Racing Against Time Read online

  Callie pressed her lips together, wishing it was so. But the truth was all she’d ever known and she couldn’t sugarcoat this. “I don’t.”

  The two words hung in the air between them, foreboding. Frightening.

  He tried not to let his imagination run away with him. It couldn’t be helped.

  Was this about his wife?

  His ex-wife, Brent amended. The first in his family to don black robes and become a judge, he was also the first in his family to get a divorce. Not all firsts were commendable, he’d thought bitterly at the time. Just unavoidable. Had this woman come to tell him that something had happened to Jennifer?

  Inner instincts had him bracing himself. “Well then, what is it, Detective? I really—”

  Do it. It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid. The faster, the better.

  Her father had counseled her with that. She was not entirely sure if that was the best approach to use. All she knew was that she didn’t want to prolong this any more than was absolutely necessary.

  Sympathy flooded through her as she said, “Your housekeeper was killed this morning.”

  Brent stared at her as if she’d just spoken in tongues. He’d just seen his housekeeper, what, two, two and a half hours ago. How could she possibly be dead?

  “Delia? Killed?” he echoed in blatant disbelief. “How?”

  Beneath the composure she could see that he was genuinely upset. Was it just shock? Or was there something more going on between the judge and the crumpled woman who had been reduced to a chalk outline by the cruel whimsy of fate?

  “Hit-and-run.”

  The words were only marginally sinking in. And then fear sprang up, huge and hoary, seizing him by the throat.

  Rachel.

  “What time?”

  Callie blinked, thinking she’d misheard the question. “Excuse me?”

  “What time?” he demanded again, his voice rising, booming about the small chambers. “What time was she killed?”

  Callie thought back to the coroner’s estimation. “Approximately eight o’clock.”

  Approximately. Delia always liked to be early. Had the housekeeper gotten his daughter to school before eight and been on her way home when the car had struck her?

  Or—

  His mind couldn’t, wouldn’t go there. Not if it didn’t have to.

  As if he were poised on a spring, Brent suddenly turned from the woman in his room and began dialing the phone on his desk. Halfway through, he realized he’d transposed two of the numbers. Swallowing a curse, telling himself that everything, at least for Rachel, was all right, he began dialing again.

  “Judge, who are you—”

  Callie didn’t get a chance to finish her question, to ask the judge who he was calling. The expression on his face as he looked up at her stopped her dead, sucking out her very breath.

  There was controlled terror in his eyes.

  “She was taking my daughter to school. I want to find out if Rachel is in her classroom.”

  Very gently Callie placed her hand over his to stop him. The man needed more information before he called anyone. He deserved it.

  Callie hated this, absolutely hated this. But he had to be told. “We found your daughter’s backpack at the scene.”

  Brent could feel the blood draining out of his face as he looked at the woman who was discharging the nail gun straight at his heart.

  “Where is she?” Everything inside of him was shaking, and it was all he could do not to allow it to take complete control.

  Was he going to go into shock? She looked toward the chair behind him. Maybe she could get him to sit down. “Your Honor—”

  He felt like shaking her, grabbing her waist and squeezing out of her the words he needed to hear. Why was she putting him through this? Why this torture in slow motion?

  “Where is she?” he demanded again, his voice bouncing along the walls of the small, austere chambers like captive thunder.

  Callie hated this feeling of helplessness. She knew everything took time, that good police work was far removed from magic or the quick solutions that the public was spoon-fed via TV dramas. But that didn’t keep her from wishing she had answers for this heart-broken father standing before her.

  She curbed the urge to place a comforting hand on his shoulder, knowing it wouldn’t be appreciated. Knowing he’d push it away.

  “We don’t know,” she told him honestly. “We think she might have run off when she saw your housekeeper struck by the vehicle.”

  Brent shut his eyes, searching for strength, for resolve. He shook his head. “She wouldn’t do that.”

  But even as he said the words, his brain demanded: How do you know? How do you know what a traumatized five-year-old would do? He knew he was operating on hope and nothing more.

  Get hold of yourself, man. She’s fine. She probably ran off to school. It’s Delia who you should be concerned about.

  Brent thought of the bright young woman who’d formed such a bond with his daughter. Delia had come to him with excellent references and a real hunger to make a difference in someone’s life. Rachel had been that someone.

  Still, denial was part of survival and it was strong. He looked at Callie, a kernel of hope popping up. Maybe there was some mistake. “Are you sure it was my housekeeper?”

  She knew what he was asking, what he was hoping. Her heart went out to him. He hadn’t had an easy time of it, and she admired the fact that he was a single father. Like her father had been for the past fifteen years.

  Grimly, Callie took out the plastic-encased wallet that the CSI agent had inserted into a bag at her request and given to her. Delia Culhane’s wallet had been placed inside, opened to the woman’s driver’s license. Callie held it up for the judge’s benefit.

  “Oh, God.” He took it into his hands, staring at the woman’s face through the plastic. The license hardly did her justice. It didn’t capture the sparkling eyes, the laughter that his daughter was so quick to respond to. “Did she suffer?”

