straight into the bedroom. “Holy fucking hell,” he said.
I took a deep breath and braced myself for what was around the corner. Luke followed behind. Cash was propped up against a pillow. He was holding a towel against his head, and it was stained with blood. One side of his mouth had a gash, and it was swollen to the size of a golf ball. His shirt was ripped to shreds, and there was plenty of blood everywhere. It was just hard to tell if all of it had come from his head wound or mouth or someplace else.
“It looks worse than it is,” Cash mumbled from his swollen mouth.
“Bro, I fucking hope so cuz it looks bad. Like you just stepped out of one of those crazy chainsaw murder movies.” Jericho tried hard to force a light tone, but I knew this whole thing made him nervous.
Lauren stood in the doorway. “Can you guys get him out of here soon? I don’t need any trouble from Bedlam.”
“So, it was definitely Bedlam?” Luke asked.
Cash held the cloth against his face and nodded weakly. “I was riding down the highway, and three of them came up around me.”
“Who was it?” Jericho asked.
“Not completely sure of the third guy but Hoover and Blade were there.”
“Assholes,” Jericho said.
“What happened?” Luke asked.
“They ran me off the road. I tried to outrace them.” Cash stopped and touched his mouth. His uncovered eye squeezed shut as he winced from the pain. He leaned his head back against the wall. “I hit a deep rut and laid the bike down. I hit the dirt hard enough to blackout. Before I could suck air back into my lungs, they were pounding on me.”
I sat on the bed next to him and touched his hand that held the cloth. “Can I see?”
“See it? I was counting on you to stitch me up. But for now—” He glanced toward a highly agitated Lauren. “—I’ve been warned not to get blood on the bedding, so I’ll keep the cloth here.”
Lauren was anxious for us to leave.
“Can you walk?” Luke asked.
“Yeah, like a zombie whose limbs might fall off at any moment, but I can move.” Cash moved in slow motion as he placed his feet on the ground. “Richo, get my boots.”
Jericho helped him get his boots on and then Cash put an arm around his shoulder. “Thanks Lo Lo,” Cash said. The pet name made her smile.
“Sure thing. And try to stay the fuck out of trouble.” For a second she looked at him with the same longing I used to see when she’d lived at the compound. Unfortunately for her, she’d always had the same longing look when she gazed at a line of cocaine.
Luke ducked under Cash’s other arm. I walked behind holding Cash’s leather motorcycle coat. He’d, of course, stopped wearing his Bedlam cut long ago, and I still hadn’t gotten used to seeing him without it. From behind, weakened by the pain and dressed only in a bloodied t-shirt, he looked almost like a stranger.
Cash’s bike was parked under a carport in the corner. “Should I ride it home?” Jericho asked.
“The handle bars are tweaked,” Cash said.
“Besides, I’m not sure about you being out on the road on that thing alone,” Luke said. “We’ll come back for it another time.”
Luke kept an eye on the surrounding parking lot as Jericho got Cash into the backseat. I slid in next to Cash. I sat up on my knees and leaned over him. I balanced on the seat as Luke drove out of the parking lot. “Let me see the gash. Is it near your eye?”
“Not sure.” He scrunched his face in pain as he lowered the towel.
An ugly, gaping cut about three inches long ran nearly perpendicular to his dark eyebrow. “Thank goodness they didn’t get your eye. But you really should see a doctor. You’ll need antibiotics even if I stitch it up. Shit, it seems like I was just removing stitches from your skin.”
“No doctors. I don’t need any more trouble than what I’ve already got.”
Luke glanced up in the mirror. “If this was Bedlam, then we need to let your lawyer know. This will prove self-defense, and Scoffield needs to get you back under protection.”
Cash leaned his head back and misery covered his face. It seemed to be more from the weight of his situation than the pain he was experiencing. “I don’t want any protection. I’m fucked either way.”
Jericho looked back over the seat at him. “Why do you think they only beat you instead of killing you?”
Cash chuckled and it was filled with misery. “They told me that this was my new punishment, a sentence handed down from the president.” Cash glanced over at me with an apologetic look. “They said that death was too kind for snitches. Instead, I get to heal up and just as I’m feeling better, they are goin
g to come after me again. I’ll be looking over my shoulder everywhere I go. I’m screwed. I should’ve stayed with the club.”
“No, you did the right thing, Cash,” I said, but I knew my words were futile, especially with the way he was feeling. His eyes drifted shut. I worried that he’d taken enough blows to the head to have a concussion. I reached over and lifted his eyelid to gauge the size of his pupil. His eye closed the second I let it go. Being gentler with the eye beneath the cut, I lifted its lid.
“Why are you pulling my eyelids?” he said groggily.
“Hold still. I’m checking your pupils.”
“Are they still there?”
“Yes, and they seem to be the same size and not necessarily dilated. But I still say you need to see a doctor. I don’t have access to Dreygon’s pharmaceutical counter anymore. You’ll need an antibiotic, and what if there’s internal bleeding?”
“Angel, you’re darkening my mood, and it’s already pretty black.”
I sat back against the seat.
“I’ve still got almost an entire bottle of antibiotics,” Jericho said.
“From where?” I asked.
“They gave them to me for my leg. But I only took two. They made my stomach feel like shit.”
“Great, that will add to my torment,” Cash muttered.
“You were supposed to take them,” I said. “You’re lucky you didn’t get an infection. I should have been keeping a better watch on you, you goofball.”
“Yes, Ma,” Jericho said.
“Shut up, you ass. I’m going to need to get some Superglue from the store,” I said.
Cash rolled his head to the side and looked up at me. His face was swollen and bruised, yet he still looked startlingly handsome. “Are you planning on gluing shut Richo’s mouth, cuz I’ll hold him down for you.”
“No, I don’t think there’s glue strong enough to keep that jaw from flapping.”
Luke laughed, and Jericho shot him an angry scowl.