  Callie continued to watch every nuance that passed over the judge’s face. She felt like a voyeur and hated it, but this was her job. To read people and look for telltale signs that gave them away. She didn’t have to like it.

  “Coroner said she died instantly.”

  At least that was something. Brent nodded, handing the bagged wallet back to her, his eyes on the telephone on his desk. He was dialing again the moment Callie took the wallet from him.

  Callie tucked the wallet back into the wide pockets of her jacket. She indicated the telephone. “Are you calling your daughter’s school?”

  He nodded, then raised his eyes to hers. Maybe she was right. Maybe Rachel had run off, hurrying to the school to notify someone about what had happened. She was a bright little girl, a feisty girl, far older than her young years. Rachel would know that Delia would need help. He pressed the last button on the keypad.

  “It’s all I can think of.”

  It was a logical next move. “Where does she—”

  He heard the question begin, but his attention suddenly shifted to the voice that was coming from the other end of the receiver. A high, sweet voice that was asking him how she might direct his call.

  “Principal Walsh, please.” He struggled to sound calm. “Yes, this is an emergency.”

  Brent shut his eyes as a click and then silence greeted him. The operator had placed him on hold. Placed his very life on hold.

  He felt a hand touch his black-draped arm.

  He was still wearing his judge’s robe, he realized. Somehow that struck him as ironic, given the fact that at this moment he felt as if there was no justice in the world. Not if hardworking women could be struck down and left like so much litter on the road. Not when young children, babies really, could vanish on their way to school in a city where they were supposed to be safe.

  The detective was looking at him, compassion in her blue-gray eyes.

  “If you give me the name of the school, I can have some
one there probably before you get taken off hold,” Callie told him helpfully.

  He was about to tell her the school’s name when he heard a click and then a woman’s deep voice echoing in his ear. It was the school’s principal. The one time he’d met her, he remembered thinking she looked like a feminine version of a U.S. Marines drill sergeant. He also remembered thinking that Rachel would be safe in a place run by a woman like that.

  “Yes, this is Judge Brenton Montgomery. My daughter attends the morning kindergarten sessions at your school. Could you have someone check to see if she arrived this morning? Rachel Montgomery,” he said in reply to the question. “No, I don’t remember her teacher’s name.” He almost lost his patience, then fought to regain it. “No, wait, it’s Preston, Presley, something like that. Yes, Peterson, that’s right. Mrs. Peterson. Could you please check if Rachel arrived? Because there’s been an accident, that’s why.”

  What a hollow phrase that was, he thought in disgust. There’s been an accident. Delia Culhane’s life was cut short and it could be explained away by a single sentence that consisted of four words. It just didn’t seem right or fair.

  He blew out a breath, the last of his patience tethered by a thin thread. “Yes, I’ll hold.”

  Brent turned from the wall and looked at Callie. He felt as if he was tottering on the very brink of hell, waiting to plunge down into the fires below as he stood there listening to the sound of silence pulsing against his ear. Waiting until the principal’s messenger returned and she in turn told him what he wanted to hear. That Rachel was miraculously there.

  Or was that pulsing sound his own heart, marking time, waiting, hoping?

  Praying.

  But Bristol and Oak was such a huge intersection and Rachel was such a little girl. Would she have run across it, terrorized by the sight of her beloved nanny being hit by a car?

  Or was she still somewhere in the area, hiding? Crying. Waiting for him to come and rescue her. He wanted to be down there, looking for her. His inertia was strangling him.

  Placing a hand over the receiver’s mouthpiece, he turned toward Callie.

  “Was it a drunk driver?” What other explanation could there be for hitting someone? No matter that it was early, maybe someone was still celebrating something from the night before. And death had stolen in at the end of the celebration.

  Her own negative answers wearied her. “We don’t know. We don’t have any real details yet.”

  “What did the witnesses say?”

  “We haven’t found any witnesses. Yet,” she emphasized.

  Of course they hadn’t, he realized. If there were witnesses, someone would have been able to tell them where his daughter was. Which direction she’d gone in. He wasn’t thinking straight.

  Callie saw Brent suddenly stiffen, his eyes intent as a voice came on the line. She didn’t hear the words, only the muffled sound of someone talking.

  She didn’t need to hear the words. She read his expression.

  The receiver slipped from Brent’s fingers to the cradle beneath. Dread washed over him as he looked at Callie.

  “Rachel didn’t come to class today.”

  Chapter 3

  Callie’s heart immediately went out to him.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d seen that look of complete devastation; the look that said the person’s insides had just been seized and twisted into a knot. Fifteen years ago she’d seen it on her own father’s face.

  For the sake of his children, Andrew Cavanaugh had kept up a good front the night his wife’s car had been found nearly submerged in the river. So good a front that Callie had thought perhaps her parents’ arguments had taken their toll and he’d ceased to care for her mother.

  But then Callie had come up behind him late that second night, when the hopelessness of the situation had hit him and he’d thought he was alone. And heard him quietly crying.

  It was a sound she would never forget. It marked the first time that her very secure world had been breached. The first time the door to that world had been thrown open, leaving them all vulnerable, and she realized that no one was ever completely safe.

  Nothing had brought it home to her more acutely than when Kyle had been killed right in front of her eyes. Her fiancé hadn’t even known that she had reached him a heartbeat later, that she’d held him to her on the sidewalk in front of the bank and sobbed his name over and over again. He was already dead by then. As dead as the man she had shot an instant before she’d reached Kyle. Shot and killed the bank robber who had first turned his weapon on her—the man who had killed Kyle.

  Callie struggled to get her emotions under control now, struggled to keep a steady voice. Emotions only impeded progress on the cases she worked. She more than anyone else knew that.

  She glanced toward the back of the framed photograph on Brent’s desk. “I’m going to need a recent photograph of your daughter, Judge. The sooner we have police officers looking for her, the sooner we’ll find her.”

  He nodded numbly, feeling like a man who was underwater and drowning. His brain seemed to be processing everything in slow motion. But he knew the credo. “Every minute counts.”

  “Yes, it does.” She took out her pad, ready to jot down any shred of information that could be used. “How much does she weigh?”

  At first his mind was blank, then he remembered. Delia had told him the information after Rachel’s last pediatric checkup. “Forty-eight, no, forty-nine pounds.”

  “Height?”

  “Three foot three.” He looked at her. “She’s small for her age.”

  She offered him a smile she knew wasn’t going to help, but she felt bound to try, anyway. “Do you remember what she was wearing this morning?”

  He opened his mouth to tell her, but this time when no words came out, there was no belated memory to struggle to the foreground. “Something blue. I think.” Damn it, why hadn’t he looked at Rachel? “I didn’t notice,” he confessed.

  Didn’t notice because he was late. Because today was his day to preside over his court a half hour earlier because his docket was so overcrowded. So he hadn’t looked at his daughter because he had to listen to some jaded lawyer plead the case of an equally jaded two-bit drug dealer. And because of these two people who mattered less than nothing to him, he hadn’t sat down to breakfast with his daughter, hadn’t noticed what she was wearing.

  Hadn’t kissed her goodbye.

  The knot inside of him twisted a little more. He looked toward Callie as he upbraided himself. “I didn’t kiss her goodbye.”

  Callie looked up from the note she’d just made. “Excuse me?”

  Damn it, what was wrong with him? Rachel was the most important person in his world, how could he have just ignored her like that? What kind of father was he?

  Callie saw Brent square his shoulders like a man prepared to face a firing squad for his transgressions. “This morning when I left the house I was in a hurry. I didn’t kiss Rachel goodbye. It was the first time I didn’t kiss her goodbye.”

  As far as she was concerned, that placed him head and shoulders above a great many fathers she knew. “You’ll kiss her twice to make up for it when we bring her back.”

  “When,” he echoed. He wasn’t the kind of man who deluded himself. He wasn’t an optimist by nature. Yet he wanted to cling to the single word.

  “When,” Callie repeated firmly. As far as she was concerned, it was a promise. She couldn’t operate any other way. Every crime was to be solved, every missing person to be found. The thought of failure was impossible at this juncture. “We’re going to find your daughter, Judge. The success record for recovering children is getting better all the time.”

  “Better” meant that there were failures. But he already knew that.

  No, he couldn’t go there, couldn’t allow himself to think that he might never see Rachel again, never sit at a table again, cheating at Old Maid for the pleasure of seeing her laugh with glee because she’d won again. She was the on
ly bright light in his life, and he would have gladly given up his own life to ensure that she would be returned, unharmed.

  “Judge, the photograph,” Callie prodded gently, nodding toward the frame.

  He took it from his desk and handed it to her. Callie quickly removed the photograph from its frame. She placed the empty frame on the desk, then looked at the photograph. It was a professional portrait, taken at a studio. Happiness radiated from the small face and intelligent eyes. She could almost hear the little girl giggling.

  “I’ll get this back to you as soon as possible,” Callie promised.

  She had nearly reached the door before the fact that she was leaving registered with Brent. He felt as if a vacuum had suddenly been created around him. He knew he couldn’t just stay here.

  “Wait.” He threw off his robes, tossing the black garment in the general direction of his chair. “I’m coming with you.”

  She stopped dead. The sympathy she felt for him did not interfere with her duty. “You know the rules, Judge. You can’t do that.”

  Yes he knew the rules, but he was in no-man’s-land now and rules didn’t work here, didn’t mean anything. “I’m not the judge right now.” Crossing to her, he looked down into her eyes. “I’m Rachel’s father. I’m Brent.”

  She’d called him that once, he recalled. Long ago when they had danced. When Rachel had been safe.

  He was making this hard for her, Callie thought. And though he’d just thrown the title aside, his being a judge might very well be the reason all this was happening. But it was still early and she didn’t want to heap theories on the man until she had a few more facts to work with.

  “I need you to go home,” she told him as gently as possible. “There might be a ransom call.”

  Ransom. Money.

  Bitterness rose up in his throat as he turned the words over in his head. Ever since he could remember, his wealth had always been more a burden than a joy. It had made him doubt who his friends were. Then he’d discovered that Jennifer had been far more attracted to his wealth and his potential prestige than she had been to him.